The Canadian Forces wants to establish a new organization that will use propaganda and other techniques to try to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of Canadians, according to documents obtained by this newspaper.
The plan comes on the heels of the Canadian Forces spending more than $1 million to train public affairs officers on behaviour modification techniques of the same sort used by the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica, as well as a controversial and bizarre propaganda training mission in which the military forged letters from the Nova Scotia government to warn the public that wolves were wandering in the province.
The new Defence Strategic Communication group will advance “national interests by using defence activities to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of audiences,” according to the document dated October 2020. Target audiences for such an initiative would be the Canadian public as well as foreign populations in countries where military forces are sent.
The document is the end result of what Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance has called the “weaponization” of the military’s public affairs branch. The document is in a draft form, but work is already underway on some aspects of the plan and some techniques have been already tested on the Canadian public.
But the office of Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Sunday that the plan, at least for now, is not authorized to proceed. Sajjan has raised concerns about some of the activities related to such influence and propaganda operations. “No such plan has been approved, nor will it be,” Floriane Bonneville, Sajjan’s press secretary, said after being asked by this newspaper about the initiative.
But a series of town halls were already conducted last week for a number of military personnel on the strategies contained in the draft plan.
The report quotes Brig.-Gen. Jay Janzen, director general military public affairs, who stated, “The motto ‘who dares, wins’ is as applicable to strategic communication as it is to warfare.”
The initiative also proposes the creation of a new research capability established to analyze and collect information from the social media accounts of Canadians, non-governmental organizations, industry and the news media, according to the report.
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This article was originally published in October 2019.
When it comes to villainous bureaucrats, it’s hard to assign a ranking for the most sinister aura, cumulative harm wrought on humanity, and general unpleasantness wrapped up in one. But Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief William Casey is definitely near the head of the pack.
Prior to overseeing the CIA, Casey worked in military intelligence during World War II and thereafter offered up to postwar business elites that most unholy of statutory concoctions: the tax shelter (he wrote the book on the subject). He went on to serve on Ronald Reagan’s transition team, during which time he was said to fly to Rome where, departing from a black windowless C-141 jet, he visited the Vatican to brief Pope John Paul II on the latest developments in the war on communism. At the end of his life, Casey was directly implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly avoiding prosecution when he was hospitalized less than 24 hours before Congress called on him to testify. He died of a brain tumor soon after.
Casey’s vampiric persona bears little resemblance to presidential candidate Joe Biden, a career politician who has spent close to four decades in Congress cultivating an image of patriotism, trustworthiness, and bipartisanship. But records in the CIA CREST archive, unsealed in 2017, detail Biden’s role in supporting Casey’s rise, and ushering in one of the darkest eras of the CIA’s history.
In a classified memo sent to intelligence staff in the early ’80s, Casey praised Biden for giving the most serious threat to the CIA’s unchecked power—the Justice Department—a good thrashing. Casey highlighted “the tongue lashing [Biden] gave Justice for their passive attitude and general ineffectiveness,” as well as “his demand that if his grey mail legislation which he sponsored was not enough to enable them to go after leaks, they tell them what else needs to be done.”
The partnership between the two careerists was initiated by legislation sponsored by Biden attempting to ban graymailing, a tactic used in leaker trials in which classified documents are requested by the defense during discovery to pressure the government into dropping its case. This legislation would be Biden’s entry into a precarious balancing act between surveillance hawks like Casey and a liberal establishment wary of the intelligence community’s long history of overreach. Graymail represented for Biden the type of middle-of-the-road, bipartisan legislation that everyone could get behind.
As Casey’s comments make clear, Biden decided his graymail legislation didn’t go far enough to deter leakers and whistleblowers. At an informal speech at Stanford—given in part to bolster the CIA’s image—Biden told an undergraduate audience that an entire Central American spy network had been compromised by leaks. In the same speech he alluded to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American citizens who were executed by electric chair for providing intelligence to the Soviet government. “If you’re going to engage in espionage against this country,” he said, “be sure it really does jeopardize American society.”
This type of public outreach is documented in Casey’s memos as a top priority for the CIA to recover its image—tarnished from decades of foreign intervention and domestic maleficence. The Biden charm offensive came just a few years after the Church Committee’s findings on domestic spying operations sunk the CIA in the public consciousness. Like all things political, Biden viewed the CIA’s “missteps” not as constituting features of the institution, but rather as an aberration to be corrected, much in the same way he today views the election of our current commander in chief: not as the logical conclusion to decades of disastrous neoliberal policies, but rather as a one-in-a-million fluke.
Biden took a harder line during Casey’s 1981 confirmation hearings, if ever so slightly. He repeatedly pressed Casey for assurances that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would maintain oversight on the CIA, and that he would not be edged out. Biden wanted to retain access to classified CIA briefings, and warned Casey of the danger that unchecked “KGB” style surveillance posed to civil liberties and freedoms.
Biden’s fear of losing the small measure of power afforded to him by what he would later admit was an impotent and ineffective committee represented an about-face from the sentiment he had expressed to the ACLU just one year earlier, during a public hearing on the CIA’s charter. “Let me tell you something, fellas,” he said to a panel of riled-up ACLU lawyers criticizing the agency. “The folks don’t care. The average American couldn’t care less right now about any of this … you keep talking about public concern [about the CIA]. There ain’t none.”
And while Biden pressed Casey more than any of his colleagues during the director’s confirmation hearing, his questions reflect the special brand of damning leniency that only Joe Biden is capable of. After heaping lavish praise on Casey’s record, Biden asked him if his personal relationship with the president would cause a conflict of interest, whether he would disclose covert operations to the committee like “planting a bug in the room of the president of Mars,” and what report card the soon-to-be-confirmed CIA director would give the committee. On the last point, Casey replied, “Well, you know, I don’t like to disagree with you, Senator, but the truth is I thought I’d let the committee investigate me before I undertook to investigate it.”
Just months after Casey’s confirmation, in the wake of the revelation that Casey had failed to disclose to the committee “nine investments valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars, personal debts and contingent liabilities of nearly $500,000, a number of corporations or foundations on whose board Mr. Casey served, four civil lawsuits and more than 70 clients he had represented in private practice in the last five years,” Biden admonished him for displaying “a consistent pattern of omissions, misstatements and contradictions.” But as with Biden’s record on busing, drugs, incarceration, and the Anita Hill hearings, his reversal came too little, too late. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ultimately found that Casey was “not unfit” to continue in his role, and in doing so allowed a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal to continue on in his role unchecked.
Biden’s comments to Casey during the confirmation hearing make clear that he was aware of the risks the intelligence chief posed to civil liberties and the healthy separation of the branches of government. He knew full well that Casey—who had only accepted the directorship under the promise that he would have influence over foreign policy—was to Reagan what Dick Cheney was to George W. Bush. Yet he ultimately failed to vote against Casey, in what should be recognized as the most defining and consistent feature of his political career: bipartisanship. Despite articulating the very dangers which would later come to pass—Casey covering for Reagan, lying to the committee, and failing to disclose covert operations—Biden weighed the political worth of voting against Casey, determined that it was easier to play nice, and decided to roll over in bed with his Republican colleagues rather than cause a fuss.
While Casey and Biden were first united in their hatred of leakers, their perspectives diverged as the ’80s wore on. Casey advocated for more subtle and insidious ways of targeting leakers and the journalists who covered them, while Biden endorsed a Manichean application of the Espionage Act—still used today to obliterate the lives of “bad” whistleblowers.
Casey died before he could testify to Congress about his role in Iran-Contra, but his rap sheet is seeded with some of the CIA’s most egregious acts of terror and coercion, including the distribution of the Human Resource Exploitation Manual to the Honduran government (used in the torture and murder of hundreds of left-wing dissidents), the invasion of Grenada, and the 1986 Haitian election coup.
The CIA and its assemblage of operatives, directors, and informants are easy targets for the ire of anyone with even a dim awareness of the terror and harm they have caused. But none of these crimes could have come to pass without the combination of tacit and explicit approval from politicians like Joe Biden, charged with regulating an arm of government defined by its will to crush democracy at home and abroad.
It’s unclear whether Biden’s record with Casey has been recapitulated in recent memory, but if his personal efforts to block Edward Snowden’s attempts to claim asylum are anything to go by, it would seem that his relationship with the intelligence community hasn’t changed much in the 30-plus years since Casey’s death. Biden has staunchly supported corporate whistleblowers’ rights while aligning himself with the Obama administration’s expanded policy charter of punishing (or in the case of Snowden, seeking to punish) the whistleblowers bringing to light the intelligence community’s authoritarian and illegal surveillance practices.
Biden’s stance is now out in the open for all to see as the whistleblower-led impeachment picks up steam. As long as the whistleblower can find some measure of bipartisan support, he or she is one of the good ones. As long as the whistleblower doesn’t upend the entrenched forms of power that Biden sees as essential to our democracy, they can stay. And so long as they follow the protocols which make it next to impossible to legally leak information, they can count Uncle Joe as a friend.
As Biden continues to explain his voting record, his contribution to William Casey’s tenure and his troubling stance on whistleblowers should also be included in the long list of decisions for which he must answer, and which continue to haunt our democracy.
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Daniel Boguslaw is a writer and researcher living in New York.
The US establishment, and the world, has spent the last four years trying to adapt to the disruptive policies of a childish president. Now the Democrats’ ‘adult’ leadership team will return. Watch out, folks.
To those watching the drama unfolding in Washington, DC around the stalled efforts on the part of nominal President-elect Joe Biden in forming a transition team, the parallels are eerily familiar: a bitterly contested election between an establishment political figure and a brash DC ‘outsider’, a controversial outcome delaying the implementation of the transition between administrations, and an openly condescending atmosphere where the incoming team postured as comprising a return to ‘adult’ leadership.
That time was December 2000, when a Republican team led by President-elect George W. Bush stood ready to install a cabinet composed of veteran spies, diplomats, and national security managers who had cut their policy teeth during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. With Colin Powell as secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, George Tenet as director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor, the foreign policy and national security team that Dubya surrounded himself with upon assuming the presidency was as experienced a team as one could imagine.
And yet, within two years of assuming their responsibilities, this team of ‘adults’ had presided over the worst terrorist attack in American history, and the initiation of two wars (in Afghanistan and Iraq) that would forever change both the geopolitical map of the world and America’s role as world leader.
Twenty years later, the roles have reversed, with an experienced team of veteran ‘adults’ hailing from the eight-year tenure of President Barack Obama preparing to transition the US away from four tumultuous years of the presidency of Donald J. Trump. While Biden has not finalized his foreign policy and national security team, there is a consensus among experienced political observers about who the top contenders might be for the ‘big four’ foreign and national security policy positions in his administration.
While there is no doubting the experience and professional credentials of these potential nominees, they all have one thing in common: a proclivity for military intervention on the part of the US. For anyone who hoped that a Biden administration might complete the task begun by President Trump of leading America out of the ‘forever wars’ initiated by the ‘adults’ of the administration of George W. Bush, these choices represent a wake-up call that this will not be the likely outcome.
Moreover, a potential Biden cabinet would more than likely complement the existing predilection on the part of the president-elect for military intervention, pointing to a foreign and national security policy which not only sustains the existing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, but increases the likelihood of additional military misadventures. The Biden team will almost certainly seek to shoehorn the president-elect’s aggressive “America is back” philosophy into a geopolitical reality that is not inclined to accept such a role sitting down.
So who’s likely to fill what role?
Secretary of State
The hands-on favorite here is Susan Rice, who served as both national security advisor and US ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama. Biden knows her very well, and they have a great working relationship. With a history of promoting US intervention in Syria and Libya, Rice would more than likely support any policy suggestions concerning a re-engagement by the US in Syria in an effort to contain and/or overthrow Bashar al-Assad, and would be reticent to withdraw US forces from either Afghanistan or Iraq.
She would also most likely seek hardline ‘confrontational’ policies designed to ‘roll-back’ Russian influence in Europe and the Middle East, as well as China’s claims regarding the South China Sea. Rice would seek to strengthen the military aspects of NATO to better position that organization against Russia in Europe, and China in the Pacific.
A Rice nomination could run afoul of a Republican-controlled Senate, where a source close to the current Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has noted that a “Republican Senate would work with Biden on centrist nominees” but would oppose “radical progressives” or ones who are controversial among conservatives.
While Rice is not a “radical progressive,” the Republicans continue to condemn her actions while serving as the US ambassador to the UN in response to the 2012 terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans – including the US ambassador to Libya – dead. This controversy prevented her from becoming secretary of state during Obama’s second term, and one can expect a very contentious Senate hearing if she is nominated, with no guarantee that she would pass.
Secretary of Defense
An equally qualified, but far less controversial, woman is the likely nominee for this position. Michele Flournoy, if nominated and confirmed, would become the first female secretary of defense in the history of the US. Given her extensive resume, which includes several previous appointments in senior policy positions in the Department of Defense during both the Clinton and Obama administrations, she would provide an experienced hand in the management of the Pentagon.
Flournoy once famously told the New York Times that “warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future.” In her previous postings in the Pentagon, she took a hardline stance against both Russia and China, encouraged military intervention in Libya and Syria, and sustained military operations in Afghanistan. Her proclivity to seek military solutions to challenging foreign policy issues would reinforce the similar inclinations of Biden. With Flournoy at the helm of the Pentagon, America can expect to experience a full menu of war “flavoring.”
Director of the CIA
While the above two positions represent the ostensible heads of US foreign and defense policy, the reality is that the US has become increasingly reliant upon the covert action capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency when it comes to influencing diplomatic and military outcomes. While news reports have on occasion lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding covert CIA activities, allowing Americans and the world a small measure of insight into their scope, scale and effectiveness, the reality is that the vast majority of the work of the CIA remains classified, revealed only decades after the fact, if at all.
As the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and later as vice president, Biden is intimately familiar with these covert activities, and of the potential of the CIA to impact American foreign and national security policy. One of the names being bandied about for the role of director is Michael Morell. He is a retired career CIA officer, having worked his way up the ranks over the course of a 33-year career, finishing in 2013 having twice served as the acting director under President Obama.
Morell would no doubt manage the agency in a professional manner. He is a CIA man, seeped in the dark arts. Insight into how this experience might manifest itself in a Biden administration was provided through comments Morell made about Syria while appearing on PBS in 2016. “What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” he said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”
By “paying a price,” Morell meant “killing.” Russians and Iranians, he said, should be killed “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say ‘we did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”
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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
If Biden/Harris succeed Trump on January 20, they’ll be president and vice president-selected, not elected.
That’s the disturbing reality of Election 2020.
Illegitimate by systemic fraud, it wasn’t the first, and surely not the last, time that losers of US elections were declared winners.
Throughout US history, it happened time and again at the federal, state, and local levels.
It shows that monied interests and other power brokers chose winners and losers, not voting-age Americans.
They have no say over how the US is run or by whom, no say as well over who benefits and who’s left out.
“Democracy” in America is pure fantasy, how it’s always been by design from inception.
Establishment media promote the fiction of a free, fair, and open process — manipulating the public mind instead of reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Clear evidence shows that Election 2020 was rigged for Biden/Harris over Trump.
In a November 13 report titled “WE CAUGHT THEM,” Gateway Pundit explained the following:
Election 2020 results key swing state Pennsylvania Trump won in 2016 were “fraudulent because they are nearly statistically impossible,” adding:
On election night after polls closed, Trump led Biden/Harris “by nearly 700,000 votes,” a virtually “insurmountable lead.”
The next day, DJT lead by a 56% – 43% margin.
“According to Pennsylvania’s election returns website, on election day…Trump won nearly two thirds of all votes cast in the state” — a landslide margin.
Yet Biden/Harris did the near-impossible. State election authorities claimed they won after an unreported number of mail-in ballots were counted.
For three days post-election, ballots arriving late were included in the count.
