For my words, my words, my writings, I was dismissed like a waste, a thief, without the right to answer.
An experienced, competent emergency physician, appreciated by his colleagues for my actions in stressful situations, fired in the middle of COVID!
For words, for an image.
All you had to do was reassure people, defend your doctor, attenuate and wait for the storm to calm down… and then talk.
I write, it’s true, things that disturb, dissident points of view, those who follow me on this site since 2009 know it.
When I resumed my writing starting in 2020, about the political management of the COVID crisis, but also generally, about the endemic corruption of medicine, science and official bodies in Belgium, I felt that it would be risky, really.
But I did not give up because I will never let my life be controlled by fear.
Some people say that I am unconscious. Do you think that after 17 years of treating people, in emergency, stress, often for 24 hours at a time, I could have done all this while being unconscious?
Some people say that I am irresponsible. I have always taken my responsibilities, preferred writing to speaking because it allows reflection, rereading, and I have always turned my tongue 7 times in my mouth, before finishing an article and sending it with all its sources and references. I have always respected the rules of the hospital, of society, even when, as they stand, they seemed crazy to me and likely to cause more harm than good. I have always put the safety of my patients above my convictions, preferring to explain, to convince through words and writings.
Some say I am a disgrace to the profession.
Those who say that are ignorant of my profession. Many people talk about critical care, especially today with Covid, when critical care has been around for 70 years, but do they even know, these accusing people, what they are talking about?
We can’t pretend, this is live, live, surrounded by death and suffering,
We don’t know how to lie and if we do, we get out. I’ve held on to it for 17 years and I only had to stop suddenly because of people who don’t like what I say, don’t like my opinions!
Some say, the most beautiful things, that I am anti-everything. Those who say that are certainly much more so than I am. I will tell you all the things I am for:
The truth, in any case its permanent search and accept for that, to deceive me.
Tolerance of other people’s ideas, opinions and writings.
The will, in turn, to be able to express my ideas, opinions and writings.
Respect for nature and animals
Relief of pain and suffering
Life in all its facets, music, sounds, songs, dances, colors, and therefore accept death, because one cannot live like this without accepting the idea of dying at any time.
I only wanted to ask questions, to give my points of view without ever imposing them, to question, to nuance, to contextualize, to reassure when others only want to terrorize.
I was condemned, thrown away for that.
I was forced to abandon my colleagues in difficulty, summoned to leave burning places by people who should not so easily spit on the help of one of their own, a resuscitator, for words, a picture!
That’s how it is.
They have that power.
And yet,
Professor Didier Raoult (France)
Professor Christian Perronne (France)
Professor Toubiana (France)
Professor Toussaint (France)
Professor Gala (Belgium)
And all those other doctors, caregivers, health care professionals,
“While Donald Trump continues to stoke the flames of division and uncertainty surrounding election 2020, the Establishment is also preparing for the possibility of martial law in response to this chaos. Meanwhile, the public is being prepped for a second wave of COVID-19 infections which could lead to the foreshadowed Darkest Winter. While we don’t care to instill fear we do encourage everyone to heed these warnings and be prepared for potential unrest in the days and weeks following the election.”
– Derrick Broze, excerpt of The Darkest Winter [1]
“Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in human history.”
– Richard Bright, Former Dir, DHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Auth (excerpted from Dark Winter)
The ballots to the US Presidential election have been counted. That tally indicates that the Joe Biden won and that Donald Trump lost. [2]
The battle isn’t quite over yet. Trump insisted since the night of the election that he won. Biden’s victory after the fact was, according to Trump, a product of election-rigging and fraud.
The interesting development though is how this circumstance was predicted as an outcome! In October, the site TheLastAmericanVagabond.com featured extensive conversations about election simulations guided by the Transition Integrity Project (TIP). The drill anticipated scenarios where Trump lost the election but refused to accept defeat under any circumstances, resulting in chaos confusion and possibly a potential civil war.
On October 29, a video, The Darkest Winter, debuted about 5 days in advance of the election. It was intended as a message and a warning to members of the general public. Not only was it about the election result, it highlighted the potential for a second wave of COVID-19, which was predicted by several officials, and even the prospect of martial law being invoked to contain the ebullient spirits waking up opposing any establishment narratives.
The author of The Darkest Winter is a young man by the name of Derrick Broze. He will be our feature guest this week.
a
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For about 40 minutes, he not only expands on his video prediction, he focuses on The Great Reset being planned as a strategy for resolving COVID-19 and other issues related to the economy, technology, the environment and other issues. He will also share his views on Operation Warp Speed and the alliance of vaccines with bio-electronics placed inside the body. And he will discuss the issues associated with the immense 5G project.
Following the interview, we will pay a clip from Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a prominent physician and CEO speaking the Edmonton City Hall earlier in November in opposition to the ‘anti-COVID’ strategies being implemented.
Roger Hodkinson received his medical degree at Cambridge University and is the CEO of Western Medical Assessments providing Independent Medical Examinations (IMEs) to insurance companies, employers, and lawyers. He is the CEO of a biotech company that manufactures COVID tests. He is also a general practitioner in the UK and Canada, a Pathologist with the Medical Examiner’s Office in Edmonton, and the President of the Alberta Society of Laboratory Physicians.
Sarah Elbeshbishi (Nov. 25, 2020) ‘Biden won, but technically the election’s not over: What to expect in the next 60 days’, USA Today; https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/elections/2020/11/13/electoral-process-and-what-expect/6234952002/
On Thanksgiving day, throughout the year, with likely worsening times ahead, ordinary Americans are suffering through the hardest of hard times in US history. For 36 straight weeks since March, over one million Americans sought unemployment insurance benefits.
Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, intervened this Wednesday in the session of the Security Council to denounce the economic aggression of the United States against twenty-nine countries of the world, through their misnamed “sanctions,” and proposed the formation of an International Alliance to stop the crimes against humanity perpetuated by the US.
The Environmental Protection Agency released a draft biological evaluation today finding that glyphosate is likely to injure or kill 93% of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.
He will doom Labour at the ballot box; he’s a threat to your nan; if you say his name three times the ghost of Trotsky will appear, collectivize your cat and steal your taxes. This circus of fear isn’t just misleading: when Corbyn is trying to shine a light on the troublesome logic of government policy, on the nightmare that austerity and privatization creates, it shuts down dialogue before it can even get started.
In this abridged article published by the London Daily Mirror & based on his 1975 film, Smashing Kids, John Pilger describes class as Britain’s most virulent disease, causing record levels of child poverty.
Another scandal erupted in relations between Turkey and the EU – on November 22, the Turkish merchant vessel, Roseline A, was detained and fully inspected by personnel of German frigate Hamburg in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 160 nautical miles north of the Libyan city of Benghazi.
For all practical purposes, Iraq has now been destroyed. It no longer exists as a single country and has disintegrated into regional power bases, with widespread ethnic cleansing in each region. It is estimated that approximately two million people have died in Iraq since the invasion, and millions more have been displaced.
Government lawbreaking in Boris Johnson’s adminstration has now reached an unprecedented scale for a British government – and we should all be concerned.
‘America is back’ hailed Joe Biden on Twitter this week. The world tried to work out exactly what that meant. For different parts of the world, of course, it means different things. As many liberal Americans breathe a sigh of relief, the people of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq may shudder.
His life was a running planetary pop opera for the ages. From Somalia to Bangladesh, everyone is familiar with the basic contours of his story – the pibe from Villa Fiorito, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires (“I am a slum dweller”), who elevated football to the status of pure art.
“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law…We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.” (Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize for Literature Speech, 2005)
Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre Twin Towers in New York, on September 11, 2001, (known as 9/11) the US declared a global war on terror. Since then it has destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It has supported the destruction of Yemen, and the attempted destruction of Syria. (Libya, Syria and Yemen will be discussed in a subsequent post).
Afghanistan
For many years, Afghanistan has been seen as a key area in what is known as ‘The Grand Chessboard’ – It is important for control of immense energy resources (oil and gas) in central Asia. Up until 1989, the US government had been unable to take control of the region because of the proximity of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 changed this. Immense deposits of oil and gas in the region are now accessible to Western corporations. Not only does Afghanistan have its own deposits of natural gas, it is the obvious choice for numerous pipeline routes.(1)
The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. The explanations given for the invasion included dealing with the al-Qaida terrorist network, led by Osama Bin Laden, and to replace the extremely repressive Taliban government with a better one for humanitarian reasons. As with the justifications for other wars, these reasons were repeated by the media with little questioning. However, most of the 9/11 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. It was widely recognised that most of the al-Qaida network would have dispersed before the attacks, and the attempted removal of the Taliban left equally violent warlords in power in many parts of the country. The US had been negotiating with the Taliban about building oil pipelines late into the 1990s, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US had therefore decided to “bury you [the Taliban] under a carpet of bombs” shortly before the 9/11 attacks.(2) The US went ahead and dropped plenty of bombs, but this has not decreased terrorism in the region. Predictably, the first US representative in Afghanistan was connected to the oil industry, and had been involved in earlier negotiations to build pipelines.(3)
The war in Afghanistan does not receive nearly as much media coverage as the Iraq war, but thousands of Afghan citizens are still being killed every year.(4) Wikileaks released files showing that the US military is aware that they have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan.(5) The country has been in chaos for almost 20 years.
Iraq
Britain and the US helped to overthrow the leadership of Iraq in 1963. Saddam Hussein became President of that Iraqi government in 1979. The US and Britain supplied him with weapons for many years, despite knowing that he was a murderous dictator. They encouraged him to fight a war throughout the 1980s against Iran(6), creating devastation in the region. In 1991, Saddam invaded the neighbouring country of Kuwait. In response, US forces invaded Iraq. This was known as Gulf War 1. President H.W.Bush stated that the issue in Kuwait was not democracy, but to “prevent a dictator…from seizing control of more than a quarter of the world’s oil reserves”.(7) There were opportunities to negotiate a peaceful resolution with Iraq in 1991, but the US leadership did not want this to happen so they deliberately suppressed information about possible non-violent solutions, and the media also failed to discuss these alternatives(8). Throughout the 1990’s Britain and the US continued to wage war against Iraq, bombing it approximately once every three days.(9) In 2003, the US and Britain carried out a full-scale invasion, known as Gulf War 2. Immediately following the invasion, US forces secured the oilfields and the ministry of oil, but not much else.(10)
Image below: George W. Bush declares victory in Iraq War, USS Abraham Lincoln, San Diego, May 1, 2003)
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was an excellent example of the way in which the US and British governments try to scare us into supporting war by exaggerating threats. First we were told that we should be afraid because Iraq was making Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but the only WMD that Iraq might have had were old, degraded chemical shells.(11) Then we were told lies about Saddam’s links to terrorism. The ‘links to terrorists’ explanation was always doubtful as Saddam Hussein’s government was secular (non-religious) and he was therefore an unlikely ally of religious terrorists. Finally we were told that we had to invade for humanitarian reasons – essentially ‘Saddam is a bad man’ – but Britain and the US had actively helped him when he had committed earlier atrocities. The US and British governments lied repeatedly to justify the invasion.(12) There were forgeries supposedly showing that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material from Africa(13), and a ‘dodgy’ dossier(14) trying to convince journalists that Saddam was a serious threat. None of these had much evidence to back them up, yet, as with earlier interventions, they were repeated by the media without adequate scrutiny. The government decided on its plan, then tried to pick and choose selective pieces of information to fit that plan. Iraq was slightly unusual in that lots of people did not believe any of these scare stories. Millions of people protested against the war in many countries,(15) including huge protests in Britain and the US, but the invasion went ahead anyway.
The extent of the lies has been admitted by former government insiders. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, has now admitted briefing George Bush that Saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction, and other sources have admitted that the intelligence information was “being fixed around the plan.”(16) In other words, the invasion was going ahead and the politicians needed an excuse. There is an unofficial record of notes by the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, from the afternoon of September 11th 2001 (just a few hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks) which says: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only U.B.L. [Usama Bin Laden]. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”(17) Rumsfeld wanted to see if the terrorist attacks could be used to justify invading Iraq. He repeatedly asked for evidence to connect Iraq to the terrorist attacks but the CIA was unable to find any.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair supported these policies and actively participated in the lies. He has written that “[Vice-President] Cheney wanted forcible ‘regime change’ in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to US interests”.(18) This strategy has been confirmed by former US general, Wesley Clark, who admitted that in 2001 he was told that US President Bush and US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wanted to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years. These were Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan and Iran.(19) President Bush’s Energy Secretary, Paul O’Neill, has disclosed that President Bush came into office planning to overthrow Saddam.(20) Although the war began two years later, the decision to invade Iraq was made less than two weeks after 9/11. One US commentator pointed out “This is a war of an elite. I could give you the names of 25 people [in Washington] who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened”.(21)
For all practical purposes, Iraq has now been destroyed. It no longer exists as a single country and has disintegrated into regional power bases, with widespread ethnic cleansing in each region.(22) It is estimated that approximately two million people have died in Iraq since the invasion,(23) and millions more have been displaced. This has been described as genocide.(24) Many people have fled the country and others are homeless within the country. Over half of Iraqis have had a close friend or relative killed or injured, and a whole generation of people growing up from 1991 to the present day have been traumatised. The invasion and destruction of Iraq is almost certainly the worst crime of the 21st Century.
Key Points
The invasion of Afghanistan was not about terrorism or humanitarianism.
The invasion of Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction, or humanitarianism, or links to terrorism.
Both wars were part of a wider policy of US imperialism and control of energy resources.
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the third 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.
9) Jeffrey St. Clair, ‘Iraq as Prison State’, Oct 15, 2002, in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia,
During the era of Yellow Journalism in the U.S. which defined the type of journalism that existed before the start of Spanish-American War in 1898. The term, ‘Yellow Journalism’ was associated with various major newspapers that held no journalistic principals or truth, “sensationalism” or “eye-catching headlines” was the only truth that mattered for newspaper owners that exaggerated stories to sell newspapers and fill their pockets with profits. Today they sell you lies to support the agendas of major corporations and the Military-Industrial Complex because corporate interests pays the MSM handsomely to sell their wars, drugs and propaganda.
The accelerated downfall of the mainstream media (MSM) occurred since the election of Donald Trump. It’s apparent that the MSM has caught TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don’t know what you feel or sense when you are watching the MSM, whether it’s CNN, MSNBC who are obviously liberal networks or FOX News who is aligned with the Republicans party, it’s almost like watching the twilight zone.
Journalistic integrity has been absolutely flushed down the toilet. For the record, the MSM has been losing its reputation as a reliable news source way before Trump became US president, he just added TDS to the so-called “television journalists” on CNN and MSNBC. However, that did not stop CNN’s president Jeff Zucker to propose a weekly show with the US President on a call with Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen according to The Hill, “I have all these proposals for him,” Zucker reportedly told Cohen “I want to do a weekly show with him and all this stuff.” Despite the fact that anti-Trumpism is alive and well in the MSM, it’s hypocritical. CNN and MSNBC will surely miss Trump if Joe Biden officially steals the election because low-ratings will collapse both networks and even FOX news will suffer to a point without Trump being showcased regularly on television networks and that’s probably why Jeff Zucker, had reportedly called Trump “the boss” if he would have signed a contract with CNN.
The print media is also guilty for publishing numerous false claims, accusations and lies that has led to wars and regime change in various countries for decades. One recent example is the case with The New York Times who published an article with the worst possible title ‘The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises again’ yet, on November 1st, Time magazine published a cover story that read ‘The Great Reset’ on its front page.
The media must think the people are that stupid, it clearly shows how they view its target audience. There are many reasons why liberal networks with the possibility of FOX news following in the same direction will collapse due to low-viewership ratings. CNN, MSNBC and FOX employs a long list of liars and state propagandists who were in previous administrations that offer their one-sided analysis and reports in domestic and foreign issues presented to the viewer. In an important note, all of the MSM networks are on board and all agree that no matter who is president, they know who their foreign enemies are when it comes to war because they all obviously work for the same US war machine. Remember when liberal media host on MSNBC, Brian Williams and his comment on U.S. missiles hitting Syrian airfields with Trump’s approval in 2017 as “beautiful”? I guess he thought Trump wasn’t so bad after all. The MSM is a propaganda organ of the Democratic party and to the Republican party if we include FOX news. All of US viewers are beholden to the US war machine that includes all special interest groups and major corporate powers that dictate to the MSM what to report and say to the public. Since 2016, the MSM has stooped to its lowest level of lies and deceit. Its journalistic principles have evolved into a joke, a laughing stock in the world of news. Here is a short list out of many lies by the MSM:
The Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax: 3 Years Worth of Conspiracy Theories
The Trump-Russia Collusion scandal was proof in itself that CNN and MSNBC are conspiracy theorists with no actual facts. Conspiracy theorists is defined as those who create “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators” Well there is a group of “powerful conspirators” that does explain a set of fake circumstances surrounding Trump’s collusion with Russia which in under the definition of a conspiracy theorist. It took 3 years of this non-stop nonsense about Trump and Russia colluding 24 hours a day which was way over the top for anyone, even for some democrats who turned into republicans because of the MSM lies. The nearly $32 million spent on the Trump-Russia Collusion report turned out to be a devastating blow to the Democratic party.
A letter that was addressed to Senator Lindsey Graham that was signed by John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence (NIA) for the Trump administration requested information on the FBI’s behalf concerning their Investigation. Ratcliffe declassified the information which exposed the scandal and as many of us knew from the start, it was a hoax. It all turned out to be a major humiliation for the MSM after the dossier was exposed as a Hillary Clinton smear campaign against President Trump. Hillary Clinton was on board with a plan to link candidate Trump in 2016 to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In late July 2o16, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by typing him to Putin and the Russians’ in hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” It also stated the following:
According to handwritten noted, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services
The letter also included that “On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. President candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The MSM including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (who cried on air) after the hoax was exposed was humiliated. The MSM has lost time, money and whatever they had left of their credentials based on Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia lie, at this point they should be all crying themselves to sleep at night.
CNN Claimed Ecuador’s Embassy in London is a ‘Russian Hacking Hub’
Another case of pure MSM propaganda was against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who at the time was in exile in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The former President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa criticized the MSM’s side of the story on Ecuador’s Embassy in London as a ‘Russian Hacking Hub.’ Correa was interviewed by RT.com and this is what he said about CNN and other US media sources:
We never approved interference in the internal affairs of other countries, we respect every nation, that is why when we saw that Julian Assange was publishing the data of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign, we warned him two or three times, and on the third or fourth time we acted, we cut the internet. The story that CNN wants to build, that in the embassy there was a center for espionage operations with Russian support, that we knew about it and approved it. That’s how they want it to appear. what they want to sell to the world. What CNN and other media are saying is rubbish, but were use to it. They are prepping for the show. The reason is, when they extradite Assange to the US and sentence him to life, they want the honest backing of the public, they are setting the stage
What CNN reported on December 9, 2017, was that Donald Trump, Jr. was offered “advanced access” to the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks before those emails were made public. MSNBC also jumped on the band wagon and “independently confirmed” CNN’s evidence about the collaboration between the Trump team and WikiLeaks over the hacked DNC emails. It all turned out to be false information. The email which Donald Trump, Jr. received was a link that was published online and open to the public. If that is not reckless and irresponsible journalism on a grand scale or just plain spiteful propaganda to paint Trump’s team as Russian assets, I don’t know what is.
The Pentagon with Help from the MSM is Pushing Regime Change in Venezuela
The MSM’s Commitment to the Pentagon’s agenda of regime change in Venezuela has been steady as well with CNN has been following Trump’s Line on Venezuela who falsely claimed in the SOTU address last February when Trump declared Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s true and legitimate president. CNN claimed that the voters wanted Maduro to step down since the elections in January 2019, but there’s one problem with that statement, Venezuela’s presidential election was actually held on May 20, 2018. CNN’s story ‘Military helicopter crashes in Venezuela, killing 7, amid protests’ first reported on a helicopter crash that killed seven military officers then redirects the story to the political scene mentioning Juan Guaido, the unpopular political figure who was unpopular among the opposition he’s part of. Washington chose Guaido as the best puppet they can manage as it’s “acting President.” After all, Uncle Sam still makes important decisions for the Venezuelan elite and the rest of its Latin American puppet states. CNN said that “pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.” Current president Nicolas Maduro won that election by more than 67% of the vote as Juan Guaido and his followers decided not to participate in the elections as a way of protest against the Maduro government.
Eventually Big Tech Will Collapse, And the Independent Media Will Rise
I feel sorry for the MSM’s faithful viewers, frying their brains with absolute propaganda from their preferred sources of information. They could have done more productive things with their lives. Just imagine, decades of endless lies by the MSM. It’s hard to wrap my head around what and how the MSM reports to its target audience who accept what is reported as the truth. The media has used propaganda and flat out lies to manipulate the public into believing whatever they said to further Washington’s agenda at all costs, even if it means losing viewership and they still get paid no matter what. Real journalism has died a long time ago in the US and that’s why the alternative media has grown significantly to challenge MSM’s narrative.
Big Tech companies such as Face book, Twitter and YouTube are trying to suppress the alternative media and the truth it reveals to the public by way of censorship, but guess what? There will be alternative platforms that will compete and outperform Big Tech in the future. We already have numerous platforms where alternative voices are heard such as www.bitchute.com, www.minds.com, ise.media, Global Research.ca, Information Clearinghouse, The Corbett Report, The Gray Zone, rt.com, sometimes even Al Jazeera can be truthful when it wants to be and many others that will rise to the occasion of telling or spreading the truth on various platforms. The MSM has embarrassed themselves to the point of no return. They are dead in its tracks and the world is waking up to that fact.
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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.
Recent attempted infringements of Russia’s airspace and maritime borders by NATO are very dangerous instances of de-facto brinksmanship intended to provoke the Eurasian Great Power into reacting in a way that could then be manipulated as the “plausible pretext” for imposing further pressure upon it.
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It seems like almost every week that Russian media reports on NATO’s attempted infringement of Russian airspace and maritime borders, but two ultra-dangerous developments occurred over the past week which signify that this trend will intensify. The Russian Navy threatened to ram the USS John McCain after it aggressively passed into the country’s territorial waters near Peter the Great Bay off Vladivostok, after which it thankfully reversed its course. The second incident involved the US launching rockets into the Black Sea from Romania that are capable of reaching Crimea in a wartime scenario. These two events deserve to be discussed more in detail because of their significance to NATO’s grand strategy.
The transatlantic alliance intends to provoke the Eurasian Great Power into reacting in a way that could then be manipulated as the “plausible pretext” for imposing further pressure upon it. It amounts to de-facto brinksmanship and is therefore incredibly dangerous since both parties are nuclear powers. Furthermore, it’s the definition of unprovoked aggression since Russia doesn’t partake in symmetrical provocations against NATO. If anything, every time that it’s been dishonestly accused of such was just the country carrying out military exercises within its own borders which just so happen to abut several NATO states after the bloc extended its frontiers eastward following the end of the Old Cold War.
It’s the eastern expansion of NATO and the alliance’s recent activities in the Arctic Ocean that represent the greatest threat to peace between the two. On the eastern front, the US is once again provoking Russia in order to craft the false impression among the Japanese that Moscow is a military threat to their interests. Washington is greatly perturbed by their past couple years of technically fruitless but nevertheless highly symbolic talks over signing a peace treaty to end the Second World War and resolve what Tokyo subjectively regards as the “Northern Territories Dispute”. Moscow’s reclamation of control over the Kuril Islands following that conflict was agreed to by the Allies, but then America went back on its word in order to divide and rule the two.
Their mutual intent to enter into a rapprochement with one another could in theory occur in parallel with a similar rapprochement between Japan and China, which might altogether reduce Tokyo’s need to retain as robust of an American military presence on its islands. That in turn would weaken the US’ military posturing and therefore reduce the viability of its grand strategic designs to “contain” both multipolar countries in that theater. As regards the Arctic and Eastern European fronts, these are also part of the same “containment” policy, albeit aimed most directly against Russia and only tangentially against China’s “Polar Silk Road”.
It’s understandable that the US will continue to compete with these two rival Great Powers, but such competition must be responsibly regulated in order to avoid the unintended scenario of a war by miscalculation. It’s for that reason why the world should be alarmed by American brinksmanship against them, especially the latest developments with respect to Russia that were earlier described. All that it takes is one wrong move for everything to spiral out of control and beyond the point of no return. Regrettably, while Biden might ease some pressure on China, he’ll likely compensate by doubling down against Russia.
Trump should also take responsibility for this as well since it’s occurring during his presidency after all, even if it might possibly be in its final months if he isn’t able to thwart the Democrats’ illegal seizure of power following their large-scale defrauding of this month’s elections. He capitulated to hostile “deep state” pressure early on into this term perhaps out of the mistaken belief that “compromising” with his enemies in the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies would result in them easing their pressure upon him on other fronts, but this gamble obviously failed since it only emboldened them to pressure him even more.
It’s unfortunate that Trump was never able to actualize his intended rapprochement with Russia for the aforementioned reasons, but he could have rebelliously defied the “deep state” after this month’s fraudulent elections by reversing his currently aggressive policy against Moscow if he truly had the political will to do so. He doesn’t, though, and this might nowadays be due more to his support of the military-industrial complex than any “deep state” pressure like it initially was. After all, war is a very profitable business, and artificially amplifying the so-called “Russia threat” by provoking Moscow into various responses could pay off handsomely.
It’s therefore extremely unlikely that this dangerous trend will change anytime in the coming future. To the contrary, it’ll likely only intensify and get much worse under a possible Biden Administration. Nevertheless, Russia doesn’t lack the resolve to defend its legitimate interests and will always do what’s needed in this respect, albeit responsibly (so long as it’s realistic to react in such a way) in order to avoid falling into the Americans’ trap. The ones who should be the most worried, then, are the US’ NATO and other “allied” vassals who stand to lose the most by getting caught in any potential crossfire for facilitating American aggression.
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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.
Another scandal erupted in relations between Turkey and the EU – on November 22, the Turkish merchant vessel, Roseline A, was detained and fully inspected by personnel of German frigate Hamburg in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 160 nautical miles north of the Libyan city of Benghazi.
Since no weapons were found on board, Ankara received moral satisfaction which would later turn into notes of protest demanding an apology and compensation, as well as statements about European “Turkophobia”. Turkey for sure will use this cause in all possible ways – necessary protests will be made; lawsuits will be filed. This very issue will be included in the agenda of Turkey’s activities in NATO and the UN. The Turkish side has already declared its official protest, and the EU ambassadors have been invited to the Turkish Foreign Ministry for “talks”.
It is worth noting that this incident occurred shortly before the next EU summit scheduled on December 10, devoted to possible imposing of sanctions against Turkey for its actions in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. EU top officials are once again trying to make it clear to Turkey that its activities in the region are unacceptable and “sanctions are more likely than ever.”
Moreover, on November 26, MEPs voted by an absolute majority in favor of a draft resolution calling on the EU member states to impose tough sanctions on Ankara. The document emphasizes that relations between Turkey and the EU have reached a “historical minimum” due to Ankara’s actions in the Mediterranean, Libya, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Europe sends constant signals to Turkey that its position is contrary to European values, interests, and understanding of regional and global security.
What will happen at the summit on December 10, when the EU will, once again, discuss sanctions against Turkey? How far the EU will be ready to go and what steps Ankara will take in the near future to prevent it? Now Turkey provides a more restrained policy trying not to give a leverage to Europe, Paris, or Berlin.
France still may be the most anti-Turkish country in the EU, but now Berlin is starting to act more openly against Ankara. The incident in the Eastern Mediterranean was approved by the German leadership in advance for sure. This means that the situation for Turkey is changing for the worse on the eve of the EU summit, so important for Erdogan.
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Armen Tigranakert is a freelance journalist from Armenian diaspora in Syrian Aleppo.
‘America is back’ hailed Joe Biden on Twitter this week. The world tried to work out exactly what that meant. For different parts of the world, of course, it means different things. As many liberal Americans breathe a sigh of relief, the people of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq may shudder. For democratic, progressive values at home were often balanced with interventionism and destruction abroad during previous ‘normal’ administrations. There is no doubt that Russians are viewing Biden’s presidency with trepidation: the return of familiar hawks does not bode well for Russian-US relations.
Biden’s announcement curiously coincided with another incident on the very same day – the appearance of US naval destroyer John S McCain within Russian waters off the coast of Vladivostok. The incident should not be overlooked. The move seems to be a display of sheer bravado on the part of the Americans, who released a statement later on asserting that they had the right to challenge ‘Russia’s excessive maritime claims’. Moscow responded by saying the ship had been ‘warned of the unacceptability of its actions’ and (in short) it was lucky it had not been rammed by the Udaloy-class destroyer which had been tailing it. This provocative move was followed on the next day by US missiles being launched into the Black Sea from Romania. The rocket-launch tests reportedly involved more than 130 troops and 30 pieces of military hardware. It doesn’t take much imagination to work out what they could be used for: the range of these missiles is 300km, they could reach Crimea.
But don’t take my word for it. For greater insight into the US’ ambitions when it comes to Russia, one need only look to this RAND report from last year. This think-tank has close ties to the US military and therefore offers a pretty good reflection of what current US policy is. And it makes disturbing reading. Entitled ‘Extending Russia’ the document discusses all the different ways the US can undermine Russia, ideologically, geopolitically and militarily. It identifies that the US is locked in a ‘great-power’ competition with Russia (welcome back to the 19th century) and it assesses which tactics would bring about the best results at what risk. From promoting regime change in Belarus to increasing NATO exercises in Europe, every possibility is explored. With regard to the recent military exercises in Romania, and the incident with the USS John S McCain, we can see where the ground has been laid for such provocations:
‘There are several measures the US and its allies could take to encourage Russia to divert defense resources into the maritime domain, an area where the US already possesses key comparative advantages…deploying land-based or air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles on NATO’s Black Sea coast could compel Russia to strengthen defenses of its Crimean bases, limit its navy’s ability to operate in the Black Sea, and thus diminish the utility of its Crimean conquest.’
It speaks of developing a land-based military presence on the coast, citing Romania as a country likely to comply with such plans, having concerns over the Russian ‘build-up’ in the Black Sea region. It suggests that installing land-based weapons systems could be preferable to increasing maritime activity, as the increased presence of NATO vessels in the Black Sea could lead to Russia bolstering its presence in the region. Which, naturally, given this increased US threat, it already has. Only this week, it was reported that the Russian army had installed advanced artillery on Crimea to defend the peninsula from any “surprise missile attack.” The Deputy Head of the Public Chamber of Crimea, Alexander Formanchuk, expressedconcern that these NATO exercises fit within a wider pattern of escalation, saying that “provocations against Crimea have become more frequent. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a further exacerbation of international relations and the international situation. And the topic of Crimea is a convenient reason for escalating such provocations.”
The question is, does the US appreciate the danger of the path it is treading? Do these policy makers understand that if it continues on the current trajectory the chances of conflict with Russia, even being triggered accidentally, are increasing? With such demonstrations of force taking place on Russia’s borders, there is a high risk of one side misinterpreting the other’s actions, leading to retaliation. One has to ask if this is in fact the goal of some in the US military and security establishment. Look where this ‘great power’ competition led us to in the 20th century- two catastrophic world wars. And yet the rhetoric coming from US politicians and media couldn’t try to incite war more if it tried. “The U.S. Army Has A Rocket Surprise For Russian Troops In Crimea’ a Forbes article read this week. The US is sending ‘a message’ to Moscow it reads, ‘The U.S. Army in Europe has restored its long-range firepower. And it wants the Russians to know’. Sounds friendly, doesn’t it?
The US has never recognised Crimea’s reunification with Russia; nor has it ever understood or appreciated the history of the peninsula or why Russia felt obliged to involve itself in the Ukraine conflict to protect ethnic Russians. Only this year Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that the US ‘will not ever recognize’ Crimea as Russian territory and that it will maintain sanctions against Russia until the peninsula returns to Ukraine. This unequivocal position, together with the somewhat fanciful hope that Crimea could return to Ukraine demonstrates just how far apart the two nations are. It has been widely acknowledged that relations between the US and Russia are worse now than during the Cold War. With Joe Biden, having already acknowledged during his recent election campaign that Russia is the ‘biggest threat’ the US faces, we are entering a very uncertain and potentially volatile period ahead.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow the author on Twitter @shottlandka
Government lawbreaking in Boris Johnson’s adminstration has now reached an unprecedented scale for a British government – and we should all be concerned.
In September last year, the supreme court ruled that Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen that parliament should be prorogued for five weeks at the height of the Brexit crisis was unlawful. It was a unanimous judgment from the 11 justices on the UK’s highest court. Johnson’s response was to attack the supreme court and threatened to dissolve it.
More recently, we’ve heard how Members of Parliament have been pushing the UK government to back down over its controversial plan to breach international law with its Internal Markets Bill. The House of Lords reacted badly to it and inflicted a crushing defeat on Boris Johnson. In the first vote, the government was defeated by 433 to 165 by the Lords, in the second, by 407 to 148. This is still not resolved. For ‘global Britain’ this alone has been a disaster as it has attracted worldwide derision.
You could argue that both these events are seen by the government as the only way to get through their Brexit agenda – others would say that these are acts of desperation because Brexit simply can’t be done by working inside political, economic and diplomatic norms.
But as each day passes we are learning that at the very highest levels of government – new lawbreaking is being reported.
For the purposes of this article, we can leave aside the scale of illegal contracts provided by what is becoming known as the ‘chumocracy’ to Tory donors and friends of Tory MP’s who are taking advantage of the Covid crisis to feather their nests. Court cases against the government are already filed.
A report from OpenDemocracy this week that exposes the government of creating a ‘clearing house’ to control Freedom of Information requests is breathtaking. This is the stuff of tinpot dictators. Here, the governemt has been accused of running an ‘Orwellian’ unit in Michael Gove’s office that instructs Whitehall departments on how to respond to Freedom of Information requests. Worse still, it collects the personal information about journalists who submit them for nefarious reasons.
oD reports – “Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are supposed to be ‘applicant-blind’: meaning who makes the request should not matter. But it now emerges that government departments and non-departmental public bodies have been referring ‘sensitive’ FOI requests from journalists and researchers to the Clearing House in Gove’s department in a move described by a shadow cabinet minister as “blacklisting”.
Not only is the government centralising control over what information can be released for the public – but journalists are being targeted. oD again:
“The secrecy of this list and the fact that our names have been circulated around Whitehall is seriously chilling”
Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Helen Hayes said: “This is extremely troubling. If the cabinet office is interfering in FOI requests and seeking to work around the requirements of the Act by blacklisting journalists, it is a grave threat to our values and transparency in our democracy.”
As the government continues to act in a way that raises the suspicion of its lawbreaking, immorality or malfeasance in office – the government has since been found in this investigation to have granted fewer and rejected more FOI requests than ever in the history of the Freedom of Information Act. That report, entitled ‘Art of Darkness’ paints a disturbing picture of the state of Freedom of Information in Britain. The government are now being legally pursued in this case.
Silke Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch said,
“We’re appalled that such important information rights have been so disrespected by the government. The centralisation of difficult FOIs, the secrecy of this list and the fact that our names have been circulated around Whitehall is seriously chilling. This is a shameful reflection on the government’s attitude towards transparency.”
Detained, deported and denied legal rights
Next up is the Windrush scandal that broke in 2018 when it was discovered that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights.
“It is unacceptable that equality legislation, designed to prevent an unfair or disproportionate impact on people from ethnic minorities and other groups, was effectively ignored”
The Equality and Human Rights Commission agreed with an earlier report that the experiences of the Windrush generation were “foreseeable and avoidable”, and its chair described their treatment as a “shameful stain on British history”. In its investigation, which it has subsequently just published it found the government had willfully broken the law and went on to say –
“It is unacceptable that equality legislation, designed to prevent an unfair or disproportionate impact on people from ethnic minorities and other groups, was effectively ignored in the creation and delivery of policies that had such profound implications for so many people’s lives.”
Children
Last Tuesday, we find that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson acted unlawfully by failing to consult children’s rights bodies before deliberately watering down safeguards for children in care, a court has just ruled.
Judges found against Williamson over his actions in relaxing some of the important obligations on local councils over the 78,000 children in care in England during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The government’s actions were shameful, both in the scale of the protections they took away from very vulnerable children in England and the way they went about it”
A case was brought against Williamson because it was thought he acted illegally. The Court has now ruled that there was “no good reason” why Williamson excluded England’s children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, and other bodies representing children in care from his decision-making.
Carolyne Willow, the director of the charity that brought the case said:
“I am hugely relieved and overjoyed that the Court has confirmed that children and young people, and the organisations who represent their rights and interests, must be consulted when the government is considering changes to their legal rights and protections. The government’s actions were shameful, both in the scale of the protections they took away from very vulnerable children in England and the way they went about it. This should draw to a close backroom, secret government consultations which exclude the rights, views and experiences of children and young people.”
Intimidation
The Priti Patel case is a high profile case but it only scratches the surface. Boris Johnson was left facing questions about why he sat on this report for so long and why he tried to tone down an independent report which said Home Secretary Priti Patel broke the ministerial code by bullying staff.
Sir David Normington, a former Home Office chief, said Patel’s behaviour was “completely unacceptable” and “You shouldn’t have bullies in government”. One person at the end of Patel’s obviously vicious and insidious character attempted to take her own life. She lost her job – as did the person who reported it. After a Cabinet Office inquiry, Sir Alex Allan said the home secretary’s conduct “amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying” – finding she had breached the ministerial code. For the first time ever, Johnson rejected the advice and supported the bully – Sir Alex felt he had no choice but to resign as his role has been fully undermined.
We shouldn’t forget, it was only two weeks ago that Sonia Khan – a special adviser to the then chancellor, Sajid Javid who was escorted out of Downing Street by armed police on the orders of Dominic Cummings has been given a five-figure payoff by the government to stop a lawsuit over intimidation and unfair dismissal that it would have emphatically lost. Before that, another civil servant received a five-figure payout from a bullying case against a senior member of Michael Gove’s team. IN addition, there is an ongoing case of a senior civil servant taking the government to court for the same reasons.
In the eBook – Brexit – A Corporate Coup D’Etat, we see evidence of senior Tory MP’s at the heart of Brexit threatening and bullying the CEO’s of some large British companies for speaking out about the dangers of leaving the EU. Others were made to sign non-disclosure agreements to effectively silence CEO’s who have a legal obligation to publicly report trading threats to their shareholders and the stock market.
The governments own website says of bullying – “Bullying and harassment is behaviour that makes someone feel intimidated or offended. Harassment is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010.” No matter how the government dresses this up – they are breaking the law that applies to everyone in Britain.
Autocrats
These examples, distorting and withholding information of public interest, creating secretive units within government, blacklisting media operations and targeting journalists is bad enough. But to be found in a British court of wrongly detaining people, illegally deporting them and denying them their legal rights is truly shameful. Then we come to the utterly disgraceful behaviour of this government who have willfully attempted to deny poverty-stricken children a meal whilst a pandemic rages around them. It took a football player to defeat the government and force them into an embarrassing U-Turn. Since them, we have learned that the government effectively jettisoned legal obligations to protect nearly 80,000 extremely vulnerable children.
People like Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson and Michael Gove have decided that the rule of law is simply too inconvenient. It’s not for them.
Scholars say countries across the globe are experiencing a rise in autocratic rule, with declines in democratic ideals and practice. Autocratic rule – also known as authoritarianism – is when one leader or political party attempts to extend and then exercise more and more power to govern a country and its people.