What happened defied “Pennsylvania’s constitution which states that the voting process is to be determined by the legislature.”
State law prohibits the procedure followed. Rules were changed for Election 2020.
Despite an election-day landslide for Trump, state authorities claimed he only won about 20% of mail-in votes.
It gets worse.
Gateway Pundit: Trump “won two thirds of the Election Day vote.”
Except for “Philadelphia, (he) won around 80% of the (in-person) vote in each county in the state.”
“In almost every county throughout the state, (he) was awarded a percent of votes 40% less than the percent (he) won on election day.”
The pattern was almost the same in “every county (except) Philadelphia” where he only got “30%” of the election day total.
Consistent results in the state’s 67 counties — except for Philadelphia — were “almost” statistically impossible.
It never happened before in the state, maybe never again. The pattern was unlike results in previous US presidential elections.
“It is clear that corrupt (Dems) in Pennsylvania did all they could to steal the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden,” said Gateway Pundit.
“There was no excitement for the Biden campaign and there still isn’t.”
He and Harris didn’t win Pennsylvania. State election authorities stole it from Trump.
Note: Judicial Watch head Tom Fitton reported that “(i)n PA there are more people voting than are registered to vote,” adding:
An “electoral coup” occurred on November 3.
According to Judicial Watch data, “many states report(ed) voter registration rates above 100%” of registered voter totals.
“(A)cross America…voter (rolls) are filthy in terms of having more people on the(m) than are eligible to vote.”
As of September 2020, “335 US counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens.”
For Election 2020, “vote totals are changing because of unprecedented, extraordinary, illicitly secretive, and inherently suspect counting AFTER” polls closed.
In a follow-up report, Gateway Pundit said “WE CAUGHT THEM” in Michigan.
Dems “stole the battleground states,” including Michigan. Fraud occurred there similar to what happened in Pennsylvania.
In “three major (Michigan) counties, Trump’s margin was reduced by a minimum of 138,000 votes.”
“The transfer was done by a computer algorithm that linearly transferred the votes from Trump to Biden.”
The “vote transfer was greater in Republican precincts than” Dem ones.
“Tens of thousands of votes were transferred” this way — from Trump to Biden/Harris.
Similar evidence is likely to surface in other swing states if independent analysis is conducted.
According to an AmericanThinker.com report, Georgia’s recount is “being conducted with as little respect for transparency as the original vote count.”
In Georgia and other states, millions of ballots were mailed “to anyone on the voter registers” — including former state residents and deceased ones, maybe non-registered voters as well.
In Dem-run states, “voting became as easy and as vulnerable to fraud as going to a shopping mall, filling out names on slips of paper” for almost anything, including for someone else.
The Georgia recount is doing “nothing” to correct this fraud.
Most likely, the same is true in unknown numbers of other states.
The bottom line is that US elections lack legitimacy.
Ballots can be counted, discarded, or shifted to someone else — including by electronic ease for in-person voting.
Swing states for Biden that Trump won in 2016 likely turned out this way.
When election procedures are suspect, legitimacy of results is absent.
In election 2020, Trump got more votes than any other GOP presidential candidate in US history, more than his own 2016 total — including in unlikely places like New York city.
He drew huge crowds for campaign rallies compared to sparse ones for Biden.
Despite evidence of significant election fraud in key swing states as discussed above and in previous articles, establishment media across the board and DHS pretended that none occurred.
Do your own fact-checking. Judge for yourself.
Independent historians one day will likely explain that Biden/Harris were declared winners of Election 2020 they lost to Trump.
As things now stand, that’s likely how the race for the White House will turn out.
Popular sentiment in most states, including key swing ones, and Trump both lost.
So did the notion of a free, fair, and open process.
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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.”
At TFF, we are blessed by having a number of peace and future scholars, world-leading in their professions, who have followed world events over many decades and continue to be committed to world order change and public education.
I say “blessed” because I assume that the reader share my reverence for high age and the sharing of long life experience as well as the wisdom that may accompany it in the midst of the youth-worshipping which characterises the ageing and increasingly grumpy West itself – also sometimes called age discrimination.
Last month we celebrated Johan Galtung at 90. And today, Richard Falk at 90 – both world-renowned mega-productive scholars restlessly seeking ways to make the world a more peaceful place. And both TFF Associates, mentors and friends of the founders even before we set up TFF in 1985.
As a student of sociology, peace and world affairs in the 1970s, I had been drawn to Falk’s pioneering writings and textbooks – and the “relevantly utopian” World Order Models Project, WOMP, that he participated in. I then met him in Lisbon for that project’s meeting in 1980 and have benefited ever since from his academic/law perspectives, peace thinking as well as from his sophisticated, elegantly complex style of writing.
In sum, more than 380 pieces of theory, visions, commentaries, analyses and debate articles. Although this is only a fraction of his total production, I allow myself to interpret this publication result as a modest token of my deep gratitude and my joy of paying back a little of what he has so generously given TFF and me personally during all these years – not the least, I may add, by reading and editing all these articles before I posted them!
It isn’t easy, perhaps actually impossible, to pin down who Richard Falk is, incessantly writing and speaking around the world, over so many years. But it suffices here to just celebrate the incredible diversity. Richard’s lifelong engagement with the Palestinian people stands out – as do critical analyses of USand NATO militarism and interventionism; Middle Eastern developments and wars, of course; international law and the UN in particular – we share a big heart for its basic idea and role in the world – as well as nonviolence and peace and analysis of topical issues such as this from just a couple of days ago. . .
Richard Falk is Jewish and explains what this identity means to him and, in passing, why he cannot in spite of his critical attitude to Zionism be categorized as he has been, as a self-hating Jew. He speaks rather from an ecumenical perspective – of great significance for world peace thinking:
“In a more fundamental respect my own evolution has always been suspicious of those who give priority to tribalist or sectarian identities. In other words, it is fine to affirm being Jewish, but it should not take precedence over being human or being open and receptive to the insight and wisdom of other traditions. We have reached a point in the political and cultural evolution that our future flourishing as a species vitally depends upon the spread of a more ecumenical ethos. We have expressed this embrace of otherness in relation to food, with the rise of ‘fusion’ cuisines, and with regard to popular culture, particularly music, where all kinds of borrowing and synthesis are perceived as exciting, authentic, valuable.”
And…
“In my experience what is most appropriate in our historical circumstances is an ecumenical and inclusive spiritual identity, and associated ethical and political commitments. In effect, what would awaken the collective sensibilities of the peoples of the earth to the challenges confronting humanity is a movement of spiritual and ethical globalization that approaches the universal through an immersion in a variety of particularities.
In this sense, I want to say, yes I am Jewish, and proud of it, but I am equally indigenous, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian to the extent that I allow myself to participate in their rituals, partake of their sacred texts, and seek and avail myself of the opportunity to sit at the feet of their masters. Many persons living deprived lives do not have or desire such ecumenical opportunities, and can best approach this universal ideal, by seeking out the inclusive potentialities of their own religious and cultural reality.”
Of course, like many other experts critical of Israel’s policies in general and policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians, he has been accused of anti-Semitism. In this short video from autumn 2019, you’ll see how he – careful with formulations around the complexity of the issue – explains how Zionism’s rejection/diversion of all criticism as anti-Semitism has more dimensions and purposes than we may have thought of. Indeed, this short sequence a pearl of pedagogics.
Richard’s style of writing has literary qualities way beyond the normal academic text – and without losing its precision and attempted rational reasoning. That may very well have to do with his reading of fiction and his own writing of poetry.
You’ll see in Memoir sketch – Championing lost causes how literary-philosophical classics such as Albert Camus influences his thinking, not only about external academic issues and the world but what it means to be an intellectual acting responsibly into that world and – even in dark times – avoid the traps of losing hope and being overtaken by fear.
In this article he pays tribute to one of his dearest friends, literature professor Edward Said (1935-2003) taking as his point of departure Said’s 1997 essay “On lost causes”, something which he elaborates further on in this 2014 article in The Nation about the future of Palestine.
It wasn’t before he turned 80 that Falk started his personal blog, Global Justice in the 21st Century which contains posts of a fascinating diversity and in a quantity that makes you wonder whether the man ever sleeps (he maintains that he does but gives the impression that to him sleep is an unfortunate, necessary waste of time; it’s a feeling we share).
Not to be missed, throughout this blog, he explores directly and indirectly what it means to be what he calls a citizens pilgrim. He defines that as an identity shaped through an appreciative reference to ‘the citizen pilgrim,’ that is, to the citizen whose conscience is directed at others without heeding boundaries of space or time, or such contingent features of identity as nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, class. The citizen pilgrim has embarked upon what is essentially a spiritual journey or pilgrimage, seeking an inspirational future that seems neither feasible nor impossible. Such an inspirational dedication also minimizes the imaginative foreclosures of mortality, making the certainty of death a part of life, and accepting this destiny without seeking the comfort of metaphysical fictions, and thus not deeply disconcerted by ‘the dying of the light.’
As I’ve hinted above, parallel with his academic and political production, Richard has consistently grappled with what it means to be a responsible intellectual – over the moral aspects of his lifelong project and its meandering path. “Responsible scholarship in dark times” from 2007 is but one of many such thoughtful pieces – rare in the academic world – with the greatest relevance for today’s – no less dark – world in which true knowledge, not to mention wisdom, seems to have lost out to the fast market’s banality-driven timespan-contracting and impulsive clicking fad that gives priority to fast, smart opinions rather than the slower knowledge-building – in short, a new illiteracy.
The world as a whole and as we experience it today in a macro-historical perspective has not progressed to the better, towards what he has struggled and hoped for. But is he frustrated?
This little tribute to one of the most prolific and elegantly-reasoning social scientists of our time cannot be anything but kaleidoscopic. The reader is advised to explore the Falk universe and its enlightenment on their own, perhaps through some of the links provided in this article.
Of particular importance for our relations with him is, naturally, his deep belief in and advocacy of using all the civilian means at humanity’s disposal and only use violence as the last resort, completely in unison with the UN Charter’s Article 1 – the promotion of which is TFF’s mission.
An example. Already in September 2002 – about half a year before the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq with its allies under Goerge W. Bush, Falk pulled the entire project apart, intellectually, legally, politically and morally in this short article on TFF – “A roadmap to war: A flawed debate.”
Falk stated his factual and intuitive pre-war criticism succinctly as did other TFF Associates such as Hans von Sponeck, Johan Galtung, Brian Martin, David Krieger, Burns Weston, Birgitte Rahbek, Else Hammerich and myself to mention some of the more vocal anti-intervention voices at the time.
It’s noteworthy that all TFF Associates who advised strongly against that war before it started also predicted its catastrophic consequences it would have in Iraq as well as for the possibility of a new and more benign world order that had been made possible by the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. But few politicians and media in the US and NATO countries had any wish or capacity to listen. Today the consequences of that insensitive and self-destructive militarism causes the decline of the US and NATO itself.
If a Nobel Peace Prize should, for the first time, be awarded to a peace and conflict scholar, Richard Falk would be on top of the shortlist. Fortunately, he is on the list of the Nobel Peace Prize Watch. Here you may read the motivation for his nomination, every year over the last 12.
However, like Johan Galtung and the other qualified people on that list, Falk is probably too central to the essential peace concerns as Alfred Nobel expressed them in his will to ever even be considered – not that I think it bothers him the slightest.
My wife and co-founder Christina – and many other TFF Associates – join you today to say thank you, dear Richard, for your friendship, mentorship and TFF Associateship over more than 40 years.
As we look forward, we wish you and you wife Hilal Elver everything good in years to come, good health in particular so you can continue happily your citizen’s pilgrimage which will, beyond a doubt, continue to inspire way beyond your own time and space. And do continue your daily ping-pong matches too…
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The head of the Joe Biden transition team for the US Agency for Global Media, Richard Stengel, has branded himself the “chief propagandist,” urged the government to use propaganda against its “own population,” and called to “rethink” the First Amendment.
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Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.
A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the carefully management of the public’s access to information.
Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”
Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”
The head of the Joe Biden transition team for state media @USAGMgov, Richard @Stengel, called himself the “chief propagandist” and advocated using propaganda against your “own population.”
The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.
Stengel’s appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad.
From Obama admin’s “chief propagandist” to Russiagate-peddling MSNBC pundit
Before being appointed as the US State Department’s “chief propagandist” in 2013, Richard Stengel was a managing editor of TIME Magazine.
In the Obama administration, Stengel not only created the Global Engagement Center propaganda vehicle; he also boasted that he “led the creation of English for All, a government-wide effort to promote the teaching of English around the world.”
After leaving the State Department in 2016, Stengel became a strategic advisor to Snap Inc., the company that runs the social media apps Snapchat and Bitmoji.
Stengel also found time for a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a think tankclosely linked to NATO and the Biden camp which has received funding from the US government, Britain, the European Union, and NATO itself, along with a host of Western weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, Gulf monarchies, and Big Tech juggernauts.
Stengel worked closely with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a dubious organization that has fueled efforts to censor independent media outlets in the name of fighting “disinformation.”
Stengel left MSNBC this November to join Biden’s presidential transition. The campaign announced that he was tapped to lead the Biden-Harris agency review team for the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Agency review teams are an integral part of the transition process, responsible for evaluating the operations of federal agencies.
Our teams are composed of diverse experts with deep policy expertise, ready to ensure we're prepared to lead on Day One.https://t.co/2gY1E0Ey5k
— Biden-Harris Presidential Transition (@Transition46) November 10, 2020
USAGM is a state media propaganda organization that has its origins in a Cold War vehicle created by the CIA to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union and communist China. (The agency was previously called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, until it rebranded in 2018.)
An agency shakeup this year produced revelations that USAGM provided clandestine assistance to separatist activists during the protests that consumed Hong Kong in 2019. The program earmarked secure communications assistance for protesters and $2 million in “rapid response” payouts for anti-China activists.
Ironic allegations given the US Agency for Global Media – the parent of @VOANews – was just exposed for earmarking $2 million to fuel Hong Kong protests & provide protesters with “secure communications apps.”
Richard Stengel’s “obsessive” crusade against Russian “disinformation”
When Richard Stengel referred to himself as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” advocated the use of propaganda against the American people, and proposed to “rethink” the First Amendment, he was participating in a May 3, 2018 panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
During the CFR event, titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News,” Stengel hyped up the threat of supposed “Russian disinformation,” a vague term that is increasingly used as an empty signifier for any narrative that offends the sensibilities of Washington’s foreign policy establishment.
Stengel stated that he was “obsessed with” fighting “disinformation,” and made it clear he has a particular obsession with Moscow, accusing “the Russians” of engaging in “full spectrum” disinformation.
Joining him on stage was political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill, who mourned that alternative media platforms publish “things that seem like they could be true… that’s the sphere where it’s particularly difficult to debunk them… it’s this gray region, this gray zone, where it’s not traditional disinformation, but a combination of misinformation and play on rumors, conspiracy theories, sort of gray propaganda, that’s where I think the nub or the crux of the problem lies.”
Stengel approved, adding, “By the way those terms, the gray zone, are all from Russian active measures, that they’ve been doing for a million years.”
The panelists made no effort to hide their disdain for independent and foreign media outlets. Stengel stated clearly that a “news cartel” of mainstream corporate media outlets had long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those “cartels don’t have hegemony like they used to.”
Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.
“The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us. And the Russians in particular are smart about this,” Stengel grumbled.
He singled out Russia’s state-funded media network, RT, lamenting that “Vladimir Putin, when they launched Russia Today, said it was an antidote to the American English hegemony over the world media system. That’s how people saw it.”
Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Misinformation Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, lamented that “RT is invading every weekly finance media space.”
But Decker was cheered by the proliferation of US oligarchs committed to retaking control of the narrative. “In America and across the world,” he stated, “the donor community is very eager to address this problem, and very eager to work with communities of researchers, academics, journalists, etc. to target this problem.”
“I think that there is an appetite to solve this from the top down,” he continued, urging the many academics in the audience “to apply for grant money” in order to fight this Russian “disinformation.”
The CFR panel culminated with an African audience member rising from the crowd and confronting Stengel: “Because what is happening in America is what the United States flipped on the Global South and in the Third World, which we lived with, for many, many years, in terms of a master narrative that was and still is propaganda,” the man declared.
Rather than respond, Stengel rudely ignored the question and made his way hurriedly for the exit: “You know what, I hate last questions. Don’t you? I never, I usually just want to end something before the last question.”
The video of the revealing confrontation caused such a furor that CFR’s YouTube account disabled comments and made the video unlisted. It cannot be found in a search on Google or YouTube; it can only be found with the direct link.
The video of the full discussion is embedded below:
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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated
On Tuesday, Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.
The team is led by Kathleen Hicks, who worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration. Hicks most recent employer is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank that receives contributions from arms makers like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, to name a few.
CSIS also receives contributions from governments. The think tank’s top government donors are the US, the UAE, Taiwan, and Japan. Two other CSIS employees are on the transition team; Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, who both worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration.
CSIS employees author policy papers and Op-Eds that generally call for more US involvement around the world. In August, Hicks co-authored an Op-Ed in The Hill titled, “Pentagon Action to Withdraw from Germany Benefits Our Adversaries,” a piece that slammed Trump’s plan to draw down troops from Germany, which Biden could to call off.
Two members of the transition team come from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon employee, and Ely Ratner, who served as deputy national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017.
Three more team members list their latest employer as the RAND Corporation,Stacie Pettyjohn, a wargaming expert, Christine Wormuth, who held a few roles in the Obama administration, and Terri Tanielian, a behavioral scientist.
A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skelly, from CACI International, and Victor Garcia, from Rebellion Defense.
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Dave DeCamp is the assistant news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.
Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health.[1] Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.
The UK’s pandemic response provides at least four examples of suppression of science or scientists. First, the membership, research, and deliberations of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were initially secret until a press leak forced transparency.[2] The leak revealed inappropriate involvement of government advisers in SAGE, while exposing under-representation from public health, clinical care, women, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, the government was also recently ordered to release a 2016 report on deficiencies in pandemic preparedness, Operation Cygnus, following a verdict from the Information Commissioner’s Office.[3,4]
Next, a Public Health England report on covid-19 and inequalities. The report’s publication was delayed by England’s Department of Health; a section on ethnic minorities was initially withheld and then, following a public outcry, was published as part of a follow-up report.[5,6] Authors from Public Health England were instructed not to talk to the media. Third, on 15 October, the editor of the Lancet complained that an author of a research paper, a UK government scientist, was blocked by the government from speaking to media because of a “difficult political landscape.”[7]
Now, a new example concerns the controversy over point-of-care antibody testing for covid-19.[8] The prime minister’s Operation Moonshot depends on immediate and wide availability of accurate rapid diagnostic tests.[9] It also depends on the questionable logic of mass screening—currently being trialled in Liverpool with a suboptimal PCR test.[10,11]
The incident relates to research published this week by The BMJ, which finds that the government procured an antibody test that in real world tests falls well short of performance claims made by its manufacturers.[12,13] Researchers from Public Health England and collaborating institutions sensibly pushed to publish their study findings before the government committed to buying a million of these tests but were blocked by the health department and the prime minister’s office.[14] Why was it important to procure this product without due scrutiny? Prior publication of research on a preprint server or a government website is compatible with The BMJ’s publication policy. As if to prove a point, Public Health England then unsuccessfully attempted to block The BMJ’s press release about the research paper.
Politicians often claim to follow the science, but that is a misleading oversimplification. Science is rarely absolute. It rarely applies to every setting or every population. It doesn’t make sense to slavishly follow science or evidence. A better approach is for politicians, the publicly appointed decision makers, to be informed and guided by science when they decide policy for their public. But even that approach retains public and professional trust only if science is available for scrutiny and free of political interference, and if the system is transparent and not compromised by conflicts of interest.
Suppression of science and scientists is not new or a peculiarly British phenomenon. In the US, President Trump’s government manipulated the Food and Drug Administration to hastily approve unproved drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir.[15] Globally, people, policies, and procurement are being corrupted by political and commercial agendas.[16]
The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.[17] Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science—another form of misuse—and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.[18]
How might science be safeguarded in these exceptional times? The first step is full disclosure of competing interests from government, politicians, scientific advisers, and appointees, such as the heads of test and trace, diagnostic test procurement, and vaccine delivery. The next step is full transparency about decision making systems, processes, and knowing who is accountable for what.
Once transparency and accountability are established as norms, individuals employed by government should ideally only work in areas unrelated to their competing interests. Expertise is possible without competing interests. If such a strict rule becomes impractical, minimum good practice is that people with competing interests must not be involved in decisions on products and policies in which they have a financial interest.
Governments and industry must also stop announcing critical science policy by press release. Such ill judged moves leave science, the media, and stock markets vulnerable to manipulation. Clear, open, and advance publication of the scientific basis for policy, procurements, and wonder drugs is a fundamental requirement.[19]
The stakes are high for politicians, scientific advisers, and government appointees. Their careers and bank balances may hinge on the decisions that they make. But they have a higher responsibility and duty to the public. Science is a public good. It doesn’t need to be followed blindly, but it does need to be fairly considered. Importantly, suppressing science, whether by delaying publication, cherry picking favourable research, or gagging scientists, is a danger to public health, causing deaths by exposing people to unsafe or ineffective interventions and preventing them from benefiting from better ones. When entangled with commercial decisions it is also maladministration of taxpayers’ money.
Politicisation of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now regrettably commonplace in democracies.[20] The medical-political complex tends towards suppression of science to aggrandise and enrich those in power. And, as the powerful become more successful, richer, and further intoxicated with power, the inconvenient truths of science are suppressed. When good science is suppressed, people die.
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ScallyG, JacobsonB, AbbasiK. The UK’s public health response to covid-19. BMJ2020;369:m1932.doi:10.1136/bmj.m1932pmid:32414712
IacobucciG. Pandemic preparedness: Government must release 2016 report, says information commissioner. BMJ2020;371:m3953. doi:10.1136/bmj.m3953pmid:33046458
IacobucciG, CoombesR. Covid-19: Government plans to spend £100bn on expanding testing to 10 million a day. BMJ2020;370:m3520. doi:10.1136/bmj.m3520pmid:32907851
IacobucciG. Covid-19: mass population testing is rolled out in Liverpool. BMJ2020;371:m4268.doi:10.1136/bmj.m4268pmid:33144291
IacobucciG. Covid-19: rapid test missed over 50% of positive cases in Manchester pilot. BMJ2020;371:m4323.doi:10.1136/bmj.m4323pmid:33158908
RanyaM, JonesHE, SianT-P, et al. Accuracy of UK rapid test consortium (UK-RTC) “AbC-19 rapid test” for detection of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection in key workers: test accuracy study. BMJ2020;371:m4262.
DipenderG, PonsfordMJ. Testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. BMJ2020;371:m4288.
ArmstrongS. Covid-19: Government buried negative data on its favoured antibody test. BMJ2020;371:m4353.doi:10.1136/bmj.m4353
Amid a global public-health crisis and with oil prices at extreme lows, the lame duck Trump administration is expected to issue a “request for nominations” as early as Monday, asking oil companies to identify their preferences on areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to lease for oil drilling. This is the latest move by the Trump administration in its rushed process to open one of the nation’s most iconic and sacred landscapes to oil drilling.
The case for protecting this sacred land is so clear that five of the six major U.S. banks — Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo — are among the two dozen banks around the world that have announced they will not fund any new oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge. And President-elect Biden has made permanent protection for the Arctic Refuge and other areas impacted by President Trump’s attack on federal lands and waters a Day One priority.
Indigenous leaders issued the following statements:
“The oil and gas lease sales on the Arctic Refuge demonstrate the Trump administration’s complete disregard for the human rights of the Gwich’in & Inupiat people and our ways of life that depend on the health of the Refuge’s coastal plain,” said Jody Potts (Han Gwich’in), Native Movement regional director. “In the Arctic, our peoples are being heavily impacted by a climate crisis due to fossil fuel extraction, which we cannot afford to continue. The adverse impacts of oil development in these sacred and critical caribou calving grounds will be heavily felt by Gwich’in and Inupiat villages. As a Gwich’in person, I know my family’s food security, culture, spirituality and ways of life are at stake. Gwich’in people will not compromise and we will defend our way of life for future generations until this sacred land is permanently protected.”
“The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is sacred land that sustains not just the Gwich’in and Iñupiat Peoples but is one of the last untouched ecosystems in the world,” said the director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic (SILA), Siqiñiq Maupin. “The global consciousness is shifting into an equitable and just transition to a sustainable economy, yet the United States continues to ignore science and human rights. Indigenous Peoples have passed down stories for generations of the climate crisis we are currently facing. Without Indigenous leadership and values going forward we are left with empty promises, boom and bust economy, and endangering the health and safety for all. Iñupiat People value all life and the narrative of our Iñupiaq Nation supporting this type of project goes against all our principles, ways of life, and who we are. SILA stands in solidarity with the Gwich’in for protection of the Porcupine caribou birthing grounds.”
“This administration has consistently ignored our voices and dismissed our concerns. Our food security, our land and our way of life is on the verge of being destroyed. Handing up this very sacred area to oil companies is a violation of our human rights,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. “Any company thinking about participating in this corrupt process should know that they will have to answer to the Gwich’in people and the millions of Americans who stand with us. We will continue to protect this place forever. This fight is far from over, and we will do whatever it takes to defend our sacred homelands.”
“The Trump administration opening up oil lease sales is devastating to our way of life and to our future,” said members of the Gwich’in Youth Council. “The Gwich’in people’s identity is connected to the land, water and animals. We have lost so much we can’t afford to lose more. Please stand with the Gwich’in Nation and help us prevent oil extraction in the calving grounds of the porcupine caribou herd, the sacred place where life begins.”
Earthjustice Deputy Managing Attorney Erik Grafe, in the Alaska regional office, issued the following statement:
“This is the Trump administration’s midnight effort to sell off irreplaceable lands in the refuge before a new day dawns. We are already in court challenging the administration’s decision to open the whole coastal plain to leasing, and we’ll hold the line against this rushed attempt to implement the unlawful program. As the majority of Americans know, the Arctic Refuge is no place to drill.”
A coalition of indigenous, human rights and environmental organizations responded as follows:
“The Trump administration is barreling forward with a last-minute lease sale in America’s most iconic wilderness after sidestepping the environmental review process mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act. The Interior Department’s own documents show it has altered or disregarded scientific data on drilling’s impacts on imperiled wildlife, including threatened polar bears who den on the coastal plain; drastically overestimated potential leasing revenue; and failed to adequately consult with the Indigenous Peoples of the Gwichʼin Nation of Alaska and Canada who make their home along the migratory route of the Porcupine caribou herd and rely on the herd for their survival.
“The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) should not move forward with this rushed lease sale. This agency acknowledged that drilling would release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but asserted that, ‘there is not a climate crisis.’ BLM has compromised the integrity of its analysis and the hard-working career scientists and professionals who have dedicated themselves to protecting the coastal plain’s exceptional values. BLM should scrap this flawed review and start over. The agency needs to truly, thoroughly assess all the impacts from oil and gas activities before holding a lease sale.
“Political appointees in the Trump administration have flouted the law at the expense of a wondrous expanse of land that has sustained Indigenous Peoples for thousands of years and that the vast majority of Americans want to protect. Any company that is foolish enough to participate in this sham process must now know that we are fully committed to challenging these legally flawed actions in court. The will of the American people and the rule of law will prevail.”
Members of the public are encouraged to stand with these communities in opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Learn more here.
Contacts
Corey Himrod, Alaska Wilderness League
Nicole Schmitt, Alaska Wildlife Alliance
Pam Miller, Arctic Audubon Society
Rebecca Sentner, Audubon Alaska
Chris Rider, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Yukon Chapter
Gwen Dobbs, Defenders of Wildlife
Rebecca Bowe, Earthjustice
Rose Mohammadi, Environment America
David Raskin, Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges
Patrick Davis, Friends of the Earth US
Emily Samsel, League of Conservation Voters
Matt Smelser, National Audubon Society
Anne Hawke, Natural Resources Defense Council
Erica Watson, Northern Alaska Environmental Center
Gabby Brown, Sierra Club
Tim Woody, The Wilderness Society
Dawnell Smith, Trustees for Alaska
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Pakistan’s prime minister said he has been under “pressure” to recognize Israel. However, Islamabad will never recognize the “Zionist” state until a just settlement is reached for the decadeslong Palestinian issue.
In an interview with a local broadcaster aired on Thursday night, Imran Khan, nonetheless, refused to name the countries that have been pressuring him to recognize Israel.
“Are they non-Muslim or Muslim countries that have been putting pressure on you?” the anchorperson asked in an attempt to get a clear answer.
“Leave this (question). There are things we cannot say. We have good relations with them (countries),” Khan said.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain have recently established diplomatic and economic relations with Tel Aviv. Some other Gulf countries are also weighing options to normalize relations with Israel.
“Let us stand on our own feet in terms of economy, then you may ask these questions,” Khan said, referring to Islamabad’s longtime economic dependence on the oil-rich Gulf states, largely Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
He, however, made it clear that he has no “second thought” about recognizing Israel.
“I have no second thought to recognize Israel unless there is a just settlement, which satisfies Palestinians,” he went on to say.
Referring to the country’s founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who time and again had refused to recognize Israel, the premier said Islamabad would continue to follow in Jinnah’s footsteps vis-a-vis Palestine.
Israel, he observed, has had a deep influence in the United States, which is another country pressurizing him to recognize Israel.
“The pressure is because of Israel’s deep impact (influence) in the US. This (influence) was in fact extraordinary during Trump’s stint,” he maintained.
Replying to a series of questions about Islamabad’s future relations with U.S. President-elect Joe Biden‘s administration with special reference to Afghanistan, Khan said there will be no “change” in Washington’s ongoing Afghan policy, which aims to bring an end to the 19-year bloody conflict through a political settlement in the war-torn country.
“Afghanistan is not the real issue. The real issue is Israel. It is to be seen how he (Biden) deals with that. Whether he changes Trump’s policies (about Israel) or continue with them.”
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One dogma that is likely to persist in US foreign policy during a Biden presidency will be the sanctions regime adopted towards Iran. Every messianic state craves clearly scripted enemies, and the demonology about the Islamic Republic is not going to go begging. Elliot Abrams, the current US special representative for Iran, told Associated Press on November 12 that,
“Even if you went back to the (nuclear deal) and even if the Iranians were willing to return … this newly enriched uranium, you would not have solved these fundamental questions of whether Iran is going to be permitted to violate long-term commitments it has made to the world community.”
It is worth pointing out that it was President Donald Trump who proved so itchy to renege on the nuclear deal to begin with. In May 2018, his administration formally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the long negotiated harvest of the Obama administration in July 2015. Over the course of 120 days, it re-imposed all previously lifted economic sanctions, including “secondary sanctions” on non-US entities conducting financial or commercial transactions with Iran. A unilateral shredding of Washington’s own undertakings was made while still expecting the mullahs to continue in sweet compliance.
The less than compliant response from Tehran has not made this one of Trump’s finer moments: an abandonment of nuclear limits marked out by the agreement; a resumption of the nuclear program; an increasingly emboldened stance in the Middle East. According to UN inspectors, Iran’s enriched stockpile currently lies at 2,440 kilograms. Under the deal, it would have been under 300 kilograms. All of this took place despite the precipitous fall in oil exports, a decline in currency value and a steep rise in inflation.