The Tories are now dispensing with long-held checks and balances designed to highlight government lawbreaking and accountability in what was once a functioning democracy. This government is: extending its own executive powers, repressing citizen efforts to hold it accountable, appealing to an ethno-nationalistic force to support it, are capturing elite support, controlling information, singling out journalists and abusing emergency laws. These are signs of rising authoritarianism according to Shelley Inglis – who for 15 years with the United Nations, advised governments and democracy advocates on how to strengthen the rule of law, human rights and democratic governance.
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In this abridged article published by the London Daily Mirror & based on his 1975 film, Smashing Kids, John Pilger describes class as Britain’s most virulent disease, causing record levels of child poverty.
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When I first reported on child poverty in Britain, I was struck by the faces of children I spoke to, especially the eyes. They were different: watchful, fearful.
In Hackney, in 1975, I filmed Irene Brunsden’s family. Irene told me she gave her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes. “She doesn’t tell me she’s hungry, she just moans. When she moans, I know something is wrong.”
“How much money do you have in the house? I asked.
“Five pence,” she replied.
Irene said she might have to take up prostitution, “for the baby’s sake”. Her husband Jim, a truck driver who was unable to work because of illness, was next to her. It was as if they shared a private grief.
This is what poverty does. In my experience, its damage is like the damage of war; it can last a lifetime, spread to loved ones and contaminate the next generation. It stunts children, brings on a host of diseases and, as unemployed Harry Hopwood in Liverpool told me, “it’s like being in prison”.
This prison has invisible walls. When I asked Harry’s young daughter if she ever thought that one day she would live a life like better-off children, she said unhesitatingly: “No”.
What has changed 45 years later? At least one member of an impoverished family is likely to have a job — a job that denies them a living wage. Incredibly, although poverty is more disguised, countless British children still go to bed hungry and are ruthlessly denied opportunities..
What has not changed is that poverty is the result of a disease that is still virulent yet rarely spoken about – class.
Study after study shows that the people who suffer and die early from the diseases of poverty brought on by a poor diet, sub-standard housing and the priorities of the political elite and its hostile “welfare” officials — are working people. In 2020, one in three preschool British children suffers like this.
In making my recent film, The Dirty War on the NHS, it was clear to me that the savage cutbacks to the NHS and its privatisation by the Blair, Cameron, May and Johnson governments had devastated the vulnerable, including many NHS workers and their families. I interviewed one low-paid NHS worker who could not afford her rent and was forced, to sleep in churches or on the streets.
At a food bank in central London, I watched young mothers looking nervously around as they hurried away with old Tesco bags of food and washing powder and tampons they could no longer afford, their young children holding on to them. It is no exaggeration that at times I felt I was walking in the footprints of Dickens.
Boris Johnson has claimed that 400,000 fewer children are living in poverty since 2010 when the Conservatives came to power. This is a lie, as the Children’s Commissioner has confirmed. In fact, more than 600,000 children have fallen into poverty since 2012; the total is expected to exceed 5 million. This, few dare say, is a class war on children.
Old Etonian Johnson is may be a caricature of the born-to-rule class; but his “elite” is not the only one. All the parties in Parliament, notably if not especially Labour – like much of the bureaucracy and most of the media — have scant if any connection to the “streets”: to the world of the poor: of the “gig economy”: of battling a system of Universal Credit that can leave you without a penny and in despair.
Last week, the prime minister and his “elite” showed where their priorities lay. In the face of the greatest health crisis in living memory when Britain has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe and poverty is accelerating as the result of a punitive “austerity” policy, he announced £16.5 billion for “defence”. This makes Britain, whose military bases cover the world, the highest military spender in Europe.
And the enemy? The real one is poverty and those who impose it and perpetuate it.
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John Pilgeris an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20thcentury. Some of his previous contributions to Consortium News can be found here.
Featured image: A British family from the film Smashing Kids, 1975. (John Garrett)
Taiwan has found itself increasingly in the middle of the growing power struggle between a waning US and a rising China.
Taiwan is recognized by both the UN and the vast majority of the world’s nations including (officially) the United States under the One China policy – but Taiwan’s pro-independence circles have nonetheless enjoyed large amounts of financial and political support from Washington and has been a point of contention in the region and between Beijing and Washington for decades.
The most recent example of this – reported by the Taipei Times in their article, “Two Washington-based pro-democracy NGOs to establish offices in Taipei,” – was the increased footprint of Washington’s notorious regime change front – the National Endowment for Democracy.
The article would claim:
Two Washington-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), are to establish offices in Taiwan after they were sanctioned by Beijing last year.
The two institutes, along with the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House and Human Rights Watch were sanctioned last year after speaking in support of Hong Kong democracy activists and as well as being part of China’s tit-for-tat reaction against US President Donald Trump signing the US’ Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
Of course the US NED was not simply “speaking in support” of Hong Kong opposition groups – but was a primary conduit through which US government funding passed to these opposition groups.
Making the purpose behind the US NED’s expansion in Taiwan much clearer was IRI president Daniel Twining’s comments claiming (emphasis added):
From our Taipei base, we will work with our partners to highlight Taiwan’s hard-won democratic lessons, strengthen networks of Asia’s democratic actors and build resilience against malign authoritarian influence in the region… As the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] becomes more aggressive in violating the global rules-based order, now is the time for all democracies … to invest in strengthening ties with Taiwan.
In other words, the US NED’s move in Taiwan is meant to contribute to Washington’s wider campaign of encircling and containing not only China but to fuel US-funded unrest targeting China’s closest regional allies.
Independence movements in Taiwan have identified themselves as part of the so-called “Milk Tea Alliance” – a united front of US-funded opposition groups from across the region attempting to coerce their respective governments into a confrontational posture toward Beijing. Most recently this has included the opposition in Hong Kong and anti-government protests in Thailand.
And while the US is clearly banking on its heavy investments in “soft power” – essentially region-wide political interference – China’s strategy focuses instead on economic ties underpinned by principles of non-interference.
It is no surprise that the Asian region has responded positively to the latter instead of the former.
Taiwan’s Future is Inevitable
The US and the wider Western media have promoted narratives of an impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan. This narrative has been used to justify the sale of US weapons to Taiwan’s military including a recent arms deal worth several billion US dollars.
The Business Insider in an article titled, “A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not be easy, and the 400 anti-ship missiles the US plans to sell to Taiwan would make it even harder,” would note:
Less than a week after it authorized a $1.8 billion arms sale to Taiwan, the US Department of State notified Congress on Monday of another possible Foreign Military Sale to Taiwan for $2.4 billion that includes hundreds of Harpoon anti-ship missiles and launchers.
The big sale, if approved by Congress, would give Taiwan 100 Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems (HCDS) and 400 RGM-84L-4 Harpoon Block II Surface-Launched Missiles, very capable all-weather weapons that can search for and take out ships as far as half-way across the Taiwan Strait.
The sale of the additional missiles would later be approved.
The weapons are for a “Chinese invasion” that will likely never come and in addition to the US “soft power” networks Taiwan now serves as a base for – the US still lacks any means to confront or contain China’s influence – both in regards to Taiwan and in regards to the wider region.
The need for a “Chinese invasion” of territory already recognized as part of China by the UN makes so little sense on so many levels. But the clearest level is economically where mainland China now stands as Taiwan’s largest trade partner and investor.
Mainland China has been the key to Taiwan’s economic growth throughout recent years and had helped drive the easing of cross Strait tensions.
Because of Taiwan’s economic ties with the mainland, the most recent drive by the US to re-introduce a wedge between the two has come at high cost to Taiwan’s economy. The government fulfilling Washington’s desire to restrict mainland investment and oppose Beijing’s decisions regarding Chinese territory has cut Taiwan off from economic inflows the US – and even the wider West – are unable to compensate for.
A look at Taiwan’s foreign investment and trade over the last two decades reveals an obvious and unavoidable trend regarding Taiwan’s near to intermediate future. It is a trend of a shrinking Western role in Taiwan’s economy replaced by a rising mainland China – and a trend that inevitably impacts Taiwan geopolitically.
Twenty years ago only 4% of Taiwan’s exports headed to mainland China while 18% headed to the United States. Today, 34% of Taiwan’s exports head to China versus 10% to the United States. Taiwan’s imports reflect a similar shift in economic power. Both China’s economic rise and its proximity to Taiwan means that this trend will only continue.
US efforts to build up Taiwan’s independence movement is meant to deliberately disrupt this trend – and it is doing so not by providing Taiwan with economic alternatives but instead baiting the island into a growing political and even military standoff with the mainland and its regional allies. This is being done specifically at the expense of Taiwan’s economic ties to both.
Just like Australia and others being drawn into Washington’s anti-Chinese foreign policy – such a stance is not sustainable. As long as China can avoid provocations and conflict and continue offering the benefits of economic prosperity and peace as an alternative to Washington’s strategy of tension – patience and time will run out for Washington’s style of Indo-Pacific hegemony and the interests in the region abetting it will be displaced by those interested in a more constructive regional architecture.
Perhaps on a more global scale a similar process can play out within the United States itself – where current circles of power pursuing this counterproductive foreign policy are displaced by those with a more constructive vision of America’s role not only in Asia but around the globe.
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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from US-China Perception Monitor
There was no reason to think that a Biden administration would be to the left of the Obama administration when it comes to foreign policy. Biden comes with a long political career of supporting the wars of the United States and its allies, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to Israel’s aggression against Palestinians to the protracted occupation of Afghanistan. And whatever limited overtures he made to the Left during his campaign for the general election in 2020 (while he simultaneously ran on distancing himself from the Left), foreign policy was almost entirely omitted, as evidenced by the issue’s exclusion from the unity task force with Bernie Sanders.
Perhaps the most distinguishing foreign policy position Biden took on the campaign trail was his saber rattling toward China, which was not quite as racist at Trump’s, but nonetheless got so bad a Biden ad was rebuked by progressive Asian-American groups for its racist content (Biden eventually walked back some of the ad’s rhetoric). Biden did say during his campaign that he wants to end “forever wars” (many of which he helped start) and that he’s against the war in Yemen (a position he only took after he served in the Obama administration that supported the war), but he neither centered these platforms nor accompanied them with concrete policy proposals that would actually bring an end to endless war.
In keeping with this trajectory, Biden is already drawing from a host of pro-war individuals from the Obama era to fill his cabinet. Because many of these people have been around for a while and have relationships across Washington, there is no shortage of well-known political figures who are testifying to their decency and smarts—that’s how the relatively insular world of Washington “national security professionals” works, after all. But for those on the outside of the Washington Blob looking in, the operative questions are, “What are these appointees’ records, and what does this say about what exactly we are up against in a Biden administration?”
Antony Blinken — who will be nominated for Secretary of State, as the Biden-Harris transition team announced Monday — has rightfully attracted considerable criticism for a record of supporting wars and so-called humanitarian interventions. Blinken was a top aide to Biden when the then-Senator voted to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Blinken helped Biden develop a proposal to partition Iraq into three separate regions based on ethnic and sectarian identity. As deputy national security adviser, Blinken supported the disastrous military intervention in Libya in 2011, and in 2018he helped launch WestExec Advisors, a “strategic advisory firm” that is secretive about its clients, along with other Obama administration alumni like Michèle Flournoy. Jonathan Guyer writes in The American Prospect, “I learned that Blinken and Flournoy used their networks to build a large client base at the intersection of tech and defense. An Israeli surveillance startup turned to them. So did a major U.S. defense company. Google billionaire Eric Schmidt and Fortune 100 companies went to them, too.”
But other, lesser-known Obama administration alumni deserve greater scrutiny. Among them is Avril Haines, who has been tapped as Biden’s Director of National Intelligence. Haines was one of the co-authors of Obama’s “presidential policy guidance,” the infamous drone playbook that normalized targeted assassinations around the world. Here’s how Newsweek described Haines in 2013:
Since becoming the National Security Council’s legal adviser in 2011, she had been working on a wide array of highly complicated and legally sensitive issues — generally until 1 or 2 in the morning, sometimes later — that go to the core of U.S. security interests. Among them were the legal requirements governing U.S. intervention in Syria and the range of highly classified options for thwarting Iran’s nuclear program. All the while, Haines was sometimes summoned in the middle of the night to weigh in on whether a suspected terrorist could be lawfully incinerated by a drone strike.
During the Biden presidential campaign, there was a concerted effort by former Obama aides to cast Haines retroactively as a voice of restraint and protecting civilians, as captured in an article by Spencer Ackerman. This revisionism should not be believed: Whatever civilian protections Haines may have written into drone law, they clearly did not work, as evidenced by the devastating toll of U.S. drone wars on civilians. While the Trump administration escalated the drone war and loosened restrictions on killing civilians, it was the Obama administration — aided by Haines — that normalized the widespread use of targeted assassinations that turned the whole world into a potential U.S. battlefield.
There are other aspects of Haines’ record that are worrying. She has “in the past described herself as a former consultant for the controversial data-mining firm Palantir,” as Murtaza Hussain reported for The Intercept. Palantir was co-founded by a Trump-backing billionaire, and is implicated in some of the worst wrongdoings of the Trump administration, including mass surveillance and immigrant detention. As Hussain reports, little is known about Haines’ role at the firm, and she scrubbed any mention from her bio when she came on as a Biden advisor. (Haines also worked for WestExec, as Guyer reports.)
In 2018, Haines angered progressives when she spoke in support of Gina Haspel’s nomination for CIA Director. Haspel was widely opposed for her role in running CIA prisons where torture took place.
And then there is Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tapped to serve as United Nations Ambassador. Thomas-Greenfield lists her most recent employment Albright Stonebridge Group, a secretive “global strategy firm” somewhat similar to McKinsey & Company, and chaired by Madeleine Albright (Thomas-Greenfield is currently listed as “on leave” from the firm). Albright Stonebridge Group is a black box: It’s near impossible to get any info about who its clients are. The firm claims that it does not lobby the U.S. government or do work that is covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but many of its staffers double in roles that certainly do exert influence, or have in the past. The firm’s UAE office is headed by Jad Mneymneh, who previously was in the Crown Prince Court of Abu Dhabi’s Office of Strategic Affairs.
There is nothing remarkable about Biden appointing someone who hails from a shadowy global strategy firm for a powerful role, but that is precisely the problem. As Guyer points out, Jake Sullivan, set to be Biden’s National Security Advisor, went to work for Macro Advisory Partners in 2017. “Run by former British spy chiefs, Macro Advisory Partners has about 30 full-time staff and reported $37 million in revenue last year,” notes Guyer. “Macro Advisory Partners has used Sullivan’s involvement as a selling point in offering ‘trusted counsel in a turbulent world,’ with his face atop the roster on their website’s landing page. But when Sullivan publishes a magazine article about U.S. foreign policy or delivers university lectures, he almost always omits this job from his biography.”
Then there is Michèle Flournoy, considered the favorite to lead the Pentagon (though this hasn’t been officially announced yet). Not only is she on the board of military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, but she co-founded the the hawkish center-left think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) — which receives significant funding from the weapons industry, including General Dynamics Corporation, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Corporation and Lockheed Martin Corporation. She served in the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012and then played a powerful role at CNAS. She was a major backer of the 2011military intervention in Libya, a supporter of the occupation of Afghanistan, and firmly opposed the complete removal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
More Biden nominations will be trickling in over the coming days and weeks, and we have every reason to expect more of the same: His transition team is a clear tell. As I reported on November 11, one third of Biden’s Pentagon transition team alone lists as their “most recent employment” think tanks, organizations or companies that are either funded by the weapons industry or are directly part of this industry. Many of these entities are well-known and even respected, including influential think tanks like CNAS and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Staffers of these think tanks do not get the same bad flak that lobbyists receive, but they deserve it: Via policy papers, media outreach and relationships with politicians, these staffers effectively do the same thing lobbyists do, but dressed in a more academic veneer, and the think tanks Biden is drawing from have proven track records of pushing weapons systems on the U.S. government. Indeed, in 2016 even the New York Timesaccused CSIS of lobbying for General Atomics, a California-based manufacturer of Predator drones, based on a cache of emails showing it doing just that. And then there are the many that do not disclose their funders, including four transition team members (Linda Thomas-Greenfield among them) who hail from Albright Stonebridge Group.
There is a temptation to take a moment to breathe, to celebrate that the Trump administration has been voted out (although Trump appears determined to maintain power), and to hold on to hope that Biden will mark a turn away from some of Trump’s worst impulses, including his war mongering. But we learned from the earliest days of the Obama administration that it is sober assessment — rather than projection — that is called for in moments like this. Obama, with Biden at his side, oversaw intervention in Libya, disastrous involvement in the Yemen war, ongoing occupation in Afghanistan, support for the coup in Honduras, and much more. And Biden is now pulling from the same team of advisors and influence peddlers and consultants who helped make it all happen.
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Sarah Lazare is web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including The Intercept, The Nation, and Tom Dispatch. She tweets at @sarahlazare.
Featured image: Then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE
Thailand’s ongoing US-funded anti-government protests aren’t “pro-democracy,” they are anti-Chinese.
Just like in Hong Kong, the US is attempting to create crisis for China and its allies and impede both China’s and Asia’s rise upon the global stage.
I go over the close and ever-growing ties between Thailand and China and why the US is so determined to undo them.
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By now the apocalyptic metaphor for Jeremy Corbyn has crept through the doors of our consciousness. The tendency in the press to describe the unlikely leader in foreboding words which contain a warning: toxic; dangerous; destroy; risk, has gone in to overload. There’s always a warning attached to Corbyn. He will doom Labour at the ballot box; he’s a threat to your nan; if you say his name three times the ghost of Trotsky will appear, collectivize your cat and steal your taxes. This circus of fear isn’t just misleading: when Corbyn is trying to shine a light on the troublesome logic of government policy, on the nightmare that austerity and privatization creates, it shuts down dialogue before it can even get started.
Mainstream media renderings of Jeremy Corbyn tell us he has travelled through a wormhole that leads back to 1970, to drag us all back kicking and screaming in to an age of unbridled left-wing lunacy. In truth, like most ‘golden ages’ alluded to in politics, the reality is often more complex than the mythologizing which hides it. A lot seems odd about the reasoning of the debunkers. Firstly the issue that the chief problem is Corbyn’s obsolescence, rather than the reverse: precisely because of the way global debates on security, warfare, climate change and inequality are escalating, throwing 21st century challenges in to sharp relief, Corbyn’s ideas on rail and energy nationalisation, trident renewal and redistributive justice are ever salient. What should the era of an idea matter anyway? It made sense to left-wing activists in the sixties and seventies to protest the fact that the war economy hoovers up resources that might instead be devoted to helping people. Why can’t it make sense now? If anything those beliefs have been vindicated by time. You’d hope the idea that libraries, schools, hospitals and nurses do more good than bombs didn’t just die on January 1st 1980.
As for introducing Hamas as “friends”, one senses the alternative phrasing, “our enemies in Hamas”, may have escalated tensions somewhat. Corbyn’s choice was simply politic. There is a better reason why his bedfellows stir controversy, and that is when they are at odds with humanitarian principles. For example Corbyn’s refusal to speak out on regimes like Russia and Iran, which violate principles of justice by persecuting LGBTQI citizens, is horrendously out of touch.
Nevertheless he has done good to challenge the UK government for its collusion with Saudi Arabia, an extremist regime notorious for its abuse of human rights and to whom we nevertheless have a policy of selling guns and bombs. Arguably the UN has bastardized the whole legacy of humanitarianism by inviting Saudi Arabia to sit on its human rights council. It is horrifying to think that the (dubiously named) Ministry of Justice in the UK is being contracted to make Saudi Arabia’s disgusting penal system more efficient, at a time when human rights activists are campaigning for the release of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, a teenager sentenced to death for his involvement with anti-government protests. Jeremy Corbyn can be a force for good if he can keep applying diplomatic pressure and expose the pernicious influence of the Sauds on government policy.
Despite his high ideals he will doom us at the ballot box, say many. Of course Labour has to fight elections, but is that its central political task? If seizing the centre and capturing the average voter means capitulating to the portfolio and rhetoric of the Conservatives, it is mind-boggling why anyone would want to try. Obviously Blair did it, and sold Labour’s soul for peanuts. But there is no reason Labour should ever again ditch people power for parliamentary privilege, and ditch progress for politics.
Elections matter, but there is another battle, to build a mass movement for social justice sustainable on the local level, to win back the population for whom Labour was once an authentic opposition to the status quo but morphed in to a spooky robot replica of the Conservatives. Labour shouldn’t just rely on elections, but should equally support the struggle of trade unions, campaign groups and students aspiring in earnest to eliminate poverty and injustice from the world. There’s a whole generation of young people who want to change the state of democracy and struggle for peace and freedom who have found cause for hope in Corbyn, and his success in galvanizing this generation is a great illustration of how progressive principles of the past can still have meaning for people today.
People may accuse Labour of being stuck in the past but the truth is that we are still fighting Thatcher. We have a choice between the neoliberal society, organized by markets and private ownership and run for the benefit of a few self-serving plutocrats, or a socialist democracy, putting power in people’s hands to end the blight of war and division. Thatcher’s triumph was to convince the political class that “there is no alternative” to her Rayndian social engineering. New Labour embraced the essentials of the consensus. She herself said Blair was her greatest success. And every now and then a Blairite will rise up in a bubble of hot air to spew invective over the people’s protest, to try and kill off the Corbyn conga. But socialism is back. The struggle of progressives to reveal the truth, that “another world is possible”, has won, and the establishment hates it. And that is why they crank out phoney propaganda, and ask us if Jeremy Corbyn wins, would the last person who leaves Britain turn the lights out. Because it sits very, very uneasily with them that even if the all the lights did go out, more and more people are following Jeremy Corbyn, who may be a blind man leading the blind, but leading with the light of socialism in his heart.
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First things first, and rather than speculate about what may happen five or ten years from now, we need to look at the present. What is being tested now is to what extent the powerful are able to shape our perception of reality at will, and were we to believe mainstream media, it seems they are getting it.
We can only trust our instinct, and what my instinct tells me is we have to throw away the masks and go on general strike. Act in unison, not in that social distancing that they want to enforce to its last consequences. Everything else is calculated ambiguity, mediocrity and delirium, a worthless attempt to escape from what is happening right now.
This would be truly cathartic, and the crossing of supposedly contradictory gestures would short-circuit power and the ideological divisions that are at its service.
The future will depend on what we do in the present and not the other way around. Today what we observe is general subjection; each mask is the most effective vote for the party of the technocracy, fear and the multiple levers of repression. We will return to this at the end. But it is also necessary to pay attention to the medium and long term and not give a few the additional advantage of being the only ones capable of playing a long game, since they already have too many.
It has almost become commonplace to put populism and technocracy at opposite poles, and so it is on a superficial reading. What is less appreciated is how they participate in the same lie, and this is always the essential thing if one wants to see beyond banana politics.
Everything encompassed under the umbrella term “populism” has the common denominator of claiming to represent “the people” as opposed to an elite; the unitary character of such a people may be a myth, but the overwhelming reality of a tiny kleptocracy is not, which ends up endowing populist claims with undeniable strength and truth.
On the other hand, it is crystal clear that technocracy is at the service of these minute elites and their facilitators, which exposes a myth much more unfounded and false than that of populism: its legitimization in the name of efficiency. Since the aim is to optimize benefits and structural advantages for a minimum percentage of the population, it is absolutely impossible for technicians at the service of power to work for the benefit of general efficiency, but for a very particular efficiency that is not only different but so often in stark contrast to the former.
No technocracy is more consolidated today than that of the central banks whose archetype and keystone is the Federal Reserve System, a mere consortium of private banks with the official blessing of the Government. And it is clear that the Fed does not work for the general efficiency of the economy —not even that of its own nation- but for the financial interests of global banking with the hegemony of the dollar as instrument.
It is also clear that the economic theory that technocrats force on us is garbage economics at the service of the debt trap, so their alleged technical superiority is simply ridiculous: it is just counter-demagogy at the service of the economic elite.
It is in the interest of this pseudo-elite that everything is, or at least seems, way more complicated than it really is, so that no one but them can be in charge. The best example is the convoluted fractional reserve system, which is ten times more complex than a hundred percent legal money system and incomparably less fair, since it is at the service of and intimately related to the inverted pyramid of inequality.
So-called “right-wing populism” claims to be sovereignist, but today it is impossible to seriously consider sovereignty without a way to guarantee an economic autonomy which begins with monetary independence. In this way any claim to sovereignty is a dead letter from the outset, and national-populism is a neutered cat that is only allowed the mewing, or rather the screaming, of cheap demagogy.
Trump is the textbook example: the base that support Trump is that of the impoverished white worker, but all he offers is more tax breaks for the rich and inconsequential measures against China. His feeble invectives against the Fed are a very small matter because we all know that the consortium has much more weight than the chief executive —he is there to assume quick decisions, distract the attention, and take the hits and the slaps.
Populism could only be something more than demagoguery if it had a place to grasp the question of monetary sovereignty, but this cannot even be posed in the current correlation of forces.
Populism as a “fourth political theory”, whether right or left, is an option neutralized beforehand by the prevailing system as long as it is incapable of proposing monetary sovereignty: it continues to be on the same plane and turns within the same wheel as the rest of the parties and ideologies, each with its own ambiguity and indetermination, each with its own demagoguery.
But is it not also demagogy to raise economic sovereignty when it has been totally hijacked and is impossible to access? Demagogy, it is not; it is a vital and elemental question, but totally beyond the reach of modern democracies. After all, democracy itself has been emptied of real content because the usurpation by private banks of such a fundamental public prerogative has also emptied it of effective power.
Geoeconomics and Geopolitics
Except for China, no country today has monetary sovereignty: certainly not the United States, despite what appearances might suggest. And it is this situation that really determines the hostility of the globalists towards the eastern giant, a hostility that they try to transfer to the masses that support them.
The media does a great job, and so we see the corner shopkeeper complaining about the Chinese next door and his fellows, “who are taking everything,” instead of looking at the bank to whom he pays the mortgage and who happens to be the engine of globalization.
The Empire’s hostility towards China will not be tempered, but rather the contrary, since it is an existential threat. And it is here that the wires of geoeconomics and geopolitics will cross.
The Chinese government never had global hegemonic aspirations and would be content with having a voice in international affairs commensurate with its weight. Understandably, the real hegemon is not willing to yield a single portion of its present power. By increasingly harassing China, it is forcing her to defend herself in all spheres —and today attack is an integral part of defense.
The more hostile the West is to the Sinosphere, the deeper her reaction will be. Previously, Western decision-makers believed that these attacks would leave no wounds and would be reversible since the ultimate goal was to assimilate the Chinese economy into global capitalism. Thus, anything that would weaken the dragon would be good for gaining bargaining power and obtaining concessions more easily.
But, reached a certain point, the hostility begins to take on an irreversible character and the rival moves further and further away from the negotiating horizon, even if it never loses sight of it. It is forced to move deeper. And that is the point we are getting to, because, unable to solve their own problems, Democrats and Republicans alike need to blame China to get returns from both the electorate and the deep state.
In the United States, the fallacy of Chinese guilt becomes the only “floating signifier,” the only remaining space left for powerless politicians to the point of pathetic.
But what is a floating signifier in the jumble of lies of the West could end up being a meaningful token for China, and for this very thing that liars cannot meddle with.
There is a much more pressing technological race right now than that of coronavirus vaccines. It is the race for control of the cryptocurrency space, in which China seems to be in the lead.
Digital currency is the ultimate phase of capitalism in the final stage of the liquefaction of money: both a technical culmination and a critical step in the enslavement of the masses and the closure of the system. This step poses a great danger both for those who run it and for those who suffer from it.
It is only natural that in this phase neoliberalism takes a sharp turn towards technocracy and global governance until it is no longer recognizable. But technocracy itself is only a screen to disguise as neutral the unusual power of a plutarchy that also uses the oligarchy to hide.
In previous works we have detected a “double contradiction” at the crossroads of the main monetary decisions. We have seen that there are two basic attitudes of the states with respect to the digital currency, as well as two types of private crypto-currencies, the speculative and corporate cryptos, and the alternative cryptos for all sorts of communities. The latter seem to be a residual option but may tip the balance in the very plausible case of a generalized currency war.
China has no pretensions to monetary hegemony —its currency is still pegged to the dollar- and would be content with some sort of equilibrium; but it is the aggressiveness of those who want to impose the rules that will force her to undertake incursions in the global market even reluctantly, and precisely to preserve the equilibrium.
The coming crypto-currency war can be a great test to find out the truth of monetary theories. The globalist elite wants to impose a “global governance” of the digital currencies so that the subjects have no escape from their system, even if it means the end of the dollar’s hegemony, now replaced by a new design and a new consensus. This is something that Mark Carney, ex of Goldman Sachs and former governor of the Bank of England, put frankly at the Jackson Hole meeting in 2019.
But efforts to reach international agreements may come late and badly, at least with respect to a player as important as China; and if agreements were finally reached, today it could only be at the expense of the US dollar, or more precisely of the people of the United States, which would have to submit to a new international discipline for which their internal market is not even remotely accustomed.
Today the different currencies do not have real autonomy because if they turn their backs to the dollar system, the response, whether financial or military, is almost immediate, as we have seen with relatively modest countries like Iraq or Libya. If the monetary hegemony is transferred to a global crypto-currency, blessed by the Bank for International Settlements, they must be certain that the US army will continue to be at its service, or else the always decisive resource of force will be lost.
On the other hand, if the dollar is abandoned, the Americans will see with painful clarity something they should have seen long before: that the United States has always been an instrument and nobody gave a damn about the people. To speak in such circumstances of betrayal of the American people would be ludicrous; but a new kind of humiliation, of plundering and derision, can still await them if they don’t wake up. Not everyone will accept it.
The question of the transfer of monetary hegemony, which until now had nothing to do with Chinese initiatives, is a very delicate one and reminds us of a blanket too short for the bed —one has to choose between the feet and the head.
American populism is not going to die with Trump, that could represent only the beginning of a somewhat comical but more than understandable struggle for self-determination. The division in American society is deep and has a dual but unique origin: in the external opposition between globalists and isolationists, and in the internal division of the elites themselves.
It may well be the case that global banking will reach an agreement with China to the detriment of the American people, but this would only further fuel populism and neo-isolationism: one can even imagine soon the vindication of the dollar as a symbol of the lost sovereignty… even if it was through the dollar that sovereignty fled to the Empire.
But on the other hand, a monetary hegemony dissociated from military hegemony and force will never get very far. Add to this the fact that the American stock market bubble is the greatest in history and is yet to pop, and we can begin to imagine the chaos into which the old models and behaviors will be plunged.
Smaller economies and currencies always look for another reference currency to be backed for. After the Last Great Bubble pops, it will be really difficult for the dollar to be the main reserve currency —because the Fed is the Last Great Bubble itself. What is broken, is broken. Hence the urgency to “reinvent” the hegemony by the Great Financial Siphon.
This will make the impending digital yuan, better supported by both a more robust economy and a more solid and balanced state, even more attractive. If the American bullying disappears, the flight to the eastern currency will be much easier —but here we are not only talking about national currencies, but also private crypto-currencies, whether speculative or alternative.
From Chinese dual circulation to the Tao of Judah
Just this fall of 2020 the Communist Party of China has revealed its new five-year strategy of “dual circulation” to reduce dependence on foreign markets and technologies from 2021 to 2025.
It does not take much insight to realize that the dual attitude is a deeply rooted feature of Chinese idiosyncrasy: from yin and yang to the “one China, two systems”, to this brand-new dual circulation that admits more levels of interpretation than what commentators have so far discovered.
One of these levels, and a vital one indeed, would be the imminent new digital currency. Let us remember in passing that our own fractional reserve monetary system is also a dual circulation system, with legal money issued by the central banks, barely a five per cent of it, and endogenous money created out of thin air by bank credit, which is the bulk of the total: the debt-money for which we all work, even if we have never asked for credit in our whole lives.
But the “dual circulation” of the Chinese digital currency would have very different implications. The Chinese government could be extremely restrictive about the use of its crypto-currency in its huge domestic market, while adopting a much more “liberal” approach in foreign markets in order to attract long-awaited capital while harvesting new support and a new kind of soft power.
It sounds very attractive, both to the Chinese government and to a growing sector of the foreign population that feels increasingly destitute, not to mention the flow of capitals that ignores ideologies and is always willing to sell out its mother.
This explains why guys like Carney are stressing once and again that “governance is the core pillar of any form of digital currency” —global governance, of course; because it is not easy to empty the sea with a sieve.
China would in no way want to play hard the card of a dual monetary system unless it is strongly provoked, that is, as a defensive countermeasure; but this game, which would disrupt the global financial corral, would be easily interpreted as an incursion into someone else’s yard or “aggression” in other words. Put another way, if China is winning the economic war, the Western countries will intensify their offensive in the other sectors of the hybrid war, from opinion to military pressure and attempts of destabilization.
It can be assumed then that China will evolve in this arena with great caution and according to the behavior of its rivals, because after all, the official approach to double circulation is to decrease the dependence on foreign markets and to come closer to the Chinese ideal of self-sufficiency, which will never cease to be the ultimate goal of its movements.
The Chinese government would also have an additional reason for concern: the difference in treatment for users of its currency in the domestic and foreign markets could lead to growing discontent at home. It is not easy to harmonize the state-directed economy with navigating the markets, but the Chinese technocracy already know something about it. And they are not alone, because the Fed and the other central banks are familiar with this issue too.
However, this contrasts sharply with the attitude of the Western powers, which still believe they have a special right to rule the world and impose their wills on others. But we should not blame the “West” for what is basically a matter of the plutocracy and its lackeys.
Elite comes from elected, the chosen ones, and it is known that some are more Chosen than others. We have spoken repeatedly of the 80/20 law in the distribution of wealth and its successive powers, and we have also spoken of the x-ray of that x-ray, that informal “law” of 50/50 that affects the share of the booty and the most intimate physiology of accumulation, that special relationship within AngloZionism between leaders in the exercise of violence and deceit.
This share seems insufficient to one of the parties given the notorious advantage they enjoy; the financial elite wants the United States to serve the Empire and not the other way around. The disappearance of the dollar would not at all imply the retreat of the interests of those who manage the Federal Reserve, but its protection against the growing instabilities of the nation and loss of consensus —of which they are the main cause.
This transfer or succession would imply an internecine war that can only be read between the lines, and this conflict is the invisible cause of a social division that is but the ultimate consequence of the projection of power with its control of means and minds.
The transfer of the coercive mechanisms of financial control can leave a vacuum of power and authority that will be favorable to the monetary sovereignty of countries, collectives and peoples, and right now it is impossible to say what will tip the balance, since many of the consequences will be unintended.
China may favor that spring, but so may the United States if it throws off the yoke of empire and creates the first one hundred percent legal tender, as already proposed in the 1933 Chicago Plan. And only in this way they could set a positive example and have the only moral leadership, involuntary, that may be worthwhile.
Social Democrat Roosevelt did a great job for the Fed at the time, which should not be surprising. But it is in the destiny of the United States and of all of us that this unprecedented option —which will not fail to come up at the critical moment of “change of phase” in the state and reality of money. And this will completely disrupt the props of the political spectrum, which, as we see, can no longer stand.
Today there would no longer be globalism or a will to continue with this project were it not for the weight and power projection of “Jewish” money, which is the only will that continues to give a direction to the multiple divergent interests of the oligarchies. The West itself would be dismembered into a heap of disperse interests without this element of cohesion; there is nothing easier to demonstrate, if the question is the fate and concentration of capital. It is good to understand this, and he who ignores it miss the thread of the plot.
Not even the Jews themselves have exhausted the meaning of this reality, since censorship of public opinion must also have a profound effect on involuntary mechanisms of self-censorship. Only at the very end can instinct attain self-understanding.
Too many confuse loyalty to the West with loyalty to Netflix, and there is a point to it, since the West is above all the imaginary of the descent in search of its unfathomable bottom.
As the couplet goes, ’cause the Tao of Judah, neither is tao nor is not nah, the anonymous poet complaining that the sharp-edged rigor of the Law has little to do with the harmonious roundness of reciprocity. But surely our coplero, whether Benjamin of Tudela or not, had an understandable bias that prevented him from seeing the issue more objectively.
Because yes, there is a Tao of Judah; and it is true that it does not have to do directly with the Law, but with its reversal: we are talking about the dialectic between the Jews and the Goyim —the nations and their peoples. The “tao of Judah” is literally the winding road and tortuous way of the Law among the nations.
Jewish scriptures continuously emphasize the outstanding status of Israel over all peoples and nations; China, on the contrary, was the popular civilization par excellence long before the People’s Republic, since there the ideal is not to stand out. The Tao of Judah seeks the extremes with full intention, turning everything into gold included, while the Chinese people, in their instinctive search for the invariable medium, aspire to the golden mean or aurea mediocritas by carefully avoiding the extremes.
So the archetype of the Jew and the Chinese are like the scorpion and the frog of the fable: one is always looking for soft parts to nail the sting to the heart, while the other, all defensive instinct, is always ready to avoid it.
Of course, we are talking of a big frog. And if we are dealing with how the digital liquefaction of money is going to affect the balance and legitimacy of nations —water and earth, after all- it is not hard to spot a curious fight between Behemoth and Leviathan. And in our upside-down world, the earth has to use the liquid element of money to defend itself, while the plutarchs who accumulate the bulk of the wealth seek to poison all the levers of politics to prevent it.
Those who like enigmas may wonder where the Ziz is today —that mysterious creature of the air capable of covering the Sun with its wings.
To avoid being fried in the pan, China would have to combine the three mythical creatures into a single entity: a full-fledged Dragon with brand new claws.
Israel’s extremely close ties with the national-populist movements are telling: from Trump to Bolsonaro, Johnson, or the European populist parties. It is as much about controlling their movements as it is about ensuring that their leaders are unpresentable enough to discredit their most legitimate claims. And so far they are having great success, because even if they win, and especially if they win, the expectations about a real sovereignty wear down more and more —especially when they have control of the media and can round out the caricature of these already cartoonish characters.
The current national-populist leader appeals on the one hand to healthy instincts against globalization, while on the other appeals to the most dull and stupid selfishness. Lacking real power, he is a movie loser doomed to ridicule.
The only game changer here would be the new (digital) monetary balance. If sovereignty is able to regain control of money for nations and do so successfully, the myth of the efficient technocracy would be forever discredited.
But this requires not only a window of opportunity, but also another sense of goodness and justice. There should be much more coherence and integrity in speaking about the common good and the ways to achieve it.
There is the erotics of power and there is the necrotics: but now they are barely distinguishable for both politicians and technocrats. The true erotics of power is being able to awaken in the people the desire for good, and the present national-populist has no idea what that might be. If he gets so many votes today, it is only because many people know what they hate. Adherence by negative reaction is already guaranteed by the system; the question is if there is a real offer beyond demagoguery.
Given the nature of the forces at play, the time to rise this question will come.
Saying no
In the coming monetary war we can distinguish three axes: the horizontal axis, linked to the most purely commercial, civil and liquidity factors, the vertical axis, to the political-legal environment of the states and the agreements between states, and a temporal axis in depth encoding the scope of the reversibility and irreversibility of the debt, and of the uses and changes in monetary technology.
As we have already said elsewhere, this third axis is as important or more than the other two, and it is present in all orders and not only in the economy. In fact, it defines the extremes of our sense of temporality, and maybe one day analysts will understand its relevance. Today it is beyond their estimations, and even their ideas, which makes it even more interesting.
The things now being discussed are at a very different level; issues such as basic income, which, by the way, will be one of the star products to gain the assent of the debt-serf without costing the elites a penny. The same people responsible for all this situation have to present themselves as saviors; what less not to end up hanged.
And this brings us back to the beginning of our article, and how to respond to those who care so much about saving us. And for this we do not need to ponder or analyze; we only need to have guts.