Even before the pandemic, human rights organisations were already warning about the broader health implications of a brutal sanctions regime. As Human Rights Watch explained in an October 2019 report, the consequences of such sanctions “pose a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines – and has almost certainly contributed to documented shortages – ranging from a lack of critical drugs for epilepsy patients to limited chemotherapy medications for Iranians with cancer.”
The US State Department and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control continue to maintain that humanitarian goods, which also covers medicine and medical supplies, are exempt in the sanctions policy. A rosily inaccurate picture, given the imposition of sanctions on 18 Iranian banks including those entities engaged in financing foods and medicines. To this comes the added complication of what the US considers “dual use” items: hazmat suits, face shields, oxygen generators, air filters. Decisions to grant exemptions, the purview of bureaucrats, are tardily made.
The advent of the novel coronavirus pandemic inspired a ghoulish train of thought in the Trump administration. Easing sanctions to better enable Iran to cope with COVID-19 was never entertained. Instead, as Djavad Salehi-Isfahani of the Brookings Institute observed, “the US piled on more sanctions, and chose to ignore calls from world leaders, former US diplomats, and the United Nations to ease sanctions.” Such a bloodthirsty sentiment was captured by the Wall Street Journal in March 2020, whose editors decided that sanctions should continue, despite Iran becoming a pandemic hotspot. “If American sanctions were the culprit, it might be reasonable to consider lifting them. But the regime’s incompetence and self-interest are to blame.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif thought differently of it, accusing the US of “medical terrorism” in blunting Tehran’s efforts to access financial resources during the COVID-19 crisis. Hadi Yazdani, a physician and a member of the reformist Union of Islamic People Party, sports a more nuanced view: US sanctions have well hobbled the government’s pandemic policy, but so has inefficiency and habitual bureaucratic mismanagement.
The dedicatedly nasty sanctions regime encouraged and enforced by the United States is now frustrating efforts in the country to make advance payment to the COVAX facility, created to assist in providing future COVID-19 vaccines to more indigent states. This will become more pressing, given rising death tolls. (On November 13, 461 were reported in the state media.)
The rate of COVID-19 infections is also scorching: 11,737 cases over 24 hours from Friday, according to Sima Sadat Lari, a health ministry spokeswoman who has become the regular herald of doom. She also admitted that various questions on the vaccines remained unanswered, notably in terms of “how effective the vaccine is and for what groups it is more effective.”
During the transition period in US politics, we can expect the Trump administration to be particularly testy about modifying its position on sanctions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continues to busy himself with blacklisting Iranian entities. The Treasury Department, for instance, recently placed a supply chain network on the list, claiming it “facilitated the procurement of sensitive goods, including US-origin electronic components” for an Iranian entity linked to the production of “military communication systems, avionics, information technology, electronic warfare, and missile launchers.”
Pompeo – and in this, he has a few devotees- argues that a return to the nuclear deal would be dotty and dangerous. “It’s a crazy idea to think that you’re going to get back into a deal that permitted a clean pathway for the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon by which they could terrorize the entire world.” President-elect Joe Biden, for his part, insists that Iran “must return to strict compliance with the deal. If it does so, I would rejoin the agreement and use our renewed commitment to diplomacy to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities.”
The statements of the president-elect suggest nothing comforting to health specialists and policy makers bearing witness to the suffering caused by sanctions. Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy might be abandoned in name, but will continue exerting a haunting influence. The hawks in the Republican Party will be sharpening their talons, ever watchful of any softening towards Tehran.
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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]
Criticised by orthodox Marxists for being a “pseudo-left” agitator, Herbert Marcuse was nonetheless committed to a scientific study of the material conditions of industrial capitalism.
Herbert Marcuse’s theoretical development was rooted in his analysis of the relationship between civilisation and domination. His critique of the rule of the consumer society reflects a synthesis of such earlier theorists as Freud and Marx, and adds to a wealth of critical social theory by the Frankfurt school.
Marcuse argues that a process of alienation consists in consumer society that results in one’s being alienated from nature and eros. He contends that capitalist and state communist societies dominate individuals and the whole citizenry through a one-dimensional productive apparatus, dominated from within by instrumental rationalities that suppress values that can’t be validated by the status quo, thus integrating individuals into regulated modes of thought and behaviour. Marcuse worried that the hegemony of instrumental rationalities in all spheres of life denied oxygen to the alternative, critical rationalities necessary to stimulate visionary social change. All these elements coalesced to create an original and vibrant politics of liberation that ran deep through the culture of the sixties.
Capitalism and alienation
Like in Marx, Marcuse’s philosophy of liberation argues that the central problem of modernity is that class society and capitalism alienates the essence of our humanity. As a critic of industrialisation, Marcuse was attentive to the fact that the consolidation of industrial society had created a mass of unhappy humans robbed of their full creative potential, whilst concurrently turning us into systematic abusers of nature. It is a development of Marx’s argument that under the capitalist economic system the interests and wellbeing of the individual and wider society are lost in alienated labour.
According to Marx, wage labour demands subjection to specialised, menial tasks which may not be socially useful, which may even be socially harmful, and which tend to lack the meaningful, creative and self-expressive aspects of fulfilling labour. He argued alongside Engels that workers are alienated from their product because their product is appropriated in the agenda to extract profit from it, and that they are alienated from their own productive activity insofar as they have no control over it and it doesn’t express their goals. On this view there is an antagonism between human instinct and the demands of capitalist society. The economic system permanently subjugates the instincts, the instincts we ought to nurture in order to fully live.
Marx calls this process the alienation of “species being,” the frustration of our intrinsically human capacity to engage in conscious and creative work. It is precisely because capitalism frustrates the need for satisfying, gratifying work that it is an alienating system. Moreover, capitalism creates alienation because it is an economic model in which the masses do not own the means of production, and thus have to survive by working within the capitalist system, selling their labour power at a rate that extorts them. In addition, under capitalism we find our lives dominated by faceless powers. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe alienation as “the positing of social activity, the consolidation of our product as a real power over us, growing out of our control.” Marcuse could see from the perspective of the twentieth century that Marx had been right, and if anything alienation had become more entrenched and extreme with time, with workers losing even more control over the direction of their lives and society.
In 1964, reflecting on the alienation of man in the planned waste and irrational affluence of the consumer society, Marcuse asked how man can end “his servitude on an exploitative apparatus, which in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude.” Developing Marx’s line of thought on the alienation of the individual in commodity fetishism – the erotic identification of consumers with the objects they purchase – Marcuse added that their interests are lost in the alienated labour needed to create the products and services which constitute false, manufactured needs. At the basis of the consumer society is a means of production which superficially satisfies people by meeting their basic needs whilst avalanching them simultaneously with false, socially created needs.
Because false needs – those that are external to our basic, vital needs – are “superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression” the prospect of meeting everybody’s needs and eliminating the cruel prevalence of toil and injustice to deal with scarcity is limited. Thus the social controls of wasteful production and consumption prevail whilst workers are too stultified by the avalanche of products and diversions to think critically, outside of the whole. To maintain the system we are needed as its consumers and we internalise the ethics (or lack thereof) of the system. We work in order to consume because we must keep buying. Our motivations and aspirations are created and shaped entirely within the system. The consumer society has perfected the manipulation of our innermost needs as it creates an unprecedented and extensive regime of control over our personal and social behaviour.
In Eros and Civilisation Marcuse declared that civilisation “is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.” Since alienated labour is hoisted to the demands of productivity and the performance principle, it eviscerates energies that might, in a non-repressive society, be applied to non-alienated libidinal work. Contrary to Freud, Marcuse argues that the need to repress instinct to deal with scarcity is now minimised by technological accomplishments. Freud had argued that the repression of eros by degrees of sublimation allowed for human energy to be applied fruitfully in labour to defeat resource scarcity, and he believed the pleasure principle ought to be denied in the interest of the performance principle.
Marcuse on the other hand reasoned that because technological advancements promised to provide for our basic needs, even to excess, scarcity was a void justification for repression, and he saw in society an avalanche of false needs and organised, managed scarcity to defend the reign of the performance principle. Instead of repressing eros in the interest of control, growth and the status quo, he argued we ought to create a new society based on non-repressive relations, incorporating automation to provide for necessities whilst we use our free time to cultivate our human potentialities and liberate our consciousness.
An inextricable aspect of Marcuse’s theory is the role that alienation of external nature also plays in a repressive civilisation. He detested the wasteful production and consumption of the industrialised world, lamenting the fact that human energies couldn’t be harnessed for more socially and ecologically useful enterprises. According to Marcuse’s ecological vision, the instrumental rationalities at the heart of advanced industrial civilisation rationalise domination over nature, resulting in the subsequent objectification of people and environments in extractivist economic systems. Marcuse sees the liberation of people and environments, their protection and preservation from organised exploitation, as a struggle with equal stakes. His work drew a decisive link between technological development and domination, reasoning that teleologies of modernity which conflate capitalism with progress were fundamentally flawed. Marcuse saw many problems with the ideology of the advanced industrial societies. According to his view oppression consists in industrialisation, which assimilates individuals and external nature into the totalising authority of the mode of production.
Marcuse argued that alienation occurs for all groups in society, not just the proletariat, with the advancement of scientism and technology pushing all towards a closed consciousness. Most Marxist consciousness of and reflection on the revolutionary subject had stayed within the parameters delimited by Marx’s theory of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent, as able to overcome their alienation in a worker’s revolution, but Marcuse’s and the New Left’s remediation of Marx was an attempt to temporise left theory with the realities of the twentieth century. Because, as Marcuse argued, negation of capitalist and state communist exploitation could only develop beyond the monolithic one-dimensional society and tightly regulated administration of needs and satisfactions, the assimilated proletariat could not necessarily be depended upon to foment revolution anymore. Marcuse argued the theory had become historically obsolescent because the working classes had been defused and deradicalised by their assimilation into the system of false, manipulated needs. Instead, Marcuse’s theory of one-dimensionality and the Great Refusal argued, we ought to identify where negation of the whole might develop, namely amongst students, minorities and intellectuals. In his view, the Great Refusal was to be a conscious, active transformation of oneself and society, a drive for one’s own liberation and the transformation of the world beyond, to transcend the limitations of the closed off universe, the stultifying conditions of one-dimensional life. It is to this visionary aspect of Marcuse’s theory – the idea of one-dimensional society – that I will now turn.
One-dimensionality
Marcuse’s star rose with the explosion of his study of advanced industrial society into the forefront of critical social theory and practice. First published in 1964, his best known work One-dimensional Man spoke to the anti-authoritarian zeitgeist of the sixties and ameliorated several strands of his thought on society and freedom, arguing that we find ourselves and all other living things to be parts of a vast being in which its entirety has the power to maintain our world as a ripe habitat for its project of domination. Marcuse’s findings and conclusions were very much out of the step with the conventional political wisdom of the West when he published them. Cold War demonology had unequivocally cast communism as the oppressor against liberal democracy, but to Marcuse the truth was more nuanced and complex.
The implication democracies could be oppressive in ways like communism was unwelcome news to those with a vested interest in the status quo, and ideas like that were discouraged to the point Marcuse received death threats. In sum, One-dimensional Man critiques the consumerist, technocratic society and the instrumental rationalities that dominate it from within, suppressing opposition to the irrational status quo and ultimately threatening the realisation of human and individual freedom. According to the theory, the technological administration of society under advanced capitalism (as well as state communism) had assimilated people into a one-dimensional universe, in which potentials for radical social change were curtailed by a subtle network of repression.
Referring to the “society without opposition” and its centralised yet diffused strategies of control and domination, Marcuse wrote that “the distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation,” because the centralised production of needs and aspirations by the experts and administrators of society integrated individuals into the values of the establishment and its restrictive rules of thought and behaviour. Marcuse argued that one-dimensional infrastructure produces one-dimensional people and a cognitive dissonance which stultifies the transformative, restorative power of negative, dialectical thought and critical rationality. In the closed-off universe there is no space for such a thing as a revolutionary agent. Visionary utopian thinking is reduced to Marxist history, irrelevant, forgotten. It is against the repression of these values that Marcuse wrote, in the spirit of a genuinely radical critique.
Marcuse’s flash of enlightenment was the thought that to keep society in stasis, there must be a dominating force regulating it, and that somehow the constellations of new economic, technical and military forces must be involved. One-dimensional Man presented an extensive analysis of the universal system he identified as the mainframe of technological societies, placing special emphasis on the role of the consumer economy in totalising the power of commodities over the collective, the individual psyche and the biological organism. Marcuse’s writings reasoned that there had been a decline of the proletariat as an agent of radical social change, because the destructive engine of one-dimensional thought had successfully subjugated them to false consciousness. In light of these new methods of social control coalescing to contain social change, the relation between democracy and totalitarianism thus becomes much closer and more essential than is usually thought.
As well as reflecting Marcuse’s independent research as a student of the new false consciousness, the theory of one-dimensionality also contributed to the Frankfurt school project which aspired to a critical theory of society and sought to explain the cooptation and subversion of politics, art and culture by the industrial society. The Frankfurt theorists recognised that changes in production and consumption in the twentieth century had had concurrent effects on society which had jeopardized utopian change. They argued that the extension of productivity, the growth of technological efficiency, and the distribution of goods to the masses had given the industrial society a new and disturbingly effective set of introjected social controls. The consumer economy, the “affluent monster”, had created a society which integrated individuals into a system in which their needs and satisfaction were administered from a small island of experts. The purpose of Marcuse’s philosophy was to ask how man can end “his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude?”
Because it only validates thought and behaviour within its rationale, the one-dimensional society represses the emergence of a critical perspective on the problems created by the economic status quo. An avalanche of products, advertising and diversions distract people’s focus from irrational spending on defence and the neglection of public policy to address systemic issues like racism and poverty. This notion of the closed-off universe is the crux of the theory of one-dimensionality and it is deserving of more consideration in order to understand Marcuse’s analysis of the prospects for liberation. Although within the one-dimensional apparatus there is no tension between what is and what could be, his account of it provides grounds for both pessimism and optimism that alternatives may be formulated. In the introduction to One-dimensional Man Marcuse declares that the book will “vacillate throughout between two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society.”
According to the theory, society does contain within it the means for collapse of the internal system of domination. Marcuse reserves a privileged role for critical reason and its potential for criticising irrational forms of social life. Instead of using one-dimensionality as a metaphor for unending totalitarianism, Marcuse meant for it to have a more subtle meaning, as a way of describing the standardised, naturalised mode of thought and behaviour in the advanced industrial state, to which, crucially, there were real – but hidden – alternatives. One-dimensional Man uses comparisons against deficient conditions in society to throw light on alternative states that might be. The gap between the status quo and utopia opens in consciousness of and reflection on what is missing. From Marcuse’s point of view the activity of genuine thinking about social transformation is a fight against democratic totalitarianism and fascism itself.
At the centre of the one-dimensional development was the slow and steady encroachment of instrumental rationalities in all spheres of life in the advanced industrial state. Marcuse wrote extensively on the complexly correlated relationship between technics and society. In an article in French he described his thesis that “technology has replaced ontology ” as the primary means of defining subject-object relations, the basis of our understanding of the world. In other words, instrumental rationalities – rather than dialectical thought- replaced hitherto prevailing ontology, which posited a conscious, active subject confronting a world of controllable objects. The processes, protocols and algorithms of the dominant mode of production subordinated both subject and object to the means and ends of a pre-ordained industrial universe. It was a universe in which the people had next to no control or autonomy over their experience of the world.
On this view, imaginative capabilities become crucial to liberation.
The hegemony of instrumental reason gave rise to a version of social reality which describes itself as objective, neutral, unloaded by bias or value judgements. In truth, it reinforces the instrumental logic which justifies domination of the natural world and human bodies, affirming the value judgement that our worth consists in how much of ourselves we can sacrifice in service of economic growth and exchange value. Marcuse detested this objectivity as a false construct and one more irrefutable verity to do away with. He argued that potential for social transformation consisted in the ability of conscientious citizens to reclaim spaces for radical thought, to claim territories where ‘negative’ thought at odds with the prevailing positivism could flourish. The one-dimensional apparatus was a vicarious, unstable deception that had to militate to ensure it’s own survival, as explosive forces of opposition and dissent began to shatter its foundations in the germination of the Great Refusal, which sought to prefigure an alternative society based on non-repressive relations.
To be continued…
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Nach den Erkenntnissen der Humanwissenschaften Anthropologie, Soziologie und Psychologie besitzt der Mensch von Natur aus einen gesunden Verstand beziehungsweise ein natürliches Urteilsvermögen. Dieser gesunde Menschenverstand arbeitet empirisch, das heißt, er fällt konkrete Urteile auf der Basis alltäglicher Lebenserfahrung und Beobachtung. Mündige Bürger teilen diese Urteile. Zudem ist er mehr auf praktische Anwendung ausgerichtet als auf abstrakte Theorie. Auch nimmt der gesunde Menschenverstand auf die Urteile aller anderen Menschen Rücksicht und ist damit gemeinschaftsfördernd. Der Aufklärer Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) stufte den gesunden Menschenverstand im Alltag als nützlicher ein als wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse.
Für den erfolgreichen Gebrauch des gesunden Menschenverstands stellt er drei Maximen auf:
1. “Selbstdenken“
2. “An der Stelle jedes andern denken“
3. “Jederzeit mit sich selbst einstimmig denken“ (1)
Ähnlich sieht es der französische Schriftsteller und Literatur-Nobelpreisträger Romain Rolland (1866-1944). In der Einleitung seines Antikriegs-Romans von 1920 „Clerambault. Geschichte eines freien Gewissens im Krieg“ schreibt er:
„Jeder Mensch muss, so er ein wahrer Mensch ist, lernen, allein innerhalb aller zu stehen, allein für alle zu denken – wenn es not tut, sogar auch gegen alle! Aufrichtig denken heißt für alle denken, selbst wenn man gegen alle denkt. Die Menschheit bedarf derer, die ihr aus Liebe Schach bieten und sich gegen sie auflehnen, wenn es not tut!“ (2)
Der Mensch besitzt nicht nur einen gesunden Verstand, er ist auch autonom. Autonomie ist der Zustand und das Lebensgefühl der Selbstbestimmung, Unabhängigkeit und Selbstverwaltung. Philosophisch gesehen ist sie die Fähigkeit, sich als Wesen der Freiheit zu sehen und aus dieser Freiheit heraus zu handeln. Damit ist sie auch die Kraft zum Nicht-Mitmachen (Adorno). Ausgestattet mit diesen besonderen Fähigkeiten übergibt der Mensch jedoch ohne Not immer wieder einem anderen die Macht, über sein Leben und seine Zukunft zu entscheiden.
Zum Beispiel werden in den „Demokratien“ der westlichen Welt alle vier bis fünf Jahre korrupte Politiker in hohe Regierungsämter gewählt und als respektable Autoritäten angesehen. Die Politiker verbinden mit dieser Zuschreibung umgehend Herrschaftsansprüche, schaffen ein Verhältnis der Über- und Unterordnung und setzen gegenüber den Bürgern ihren Willen durch; präziser gesagt, den Willen oder die Anweisungen ihrer Auftraggeber, der globalen „Macht-Elite“. Damit betreiben sie auf Kosten der arbeitenden Bevölkerung eine Politik, die es der „Milliardärs-Elite“ im Hintergrund ermöglicht, so viele Dollar-Milliarden zusammenzustehlen, dass sie sich nahezu alles beziehungsweise jeden kaufen können: angefangen von korrupten Politikern bis hin zur korrupten Weltgesundheitsorganisation WHO. Wir alle sind seit der Ausrufung des „Corona-Skandals“ (Reiner Füllmich) Anfang Jahr 2020 Augenzeugen und Leidtragende dieses skrupellosen weltgeschichtlichen „Ausflusses“.
Diesen Regierenden kann man weder heute noch in Zukunft vertrauen. Der russische Schriftsteller Lew Nikolajewitsch Graf Tolstoi (1828-1910) schrieb in seinen politischen Flugschriften zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts, dass das kein Zufall sei:
„Man könnte die Unterordnung eines ganzen Volkes unter wenige Leute noch rechtfertigen, wenn die Regierenden die besten Menschen wären; aber das ist nicht der Fall, war niemals der Fall und kann es nie sein. Es herrschen häufig die schlechtesten, unbedeutendsten, grausamsten, sittenlosesten und besonders die verlogensten Menschen. Und dass dem so ist, ist kein Zufall.“ (3)
Viele Erwachsene reagieren auf diese Politiker jedoch 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. Deshalb die Aufforderung: Keinem anderen Menschen die Macht übergeben!
Keinem anderen Menschen, aber auch keinem übernatürlichen Wesen, das uns als „Gottheit“ von frühester Kindheit bis ans Ende der Tage führen und beschützen soll. Sind wir doch eingebettet in die Gemeinschaft von Artgenossen, auf deren Unterstützung und Solidarität wir bauen könnten. Der überwiegende Teil der erwachsenen Menschen klammert sich jedoch an eine eingebildete überirdische Macht und versucht, sie günstig zu beeinflussen. Ist das ein Ausdruck menschlicher Hilflosigkeit und mangelnden Selbstvertrauens? Oder können sich diese Mitbürger ein Leben ohne eine solche „himmlische Macht“ nicht mehr vorstellen?
Es ist das Anliegen des Autors, nachvollziehbar und nachprüfbar darzulegen, warum erwachsene Personen und auch Persönlichkeiten diese unverständlichen Reaktionen zeigen. Da die Bürger seit Frühjahr 2020 Leittragende staatlich verordneter Zwangsmaßnahmen wie Freiheitsberaubung, Test-, Impf- und Maulkorbzwang sind, wären doch ziviler Ungehorsam, lautstarker öffentlicher Protest und echte Solidarität mit Gleichgesinnten das Gebot der Stunde. Weil die Regierenden zudem die Existenzgrundlage von Millionen Bürgern zerstören, was zu wirtschaftlicher Verarmung, Vereinsamung, Verzweiflung und oft zum vorzeitigen Ableben führt, ist dies ein Verbrechen an der Menschheit und die erste schaurige Bilanz des neuen Faschismus.
Nicht nur die Intelligenz vollsinniger Erwachsener ist eingeschüchtert und herabgesetzt, sondern auch ihr Wille und ihr Selbstbewusstsein. Das führt in vielen Fällen zu Fatalismus, Schuldgefühlen, Depressionen und der Unfähigkeit, sich mit den Mitbürgern zusammenzuschließen. Daher ist es zwecklos, sich mit flehentlichen Appellen an sie zu wenden:
„Wagt es, weise zu sein! („Sapere aude!“)
„Bringt den Mut auf, euch des eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!“ (Kant)
„Tretet selber vor die Haustüre, um nachzusehen, was es gibt!“ (Gottfried Keller)
Die meisten können einfach „nicht aus ihrer Haut“, das heißt, sie getrauen sich nicht, ihren gewohnten Weg des Denkens und Handelns eine Handbreit weit zu verlassen. Auch ist es kontraproduktiv und verletzend, ängstliche und gehorsame Mitbürger als „Vollidioten“ oder „ewige Duckmäuser“ zu diskriminieren. Eine solche Bewertung zeugt davon, dass man ihre tieferen Beweggründe nicht kennt. Der sprichwörtliche „Kadavergehorsam“ ist nur eine von mehreren Ursachen für die Verstandeslähmung und greift deshalb zu kurz. Aus diesem Grund müssen alle denkbaren Beweggründe der beklagten menschlichen Reaktionsweisen erforscht werden – insbesondere die autoritäre und religiöse Erziehung in Elternhaus und Schule sowie der Einfluss der Gesellschaft.
Das Land und die Welt brauchen hellwache, selbst denkende und mutige Bürger, die durchschauen, welche Funktion die von diabolischen Mächten initiierte „Angst-Pandemie“ wirklich hat. Nur so lässt sich das Überleben der Spezies sichern. Wenn es gelingt, die Autoritätsgläubigkeit und die Angst vor den Mitmenschen aufzugeben und sich mit ihnen zusammenzuschließen, können die drohenden sozialen, ökonomischen und gesellschaftspolitischen Hausforderungen bewältigt und die diabolischen Mächte in Schach gehalten werden. Diktatur und Faschismus haben dann keine Chance und unsere Kinder wieder eine Zukunft.
Natürlich weiß der Autor aufgrund jahrzehntelanger Erfahrung als Pädagoge, Psychologe und Psychotherapeut, dass sich Erwachsene – wenn überhaupt – nur ungern und zögerlich mit unangenehmen Kindheitserlebnissen und religiösen Gefühlen auseinandersetzen und sie in Frage stellen wollen beziehungsweise können. Dabei wäre die aktuelle Lebenssituation ein gegebener Anlass, sich selbst zu erkennen. Das heißt, sich zu besinnen und zu entdecken, welche speziellen Stärken und Kräfte in einem schlummern und wie diese für das Gemeinwohl eingesetzt werden können. Auch über Einstellungen, die das Leben stark einschränken, könnte man nachdenken und überlegen, ob man sie mithilfe von Freunden oder psychologischen Experten nicht besser in Zweifel ziehen und durch förderliche ersetzen sollte. (4)
Da die meisten Erwachsenen also kaum mehr willens oder fähig sind, ihre Gefühle, ihre Einstellungen und ihr Verhalten zu verändern, plädiert der Autor abschließend für prophylaktische und psychohygienische Konsequenzen aus dem Gesagten: Alle an der Erziehung von Kindern und Jugendlichen Beteiligten sollten es tunlichst unterlassen, die heranwachsende Generation auf ihrem Weg ins Erwachsenenleben mit autoritären Erziehungsmethoden „gehorsam“ und „gefügig“ zu machen. Auch sollten sie ihnen nicht den verstandeslähmenden „Ballast“ der Religion aufbürden. Nur so können die Jungen als frei denkende, mutige und mitfühlende Bürger die Welt eines Tages in eine andere Bahn lenken.
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Dieser Artikel wurde ursprünglich auf NRhZ-ONLINE veröffentlicht.
Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Diplom-Psychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.
While US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls for vigilance over think tanks he believes are “tainted by the machinations” of foreign governments, he turns blind eye to the fact that the US is the world’s worst when it comes to interfering in other countries’ internal affairs by funding think tanks to do its bidding, experts said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying on Wednesday mocked US hypocrisy on her Twitter account after the Trump administration demanded international think tanks in the US to publicly disclose the funding they receive from foreign governments or risk being forbidden from engaging with the State Department.
Pompeo said the decision comes amid growing bipartisan concern about the role of outside governments, such as China and Russia, who “seek to exert influence over US foreign policy through lobbyists, external experts, and think tanks.”
“Great! We’d very much like to see the US lead the way. How about the US government goes first: How many think tanks has it sponsored? How many of them have been instructed to make and spread fake news and disinformation about targeted countries such as China? How much money has the US government poured into the National Endowment for Democracy to enable it to create instability in other countries in the name of democracy? Can Secretary Pompeo explain?” Hua questioned.
“The purpose is simple: to promote objective and impartial information exchange, untainted by the vicious intention to use think tanks as a political tool and cause turmoil,” Hua said, mimicking Pompeo’s tone.
The US government’s approach is akin to a thief crying “stop thief,” as the US is always the top sponsor for many think tanks both domestic and overseas, said Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University. “US’ request for funding disclosure is tantamount to launching McCarthyism again to suppress academic institutions that advocate rational and moderate communication and understanding of China,” Shen said.
Offer to meddle
Some US-funded think tanks have played a disgraceful role in pushing for regime change, bringing global turmoil, interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, and cooperating with other anti-China forces to contain China, that include fabricating sources and baseless conclusions about China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region and the Taiwan question, said observers.
In September 2019 China announced sanctions on a number of US-funded institutions that have “great responsibility for the chaos in Hong Kong,” including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), Freedom House, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and Human Rights Watch. They are among the most influential in Washington and often make irresponsible remarks on the internal affairs of other countries.
Founded in 1983, the NED offers more than 1,600 grants each year to support the projects of nongovernmental groups abroad that are working for so-called “democratic goals” in more than 90 countries and regions, with its funding mainly from the US Congress.
According to NED’s own data, it spent more than $1.16 million in Hong Kong from 2016 to 2018. A majority of its sponsorships went to Solidarity Center and National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, which NED refers to as core grantees.
Founded in 1941 to oppose communism in Europe, Freedom House works as a think tank for the US Department of Defense and is closely linked to the Busch family. Around 80 percent of its funds are from the US government and it works for US authorities, according to an article published in 2005 in a journal affiliated to China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which is funded by the Australian Department of Defence, has also been repeatedly criticized of agitating anti-China hysteria, to cater to its benefactors.
US-backed research institutions – “Eyes on Earth” and “Stimson Center” – meddled also in Mekong River development project as they launched loophole-riddled reports and campaign against Chinese dams, based on weak evidence and sources, and academically problematic research methods.
Funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal government organ that promotes US foreign policies, the Stimson Center established a platform for multi-field research in the Mekong River Basin and repeatedly lambasted China and provoked tensions among China and riparian countries in media interviews.
With its academic credibility strongly challenged, these research groups have come under fire for their obvious ideological bias.
Deep fear grew
US anxiety over foreign elements in its academic, research and cultural institutions is on the rise leading it to label Chinese state media and the Confucius Institute centers in the US as being Chinese missions, observers said.
Source: Xinhua
Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said US restrictions, disruptions and suppression of China-US exchanges exposes the faded confidence of the US.
Peng Weibu, professor at Jinan University in Guangzhou and expert on American think tanks said the US government’s assertion that Chinese think tanks interfere in US internal affairs is an attempt to politicize normal and friendly Sino-US exchanges.
“Chinese academic institutions have no similar intention as the US government. Such groundless and untenable slander is actually a brutal interference in academic communications, which undermines the fair development of academic cooperation between the two countries,” he said.
Peng noted that in many cases, the US government and some political think tanks rely on each other to deliver American values and ideology.
The think tanks serve as a tool to lobby some governments to adopt policies that often reflect US priorities through policy analysis, Peng said.
Peng indicated that the coronavirus pandemic has stopped many China-US exchanges, but many US-based think tanks continue their reports on China without any real field research or actual observation.
US think tanks are meant to be neutral and objective, but nowadays the think tanks become a tool to serve US politicians and diplomatic interests via touting biased conclusions or even irrational views, Shen noted, explaining that it is partly due to the current US administration that eschews science and truth.
“If China were to follow Pompeo’s logic and request the financial details of all the US-backed institutes, it would only embarrass Washington,” Shen said.
There are still respectable think tanks that objectively and fairly interpret a complex China based on their interaction with Chinese officials and people. If the US imposes further restrictions on think tanks, it will completely cut off an important channel for communication between China and the US, Shen warned.
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US imperialism seeks to enforce obedience to its objectives domestically and throughout the world by war, sanctions and policing opinion.
American wars hide behind the fraudulent concept of liberal interventionism, a bogus philosophy that justifies and rationalises the brutal subjugation of weaker states. Empire’s accomplices in universities elevate liberal interventionism to the status of empiricism, creating and staunching an interface between academia and defence.
Regime change in the middle east is the logical extension of a new world order based on American control of global geopolitics.
These interventions represent the realisation of a nefarious agenda for world domination that extends right back to the founding of America.
The project for a new American century hypothesized by Washington think tanks has become a devastating actuality in foreign policy. Neoconservative elites have designed and enforced an agenda for the aggressive expansion of American power.
America’s superpower status affords it broad latitude in deciding which international laws it will obey. America exhibits a double standard whereby it punishes other states for not adhering to humanitarian norms it thinks it is exempt from.
The wartime practice of extraordinary rendition violates the norms of global human rights regimes. Increasingly, ethics is only a secondary consideration, an obstacle instead of a guide.