They say fear is free but nothing is further from truth. Surely those who seek to frighten us 24/7 are trying to free us.
Many people who often talk about the Revolution and taking over the Winter Palace not only put on their masks but also launch diatribes against the “deniers”. It is well known that “fascism” must be fought —but operetta fascism, not the real thing we know so well. Perhaps, by attacking this paper fascism they believe they have fulfilled their political consciousness, a truly revolutionary one. They are the necessary counterpart of all those who say that the Democratic Party is communist.
I am not going to tell anyone what to do, but there is no need to wait for the revolution, or the taking of the Winter Palace, or anything like that. If you wanted a chance to do something against this system, to make a real gesture for once, the time has long since come. It never will be easier for you, because you don’t even have to start by doing something, but simply decide not to do it.
Not to wear a mask. Not to close your business. Not to submit to disgusting and unnecessary tests. Not to be vaccinated with completely experimental and unnatural vaccines. Not letting them muzzle you or inserting icky sticks and needles in your body, you insert them something bigger by the best place possible, without no need to stain yourself with their shit.
It is way better to die alone than suffer their special treatments, because anything is better than owing them your life. Show yourself you don’t depend on them. If there is a time to prove it, this is it.
You don’t need to be their guinea pig, let them graciously experiment in their own flesh —this are the only experiments worthwhile. You don’t need to back up with actions what you don’t believe in. If you stop doing and consuming certain things, you will soon find room to do and assimilate others; if you stop giving in to the all-pervasive pressure to isolate yourself, you will soon find unexpected companions, because you will also be busy looking for them.
Whatever happens, in spite of everything and with all our actions included, I am convinced that this is always the least bad of the infinite possible worlds; but no one can imagine how the others might be. We have enough with just one.
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For over 40 years, the US never attacked Iranian territory — other than by covert operations.
Tehran’s legitimate nuclear energy program has no military component — confirmed time and again by the IAEA and US intelligence community assessments.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh earlier said the following:
According to US National Intelligence Estimates on Iran’s nuclear program, “there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb,” adding:
“Despite years of covert operations inside Iran, extensive satellite imagery, and the recruitment of many Iranian intelligence assets, the United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran…”
It’s because none exists, not now or earlier.
Iran’s nuclear program is the world’s most heavily monitored by IAEA inspectors.
Their reports across the board stress the program’s legitimacy.
No evidence suggests a future Iranian aim to develop the “bomb.”
In stark contrast, Israel is nuclear armed and dangerous. It maintains stockpiles of chemical, biological and other banned weapons.
The US operates the same way, using banned weapons in all its preemptive wars.
Yet the UN, most of its member states, and corporate-controlled establishment media turn a blind eye to vital information everyone has a right to know.
At the same time, US major media promote the myth of an Iranian threat — when none ever existed throughout Islamic State history. More on this below.
Iran is the region’s leading proponent of peace, stability, and mutual cooperation with other nations — seeking confrontation with none, threatening no other countries.
Throughout nearly four years in office, Trump waged all-out war on Iran by other means — short of military confrontation.
The one exception of sorts was last January when the Pentagon assassinated Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani and deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in their car after departing from the Baghdad International Airport.
While continuing wars he inherited, Trump launched no new ones on his own.
With his tenure nearing an end — barring a highly unlikely 11th hour Supreme Court ruling that invalidates fraudulent election results — why would he risk embroiling the Middle East in potentially greater war than anything seen since WW II?
Would he want his legacy more greatly tarnished than already?
If Iranian territory is attacked, retaliation would be swift and harsh against US regional forces, possibly against Israel.
Russia and/or China might intervene to protect their regional interests – a worst case global war scenario.
Where US ruling authorities never went since Jimmy Carter was president is highly unlikely to happen now — especially near the end of Trump’s time in office.
Yet saber-rattling US media suggest possibly otherwise.
In November, the NYT claimed Trump “asked senior advisors (for possible) options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks,” adding:
He was “dissuaded” from striking Iran militarily, including by Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley.
According to the Middle East Eye (MEE) on Tuesday, Iranian Quds Force commander General Ismail Qaani told Iraqi PMU officials in Baghdad to halt attacks on the Green Zone and US bases until Trump’s tenure ends.
According to a senior PMU commander quoted by the MEE:
“Qaani made it clear that Trump wants to drag the region into an open war before leaving, to take revenge on his opponents over losing the election, and it is not in our interest to give him any justification to start such a war.”
While it’s highly unlikely that Trump would order an attack on Iran militarily at this time, Iranian officials don’t want a pretext created for him to do the unthinkable.
Qaani added that
“(i)f war breaks out between Iran and America, its repercussions cannot be contained, and Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran will all be a battleground for both sides.”
“Therefore, the higher interest must be taken into consideration…So all attacks targeting US interests in the region should be stopped.”
According to a November 21 CENTCOM press release, a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber was sent to the Middle East on the phony pretext of “deter(ring) aggression and reassur(ing) US partners and allies.”
Reportedly, a US aircraft carrier task force is en route to the Persian Gulf, what appears to be a saber-rattling move, not preparation to strike Iran.
On Thursday, WaPo said “(a)nti-Iran hawks in the (US) and Israel see the window closing on the possibility of a preemptive US-Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program,” adding:
Netanyahu, Pompeo, and other Trump regime hardliners support what cooler head US and Israeli officials reject.
Netanyahu cried wolf about a nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program countless times before — knowing it doesn’t exist. Last week, he was quoted saying:
“There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement.”
“We must stick to an uncompromising policy to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons (sic)” — ignoring his own illegal stockpile.
According to an unnamed US war department official, the idea of a “clean, limited surgical strike” on one more Iranian nuclear facilities is folly.
All-out regional war could follow with potentially devastating consequences for Iran, Israel, and US-allied Arab countries.
According to individuals close to Trump, he values preservation of steps taken to draw down US regional forces, an effort to stop endless wars.
Striking Iran militarily would be a polar opposite step.
His regular intelligence briefings surely explained that Iran’s nuclear program has no military component.
On November 25, Reuters reported that Trump’s envoy for regime change in Iran Elliott Abrams said more US sanctions on the country are coming regularly through January 20.
He stopped short of suggesting possible military confrontation.
Because high-level US political and military officials oppose the idea — along with the type legacy Trump wants to preserve — anything potentially leading to war with Iran is highly unlikely.
Separately on Wednesday, Axios reported that Israel’s IDF was “instructed to prepare for the possibility that the US will conduct a military strike against Iran before President Trump leaves office,” adding:
The move was unrelated to an “intelligence assessment” or belief that Trump would order such a strike.
It’s another example of saber-rattling.
With Trump’s tenure near an end, his focus mainly on convincing at least five Supreme Court justices to reject rigged election results against him in hopes of a second term, Iran is a side issue by comparison.
The clock is ticking on his remaining days in office, as things now stand.
As January 20 inauguration day draws closer, chances for Trump ordering a military strike on Iran will likely diminish and fade away.
Hostile US actions on Iran — short of hot war — will continue as it’s played out endlessly since its 1979 revolution.
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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.”
The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
With President Donald Trump all but conceding to the transition team that will take over after January next year, interest now shifts to President-elect Joe Biden’s choices for cabinet. On the national security front, the imperial-military lobby will have reasons to be satisfied. If Trump promised to rein in, if not put the brakes on the US imperium, Biden promises a cocktail of energising stimulants.
While campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Biden tried to give a different impression. Biden the militarist was gone. “It time to end the Forever Wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” he stated in July 2019. Pinching a leaf or two out of Trump’s own playbook, he insisted on bringing “the vast majority of our troops home – from the wars on Afghanistan and the Middle East”. Missions would be more narrowly focused on Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Support would also be withdrawn from the unpardonable Saudi-led war in Yemen. “So I will make it my mission – to restore American leadership – and elevate diplomacy as our principal tool of foreign policy.”
This was an unconvincing display of the leopard desperately trying to change its striking spots. During the Obama administration, the Vice-President found war sweet, despite subsequent attempts to distance himself from collective cabinet responsibility. These included the current war in Yemen, the assault on Libya that crippled the country and turned it into a terrorist wonderland, and that “forever war” in Afghanistan. In 2016, Biden claimed to be the sage in the administration, warning President Barack Obama against the Libyan intervention. An impression of combative wisdom was offered. He had “argued strongly” in the White House “against going … to Libya,” a position at odds with the hawkish Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on something a bit more than going to Libya. After the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, what then? “Doesn’t the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a – petri dish for the growth of extremism?” So many questions, so few answers.
The Iraq War is another stubborn stain on Biden’s garments. His approval of the invasion of Iraq has been feebly justified as benign ignorance. As he explained to NPR in September last year, he had received “a commitment from President [George W.] Bush he was not going to go to war in Iraq.” Bush looked him “in the eye at the Oval Office; he said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program.” Then came the invasion: “we had a shock and awe”. For Iraqis, it was a bit more than shock and awe.
With the warring efforts of the US in Iraq turning sour, Biden entertained a proposal reminiscent of Europe’s old imperial planners: the establishment of “three largely autonomous regions” for each of Iraq’s ethnic and confessional groups, governed by Baghdad in the execrable policy of “unity through autonomy”. Not exactly an enlightened suggestion but consistent with previous conventions of dismemberment that have marked Middle Eastern politics.
In considering Biden’s record on Iraq, Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beastwas clear in describing an erratic, bumbling and egregious performance. “Reviewing Biden’s record on Iraq is like rewinding footage of a car crash to identify the fateful decisions that arrayed people at the bloody intersection.”
Now, we forward ourselves to November 2020. The Trump administration has given a good cover to the incoming Democratic administration. Considered putatively wicked, all that follows the orange ogre will be good. In introducing some of his key appointments, Biden’s crusted choices stood to attention like storm troopers-elect, an effect helped by face masks, solemn lighting and their sense of wonder. “America is back,” declared Biden. A collective global shudder could be felt. The Beltway establishment, mocked by Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes as “the Blob,” had returned.
In the cast are such figures from the past as former Deputy Secretary of State and former Deputy National Security Adviser, Tony Blinken. He will serve as Secretary of State. National Security adviser: former Hillary Clinton aide and senior adviser Jake Sullivan. Director of National Intelligence: Avril Haines (“a reliable expert leading our intelligence community,” remarked CNN’s unflinching militarist Samantha Vinograd of CNN, herself another former Obama stable hand from the National Security Council). Secretary of Defence: most probably Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defence for Policy.
Blinken, it should be remembered, was the one who encouraged Biden to embrace the antediluvian, near criminal project of partitioning Iraq. This does not worry The Guardian, which praises his “urbane bilingual charm” which will be indispensable in “soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player.” He is a “born internationalist” who likes soccer and played a weekly game with US officials, diplomats and journalists before joining the Obama administration.
Johannes Lang, writing in the Harvard Political Review, is a touch sharper, noting that Blinken “is a committed internationalist with a penchant for interventionism.” The two often go together. As Blinken recently toldThe New York Times (members of the UN General Assembly, take note), “Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself.”
Flournoy and Blinken have been spending time during the Trump years drawing sustenance through their co-founded outfit WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm promising to bring “the Situation Room to the Board Room.” Revolving door rhetoric is used unabashedly: We knew power; we can show you how to exploit it. Having served in a presidential administration, these individuals are keen to use “scenario development and table-top exercises to test ideas or enhance preparedness for a future contingency”. The consultants are willing to give their clients “higher confidence in their business decisions,” as Flournoy puts it, in times of “historic levels of turmoil and uncertainty around the world”.
The Flournoy set have also been the beneficiaries of the US defence funding complex, fronting think tanks that have received generous largesse. In a report for the Center for International Policy, Ben Freeman notes that, “Think tanks very considerably in terms of their objectives and organization, but many think tanks in Washington D.C. share a common trait: they receive substantial financial support from the US government and private businesses that work for the US government, most notably defense contractors.” Flournoy’s own Center for a New American Security now ranks second to the RAND Corporation in the cash it gets from defence contractors and US government sources.
Biden’s Department of Defense agency review team, tasked with informing what is hoped will be a “smooth transfer of power,” has its fair complement of those from entities either part of the weapons industry or beneficiaries of it. According to In These Times, they make up at least eight of the 23 people in that team. Think tanks with Biden advisory personnel include the militarily minded Center for Strategic and International Studies, which boasts funding from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation and General Dynamics Corporation.
America – at least a version of it – is back, well and truly. The stench of wars continuous, and interventions compulsive, is upon us.
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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]
November 27th, 2020 by Center For Biological Diversity
The Environmental Protection Agency released a draft biological evaluation today finding that glyphosate is likely to injure or kill 93% of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The long-anticipated draft biological evaluation released by the agency’s pesticide office found that 1,676 endangered species are likely to be harmed by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the world’s most-used pesticide.
The draft biological opinion also found that glyphosate adversely modifies critical habitat for 759 endangered species, or 96% of all species for which critical habitat has been designated.
“The hideous impacts of glyphosate on the nation’s most endangered species are impossible to ignore now,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Glyphosate use is so widespread that even the EPA’s notoriously industry-friendly pesticide office had to conclude that there are hardly any endangered species that can manage to evade its toxic impacts.”
Hundreds of millions of pounds of glyphosate are used each year in the United States, mostly in agriculture but also on lawns, gardens, landscaping, roadsides, schoolyards, national forests, rangelands, power lines and more.
According to the EPA, 280 million pounds of glyphosate are used just in agriculture, and glyphosate is sprayed on 298 million acres of crop land each year. Eighty-four percent of glyphosate pounds applied in agriculture are applied to soy, corn and cotton, commodity crops that are genetically engineered to tolerate being drenched with quantities of glyphosate that would normally kill a plant.
Glyphosate is also widely used in fruit and vegetable production.
“As we prepare to feast on our favorite Thanksgiving dishes, the ugly truth of how harmful industrial-scale agriculture has become in the U.S. has never been so apparent,” said Burd. “If we want to stop the extinction of amazing creatures like monarch butterflies, we need the EPA to take action to stop the out-of-control spraying of deadly poisons.”
The EPA has, for decades, steadfastly refused to comply with its obligation under the Endangered Species Act to assess the harms of pesticides to protected plants and animals. But it was finally forced to do this evaluation under the terms of a 2016 legal agreement with the Center.
Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto/Bayer by cancer victims and their families have uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the agency and the company on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.
In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, an EPA official assured Monsanto he would work to thwart the review, saying, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.” The Health and Human Services review was delayed for three years.
Monsanto/Bayer has also enjoyed broad support from the Trump White House. A domestic policy advisor in the Trump administration stated, “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.”
Earlier this year, relying on confidential industry research, the EPA reapproved glyphosate. The EPA’s assessment contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of published research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.
President-elect Joe Biden has already tapped Michael McCabe, a former consultant to chemical giant DuPont, to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition board, drawing broad outrage, including from Erin Brockovich.
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Researchers at North Carolina State University are calling for a coalition of biotech industry, government and non-government organizations, trade organizations, and academic experts to work together to provide basic information about gene-edited crops to lift the veil on how plants or plant products are modified and provide greater transparency on the presence and use of gene editing in food supplies.
At issue is a May 2020 US Dept of Agriculture rule called SECURE (sustainable, ecological, consistent, uniform, responsible, efficient) that governs genetically engineered organisms. The rule is expected to exempt most genetically modified plants from pre-market field testing and data-based risk assessment. In fact, the USDA estimates that 99% of biotech crops would receive this exemption.
NC State researchers Jennifer Kuzma and Khara Grieger, in a policy forum paper published in the journal Science, say that SECURE, though decades in the making, falls short in providing enough public information about gene-edited crops in the food supply. Given consumer interest in GM foods and labelling information, the lack of public information on gene-edited crops could decrease trust and confidence as they begin to enter the marketplace and become more commonplace.
“It’s pretty clear that consumers want to know which products are genetically modified and which are not, and we suspect that these desires will not be different for gene-edited crops,” said Kuzma, the Goodnight-NC GSK Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at NC State. “Crop developers, including companies, have signalled that they want to do better with gene editing to improve public trust. We present a model for them to improve transparency and obtain certification based on providing information about their gene-edited and other GM crops in a public repository.”
To provide more transparency, the NC State researchers recommend the creation of CLEAR-GOV, or a “Community-Led and Responsive Governance” coalition, that would provide access to basic information on biotech crops in accessible language. That would include the species and variety of plant, type of trait modified, improved quality provided by the trait modification, general areas where the crop is grown, and downstream uses of the crop. CLEAR-GOV would be operated through a non-profit organization staffed by experts from a variety of academic fields.
“If leadership at a non-profit, independent research organization decided that this is something that they are passionate about, they could see a market value in housing this coalition and hosting this depository,” said Grieger, a paper co-author and assistant professor and extension specialist in NC State’s Department of Applied Ecology.
Kuzma adds that CLEAR-GOV would fill an important gap for consumers and other stakeholder groups who want to know more about gene-edited products in the marketplace.
“Because many gene-edited crops would be exempt under SECURE and new GM food labelling rules may also not apply to them, there needs to be some information repository for companies that want to do the right thing and be more transparent,” Kuzma said. “Our recommendations would provide a mechanism for that.”
This initiative is timely in light of the biotech company Cibus’s obfuscation over the origins of its gene-edited herbicide-tolerant canola. Cibus promoted the canola for years as a triumph of its proprietary “precision” gene-editing technology. But as soon as the canola became detectable through the development of a public test, Cibus did a U-turn and claimed that the herbicide tolerance was the result of an accidental mutation rather than gene editing.
We might speculate that Cibus’s turnaround came because the gene-edited canola does not have EU approval under the GMO regulations and thus any presence in EU imports would be illegal.
GMWatch welcomes the researchers’ call for more transparency. But in our view, the responsibility to deliver that transparency lies firmly with the gene-edited crop developer. It should not fall to the public, NGOs, or academics to fill the gaps in knowledge created by the secrecy of the GMO industry.
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The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN), Samuel Moncada, intervened this Wednesday in the session of the Security Council to denounce the economic aggression of the United States against twenty-nine countries of the world, through their misnamed “sanctions,” and proposed the formation of an International Alliance to stop the crimes against humanity perpetuated by the US in violation of human rights and the UN Charter.
“The US pretension to impose its national legislation as if they were universal laws, through economic and military coercion, is a danger to the entire system of international relations,” said the high diplomatic representative at the UN, through the publication of several videos in his virtual participation in the session.
Through his Twitter account, @SMoncada_VEN , he reported that Venezuela supports the creation of this “International Association against Unilateral Coercive Measures,” as an operational platform that will combat the illegal sanctions that the US has imposed against a third of humanity.
Venezuela propone en ONU la formación de una “Asociación Internacional contra las Medidas Coercitivas Unilaterales” como plataforma operacional que permita combatir las sanciones ilegales de EEUU contra un tercio de la humanidad. pic.twitter.com/KdmADHesAE
“Today we denounce in the UN Security Council, Trump’s economic aggression against twenty-nine countries—including Venezuela—representing a third of humanity, attacked in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic,” stated the Venezuelan ambassador.
He stressed that these illegal measures amount to a systematic and deliberate attack against entire populations, and against the right to self-determination of peoples, “by a permanent member of the Security Council.”
La pretensión de EEUU de imponer su legislación nacional como si fueran leyes universales, a través de la coerción económica y militar, es un peligro para todo el sistema de relaciones internacionales. pic.twitter.com/xKGYGWGxsg
“We face the unusual situation in which a Member State with a special responsibility to comply with international law, perpetrates crimes against humanity and forces other States to assist it in committing the crime,” he reproached.
The immoral economic persecution through criminal means is aggravated by the use of military threats, which increase obstacles in the struggle of countries to combat the coronavirus pandemic. In this sense, he denounced the so-called “humanitarian exceptions” to these coercive measures, which the US says it applies to help the affected peoples, as a cruel and utter mockery.
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COVID-19, which has thus far killed over 1.4 million people globally; the alleged treatment of the Uighur minority; the neoliberal-supporting rioters in Hong Kong; and, the trade war with Washington, have all contributed to the deterioration of China’s image in the West. The majority of French people also have a negative image of China, according to the findings of a European study, which is curious as it opposes France’s own economic interests. The result of the study demonstrates that there was a successful culmination on the demonization of China by the West, especially in the Anglosphere, which in turn influences other countries in Western Europe and pro-American states around the world.
The perception of China was the subject of a vast survey carried out in September and October in thirteen European countries by the Czech Palacký University Olomouc, in partnership with the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). And the result is interesting as 62% of French people have a negative image of China for only 16% of positive perceptions. The overwhelming negative sentiment towards China was also shared by Sweden, Germany, the UK, Czechia and Hungary. Spain, Slovakia, Italy, Poland and Latvia were more neutral towards China while Serbia and Russia had overwhelmingly positive views.
Interviewed by Le Monde, researcher Marc Julienne also observed that the French are more attached to “political than economic” interests. Thus the “first terms that come to the minds of those surveyed, apart from COVID-19, are ‘dictatorship’ and ‘authoritarian’” when they think of China. The French rank China last among trusted states and entities behind the EU, the U.S. and Russia, according to Julienne.
Such a radical opinion by Westerners against China is not surprising. One of the most determining factors in the construction of these public opinions is the posture of the direct and increasingly ideologized confrontation of U.S. President Donald Trump against China. Trump started with a trade war against China, blaming the Asian Giant for the end of U.S. manufacturing rather than the corporations that sought greater profits by using cheap labor in China. However, what started off as only a trade war against China ended up with direct attacks against the ruling Chinese Communist Party for its political and economic system.
Responding to Trump’s accusations of the “China virus,” Beijing’s diplomacy went on the offensive at the start of the year. In March, the Twitter account of the Chinese Embassy in Paris had mentioned the possibility that the U.S. was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Chinese ambassador, Lu Shaye, was even summoned by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian for his remarks publicly denigrating France’s abandonment of the elderly in the first months of the pandemic.
If Chinese diplomats ever dare to make arguments against the provocations of Western media and politicians, they are immediately described as aggressive. This is a demonstration of Western soft power, and the results of the survey are a testament to this. This is because there is an ideological alignment of the U.S.’ anti-China position which has been adopted by all Western media, a far cry from when they once adored the Cultural Revolution and Maoism at the height of the Sino-Soviet Split during the Cold War.
The demonization of China, that has spilled over into France and the majority of Western Europe, has been imposed by American diplomacy – this is whether they are backing and supporting neoliberal rioters in Hong Kong, constantly denouncing China’s alleged treatment of the Uighur minority, pushing COVID-19 conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, or instigating a trade war. The media have been unanimous on China since the accession of Trump to the presidency. We of course cannot be massively surprised that public opinion towards China has been deeply influenced by Trump’s rhetoric and the media’s portrayal of the Asian country.
China has therefore become the scapegoat for Western countries to project their own internal crises, for example the poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., or the endless protests like those by the Yellow Vests in France, or the bad treatment of minorities like Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada, or the lack of domestic manufacturing all across the Western World.
However, despite the constant antagonizations and provocations against China, economic ties have simply continued and developed. Beijing has once again opted to rhetorically react to provocations, but continue economic developments, presenting a major rift between the French political class and the economic elite. China is France’s second largest non-EU trading partner after the U.S., and is quickly rising through the ranks and even surpasses rich countries neighboring France like Switzerland and Belgium.
French President Emmanuel Macron believes that Europe stretches from Lisbon in Portugal to Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East close to the borders with China and North Korea. This is in the hope that in the future Europe will have direct access to Asia’s rising markets via the Eurasian landmass. Constant provocations by the French political elite have the risk of locking out the European country from reaching the pearl of all of Asia’s markets – China. By following the example of Trump and the U.S. media establishment, Paris risks a lot for virtually no gain by joining the U.S.’ anti-China initiative.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
I am an independent scientist of over 30 years experience leading research into new medicines, operating up to Vice President and head of Respiratory Research at Pfizer, a US pharmaceutical company and founder and CEO of Ziarco Ltd a biotechnology company sold to Novartis in 2017.
As an independent I am less constrained than academics and commercial persons. However, I have applied the same rigour to analysing the pandemic since March as with any of my former projects.
In brief:
I am certain the pandemic is over and was over before the end of June.
There was a clear peak of excess deaths in spring. COVID-19 clearly caused many deaths, mostly of the elderly and already ill.
Turning to late summer and into the autumn – despite exaggerated claims that there is an ongoing full-blown pandemic, there are still FEWER respiratory deaths than at the same time periods in all five of the years since 2015. The below shows monthly deaths with any respiratory primary diagnoses including COVID-19.
There is a small and potentially growing all-causes excess mortality signal. I am working with a pathologist and our evaluation so far shows that these excess deaths are inconsistent with being COVID-19. In short, they are not dying from respiratory illness, but from heart failure and from cerebrovascular accidents such as stroke and diabetes. An awful realisation I have is that these excess deaths are just the sort you would expect if you take a mixed population, deprive them of easy access to the healthcare system for seven months and keep them stressed.
Looking at data obtained from contacts within the NHS, we do not have hospitals full of respiratory patients to any greater extent than usual for November. There are always hotspots and we know Liverpool is one such today. Again, the evidence is against this being due to COVID-19. And to repeat, we have not had excess respiratory deaths since the spring event itself. Liverpool and other cities and towns nearby have additional capacity and ‘surge capacity’, if required. The NHS as a whole is not in crisis and there is nothing to suggest it is about to be. I also checked with a colleague regarding intensive care beds. While an increasing number of their occupants have tested positive for COVID-19, intensive care beds are at exactly normal loadings for the time of year, i.e. 82%. I believe those COVID-19 diagnoses are mostly or all incorrect. We have tested well over 30,000,000 people. It wouldn’t be surprising if lots of people get a false diagnosis from a PCR test.
Antibody prevalence in the blood of those surveyed periodically is falling steadily and has been since its peak in the spring, when the virus was moving very fast through the population, infecting perhaps hundreds of thousands per day at its very peak. That antibodies are falling was last week wrongly touted as problematic and suggested immunity was fading. That’s the wrong interpretation. The human body does not maintain high levels of antibodies which are not needed. Consequently, steady falls in prevalence of antibodies is a clear signal that people are no longer encountering the virus. I believe that insofar as it is still present, it has become endemic at low levels and represents no threat to the health of the nation.
As someone experienced at reading into adjacent areas of science which I have done time without number since obtaining my PhD in respiratory pharmacology in 1988, I was always confident that the population would speedily attain ‘community immunity’. This is what I believe has happened as detailed in my article “What SAGE has got wrong”.
In my view – probably because SAGE lacked cellular and clinical immunologist expertise earlier this year and at no time during this event has it seconded a pathologist or an expert generalist such as myself – they’ve made a series of terrible errors which continue to infect policy to this very day. If such experts had been consulted, our advice would have made a huge difference, not least to the starting assumptions which are widely criticised as outlandish in the scientific community. In addition, we could have “sense checked” some of the more perplexingly unlikely predictions, such as 4,000 deaths per day.
The most fundamental error SAGE has made was to ignore all evidence of the very existence of prior immunity in the population on the spurious grounds that this was a novel virus. This virus is in fact related to four common-cold producing coronaviruses in general circulation and it has been shown unequivocally that a sizeable proportion of the peoples of at least Europe and North America possess T-cells that provide them with some protection against both endemic and novel viruses.
This virus is a serious threat to a low proportion of the elderly, especially if they are already ill. This description of the most vulnerable accounts for the vast majority of Covid deaths and the median age of those who’ve died of COVID-19 is slightly older than the median age of those who died of all other causes. However, the majority even of this elderly group survive infection. Overall, the lethality of the virus is now known to be very close to typical seasonal influenza. Notably, in relation to risks to the working population, the lethality of the virus in those aged 60 and younger is actually less than seasonal flu.
By using several sets of data I have been able to estimate the proportion of the UK population who have been infected. If you add them to the estimated proportion of the population that had prior immunity, and take account of the fact that young children do not often participate in transmission or become very ill, it is clear that there are far too few susceptible people remaining in UK to support an expanding infection as has been suggested. Instead, the evidence is strong from practical, theoretical and observational standpoints that the nation as a whole and probably most if not all regions in the UK are already protected by community immunity as described by many world leading academic epidemiologists in UK.
I heard with disbelief suggestions that surviving infection might not lead to immunity, or that immunity might only last a few months. Let me assure you, we have known for scores of years that surviving simple respiratory viruses which are neither immuno-toxic like HIV or change their appearance yearly like flu, leads as a rule, not an exception, to long-lived and robust T-cell mediated immunity. Antibodies may play a role but they are not central. That this ordinary virus has become a global media event is simply not justified by its profile.
I have been active on Twitter rather a lot in recent months. I would suggest that the people of UK are now highly suspicious of what is claimed to be happening. Many is the time people have in exasperation said: “This just doesn’t make any sense.” Indeed, what we are being told (that there is a full blown pandemic still underway) does not make sense and while I have no idea why it is being said, it is doubtless incorrect. Ordinary people know that each season’s flu takes perhaps three-to-four months to pass through the whole population. Knowing that SARS-CoV-2 is more infectious, they know that it would take the same or less time to pass through the UK population, not more. Indeed, we know it was in the UK by February. Adding a generous four months takes us to June, where all clinical signs of COVID-19 has disappeared (ignoring PCR test results, of which more in a moment). The rise and fall of Covid deaths in the UK follows exactly the same curve as that of other, highly seeded/infected countries such as Sweden. There is no doubt that we are in the same position as Sweden and it is only the monstrously error-prone and untrustworthy PCR test that suggests otherwise. What SAGE claims is happening is immunologically implausible in light of other data, specifically the shape of the death versus time curve, which shows beyond all reasonable doubt that the pandemic was self-extinguishing.
The PCR testing machinery is, at best, greatly in error and completely misleading. I have good knowledge of mass testing systems. I have always been deeply worried about polymerase chain reaction (PCR) because of its power, not only to find one molecule as small as a broken fragment of viral RNA and amplify it, sometimes by two to the power of 40, through repeated cycling, but also because it can find something that is not there – it can yield a ‘positive’ result even though the virus is not present. The greater the amplification and the higher the number of tests being done each day day – and the lower the expertise of the staff doing it – the higher the probability of error. I was the person who, with a radio journalist, finally pressed Mr Hancock to disclose the false positive rate of the Pillar 2 test, when it was still measuring far fewer tests per day than now. Having established that false positives exist, it is important to know that the rate of these can be small yet, when the prevalence of the virus is low, many or even all the positive results are false. That’s a practical debate for another time.
Yesterday, in response to a written question, the Government disclosed that while attempts had apparently been made to determine the operational false positive rate, it still doesn’t know it. As an experienced lab scientist, I know that when testing capacity is boosted substantially and the staff recruited have less and less lab experiences, there is only one outcome: errors of handling and of procedure. These in turn destroy the integrity of the testing system. The entire response of the UK depends upon the reliability of these tests. I have to tell you quite firmly: at present, it is practically, logically and legally impossible for anyone to be able to tell you what fraction of the positive tests recently obtained are real and which are not. For a range of reasons related to strong evidence that this virus cannot just hover around as it has been suggested and viruses certainly do not perform waves ever, the most secure conclusion is that these results are not to be trusted and are not reliable in any way.
So what I am saying is this. Despite warnings from all sides over months about this test it has continued to be used with increasing ferocity. It’s a medical diagnostic test. On no occasion would such a diagnostic be put into mass testing – in the NHS, for example – without knowing in advance how reliable it is. In terms of proper characterisation, it has NEVER been measured, despite the war-like impact of the test results on the nation and its people. At a minimum, the charge is reckless endangerment. Given all this information, it is literally impossible to guess whether the FPR is 1% or 10%. If even near the latter, there are no “cases” et seq. And there are other reasons to be very concerned about mass testing which I cannot go into today.
In my view, community mass testing is the pathology in the country now – not the virus. It must cease today. Without the ‘cover’ of mass testing, there is no evidence at all that the health of the nation is under any threat whatsoever. That event occurred in spring and our responses to it have been exaggerated and – what is worse – extraordinarily persistent, even when all the evidence says the pandemic has concluded.
I have a colleague who has a half a dozen sets of data all related to the pandemic. These show clear relationships between the data in the spring, all of which illustrated the impact of the virus. However, time after time, these relationships have broken down. The explanation for this is that at least one of the measurements are wrong, and the culprit is the PCR test. This has happened before. In New Hampshire in the USA there was a hospital that was convinced it had a huge outbreak of whooping cough. Physicians, patients and parents were all very worried about the expected deaths. Eventually, an older physician examined some of the patients and did not agree with the diagnosis. Asking the staff why they were so sure it was whooping cough, the answer was it had been diagnosed by the PCR test, the sole diagnostic tool. A review was ordered and this led to culture of the organism from the suspected patients. There was not a single person who actually had whopping cough. No infectious organism was found. What had happened was a now infamous case of a “PCR False Positive Pseudo-epidemic”. That is what I believe we have now in UK and in many other countries using similar technology.
MPs: If you vote for it now, you will condemn more people to suffering and some to death and the evidence does not support this extreme measure for which, even if the virus was circulating as SAGE claims, there is no evidence of benefit.
I urge you to vote against so we can all disclose our evidence that the pandemic is over and the epidemic of PCR testing can end.
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On Thanksgiving day, throughout the year, with likely worsening times ahead, ordinary Americans are suffering through the hardest of hard times in US history.
For 36 straight weeks since March, over one million Americans sought unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.
It’s at time when real US unemployment exceeds 26% — based on the pre-1990 calculation model.
The official Labor Department reported 6.7% rate is fabricated.
It’s part of a major media-supported grand scheme to conceal evidence of manufactured Main Street economic collapse and the nation’s dismal state.
In the past week, another 778,000 jobless Americans applied for UI, 312,000 more seeking Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) — about 1.1 million in total.
Unless renewed, these benefits expire at yearend.
An additional 13 weeks of Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) for qualified recipients also expires at yearend.
At this time, nothing is being done to provide millions of unemployed, impoverished Americans with vital aid for essentials to life.
Millions of US households are food insecure, millions more face eviction from residences in January for lack of income to pay rent.
Millions of US debt-entrapped students can’t service loans for the same reason.
The vast majority of ordinary Americans struggle daily to get by while privileged ones never had things better.
The greatest ever engineered wealth transfer from ordinary people to the super-rich added trillions of dollars to their wealth in the last four years — around $1 trillion this year alone for US billionaires.
All politicians lie, Biden as untrustworthy as Trump.
In August, candidate Biden falsely pledged to largely reverse Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.
He lied saying he’ll use the funds for education, healthcare, childcare, strengthening Social Security, and other vital homeland needs.
He’ll do none of the above. Nor will he make corporations and rich households pay their fair share.
He falsely claimed that he’ll reduce incentives for corporations to outsource jobs by raising the tax rate on offshore profits and closing tax loopholes.
His regime will continue neoliberal harshness he supported as US senator and vice president.
He’ll exclusively serve privileged interests at the expense of the general welfare at a time of greater Depression than in the 1930s.
Thanksgiving day through the weekend and what follows won’t be enjoyed by millions of hungry Americans, millions more facing possible homelessness.
What reasons exist to give thanks when endless US wars on humanity rage at home and abroad, when mass unemployment and impoverishment exists, when ordinary Americans are exploited, not served, when elections are rigged and fundamental freedoms are disappearing in plain sight.
Robert Jensen earlier called for replacing Thanksgiving with “a National Day of Atonement, accompanied by a self-reflective fasting.”
It’ll take far more than an annual day of self-reflection and fasting to change the nation’s longstanding wicked ways.
The only solution is popular revolution. It’s the only way for transformational change — what elections and legislation never accomplish.
Duopoly rule runs the US. Elections are selections, not democracy in action.
If the real thing emerged, it would be banned.
If peace took hold, another 9/11 type state-sponsored false flag would invent an enemy to attack.
If alternative voices made a difference for constructive change, they’d be silenced or otherwise eliminated.
Growing up long ago, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday.
It was at a time when America wasn’t beautiful, far from it.
Yet ordinary inner-city kids like myself benefitted from public schools teachers who taught, affordable higher education, and career opportunities after graduation.
All of the above are gone for the vast majority today, remaining only for the privileged few.
No reasons exist to give thanks at any time of year when government in cahoots with dark forces harm ordinary people instead of serving everyone equitably according to the rule of law.
I’ll spend Thanksgiving day, weekend, and throughout the year reflecting, not celebrating.
As long as my health and energy hold out, I’ll keep doing what I can for a nation safe and fit to live in, for an end to imperial wars and growing homeland tyranny.
I hope millions of others will get involved through activism for vital change.
The alternative is grim or grimmer than what Orwell, Huxley and others like them imagined.
Politicians won’t deliver governance of, by, and for everyone equitably.
Positive change only comes from the bottom up, never the top down, never through the ballot box.
It’ll only come by taking to the streets and staying the course, doing whatever it takes for constructive change.
There’s no other way.
That’s the cold, hard reality on Thanksgiving day and every other day of the year.
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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.”
His life was a running planetary pop opera for the ages. From Somalia to Bangladesh, everyone is familiar with the basic contours of his story – the pibe from Villa Fiorito, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires (“I am a slum dweller”), who elevated football to the status of pure art.
Being the king of the pitch is one thing. Playing on the global pitch non-stop is a completely different ball game. Multitudes instinctively seized what he was all about – like he was always emitting a magic buzz in a higher frequency, beyond the Empire of the Senses.
Italians, who know a thing or two about aesthetic genius, would compare him to Caravaggio: a wild, human – all too human – pagan deity dwelling in light and shades, hitting all time lows over and over as virtually his whole life played out in public: the dizzying ballet of all inner demons exploding, family scandals, divorces, rivers of alcohol, doping, evading the income tax enforcers, Himalayas of Colombian marching powder, countless intimations of death amid perpetual joy.
He personified the non-stop crossover of Olympian Heights with The Harder They Fall: a walking – dribbling – fest of wild contradictions, beyond good and evil. To borrow, laterally, from T.S. Eliot, he was like a river, “a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable.”
The late, great Eduardo Galeano did picture him as a pagan deity, just like one of us: “arrogant, womanizer, weak…. We’re all like that!” El Pibe was the ultimate dirty god – “a sinner, irresponsible, presumptuous, a drunkard.” He could “never return to the anonymous multitude where he came from.”
While the world is trying to limit the destruction caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we are only starting to understand its long-term effects on governments, economies, companies and individuals. The global crisis has exacerbated existing flaws at all levels, including vulnerabilities to corruption and bribery.
The architects of the plan claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change. But a closer look at the corporations and think tanks the WEF is partnering with to usher in this global transformation suggests that the real motive is tighter corporate control over the food system by means of technological solutions.
She warns in a new interview that “The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life”.
Pfizer recently announced that its covid vaccine was more than 90 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Shortly after this announcement, Moderna announced that its covid vaccine was 94.5 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Unlike the flu vaccine, which is one shot, both covid vaccines require two shots given three to four weeks apart. Hidden toward the end of both announcements, were the definitions of “effective.”
The political significance of this vote is clear: NATO members and partners boycotted the Resolution which, first of all, calls into question Ukraine without naming it, whose neo-Nazi movements have been and are used by NATO for strategic purposes.
When he departs the White House on January 20, Donald Trump will leave this region with a toxic legacy. First and foremost, his ongoing campaign to delegitimise the Palestinian people and encourage Israel to continue colonising their homeland has had disastrous consequences for both Palestine and countries further afield.
US trade, legislative and propaganda war rage against China. Is what’s unthinkable possible? What’s gone on since the Obama/Biden regime’s 2013 Asia pivot, greatly escalated by Trump hardliners, is the stuff that preemptive wars are made of.
‘I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and it ends now.’ These were the words of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, when he the biggest increase to the UK’s military budget since the Cold War. His shopping list includes lasers, a ‘hackers HQ’ and all sorts of conventional weapons.