The power of the national security state is routinely used to violate the constitution, making democracy a fantasy. Draconian espionage policies are used against whistleblowers who make their crimes public knowledge. They tend to be tried in the eastern district of Virginia, where the jury sample is made up of a population who predominantly work for the CIA or NSA.
Since 9/11, US policy has been in the tradition of Stalinism, ruthlessly punishing dissidents in the war on terror. The state exhibits absolute power over debate in the public sphere. The only legitimate thought is state approved thought.
A modern empire, whose organising principle is capitalism, is a centralised system of corporate power over nations, populations and resources. Power is utilized unilaterally to promote and enforce narrow partisan, elite agendas.
Through narrative control in the mass media, the military-industrial and intelligence complexes carefully manage perceptions of reality, indoctrinating citizens to be conformists. The corporate fourth estate dissolves free will, critical reason and thus democracy.
But at the same time, the advent of the world wide web has empowered citizens by facilitating the mass dissemination of critical narratives, most notably in the case of pacifist research collective Wikileaks, which makes state secrets a public utility. In so doing, it undercuts the power of elite privilege networks whose livelihoods depend on empire.
And the rise of competing powers like Russia and China prohibits a unipolar world order based on unrivalled American supremacy. Increasingly, multilateralism and social democracy in the global South will play a role on the world stage, limiting the scope of American power.
For now the spectre of American imperialism may seem menacing and absolute, but we must not underestimate the power of conscientious global citizenship in undermining the hegemon.
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Election fraud has been part of the US political landscape since the republic’s early days — at the federal, state and local levels.
There’s nothing legitimate about a political process that excludes the popular will.
Power brokers decide who wins and loses. Voting-age Americans have no say whatever.
Fantasy democracy has been the American way from inception — the real thing considered anathema by the nation’s ruling class.
Election 2020 was decided long before early voting began and polls opened on November 3.
Biden/Harris were chosen over Trump because of the predictability factor.
Biden is a longtime dirty politician since the 1970s, Harris a relative newcomer.
Trump is a businessman turned politician at age-70 in 2016, a rare anomaly in the West and elsewhere.
Based on his record as US senator and vice president — along with his current deteriorated mental and physical state — Biden is both predicable and easily manipulated by the nation’s ruling class.
In stark contrast, Trump is less controllable. He shoots from the hip, notably by daily tweetstorms and other off-script public remarks.
Based on what’s gone on so far, Biden/Harris look almost certain to succeed Trump on January 20.
Dirty business as usual continuity won’t miss a beat with them in charge.
The wish list of the nation’s monied interests, its militarists, and other dark forces will be fulfilled across the board with full Biden/Harris regime support.
More muscular domestic and foreign policies are likely — including greater crackdowns on fundamental freedoms at home and increased aggression abroad, by hot and other means.
US relations with China, Russia, Iran, and other independent countries targeted for regime change will likely deteriorate more than already.
According to head of Moscow State Institute of International Relations Anatoly Torkunov:
“No matter who wins (US elections, its ruling authorities) will continue the policy of pressure as far as Russia goes,” adding:
“The only thing that is clear today is that Biden’s foreign policy would be more predictable, particularly as far as Russia is concerned.”
“I certainly don’t expect any radical changes and improvements to take place in the near future, but we can expect things to be more predictable.”
Whichever right wing of duopoly rule controls the White House and/or Congress ahead, policies affecting ordinary Americans are likely to worsen more than already.
Establishment Law Professor Jonathan Turley sounded the alarm about “rising McCarthyism…and the growing threat to both free speech and academic freedom” in the US.
Major media are complicit with a diabolical scheme to silence dissent and other free expression.
Biden/Harris and other Dems threaten Internet freedom.
It’s the last frontier of free and open expression, the only reliable independent space for real news, information and analysis – enabling anyone to freely express views on any issues.
Digital democracy is threatened in America and other Western countries.
What’s essential to preserve is eroding in plain sight.
If Dems against free expression control Biden/Harris regime policymaking, a free and open Internet may die on their watch.
Turley believes they’ll “continue…assaulting against Internet free speech” — the most defining feature of constitutional law, along with open, free, and fair elections.
The former is on life support in the US, the latter an illusion in the country since established.
Election 2020 is the latest example of election rigging — this time to replace Trump with Biden/Harris, deep state dark forces deciding things like they always do.
Appearing Friday on Newsmax TV’s National Report, US Federal Election Commission chairman Trey Trainor said the following:
“I do believe that there is voter fraud taking place in (US states). Otherwise they would allow the observers to go in.”
They “have not been allowed into the polling locations in a meaningful way.”
“Our whole political system is based upon transparency to avoid the appearance of corruption.”
“State law allows those observers to be in there.” In states where it wasn’t observed, Election 2020 was “illegitimate.”
Trump campaign lawsuits are “very valid…”
Trainor believes Trump team legal challenges will end up in the Supreme Court.
I doubt it’ll make a difference because the High Court usually swims with tide.
It’s coming in for Biden/Harris and going out for Trump.
Across the board claims of an open, free and fair process by establishment media represent an orchestrated aim to whitewash election-rigging for Biden/Harris over Trump.
When major media speak with one voice on most any issue, views expressed are highly suspect.
Free and open societies are characterized by diversity, including a range of views on at least most issues.
On Election 2020, major media reports have been and continue to be virtually unanimous in supporting fraud over democracy the way it should be.
What’s going on is a dark moment in US history.
Looking ahead, things are likely to worsen politically and economically for the vast majority of Americans.
It’s the wrong time to growing up under governance of, by, and for special interests by exploiting the vast majority of others.
Opportunities that once existed long ago are gone.
Governance by plutocrats, autocrats, and kleptocrats replaced it.
Today’s America resembles Dante’s Inferno for the vast majority.
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
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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.”
On November 10, 2020, UN Report: International Organization of Migration – World Food Program Find Global Hunger and Population Displacement Could Surge as People on the Move and Those Relying on Dwindling Remittances Seek Work to Support Their Families.
The Report Shows how the Pandemic has Driven up Food Insecurity and Increased Vulnerability Among Migrants, Families Reliant on Remittances and Communities Forced From their Homes by conflict, violence and Disasters.
Introduction
This new report describes escalation of the catastrophe reported in The New York Times, August 4, 2020 Science Times:
“It begins with a mild fever and malaise, followed by a painful cough and shortness of breath. This infection prospers in crowds, spreading to people in close reach. Containing an outbreak requires contact tracing, as well as isolation and treatment of the sick for weeks or months. This insidious disease has touched every part of the globe. It is tuberculosis, the biggest infectious-disease killer worldwide, claiming 1.5 million lives each year. Until this year, TB and its deadly allies, H.I.V. and malaria were on the run. The toll from each disease over the previous decade was at its nadir in 2018, the last year for which data are available. Tuberculosis is making a comeback around the world, along with H.I.V. and malaria, as the coronavirus pandemic disrupts treatments and diagnostic efforts.”
“Yet now, as the coronavirus pandemic spreads around the world, consuming global health resources, these perennially neglected adversaries are making a comeback. ‘Covid-19 risks derailing all our efforts and taking us back to where we were 20 years ago,’ said Dr. Pedro L. Alonso, the director of the World Health Organization’s global malaria program…..The lockdowns, particularly across parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, have raised insurmountable barriers to patients who must travel to obtain diagnoses or drugs….Fear of the coronavirus and the shuttering of clinics have kept away many patients struggling with H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria, while restrictions on air and sea travel have severely limited delivery of medications to the hardest-hit regions.”
“If history is any guide, the coronavirus’s impact on the poor will be felt long after the pandemic is over. The socioeconomic crisis in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, led to the highest rates in the world of a kind of tuberculosis that was resistant to multiple drugs, a dubious distinction the region holds even today. Dr. Giorgio Franyuti, the executive director of Medical Impact, based in Mexico stated: “Nobody is testing for TB at any facility. The mind of clinicians in Mexico as well as decision makers, is stuck with Covid-19. TB is the biggest monster of them all. If we’re talking about deaths and pandemics, 10 million cases a year, Covid doesn’t compare yet to that toll.”
Coronavirus tests are much more lucrative, at about $10.00 compared with 18 cents for a rapid malaria test.”
Alternatives
According to reports in The New York Times, and multiple other sources, quoting doctors in Russian hospitals, in 1990, tuberculosis had been virtually eradicated in the Soviet Union, much to the chagrin of famous US philanthropists, since skilled medical care was available free to the entire population; but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the excellent health care system they had built collapsed, along with the great country, and without proper medical care, and diminished health care facilities and patient crowding in deteriorating hospitals, resistant strains of tuberculosis became epidemic.
AIDS became epidemic in Russia, and, according to a report of a panel of experts on drug addiction in Russia, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was flooded with heroin, and the rate of heroin addiction soared, one of the wonders of capitalism. These scourges were so severe that by 1993-1994 The New Yorker and U.S. News and World Report published cover stories headlined: “Is Russia Dying?” Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski gloated over his pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Was he also, no doubt, elated at the number of tragic deaths of Russians as a consequence of his work?
It is now acknowledged that the poorest in the population, both in the USA, and throughout the world, are suffering the most from Covid-19, and lack the resources to treat it, and live in such cramped and squalid conditions that any possibility of “social distancing” is non-existent. Thus, the recurrent surge of Covid-19 finds the worst fatalities among the most vulnerable, the poorest, the eldest, etc.
Convergence of Interests
This entire course of events can be seen from another perspective, not so entirely different from that of observers of the Irish famine more than a century ago, during which England’s Lord Trevelyan, considering Catholic Ireland overpopulated, regarded the famine, which starved to death at least 1.5 million Irish citizens, a very effective means of reducing the Irish overpopulation: “culling” the population, and although others regarded Trevelyan as a mass murderer for his policies which calculatedly starved 1.5 million Irish to death, he was honored in Britain. Similarly, there are those fixated on reducing the global population, and from a cynical (or realistic) perspective, may regard Covid-19 as an effective method of “culling” the undesirable poor and people of color throughout the world. While it is true that Covid-19 also infects some heads of state, and various celebrities, including the US President, these privileged ones have access to the best health treatment, and have the luxury of vast “social distancing” to protect their elite cohort.
While there is an enormous amount of attention given to the so-called lethal spread of the so-called lethal Covid-19, this may be a mask obscuring other benefits the oligarchy accrue from this current global pandemic, as earlier warned by the UN, the COVID is also being used to attempt to justify unwarranted “intrusive surveillance,” curfews, contact tracing and other methods of social control and repression used by fascist police states. There are numerous “conspiracy theories,” but as the gap between the miniscule few who each possess hundreds of billions of dollars, and the vast majority of people throughout the world who are increasingly destitute and desperate economically, these conspiracy “theories” bear increasing resemblance to reality.
Some organizations and groups fixated on global population reduction, (originally called “population control,” but later changed to the less provocative and controversial term, “population stabilization,”), have no interest in the concept of distribution (implying equitable distribution of food and other resources, a concept dangerously close to socialism). These organizations, including the UN Population Fund have been implicated in forced sterilization of women in Peru, especially those who were poor, indigenous and spoke Quechua. According to the BBC, one horrific example is Sabina Huilica of Lima. She was quoted by the BBC that
“’the nightmare started straight after she gave birth.’ ‘A nurse put me on a stretcher and tied my hands and feet. I asked them to bring me my little baby girl but instead they anesthetized me. When I woke up, the doctor was stitching my stomach. I started screaming. I knew I had been sterilized.’ Ms. Huillca was a victim of a family planning programme as a result of which thousands of women were forcibly sterilized. In 1996 Reproductive Health and Family Planning Programme starts and Mamerita Mestanza dies following a tubal ligation she did not consent to….According to data released in 2002 by Peru’s Health Ministry, 260,874 women had forced tubal-ligation operations between 1996 and 2000. Micaela Flores said she and other women were taken by lorries to a health centre. ‘We all arrived innocent and happy, then we heard screams and I just ran. She said the doors were padlocked, so she could not escape and that she was sterilized against her will. Thousands of women have reported being harassed, threatened or blackmailed to undergo the procedure.”
Today, according to the ACLU, September 29, 2020,
“The recent news of a whistleblower’s allegations that a for-profit ICE detention center forced sterilization procedures on immigrant women shocked many people and drew comparisons to Nazi sterilization campaigns. The ICE detention story reflects a long pattern in the United States of the coerced sterilization of marginalized populations, particularly of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. In fact, the Nazis borrowed ideas for their sterilization regimen from eugenic sterilization laws adopted in the U.S. in the early 20th century…..both public and private actors in the U.S. targeted the poor, the disabled, immigrants and racial minorities for forced sterilization…..More than 60,000 coercive sterilizations were performed throughout the U.S. pursuit to the eugenic laws beginning in 1907.”
Conclusion
“The pandemic has hindered the availability of drugs for H.I.V. TB and malaria worldwide by interrupting supply chains, diverting manufacturing capacity and imposing physical barriers for patients who must travel to distant clinics to pick up the medications….
People with H.I.V. and TB who skip medication are likely to get sicker in the short term. In the long term, there’s an even more worrisome consequence: a rise in drug-resistant forms of these diseases. Already drug-resistant TB is such a threat that patients are closely monitored during treatment—a practice that has mostly been suspended during the pandemic. ‘This is really difficult to digest,’ Dr. Ditiu said. It took a lot of work to arrive where we are. We were not at the peak of the mountain, but we were away from the base. But then an avalanche came and pushed us back to the bottom.”
In a cynical view of these deteriorations in global health, especially among the poorest, and people of color in the USA, Asia, Africa and Latin America, Covid-19 may assist the agenda of organizations fixated on “population control.” While more than one million people globally have [allegedly] died of Covid-19 [based on questionable data], adding this together with the escalating deaths from the resurgence of TB, H.I.V. and Malaria, including an additional 10 million deaths or more, yearly from resurgent and resistant strains of TB, another 10 million deaths or more from resistant strains of H.I.V., and many million deaths, yearly from malaria, (potentially fatal illnesses previously declining, in all three instances), continuation of this deadly trend could result in the deaths of many millions of the poorest, most destitute people throughout the world, and could approach a half-billion deaths, if these trends do not reverse course. That would accomplish the fervently desired “population control” or “population stabilization,” on which certain organizations and groups within the US and the United Nations are focused, and that result would have been enthusiastically hailed by the late Trevelyan, whose methods of population control included de facto mass murder of at least 1.5 million Irish. Many of these “population control” organizations do not focus upon distribution, the concept dangerously suggestive of socialist economic methods. However, It is interesting that citizens of China, which has the largest population in the world, over one billion people, do not suffer from starvation, because their economic system, socialism, makes possible the availability of adequate food, health care and education on an equitable basis.
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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York.
Donald Trump made it the leitmotif of his presidency to eliminate all vestige of the Obamani legacy. Thus, after the attempt to end Obamacare, the announcement of the revision of the NAFTA Treaty and the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement against Climate Change, the next step was to undo the diplomatic and commercial advances made with Cuba under the mandate of Barack Obama. Thus, the changes proposed by the Trump administration were intended to increase regulations and supervision to make it difficult for US companies to sign agreements with Cuba as well as for Americans to continue traveling to the country and would be the result of strenuous pressure from prominent Cuban representatives. -Americans Marco Rubio and Mario Díaz-Balart, both Republicans.
For his part, Mike Pence announced the implementation of new measures against two companies that transport Venezuelan crude to Cuba as well as against the 34 vessels that PDVSA uses for this purpose with the avowed objective of causing the “energy asphyxia of Cuba” by means of the amputation of the umbilical cord connecting Venezuela and Cuba following the Kentian theory of the “carrot and stick” exposed by Sherman Kent in his book “Strategic Intelligence for North American World Politics” (1949). In this book, Kent states that
“war is not always conventional: indeed, a large part of warfare, remote and close, has always been carried out with unconventional weapons: […] weapons [. ..] political and economic. The kind of war in which they are […] used (are) political warfare and economic warfare. ”
Following the repressive escalation, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Cuban state company Cubametales for “its continued importation of Venezuelan crude and support for the Government of the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.”
As a result of this measure, the assets that the company may have under US jurisdiction are frozen and financial transactions with US entities are prohibited since Cubametales would be, according to the US Government, “responsible for guaranteeing total imports and exports of fuels. from and to Cuba ”. The avowed objective was for the island to be doomed to a suffocation of unpredictable results after the collapse of tourism caused by the irruption on the island of the coronavirus pandemic and in the paroxysm of lack of solidarity, the Trump Administration blocked purchases and deliveries masks, lung ventilators and other basic health supplies for the treatment of patients with Covid-19 as the ultimate goal of the Trump Administration would be to achieve a total shortage of oil, food and vital health supplies to shake the current status quo of the Island.
However, after Joe Biden‘s victory at the polls, the Republican establishment will end up accepting the electoral results and will leave Donald Trump abandoned to his fate and at the mercy of the future judicial processes that await him, the Presidential pardon to Trump not being ruled out to exonerate him from possible court charges in exchange for acknowledging his defeat and leaving the White House. Joe Biden in an interview with CBS said that in the event of winning the elections he would resume the policy carried out by Barack Obama towards Cuba, which will translate into a radical change in Cuban-American relations after the progressive cancellation of the anachronistic Blockade against the Island.
Likewise, the Biden Administration will write off Juan Guaidó and given that Maduro plans to appoint a National Electoral Council to suit him for the next legislative elections, the United States will move its pieces to force the exile of the Chavista leadership to Cuba and the subsequent formation of a Transitional Government made up of consensus figures from both the opposition and Chavismo that will have to prepare new Legislative and Presidential Elections for 2021 in the post-Madurist scenario, with Cuba in the process getting the US to suspend the energy blockade on the island.
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The Past. In the not too distant past, the warring factions in Libya (the Government of National Accord, GNA, and the Libyan National Army, LNA) concluded an armistice. The negotiations, stretching from the August 2020 ceasefire to the October 2020 agreement, revived the country’s oil production and exports. Funds started pouring out into the Libyan economy, with equal shares going to regions and tribes. That arrangement also boosted the career of Deputy Prime Minister of the GNA,Ahmed Maiteeq, who negotiated the deal with the Commander of the LNA,Khalifa Haftar.
Or that was the idea, then. Now, despite overcoming initial opposition and confronting Turkish and Syrian mercenaries occupying parts of the country, Libya is back where it started, with a GNA filing up with Islamists and war lords.
Changes Coming. Chairman of the Presidential Council of Libya, Fayez al-Sarraj, is planning retirement. Although the logical choice for his successor is Deputy Prime Minister of the GNA, Ahmed Maiteeq, there are other contenders, those whose allegiances apparently lie outside of Libya. Some of these claimants are Fathi Bashagha, the Interior Minister, accused of torture, and Khaled al-Mishri, the head of Libya’s High Council of State, a representative of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Both seem to have ties to the United States.
These two appear on the lists of possible leaders of Libya compiled by The Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF). The head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), Stephanie Williams, an American diplomat, selected 49 out of 75 participants for the Tunisian conference on Libya’s future. Its aim is to appoint Libya’s new leadership that will govern the country until fresh elections are held throughout the land.
More disturbingly, UNSMIL has reserved the right to determine which candidates are suitable for positions in Libya’s new leadership “compromise” and which are not. Consequently, this allows the Americans to use the LPDF to appoint the new UN-recognized leadership of Libya. (It was Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and NATO which, in 2011, murdered Moammar Gaddafi, and destroyed Libya, the African country with the greatest quality of life.)
Fathi Bashagha now seems well-positioned to take over from Fayez al-Sarraj. He is the only leader in Libya who has called for the American military to set up a base in the country. He is in close contact with Stephanie Williams and makes regular voyages to foreign capitals in an effort to gain external support.
Problems. But, there is a fly in the ointment. Bashagha has been plagued by his involvement in war crimes and torture since the storming of Tripoli Airport in 2014. He is closely associated with armed groups from Misrata. The US Department of State has claimed that the Libyan Interior Ministry under his leadership has been actively involved in human trafficking.
Bashagha’s rise to power will undoubtedly set in motion a fresh conflict. It may be against Haftar, who had launched an operation against Tripoli last year precisely to stop people like Bashagha. Or there might be war between Bashagha and the Tripoli Protection Force (TPF), a militia regularly opposing Bashagha. There have been numerous clashes between the TPF and formations under Bashagha’s control already. If Bashagha is promoted to the head of government or Presidential Council, these groups may start a civil war in the Libyan capital itself. Bashagha’s rise to power may set in motion a fresh conflict.
But what of Khaled al-Mishri? His backers, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, also support Haftar. They and many Libyans would not want a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in charge. It was also Khaled al-Mishri, head of Libya’s Supreme State Council, that reportedly even tried to prevent the Haftar oil agreement from being signed.
Resolution? Will this really lead to new conflict? Would the appointment of a capable, flexible technocrat, such as Ahmed Maiteeq, be a way out? He understands that politics is the art of the possible, not the route to personal or extra-national gains.
Maiteeq’s other advantages are that he is a secular businessman and respected politician. He is not a powerless figurehead like Fayez Sarraj, a warlord like Fathi Bashagha, or a Brotherhood backer like Khaled al-Mishri. Ahmed Maiteeq appears to be a compromise figure who could coordinate the peace process between the GNA and the LNA.
As we’ve seen, his lucrative deal with Khalifa Haftar unlocked Libyan oil exports. That is the sort of achievement the world community should be looking for: technocrats like Maiteeq, acceptable to all external actors and someone with enough authority in Libya to help restore unity and hold general elections for president and parliament.
Yet the opposition won’t go quietly. According to the Voice of America (VOA),
” A news conference at which Maitiq was to explain the oil production agreement ended abruptly when supporters of a Tripoli militia prevented him from speaking. Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV reported that partisans of Islamist Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha blocked both the deal and the media event.” Continuing, VOA noted “The foreign minister of the interim government in eastern Libya, Abdul Hadi al Hwiej, told Arab media that he thought Turkey was responsible for [attempting to torpedo] the oil deal. The agreement included a stipulation that no oil money would be used to fund mercenaries or agreements with Ankara.”
Still, “Libya analyst Aya Burweila, a visiting lecturer at the Hellenic National Defense College, told VOA that [the September oil] deal was a “breakthrough for conflict resolution” since “traditionally antagonistic parties” from both east and west “cooperated” to make it, but that “a minority of spoilers and actors, who have profited from the staggering corruption and lack of transparency in Libya, are up in arms over the agreement.”
In the End. What’s really important is that the long-suffering people of Libya, where the civil war has been going on for almost 10 years, are interested in peace and need the stability it will bring.
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J Michael Springmannis a former U.S. State Department official having served as a diplomat in the Foreign Service with postings in Germany, India, and Saudi Arabia. He previously authored,Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World: An Insider’s Viewrecounting his experiences observing officials granting travel visas to unqualified individuals. Additionally, he penned Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb,an analysis of the alien wave sweeping the Continent. He currently practices law in the Washington D.C. Area.
“I spent 33 years…being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American Sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”(1) (Major-General Smedley D. Butler, 1931, US Marine Corps)
Once people understand the extent of the crimes of the US and British governments, the next question they ask themselves is ‘Why?’
The quote above shows clearly that US war and economic exploitation are two sides of the same coin. Military aggression by rich nations often supports the economic interests of a small number of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations. Decisions about wars and decisions about how the world’s trading system is structured are each made by a small number of powerful people.
This includes not only politicians, but also senior executives in industry, particularly banking, oil, mining, food and weapons. Most of these people live in the world’s advanced nations, particularly the US. I shall use the phrase ‘Western elites’ to refer to these people. Some of these elites have gone to extraordinary lengths to try to make sure that their position of power and wealth in the world is maintained. In 1948 the US had only 6% of the world’s population but 50% of the world’s wealth. A US official stated at the time that their aim was “to maintain this position of disparity”(2). As will become clear throughout these posts, the views of US planners have changed little in the last 70 years.
Control of Resources and Trade
What is important in the minds of Western elites can be summed up by the phrase ‘control of resources and trade’. This is a shorthand way of summarising a number of connected ideas. Resources include things like land, oil, minerals, crops and human labor. Rich countries want poor countries to allow global corporations to extract and process these resources, and to take them overseas, without too much interference from national governments, whatever the downsides for local people. Rich countries also want poor countries to have economic systems that will allow global corporations to dominate trade, buying and selling in order to make substantial profits, without being too restricted by local laws. Again, this applies even where there are downsides for local people.
Western elites therefore want leaders in other countries who will implement the ‘right’ economic system. This means a particularly exploitative version of capitalism, sometimes called neoliberalism or predatory capitalism, including widespread privatisation, weaker regulations for big companies, and decreases in government expenditure, known as austerity. (These economic policies will be discussed in more detail in later posts). The global financial and trade system is manipulated deliberately and systematically to create this outcome. This might sound like a conspiracy, but it does not really work that way. Provided everyone just plays their part (corporate executives and bankers pursue profit, politicians make laws that favor corporations, and trade negotiators from rich countries try to create trading agreements that benefit their corporations), the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
Blocking Independent Development
If leaders in other countries want to determine their own economic systems, this is known as independent development. This does not mean that a country cuts itself off from the rest of the world, or does not engage in trade. It simply means that the leaders of a country refuse to implement neoliberal economic policies that allow corporations from rich countries to dominate their economies, to plunder their resources, or to exploit their people. Western elites have tried very hard to block independent development, because it limits their control. Leaders who object to being exploited by rich nations can be overthrown and replaced, often causing devastating consequences for their people, particularly the poor. The new leaders are often referred to as US clients. They usually cooperate with the US because this helps them gain power and wealth in their own country. Getting these rulers into power can be quite tricky. Techniques range from manipulating elections right up to full-scale military invasion.
US Dominance
The US in particular has two other key goals. It wants to maintain a global financial system based around the US dollar, and it would like to ensure that no other country becomes strong enough, either militarily or economically, to be a rival. In 2018 the US announced that its main focus was no longer on the ‘war on terror’, but would focus on “inter-state strategic competition”(3), meaning Russia and China.
Whenever the reasons for a war are discussed in the mainstream, there is a tendency to look for a single explanatory factor. In practice there tend to be a cluster of factors, often connected to each other, that all push in the same direction. As well as the reasons discussed above, there are plenty of big corporations that frequently benefit from war. This includes the weapons industry, financial companies, private military contractors (mercenaries), oil and minerals companies, and more recently many companies that win contracts to participate in the reconstruction process in war zones.(4)
The Importance of Oil
Oil in the Middle East has been described as
“a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the great material prizes in world history.”(5)
Without oil, most advanced economies would grind to a halt. Of all the resources that American leaders want to control, by far the most important is oil. Their control of oil is not so much about wanting it all for themselves. It is more about being able to deny it to others.(6) Anything that a country cannot produce for itself, but needs badly, can be used as a means of control. A shortage of oil for a country such as China would make life very difficult for them. This is the main reason that the major wars of the 21st century have been in oil rich regions. Specific motives relating to recent wars will be discussed in later posts.
How Do We Know The Real Reasons For British and US Wars
Until 2006 it was difficult to know what politicians and government decision-makers were really saying to each other about their reasons for wars and other activities. The government kept many files secret in order to hide their crimes. In the UK we had to wait for 30 years (this has now been reduced to 20 years) until some of these files became declassified. During that period, we had to rely on the word of politicians and journalists for information. The declassified files show that politicians often lie, particularly about their reasons for war, and that mainstream media are not sufficiently questioning.(7) Time and again, the mainstream media would show clips of Prime Ministers and Presidents saying ‘We want peace’, while those same individuals were responsible for major wars. The files also show that Politicians use concepts like ‘national security’ or ‘official secrets’ to cover up their crimes.
In 2006 a man named Julian Assange set up a new organisation called Wikileaks. This enabled whistleblowers (people who witness criminal or unethical activity, usually by their employers) to make information available to the public without their identity becoming known. Millions of documents were given to Wikileaks exposing widespread war crimes by the British and US governments, and widespread criminal activity by other governments and big companies. All of these documents are available online and can be examined by anyone.(8)
Key Points
US and British wars are about control of trade and resources in other countries.
Of all the resources that the US wants to control, oil is the most important.
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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 second 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.
6) The expression ‘veto power’ is used frequently by Noam Chomsky in interviews to refer to control over other countries by denying them access to oil supplies.
7) The writer, Mark Curtis, has written multiple books that examine the declassified files in Britain. These include Unpeople, Web of Deceit, The Great Deception, Ambiguities of Power and Secret Affairs.
British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.
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In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.
UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”
On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.” The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.
It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.
While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation.
This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”
In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.
Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”
InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”
An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”
Simone Warstat of Louisville, Colo., waves a placard during a rally against a legislative bill to make it more difficult for parents to opt out for non-medical reasons to immunize their children Sunday, June 7, 2020, in Denver.
It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politiciansin both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.
The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI
In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”
According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”
Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”
In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”
Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,”the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”
Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.
Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.
The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:
Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.
In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.
Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg
The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed.
Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabondby this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.
Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging).
The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.”
Those phases are:
Before a vaccine is available
The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
The vaccine is widely available
Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
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Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
The purpose of this report is to offer a clear explanation of how two financial reporting exemptions has de facto created a hidden system of finance that runs parallel to the official financial system that facilitates and governs interactions between the federal government and the private sector. Below, I present a discussion of national security waivers that exempt some businesses from standard financial reporting requirements laid out by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). I also summarize the recent adoption of Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASAB) Standard 56, which gives those with high level national security clearances the authority to modify government financial statements. I then discuss the implications of these to reporting exemptions for both the federal government and the financial system.
Private Sector Financial Reporting Exemptions
On May 23,2006, BusinessWeek published the article “Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC Rules (Kopeki, 2006). In the article Kopeki writes that at least since the Carter era the President had the ability to waive standard business accounting and securities-disclosure obligations required by the SEC. However, an entry in the Federal Register revealed that in 2006 President Bush delegated the authority to waive financial reporting to the Director of National Intelligence. At the time the article was written, the primary concern appeared to be in concealing top-secret defense projects and investments. However, to our knowledge there is nothing in the law to restricts its use of financial reporting exemptions to the defense industry. Perhaps the most important factor in maintaining a strong military is to ensure the strength and reputation of financial system and the dollar as the primary reserve currency of the world. It is possible that this authority could be used to conceal certain financial institutions from fully reporting if such waivers were deemed to be in the interest of national security. Note also that the timing of the transfer of this authority to the Director of National Intelligence just preceded the financial crisis; reporting exemptions may well have been granted during the crisis in order to conceal sensitive actions by the Federal Reserve and other key financial entities.
Federal Government Financial Reporting Exemptions
In October 2018, the government implemented a critical recommendation by the Federal Accounting Standard Advisory Board (FASAB) (FASAB, 2018). The recommendation, which is called FASAB Standard 56, was motivated by the first ever external audit of the Department of Defense (DOD) that began in January 2018. The stated concern was that if the DOD were to fully report as per existing financial reporting regulations and laws, sensitive information could be revealed and thus pose a threat to national security. As discussed in detail in Skidmore and Fitts (2019), the new policy allowed government authorities to create a modified set of financial statements for the public, and an actual set of actual financial statements that that is accessible only to those with the required national security clearances. 2 Astoundingly, the FASAB Standard 56 had no parameters or constraints limiting the degree to which financial statements could be modified:
The financial statements of all federal entities could potentially be modified to conceal sensitive information;
The financial statements of all federal entities could have modifications inserted that do not affect net results of operation or position;
Allows a component reporting entity to be excluded from one reporting entity and consolidated into another reporting entity in a way that changes net results of operation and/or net worth; and
There is no limit on the amount by which financial reporting can be modified.