With Biden frequently emphasizing that “America is back,” it gives a clear indication that the period of Washington’s limited isolation from the world stage under Trump has come to an end. Biden has already promised to help political opposition, without specifying exactly where except in the case of Turkey, but we can expect that this would include Russia, Belarus and Syria.
Britain’s military has a permanent presence at 145 base sites in 42 countries or territories around the world, research by Declassified UK has found. The size of this global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.
US trade, legislative and propaganda war rage against China.
Will it turn hot after hawkish interventionists infesting the Biden/Harris regime’s national security team take over in January?
Is what’s unthinkable possible? What’s gone on since the Obama/Biden regime’s 2013 Asia pivot, greatly escalated by Trump hardliners, is the stuff that preemptive wars are made of.
While neither side wants hot war with the other, the absence of mutual trust — combined with US hegemonic rage to control planet earth, its resources and populations — makes the unthinkable possible.
While the US is militarily superior to other nations — except Russia because of its unmatched super-weapons — war with China would be against a far more formidable adversary than any Washington ever attacked preemptively.
Twice post-WW II, the US waged two failed Asia wars, one ending with an uneasy armistice, the other in humiliating defeat — both against nations far less powerful than China today.
Pentagon joint chiefs are very leery about war with Iran, a nation able to hit back hard if attacked.
Nuclear-armed China with intercontinental ballistic missiles and other super-weapons would be able to exact a heavy price on the US in response to aggression if launched.
While it’s clearly possible ahead by accident or design, it’s highly unlikely.
Pentagon commanders no doubt want another humiliating Asia war defeat avoided.
Most likely, Republicans and Dems will stick to war by other means on China, including use of intense propaganda — amplified by establishment media.
China’s growing political, economic, industrial, technological, and military prominence on the world stage made it Washington’s public enemy No. one.
Yet no foreign threats to the US and West exist, invented ones alone to maintain a perpetual war on humanity by hot and other means.
Pompeo and material on the Trump regime’s State Department website keep up a steady drumbeat of anti-China propaganda.
It currently features fake news about nonexistent “Chin(ese) military aggression in the Indo/Pacific region.”
It’s how the US operates globally in stark contrast to China’s pursuit of peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.
Below is a litany of Pompeo OK’d bald-faced Big Lies about China— likely to be repeated by incoming Biden/Harris regime interventionists:
“Across much of the Indo-Pacific region, (China) is using military and economic coercion to bully its neighbors, advance unlawful maritime claims, threaten maritime shipping lanes, and destabilize” regional territory (sic).
All of the above describes how the scourge of US imperialism operates worldwide — polar opposite China’s law-abiding higher standard.
US “conduct increases the risk of miscalculation and conflict,” not China’s or any other independent nation free from Washington’s control.
US policy under both wings of its war party militantly oppose “a free and open Indo-Pacific” they seek unchallenged control over.
Beijing seeks to strengthen its military capabilities because of possible US aggression, not to advance its regional “footprint” as the State Department falsely claimed.
Nor does evidence exist to suggest that China aims “to project and sustain military power at greater distances (sic).”
In stark contrast, the US empire of bases operates worldwide.
Pentagon conventional and special ops forces are based in or occupy over 150 countries on every continent — posing a major threat to world peace and stability.
According to TomDispatch’s Nick Turse, Pentagon “commandos (are) deployed (in at least) 141 countries.”
Many US “secretive bases (are) left off the (Pentagon’s) books.”
Officially it “maintains (about) 4,775 ‘sites, spread across all 50 states, eight US territories, and 45 foreign countries.”
Officially, the Pentagon operates about 800 bases globally.
Unofficially — including mini-bases and others shared with host countries — it operates thousands at home and abroad.
What’s secret and off-the-books avoids congressional and other public scrutiny.
Countless billions of dollars are spent annually to maintain the US empire of bases.
According to the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition, around 95 percent of foreign military bases are US ones.
At most, China and Russia have a scattered few abroad by comparison, none used as launching pads for hostilities toward other nations the way the US operates.
The Pentagon recently admitted having a military presence (including about “4,800 defense sites”) in 164 countries — with little or no further elaboration.
According to Turse, the Pentagon doesn’t define what it means by a “location,” adding:
“The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated $150 billion annually, according to the Overseas Bases Realignment and Closure Coalition.”
The cost of maintaining outposts is about “one-third” of the above total.
Including for intelligence, off-the-books black budgets, homeland security, and other related categories, annual US military/security-related spending at home and abroad matches or exceeds other world community of nations combined.
It represents a monumental black hole of waste, fraud and abuse.
In February 2018, Project Censored reported a whopping $21 trillion gone missing from the federal budget throughout the 1998 – 2015 period.
Most likely it went for militarism, warmaking, Wall Street bailouts and speculation, trillions more to the present day — an abuse of power left unexplained by US officials and establishment media
Countless trillions of dollars go for so-called national security, with little or no oversight, at a time when America’s only enemies are invented.
No real ones exist — not China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or any other nations.
All of the above goes on endlessly while vital homeland needs go begging — especially at a time of manufactured economic collapse with over one-fourth of working-age Americans left jobless.
The State Department falsely accused China of “stealing” South China Sea resources.
It accused Beijing of a “might makes right” agenda, “imposing its will on the region…intimidat(ing) and challeng(ing) its neighbors.”
All of the above and much more applies to US hegemonic practices worldwide, polar opposite China’s geopolitical agenda.
Claiming the US “partners (with other nations) for peace and prosperity” ignores its endless wars on humanity at home and abroad.
China, Russia, Iran, and other nations on the US target list for regime change seek cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.
Washington under both right wings of duopoly rule seeks unchallenged global dominance — endless wars by hot and other means its favored strategies.
When Biden/Harris most likely replace Trump in January, longstanding US dirty business as usual at home and abroad is sure to continue at least largely unchanged.
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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.”
Joe Biden’s team has created a new body, unprecedented in the transitional period between American presidents, and provided the names of six people who will occupy some of the most important positions in his administration if he assumes the presidency on January 20. Judging from those appointed, we have a clear insight into Washington’s foreign policy if Biden enters the White House next year – and there’s no mistaking, “America Is Back,” as Biden announced once again this week.
In particular, the two most important appointments Biden made were Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor and Antony Blinken as Secretary of State as these are crucial roles. The National Security Advisor is in charge of the powerful National Security Council housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, and normally meets the U.S. President every day. The Secretary of State has the task of coordinating American diplomatic actions, both bilaterally and within many multilateral forums.
Judging from the two names listed, Biden gives a decisive sign of discontinuing Trump’s foreign and national security policies. There is also a strong feeling that Biden wants many of the policies made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to return.
Sullivan has already held the position of National Security Advisor and his ideas resembles that of the policies enacted and endorsed by Clinton. In 2008, Sullivan was deputy political director of Obama’s election campaign and even prepared Obama’s televised debates against John McCain. When Clinton became Secretary of State, Sullivan became her Deputy Chief of Staff and the Director of Policy Planning. He has been credited with making significant contributions to Washington’s Libya and Syria policies during the so-called Arab Spring. Sullivan also took part in the negotiation process that would lead to the Geneva accords with Iran, in particular by participating in a series of secret meetings held in Oman.
As for Blinken, he was National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden between 2009 and 2013 right before Sullivan. He then became Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor between 2013 and 2015 and finally Deputy Secretary of State. In these positions, he had a significant role in policies adopted for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as negotiations with Iran. He also influenced the American response to Crimea’s reunification with Russia where he argued the necessity for sanctions against Moscow. After Trump’s ascent to the White House, Blinken worked as a global policy expert for CNN.
The combination of these two appointments suggests important changes could begin on January 20, both in the global posture of the U.S. and in the choices that will be made in some crucial areas, confirming the underlying difference between Biden’s vision and Trump’s. Under Biden, the U.S. will attempt to regain global influence it lost under Trump. In doing so, the architects of Washington’s new foreign policies will undoubtedly have full support from the American establishment and much more resources at its disposal.
It is reasonable to assume that Washington’s re-engagement with the world under a Biden presidency will begin with renewed pressure against governments whose economic and political systems do not reflect those of Western liberalism. We can expect that Biden will offer support to political oppositions, like he has already said he will do in Turkey, or with economic measures like sanctions. These measures will most likely reverberate not only against Russia, but also several countries like Syria, Turkey and Serbia.
A reassessment of bilateral relations with Iran is also likely, albeit most probably not how it was under Obama. Among the people that Biden selected, there is indeed an opportunity to abandon the policy of maximum pressure against the Islamic Republic to induce negotiations and potentially dismantle sanctions. Perhaps Tehran could be convinced to abandon its nuclear program.
With China, defined as a competitor rather than a rival by Biden, intense negotiations will likely occur. However, trade wars will probably be renounced, which for Trump was not only a system to rebalance trade and attempt to relaunch U.S. manufacturing, but also a form of disguised strategic embargo aimed at slowing the economic and military growth of China.
Although not confirmed yet, just like Biden’s success in the 2020 elections, it is being flouted in U.S. media that Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense between 2009 and 2012, will likely become the chief of the Pentagon. She sits on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, a Washington D.C. think tank known for viscerally alleging Russian hackers steered the 2016 American elections in Trump’s favor. As given in the name, the think-tank is a major hub of disseminating Atlanticism and U.S. unipolarity.
The appointments of Sullivan and Blinken, and potentially Flournoy, demonstrates that a Biden administration would be steered against states opposing U.S. unilateralism and unipolarity, particularly Russia. Although we can expect softer stances towards China and Iran, it will still be far removed from normality. In addition, with Biden frequently emphasizing that “America is back,” it gives a clear indication that the period of Washington’s limited isolation from the world stage under Trump has come to an end. Biden has already promised to help political opposition, without specifying exactly where except in the case of Turkey, but we can expect that this would include Russia, Belarus and Syria, all with the aim of weakening Moscow’s influence and geopolitical position. Therefore, we can also expect more color revolutions in areas that are critical to Russia’s security and geopolitical aims.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
The UK government has responded to pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Conservative Friends of Israel by listing Israel and occupied Jerusalem together as one country in its weekly update to COVID-19 related travel corridors.
Yesterday the Board condemned the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in a tweet which contained a screenshot of the revised FCDO list that had made a clear distinction between the status of Israel and Jerusalem by including the two territories on its list as separate countries.
— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) November 20, 2020
Members of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) Stephen Crabb and Eric Pickles and President Lord Polak also urged the government to make an immediate correction to the advice about Jerusalem.
“The announcement of a travel corridor with Israel is excellent news. However, the FCDO’s decision to define Jerusalem as a territory separate from Israel is offensive and hostile,” CFI is reported saying in the Times of Israel.
“Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. To describe Jerusalem as anything other than an integral part of Israel is a fiction divorced from reality and the travel advice must be immediately corrected”.
Following the complaint, the FCDO published a revised list which had Israel and Jerusalem down as the same country, even though there has been no change in the UK’s position over Jerusalem.
“The position of the UK government has remained constant since April 1950” the FCDO says on its website. “We recognise Israel’s de facto authority over West Jerusalem. In line with Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and subsequent Council resolutions, we regard East Jerusalem as under Israeli occupation”.
MEMO has asked the FCDO to explain its reason for listing Israel and Jerusalem as the same country when hours before it had made a distinction between the two territories in line with its long-held position that East Jerusalem is occupied territory. No response has been received at the time of publication.
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Featured image: Partition of Jerusalem? Let my people in! – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
‘I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and it ends now.’
These were the words of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, when he the biggest increase to the UK’s military budget since the Cold War. His shopping list includes lasers, a ‘hackers HQ’ and all sorts of conventional weapons.
It is hard to believe that this is the same Prime Minister who only a matter of days ago was arguing that his government could not afford to provide meals for hungry school students during the October break. But this decision does not just tell us about the domestic priorities of the PM, it also tells us a lot about how ‘Global Britain’ will act on the world stage.
With the UK in the final days of Brexit negotiations, we are starting to see the redrawing of its foreign policy. It is likely to see an even more inward-looking approach to world affairs. Earlier this week the government refused to rule out cuts to the overseas aid budget, with Downing Street sources briefing that it could be reduced from 0.7 per cent of spending to 0.5 per cent – a cut of around one third to a commitment that is enshrined in law.
In comparison, the proposed increase in military spending, of £16 ($21) billion over a four-year period, would be on top of what is already one of the highest military budgets in the world. Contrary to the image we are often given of a depleted military that is supposedly dying on its knees, data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies shows that, with £55 ($72) billion at its disposal prior to the announcement, the UK already has the sixth–highest military budget in the world.
The problem is not just the scale of military spending. It is also what it is used for. For far too long, UK security policy has been focused on military solutions, foreign wars of aggression and hypocritical and dangerous partnerships with human rights abusing regimes. These policies have had a devastating impact around the world, while doing nothing to keep us safe from many of the biggest threats, including pandemics, inequality and climate change.
With the scale of the Covid-19 crisis becoming apparent, it is clear that the government has a big job ahead in terms of rebuilding the economy after the pandemic, and, with so many sectors of the economy facing uncertain futures, it is important that it is done right.
We are told that this military funding is a necessary part of that rebuilding, and that it will be used to secure thousands of jobs. However, even if we were to strip away the dire political consequences and look at military spending as nothing more than a job creation scheme, then it is totally ineffective. There are more and better jobs that can be created through investing in far more positive and sustainable areas of engineering, such as renewable energy.
Research from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) shows that investment in offshore wind and marine energy could produce more jobs than the entire arms industry, providing alternative high-skilled employment for arms trade workers. Jobs in an industry which is growing rather than declining, and which would contribute to building a safer, rather than a more dangerous, world.
Making a transition from arms to renewables and other areas of engineering is a long-term process, but that is no reason not to do it. There is no doubt that such a change would require major support and political will from the government, but if these changes are made then it can help us to prepare for a different future based on different political and economic choices.
This pandemic has underlined many things: how our security is interdependent on that of our neighbours around the world; that the least well-paid with the least working rights are many of the same people that keep our societies running, and that people of colour have been hit hardest by Covid-19. That is why the government must maintain its aid commitments, while investing in the services and workers that we all rely on.
The decisions made by the government will have consequences for years to come. In a post-covid world, access to healthcare facilities, a living wage, environmental sustainability, and other essential services should be seen as a key part of a wider national security strategy. None of these causes are advanced by the ever-greater proliferation of bombs, missiles, and fighter jets. Security does not come from throwing money at the military, it comes from building more equal societies and better services.
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Andrew Smith is a spokesperson for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT).
Featured image: Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a press conference on 16 March, with Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Witty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Picture by Andrew Parsons
In the midst of the attempt by US President Donald Trump to nullify the 2020 election by means of an extra-constitutional coup, neither Biden and the Democrats, nor the US corporate media, have seen fit to alert the American and world public to ominous developments within the US military and its Pentagon command.
The outlines of this coup have come into sharp focus in the past few days. This is not a matter merely of Trump’s intentions, but rather of actions aimed at executing this coup that are being carried out in real time.
Trump’s invitation to the White House Friday of Michigan Republican state legislators has laid bare a definite strategy for establishing a presidential dictatorship. Trump and his supporters are carrying out an aggressive propaganda campaign to delegitimize the election with lying allegations of ballot fraud and increasingly fascistic conspiracy theories in order to provide a pretext for Republican-controlled statehouses in states like Michigan to repudiate the popular vote and select slates of pro-Trump electors.
They are counting on this extralegal operation ending up in the US Supreme Court, where fully one-third of the justices are Trump appointees, and a precedent has already been established by the 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which stopped the popular vote count in Florida and awarded the presidency to Republican George W. Bush, with no opposition from the Democratic Party.
Such a brazen attempt to overturn an election will inevitably provoke explosive resistance, particularly in the heavily working-class urban areas where millions cast their ballots to drive Trump from office. Such an assault on core democratic rights and the last vestiges of constitutional forms of rule cannot be executed without a resort to overwhelming repression.
Image on the right: Christopher Miller (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
It is in this context that a ceremony held Wednesday at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina headquarters of the US military’s Special Operations Command—comprised of the Army’s Green Berets, the Navy’s SEALs and other elite killing squads—serves as a deadly warning. The new “acting” Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller announced the elevation of the Special Operations Command to a status on a par with the existing branches of the armed forces, the Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.
As the well-connected military website breakingdefense.com explained the shakeup:
“The crux of the transformation will ensure that the top special operations official at the Pentagon can go directly to the Defense Secretary on … operational matters, including secret raids against high-value targets. The office will no longer have to move through the larger DoD Policy apparatus to reach the secretary.”
Miller, who has refused to answer any questions from the media since being installed as Pentagon chief, told an audience of assembled troops,
“I am here today to announce that I have directed the Special Operations civilian leadership to report directly to me, instead of through the current bureaucratic channels.”
Miller has not been confirmed, and will not be confirmed, by the US Senate to an office he has held for little more than a week. A retired colonel and 30-year Special Forces officer, he has no qualifications to hold the post outside of his unswerving loyalty to Trump.
Under normal circumstances, Miller would be surrendering his office to a Biden appointee in barely two months and, in the interregnum, would be collaborating closely with his incoming replacement. Instead, he is announcing the most far-reaching change in the military chain of command in recent memory.
Miller’s installation as defense secretary is the result of a wholesale purge of the top civilian leadership at the Pentagon that Trump initiated with the firing-by-tweet of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Trump’s determination to oust Esper dates back to last June, when the US president deployed federal security forces and US troops to suppress anti-police-violence demonstrations near the White House and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to send troops into the streets across the country to put down the mass protests provoked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Esper, a former lobbyist for the arms industry, voiced his opposition, saying that such a domestic deployment of the US military to suppress the American population could be ordered only as a “last resort.” His position, shared by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, expressed fears that such a use of US troops would provoke uncontrollable resistance and tear the military apart. Since his ouster, Esper, Milley and the fired number-three official at the Pentagon have all issued statements pointedly reminding US military personnel that they have sworn an oath to the Constitution.
Such invocations will have no effect on the cabal of Trump loyalists and semi-fascists that have been placed in charge at the Pentagon since the election. Miller made it clear in a confirmation hearing for another national security post that he had no compunction against using federal intelligence resources to pursue protesters at the order of the White House.
The new civilian head of Special Operations, who will now enjoy direct and secret collaboration with the defense secretary, unencumbered by “bureaucratic channels,” is one Ezra Cohen-Watnick, 34, an extreme right-wing operative. He was brought onto the National Security Council by virtue of his political connections to the likes of Trump’s fascistic former adviser Steve Bannon, the fanatically anti-Iranian and indicted ex-National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Named to the number-three post at the Pentagon, undersecretary for policy, is retired general and frequent Fox News commentator Anthony Tata, whose previous nomination for the post had to be withdrawn after it emerged that he has denounced Obama as a “terrorist leader,” a “Manchurian candidate” and a Muslim.
A similar figure has been named as Miller’s chief adviser, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, another Fox News commentator known for denouncing European countries for admitting “unwanted Muslim invaders” bent on “turning Europe into an Islamic state.” He has also condemned attempts in Germany to come to terms with the Holocaust as a “sick mentality” and called for martial law and the summary execution of migrants on the US-Mexican border.
Trump has made a particular appeal to the Special Operations forces that have now been elevated in status within the chain of command. He aggressively intervened last year in the court martial of Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher for war crimes in Iraq, protesting,
“We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”
At the close of his campaign, just five days before the election, Trump flew to Fort Bragg for closed-door meetings with Special Forces troops and their commanders. Given subsequent developments, there is every reason to believe that the purpose of this trip was to assess the level of his support within the military units stationed there, and among their commanders, and to discuss plans for an armed response to an explosion of resistance to his plans to steal the election and establish a presidential dictatorship.
The tactics being employed by the Trump White House have been rehearsed countless times abroad under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Fabricated claims of election fraud have been used to justify US-backed coups, oust presidents and foment “color revolutions” from Honduras, Bolivia and Venezuela to Ukraine and Georgia.
Now these same methods are being brought “home” under conditions of an insoluble economic and social crisis, characterized above all by staggering levels of social inequality and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the homicidal “herd immunity,” back-to-work policy of the capitalist ruling class.
The Democratic Party is well aware of Trump’s maneuvers and threats. There has been a stream of contacts between Biden’s transition team and the Pentagon, no doubt to assess the attitude of the military to Trump’s coup plotting. The widely reported discussions between the Biden camp and former Trump defense secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general with wide contacts throughout the officer corps, are only the tip of the iceberg.
Former president Barack Obama said Wednesday night that in response to Trump’s intransigent refusal to concede the election, “I think we can always send the Navy SEALs in there to dig them out.” While presented by the media as a joke, this remark confirms that, in the final analysis, the Democrats rely on the military, rather than popular opposition, to remove Trump from office. Such an outcome would make the military the arbiter of American politics.
Far more than the threat of a coup and dictatorship, Biden and the Democratic Party fear an eruption of popular protest and mass resistance from below against Trump and his co-conspirators. Whatever their tactical differences with Trump, they represent the interests of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus.
The working class must intervene in this unprecedented crisis as an independent social and political force, opposing the conspiracies of the Trump White House and its military allies through the methods of class struggle and the fight for the socialist transformation of society.
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On November 25, Azerbaijani troops entered the district of Kalbajar in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The district was handed over to Baku under the ceasefire deal reached between Armenia and Azerbaijan to put an end to the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War earlier in November.
In total, Armenian forces were set to hand over the following districts: Agdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin, excluding the Lachin corridor. Agdam and Kalbajar are already in the hands of Azerbaijani forces. Lachin will be handed over on December 1. Withdrawing Armenians are destroying their properties and even evacuating graves of their relatives. Just a day ago, on November 24, Armenians troops blew up their barracks in Kalbajar.
In these conditions, the presence of the Russian peacekeepers remains the only guarantee of the security of the local Armenian population. And Russian forces already suffered first casualties as a part of this mission. On November 23, a Russian peacekeeper, four employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic were wounded, and an Azerbaijani officer was killed in a mine explosion near the village of Magadiz. A joint group, that also included representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, was searching bodies of those killed in the war.
A large number of IEDs, not exploded ammunition and projectiles are an important security factor that prevents the potential return of displaced civilians to Nagorno-Karabkah. A group of Russian sappers has been already working on demining key roads and areas in the Russian zone of responsibility. Baku also vowed to demine territories that its forces captured and already started building a new road linking the town of Shusha and Ahmedbeyli.
In the coming months, the security and humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabkah will likely improve, but there are almost zero chances the Armenian population that fled the Azerbaijani advance would return. Therefore, the Azerbaijani-controlled part of Nagorno-Karabakh is in fact empty and the Azerbaijani leadership would have to launch some settlement program if it wants re-populate the region.
Pro-Kurdish sources, waging a propaganda campaign against the traditional Azerbaijani ally, Turkey, already claimed that Ankara is planning to settle families of fighters of Turkish-backed Syrian militant groups in Karabakh. According to reports, Turkish authorities opened 2 offices in the Turkish-occupied Syrian town of Afrin for this purpose. If such plans even exist, it is unlikely that Azerbaijan would be happy to support them. The one thing is to use a cheap cannon fodder recruited by the Big Turkish Brother and the very different thing is to allow multiple Syrian radicals to become the permanent factor of your internal security. The implementation of such a plan would inevitably turn the Azerbaijani-controlled part of Nagorno-Karabkah into the hotbed of terrorism.
Meanwhile, Israel has been desperately exploiting the last months of the current Trump presidency term. Early on November 25, the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of airstrikes on targets in the southern countryside of Damascus and the province of Quneitra. According to Syrian state media, missiles were launched from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights. As of now, the Syrian side denies any casualties and claims that the strike caused a material damage only. Pro-Israeli sources insist that the strike led to multiple casualties among Iranian-backed forces and Iranian personnel.
This became the second Israeli strike on Syria in the last 7 days. The previous one took place on November 18 and hit the very same areas, including Damascus International Airport. The activation of the Israeli military activity in the region indicates that Tel Aviv expects a particular decrease of unconditional support that it was receiving from the United States under the Trump administration. Therefore, it seeks to use the last days of this 4-year-long honeymoon as effective as possible. Even more Israeli and potentially US actions against Iranian interests in the region and Iran itself could be expected in the coming weeks.
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Britain’s military has a permanent presence at 145 base sites in 42 countries or territories around the world, research by Declassified UK has found.
The size of this global military presence is far larger than previouslythought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.
It is the first time the true size of this network has been revealed.
The UK uses 17 separate military installations in Cyprus as well as 15 in Saudi Arabia and 16 in Oman – the latter both dictatorships with whom the UK has especially close military relations.
The UK’s base sites include 60 it manages itself in addition to 85 facilities run by its allies where the UK has a significant presence.
These appear to fit the description of what General Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain’s Chief of the General Staff, recently termed as “lily pads” – sites which the UK has easy access to as and when required.
Declassified has not included in the figures the UK’s small troop contributions to UN peacekeeping missions in South Sudan or the Cyprus buffer zone, nor staffing commitments at NATO administrative sites in Europe or most of its special forces deployments, which are largely unknown.
The findings come days after Prime Minister Boris Johnsonannounced an extra £16-billion would be spent on the UK military over the next four years – a 10% increase.
The spending announcement was originally meant to be combined with a review of defence strategy, that was being championed by Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings.
The results of Whitehall’s “integrated defence review” are now not expected until next year. Indications suggest the review will recommend a traditional British strategy of building more overseas military bases.
Last month, former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said the UK needs a more permanent presence in the Asia-Pacific region. The current Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, has gone further. In September he announced a £23.8-million investment to expand Britain’s army and navy bases in Oman, to accommodate the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers as well as many tanks.
“We think there is a market for a more persistent presence from the British Army (in Asia).”
His superior, Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter, spoke more cryptically when he said the military’s future “posture will be engaged and forward deployed.”
Encircling China?
The rise of China is leading many Whitehall planners to believe Britain needs military bases in the Asia-Pacific region to counter Beijing’s power. However, the UK already has military base sites in five countries around China.
These include a naval logistics base at Sembawang Wharf in Singapore, where eight British military staff are permanently based. The base provides Britain with a commanding position overlooking the Malacca Strait, the world’s busiest shipping lanes which are a key choke point for vessels sailing from the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean.
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has previously told Declassified: “Singapore is a strategically important location for commerce and trade.” Singapore’s most elite police unit is recruited by British soldiers and commanded by UK military veterans.
As well as having a naval base on the rim of the South China Sea, the British military has an even more central basing location in Brunei, near the disputed Spratly Islands.
The Sultan of Brunei, a dictator who recently proposed the death penalty for homosexuals, pays for British military support in order to stay in power. He also allows the British oil giant Shell to have a major stake in Brunei’s oil and gas fields.
The UK has three garrisons in Brunei, at Sittang Camp, Medicina Lines and Tuker Lines, where around half of Britain’s Gurkha soldiers are permanently based.
Declassified files show that in 1980, British troops in Brunei were based “on land provided by Shell and in the middle of their headquarters complex”.
Special accommodation for British troops is provided through a network of 545 apartments and bungalows in Kuala Belait, near the military bases.
Elsewhere in Brunei, 27 British troops are on loan to the Sultan at three locations, including the Muara naval base. Their roles include imagery analysis and sniper instruction.
Declassified has found that the UK also has around 60 personnel spread across Australia. Some 25 of these hold defence attaché roles in the British High Commission in Canberra and at Australian Defence Department sites near the capital, such as the Headquarters Joint Operations Command at Bungendore.
The remainder are on exchange to 18 separate Australian military bases, including a warrant officer at Australia’s Electronic Warfare Unit in Cabarlah, Queensland.
Four Royal Air Force (RAF) officers are based at the Williamtown airfield in New South Wales, where they are learning to fly the Wedgetail radar plane.
Britain’s MOD is also testing its high-altitude Zephyr surveillance drone at an Airbus site in the remote settlement of Wyndham in Western Australia. Declassified understands from a freedom of information response that MOD staff visit the test site but are not based there.
Two members of UK Strategic Command, which manages British military operations across the services, and one from Defence Equipment and Support visited Wyndham in September 2019.
The Zephyr, which is designed to fly in the stratosphere and could be used to surveil China, has crashed twice during testing from Wyndham. Another high-altitude drone, the PHASA-35, is being tested by staff from arms corporation BAE Systems and the UK military’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Woomera, South Australia.
Airbus also operates a ground station for the Skynet 5A military communications satellite on behalf of the MOD at Mawson Lakes in Adelaide. A British naval commander is based in the coastal city, according to a freedom of information response.
A further 10 British military personnel are based at unspecified locations in New Zealand. Parliamentary data from 2014 showed their roles included working as navigators on a P-3K Orion aircraft, which can be used for maritime surveillance.
Meanwhile in Nepal, on China’s western flank close to Tibet, the British army runs at least three facilities. These include Gurkha recruitment camps in Pokhara and Dharan, plus administrative facilities in the capital Kathmandu.
Britain’s use of young Nepalese men as soldiers has continued despite a Maoist government coming to power in Kathmandu.
In Afghanistan, where peace talks are now under way between the government and the Taliban, UK forces have long maintained a quick reaction force at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, as well as providing mentoring at the Infantry Branch School and the Afghan National Army Officers’ Academy. The latter, known as ‘Sandhurst in the Sand’, was built with £75-million of British money.
Around 10 personnel are based in Pakistan, where roles have included teaching pilots at the air force academy in Risalpur.
Europe and Russia
In addition to concern over China, military chiefs believe Britain is now locked in a permanent competition with Russia. The UK has a military presence in at least six European countries, as well as at NATO administrative sites, which Declassified has not included in our survey.
Britain continues to run four base sites in Germany that house 540 personnel, despite a 10-year drive called “Operation Owl” to scale down its Cold War-era network.
Two barracks remain in Sennelager, in northern Germany, with a vast vehicle depot in Mönchengladbach and a munitions storage facility in Wulfen on a site originally built by slave labour for the Nazis.
In Norway, the British military has a helicopter base codenamed “Clockwork” at Bardufoss airport, deep in the Arctic Circle. The base is frequently used for mountain warfare exercises and lies 350 miles from the headquarters of Russia’s northern fleet in Severomorsk near Murmansk.
Bardufoss airport and the Andselv town, centre of the municipality of Malselv, Troms (North Norway). Photo: Wikipedia
Since the fall of the USSR, Britain has expanded its military presence into former Soviet bloc states. Twenty UK military personnel are currently on loan to the Czech military academy in Vyškov.
Closer to Russia’s border, the RAF bases Typhoon fighter jets at Estonia’sAmari Air Base and Lithuania’sSiauliai Air Base, from where they can intercept Russian jets over the Baltic as part of NATO’s “air policing” mission.
In the eastern Mediterranean, Declassified has found there are 17 separate UK military installations in Cyprus, which analysts have traditionally counted as one British overseas territory comprising the “sovereign base areas” of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, containing 2,290 British personnel.
The sites, which were retained at independence in 1960, include runways, firing ranges, barracks, fuel bunkers and spy stations run by the UK’s signals intelligence agency – GCHQ.
Declassified has also found that several of the sites are located beyond the sovereign base areas, including on the top of Mount Olympus, the highest point on Cyprus.
British military exercises areas L1 to L13 are outside of the UK enclave and inside the Republic of Cyprus
A map obtained by Declassified shows that the UK military can use a large area of land outside Akrotiri known as Lima as a training area. Declassified previously revealed that low flying British military aircraft have caused the deaths of farm animals in the Lima training area.
British special forces operating in Syria are believed to be resupplied by air from Cyprus, where RAF transport planes can be seen online taking off before their trackers disappear over Syria.
Little is known about the location of UK special forces teams in Syria, aside from a claim that they are based at Al-Tanf near the Iraq/Jordan border and/or in the north near Manbij.
Guarding Gulf Dictators
RAF flights from Cyprus also frequently land in the Gulf dictatorships of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where the UK has permanent bases at the Al Minhad and Al Udeid air fields, run by around 80 personnel.
These bases have been used to supply troops in Afghanistan as well as for conducting military operations in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Qatar has a joint Typhoon squadron with the RAF based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire which is half-funded by the Gulf emirate. Defence minister James Heappey has refused to tell Parliament how many Qatari military personnel are based at Coningsby amid plans to expand the base.
Even more controversial is Britain’s major military presence in Saudi Arabia. Declassified has found that UK personnel are installed across 15 key sites in Saudi Arabia. In the capital, Riyadh, British armed forces are spread out over half a dozen locations, including the air operations centres where RAF officers observe Saudi-led coalition air operations in Yemen.
Under the Ministry of Defence Saudi Armed Forces Project (MODSAP), BAE Systems has made 73 accommodation units available to UK military personnel at its Salwa Garden Village compound in Riyadh.
RAF staff, some of whom are on secondment to BAE Systems, also serve at the King Fahad air base in Taif, which services the Typhoon jet fleet, the King Khalid air base in Khamis Mushayt close to the Yemen border and at the King Faisal air base in Tabuk where Hawk jet pilots train.
There are separate contracts for Britain to support the “special security brigade” of Saudi Arabia’s National Guard (SANG), a unit that protects the ruling family and promotes “internal security”.
British soldiers are believed to be stationed at the Guard’s ministry in Riyadh as well as at its Signals School (SANGCOM) in Khashm al-An on the outskirts of the capital, in addition to smaller teams at SANG command posts in the western and central regions at Jeddah and Buraydah.
The rest of the British personnel in Saudi Arabia are situated in its oil-rich eastern province, whose Shia Muslim majority is harshly discriminated against by the ruling Sunni monarchy.
A Royal Navy team teaches at the King Fahd Naval Academy in Jubail, while RAF staff assist the Tornado jet fleet at King Abdulaziz air base in Dhahran.
Accommodation for British contractors and personnel is provided by BAE at the company’s purpose built Sara compound at Khobar, near Dhahran. A British army lieutenant colonel advises SANG infantry units at their Eastern Command post in Damman.
These British personnel in the eastern province are close to the King Fahd Causeway, the vast bridge connecting Saudi Arabia to the neighbouring island of Bahrain where Britain has a naval base and a smaller presence (costing £270,000 per year) near the international airport in Muharraq.
In 2011, the SANG drove BAE-made armoured vehicles over the causeway to suppress pro-democracy protests by Bahrain’s Shia majority against its Sunni dictator King Hamad.
The British government later admitted: “It is possible that some members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard which were deployed in Bahrain may have undertaken some training provided by the British military mission [to the SANG].
After the uprising was crushed, Britain increased its military presence in Bahrain with the construction of a naval base that was opened in 2018 by Prince Andrew, a friend of King Hamad.
Britain maintains a substantial military presence in seven Arab monarchies where citizens have little or no say in how they are governed. These include around 20 British troops supporting the Sandhurst-trained King Abdullah II of Jordan.
The country’s army has received £4-million in aid from Britain’s shadowy Conflict, Security and Stabilisation Fund to set up a quick reaction force, with a British army lieutenant colonel on loan to the unit.
Last year it was reported that a British military adviser to Jordan’s King, Brigadier Alex Macintosh, was “fired” after becoming too politically influential. Macintosh was reportedly replaced immediately, and Declassified has seen army records that show a serving British Brigadier remains on loan to Jordan.
Similar arrangements exist in Kuwait, where around 40 British troops are stationed. They are believed to operate Reaper drones from the Ali Al Salem air base and teach at Kuwait’s Mubarak Al-Abdullah Joint Command and Staff College.
Until August, former Royal Navy officerAndrew Loring was among the college’s leading staff, in keeping with a tradition of giving British personnel very senior roles.
Although there are British personnel on loan to all three branches of Kuwait’s military, the MOD has refused to tell Declassified what role they have played in the war in Yemen, where Kuwait is a member of the Saudi-led coalition.
The most extensive British military presence in the Gulf can be found in Oman, where 91 UK troops are on loan to the country’s repressive Sultan. They are stationed at 16 sites, some of which are run directly by the British military or intelligence agencies.
These include the Royal Navy base in Duqm, which is being tripled in size as part of a £23.8-million investment designed to support Britain’s new aircraft carriers during their deployments to the Indian Ocean and beyond.
It is unclear how many British personnel will be based at Duqm.
Heappey has told Parliament: “The possibility of additional personnel to support this logistics hub at Duqm is being considered as part of the ongoing Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy.”
Duqm port expansion, 2009 (top) and 2019 (bottom)
He added that 20 personnel have been temporarily deployed to Duqm as a “UK Port Task Group” to assist with the expansion plans.
Another major development to Britain’s base network in Oman is the new “joint training area” located 70kms south of Duqm at Ras Madrakah, which it has used for tank firing practice. It appears plans are underway to move a large number of Britain’s tanks from their current firing range in Canada to Ras Madrakah.
In Oman, it is a criminal offence to insult the Sultan, so domestic resistance to the new British bases is unlikely to get far.
British forces at Duqm will likely work closely with the US military facility at Diego Garcia on the Chagos Islands, part of the British Indian Ocean territory that belongs to Mauritius under international law. Some 40 UK military personnel are stationed at Diego Garcia.
Britain has refused to return the islands to Mauritius, in defiance of a recent UN General Assembly resolution, after having forcibly removed the indigenous population in the 1970s.
In Iraq, the only democracy in the Arab world which housed British troops this year, the political figures have taken a different approach.
In January, Iraq’s parliament voted to expel foreign military forces, which include the remaining 400 British troops, and which, if implemented, would bring an end to their presence at four sites: Camp Havoc in Anbar, Camp Taji and Union III in Baghdad and Erbil International Airport in the north.
Britain’s other military presence in the Middle East can be found in Israel and Palestine, where around 10 troops are stationed. The team is split between the British embassy in Tel Aviv and the United States security coordinator’s office which is, controversially, based in the US embassy in Jerusalem.
Declassified recently discovered that two British army personnel assist the US team.
Militarised Tax Havens
Another feature of Britain’s overseas military bases is that they are often located in tax havens, with Declassified finding six such sites. Closest to home, these include Jersey in the Channel Islands, which is one of the world’s top ten tax havens according to the Tax Justice Network.
A crown dependency and not technically part of the UK, Jersey’s capital, St Helier, is home to an army base for the Royal Engineers’ Jersey Field Squadron.
Further afield, Britain continues to govern Gibraltar, at the southernmost tip of Spain, amidst demands from Madrid to return the territory which was seized by the Royal Marines in 1704. Gibraltar has a corporation tax rate as low as 10% and is a global hub for gambling companies.
Approximately 670 British military personnel are stationed across four sites in Gibraltar, including at the airport and dockyard. Accommodation facilities include the Devil’s Tower Camp and an MOD-run swimming pool.
The rest of Britain’s militarised tax havens can be found branching out across the Atlantic Ocean. Bermuda, a British territory in the mid-Atlantic, is ranked as the world’s second “most corrosive” tax haven.
It contains a small military site at Warwick Camp, run by 350 members of the Royal Bermuda Regiment which is “affiliated to the British army” and commanded by a British officer.
A similar arrangement exists on the British territory of Montserrat in the Carribean, which is periodically included on lists of tax havens. Security for the island is provided by 40 local volunteers of the Royal Montserrat Defence Force based in Brades.
This model appears to have inspired plans for similar schemes in the Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos, two British Carribean territories which are both major tax havens.
Since 2019, there have been efforts to establish a Cayman Islands Regiment, which aims to recruit 175 soldiers by the end of 2021. Much of the officer training has taken place at Sandhurst in the UK. Plans for a Turks and Caicos Regiment appear to be less advanced.
The Americas
While these military installations in the Caribbean are unlikely to grow to significant size, the UK presence in the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic is much larger and more expensive.
Thirty-eight years after the Falklands war with Argentina, the UK maintains six separate sites across the islands. The barracks and airport at RAF Mount Pleasant is the largest, but it relies upon a dockyard at Mare Harbour and three anti-aircraft missile silos on Mount Alice, Byron Heights and Mount Kent.
Their remote nature has given rise to abusive behaviour.
RAF veteran Rebecca Crookshank claims she was subjected to sexual harassment when serving as the only female recruit at Mount Alice in the early 2000s. Naked airmen greeted her upon arrival and rubbed their genitals against her in a crude initiation ritual. Later she was cable-tied to a bed.
The incident is alleged to have taken place in facilities where the MOD subsequently spent £153-million in 2017 to install a Sky Sabre air-defence system, the majority of which is supplied by Israeli arms company, Rafael. The move was criticised at the time, given Rafael’s history of supplying missiles to Argentina.
In addition to these sites, there is a local defence camp in the capital of Stanley, while Royal Navy vessels keep a constant patrol offshore.
The net result is a military presence of between 70 and 100 MOD personnel, although the Falkland Islands Government puts the figure much higher: 1,200 troops and 400 civilian contractors.
None of this comes cheap. Stationing soldiers and their families overseas requires housing, schools, hospitals and engineering work, overseen by the government’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO).
The DIO has a 10-year investment scheme for the Falklands budgeted at £180-million. Almost a quarter of this has been spent on keeping troops warm. In 2016, £55.7-million went on a boiler house and power station for the Mount Pleasant military headquarters complex.
In 2018, Mare Harbour was expanded at a cost of £19-million, mainly to ensure food and other supplies can reach the troops more easily. Cleaning, cooking, emptying the bins and other administrative tasks costs another £5.4-million a year, payable to outsourcing firm Sodexo.
This expenditure has been justified by the government despite a decade of austerity on the UK mainland, which saw 59-year-old army veteran David Clapson die in 2014 after his job seeker’s allowance was stopped. Clapson was diabetic and relied on a supply of refrigerated insulin. He had £3.44 left in his bank account and had run out of electricity and food.
The Falklands also serves as a link to the British Antarctic Territory, a vast area which is reserved for scientific exploration. Its research station at Rothera relies on logistical support from the UK military and is resupplied by HMS Protector, an ice patrol ship in the Royal Navy with around 65 personnel usually onboard.
Maintaining such a ‘forward’ presence in Antarctica and the Falklands is only possible because of another expensive British territory in the South Atlantic, Ascension Island, whose runway at Wideawake Airfield acts as an air bridge between Mount Pleasant and RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.
Ascension recently hit the news with Foreign Office proposals to build a detention centre for asylum seekers on the island, which is 5,000 miles from the UK. In reality such a scheme is unlikely to go ahead.
The runway is in need of costly repairs, and Britain’s secretive spy agency GCHQ has a significant presence there at Cat Hill.
In total there appear to be five UK military and intelligence sites on Ascension, including accommodation at Travellers Hill and married quarters at Two Boats and George Town.
The US air force and National Security Agency operate alongside the UK personnel on the island, a relationship mirrored in the United States where 730 Britons are spread throughout the country.
Many of them are clustered in US military command centres around Washington D.C. and NATO sites in Norfolk, Virginia. The RAF has around 90 personnel based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where they fly Reaper drones on combat operations around the world.
Until recently, there were also major deployments of RAF and Navy pilots at other airfields in the US, where they were learning to fly the new F-35 strike fighter. This scheme saw 80 British personnel conducting long-term training at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) in California.
Other sites involved in the F-35 training scheme included Eglin AFB in Florida, Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina and the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. By 2020, many of these pilots returned to the UK to practice flying the F-35s from the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers.
In addition to these deployments, there are British military officers on exchange to a wide range of US units. In September 2019, British Major General Gerald Strickland held a senior role at the US army base in Fort Hood, Texas, where he was working on Operation Inherent Resolve, the mission to combat Islamic State in the Middle East.
There have also been British personnel stationed inside President Trump’s much derided Space Force. Last December, it was reported that the Deputy Director of the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was “Group Captain Darren Whiteley – a Royal Air Force officer from the United Kingdom”.
One of the few British overseas bases that looks threatened by the government’s defence review is the tank training range at Suffield in Canada, where around 400 permanent staff maintain 1,000 vehicles.
Many of these are Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles. The Defence review is expected to announce a reduction in the size of Britain’s tank force, which would decrease the need for a base in Canada.
However, there is no sign that Britain’s other major base in the Americas, in Belize, will be axed by the review. British troops maintain a small garrison at Belize’s main airport from where they have access to 13 sites for jungle warfare training.
Declassified recently revealed that British troops have access to one sixth of Belize’s land, including a protected forest area, for such training, which includes firing mortars, artillery and “machine-gunning from helicopters”. Belize is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, home to “critically endangered species” and rare archaeological sites.
Exercises in Belize are run by the British Army Training Support Unit Belize (BATSUB), located at Price Barracks near Belize City. In 2018, the MOD spent £575,000 on a new water treatment plant for the barracks.
Africa
Another region where the British military still maintains military bases is Africa. During the 1950s, the British army suppressed anti-colonial fighters in Kenya by using concentration camps where prisoners were tortured and even castrated.
After independence, the British army was able to retain its base at Nyati Camp in Nanyuki, Laikipia County. Known as BATUK, it is the hub for hundreds of British army personnel in Kenya.
Britain has access to five more sites in Kenya and 13 training grounds, which are used for preparing troops before they deploy to Afghanistan and elsewhere. In 2002, the MOD paid £4.5-million in compensation to hundreds of Kenyans who had been injured by unexploded weaponry fired by British troops at these training grounds.
From Nyati, British soldiers also make use of the nearby Laikipia air base, and the training ground at Archers Post in Laresoro and Mukogodo in Dol-Dol. In the capital Nairobi, British troops have access to Kifaru Camp at Kahawa Barracks and an International Peace Support Training Centre in Karen.
An agreement signed in 2016 set out that: “The Visiting Forces shall respect and be sensitive to the traditions, customs and cultures of local communities of the places where they are deployed in the Host Nation.”
British soldiers are also known to use local sex workers.
There have been attempts to attack the British troops in Kenya. In January, three men were arrested for attempting to break in to Laikipia and were questioned by anti-terrorism police.
They are believed to be linked to the Al Shabaab group in neighbouring Somalia, where British troops also have a permanent presence. Army training teams are stationed at Mogadishu International Airport, with another team at the Baidoa Security Training Centre.
A smaller British military presence can be found at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, where UK forces are involved in drone operations over the Horn of Africa and Yemen. This secretive site is linked by a high-speed fibre optic cable to the Croughton spy base in England, which is connected to the GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham. Djibouti has also been linked to UK special forces operations in Yemen.
A more overt British presence is maintained in Malawi, where British soldiers are assigned to counter-poaching missions in Liwonde National Park and the Nkhotakota and Majete Wildlife Reserves.
Image on the right: Mathew Talbot in Malawi. Photo: MOD
In 2019, a 22-year-old soldier, Mathew Talbot, was trampled by an elephant in Liwonde. There was no helicopter support on standby to airlift injured troops and it took over three hours for a paramedic to reach him. Talbot died before arriving at hospital. An MOD investigation made 30 recommendations to improve safety after the incident.
Meanwhile in west Africa, one British officer still runs the Horton Academy, a military training centre, in Sierra Leone, a legacy of Britain’s involvement in the country’s civil war.
In Nigeria, around nine British troops are on loan to the Nigerian armed forces, amid its controversial human rights record. British troops seem to have regular access to Kaduna International Airport where they train local forces to guard against the threat from Boko Haram.
Amnesty International alleges that 10,000 civilians have died in detention camps run by the Nigerian military, one of which was part funded by the UK.
Britain’s military presence in Africa is set to grow substantially later this year with the deployment of a “peacekeeping” force to Mali in the Sahara. The country has been rocked by civil war and terrorism since the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011.
UK troops have operated with French forces in Mali under the banner of Operation Newcombe almost continuously since the Libya intervention. The current order of battle involves RAF Chinook helicopters based in Gao flying ‘logistical’ missions to more remote bases manned by French troops who have suffered heavy losses. The SAS is also reported to be operating in the area.
The future of the mission has been in jeopardy since Mali’s military staged a coup in August 2020, following massive protests against the presence of foreign forces in the country and years of frustration at the government’s handling of the conflict.
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A note on our method: We have defined “overseas” as outside the United Kingdom. The base must have a permanent or long-term British presence in 2020 for it to be counted. We included bases run by other nations, but only where the UK has constant access or a significant presence. We only counted NATO bases where the UK has a major combat presence e.g with Typhoon jets deployed, not just officers stationed on a reciprocal basis.
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Phil Miller is a staff reporter for Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world.
It has been more than three weeks since election day and the incumbent U.S. president still has yet to concede defeat. Despite the media’s distraction over the perspiration of his personal attorney during a bizarre press conference, the legal team led by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has actually done a decent job uncovering potential fraud in battleground states where vote counting was delayed for several days before the former vice president was declared a “winner” by the news media and Silicon Valley.
Unfortunately, the 2020 election is not a sporting event or academic paper, therefore evidence that instances of fraud occurred will likely not be enough for the litigation to change the outcome, though it does appear his camp is finally facing up to leaving the White House come January. Then again, whether or not burden of proof was ever provided is immaterial, seeing as before he even took the oath of office a silent coup was underway to remove the democratically-elected government of Donald J. Trump that is now entering its final phase.
Trump found an unlikely voice of support contesting Biden’s premature declaration of victory in former six-term Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who this time was the running mate of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura as a write-in entrant in some eligible states for the divided Greens who officially nominated labor activist Howie Hawkins.
During the 2016 election, the Democrats scapegoated Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss, even baselessly implicating the Green Party nominee in the Russiagate hoax simply for having appeared at a 2015 Moscow gala for the RT television network where General Michael Flynn and Russian President Vladimir Putin were in attendance. Not only did the legislatures of swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exclude Hawkins from the ballot at the behest of Democrats in a shameless act of voter suppression, but McKinney described the irregularities which plagued electronic voting machines in her home state of Georgia in 2020 as “déjà vu”, having been cheated out of Congress herself by such tactics in 2006. McKinney also previously penned an essay entitled “The Purple Revolution: U.S. Hybrid Warfare Comes Home to Roost?” on the establishment’s efforts to remove Trump which makes an apropos historical reference.
This November 22nd marked fifty-seven years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When asked for his reaction to the killing of the 35th president in Dallas back in 1963 and less than two years before his own public murder, civil rights leader Malcolm X famously stated that “chickens were coming home to roost”, alluding to the U.S. government’s interventions overseas such as the CIA-orchestrated assassination of the first Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960 following its independence from Belgian colonial rule. His remarks in the wake of a national tragedy proved too controversial even for the Nation of Islam which publicly censured its most recognizable minister who would announce his departure from the black nationalist organization a few months later. The following year, he would be gunned down in Harlem in an assassination long-suspected to have been the work of the FBI’s counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) which had infiltrated his inner circle to frame the NOI for a mysterious death equally thought by the public to have been a state-sanctioned execution like that of JFK.
It is unclear whether the African-American Muslim leader believed the U.S. government was behind Kennedy’s death, but chances are he was not naïve enough to think that the same machinations used abroad could not be implemented by those very forces domestically to remove someone elected by the American people they opposed. If the Kennedy assassination was indeed a result of the “unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex” which his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower even famously warned of during his farewell address, what took place was almost certainly a secret putsch. The president had already been undercut by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Intelligence Agency in trying to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis and his back-channel negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev were sabotaged by hawkish officials within his own administration. The internal struggle that scuttled Kennedy’s attempts at détente parallels the vying factions which undermined Trump ’s diplomacy with North Korea to a near tee.
Political scientist Michael Parenti explained in his essayThe JFK Assassination: Defending the Gangster State how the 35th president was targeted by the security state which perceived Kennedy as “soft on communism” and placating the Soviet Union in his diplomatic efforts following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion:
“The dirty truth is that Kennedy was heartily hated by right-wing forces in this country, including many powerful people in the intelligence organizations. He had betrayed the national interest as they defined it, by refusing to go all out against Cuba, making overtures of rapproachment with Castro, and refusing to escalate the ground war in Vietnam. They also saw him as an anti-business liberal who was taking the country down the wrong path. Whether Kennedy really was all that liberal is another matter. What the national security rightists saw him to be was what counted.”
While the widely perceived truth about the JFK assassination remains sealed from public view, the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commissions of the 1970s exposed the numerous CIA-backed juntas which unseated popular leaders in Guatemala, Syria, Iran, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, and countless other nations in the global south. Ever since, the CIA’s preferred regime change stratagem has been to use what are paradoxically labeled non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — which actually receive U.S. government funding — as cutouts to destabilize noncompliant nations under the guise of supporting “pro-democracy” opposition movements. During the Cold War, the vast majority of states overthrown were left-leaning or socialist governments aligned with the Eastern Bloc, but in the post-Soviet world many of the toppled administrations have been far from left-wing and even conservative, with their only offense favoring economic ties with Russia or China and resisting Western hegemony.
Similarly, when domestic protest movements have taken shape at home in the U.S., the political establishment has used plutocratic foundations in Big Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to defang them for its own agenda.
Look no further than the way the nationwide mass demonstrations against racism and police brutality this year were rapidly transformed into a movement to elect Joe Biden, who drafted the senate version of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, with no substantial legislation passed to reform police. The corporatized Black Lives Matter movement, a recipient of $100 million dollar grants from the CIA’s philanthropic frontage in the Ford Foundation, grew out of the legacy of the short-lived Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 which itself were coopted by reformist and pro-Democratic Party outfits. Not coincidentally, OWS was also infiltrated by Serbian political activist Srđa Popović of Otpor! (“Resistance!”) and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) fame who previously led the Bulldozer Revolution which overthrew Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević in 2000.
A central component of the Gene Sharp-inspired ‘Color Revolution’ template is the engineering of contested election scenarios where leaders singled-out for regime change can be ousted after appearing to consolidate power, as seen in election-themed revolutions in Serbia (Bulldozer), Georgia (Rose), Ukraine (Orange), Kyrgyzstan (Tulip), Moldova (Grape), and other countries. The same manner in which Biden declared himself the victor in spite of the lawsuits filed in federal court was recently observed abroad in the disputed election aftermath in Belarus where U.S.-backed opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya announced herself the winner of its presidential contest in order to spark preplanned protests in Minsk against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. This was a replication of an unsuccessful blueprint from the 2009 Green Movement unrest in Iran during the incumbency of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidential crisis in Venezuela last year, among others.
Trump‘s lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared to be confused when he alleged that the e-voting irregularities involving the election software company Dominion Voting Systems had ties to deceased former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and international financier George Soros, who actually supports the U.S.-backed opposition to the Chavista government in Caracas. Giuliani may be mistaken but is pointing to something accurate, except in the contested U.S. election his client is in the position of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while Biden would be the equivalent of self-appointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó. Sans a few exceptions such as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who certainly knows a rigged contest when he sees one), most of the “international community” congratulated Biden on his assumed win just like Venezuela’s illegitimate coup leader. Meanwhile, both the pseudo-left and conservative right seem to be equally misunderstood about Soros, who is neither the charitable billionaire or “globalist” bogeyman they imagine, but rather an anti-communist business tycoon who favors vulture capitalism and Western imperialism under the banner of liberal democracy.
As touched on by Cynthia McKinney, in the aftermath of Trump’s shocking triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016, rumors began to swirl that a philanthropist-funded U.S. ‘Color Revolution’ was in the works — a ‘Purple Revolution’, monikered after the noticeable shade Mrs. Clinton chose to don in her concession speech as a combination of blue and red intended to symbolize bipartisan opposition to Trump. Whether or not that was true, it was in the wee hours following her loss that the Clinton campaign reportedly settled on placing the blame at the feet of unproven Russian interference for Trump’s unlikely victory. Or was it even earlier? Recently declassified CIA memorandums proved that months before the election in July 2016, Clinton had orchestrated a plan to whip up a smear campaign tying Trump to the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee email server. The documents also showed beyond a doubt how the Russia probe was launched even though both the FBI and CIA were privy to Clinton’s intent on linking Trump with the Kremlin.
The three-year Russia investigation and subsequent impeachment over the Ukraine scandal were only the beginning chapters in the slow-motion soft coup against Trump. When all else failed, the U.S. elite began to prepare for his ouster in the 2020 election. In fact, the possibility of a second Trump term was evidently too much of a nightmare for the establishment to even fathom, so they only prepared for his defeat and presupposed refusal to relinquish power instead. Quite literally, an exclusive cabal of Washington insiders, establishment Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were gathered by a former high-ranking Pentagon official, Nils Gilman, to participate in role-playing “election simulation” scenarios and tabletop “war game” exercises predicting various election outcomes which anticipated that Trump would resist acknowledging defeat and transferring power, precipitating a constitutional crisis. It was called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and featured Clintonites John Podesta and Donna Brazile, who were joined by prominent neoconservative figures William Kristol, Max Boot, and the former George W. Bush speechwriter who coined the “Axis of Evil” phrase, war criminal David Frum.
Most telling is that among the scenarios considered, even in the postulated drill where the premise was a decisive victory for Trump, TIP determined that Biden should ignore the vote result and consider any measures necessary to attain the presidency, including provoking a constitutional crisis and possible civil war where Democratic-held states would be encouraged to secede from the Union, the electoral college abolished, and statehood awarded to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Upon reading the TIP report, it is clear that the real purpose of the bipartisan exercise was to mastermind the very disputed election outcome and concentration of power it predicts would be triggered by Trump. It is also possible that the project enlisted mass media in its scheme. Just weeks before Election Day, a highly-publicized scandal broke at The New Yorker magazine after staff writer and CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin accidentally exposed himself during a Zoom video meeting with fellow employees. Many were too amused to notice the online conference call was revealed to be an “election simulation” featuring top columnists of the publication role-playing as participants.
It would not be out of the realm of possibility given the unprecedented extent to which corporate outlets and Big Tech companies have gone to influence the outcome of the election.
Even those within legacy media such as The New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, found itself censored by Twitter for publishing an explosive story which contained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop of which not even the former vice president’s campaign denied the authenticity.
When Trump delivered a press conference outlining his campaign’s allegations of election fraud, major news outlets not only made the Orwellian decision to “fact check” Trump live on-air but cut away from the speech in the middle of his remarks in coordinated unison. Then when the president’s own social media posts were censored and flagged as disinformation, the jig was truly up. It’s little wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly bragged about how the platform was “partnering with the intelligence community” for censorship to be a soft power arm after the 2016 election. Lo and behold, rather than being broken up for violating anti-trust laws, Silicon Valley has already been rewarded for staying true to its roots in the national security state by Biden’s transition team which consists of executives from Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Dell, DropBox, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Lyft, Stripe and Uber.
Can it really be that Trump is so hated because of his rejection of certain foreign policy orthodoxies like JFK alone? The truth is really so much more. It is because of his inclination to disgrace Washington’s sacred institutions for his own political gain which the entire establishment desperately needs to maintain the faith of the masses in its corrupt political system, rogue national security state, yellow press, and obsolete democratic process. It is imperative to preserve these bureaucratic cornerstones as above criticism because they are a linchpin to holding power. As a political outsider, Trump blazed his own trail to the presidency and in doing so undermined the hallowed bastions of power in Washington, promising to “drain the swamp” while eroding faith in the leading U.S. spy agencies as an unelected secret government or “deep state”, and most of all denouncing corporate media as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Even though these were accuracies cynically told by Trump for his own advantage, they were misunderstood by his detractors to be falsehoods simply because he was the source.
Trump’s populist agitation even worried his own group of backers within the ruling elite who convinced him to soften his rhetoric and reverse many of his positions once he took office. Since the 2020 election has not resulted in a desirable outcome, he has only continued to increase popular distrust of the political order and its mechanisms which guarantee the status quo overrides the will of the people, signaling he is more than willing to take the whole system down with him. Indeed, polls indicate many Americans seem to agree with the president that the election was rigged in Biden’s favor. This is precisely why his rabble-rousing is viewed as dangerous by the elite which unleashed its media organs and intelligence agencies from day one to sabotage him — they knew that he is willing to lay bare the full corruption of the powers that be in order to help his own cause. For this reason, the media has resorted to the most deceitful and partisan methods to portray Trump as a unique danger that most be ousted at any cost.
It is no wonder how a coalition as incongruous as that behind Biden came into formation, from Lincoln Project “Never Trumper” Republicans to the Democratic Socialists of America, Big Tech monopolies to Black Lives Matter, Wall Street megadonors to the remnants of Occupy Wall Street, Bush-era national security officials to the inappropriately-named Revolutionary Communist Party (Refuse Fascism), and so on. Or to really give an idea of just how absurd the ideological alliance was to ensure a Biden presidency, the Transition Integrity Project was even shamefully promoted by the likes of so-called “progressive” news outlets like Democracy Now! which made its journalistic name critically covering the very neoconservative figures from the Bush years behind TIP. Somehow, those in power managed to persuade the “anti-establishment” to side with them against the bad orange man as the supposed greater evil, tricking them into defending institutions they should oppose as inviolable and the archaic U.S. electoral system which deprives them of real democracy as unimpeachable. This is the real legacy of the Trump era — only time will tell if it is its lesson.
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Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Max may be reached at[email protected].
When he departs the White House on January 20, Donald Trump will leave this region with a toxic legacy. First and foremost, his ongoing campaign to delegitimise the Palestinian people and encourage Israel to continue colonising their homeland has had disastrous consequences for both Palestine and countries further afield.
Trump defied decades old international policy by recognising occupied East Jerusalem as part of Israel’s capital although its status is meant to be determined in negotiations between Palestine and Israel. Trump cancelled the US contribution to UNRWA, the UN agency providing for five million Palestinian refugees. This has deprived UNRWA of $665 million over two years and forced the agency to cut expenditures, services and staff jobs. For decades, the US donation had been one-third of UNRWA’s budget. Trump has also cut off all funding for USAID projects in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, where the St John’s Opthalmic and Makassad hospitals in East Jerusalem were defunded.
Trump closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, launched his “Deal of the Century” peace plan which promised the Palestinians economic incentives to agree to accept autonomy in isolated islets of territory in Gaza, the West Bank, a capital on the edge of East Jerusalem and Israel’s annexation of 30 per cent of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. Israel would remain in control of Palestinian air, land and sea. This plan — rejected by the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the international community — would have put paid to Palestinian hopes for an end to the occupation and statehood. Trump has consigned the Palestinian people to either endless occupation or perpetual exile.
Trump followed up these “gifts” to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government with others. In March 2019, he recognised as part of Israel, the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. In November of that year, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a radical evangelical Christian, declared that Israeli “settlements” in occupied territory are not “inconsistent with international law”, although occupiers are prohibited by international law from colonising and annexing conquered territories, a dikta accepted by the majority of countries. Pompeo’s statement amounted to a reversal of the Obama’s administration policy on “settlements” and of earlier administrations which regarded them, a least, as “obstacles” to a peace deal. Last week, Pompeo took a further provocative step by not only visiting an Israeli colony near Ramallah in the West Bank but also going to a colony in the Syrian Golan. Pompeo subsequently declared products from colonies could be labelled “Made in Israel”, rather than in the West Bank or Golan colonies.
Pompeo piled on the administration’s anti-Palestinian policies by declaring that Washington would regard as “anti-Semitic”, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, designed to put pressure on Israel to end its occupation and reach a just deal with the Palestinians. He labelled BDS a “cancer”. He said he would identify and sanction organisations that adopt “politically motivated actions intended to penalise or limit commercial relations with Israel”. This policy would put an end to peaceful Palestinian, Arab and international resistance to Israel’s occupation regime even though resistance — both violent and peaceful — is legal under international law.
As it nears the end of its term in office, the Trump administration has also ruled that US citizens born in Jerusalem can put “born in Israel” on their passports and that Jonathan Pollard, convicted of spying on the US navy for Israel, could leave the US to live in Israel although he had been banned from doing just this.
Trump also gifted Netanyahu with the withdrawal of the US from the 2015 six-nation agreement lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for reducing its nuclear programme by 90 per cent. This involved violating the terms of a deal which has the force of an international treaty. Trump also reimposed sanctions which had been lifted and imposed fresh primary and secondary sanctions in order to prevent governments, businesses and individuals from dealing with Iran. This punitive policy, adopted during the global COVID pandemic, has impoverished millions of Iranians and Syrians, whose government is allied to Iran, and Lebanese, whose Hizbollah movement is tied to Iran. Why did Trump oblige Netanyahu? Because of the opposition to Israel of Iran, Syria, and Hizbollah.
Nevertheless, pulling out of the nuclear deal has not been enough for Netanyahu who has pressed the Trump administration to take military action against Iran. Trump did this by assassinating Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in January and by threatening further strikes if Iran retaliated. Tehran did not oblige and patiently awaits the end of Trump’s reign.
The murder of Suleimani and Iraqi Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis, deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, which consists largely of pro-Iranian militias, prompted a vote in the Iraqi parliament demanding the total withdrawal of US and other foreign forces from that country. The Trump administration refused at first but is now planning to pull out 500 of the remaining 3,000 US troops deployed in Iraq. This is a half measure which will please neither the Pentagon nor the Iraqi people. They seek an end to the current Iran-friendly Shia sectarian regime and want both the US and Iran to stop intervening in their affairs.
The strike on Suleimani combined with anti-government protests led to the fall of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi and the formation of a new cabinet by Mustafa Al Kadhimi who has struggled to contain demonstrations and restrain pro-Iranian militias from mounting rocket attacks on military bases housing US forces. Determined to deny Trump a pretext to attack Iran itself, Tehran displayed its influence in Iraq by ordering the militias to suspend their attacks.
Trump’s exit from the White House on January 20 will be welcomed by a majority of people in this region, but his destructive policies will be hard to reverse and will continue to inflict damage and suffering.
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Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence participate in an expanded bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, Jan. 27, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Great Reset includes a plan to transform the global food and agricultural industries and the human diet. The architects of the plan claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change.
But a closer look at the corporations and think tanks the WEF is partnering with to usher in this global transformation suggests that the real motive is tighter corporate control over the food system by means of technological solutions.
Vandana Shiva, scholar, environmentalist, food sovereignty advocate and author, told The Defender,
“The Great Reset is about multinational corporate stakeholders at the World Economic Forum controlling as many elements of planetary life as they possibly can. From the digital data humans produce to each morsel of food we eat.”
The WEF describes itself as “the global platform for public-private cooperation” that creates partnerships between corporations, politicians, intellectuals, scientists and other leaders of society to “define, discuss and advance key issues on the global agenda.”
According to WEF’s founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab, the forum is guided by the goal of positioning “private corporations as the trustees of society” to “address social and environmental challenges.”
In July, Schwab published a 195-page book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” in which he challenged industry leaders and decision makers to “make good use of the pandemic by not letting the crisis go to waste.”
TIME magazine (whose owner Marc Benioff is a WEF board member) recently partnered with the WEF to cover The Great Reset and to provide a “look at how the COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to transform the way we live.”
The Great Reset is meant to be all-encompassing. Its partner organizations include the biggest players in data collection, telecommunications, weapons manufacturing, finance, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and the food industry.
The WEF’s plans for the “reset” of food and agriculture include projects and strategic partnerships that favor genetically modified organisms, lab-made proteins and pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals as sustainable solutions to food and health issues.
For example, WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum. EAT Forum describes itself as a “Davos for food” that plans to “add value to business and industry” and “set the political agenda.”
EAT was co-founded by Wellcome Trust, an organization established with funds from GlaxoSmithKline and which still has strategic partnerships with the drugmaker. EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The organization also assists the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the “creation of new dietary guidelines” and sustainable development initiatives.
According to Federic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels, EAT network interacts closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, which aim to replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations.
“They frame it as healthy and sustainable, which of course it is neither,” Leroy told The Defender.
Impossible Foods was initially co-funded by Google, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Recent lab results showed the company’s imitation meat contained glyphosate levels 11 times higher than its closest competitor.
EAT’s biggest initiative is called FReSH, which the organization describes as an effort to drive the transformation of the food system. The project’s partners include Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever and even tech giant Google.
“Companies like Unilever and Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies are already chemical processors — so many of these companies are very well positioned to profit off of this new food business which revolves around processing chemicals and extracts needed to produce these lab-made foods on a global scale,” Leroy said.
In Schwab’s book, he discusses how biotechnology and genetically modified food should become a central pillar to repairing global food scarcity issues, issues which COVID has revealed and exacerbated.
He writes “global food security will only be achieved if regulations on genetically modified foods are adapted to reflect the reality that gene editing offers a precise, efficient and safe method of improving crops.”
Shiva disagrees. She told The Defender that the “WEF is parading fake science,” and “for Mr. Schwab to promote these technologies as solutions proves that The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life.”
EAT developed what it refers to as “the planetary health diet,” which the WEF champions as the “sustainable dietary solution of the future.” But according to Leroy, it’s a diet that’s supposed to replace everything else. “The diet aims to cut the meat and dairy intake of the global population by as much as 90% in some cases and replaces it with lab-made foods, cereals and oil,” he said.
Shiva further explained, “EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”
According to EAT’s own reports, the big adjustments the organization and its corporate partners want to make to the food system are “unlikely to be successful if left up to the individual,” and the changes they wish to impose on societal eating habits and food “require reframing at the systemic level with hard policy interventions that include laws, fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade reconfiguration and other economic and structural measures.”
But Shiva said this is the wrong approach, because “all of the science” shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity. She explained that “EAT’s uniform global diet will be produced with western technology and agricultural chemicals. Forcing this onto sovereign nations by multinational lobbying is what I refer to as food imperialism.”
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While the world is trying to limit the destruction caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we are only starting to understand its long-term effects on governments, economies, companies and individuals. The global crisis has exacerbated existing flaws at all levels, including vulnerabilities to corruption and bribery.
Corruption and bribery are not new problems, but crises such as today’s COVID-19 pandemic tend to increase their risk. Governments are occupied with urgent matters and take shortcuts to get what they need. Companies or individuals may be tempted to resort to bribes to meet objectives and there is increased competition and pressure to secure certain supplies and services. Plus, changes in supply chains and regulatory environments (borders closed, travel restrictions) create new avenues for corruption and less oversight.
Using Existing Anti-Bribery Measures
Thanks to The International Organization for Standardization, an international, independent non-governmental organization, there is a means for combating this cross-border problem. The ISO 37001 Anti-Bribery Management Systems is the universal standard that helps organizations, private or public, large or small, prevent and address bribery. ISO 37001 was developed in 2016 with input from international organizations such as Transparency International, the OECD and the International Chamber of Commerce, as well as country participants and international regulators. To become certified, organizations must implement an anti-bribery management system that meets the standard’s requirements, designate an individual to oversee compliance with the policy, establish financial controls and adopt monitoring and reporting processes.
Companies and governments also implementing their own anti-bribery policies or become members of industry-level self-regulating organizations (SROs). While both have benefits, they are also inherently flawed. As Amit Narang argued in The Hill, “It is simply unacceptable for our government to allow corporations to decide whether products and services are safe for the public when those companies have an overwhelming incentive to make products and services merely appear safe, so they can reach the market. This fundamental conflict of interest is at the heart of why industry self-regulation doesn’t work…” While he was referring to health and safety regulations, the argument is still pertinent for bribery. Self-regulators are funded and overseen by companies they are meant to be regulating. When certain business practices are lucrative for an industry, it is doubtful that SROs or companies will go out of their way to abolish or create punitive oversight for such practices. This is even more true during a global crisis when companies are struggling, and competition becomes even more cutthroat.
Fighting Government Corruption
Perhaps nowhere is bribery more widespread than at the government level – we have seen too many examples of this throughout the pandemic. The World Bank argues that the, “COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in large scale emergency spending by governments, sometimes without adhering to the regular checks and balances… The strains placed on the public sector in responding to the current situation present enormous opportunities for corruption to flourish.”In July, officials in Brazil were accused of pocketing almost $72.2 million in bribes when awarding state contracts for medical supplies. Most of the ventilators were not delivered, resulting in avoidable deaths.
ISO 37001 provides the means for curtailing such corruption. Governments can require ISO 37001 compliance not only for vendors bidding on public contracts, but also for themselves. When former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was forced out of office in 2018 after being convicted of seven corruption charges involving hundreds of millions of dollars, Mahathir Mohamad, Razak’s successor, announced that all ministries, departments and government-linked companies would pursue ISO 37001 certification. “This effort will make Malaysia the first country in the world to apply the ISO 37001 certification in the public sector,” he noted. Malaysia has since shown improvement in international corruption rankings. Given the potential risks of the current crisis, other countries would be wise to follow.
Governments also need a high level of oversight when it comes to their central banks and currencies. In 2018, it was revealed that Securency and Note Printing Australia (NPA), then subsidiaries of the Reserve Bank of Australia, were ordered to pay $21.6 million relating to corruption charges. Securency and NPA pleaded guilty to bribing foreign officials in Asia to win banknote printing contracts in 2012.
A group of banknote producers formed the Banknote Ethics Initiative (BnEI) in 2013 to write their own set of ethical practices. But BnEI faces the same issues as self-regulating organizations in other industries: member companies will ultimately want to protect their own interests. Antti Heinonen, Chairman of BnEI, claims “The key difference which separates BnEI from other similar initiatives is that – rather than self-assessment – companies are externally audited and accredited.” But with only two organizations doing the auditing, their true independence has to be questioned.
Given various scandals and with economies fragile from the pandemic, central banks need objective reassurances that companies printing their money follow strict anti-bribery guidelines. They need more than industry self-regulation and promises. In “How Companies Can Take a Stand Against Bribery,” Ravi Venkatesan and Leslie Benton argue, “Because the standard is a global tool, developed by a global expert stakeholder group that was not tied to the law or guidance of any one country, it may be more readily accepted by some as an anti-bribery common language.” Plus, central banks can trust that ISO 37001 certified manufacturers are monitored and evaluated by independent third-party auditors.
Every Business Sector is Impacted by Bribery
Corruption is certainly not limited to governments, currencies or any specific industry. Some companies have become ISO 37001 certified because clients demand it. Such was the case for U.K.-based Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management and development consulting firm. Lorna Raymond, who led the company’s certification process says, “In our tenders, the question was being asked, ‘Do you have certification to ISO 37001?’”
Others are required by prosecutors to pursue certification as part of settlement deals in corruption cases. In 2016, Brazilian construction giant, Grupo Odebrecht, signed a deal with U.S. and Swiss officials in which they agreed to pay $2.6 billion in fines for paying bribes to win contracts. Additionally, authorities demanded that the company seek ISO 37001 certification. Prosecutors in Singapore and Denmark have also made ISO 37001 certification a condition of corruption settlements. Such legal conditions signal a recognition of the standard’s merit and trustworthiness.
And some companies proactively seek certification to create a corporate culture of compliance. Microsoft, the first large American company to become ISO 37001 certified, has been very vocal in the need for a universal framework. David Howard, Corporate Vice President, General Counsel, Litigation, Competition Law, & Compliance at Microsoft states, “We think a consistent approach to anti-corruption programs is a good thing. That, along with an objective and independent certification process, should give governments around the world confidence that the companies which achieve certification are doing everything they reasonably can to reduce corruption. We encourage other major companies to adopt ISO 37001…”
In the COVID-19 era, when governments are cutting corners and rushing orders and companies are facing cutbacks and pressure to win contracts, adopting universal anti-bribery norms such as ISO 37001 has become all the more important.
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Pfizer recently announced that its covid vaccine was more than 90 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Shortly after this announcement, Moderna announced that its covid vaccine was 94.5 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Unlike the flu vaccine, which is one shot, both covid vaccines require two shots given three to four weeks apart. Hidden toward the end of both announcements, were the definitions of “effective.”
Both trials have a treatment group that received the vaccine and a control group that did not. All the trial subjects were covid negative prior to the start of the trial. The analysis for both trials was performed when a target number of “cases” were reached. “Cases” were defined by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. There was no information about the cycle number for the PCR tests. There was no information about whether the “cases” had symptoms or not. There was no information about hospitalizations or deaths. The Pfizer study had 43,538 participants and was analyzed after 164 cases. So, roughly 150 out 21,750 participants (less than 0.7 percent) became PCR positive in the control group and about one-tenth that number in the vaccine group became PCR positive. The Moderna trial had 30,000 participants. There were 95 “cases” in the 15,000 control participants (about 0.6 percent) and 5 “cases” in the 15,000 vaccine participants (about one-twentieth of 0.6 percent). The “efficacy” figures quoted in these announcements are odds ratios.
There is no evidence, yet, that the vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths. The Moderna announcement claimed that eleven cases in the control group were “severe” disease, but “severe” was not defined. If there were any hospitalizations or deaths in either group, the public has not been told. When the risks of an event are small, odds ratios can be misleading about absolute risk. A more meaningful measure of efficacy would be the number to vaccinate to prevent one hospitalization or one death. Those numbers are not available. An estimate of the number to treat from the Moderna trial to prevent a single “case” would be fifteen thousand vaccinations to prevent ninety “cases” or 167 vaccinations per “case” prevented which does not sound nearly as good as 94.5 percent effective. The publicists working for pharmaceutical companies are very smart people. If there were a reduction in mortality from these vaccines, that information would be in the first paragraph of the announcement.
There is no information about how long any protective benefit from the vaccine would persist. Antibody response following covid-19 appears to be short lived. Based on what we know, the covid vaccine may require two shots every three to six months to be protective. The more shots required, the greater the risk of side effects from sensitization to the vaccine.
There is no information about safety. None. Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) appear to have two completely different standards for attributing deaths to covid-19 and attributing side effects to covid vaccines. If these vaccines are approved, as they likely will be, the first group to be vaccinated will be the beta testers. I am employed by a university-based medical center that is a referral center for the West Texas region. My colleagues include resident physicians and faculty physicians who work with covid patients on a daily basis. I have asked a number of my colleagues whether they will be first in line for the new vaccine. I have yet to hear any of my colleagues respond affirmatively. The reasons for hesitancy are that the uncertainties about safety exceed what they perceive to be a small benefit. In other words, my colleagues would prefer to take their chances with covid rather than beta test the vaccine. Many of my colleagues want to see the safety data after a year of use before getting vaccinated; these colleagues are concerned about possible autoimmune side effects that may not appear for months after vaccination.
These announcements by Pfizer and Moderna are encouraging. I certainly hope that these vaccines protect people from the harm of covid-19. I certainly hope that these vaccines are safe. If both of these conditions are true, nobody will need to be coerced into taking the vaccine. However, you should pay even more attention about what is left out of an announcement than about what is stated. The pharmaceutical companies are more than happy for patients to misunderstand what is meant by efficacy. Caveat emptor (buyer beware)!
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Gilbert Berdine is an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and an affiliate of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.
Public health groups, including the World Health Organization, are making a concerted effort to reduce COVID vaccine hesitancy, as many medical professionals and minority groups remain doubtful about safety and efficacy.
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As details on the latest COVID vaccine contenders flood the news cycle on a daily basis, reports of concerns regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccine are widespread among many demographics, even including the professional medical community.
As vaccine hesitancy grows, agencies including the World Health Organization (WHO) are stepping up efforts to build vaccine confidence through public relations and communications campaigns.
Surveys reveal vaccine hesitancy
Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles’ Karin Fielding School of Public Health surveyed healthcare personnel working in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. As the Washington Post reported, they found that two thirds (66.5%) of healthcare workers “intend to delay vaccination,” meaning they do not intend to get the COVID vaccine when it becomes available. They plan instead on reviewing the data once it’s widely administered and proven safe.
Seventy-six percent of the vaccine-hesitant healthcare workers cited the “fast-tracked vaccine development” as a primary reason for their concerns. Typically, vaccines take between eight to 10 years to develop, Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN in an article titled, “The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that’s risky.”
The coronavirus vaccine frontrunners — Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca — are expected to make their debut in January. The pharmaceutical giants have exponentially accelerated the average safety and review timeline for vaccine development and production, to get the vaccines to market in under a year. Erbelding admitted that the accelerated pace will involve “not looking at all the data.”
Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, said in a video that the number of physicians expressing hesitancy was “unprecedented” and “posed a real risk” to public confidence in vaccines.
A recent Gallup poll showed that only 58% of Americans plan on getting the COVID vaccine when it’s available. An October poll conducted by Zogby found that nearly 50% of Americans have concerns about the safety of the coming COVID vaccines.
A new collaborative survey project by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Langer Research found that Black and Latinx Americans are overwhelmingly concerned about the coming COVID vaccine.
The survey, as reported in the Washington post, claims to be “one of the largest and most rigorous conducted on this topic to date.” It found that only 14% of Black Americans trust that a vaccine will be safe, while only 34% of Latinx Americans trust it will be safe.
The survey also found, in the context of COVID, only 19% percent of Black Americans trust drug companies, while less than a third trust the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to “look after their interests.”
According to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of medical experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fears surrounding the painful or harmful side-effects of the COVID vaccine are rooted in reality.
According to CNBC, during a virtual Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ meeting on Nov. 23, Dr. Sandra Fryhofer told fellow CDC officials that patients need to be aware that the side effects from the COVID vaccines “will not be a walk in the park.” Fryhofer acknowledged that side effects from the vaccines have been reported to mimic symptoms of a mild case of COVID, including muscle pain, fever, chills and headache.
Fryhofer, who explained that both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID vaccines require two doses, worries that her patients might not come back for a second dose after experiencing potentially unpleasant side effects after the first shot.
Despite this, officials at the forefront of the COVID response plan to combat vaccine safety concerns and hesitancy using, what some are calling, questionable psychological techniques.
For example, the WHO, which named “vaccine hesitancy” as the top global public health threat, has hired the PR firm Hill + Knowlton to identify micro-influencers, macro-influencers and “hidden heroes” on social media who could covertly promote the organization’s image as a COVID authority in order to “ensure WHO’s advice and guidance is followed.”
Cass Sunstein, the chairman of WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights, recently wrote an article in Bloomberg in which he promoted the use of popular celebrities, athletes and actors as tools for vaccine persuasion against those who “lack vaccine confidence.”
“Trusted politicians, athletes or actors — thought to be ‘one of us’ rather than ‘one of them’ — might explicitly endorse vaccination and report that they themselves have gotten the vaccine,” Sunstein wrote.
Then there’s the “Guide to COVID-19 Vaccine Communications,” developed by the University of Florida and the United Nations that aims to help governments improve COVID vaccine uptake. The authors of the guide promote the tactic of covertly using trusted community leaders to help with pro-vaccine information.
Citing vaccine hesitancy among the African American community, the guide suggests that barber shops and hair salons in predominantly black neighborhoods might be tapped to help disseminate approved vaccine messaging.
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The political significance of this vote is clear: NATO members and partners boycotted the Resolution which, first of all, calls into question Ukraine without naming it, whose neo-Nazi movements have been and are used by NATO for strategic purposes.
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The United Nations Third Committee – in charge of social, humanitarian and cultural issues – approved on November 18 the Resolution “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”.
The Resolution, recalling that “The victory over Nazism in World War II contributed to the creation of the United Nations in order to save future generations from the scourge of war” raised alarm for the spread of neo-Nazi, racist, and xenophobic movements in many parts of the world.
The Resolution expressed “deep concern for the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and former members of the Waffen-SS” in whatever form. The Resolution, therefore, emphasized that “neo-Nazism is more than just the glorification of a past movement: it is a contemporary phenomenon.” Neo-Nazi and other similar movements “fuel contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Christianophobia, xenophobia and related intolerance”.
The Resolution therefore called on the States of the United Nations to undertake a series of measures to counter this phenomenon.
The Resolution, already adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 2019, was approved by the Third Committee with 122 votes in favor, including the votes of Russia and China, two permanent members of the Security Council.
Only two members of the United Nations voted against it: The United States (a permanent member of the Security Council) and Ukraine.
The other 29 country NATO members, including Italy, certainly due to an internal directive, abstained. So did the 27 members of the European Union, 21 of them belonging to NATO. Among the 53 abstentions are also Australia, Japan, and other NATO partners.
The political significance of this vote is clear: NATO members and partners boycotted the Resolution that calls into question Ukraine first of all without naming it, Ukraine’s neo-Nazi movements have been and are used by NATO for strategic purposes.
There is ample evidence that neo-Nazi teams were trained and employed, under US / NATO direction, in the Maidan square putsch in 2014 and in the attack on Ukrainian Russians to provoke, with the detachment of Crimea and its return to Russia, a new confrontation in Europe similar to that of the Cold War.
The role of the Azov battalion – founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, the “white Führer” who is a supporter of the “racial purity of the Ukrainian nation, which must not mix with inferior races,” is emblematic.
After being distinguished for its ferocity, the Azov battalion was transformed into a regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, equipped with tanks and artillery. It preserved the emblem, modeled on that of the SS Das Reich, and the ideological formation of its recruits is modeled on that of the Nazis. The Azov Regiment is trained by US instructors, transferred from Vicenza to Ukraine, flanked by others from NATO.
Azov is not just a military unit, but an ideological and political movement. Biletsky is the charismatic leader especially for the youth organization, which is educated in hatred against Russians and militarily trained. At the same time, neo-Nazis from all over Europe, including Italy, are being recruited in Kiev. Thus, Ukraine has become the “nursery” of the resurgent Nazism in the heart of Europe.
Italy’s abstention is part of this framework, even not voting for the Resolution at the General Assembly. The Parliament agreed, as when in 2017 it signed a memorandum of understanding with the President of the Ukrainian Parliament Andriy Parubiy, who is the founder of the Ukrainian National Social Party organized on the Hitlerian National Socialist model; he is the head of the neo-Nazi squads that are responsible for murders and ferocious beatings of political opposers.
He will be the one to congratulate the Italian government on the UN Resolution on Nazism non-vote, in line with what he declared on television: “The greatest man who practiced direct democracy was Adolf Hitler.”
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
It isn’t about what happened, it’s about what will happen. Our time has come is the catchphrase, a rallying cry. The people are told they have been cheated. It won’t happen again. We are the justice seekers. Upend the global trade order, it is skewed against us. This is heady stuff.
Many adults react to the confused instructions of politicians like children or how primitive primitive people reacted: in the form of a “magical belief in authority”: uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And that has consequences.
Biden has already promised to end U.S. support for the tragic war in Yemen. He should also restore humanitarian aid to Yemen and urge Saudi Arabia to negotiate an end to that conflict. It is essential that we pressure Biden to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces.
This past week the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Bank engaged in a rare public disagreement. US Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin, in a letter to Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, last week directed the Fed to return $455 billion that the Fed was holding in reserve should future lending to banks and non-bank businesses become necessary if the US economy and markets further deteriorate in 2021.
A British Supreme Court judge has slammed the UK government as ‘control freaks’ for attempting to control people’s lives under the guise of COVID, and labeled it “morally and constitutionally indefensible” to define what freedoms the public should and shouldn’t have.
Britain, it turns out, has a rather expansive global reach when it comes to bases, military installations and testing sites. While not having the obese heft and lumbering brawn of the United States, it makes a good go of it. Globally, the UK military has a presence in 145 sites in 42 countries. Such figures tally with Ian Cobain’s prickly observation in The History Thieves: that the British were the only people “perpetually at war.”
What emerges is that the common narrative that China is overshadowing the Russian security presence in Central Asia lacks any empirical evidence. Russia is still the only extra-regional power that maintains a military base in Central Asia (in Tajikistan) and also heads a CSTO base (in Kyrgyzstan).
While the normal thing would have been all out investigations into the murder, in this particular murder the state of Texas and U.S. officials did the exact opposite. They settled for simply pinning the crime on Oswald, the purported lone nut communist ex-U.S. Marine. Here is how they pulled it off.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) and the Coalition of Canadian Palestinian Organizations (CCPO) are urging the Canadian government to take action in response to the crisis facing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency responsible for 5.7 million Palestinian refugees.
The success of Cuba’s healthcare system is widely acknowledged, even among the country’s adversaries, critics and enemies. However, little credit is given to Fidel Castro’s role and vision in bringing it to fruition.
While Pompeo is brash, Blinken is humble, and this key difference might play a leading role in repairing America’s damaged reputation abroad after the past four years of current US President Trump’s bombastic foreign policy statements. Nevertheless, this impression shouldn’t be taken to mean that Blinken isn’t decisive.
Democrat presidential candidate and popularly projected winner of this month’s elections Joe Biden announced that he’ll nominate his close advisor Antony Blinken as the US’ next Secretary of State. Blinken is a veteran Democrat expert in the foreign policy field who comes from a family of diplomats. He previously served as Biden’s National Security Advisor when he was Vice-President as well as Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Secretary of State. The tremendous experience that Blinken will bring to a possible Biden Administration means that the world can expect a return to the US’ Obama-era foreign policy.
Media reports indicate that his personality is the complete opposite of current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. While Pompeo is brash, Blinken is humble, and this key difference might play a leading role in repairing America’s damaged reputation abroad after the past four years of current US President Trump’s bombastic foreign policy statements. Nevertheless, this impression shouldn’t be taken to mean that Blinken isn’t decisive. Other reports claim that he was in favor of former President Obama bombing Syria during the 2013 chemical weapons crisis, and former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul revealed some other interesting details.
According to the Financial Times in their article titled “Biden’s ‘alter ego’ Antony Blinken tipped for top foreign policy job”, McFaul said that Blinken was part of a secretive group of Democrats called the “Phoneix Initiative”. The former ambassador claimed that they began assembling in 2004 after former Democrat presidential candidate Kerry’s loss to incumbent President Bush Jr. Their debates allegedly consisted of passionate arguments in support of more robust national security strategies, including Blinken advocating very strongly for “human rights” according to McFaul.
This correlates with the US’ Obama-era foreign policy of supporting Color Revolutions and so-called “humanitarian interventions” across the world in countries as diverse as Ukraine and Libya respectively under such pretexts. Observers might thus be worried that these policies could repeat themselves under a possible Biden Presidency, which could in turn be destabilizing for Eastern Europe and the Mideast, especially if those aforesaid processes were weaponized for the purpose of geopolitically containing Russia and Iran. It’s too early to tell whether that’ll be the case, but it’s worth noting nonetheless.
Blinken was also critical of Russia over the past few years and even dramatically claimed in 2017 that “The president’s ongoing collusion with Russia’s plans is really striking, intentional or not.” It’s therefore unlikely that he’ll oversee any improvement of relations with Russia, which is worrisome because the two nuclear powers should renegotiate a new strategic weapons treaty after the New START expires early next year. Failing to do so for reasons possibly related to Blinken’s groundless suspicions of then-former President Trump’s relations with Russia (which were never proven despite several years of investigations) would worsen global insecurity.
On the topic of Iran, however, he seems to be much more pragmatic. Blinken supported the 2015 nuclear deal and would likely see the US attempt to return to it under a possible Biden presidency. While that might repair American-Iranian relations, it could also inadvertently worsen the US’ historical ties with Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which are totally against the agreement. Still, it would represent a symbolic return to the UN-enshrined rules-based order if Blinken were to oversee the US’ return to that pact. Thus far, it can be concluded that he’d probably be harder on Russia but more flexible with Iran, but his stance towards China is unclear.
The same earlier cited Financial Times piece reported that Blinken told an interviewer during a recent podcast that “the US had to rebuild alliances to tackle the ‘democratic recession’ enabled by Mr Trump that let ‘autocracies from Russia to China . . . exploit our difficulties’.” This suggests that he might share some of his predecessor’s suspicions of China and thus be less pragmatic towards it than some had initially hoped after first hearing that Biden was projected by the media to be the next President-Elect. His ideological views towards governance hint that he might even try to strengthen the US’ regional alliances on a “democratic” basis.
It can only be hoped that Blinken wouldn’t let his personal opinions blind him to the fact that the US has no choice but to pragmatically cooperate with China despite those two countries’ different governing systems. Seeing the world in black-and-white terms of us-versus-them with respect to democracies versus what he regards as autocracies would be the wrong way to approach relations with the People’s Republic. It might even result in a possible Biden Administration ruining the chance to enter into a comprehensive rapprochement with China towards what some have predicted could even become a New Detente between the two if successful.
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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.
Today’s brave new world may be heading in directions beyond what Orwell and Huxley imagined.
It’s facilitated by made-in-the USA covid and economic collapse.
For ordinary Americans, it created worse hard times than during the Great Depression.
It’s facilitating the greatest ever wealth transfer from most people to the privileged few.
It’s part of a grand scheme for transforming the US and other Western states into ruler-serf societies.
Covid is another form of seasonal flu/influenza, an annual epidemic in the US and elsewhere that affects millions of people.
It comes and goes like clockwork without mass hysteria fear-mongering, partial or full shutdowns causing mass unemployment, mask-wearing that does more harm than good, and social distancing.
All of the above with likely more on the way seems more like a Hollywood horror film than reality.
Interventionist hawks comprising the Biden/Harris regime’s national security team likely means escalated militarism and endless wars over the next four years while vital homeland needs go begging — along with all of the above.
The World Economic Forum-promoted Great Reset may be on the way — a scheme promoted executive chairman Klaus Schwab.
Paul Craig Roberts called him an “insane tyrant,” his scheme intended to “end…human autonomy, (facilitated by) implantable microchips (to control) our bodies and brains.”
It aims to control and exploit ordinary people so privileged ones can benefit more than already.
It’s a dystopian nightmare — wrapped in deceptive equitable socioeconomic rhetoric.
Neoliberal harshness expanded a large-scale underclass in the US and West.
Great Reset planners intend expanding it further toward their goal — ruler/serf societies in the West and worldwide.
Digital health passports may be part of their scheme to facilitate hazardous mass vaxxing.
Will they be required for employment, attending school, air travel, other public transportation, hotel reservations, restaurant dining, in-store shopping, attending a sporting event, and other social interactions?
Will daily lives and routines no longer be possible without proof of covid immunity?
Will what was inconceivable not long ago become reality ahead?
Will something similar to what Britain’s Boris Johnson has in mind be on the way?
Despite unreliable PCR tests that produce false positives and negatives time and again — rendering them useless — Johnson aims to start mass-testing.
He wants to “identify people who are (covid) negative…who are not infectious so we can allow them to behave in a more normal way, in the knowledge they cannot infect anyone else.”
Will he require a health passport for Brits to resume daily life — which includes mass-vaxxing?
Rushed development of hazardous to human health covid vaccines are close to being rolled out.
Is something similar to what’s planned in Britain coming to the US and other Western societies — a brave new world more unfit to live in than already?
On Friday, Children Health Defense chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said the following about Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines:
Will “a significant percentage of people who are going to get the vaccine…get sicker than they would from covid…?”
Moderna vaccine development showed “100% of the people had some side effects, many of them mild.”
But “20% of the high-dose test subjects had serious side effects.”
“(W)e have to ask ourselves (if it’s) better to get covid, at least for most age groups, then it is to get the vaccine?”
On his Children’s Health Defense website, Kennedy discussed a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) mass-vaxxing strategy.
It recommends voluntary use initially. If “unsuccessful,” mandate it, adding:
“(P)rinciples of public health ethics support trying less burdensome policies before moving to more burdensome ones.”
Voluntary vaxxing “should be limited to a matter of weeks” — followed by federal and state legislation that mandates it.
Noncompliance should incur “substantial penalties…(like) employment suspension or stay-at-home orders.”
According to Kennedy, authors of the NEJM article are connected to the (Bill) Gates Foundation, a leading promoter of mass-vaxxing.
The NEJM’s “article is a revealing — and horrifying — blueprint for Pharma’s imposition of mandates that could require hundreds of millions of reluctant Americans to submit to a risky medical procedure with poorly-tested, ineffective, zero-liability vaccines,” Kennedy explained, adding:
“The NEJM has once again confirmed its former editor Marcia Angell’s warning that this once renowned journal has devolved into a propaganda vessel for Pharma.”
Other than diabolical brave new world plotters, who could have imagined earlier what’s unfolding in real time now.
Air travel may be affected early in the new year.
According to the International Air Transport Association’s Nick Careen:
IATA is “in the final development phase (of a) digital passport” to show if international travelers were vaccinated against covid.
IATA will urge all international carriers to adopt what the association is promoting.
Will domestic carriers in the US, West and elsewhere go the same way?
Will federal and local governments, businesses, and operators of whatever involves public interactions follow suit?
If voluntary compliance with covid vaxxing doesn’t work, will mandating it be implemented?
Is a draconian new way of life on the way under hardened police state rules?
Mass nonviolent resistance is the only alternative, pushing back against what no just societies would tolerate.
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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.”
This past week the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Bank engaged in a rare public disagreement. US Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin, in a letter to Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, last week directed the Fed to return $455 billion that the Fed was holding in reserve should future lending to banks and non-bank businesses become necessary if the US economy and markets further deteriorate in 2021.
Fed chair Powell initially balked at Mnuchin’s request, replying that the Fed needed the funds to ensure market stability since the US economy was entering a “difficult period” in late 2020 and early 2021. According to Powell, the $455 billion was essential “as a backstop for our ill-stressed and vulnerable economy”. Returning the funds therefore was “not appropriate”. To do so now was not the right time. Not “yet”, replied Powell. Not even “very soon.”
The Fed’s initial response to Mnuchin no doubt reflected Powell’s concern the US economy may very likely weaken in the current 4th quarter, compared to the 3rd. That means possibly more defaults and bankruptcies could be on the agenda for the 1st quarter 2021—in particular for junk bond heavy businesses and state and local governments that appear most vulnerable at the moment. The Fed therefore needs to keep the $455 billion funds in reserve to address a potentially worsening economic situation.
If the differences between Mnuchin and Powell represented a ‘rift’, as the mainstream media often reported, it was undoubtedly the shortest Treasury-Fed rift on record. It wasn’t twenty-four hours after Powell’s initial resistance statement that the Fed capitulated to the US Treasury. Powell quickly retreated publicly, saying the Fed would comply. In retracting his position of the day before, Powell declared the US Treasury had “sole authority”. The Fed would return the funds. The ‘rift’ was over in less than 24 hours.
What then were Mnuchin’s rationale for insisting the funds be returned to the US Treasury? What were his public reasons given for taking back $455 billion at a time of intensifying Covid impact on the economy; as fiscal stimulus appeared dead for months to come; and as 12 million workers were about to lose unemployment benefits in December while simultaneously hundreds of thousands were experiencing rent evictions, lines for food banks were growing throughout the country, and student loan forebearance for millions was about to end?
Mnuchin’s Rationale
To deflect critics Mnuchin floated a number of obviously false narratives to justify his decision to take back the $455 billion. He said it was Congress’s intent to end all the funding by December 31, 2020. Even so, he added, he was allowing Fed programs like the Fed’s commercial paper and money market mutual fund special lending facilities to continue for an additional 90 days into 2021. Then there was the $74 billion in the Fed’s Financial Stabilization Fund (FSF) which would remain at the Fed. He puffed up the $74 billon saying the Fed “would still have $800 billion”, assuming the $74 billion represented a fractional reserve that allowed the Fed to fund up to 10X that amount. The central bank could also keep another $25 billion to cover distribution of funds in progress. He further noted that the $455 billion was needed to fund spending in what might be an eventual fiscal stimulus bill later negotiated in 2021 between the US House and the Senate.
It is perhaps interesting to note that Mnuchin’s retraction of the funds came barely a month after in October he wrote a letter indicating that all the Fed’s funds, including the $455 billion, could be retained by the Fed into 2021. The October letter, followed by his November decision to retract the $455 billion, suggests strongly that some kind of decision was made by the Trump administration, or McConnell in the Republican Senate, or perhaps both, sometime after the November 3 election in order to make it as difficult as possible for the incoming Biden administration to address the deteriorating US economic situation.
McConnell had signaled quickly after November 3 there was no chance for a new fiscal stimulus in 2020; Mnuchin then retracted the $455 billion and McConnell was among the first to publicly endorse his move. The timing of both was unlikely merely coincidental.
The Reactions
The Democrat and mainstream media reactions to Mnuchin’s move were swift and to the point.
Typical was Democrat Maxine Waters’, a key player in the US House of Representatives: “It is clear that Trump and Mnuchin are willing to spitefully destroy the economy and make it difficult as possible for the incoming Biden administration”.
Even more to the point were business media editorialists and comments that followed Mnuchin’s announcement: The Financial Times declared Mnuchin has “aligned himself with Mr. Trump’s ‘burn the house down’.” The Wall St. Journal added “The termination is also important to limite the demands by politicians to use the Fed for policies they can’t get through Congress”. Fidelity Investments’ Market Watch online news service concluded the “intent of the Mnuchin move appears to be to prevent the next Treasury Secretary extending relief to state and local governments”.
In other words, the real rationale of Mnuchin was Politics, first and foremost. One might add a close second: i.e. improving Bank profits. Stripping the funds from the Fed would now force borrowers to turn more to capital markets to raise funds, instead of relying on government funding programs made available through the Fed.
The Politics of $455 Billion
Despite Mnuchin’s various explanations to the contrary, his withdrawal of the funds from the Fed is clearly about denying the incoming Biden administration from perhaps convincing the Fed to expend the $455 billion to provide loans to hard pressed state and local governments in 2021 and/or for making additional loans & grants available to small businesses.
For the Biden administration, getting the Fed to provide the financial assistance in loans to local governments and small business would obviate the need for the Biden administration to have to fight a Republican Senate, led by McConnell, to pass the same amount of aid targeting local governments and small businesses as part of an eventual Biden fiscal legislative package.
Mnuchin and McConnell have long opposed fiscal support for state and local governments, which they view as heavily weighted toward Democrat ‘blue’ states and cities. They preferred these governments raise money in capital markets instead of getting financial aid via government programs. Providing loans via government programs, with terms and conditions more favorable to borrowers (and not to banks), means less profits for private banks and private lenders. The same applies to small businesses as well as local governments. Republicans want to redirect their financing needs to private markets, instead of through government programs.
That economic motive fits nicely with the political objective of Mnuchin, McConnell, and other Republicans to deny the Biden administration access to funding already on the Fed ‘books’, i.e. funding that was already established in March 2020 as part of the Cares Act passed at the time.
The fact that $455 billion has not been spent as part of Cores Act after almost nine months is of course a related question of importance. Given the great distress of small businesses and 22 million still unemployed in the US as of late November, one might well ask why hasn’t that $455 billion been provided to businesses and their employees still in need? Why has the Trump administration not comitted it, given the growing stress on small business and expiring unemployment benefits? And why have the Democrats not more insisted it be spent, as was intended in March. Congress and the Trump administration have been at stalemate for months over passing a new fiscal stimulus bill, when $455 billion in funds was, and still remains, available.
In recalling the Fed’s funds back to his Treasury, Mnuchin’s strategy is clearly to force the Democrats to confront McConnell and Republicans directly via renewed fiscal stimulus negotiations sometime in 2021, and to do so starting from scratch. Biden and the Democrats won’t have that $455 billion potentially available from the Fed. And they’ll have to in effect ‘renegotiate it all over again’.
Moreover, should the Republicans retain control of the majority of the Senate in 2021—to be determined after the Georgia state Republican Senator election runoffs—McConnell can dictate with his Senate veto the scope and magnitude of any future fiscal stimulus in 2021. The Fed and its $455 billion ‘back door’ possible funding source for state and local governments and small businesses will be denied to Biden and the Democrats.
The Mnuchin move is therefore political—i.e. to deny Biden the availability of nearly a half trillion in bailout financing especially for small businesses and state and local governments—and to force the Democrats to renegotiate it with McConnell again. A corollary gain for the Republicans is to force the same governments and small businesses to access the private capital markets for future financing needs, thus benefiting private lenders more than they would otherwise by simply playing ‘middle men’ distributing government program loans for a fee.
Banks have consistently complained since March that the Cares Act lending programs did not provide them sufficient profits. Their interest rate spreads are too narrow. Redirecting lending from Fed programs to private capital markets would prove more profitable.
Just What is the $455 Billion?
The $455 billion represents the unspent funds left over from the Cares Act passed in March 2020. That Act consisted of four parts. One part provided $500 billion in emergency unemployment assistance and $1200 per person checks for households whose annual income was less than $75,000. The checks were spent within 60 days. A good part of the unemployment benefits later expired at the end of July 2020; the rest will expire around Christmas and thus leave 12 million workers without any unemployment benefits any longer. It is estimated the August partial ending of the benefits reduced US GDP household spending by $65 billion a month; the December expirations will reduce it another $150 billion per month.
Another part of the Cares Act amounted to $350 billion to provide loans to small businesses, called the Payroll Protection Program or PPP. That $350 billion initially proved insufficient, as larger businesses quickly scammed and exhausted the funds with the help of their banks that were responsible for distributing the funds. Many of the banks simply disbursed the funds first to their larger, preferred customers even if they didn’t qualify as ‘small business’ under the PPP program. As a result, another $320 billion supplement to the PPP was passed by Congress in April. That brought the total available in the PPP to $660 billion ($10B of which was put aside for administration). The PPP was shut down in early August 2020, even when only $525 of the $660 billion was distributed. So $135 billion of the PPP remains unspent. That remainder is apparently part of Mnuchin’s order for the Fed to return $455 billion.
As a third element, the March Cares Act provided for another $600 billion for medium sized corporations, and for a host of special directed financial bailouts of financial institutions and corporations. A number of the bailouts were created under the umbrella of what is called the ‘Main St. Program’.
The Main St. program included Fed purchases of corporate bonds for the first time in its history, including Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) which are traded like stocks. It also included Fed financial support for the Municipal Bond market, for asset backed securities, for nonprofit businesses, commercial paper issuers, and for money market mutual funds, among others.
Most of these were special lending facilities resurrect from the 2008-09 experience, with the exception of funding for corporate bonds and ETFs which were historically new and unprecedented. What was also precedent setting was none of the above markets had actually collapsed in March. The Fed resurrecting of the special lending facilities was in anticipation of a possible collapse. So much of the Fed lending to big corporations and financial markets was a pre-emptive bailout before an actual crash! So too was the Fed lending to non-financial corporations!
In short, there was at least $1.1 trillion put aside in the Fed—supported by Treasury funding—for the purpose of bailing out medium and larger corporations and targeted financial asset markets like commercial paper, asset backed securities, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, etc. But it mostly wasn’t used.
Why Big US Corporations Didn’t Need Fed Loans
Medium and large corporations didn’t require emergency liquidity from the Fed. They were able to accumulate trillions of dollars to add to their balance sheets quickly as the real economy began to crash in March-April. The Fed enabled their liquidity accumulation in significant part by pumping $120 billion a month via its QE program into the economy, and by other measures, which drove interest rates to record lows. That enabled large businesses to issue record levels of new corporate bonds. For the Fortune 500 alone it raised $2 trillion in funds. Hundreds of billions of dollars more were added by big firms drawing down their credit lines at their banks, again enabled by low rates thanks to the Fed. Nearly all big corporations suspended their dividend payouts, which in prior years had exceed more than $500 billion a year. Still other firms boosted available liquidity by saving on their daily costs of operations as workers were either laid off or allowed work remotely and facilities were shuttered.
In other words, most medium and large US businesses were fat with cash, could borrow at lower rates in private markets, and simply didn’t need the $1.1 trillion in emergency loans provided for them, through the Fed, as a result of the March Cares Act. So Mnuchin’s request for the $455 billion returned from the Fed included the funds the Treasury had given the Fed in March for possible lending to medium and large corporations—lending that never materialized because it was never needed.
About $100 billion was loaned by the Fed to date for various ‘Main St.’ lending facilities and other programs. In March the US Treasury provided $195 billion for Main St. programs. Another $25 billion was allowed the Fed to complete funding in progress. That left $70 billion of the $195 billion that Mnuchin now wants back. Add to that $70 billion the roughly $135 billion in unused PPP funds. And to that total ($70 + $135) another approximate $250 billion in funds allocated for large corporations and for other sources, and the grand total is the $455 billion that Mnuchin told Powell he wants back.
Jerome Powell’s Conundrum
The Fed will be left with the $25 billion to cover Main St. loans still being disbursed, as well as $74 billion in its ‘Financial Stabilization Fund’ (FSB) for future emergencies.
Cleaned out of most of its emergency funding originally allocated under the Cares Act, the Fed will be forced to address any future financial instability and emergencies by providing even more QE in addition to the $120 billion a month already. But that’s quite ok with financial investors and markets, since it will mean even lower (and longer duration) interest rates on Fed government securities. It may even force the Fed to introduce nominal negative interest rates, as have other central banks in Europe and Japan.
By his action, Mnuchin signaled the Republican preferred policy is to force monetary policy to again play the lead role in any future recovery. Fiscal stimulus is not primary, or even likely, in 2021. That explains in large part why both the Trump administration and McConnell’s Republican Senate have stonewalled any fiscal stimulus package subsequent to the March Cares Act. The Democrats’ ‘Heroes Act’ of $2.4 trillion passed back in June 2020 by the Democrat majority US House of Representatives has been thwarted and delayed by various tactics and means by McConnell and Trump coordinated maneuvers. Nor will McConnell permit any reasonable fiscal stimulus in what remains of 2020. Should he agree on anything, moreover, it will be to ‘give’ the Democrats back the $455 billion he took from the Fed with the assistance of Mnuchin. Moreover, should the Republicans retain control of the Senate by winning the run off elections in Georgia on January 5, 2021, McConnell’s Republican Senate majority will continue to oppose any fiscal stimulus proposed by the new Biden administration. It will mean a continuation of virtual veto of fiscal stimulus proposals that McConnell and Republicans have adhered to since at least 2012-14.
The Cares Act March 2020 fiscal stimulus was an aberration to this strategy. Immediately after, the Republicans returned to their monetary policy/central bank as primacy policy that has been in effect ever since the 2008-09 great recession 1.0. But even that generalization may be an exaggeration, since by monetary policy in this Republican strategic view is meant only QE and near zero rates—and does not include special lending to small businesses or employment assistance. In short, soon after the passage of the Cares Act it was back to monetary policy designed to benefit private markets and investors and not to benefit small business or wage earners.
The GDP Effect of Fiscal-Monetary Policy in 2020
The Cares Act has been consistently estimated as a $2.4 trillion stimulus event (or $3 trillion if one counts the $650 billion in business-investor tax cutting also provided by that legislation). But in fact the actual fiscal stimulus—in the form of PPP $525 billion and $500B employment assistance—amounted only to around $1 trillion! Add another $200 billion in direct spending assistance to hospitals and for Covid emergency health care, plus the minimal $125 billion or so in Main St. and other corporate lending, and the total actual fiscal stimulus to the general economy has totaled less than $1.5 trillion under the Cares Act. That’s around only 7% of GDP!
That compares to roughly $5.5% stimulus in the 2009 Obama recovery act, which proved grossly insufficient to generating a sustained economic recovery for most of the real economy after 2009. The 2020 contraction of the real economy has been at least four times as deep as the 2008-09 contraction. So the stimulus in GDP terms in the Cares Act was even less sufficient than was the Obama 2009 recovery package. How long it will take the 2020 great recession to recovery in employment and business activity terms with this even less sufficient stimulus to date remains to be seen. But history suggests recovery in the current great recession 2.0 will be measured in more years than the last 2008-09 great recession 1.0.
There has been much hype by politicians and media about the so-called economic recovery 3rd quarter in the USA. But the facts show the economy contracted sharply by 10.8% from March through June. It then ‘rebounded’ (not to be confused with ‘recovered’)in the 3rd quarter by 7.4%. More importantly, many key economic indicators have been flashing in the 4th quarter that the 3rd quarter recovery will weaken appreciable in the 4th. And some predict even more so in the 1st quarter 2021. Like Europe, the US Economy may be headed toward a double dip contraction over the winter months ahead. That will result in a clear ‘W-shape’ recovery (not V-shape) that is typical of all great recessions—which this writer has been predicting since last March.
The economic ‘relapse’ to a slower growth path in the 4th quarter is all but ensured by the current failure to quickly pass a sufficient fiscal stimulus bill at year’s end 2020, by the intensifying negative impact on the US economy by the Covid 3rd wave surging in America today, and for months still to come, and by the continuing political instability and gridlock in policy impacting the economy as well.
Much is made by optimists of the strength of recovery of US manufacturing and Construction sectors—i.e. the goods sectors—in the US economy. But together they constitute only 20% at best of the total US economy and GDP. Moreover, the recovery here is deceptive. Manufacturing is still 5.6% below 2019 and employment not recovered by any estimate. And Construction recovery is limited to new single family housing—with apartment and multiple housing barely improving—and commercial property construction still mired in a deep recession with no end in sight. This is not the basis for a sustained full economic recovery by any means. Especially since much of the services sector will lag in recovery for some time as well.
It is in the context of this questionable ‘recovery’ of the US economy in late 4th quarter 2020 that a fiscal stimulus package appears dead on arrival in Congress for the rest of the year; that Covid continues to surge with its expected economic impact; that the last vestiges of the Cares Act will soon expire before year end; and political instability threatens to create more business investment uncertainty.
In the midst of all this, Mnuchin and Republicans have acted to pull much needed funding from the Fed, making it even more difficult to restore economic resources needed in 2021.
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Dr. Rasmus is author of the recently published book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, January 2020. He blogs at jackrasmus.com. His website is http://kyklosproductions.comand his twitter handle @drjackrasmus.
In response to her selection, the Dow topped 30,000 for the first time in market history.
The disconnect between equity prices and Main Street reality is stark.
Since valuations plunged last winter, they’ve gone hyperbolic to record or near-record highs.
It’s happening during economic collapse with over one-fourth of working-age Americans left jobless.
According to Feeding America, one in six Americans are food insecure — unsure about how families will be fed.
At yearend, an evictions moratorium ends.
Without federal aid not forthcoming since benefits expired for millions of Americans at end of July, a tidal wave of evictions could follow.
Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) also expire at yearend — beneficiaries to be on their own if follow-up aid isn’t provided.
What’s going on exceeds the worst of earlier hard times in US history.
In 2013, the Obama/Biden regime appointed Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman.
Both figures followed the same playbook, handing Wall Street trillions of dollars of near-free money for speculation.
Noted investor Jeremy Grantham sharply criticized Fed policies earlier, saying:
“If I were a benevolent dictator,” he’d limit the Fed solely to maintaining price stability.
He’d make sure the economy got enough liquidity to function normally.
He’s “force (the Fed) to swear off manipulating asset prices through artificially low rates and asymmetric promises.”
He’d eliminate “immoral hazard” made possible by the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen put — flooding the market with liquidity, along with maintaining near-zero short interest rates over most of the past decade.
Grantham once compared Fed policy to beating a donkey “until it either turns into a horse or drops dead from too much beating.”
“We’ve been conned” at the expense of lost industrialization and failure to “educat(e) a new generation,” he added.
“We’re in this death grip that only paper things matter.”
Speculators benefit. Ordinary people lose out.
Retirees are deprived of vital income. Financial interests are served at the expense of the real economy.
Money printing madness defines Fed policy. Bernanke and Yellen dropped helicopter money on Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.
David Stockman earlier called Bernanke/Yellin supplied quantitative easing (QE) “high grade monetary heroin…legalized bank robbery.”
Their tenure at the Fed reflects its most “shameful chapter in American financial history” — chairman Powell going the same way.
It’s been at the expense of economic growth and the public welfare.
According to a University of California study, 95% of wealth accumulation since 2009 accrued to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.
Accommodative Bernanke/Yellen/Powell Fed policy made it possible.
Yellen as Treasury secretary along with Powell will likely continue monetary madness QE and near-zero short interest rates into the new year and succeeding ones — at the expense of economic growth and jobs creation.
Wall Street on Parade.org quoted Yellen’s recent reinvention of reality about the out-of-control US stock market bubble.
Admitting prices are “elevated” at “the high end of historical ranges,” she added the following:
“(E)conomists are not great at knowing what appropriate valuations are (sic).”
“We don’t have a terrific record. And the fact that those valuations are high doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily overvalued (sic).”
“We’re enjoying solid economic growth (sic) with low inflation (sic), and the risks in the global economy look more balanced than they have in many years (sic).”
“(W)hen we look at other indicators of financial stability risks, there’s nothing flashing red there or possibly even orange (sic).”
“We have a much more resilient, stronger banking system (sic), and we’re not seeing worrisome buildup in leverage or credit growth at excessive levels (sic).”
The above deception comes at a time of economic collapse, mass unemployment, profound human deprivation and despair — with things likely to worsen in the new year, not improve for ordinary Americans.
Wall Street on Parade (WSP) commented in response to Yellen’s remarks.
Citing the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s most recent quarterly report through June 30, WSP said the following:
“(T)he dystopian bank situation looked like this:”
“JPMorgan Chase had increased its derivatives exposure to $52.6 trillion notional.”
“Goldman Sachs had moved into second place with $43.3 trillion.”
“Citigroup stood at $41.1 trillion, and Bank of America hadn’t budged much at $18.5 trillion.”
“This massive, concentrated exposure to derivatives at four mega Wall Street banks has been allowed to persist by both (Dem) and (GOP)-led (regimes) despite the fact that derivatives played a central role in blowing up the US economy in 2008.”
“Until Congress gets serious about restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate federally-insured, deposit-taking banks from the trading casinos on Wall Street, the financial system of the United States remains at grave risk, regardless of who sits at the helm of the regulators.”
The real world described by WSP that Yellen ignored in her above-quoted remarks is what she’ll face as Treasury secretary — not the fantasy one she pretends exists.
Based on her accommodative Fed record, currently followed by chairman Powell, bubble US equity markets are likely to inflate further on their watch.
Only hindsight will tell to what levels before they crash with a bang heard round-the-world.
Based on his firm’s research, Grantham explained that all markets eventually revert to their mean level.
They’ve been no exceptions to the rule in market history.
The greater they inflate to unsustainable levels, the harder they’re likely to plunge when their day of reckoning arrives.
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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.”
While receiving newly arrived Ambassadors accredited to the Russian Federation from different foreign countries including Rwanda, Gambia and Central African Republic, President VladimirPutin stressed the importance of coordinating global efforts to ensure stability and halt the spread of coronavirus pandemic around the world.
Despite the well-known and necessary restrictions associated with the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony signing the official beginning of their diplomatic mission took place in the Alexander Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace.
Putin said that this year has been very difficult and unpredictable as the world is currently facing the coronavirus pandemic, and this required the adoption of extraordinary measures both in Russia and in all countries.
“As you know, Russia has developed and is already using the world’s first vaccine against coronavirus, Sputnik V, and the second EpiVacCorona has also been registered. Now the most important thing is to ensure mass production in Russia and start a public vaccination campaign. Our third vaccine is also almost ready,” he told the ambassadors’ gathering.
According to reports, Russia was one of the first to announce the development of a vaccine in August — dubbed Sputnik V after the Soviet-era satellite — but before the start of final clinical trials. It was developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology under the Russian Health Ministry. The second vaccine, EpiVacCorona, developed by the Vector Center has also obtained registration.
“We are ready to share our experience with all interested states and international agencies. Together with a number of our foreign partners, we are working out the issues of launching the production of these vaccines locally at our partners’ production base,” the president added.
By tradition, Putin said a few words about Russia’s relations with each of the countries that ambassadors represent in the Russian Federation.
With Frank Mushyo Kamanzi from the Republic of Rwanda, Putin reiterated that Russia’s relations are developing in a friendly spirit with the Republic of Rwanda. Rwandan officials took an active part in the first Russia-Africa Summit held in Sochi.
In accordance with the agreements reached at this summit, Russia and Rwanda are expanding their cooperation in power engineering, including the nuclear power industry and geological prospecting. Russia continues training Rwandan civilian and military personnel at Russian universities.
Alhagi Nyangado is the new Ambassador from Republic of the Gambia. Russia has stable ties with The Gambia. Putin stressed the development of contacts on international issues and to deepen cooperation in different areas, including in the military-technical and education areas.
December marks the 60th anniversary of Russia’s diplomatic relations with the Central African Republic. As tradition demands, Putin used the occasion to wish for an early settlement of the challenging situation in that country and expressed support for the UN Stabilization Mission activities in the Central African Republic. Its new envoy is Leon Dodonou-Punagaza.
In conclusion, President Vladimir Putin said that Russia and its people look forward to seeing these relations develop dynamically for the benefit of the people, and in the interest of international security and stability.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah is a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research.
Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump is monumental. After four years of nonstop cruelty against workers, the poor, people of color, women, LBGTQ folks, immigrants, Muslims, the environment, the climate, and the foreign victims of Trump’s bombs, we can breathe a sigh of relief.
But no sooner did Biden win the election, then centrists in the Democratic Party began blaming the left for the loss of seats in the House of Representatives and the failure to decisively regain control of the Senate.
In fact, progressives played a pivotal role in delivering the presidency to Biden and several congressional races to Democrats as well as turning Georgia and Arizona blue. Now progressives must hold Biden’s feet to the fire and demand that he govern for the 99 percent and not the 1 percent.
Biden’s cabinet selections so far are a mixed bag. His choice for United Nations ambassador has been praised by progressives. But Biden chose a secretary of state who is a strong supporter of U.S. militarism.
Progressives Were Key to Biden’s Victory
In a three-hour conference call among House Democrats on November 5, centrists lambasted their progressive colleagues for embracing socialism, Medicare for All, and supporting calls to defund the police. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), a former CIA officer, reportedly declared, “We have to commit to not saying the words ‘defund the police’ ever again. We need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. It does matter, and we have lost good members because of that.”
The protests against white supremacy led by Black Lives Matter activists and demands to defund the police, however, brought Black Americans to the polls in cities that were critical to Biden’s victory.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told CNN’s Jake Tapper she wasn’t aware of any candidate who campaigned on socialism or defunding the police, but “these were largely slogans or demands from activist groups that we saw in the largest uprising in American history around police brutality.”
Ocasio-Cortez said she offered her help to “every single swing state Democrat” and all but five refused her assistance. The five who accepted her offer were victorious or are on a path to victory. And every one who rejected her help is losing.
“It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy. It also is good politics,” Bernie Sanders wrote on November 11.
When he addressed the country as president-elect, Biden attributed his victory to “the broadest and most diverse coalition in history.” Indeed, “youth turnout was through the roof, and we’re probably looking at, when all the ballots are tallied, the highest youth vote turnout ever,” said NextGen America’s executive director, Ben Wessel. Young people of color supported Biden overwhelmingly and their votes were decisive in many races, according to an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
Many on the left were not keen on Biden because he supported the Iraq war, played a key role in the 1994 crime bill that led to mass incarceration, and refused to oppose fracking and back universal health care. They didn’t enthusiastically back Biden but rather voted against Trump’s escalating fascism.
Biden Must Be Pushed to Embrace Progressive Policies
Trump could not have been defeated but for the activism of progressives and grassroots organizing, Norman Solomon wrote at Common Dreams. “Now, on vital issues—climate, healthcare, income inequality, militarism, the prison-industrial complex, corporate power and so much more—it’s time to engage with the battle that must happen inside the Democratic Party.” Solomon advocates “a combative approach toward corporate Democrats.”
In a November 10 memo to the Democratic Party, New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, and Data for Progress wrote, “Scapegoating progressives and Black activists for their demands and messaging is not the lesson to be learned here. It was their organizing efforts, energy and calls for change needed in their communities that drove up voter turnout.”
The four progressive organizations warned that abandoning “our core progressive base agenda” will lead to the loss of the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections and the Democratic Party will not gain ground in the Senate. “We cannot let Republican narratives drive our party away from Democrats’ core base of support: young people, Black, Brown, working class, and social movements who are the present and future of the party.”
They urged linking racial and economic justice, noting that a “progressive message framing racism as a divide-and-conquer class weapon” polled effectively before the election. The memo also advocated investment in mobilizing the base, including organized labor and allied progressive organizations, and driving an economic message that resonates with all working people.
A recent New York Times poll found that 3 in 5 respondents support Medicare for All, 2 in 3 favor a wealth tax, and even more support free college tuition. National exit polls revealed that 53 percent of Americans want a national health care option “in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan.” Sixty-six percent of voters think climate change is a serious problem and 52 percent consider climate change a “severe threat” that must be an “immediate priority” for Congress and the president. And a study in late September by the Guardian and Vice Media Group demonstrated that 8 out of 10 Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans supported the Green New Deal.
Exit polls also showed that 57 percent of voters support Black Lives Matter. Seventy-one percent said that racism is either one of the most important issues or the most important issue we face today. Fifty-three percent believe that Black people are treated unfairly by the criminal legal system.
The groups recalled in their November 10 memo how controversial the statement “Black Lives Matter” was in 2014 and the way Democrats resisted too close an association with Colin Kaepernick and Black athletes who kneeled during the national anthem. But after the public lynching of George Floyd, a majority of Americans said they supported Black Lives Matter. Indeed, the organizations wrote, “the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes and have helped secure Biden’s victory in key cities.”
Biden’s Administration Must Adopt Popular, Not Corporate, Policies
If Democrats are to retake leadership of the Senate, both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff must win their runoff elections in Georgia. It was the monumental organizing by Stacey Abrams and other progressives over a decade that caused Georgia to vote Democratic. Now there is a tremendous mobilization effort underway to elect the two Democrats on January 5.
But even if Democrats are unable to reclaim control of the Senate, Biden can use executive orders to undo some of Trump’s worst actions and take other bold steps to move the country in a progressive direction.
Biden has already committed that he will reinstate DACA, reenter the Paris Climate Accord, end the Muslim Ban and rejoin the World Health Organization. As Elizabeth Warren argued in a November 11 op-ed in the Washington Post, Biden should take the offensive on Day One and cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, lower drug prices for key pharmaceuticals, issue enforceable OSHA health and safety standards for the COVID-19 pandemic to protect essential workers, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all federal contractors, declare the climate crisis a national emergency to marshal resources to fight that battle, establish a Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force to collect data and address racial disparities in funding for the pandemic, and prioritize enforceable anti-monopoly policies. Biden must also revoke Trump’s unconscionable asylum policies and support progressive immigration reform.
It is essential that Biden not capitulate to Mitch McConnell’s right-wing agenda and take independent action to implement a progressive program. Biden can use the Vacancies Act and the Presidential Adjournment Clause of the Constitution to make appointments that don’t require Senate approval.
The warning signs of a hawkish Biden administration are all too evident. “An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration,” Kevin Gosztola wrote at The Grayzone. “A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president.”
Biden Must End the Wars and Punishing Sanctions
The antiwar movement, which helped end the Vietnam War, prevented large-scale U.S. imperial wars until George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. Unfortunately, Barack Obama and Trump both bought into Bush’s “war on terror” and continued his illegal and deadly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and mounted drone and bombing attacks in multiple countries.
But Biden’s selection for ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was Obama’s assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, looks more promising.
Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s top policy official in the Pentagon, is a prospective Biden pick for secretary of defense. She advocated a preemptive strike on Iraq in 2002, and helped lead the escalation of the Afghan war and the illegal humanitarian and political disastersin Syria and Libya during the Obama administration.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, will likely be appointed to a cabinet position. Rice argued for attacking Iraq without a Security Council resolution in 2002 and engineered Obama’s disastrous policy of regime change in Libya. In 2014, she defended Israel’s illegal slaughter in Gaza.
Biden has already promised to end U.S. support for the tragic war in Yemen. He should also restore humanitarian aid to Yemen and urge Saudi Arabia to negotiate an end to that conflict. It is essential that we pressure Biden to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces. In addition, Biden must reverse Trump’s escalation of the war in Syria and urge all parties to engage in diplomacy.
We must also push Biden to end U.S. military aid to regimes that commit gross violations of human rights, as required by the Leahy Law. And he must comply with the Arms Export Control Act, which forbids the export of weapons that are not solely used for legitimate self-defense. These regimes include Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel. Although Biden has pledged his undying loyalty to Israel, in spite of its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and egregious human rights violations, he should be pressured to restore financial assistance to the Palestinians and reimburse them for the aid Trump withheld during his regime.
Biden must end the illegal punishing sanctions (unilateral coercive measures) against Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria and Cuba. He should restore Obama’s steps toward normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, and support South Korea’s diplomatic efforts for a “permanent peace regime” in Korea.
In addition, Biden must rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and end the saber-rattling against that country. He should halt the arms race — both conventional and nuclear — with Russia and China, renew the new START treaty with Russia, and rejoin the nuclear treaties from which Trump has withdrawn. And Biden must urge the Senate to consent to ratification of the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Biden should also end U.S. sanctions and threats against the International Criminal Court and cooperate with its investigations.
Finally, Biden must reduce the enormous U.S. military budget which enriches defense contractors and enables the commission of U.S. imperial wars that kill innocent people, create massive refugee crises and make us less safe.
This is a tall order and Biden will only respond to overwhelming popular pressure to pursue a progressive agenda. As history has demonstrated, the executive and congressional branches submit most effectively to mass organizing efforts. “The New Deal of the 1930s owed less to Democratic politicians than to workers’ disruption of their workplaces,” Kevin Young wrote at Truthout. It was those struggles that gave us the Social Security Act of 1935 and unemployment insurance. Likewise, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the result of the massive civil rights movement.
We have our work cut out for us. Let us begin.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
It isn’t about what happened, it’s about what will happen. Our time has come is the catchphrase, a rallying cry. The people are told they have been cheated. It won’t happen again. We are the justice seekers. Upend the global trade order, it is skewed against us. This is heady stuff.
These are not the viewpoints of the (current) occupant of the White House but rather of another world leader.
The fallout from the 2020 US presidential election is providing fascinating viewing in Beijing. Chinese president Xi Jinping would never boast publically that he trumped the Donald but the small shots of Baiju to ward off the Beijing chill are being consumed in the leadership compound off Tiananmen Square with more relish than usual. Of course there are differences between the two, not least in hair styles, but the similarities are also worth commenting on. An outsider comes to power. Xi was originally meant to be premier to Li Keqiang who was meant to be president. But Xi was able to persuade the military that he was their man more than the “economist” Li. Xi shook things up, refuses to leave office, (an option not available to Trump unless his diligent hair-dye dripping lawyers have reinterpreted the constitution in ways not attempted before) and prefers to have his country invest in itself rather than seek markets elsewhere.
Xi has abandoned “going global” for Chinese business and finance. Xi, instead, is, again you’ve guessed it, putting China first. His policies have resulted in an extension of China’s state sector. Even the Belt and Road Initiative is now seen as primarily beneficial to large-scale state firms.
A personality cult, (much more effective than Donald’s), unseen since the days of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, is being fostered. By stripping term limits from the Chinese constitution, Xi has the right to rule for life.
Nor does Xi care much for global opinion as seen by his willingness to risk international condemnation to stamp out democratic values in Hong Kong. People outside of China still have difficulty is realizing how little the former British colony matters to people on the Chinese mainland. Hong Kongers are simply viewed as ungrateful, they have liberties undreamt of on the mainland, and their economy is not as vital to China as it once was. None of this excuses the dire state of human rights in China but the party has been able to claim, unchallenged because it controls the media, that the right to work is more important than the right to vote. The job rate is national security. The party becomes less secure if the employment rate drops.
And China feels more secure now than it’s has done for centuries. And this is why the South China Sea is so important.
For the first time since Portuguese ships reached the Chinese coast five centuries ago, China is in command or believes it is in command of waters off its coast. This means that Beijing views China as secure and the party is reaping the benefits of that. One reason is sheer, old fashioned patriotism. But the other is that the military, long a byword for inefficiency and corruption, is being seen to deliver. Without a shot being fired in anger, an era of unquestioned US dominance in Asia has drawn to a close. The coverage of the South China Sea militarization in the West has been about that, the military build-up. In China the coverage has been on the security aspect.
Xi’s ascent to power took place at a time when the West was largely distracted. Financial crises, Brexit, Trump. It seemed to have enough on its plate. The West does not know how to handle Xi. Handling the West is a dilemma the Chinese president and his advisors have not had to grapple with. He can be sanctioned in the US but get trade deals in Europe. In reality, Beijing believes the West needs China more than China needs to change. Xi feels emboldened. The West seems reluctant and dithering. You do not have to be a student of history to appreciate that this is a dangerous mix.
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Noch immer in der Geschichte der Menschheit mussten sich die Bürger eines Volkes Tyrannen aller Couleur beherzt entgegenstellen, um die ihnen zustehende Freiheit zu erkämpfen und sich nicht unterjochen zu lassen. Friedrich Schiller hat uns diesen Freiheitskampf gegen die Tyrannei mit dem Recht auf individuellen und kollektiven Widerstand in seinen Schauspielen „Die Räuber“ und „Wilhelm Tell“ wortgewaltig und inspirierend vor Augen geführt. Das Eingangszitat sind seine weisen Worte. Heute ist unsere Generation gefordert, den Kampf gegen die Willkürherrschaft einer korrupten Politiker-Clique und deren finstere Hintermänner aufzunehmen, um unsere eigene Zukunft und die unserer Kinder nicht zu verspielen. Eltern und Erzieher sind in besonderem Maße dazu aufgerufen, da viele Klein- und Schulkinder bereits schwer traumatisiert sind. Doch die meisten Bürger können die „Flammenschrift an der Wand“(Heine) nicht entziffern und verharren in Untätigkeit. Autoritätshörigkeit, irrationale Ängste und ein Gehorsamsreflex hindern sie daran. In wirklicher Kenntnis der diabolischen Pläne der herrschenden Milliardärs- und Macht-„Elite“ würden sie mit unbeugsamen Willen die teils unbewussten Mechanismen ihres inneren Widerstands zu überwinden versuchen.
Der Teufelskreis des Gehorsams
Viele Erwachsene reagieren auf die wirren Anweisungen von Politikern wie Kinder oder wie die primitiven Urmenschen reagierten: in Form eines „magischen Autoritätsglaubens“: kritiklos und umnebelt von Stimmungen, Gefühlen und Glücksverheißungen. Und das hat Folgen: Die Autoritätsgläubigkeit führt unweigerlich zur Autoritätshörigkeit, die in der Regel den Reflex eines absoluten geistigen Gehorsams und eine Verstandeslähmung auslöst. Vollsinnige Erwachsene können dann nicht mehr selbständig denken und vernünftig urteilen und übergeben die Entscheidungsgewalt sittenlosen Politikern. Wohin das führt, erleben wir gerade.
Ignatius von Loyola, der Gründer des Jesuiten-Ordens, verfasste Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts einen erhellenden Text, auf den das deutsche Wort „Kadavergehorsam“ zurückzuführen ist. In der vom Spanischen ins Lateinische übertragenen und von der Ordenskongregation 1558 veröffentlichten Fassung heißt es:
„Wir sollten uns dessen bewusst sein, dass ein jeder von denen, die im Gehorsam leben, sich von der göttlichen Vorsehung mittels des Oberen führen und leiten lassen muss, als sei er ein toter Körper, der sich wohin auch immer bringen und auf welche Weise auch immer behandeln lässt, oder wie ein Stab eines alten Mannes, der dient, wo und wozu auch immer ihn der benutzen will.“
Bereits lange Zeit vor Ignatius von Loyola verglich Franz von Assisi (1181/82–1226) die vollkommene und höchste Form des Gehorsams (perfecta et summa obedientia) gegenüber dem Vorgesetzten mit einem toten, entseelten Leib (corpus mortuum, corpus exanime), der sich ohne Widerstreben und ohne Murren hinbringen lässt, wo man will. (1)
Der Teufelskreis der Gewalt
Nach dem Ergebnis einer am 19. November veröffentlichen Studie des Universitätsklinikums Ulm im Auftrag der UNICEF und des Deutschen Kinderschutzbundes sieht in Deutschland eine von zwei Personen körperliche Gewalt als adäquate Erziehungsmethode an. Jede sechste Person ohrfeigt ihr Kinder. Körperliche und emotionale Gewalt würde sich somit generationsübergreifend fortsetzen – und einen „Teufelskreis der Gewalt“ auslösen. (2)
Alle an der Erziehung von Kindern und Jugendlichen Beteiligten – ob Eltern, Erzieherinnen oder Lehrkräfte – sollten niemals versuchen, die heranwachsende Generation auf ihrem Weg ins Erwachsenenalter mit Schlägen und anderen autoritären Erziehungsmethoden gehorsam und gefügig zu machen. Auch sollten sie ihnen nicht den verstandeslähmenden Ballast der Religion aufbürden. Sie verspielen damit ihrer Kinder und unser aller Zukunft.
Die tiefenpsychologische Einsicht hat uns deutlich gemacht, welch ungeheure Tragweite die Erziehung hat. Pädagogik in Elternhaus und Schule haben deshalb auf das autoritäre Prinzip – das Jahrhunderte lang als fraglos gültige Grundlage des erzieherischen Verhaltens angesehen wurde – und auf Gewaltanwendung jeglicher Art zu verzichten. Erzieher haben sich mit wahrem Verständnis dem kindlichen Seelenleben anzupassen, die Persönlichkeit des Kindes zu achten und sich ihm freundschaftlich zuzuwenden. Eine solche Erziehung wird einen Menschentypus hervorbringen, der keine „Untertanen-Mentalität“ besitzt und darum für die Machthaber in unserer Welt kein gefügiges Werkzeug mehr sein wird. (3)
Schläge und andere Formen der Gewalt wie die gefühlsmäßige Ablehnung des Kindes bewirken, dass das Kind Angst hat vor dem anderen Menschen und der Auffassung ist, dass mit den Menschen nicht gut Kirschen essen sei. Diese teilweise unbewussten Gefühlsregungen lassen ihn nicht froh werden. Im späteren Leben in Ehe, Beruf und Gemeinschaft findet sich der Erwachsene dann nicht zurecht, kann sich mit dem anderen nicht solidarisieren. Nur dann findet er zu sich selbst, wenn er den Eltern nicht grollt und sich mit ihnen versöhnt, weil diese aufgrund mangelnder Kenntnisse über das Erziehungsproblem nicht imstande waren, mit dem Kind richtig umzugehen.
Staatliche Vollzugsbeamte als willige Vollstrecker
Auch staatliche Vollzugsbeamte wie Polizistinnen und Polizisten sowie Vertrauensärzte oder andere Beauftragte der öffentlichen Gesundheitsverwaltung (Gesundheitsämter) und der gesetzlichen Kranken- und Rentenversicherung sollten sich bewusst werden, in wessen Auftrag sie handeln. Wenn Polizeibeamte gegen friedlich demonstrierende Bürger gewaltsam vorgehen oder Gesundheitsbeauftragte in private Haushalte von Familien eindringen, um die Einhaltung von zweifelhaften Regierungsmaßnahmen zum sogenannten Schutz der Kinder zu überprüfen, handeln sie auf sehr zweifelhaften rechtlichen Grundlagen. Es sind bereits haarstäubende und angstauslösende Erfahrungsberichte sowohl von friedlichen Bürgern als auch von besorgten Eltern im Umlauf. Warum diese Eltern nicht auf die Barrikaden gehen, ist wieder eine andere Frage.
Alle Beamten haben im Verlauf ihrer Ausbildung – zumindest in Deutschland – erfahren, dass nach den Vorschriften des Beamtenrechts ein Beamter seine dienstlichen Handlungen auf ihre Rechtmäßigkeit prüfen muss. Ja, es ist ein Muss! (Remonstrationspflicht gemäß deutschem Beamtenrecht nach § 63 BBG und § 36 BeamtStG). Hat er Bedenken gegen die Rechtmäßigkeit einer Anweisung, so muss er seinem unmittelbaren Vorgesetzten gegenüber remonstrieren, das heißt, gegen die Ausführung der Weisung Einwände erheben. (4)
Inwieweit beamtete Lehrkräfte staatliche Vollzugsbeamte sind, entzieht sich meiner Kenntnis. In jedem Fall müssen sich auch diese Kolleginnen und Kollegen fragen lassen, wie sie die haarsträubenden Anweisungen ihrer Kultusbehörden einschätzen und was ihnen die Gesundheit, das Wohlergehen und die Bildung der ihnen anvertrauten Schülerinnen und Schüler wert ist.
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Diplompsychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.
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If anyone murders a federal official, you can be assured of one thing: the feds will do everything they can to ensure that everyone involved in the crime is brought to justice. It’s like when someone kills a cop. The entire police force mobilizes to capture, arrest, and prosecute everyone involved in killing the cop. The phenomenon is even more pronounced at the federal level, especially given the overwhelming power of the federal government.
Yet, the exact opposite occurred in the Kennedy assassination. The entire effort immediately became to pin the crime solely on a communist ex-U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald and to shut down any aggressive investigation into whether others were involved in the crime.
What’s up with that? That’s not the way we would expect federal officials to handle the assassination of any federal official, especially the president of the United States. We would expect them to do everything — even torture a suspect — in order to capture and arrest everyone who may have participated in the crime.
For example, just three days after the assassination and after Oswald himself had been murdered, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent out a memo stating,
“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”
How in the world could he be so certain that Oswald was the assassin and that he had no confederates? Why would he want to shut down the investigation so soon? Does that sound like a normal federal official who is confronted with the assassination of a president?
The answer to this riddle lies in the brilliantly cunning scheme of the U.S. national-security establishment to ensure that the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination would be shut down immediately and, therefore, not lead to the U.S. national-security establishment.
The assassination itself had all the earmarks of a classic military ambush, one in which shooters were firing from both the front and back of the president. It is a virtual certainty that responsibility for the ambush lay with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been waging a vicious war against Kennedy practically since the time he assumed office. (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.)
While the JCS were experts at preparing military-style ambushes, they lacked the intellectual capability of devising the overall plot and cover-up, given its high level of cunning and sophistication. That responsibility undoubtedly lay with the CIA, whose top officials were brilliant graduates of Ivy League Schools. Moreover, practically from its inception the CIA was specializing in the art of state-sponsored assassinations and in how to conceal the CIA’s role in them.
To ensure that the role of the Pentagon and the CIA in the Kennedy assassination would be kept secret, they had to figure out a way to shut down the investigation from the start. Their plan worked brilliantly. While the normal thing would have been all out investigations into the murder, in this particular murder the state of Texas and U.S. officials did the exact opposite. They settled for simply pinning the crime on Oswald, the purported lone nut communist ex-U.S. Marine.
Here is how they pulled it off.
As the years have passed, it has become increasingly clear that Oswald was a government operative, most likely for military intelligence or maybe the CIA and the FBI as well. His job was to portray himself as a communist, which would enable him to infiltrate not only domestic communist and socialist organizations but also communist countries, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union.
After all, how many communist Marines have you ever heard of? The Marines would be a good place to recruit people for intelligence roles. Oswald learned fluent Russian while in the military. How does an enlisted man do that, without the assistance of the military’s language schools? When he returned from the Soviet Union after supposedly trying to defect and after promising that he was going to give up secret information he had acquired in the military, no federal grand jury or congressional investigation was launched into his conduct, even though this was the height of the Cold War.
Thus, Oswald would make the perfect patsy. He could be stationed wherever his superiors instructed. And he would have all the earmarks of a communist, which would immediately prejudice Americans at the height of the Cold War.
But simply framing Oswald wouldn’t have been enough to shut down the investigation. An aggressive investigation would undoubtedly be able to pierce through the pat nature of the frame-up. They needed something more.
If you’re going to frame someone who is supposedly firing from the rear, then doesn’t it make sense that you would have shots being fired only from the rear? Why would they frame a guy who is supposedly firing from the rear by having shots fired from the front?
That’s where the sheer brilliance of this particular regime-change operation came into play. The plan was much more cunning than even the successful regime-change operations and assassinations that took place prior to the one against Kennedy — i.e., Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Cuba from 1959-1963, and the Congo in 1961.
There is now virtually no doubt that Kennedy was hit by two shots fired from the front. Immediately after Kennedy was declared dead, the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital described the neck wound as a wound of entry. They also said that Kennedy had a massive, orange-sized wound in the back of his head. Nurses at Parkland said the same things. Two FBI agents said they saw the big exit-sized wound. Secret Service agent Clint Hill saw it. Navy photography expert Saundra Spencer told the ARRB in the 1990s that she developed the JFK autopsy photos on a top-secret basis on the weekend of the assassination and that they depicted a big exit-sized wound in the back of JFK’s head. A bone fragment from the back of the president’s head was found in Dealey Plaza after the assassination. That is just part of the overwhelming evidence that establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the shot that hit Kennedy in the head came from the front.
Okay, if you’ve got a shooter firing from the back and he’s a communist, and if you have other shooters firing from the front, then they have to be working together. So, who would the shooters be who were firing from the front? The logical inference is that they had to be communist cohorts of Oswald.
That’s what Oswald’s supposed visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico just before the assassination were all about —making it look like Oswald was acting in concert with the Soviet and Cuban communists to kill Kennedy.
If the assassination was part of the Soviet Union’s supposed quest to conquer the world, retaliation would mean World War III, which almost surely would have meant nuclear war, which was the biggest fear among the American people in 1963.
But why not retaliate in some way? Would U.S. officials at the height of the Cold War hesitate to retaliate for the communist killing of a U.S. president, simply because they were scared of nuclear war? Not a chance! In fact, throughout Kennedy’s term in office the Pentagon and the CIA were champing at the bit to attack Cuba and go to war with the Soviet Union.
But here’s the catch: How do you take action that is going to destroy the world when it was your side that started the assassination game in the first place? Remember: It was the CIA that started the assassination game by partnering with the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Thus, Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the JCS had the perfect excuse to shut down the investigation and pin the crime only on Oswald: If they instead retaliated, it would be all-out nuclear war based on an assassination game that the U.S. had started.
In fact, when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade alleged from the start that Oswald was part of a communist conspiracy, Johnson told him to shut it down for fear that Wade might inadvertently start World War III.
Moreover, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren initially declined Johnson’s invitation to serve on what ultimately became the Warren Commission, Johnson appealed to his sense of patriotism by alluding to the importance of avoiding a nuclear war. Johnson used the same argument on Senator Richard Russell Jr.
From the start, the Warren Commission proceedings were shrouded in “national-security” state secrecy, including a top-secret meeting of the commissioners to discuss information they had received that Oswald was an intelligence agent. When Warren was asked if the American people would be able to see all the evidence, Warren responded yes, but not in your lifetime.
Does that make any sense? If the assassination was, in fact, committed by some lone nut, then what would “national security” and state secrecy have to do with it?
That’s undoubtedly how they induced the three military pathologists to conduct a fraudulent autopsy — by telling them that they had to hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front in order to ensure that there was no all-out nuclear war. That’s how we ended up with a fraudulent autopsy. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)
Thus, the plan entailed operating at two levels: One level involved what some call the World War III cover story. It entailed shutting down the investigation, as well as a fraudulent autopsy, to prevent nuclear war. The other level involved showing the American people that their president had been killed by only one person, a supposed lone nut communist former Marine.
Obviously, secrecy and obedience to orders were essential for the plan to succeed. That was why the autopsy was taken out of the hands of civilian officials and given to the military. With the military, people could be ordered to participate in the fraudulent autopsy and could be forced to keep everything they did and witnessed secret.
That’s why Navy photography expert Saundra Spencer kept her secret for some 30 years. She had been told that her development of the JFK autopsy photos was a classified operation. Military people follow orders and keep classified information secret. Imagine if Spencer had told her story suggesting a fraudulent autopsy in the week following the assassination.
Gradually, as the years have passed, the incriminating puzzle has come together. The big avalanche of secret information came out in the 1990s as part of the work done by the Assassination Records Review Board.
Of course, there are still missing pieces to the puzzle, many of which are undoubtedly among the records that the CIA and national-security establishment are still keeping secret. But enough circumstantial evidence has come to light to enable people to see the contours of one of the most cunning and successful assassination plots in history.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.
Throughout the history of mankind, the citizens of a people have had to courageously oppose tyrants of all stripes in order to fight for the freedom they deserve and not to be subjugated. Friedrich Schiller showed us this struggle for freedom against tyranny with the right to individual and collective resistance in his plays “Die Räuber” and “Wilhelm Tell”, eloquent and inspiring. The opening quotation is his wise words.
Today, our generation is called upon to take up the fight against the despotic rule of a corrupt clique of politicians and their sinister backers in order not to gamble away our own future and that of our children. Parents and educators are particularly called upon to do so, as many small children and schoolchildren are already severely traumatised. But most citizens cannot decipher the “flaming writing on the wall” (Heine) and remain inactive. A sense of authority, irrational fears and a reflex of obedience prevent them from doing so. With real knowledge of the diabolical plans of the ruling billionaire and power “elite”, they would try with unbending will to overcome the partly unconscious mechanisms of their inner resistance.
The vicious circle of obedience
Many adults react to the confused instructions of politicians like children or how primitive primitive people reacted: in the form of a “magical belief in authority”: uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And that has consequences: The belief in authority inevitably leads to a sense of belonging to authority, which usually triggers the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience and paralysis of the mind. Full-minded adults are then no longer able to think independently and judge sensibly and hand over the power of decision to immoral politicians. We are currently experiencing where this leads.
Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, wrote an illuminating text in the middle of the 16th century, to which the German word “Kadavergehorsam” can be traced back. In the version translated from Spanish into Latin and published by the Congregation of the Order in 1558, it read
“We should be aware that each one of those who live in obedience must be guided and directed by Divine Providence through the Superior, as if he were a dead body that can be taken anywhere and treated in any way, or like an old man’s staff that serves wherever and for whatever purpose he wishes to use it”.
Long before Ignatius of Loyola, Francis of Assisi (1181/82-1226) compared the perfect and highest form of obedience (perfecta et summa obedientia) to the superior with a dead, lifeless body (corpus mortuum, corpus exanime) that can be taken wherever one wants without reluctance and without grumbling. (1)
The vicious circle of violence
According to the results of a study published on 19 November by the University Hospital Ulm on behalf of UNICEF and the German Child Protection Association, one in two people in Germany considers physical violence to be an adequate method of education. Every sixth person slaps her children. Physical and emotional violence would thus continue across generations – and trigger a “vicious circle of violence”. (2)
All those involved in the education of children and young people – whether parents, educators or teachers – should never try to make the adolescent generation obedient and compliant on its way to adulthood by means of beatings and other authoritarian educational methods. Nor should they burden them with the mind-numbing ballast of religion. They are gambling with the future of their children and of all of us.
Deep psychological insight has shown us the immense importance of education. Pedagogy at home and at school must therefore renounce the authoritarian principle – which for centuries was regarded as the unquestionably valid basis of educational behaviour – and the use of violence of any kind. Educators must adapt to the child’s spiritual life with true understanding, respect the child’s personality and turn to him or her in a friendly manner. Such an upbringing will produce a type of person who does not possess a “subject mentality” and will therefore no longer be a docile tool for those in power in our world. (3)
Beatings and other forms of violence, such as emotional rejection of the child, cause the child to be afraid of the other person and to believe that it is not good to eat cherries with people. These sometimes unconscious emotions do not make him or her happy. In later life, in marriage, at work and in the community, the adult then finds it difficult to find his way around and cannot show solidarity with the other person. Only then will he find his way to himself if he does not resent his parents and reconcile with them, because they were unable to deal with the child properly due to a lack of knowledge about the problem of upbringing.
State law enforcement officers as willing executors
Government enforcement officers, such as police officers, medical officers or other representatives of the public health administration (health authorities) and the statutory health and pension insurance funds, should also be aware of whose mandate they are acting on. When police officers use violence against peacefully demonstrating citizens or when health officers invade private households of families to check compliance with dubious government measures for the so-called protection of children, they act on very dubious legal bases. There are already hair-raising and fear-inducing testimonies of both peaceful citizens and concerned parents in circulation. Why these parents do not go to the barricades is another question.
All civil servants have learned in the course of their training – at least in Germany – that according to the provisions of civil service law, a civil servant must check the legality of his or her official actions. Yes, it is a must! (Remonstration duty under German civil service law according to § 63 BBG and § 36 BeamtStG). If he has doubts about the legality of an instruction, he must remonstrate with his immediate superior, i.e. raise objections to the execution of the instruction. (4)
The extent to which civil servant teachers are state law enforcement officers is beyond my knowledge. In any case, these colleagues must also be asked how they view the hair-raising instructions of their educational authorities and what they value the health, welfare and education of the pupils entrusted to them.
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a certified psychologist and educationalist.
The Yemeni Houthis have fired their new cruise missile, the Quds-2, at a Saudi Aramco oil company distribution station in the kingdom’s city of Jeddah, the group’s media news wing announced early on November 23. A spokesperson for the Armed Forces of the Houthi-led government, Yahya Sarea, said foreign companies and residents in Saudi Arabia should stay away from the military and oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia as “operations will continue”. He emphasized that the missile precisely hit its target causing notable damage.
The Houthis claim that the Quds-2 is a new generation “winged missile” produced by their Missile Forces. As always, the missile was likely assembled thanks to technical assistance from Iran or Iranian-supplied components. That facility is located southeast of Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport. Over the past years, the Houthis have repeatedly pounded the military section of the airport with missiles and drones. Therefore, it was just the question of time, when the nearby oil infrastructure would be hit.
At the same time, the Saudi side remains silent regarding the impact of the Houthi missile strike. This is an ordinary posture of Saudi Arabia towards Houthi missile and drone strikes. The Kingdom censors social media, denies any damage and claims that all targets were intercepted, if it appears possible and that no visual evidence of destruction are leaked immediately. Also, the main oil production and export facilities of Aramco are mostly in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, more than 1000km across the country from Jeddah. Therefore, Riyadh likely believes that it can silence another setback in the ongoing war with the Yemeni movement.
In September 2019, when the Houthis, with probable help from Iran, put out of service almost a half of Saudi oil infrastructure by hitting targets in Abqaiq and Khurais, the Kingdom was vowing a powerful response and the full destruction of Houthi missile and drone capabilities. However, a year later, the situation on the ground in Yemen for Saudi-backed forces became even worse and the widely-promoted ‘great Saudi victory’ over the Houthis turned into ashes.
In recent month, Saudi-led forces lost the battle for the Yemeni province of Bayda, and now they seem to be losing the battle for Marib. Recently they retreated from the key Maas Base and the route for the potential Houthi advance on the provincial capital is almost open. The denial of the facts on the ground and the air dominance of the Kingdom did not help it to achieve a victory in the war. In turn, it’s the Houthis who have put themselves in the position that allowed them to turn the tide of the conflict. With the current trend in the Yemeni conflict, Saudi Arabia will apparently have to pay an even bigger price for its intervention in the Arab country.
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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is under fire for attempting to undermine the incoming Biden administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic on his way out the door after his department confirmed Tuesday that it intends to place $455 billion in unspent coronavirus relief funds into an account that requires congressional authorization to access.
Bloomberg reported that the funds, which Congress allocated to the Federal Reserve in March for emergency lending programs to assist local governments and struggling businesses, will be put in the Treasury Department’s General Fund following Mnuchin’s widely condemned decision last week to cut off the relief programs at the end of the year.
Mnuchin requested that the funds be reallocated by the currently divided Congress, and the Fed has agreed to cooperate with the outgoing treasury secretary’s move.
According to Bloomberg, “Mnuchin’ clawback would make it impossible” for Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Treasury Department, to utilize the funds “without lawmakers’ blessing.”
“The move leaves just under $80 billion available in the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a pot of money that can be used with some discretion by the Treasury chief,” Bloomberg noted. “By contrast, the CARES Act funds had specific uses, and weren’t available for general government spending purposes.”
While Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, insisted he is attempting to ensure the funds are put to better use, Democratic members of Congress and other observers immediately accused the treasury secretary of a potentially unlawful ploy to hamstring the Biden administration’s coronavirus response before the president-elect takes office. According to one analyst, Mnuchin’s actions are an “explicit” violation of the CARES Act.
“This is Treasury’s latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden administration. The good news is that it’s illegal and can be reversed next year,” tweetedBharat Ramamurti, a member of the congressional commission established to oversee the use of coronavirus relief money. “For its part, the Fed should not go along with this attempted sabotage and should retain the CARES Act funds it already has.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, denounced as “shameful” Mnuchin’s effort to pull back the congressional relief funds and place them out of the Biden administration’s reach.
“As the economy backslides amid skyrocketing Covid-19 cases, Secretary Mnuchin is engaged in economic sabotage, and trying to tie the Biden administration’s hands,” Wyden said in a statement to Reuters on Tuesday.
Echoing Wyden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted late Tuesday that “Secretary Mnuchin’s Covid-19 response has been a corrupt and incompetent failure.”
“He needs to stop sabotaging the Biden administration from cleaning up his mess and helping states, cities, and small businesses,” said Warren.
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If Israeli security journalist Yossi Melman is correct, Pres. Trump’s Department of Justice is expected this week to remove all parole restrictions on ex-Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard. Pollard served 30 years in prison and was freed conditionally in 2015. The Justice Department restricted him to living in New York City and not leaving the U.S. This prohibited him from his goal of moving to Israel, where the far-right Likud government could be expected to lionize him for his betrayal (of U.S. interests).
On Friday, those restrictions expire. Melman posted a series of tweets explaining that he queried DOJ about whether they might be extended and the response he received was that there was no expectation they would be.
Melman also noted that Pollard’s lawyer, accused pedophile Alan Dershowitz, told the reporter that he was cautiously optimistic that Pollard would be free on Friday and leave for Israel soon.
This will end a decades-long saga which found Pollard to be one of the most damaging Spies in U.S. history. He sold U.S. Navy top secret plans to the Israelis who, in turn, exchanged them with the Soviets to barter for the release of Soviet Jewish dissidents.
Officials in the Reagan administration felt so betrayed by Israeli promises that they would not spy on their chief ally, that they insisted on prosecuting Pollard under charges that brought a conviction and life sentence. He spent three decades in prison during which both Bill Clinton and George Bush refused to commute his sentence despite enormous pressure applied by the Israeli government and its domestic agents, the Israel Lobby. The U.S. Intelligence apparatus was adamant that Pollard’s crimes never be mitigated. CIA director George Tenet even threatened to resign if Clinton commuted Pollard’s sentence. After his release, the former spy spent several years living under parole restrictions.
If Trump and his attorney General, Bill Barr, free Pollard, it will mark yet another favor the U.S. has done for Israel’s right-wing Likud government. Those include moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the city, legitimating Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, and recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan.
It will also offer Israel a green light to continue and intensify its ongoing intelligence operations against this country, realizing that no matter what happens Israel can manipulate the U.S. and mitigate whatever punishments are involved. These operations, as Melman notes began in 1948 and continue to this day. They included the theft of enriched uranium from a U.S. storage facility in a plot devised by then Israeli-spy (now Hollywood producer), Arnon Milchan.
The freeing of Pollard would mark yet another betrayal by this administration of its intelligence services. Trump has spent the past four years braying at the FBI, CIA and NSA, complaining that they refuse to be pliant to his demands. He has run through multiple directors of each of these agencies who’ve fallen afoul of him. This is yet another way in which he can humiliate them and their interests.
Finally, the Pollard case buttresses arguments of anti-Semites who claim that American Jews harbor a dual loyalty conflict between the interests of Israel and the U.S. In fact, in cases like this some Jews like Pollard choose the interests of Israel above those of America. They may somehow justify to themselves that those interests are the same, but they’re not. And a life sentence for betraying U.S. intelligence secrets should bring that home. But what Israel did in running Pollard seriously endangered American Jews. There is absolutely no evidence that Israel understands this or even cares. And that is offensive and a schandeh.
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A British Supreme Court judge has slammed the UK government as ‘control freaks’ for attempting to control people’s lives under the guise of COVID, and labeled it “morally and constitutionally indefensible” to define what freedoms the public should and shouldn’t have.
In an op-ed published Sunday, Lord Sumption noted that the “debate about whether to let us have a family Christmas perfectly sums up what is wrong with this Government’s handling” of the crisis.
Sumption wrote that there are “many different answers to the dilemmas of a Covid Christmas”, yet the crux of the matter is “whether we should be allowed to make the choice for ourselves, instead of having it imposed on us by law.”
“But for the Jacobins of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the control freaks in the Department of Health, theirs is the only answer,” Sumption urged.
The British government has posited allowing people to spend 5 days in the company of their relatives over Christmas, but with the caveat that in January they will have to pay back the privilege with more lockdown time, specifically another 25 days.
The technocrats may allow us to escape lockdown for a few days over Christmas.
Lord Sumption, who served as a senior judge on the Supreme Court of the UK between between 2012 and 2018, slammed the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, suggesting he is engaging in “public relations management” rather than leadership.
“Boris Johnson knows that restrictions over Christmas would be deeply unpopular, widely ignored and catastrophic for the retail and hospitality industries,” Sumption asserted.
“So he will soon announce their temporary suspension, behaving as if our lives belonged to the state and Christmas was an act of indulgence on his part,” the judge added.
Sumption further wrote that “control freaks and the rest of the sackcloth and ashes brigade will demand a payback” afterwards, claiming that some “are already pressing for two, three or even five days of extra lockdown for every day of release over Christmas. ”
Sumption proclaimed that the state is exercising an “insistence on coercing the entire population,” saying it is “morally and constitutionally indefensible in a country which is not yet a totalitarian state, like China.”
“The Government has not earned our trust. Sooner or later, people will take back control of their own lives and do the right thing, whatever Ministers say,” he predicted.
Sumption’s comments come in the wake of reports that the UK government is planning to issue ‘freedom passes’ for people who agree to vaccination or twice testing negative for the virus in one week.
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A few nostalgic types still believe that the Union Jack continues to flutter to sighs and reverence over outposts of the world, from the tropics to the desert. They would be right, if only to a point. Britain, it turns out, has a rather expansive global reach when it comes to bases, military installations and testing sites. While not having the obese heft and lumbering brawn of the United States, it makes a good go of it. Globally, the UK military has a presence in 145 sites in 42 countries. Such figures tally with Ian Cobain’s prickly observation in The History Thieves: that the British were the only people “perpetually at war.”
Phil Miller’s rich overview of Britain’s military footprint for Declassified UK shows it to be heavy. “The size of the global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.” The UK military, for instance, has a presence in five countries in the Asia-Pacific: naval facilities in Singapore; garrisons in Brunei, drone testing facilities in Australia; three facilities in Nepal; a quick reaction force in Afghanistan. Cyprus remains a favourite with 17 military installations. In Africa, British personnel can be found in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Mali. Then come the ever dubious ties to Arab monarchies.
The nature of having such bases is to be kind to your host, despite him being theocratic, barking mad, or an old fashioned despot with fetishes. Despite the often silly pronouncements by British policy makers that they take issue with authoritarians, exceptions numerous in number abound. The UK has never had a problem with authoritarians it can work with or despots it can coddle. A closer look at such relations usually reveal the same ingredients: capital, commerce, perceptions of military necessity. The approach to Oman, a state marked by absolute rule, is a case in point.
Since 1798, Britain has had a hand in ensuring the success, and the survivability, of the House of Al Said. On September 12, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that a further £23.8 million would go to enhancing the British Joint Logistics Support Base at Duqm port, thereby tripling “the size of the existing UK base and help facilitate Royal Navy deployments to the Indian Ocean”. The Ministry of Defence also went so far as to describe a “renewal” of a “hugely valuable relationship,” despite the signing of a new Joint Defence Agreement in February 2019.
The agreement had been one of the swan song acts of the ailing Sultan Qaboos bin Said, whose passing this year was genuinely mourned in British political circles. Prime Minister Boris Johnsoncalled him “an exceptionally wise and respected leader who will be missed enormously.” Papers of record wrote in praise of a reformer and a developer. “The longest serving Arab ruler,” observed a sycophantic column in The Guardian, “Qaboos was an absolute monarch, albeit a relatively benevolent and popular one.”
The same Sultan, it should be said, had little fondness for freedom of expression, assembly and association, encouraged the arrests and harassment of government critics and condoned sex discrimination. But he was of the “one of us” labels: trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, an unwavering Anglophile, installed on the throne by Britain in the 1970 palace coup during the all but forgotten Dhofar Rebellion. “Strategically,” Cobain reminds us, “the Dhofar war was one of the most important conflicts of the 20th century, as the victors could expect to control the Strait of Hormuz and the flow of oil.” The British made sure their man won.
Public mention of greater British military involvement in foreign theatres can be found, though they rarely make front page acts. The business of projecting such power, especially in the Britannic model, should be careful, considered, even gnomic. Britain, for instance, is rallying to the US-led call to contain the Yellow Peril in the Asia Pacific, a nice reminder to Beijing that old imperial misdeeds should never be a bar to repetition. The head of the British Army, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, spoke in September about there being “a market for a more persistent presence from the British Army (in Asia). It’s an area that saw a much more consistent Army presence in the Eighties, but with 9/11 we naturally receded from it.” The time had come “to redress that imbalance”.
The UK Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter,prefers to be more enigmatic about the “future of Global Britain.” To deal with an “ever more complex and dynamic strategic context,” he suggests the “Integrated Operating Concept”. Britain had to “compete below the threshold of war in order to deter war, and to prevent one’s adversaries from achieving their objectives in fait accompli strategies.”
Gone are the old thuggeries of imperial snatch and grab; evident are matters of flexibility in terms of competition. “Competing involves a campaign posture that includes continuous operating on our terms and in places of our choosing.” This entails a thought process involving “several dimensions to escalate and deescalate up and down multiple ladders – as if it were a spider’s web.” The general attempts to illustrate this gibberish with the following example: “One might actively constrain in the cyber domain to protect critical national infrastructure in the maritime Domain.”
In 2017, there were already more than just murmurings from Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, that a greater British presence in the Asia-Pacific was warranted. Fallon was keen to stress the reasons for deeper involvement, listing them to a group of Australian journalists. “The tensions have been rising in the region, not just from the tests by North Korea but also escalating tension in the South China Sea with the building program that’s gone there on the islands and the need to keep those routes open.”
With such chatter about the China threat you could be forgiven for believing that British presence in the Asia-Pacific was minimal. But that would ignore, for instance, the naval logistics base at Singapore’s Sembawang Wharf, permanently staffed by eight British military personnel with an eye on the busy Malacca Strait. A more substantial presence can also be found in the Sultanate of Brunei, comprising an infantry battalion of Gurkhas and an Army Air Corps Flight of Bell 212 helicopters. The MOD is particularly keen on the surroundings, as they offer “tropical climate and terrain … well suited to jungle training”.
Over the next four years, the UK military can expect to get an extra £16.5 billion – a 10% increase in funding and a fond salute to militarists. “I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and ends now,” declared Johnson. “Our plans will safeguard hundreds of thousands of jobs in the defence industry, protecting livelihoods across the UK and keeping the British people safe.”
The prime minister was hoping to make that announcement accompanied by the “Integrated Defence and Security Review” long championed by his now departed chief special adviser, Dominic Cummings. Cummings might have been ejected from the gladiatorial arena of Downing Street politics, but the ideas in the Review are unlikely to buck old imperial trends. At the very least, there will be a promise of more military bases to reflect a posture General Carter describes rather obscurely as “engaged and forward deployed”.
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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]
‘Private medicine grants privileges to those who have money to the detriment of those who do not have it and nothing could be more inhumane than that. It is unbelievable that rich societies that apply this and many other similar policies speak of human rights and humanity when their own system is the most inhumane, the most egotistic, the most individualistic and the most alienating’ (Fidel Castro, Havana, 1999).
‘Man can’t be a piece of merchandise nor can human health be a piece of merchandise, because selling, trading, profiting from health is like selling, trading and profiting from slaves, trading and profiting from human life…’ (Fidel Castro, Havana 1998).
The success of Cuba’s healthcare system is widely acknowledged, even among the country’s adversaries, critics and enemies. However, little credit is given to Fidel Castro’s role and vision in bringing it to fruition. Before the triumph of the Socialist Revolution, Cuba faced persistent shortages of medical workers and had few hospitals. In fact, Cuba’s many poor people often had no access to healthcare services whatsoever, particularly those residing in rural and remote areas of the island. Meanwhile, it was not uncommon for people to sleep on the floor at the few hospitals that the country did have. This is because doctors mainly served ‘the owners of the sugar mills, [and] the millionaires,’ mostly in Havana (Fidel Castro Havana, 2002). Fidel Castro (Havana, 2002) described the state of health care in Cuba prior to the Socialist Revolution as ‘a crime against the people, against the sick, against the unfortunate, against those who suffer.’
Accordingly, one of the main goals of the Cuban revolutionaries was to establish a good health care system that would be available to everyone. In fact, they believed that it was the duty of the Revolution to provide the people of Cuba with excellent universal health care services. Shortly after the Revolution prevailed, the government essentially launched an ‘attack against diseases,’ and implemented measures so that the nation could effectively ‘save thousands of lives from tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough, diseases that kill thousands of children every year, and can be caught by any child in any family’ (Fidel Castro 1962). On October 17, 1962, Fidel Castro stated that this would be accomplished by:
preventing these diseases through vaccination. And in this way we will continue to combat disease after disease, and will go on decreasing the number of epidemics, the number of deaths, the number of victims. In this way we will work at fulfilling this worthy goal: to move from therapeutic medicine to preventive medicine.[i]
Since the early days of the Revolution, Fidel Castro was determined to have more students enter into medical school each year so that Cuba could, one day, boast more doctors per capita than any other country in Latin America. However, he was well aware that a good health care system and improvements in ‘medicine or the medical power of a country are not only measured by the number of doctors,’ but also by ‘the way these doctors are trained,’ their knowledge, as well as their spirit (Fidel Castro Havana, 1999).[ii] Ultimately, he wanted the country to have an abundance of well-trained doctors, who were also good human beings.
Fidel Castro advanced the socialist government’s efforts to improve Cuba’s health care system by establishing new medical schools throughout the country, introducing new services and ideas, sending family doctors to remote areas, building and expanding hospitals and polyclinics, and investing in scientific research. Now, ‘good doctors and the best specialists are at the service of all the citizens in whatever part of the country’ they reside, and regardless of the income they earn (Fidel Castro Havana, 1998).[iii] The island has transformed itself into ‘a genuine medical power’ that provides extraordinary services in Cuba and abroad.
To fully appreciate the extraordinary achievements of Cuba’s socialist regime in the area of health care, it is sufficient to examine some current health statistics. In 1962, there were only 3,960 doctors in all of Cuba. Today the country boasts one of the highest doctors per capita in the world. In 2019, it was reported that ‘Cuba has more than 100,000 doctors, the highest number in the history of the country with a proportion of nine doctors per 1,000 citizens.’[iv] That same year, ‘there were 91,375 physicians in Canada, representing 241 physicians per 100,000 population,’[v] or 2.4 doctors per 1,000 citizens. Moreover, Cuba currently produces enough medicines to meet about 90% of the island’s total needs. In October, Doctor Eduardo Martínez Díaz, president of the BioCubaFarma[vi] enterprise group, explained that Cuba has domestically developed and produced vaccines to treat a variety of ailments, including meningitis, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenzae type B.[vii] He emphasized that Cuban ‘vaccines have international prestige, made evident by the fact that hundreds of millions of doses manufactured on the island have been supplied to more than 40 nations.’[viii] In fact, Cuba was the first nation in Latin America and the Caribbean to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to clinical trials, having developed two potential candidates, SOBERANA 1 and SOBERANA 2. If either of these vaccines are determined to be safe and effective, then Cuba could become a major supplier for many of its neighbours. In discussing Cuba’s efforts to rapidly develop its own vaccine by mobilizing its best scientists and lab technicians, Doctor Eduardo Martínez Díaz stated: ‘We have worked hard, in unity, with intelligence, and we are going to do our duty, which means fulfilling our duty to the people, to Fidel and Raul.’[ix]
The Cuban health care system has faced considerable hardship, largely due to persistent material shortages on account of the American trade embargo, which has been described as ‘an attempt to kill’ Cubans through ‘hunger and disease, in order to destroy’ the Socialist Revolution. The United States has made numerous attempts to undermine Cuba’s Socialist revolution, beginning almost immediately after it succeeded in toppling the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. In addition to economic and political sanctions, the US has employed anti-Cuban propaganda, sabotage, and terrorism, including chemical and biological warfare. Nonetheless, the vision of Fidel Castro and the determined efforts of the Cuban people have made the dream of achieving excellence in health care for the benefit and well-being of all citizens of the country into a reality. Ultimately, the destructive American economic embargo has forced Cubans to learn how ‘to do a lot with very little,’ as evidenced by their successes in terms of raising life expectancy and lowering child mortality (Fidel Castro Caracas, 1999).
The destructive impacts of the blockade were intensified in an unprecedented manner with the activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act in 2019. More precisely, ‘between 2019 and 2020 alone more than 130 measures’ were imposed against Cuba, ‘with the deliberate purpose of stifling the economy, creating discontent and despair in the population.’[x] These measures resulted in the cancellation of significant commercial operations and foreign investment projects in Cuba. In particular, concerns about being subjected to fines, sanctions, and legal proceedings has led many banks and financial institutions to limit their activities and services in Cuba, while a number of shipping and delivery companies have suspended many of their shipments to the island.
Recently, Cuba was even prevented from receiving a donation of medical supplies from the Chinese company Alibaba that included mechanical ventilators, COVID-19 testing kits, face masks and various other items. The considerable challenges imposed on the lives of the Cuban people by the US blockade over last six decades, including the recent intensification by the Trump administration, makes the effectiveness and achievements of its healthcare system even more impressive. This is particularly true when considering its success in terms of managing its COVID-19 outbreak and comparing it to the outcomes observed in some of its free-market oriented counterparts.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak began, Cuba has reported 7,879 cases and 132 deaths with a population of 11.34 million. That translates into about 1.16 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, much lower than Canada’s 30.47 deaths per 100,000, and the US with 80.29 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In fact, New York City alone reported around 301,000 cases and 24,218 deaths with a population of 8.399 million, which amounts to a staggering 288.34 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, Brazil fared slightly worse than the US as a whole, with 80.89 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, which might be fitting given the spectacle that Jair Bolsonaro made by publicly demanding changes to The More Doctors program (Programa Mais Médicos), a Brazilian government initiative designed to provide doctors to underserved areas of the country. Since the program was established by the government of Dilma Rousseff in 2013, approximately 20,000 Cuban health professionals have served in Brazil, including in 700 municipal districts that never had a resident doctor before.[xi]
Recently, President Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel underscored Cuba’s success in its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak by pointing out that ‘across the planet, 75% of the sick have recovered, in the Americas 65%, and in Cuba 91%.’[xii] He also stated that ‘the percentage of active cases as compared to the population in Cuba is seven, while in the world it stands at 21.8% and in Latin America, over 31.4%.’[xiii] Furthermore, ‘there have been no deaths of children, pregnant women or health personnel’[xiv] attributed to COVID-19 on the island. President Díaz-Canel also highlighted the fact that Cuban ‘intensive care units never collapsed’ even though ‘100% of confirmed cases and their contacts have been treated in hospitals.’[xv] Subsequently, they were allowed to go home after they tested negative.
A key factor in the successful handling of the COVID-19 outbreak on the island was the quick and decisive action of Cuba’s socialist government. Like many countries, Cuba closed its borders, businesses and schools shortly after the World Health Organization declared that the global COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The government also made face masks mandatory almost immediately. Another important action taken by the government, which is beyond the scope of many other countries, was to deploy doctors, nurses and medical students to all streets and homes throughout the country to check for symptoms.
On a recent visit to Cuba, I had the opportunity to personally observe and experience some of the new measures and rules implemented by the socialist government aimed at protecting the lives of visitors to the island by minimizing the risk of contracting the COVID-19 virus. At the Cuban airport, passengers were put into a line outside of the main entrance as soon as they disembarked the airplane, with Cuban officials ensuring that the 2-metre distancing rule was being respected. Inside, a team of workers disinfected all carry-on baggage and purses, while passengers were made to sanitize their hands. Subsequently, a team of medical professionals checked each passenger’s temperature before collecting samples that were labelled and sent to a lab for testing. Meanwhile, a large contingent of workers were busy continuously cleaning every single area of the airport, as well as any objects that that passengers might have touched or otherwise come in contact with. This was a stark contrast with the airport experience when I returned to Canada, as social distancing was not enforced while waiting in lines, carry-on baggage was not disinfected, no medical personnel were visible, and no mandatory COVID-19 tests were administered.[xvi] Compared to the experience in Cuba, the Canadian airport appeared to be very poorly organized and lacking in resources when it comes to encouraging rigorous and effective hygiene practices, and enforcing social distancing rules.
At the Cuban resorts, employees are regularly tested. There are also nurses and doctors on staff to monitor the health of all their clients, which includes taking everyone’s temperate each morning. Furthermore, all public areas have been organized in a manner that ensures public distancing, while washrooms, tables, chairs, and other items are sanitized immediately after being used by tourists.
Broadly speaking, Cuba’s success in terms of containing its COVID-19 outbreak is due in large part to the centrally planned system’s adherence to the principle that free and universal health care is a fundamental human right. Consequently, its leaders have consistently made extensive investments in health care services since the early days of the Revolution. In addition to providing medical care to all inhabitants of the island, Cuban doctors are renowned for venturing well beyond their borders en masse in order to assist other nations in need, particularly in their most remote areas that are underserved and often have no doctors at all. None of this is particularly surprising, as the Cuban government has committed itself to building ‘awareness,’ and instilling ‘feelings of solidarity and a generous internationalist spirit’ at its medical schools since triumph of the Revolution (Fidel Castro Caracas, 1999).
For Cuban medical workers, their ‘mission is to create a doctrine about human health, to set an example of what can be done in this field’ (Fidel Castrol Havana, 1999).[xvii] Since the Revolution, over 400,000 Cuban health professionals have been sent to 164 countries around the world to help them meet their health care needs, and to provide assistance in times of crisis and in the aftermath of natural disasters.[xviii] Moreover, Cuban medical workers will often remain in foreign countries in order to assist them in the development of their own health care systems and services. Recently, Cuba sent about 4,000 health workers to around 40 countries to help them with their COVID-19 outbreaks.[xix]
Additionally, Cuba helps combat doctor shortages in developing countries by providing free medical school to students from those regions. In fact, Havana’s Latin American Medical School (Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM)) is ‘the largest medical school in the world.’[xx] ‘The University of Toronto has 850 medical students and Harvard University has 735. ELAM has twelve times more students than those two schools combined: 19,550.’ In 2002, Fidel Castro delivered a speech to students of the Latin American Medical School in the presence of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and stated:
what good would it do if you all went back to your countries to become part of institutions where, sadly, financial concerns, commercialism and selfishness prevail? What good would it do if no one was willing to go work in the mountains, the plains, the remote corners of the countryside or marginal neighborhoods of the cities to practice the noble profession of medicine? More than a medical school, our most fervent hope is that this will be a school of solidarity, brotherhood and justice.[xxi]
During a 2003 visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fidel Castro underscored Cuba’s commitment to preserving human life when he said:
Our country does not drop bombs on other countries, or send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country has neither nuclear weapons, nor chemical weapons, nor biological weapons. The tens of thousands of scientists and doctors in our country have been educated in the philosophy of saving lives. It would be totally contradictory to their formation to ask a scientist or a doctor to work producing substances, bacteria or viruses capable of causing the death of other human beings…Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors have offered their services on internationalist missions in the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. I once said that our country could not and would not ever launch preemptive attacks against any dark corner of the world. On the other hand, our country has sent badly needed doctors to the darkest corners of the world. Doctors and not bombs, doctors and not intelligent weapons…[xxii]
Fidel Castro (Havana 1998) believed that, instead of investing massively in the development of weapons to kill in the most efficient and destructive ways imaginable, countries with ‘the resources for it should promote medical research and put the fruits of science at the service of humanity, creating instruments of health and life and not of death.’ He was very proud of the Cuban health care system’s accomplishments, both domestically and internationally, and trusted that Cuban doctors had the integrity and skills necessary in order to save lives anywhere in the world.
Fidel Castro would likely have not been surprised by the failure of health care systems to adequately respond to and manage COVID-19 outbreaks in many of the countries that subscribe to capitalism. He was highly critical of the practice of treating health care services as though they were business transactions in a free-market place. Instead, he often reiterated the point that the commercialization of health care was ‘repugnant,’ and everybody should have free access to adequate health care services. Accordingly, the privatisation of health care would not be permitted on the socialist island nation of Cuba. In addition to denouncing all forms of private health care, Fidel also strongly condemned profit-oriented pharmaceutical companies. He specifically expressed his frustration with large and powerful pharmaceutical companies that dedicate themselves to maximizing their profits instead of demonstrating a genuine commitment to human life when he addressed ‘the special session commemorating the 50th anniversary of the World health Organization,’ in Geneva, Switzerland on May 14, 1998, when he stated:
medicines, that should be made to save lives, are sold at increasingly higher prices. In 1995, the market of pharmaceuticals involved 280 billion dollars. The developed countries with 824 million people, 14.6 percent of the world population, consume 82 percent of the medicines while consumption in the rest of the world with a 4,815 million population is only 18 percent. The prices are actually prohibitive for the Third World where consumption is limited to the privileged sectors. The control of patents and markets by the big transnational companies allows them to raise prices over ten times above production costs. The market price of some advanced antibiotics is 50 times higher than their cost.[xxiii]
Fidel Castro was not only critical of the profit maximizing behaviour of large pharmaceutical companies, he also frequently spoke of the failure of governments to provide adequate public health care services for their citizens. In a 1998 speech in Havana, he claimed that public hospitals in many countries failed ‘because they didn’t have resources, because they didn’t have a budget.’ He recalled that public health care was in a similar state in Cuba prior to the Revolution as, ‘in addition to scarce and diminishing budgets, a part of these budgets was misappropriated’ (Fidel Castro Havana, 1998). He was always a strong advocate of publicly funded and managed healthcare systems, as he stated that ‘If the state is sick, let’s cure the state, let’s give the state health. It’s necessary for the state to function healthily. But let’s not hand the solution of problems of human health over to the market’[xxiv] (Fidel Castro Havana, 1998). Fidel Castro believed that if a state was truly committed to the achievement of the collective good, it would find a way to provide its citizens with universal health care services even in the face of economic difficulties and other problems. This is evidenced by Cuba, as Castro stated:
We have lived the experience and we’ve had the opportunity, with very few resources, to see how public medicine can work and, even today, with a double blockade, it could be said, it works, not with all the resources that we would like, but, for many years, the country invested in hospitals. It first used those that existed and it later built many new hospitals and it built clinics, modest hospitals, including in the mountains, in the countryside, with a network of hospitals and polyclinics being established throughout the country, even managing to create, in addition, that outstanding network for primary care that is now made up of our family doctors, with a new sense.[xxv]
In a 1998 speech in Havana, Fidel Castro underscored the critical importance of family doctors in Cuba, as he explained that:
every doctor that graduates, except in a very few specialties, in order to become a specialist in the varied branches of medicine, first has to be a family doctor, a professional with great knowledge of man, experience, human behavior, who has looked after patients in a community, to know well how they live, in what social conditions. Then, later, if they want, they can acquire a second specialty…But they’re people who already have very wide knowledge. They’ve studied for six years at university and they’ve studied for three years from their office. They’ve had nine years studying and, later, they’ll have to study for another three or four years if they’re going to acquire a second specialty.[xxvi]
According to Fidel Castro, the success of the family doctors system in Cuba could not have been achieved under the auspices of the private sector. While he acknowledged that a number of other nations around the world also utilized family doctors, he pointed out that they often live far away from their patients. To the contrary, family doctors on the socialist island live close to their patients, sometimes right next door. ‘They can be 100 meters from the resident, from the citizen. Others have the doctor 50 meters away if they live nearer the doctor’s office. In the cities, the residents…live with a doctor next door.’[xxvii] Family doctors can essentially be found everywhere in Cuba, including in the nurseries, schools, factories, hotels and resorts, and many other workplaces. Fidel Castro (1999 Havana) made it clear that there could never be enough doctors, stating that Cubans are not ‘afraid of the number of doctors. There will never be too many doctors anywhere, be it a passenger’s plane, a train or a boat.’ [xxviii] In a 1999 speech to students graduating from the Havana Higher Institute of Medical Sciences, Fidel Castro explained that when it was suggested to him that Cuba would not need any more doctors after the island achieved the milestone of 20,000, he responded by saying:
You think that there will be too many doctors? That is not possible…because doctors have to defend people’s health like the CDRs [Comités de Defensa de la Revolución] defend the Revolution; there should be one on every block.[xxix]
Before Socialist Cuba established its health care system, people were often forced to wait for days, or even weeks, in order to have simple health procedures performed at hospitals. Now that family doctors with adequate knowledge and training to diagnose and treat many diseases, illnesses and other health problems are available all over the country, people have the option of avoiding hospitals for relatively minor health issues. However, they can also see a specialist at a polyclinic or hospital if that is their preference. Fidel Castro believed that providing people with such a wide range of choices when it comes to health care is an effective approach for the ‘saving of beds and facilities.’[xxx] It appears that he was correct, as Cuban emergency rooms and hospitals never have to contend with overcrowding. This was particularly evident during the current pandemic, as Cuban emergency rooms were at no point at risk of being overwhelmed, unlike those of a number of capitalist countries.
Cuba’s successful handling of the COVID-19 outbreak relative to many capitalist countries is not overly surprising, given that Cubans have considered health to be a fundamental human right since the Socialist Revolution. This has led the country to make significant investments and expend a massive collective effort in establishing free health care services for all Cubans. However, other features of the socialist regime were also instrumental in successfully combatting the spread of COVID-19 in addition to Cuba’s commitment to universal healthcare. For instance, President Díaz-Canel explained that Cuba’s centrally planned system, one of the fundamental and most criticized aspects of its socialist regime, played an important role by ensuring the availability of basic food items, cleaning supplies, and personal hygiene products since the outbreak began. History has shown that Cuba’s socialist government has always been very capable of swiftly and effectively mobilising its economic, natural and human resources in order to secure the well-being and safety of its citizens when faced with a catastrophic event. In fact, president Díaz-Canel went so far as to describe Cuba’s successful handing of its COVID-19 outbreak as ‘almost a miracle,’ which is an outcome of ‘people, experiences, principles and the thinking of Fidel and Army General Raul Castro Ruz.’[xxxi] He further elaborated that ‘those of us who are members of the band of non-conformists and optimists, like Fidel and Raúl, learned with them and their comrades in struggle that all challenges can be overcome. Cubans are proving, once again, that it can be done.’[xxxii] He also highlighted the key roles of solidarity, collective efforts, dedication and sacrifices on the part of Cubans since the outbreak began.[xxxiii] On October 28, 2020, president Díaz-Canel delivered a speech in ‘closing the Fifth Ordinary Period of Sessions of the National Assembly of People’s Power,’ in which he stated:
There is a component in Cuban DNA, in the magnificent mix of ethnicities and history of continuous resilience, from which emerges from “that sweet word: Cuban.” But there is another factor that is no less important, which is the conscious construction, over more than 60 years, of a work that is larger and stronger than we are, with an authentic leadership, respected and admired in the world, more respected and admired the more it has resisted the blows of the adversary without giving up. I speak, of course, of Fidel, of Raúl, of the Centennial Generation, whom we are honored to follow, with proud dedication to the cause to which they devoted their lives.[xxxiv]
Socialist Cuba has always strived to achieve a more humane and just world order, characterized by solidarity and social cooperation among human beings. Accordingly, its leaders and supporters of the Revolution were acutely aware of the many defects and destructive outcomes of free-market capitalism. In fact, some of the key factors that contributed to COVID-19 being so disastrous on a global level include the poverty of neo-liberal governmental policies, the inflexibility of neo-liberal economists, and the myopic visions of politicians who never cared about the collective good. However, the panic that ensued during the pandemic led many Western governments to suddenly transition to central deliberate planning, after being devoted to free-market capitalism, while also being adamantly opposed government interventions at achieving the collective good, for decades. By essentially transitioning away from the laissez-faire approach and towards central planning, traditionally free-market oriented governments have temporarily abandoned the principles, policies and behaviours that they have adhered to and promoted for the last four decades. In fact, the extent to which these governments have recently involved themselves in the economy, as well as in people’s lives, represents unchartered waters for many of them. Ultimately, the failures of Western countries in dealing with their respective COVID-19 outbreak supports Fidel Castro’s contention that free market capitalism is ill-equipped when it comes to responding to catastrophic events. In this regard, he stated that ‘the state is sick’ and needs to be cured. However, curing the state from the ills of capitalism is not something that can be achieved swiftly or easily.
According to Fidel Castro (Havana 1998), only revolutionary people could dedicate themselves to ensuring that the interests of the masses are ‘aligned with the best causes of humanity,’ which is necessary in order to achieve a more humane and just world order. Furthermore, he believed that ‘the Revolution is not just about putting forward ideas, it is about carrying out ideas. The Revolution is not theory; it is action, above all’ (Fidel Castro Havana, 2002). Cuba has shown that ‘whatever the Revolution has proposed to do, it has achieved. Whatever the Revolution has begun, it has carried on with. And this is the result of ideas turned into reality, of tasks undertaken and carried out’ (Fidel Castro Havana, 2002).
‘Long live free Cuba! Long live the victorious Revolution!’ (Fidel Castro)
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Global Research contributor Dr. Birsen Filip holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa.
[vi] ‘BioCubaFarma, the Cuban organization of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries, manages the country’s efforts toward manufacturing medicines, diagnostics and medical equipment and providing high quality life science services to improve people’s health. BioCubaFarma serves as a gateway for potential partners and investors interested in accessing the extensive biopharma resources Cuba has to offer.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/d43747-020-00522-5
[xi] In the first four years of The More Doctors program, the percentage of Brazilians receiving primary health care rose from 59.6% to 70%. Nonetheless, Bolsonaro stated that the 11,420 Cuban doctors working in poor and remote parts of Brazil could only stay if they received 100% of their pay and their families were permitted join them. He also questioned the qualifications of the Cuban doctors and suggested that they might have to renew their licenses in Brazil. In response, Cuba’s health ministry announced its withdrawal from the program, stating that ‘these conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the program.’ The abrupt withdrawal of Cuban doctors has not only adversely affected Brazil’s healthcare system, with Bolsonaro failing to deliver on promises to quickly find domestic substitutes, it has also hurt Cuba’s economy.
[xvi] Additionally, the kiosk display screens that each passenger has to use to fill out their Canada Border Services Agency Declaration (CBSAD) forms were not disinfected after each use. There is also a new COVID-19 form to fill out, which is done at those same kiosks using a couple of pens that have been left there for passengers to share without being disinfected. After getting through customs, the Canadian airport did not demonstrate the same level of commitment to sanitizing the washrooms and other public areas as the one in Cuba, where personnel were observed engaging in frequent cleaning.
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The recent Issue Brief by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission entitled The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A Testbed for Chinese Power Projection takes a close look at the Chinese security footprint in Central Asia and its political dimensions. A perception has grown over the most recent years amongst great game watchers generally, especially the US analysts, that China is gobbling up Central Asia. On the contrary, this report takes a contrarian view.
By the way, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, headquartered in Washington, DC, is a congressional commission of the United States government, which was created in October 2000 with the legislative mandate to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the US and China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action.
This Issue Brief appeared in the second week of November at a time when the US-China relations have hit an all-time low level in all its history since the normalisation in the early 1970s. Yet, interestingly, it eschews hyperbole or propaganda. The report estimates that Beijing almost single-mindedly uses the grouping to safeguard its national security interests and is not pursuing any geopolitical agenda.
The Issue Brief’s conclusions can be summarised as follows:
i) In recent years, Beijing has increased security cooperation with Central Asian countries under the auspices of the SCO to insulate itself from perceived threats in the region. Beijing is using the SCO to enhance its ability to project power beyond its borders.
ii) The SCO military exercises offer a unique opportunity for the Chinese armed forces to practice air-ground combat operations in foreign countries, undertaking a range of operations including long-distance mobilisation, counterterrorism missions, stability maintenance operations, and conventional warfare.
iii) Beijing has used the SCO to extend its defensive perimeter into Central Asia.
iv) Russia and China have used the SCO to leverage the eviction of US military bases in Central Asia.
v) Following the induction of India and Pakistan as SCO members, the grouping’s potential to challenge US interests in a coordinated way may have diminished; and,
vi) Beijing’s fears of instability and terrorism have grown, which prompted it to step up cooperation with SCO in relation to the Afghan situation.
Since 2016, the People’s Armed Police, part of China’s armed forces, has operated an outpost “in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan province bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor for joint counterterrorism border patrolling with Afghan and Tajik forces. However, this stems from the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism on border security comprising Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China.
Clearly, the above findings do not add up to anything earthshaking. It is well-known that the SCO was created primarily as a security organisation with the stated objectives of combatting terrorism and instability. Its original aim was to strengthen political ties between the member states, promote border security, share intelligence and counter terrorist threats. In later years, SCO also began turning attention to expansion of economic cooperation, but without any big success stories to mention so far.
What emerges is that the common narrative that China is overshadowing the Russian security presence in Central Asia lacks any empirical evidence. Russia is still the only extra-regional power that maintains a military base in Central Asia (in Tajikistan) and also heads a CSTO base (in Kyrgyzstan).
Russia’s sensitivities are historical. The Russian and Chinese shadows in the region historically overlapped. The Russian incursions into Central Asia date back to the 17th century. The first Russia-China treaty over Central Asia was concluded in 1689 allowing the Russians to enter China for trading in commodities (eg., tea, silk, porcelain, etc.) that had tremendous market in Europe, while in return, China got additional territory in Central and Inner Asia.
The Czarist Russia’s incremental takeover of Central Asia continued through the 18th century, and by 19th century, the region had come under Russian control. In 1868 Czarist Russia made Tashkent its ‘capital’ in the Central Asian region. China was ahead of Russia by moving into Xinjiang roughly a century earlier.
Indeed, riots and revolts and opposition to foreign powers continued in the Central Asian region through the 19th century and right into the 20th century. Meanwhile, Great Britain also appeared on the horizon in the 19th century, trying to build a buffer zone to protect India, particularly from Russia, by expanding into areas of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, apart from trying to expand into Tibet and Afghanistan.
These activities were later referred to as the Great Game. The Great Game receded in the 20th century with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the emergence of Soviet Central Asia. An Iron Curtain descended over Central Asia so much so that in 1988, hardly three years before the Soviet Union itself disappeared, Moscow made a great exception for its close friend India by allowing it to open a consulate in Tashkent! Needless to say, Central Asia was out of bounds for China through the Soviet era.
The above recap is in order to bear in mind that Russia and China’s present-day co-habitation in Central Asia has a profound historical backdrop. China was quick on its feet to accord diplomatic recognition to the newly independent Central Asian republics in 1991 and establish its embassies in the five ‘Stans’.
It took only a few years for Beijing to create the necessary legal underpinnings of state-to-state relations — despite the fact that the institutions of governance in the new ‘Stans’ were far from formed. On a parallel track, discussions also commenced on the boundary disputes with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The Chinese diplomats assigned to the region accomplished a lot in a short period of time. Looking back, the colourful Central Asia tour by President Jiang Zemin in 1996, the first by a Chinese president to the region, was a sort of victory lap during which, in his inimitable way, the Chinese leader spread petals of goodwill all across the steppes.
Right from the outset, Beijing attributed high importance to the Central Asian region from the perspective of China’s national security and development. It began by building the sinews of a tight partnership with the ‘Stans’ in battling the three ‘evils’ of terrorism, separatism (or ‘splittism’) and religious extremism.
Unsurprisingly, through the 1990s, China’s economic influence and geo-political interest in Central Asia also kept steadily increasing. However, Beijing proceeded very cautiously, wary of treading on Russian sensitivities in a region which Moscow saw as its traditional sphere of influence.
The good part was that there was no major conflict of interests insofar as China and Russia had common concerns in regard of the security and stability of Central Asia. Much of Beijing’s diplomacy with the Central Asian republics (including later in the ‘Shanghai Five’ forum comprising China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) was conducted in the full view of the Russian neighbour, which gave a transparency to the Chinese intentions as Beijing enthusiastically co-operated in the joint statements on common resistance to radical Islamist groups.
China co-ordinated with each of its Central Asian republic neighbours as well in intelligence sharing and anti-terrorism activities targeting anti-Chinese Uighur and Kazakh elements in Central Asia. From the Central Asian perspective, China appeared as a model of successful transition from a centrally controlled to a market economy, which was broadly the trajectory chosen by the former Soviet republics too.
Possibly, the Central Asian political elites also regarded as a useful counterweight to Russia and the West, and a potential investor as well as customer for Caspian energy resources. Above all, their comfort level Beijing was high, given China’s scrupulous adherence to non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries — and, in the central Asian context, its non-prescriptive approach to issues of human rights, authoritarianism and so on.
By the end of the 1990s, much before the Belt and Road was rolled out in 2013, China had already outbid Western companies and invested nearly $1 billion dollars in two Kazakh oil fields; this outlay eventually rise to manifold as the fields were developed. Beijing’s China National Petroleum Corporation signed an agreement to consider building a 2,500-mile pipeline to carry Kazakh Caspian oil across Kazakhstan to China’s north-east.
China publicly supported the revival of the East-West Silk Road. All in all, China was systematically staking its own economic and political claims in Central Asia. Already by 2000, three of the five Central Asian republics had more trade with China than Russia.
On the other hand, China was careful to balance its accumulating presence in Central Asia with its improving relations with Russia through the 1990s, while also retaining its strategic relationship with Pakistan. China never stopped leveraging its close and friendly relations with Pakistan as a hedge against the radical Islamist groups based on Pakistani soil, including militant elements from Central Asia and Xinjiang.
In later years, it came as no surprise that Russia also began copying the Chinese experience to seek Pakistan’s help to neutralise security threats from the extremist groups operating in the region. China’s eagerness to induct Pakistan into the SCO — and Russia’s support for it — can be put in such a perspective, and inevitably, it eventually brought China, Russia and Pakistan onto the same page as regards their common stance on the imperative need of reconciliation with the Taliban as a key template of settlement in Afghanistan.
(A second part will follow.)
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Featured image: Modern day traders on the ancient Silk Road track in Central Asia. Photo: Facebook
Venezuela Presents Proposal for an International Association Against US Sanctions to Stop Crimes Against Humanity (UN Security Council)
ts called him an “insane tyrant,” his scheme intended to “end…human autonomy, (facilitated by) implantable microchips (to control) our bodies and brains.”