Implications of Financial Reporting Exemptions
The figure below offers a simple illustration of the official financial system and the hidden (or shadow) system. At the nexus of the federal government and the private sector is the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB). The FRB serves as the fiscal agent for the federal government, and thus facilitates all transactions for the government including inflows via the purchase of government securities (by either the private sector or the FRB itself through electronically created funds recorded as liabilities on the FRB balance sheet). However, much FRB is opaque: We cannot fully observe all transactions and activities the FRB engages in and/or facilitates.3
The top portion in green of the figure illustrates the flow of officially reported financial transactions facilitated by the FRB. The arrowed blue lines represent the flow of funds in/out of government through the FRB and to/from the private sector. The private sector includes all firms such as defense contractors, financial institutions and a variety on private contracting entities that provide services to the government. The green portion of the figure represents what many believe to be the full set of government-related activities within the economy.
With the private sector reporting exemptions authorized by the Director of National Intelligence, consider the bottom righthand portion of the figure in light blue noted as “Hidden Private Sector Financial Reporting”. While we know that private entities are exempt reporting, how many firms are exempt and how much is unknown by those who do not have the needed high-level national security clearances. Prior to the adoption of FASAB Standard 56 in 2018, some of this unreported activity was reflected in government financial reporting via “unsupported journal voucher adjustments”, where unsupported transactions are documented in existing government documents. As described in Skidmore and Fitts (2017), unsupported transactions for the DOD and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) tallied to $21 trillion between 1998-2015. After the implementation of FASAB Standard 56, the government officially added the “Hidden Government Financial Reporting” component as illustrated in the bottom left portion of the figure. Those with high-level national security clearances have authority to move both revenues and expenditures from the officially reported side of the figure to the hidden ledger. This same set of government officials can also conceal financial reporting for the FRB and any private entity. The integration of the two laws has enabled an entire system of hidden finance in the sense the revenues and expenditures are not recorded in any official financial statements in either the public or private sectors.
Official and Hidden Financial Flows Schematic
What We Know and Do not Know
According to the latest official figures, the $2.2 trillion Cares Act (U.S. Treasury, 2020) pushed the official deficit to $3.2 trillion in fiscal year 2019. As of November 2020, the official total debt held internally and externally exceeds $27 trillion (United States Debt Clock, 2020). Importantly, between September 2019 and October 2020, the FRB’s balance sheet increased by $3.3 trillion (Federal Reserve, 2020); nearly all new federal government debt issuance was fully monetized by the FRB. The debt trajectory is anticipated to soar in the coming years.
However, with the opaque financial reporting rules described in this report, it is possible that the FRB’s balance sheet is much higher than official reports indicate. Unfortunately, without full transparency there is no way to know the degree to which the FRB may have funded a variety of secret activities through unreported debt monetization. Along these lines, critical financial institutions may also be exempt from reporting any covert funding activity. Normally, issuers of securities need to “make and keep books, records, and accounts, which, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflect the transactions and dispositions of the assets of the issuer” and maintain internal accounting according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) (15 USC 78m(b)). Failing to do so can result in criminal liability (15 USC 78m(b)). A waiver from the Director of National Intelligence can remove some of those requirements, allowing private entities to deviate from GAAP and even alter their books if the waiver allows.4
Even within the official financial records much activity can be and is hidden. For example, Webb (2020) carefully documents how through Operation Warp Speed $6 billion in vaccine contracts have been funneled through a government contractor with ties the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Advance Research Program (DARPA). While Webb’s article is critical reading for a variety of reasons, of greatest relevance here is that financial reporting is embedded in and thus hidden by the private contractor. These types of “public-private” partnerships are increasingly being used to shield activities and financial reportion from public scrutiny. Importantly, the activities of the private contractor are exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests. As another example, consider the BlackRock investment firm, which authored the bailout strategy for the next crisis in which central banks would make direct loans to trading houses on Wall Street as well as facilitate direct purchases of primary and secondary corporate bonds and bond exchange traded funds. What is called the “going direct” plan also includes making direct transfers to individuals in digital wallets. BlackRock was then given a no-bid contract to manage the FRB’s corporate bond buying programs. (Martens and Martens, 2020)
While I have shared several examples of finances/activities that are not fully transparent, reporters and researchers have been able to glean valuable information about opaque programs that are critical to the future of everyone. However, there is much we do not know:
How many companies are exempt from standard SEC financial reporting?
Which companies are exempt from standard SEC financial reporting?
How much in revenues, expenditures and other financial information is exempt from standard SEC financial reporting?
What kinds of projects are funded via the hidden system of finance?
How many federal government entities/agencies have modified financial statements?
Which federal government entities/agencies have modified financial statements?
How much in revenues, expenditures and funded activities are hidden from the public by FASAB Standard 56?
What kinds of projects are funded through the hidden system of finance?
Is there an unreported expansion of the FRB’s balance sheet (unreported debt monetization)?
Is there an unreported expansion of balance sheets at Treasury and FHA/Ginnie with bonds, debentures and mortgage securities that are issued without being recorded on official balance sheets?
Is there hidden market participation and leverage provided through the Exchange Stabilization Fund?5
While investigative reporters and researchers have compiled considerable information that offers some insight into these questions, the opacity of the financial system prevents one from knowing with certainty the scale of the hidden system of finance. Given all these considerations, one remaining question comes to mind: With the scale of non-transparency documented in this report, should the United States be called a representative democracy?
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[1 Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics/Department of Economics, Michigan State University, 91 Morrill Hall of Agriculture, East Lansing, MI 48824-1039; [email protected]; 517-353-9172.]
[2 See Taibbi (2019) and Ferri and Lurie (2019a) for detailed discussions of the implications of FASAB Standard 56 for transparency in federal government financial reporting.]
[3 See for example the work of Felkerson (2011) who through painstaking evaluation determined that the FRB gave or loaned out $29 trillion during the 2007-09 financial crisis. He was only able to learn of these activities after it had been done, not during the crisis. See also an excellent article by Martens and Martens (2020) on the opacity of FRB bailouts to key financial institutions during the COVID-19 crisis.]
[4 See Ferri and Lurie (2019b) for a detailed discussion of the laws relating to the black budget and financial reporting. See also Ferri and Lurie (2019c) for an in-depth discussion of waivers from SEC financial reporting requirements, and Ferri and Lurie (2019d) for a discussion of the implications of opaque government reporting for investors.]
[5 The United States Treasury website (https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/international/exchange-stabilization-fund) explicitly states that it has the authority to intervene in financial markets, including gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities, to achieve its objective of maintaining an orderly system of exchange rates. In a brief prepared by the Gold Anti-Trust Committee Inc., Powell (2001) discusses a court hearing in which Plaintiff Howe argued a case against representatives from Bank of International Settlements, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan/Chase, Citigroup, the United States Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank that there was explicit intervention in the gold market by the United States Treasury. Yet it is difficult or even impossible to ascertain from official Exchange Stabilization Fund documents the degree of such interventions. ]
In cahoots with forces running the US, establishment media feed Americans a daily diet of managed news misinformation and disinformation rubbish.
The only way to be informed about major issues affecting our lives, welfare, and futures is by following independent sources, free from state and corporate control, mainly online.
According to the NYT (and other establishment media), Election 2020 “was the most secure in (US) history” — citing a dubious statement by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Despite mounting evidence of brazen fraud in key swing states, below is the DHS statement in full, dated November 12:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history (sic).”
Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots.”
“All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary (sic).”
“This is an added benefit for security and resilience (sic).”
“This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors (sic).”
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised (sic).”
“Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the US Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020 (sic).”
“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too (sic).”
“When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections (sic).”
The above statement is one of many examples of state-sponsored mass deception.
It shows Trump’s DHS abandoned him as well as truth-telling about Election 2020.
Almost daily, new information surfaces about election fraud in key swing states.
The only unknowns are precisely how much, in what ways, in which states, and to what extent it shifted the true vote count to Biden/Harris over Trump.
Based on what’s already known, it appears that brazen fraud decided the US presidential election.
While it’s not over until Electoral College electors vote (on Dec. 14), it’s certified by House, Senate, and National Archives representatives (on Dec. 23), and Congress declares the results (on Jan. 6 — the Supreme Court perhaps to have final say — it appears almost certain that Biden/Harris will succeed Trump on January 20.
Though the judicial process, including at the highest level, may side with Trump’s legitimate lawsuits — claiming fraud in designated swing states — it’s highly unlikely as things now stand.
Election 2020 is clear testimony to how fantasy US democracy works — ordinary Americans with no say over how the nation is run and by whom.
It’s also more evidence of dominant media mass deception, supporting election fraud over a free, fair and open process.
Since last weekend, a Great Lakes Justice Center lawsuit filed in Michigan claims that Detroit election officials allowed “tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots to be added to Biden/Harris’ vote count, along with other Wayne County irregularities.
Based on the lawsuit, they included “eyewitness accounts and direct evidence” that “approximately 40,000” unsecured, irregular ballots arrived in vehicles with out-of-state license plates in Detroit.
The vote tally went entirely for Biden/Harris and other Dems on the ballot.
The lawsuit also alleges that after GOP challengers discovered evidence of fraud, they were locked out of the counting room — after which tens of thousands more ballots were counted.
County election officials also “allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate,” according to the lawsuit.
There’s more about dubious practices in Detroit that smacks of election fraud.
On Wednesday, GOP attorney generals in 10 states filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court — challenging the illegality of counting late mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, ignoring state laws banning the practice.
According to Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter “actions taken by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (on this issue) are one of the most breathtaking abuses of judicial authority that I’ve seen in my four-plus years as attorney general.”
On Monday, US Attorney General William Barr authorized DOJ officials to investigate alleged election irregularities.
At this time, results of Election 2020 are undecided. Joe Biden is NOT president-elect until these issues are settled and the election process is officially completed.
According to Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, significant statistical evidence of improper ballot counting hasn’t yet been revealed, adding:
Many states breached their own elections laws, including “pallets of ballots” entering through “the back door” of counting centers in the middle of the night.
“There is tons of evidence that hundreds of thousands of ballots are going to have to be discarded and they’re all for Biden.”
Dominion Voting Systems software used in various states swapped, padded, and in other ways altered vote tallies, said Powell.
“There is a substantial problem with the Dominion system,” Powell stressed. “We are reviewing all of that and connecting the dots.”
“There are stacks of evidence and testimony from any number of witnesses – I’ve lost count of how many they have (because) more pour in every day.”
According to Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, “(i)t’s important to understand first and foremost how insecure this system is,” adding:
“We have over 600,000 mail-in ballots that have been counted.”
“Those are votes that are official in our system.”
“We also know that we have unclean rolls – ballots that have been mailed to dead people, to people who have moved out of state, and people that got a dozen ballots in their homes, etc.”
At most, signature verification of mail-in ballots was 40%, he said. Most Nevada mail-in ballots are unverified.
Trump may lead Biden/Harris in the state instead of the other way around as reported by major media.
According to Project Veritas, “an anonymous (Pennsylvania) USPS whistleblower…claims that higher-ups ordered postal workers to discard pro-Trump and pro-Republican mail, and only deliver pro-Biden mail from now on,” adding:
“This is the third Pennsylvania USPS insider to blow the whistle on election malfeasance in the last week.”
“There is something going on with USPS and we must get to the bottom of it immediately,” Project Veritas head James O’Keefe said, stressing:
“It’s very concerning that every USPS whistleblower coming forward is telling stories that put our election integrity in serious doubt.”
Election fraud occurred many times throughout US history at the federal, state and local levels.
Election 2020 may one day be remembered as one of the most brazen examples.
Election 2020 the “most secure” in US history? Make your own judgment.
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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.”
“As I talked to him, I could not but think of Joan of Arc. He is distinctly a mystic. Hewel was telling me that the German people, many of them, begin to feel that he was a mission from God, and some of them would seek to reverence him almost as a God. He said Hitler himself tries to avoid that kind of thing. He dislikes any of them thinking of him as anything but a humble citizen who is trying to serve his country well.” – Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (June 1937) [1]
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Canadians, the British, the French, Belgian and countless other people around the globe take a moment to pay tribute to and salute soldiers who died in a battlefield in the name of defending freedom and protecting democracy in this world.
As I remember the cost and the horror of war, these aspects of our pasts should be remembered. Millions of soldiers paid a terrible price.
But above the pivotal struggle for some distant and remote target on a far-away battlefield was the dream of wealthy investors making money off the development of building war machines and staging organized violence against rivals.[2]
This past year was the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. While the targets of that war absolutely needed to be brought down, the role of Great Britain and the United States in building up the Nazi military and its capability of engaging other powers should also be recalled. Yet, this knowledge, while amply documented, is not in the awareness of most who may have visited a military grave stone honouring our soldiers.
With this edition of the Global Research News Hour, we raise more insights into the true motives of our ‘heroes.’ We continue our journey down the paths that reveal our fighting fodder and the countless individuals decimated by bombs as the necessary consequence of this form of money-making. Our guests are Richard Sanders and Dr. Jacques Pauwels.
In our first half hour, Richard Sanders shares that the anti-semitic and anti-communist views were shared not only by Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, but also by the Canadian Prime Minister! He recounts the many small Eastern European groups that fled away from the Soviets and toward Germany before heading toward other western nations including Canada.
In our second half hour, Dr. Jacques Pauwels returns to resume more information about the U.S. involvement in the war, in spite of its efforts to profit from Nazi aggression. He’ll walk us through what happened at the Conference at Yalta between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin near the end, the outcome, and how the U.S. forces changed their strategy in the years and decades to come.
Richard Sanders is the coordinator of the Coalition Opposed to the Arms Trade, and has a history of involvement in anti-war activism that spans three decades. He is also a researcher and the publisher and editor of Press For Conversion Magazine. His latest volume: ‘Cold War Canada: The WWII Collaborationist Origins and Ongoing Propaganda Efforts of EthnoNationalist, East European Émigré Groups in Canada’ will be released in a few weeks. His site is https://coat.ncf.ca
First published on Remembrance Day November 11, 2018
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These stories are not unique cases from a remote war. The same methods are constantly rinsed and repeated, the mentality in our ruling elites is the same, and the risk of a major conflict is as great today as in 1914.
These examples concentrate mostly on British/American perception management and propaganda. First of all, because they are masters of the art, and secondly, as victors they still dominate the narrative.
Arthur Ponsonby and Falsehood in Wartime
After the Great War came a huge backlash of disillusion and revulsion. Calmly analysed, most of what had been told in the war turned out to be lies and half-truths. «Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War» was the title of a book published in 1928. Written by Arthur, Ponsonby, it discussed 20 instances of lies in wartime.
The contents of the book can be summed up in the Ten Commandments of War Propaganda:
We do not want war.
The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
The enemy is the face of the devil.
We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary.
The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
Our cause is sacred.
All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors.
The Enemy Is the Face of the Devil
The perception of German atrocities in World War 1 has had is up and downs during the decades. They ‘Huns’ were indeed quite ruthless, and freely executed several thousand suspected franc-tireurs and hostages when they invaded Belgium and Northern France in 1914.
However, the theme of barbaric, nun-raping, baby-bayonetting Huns was so carried to excess by the Entente propaganda machine that there came a backlash in public opinion after the war. By the 1920s, the disillusionment with the war and its aftermath was so great that all of these stories were dismissed as atrocity propaganda, which again would backfire in 1939, when there was reluctance to believe stories of – this time real – massive German atrocities.
The same theme was used more recently, with the infamous tale of «Iraqis ripping babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals», in the warm-up to the Gulf War in 1990. Before the US Congress, a young woman in tears testified how she as a nurse in Kuwait witnessed Iraqi soldiers ripping prematurely born babies out of their incubators, leaving them to die on the floor. The story was later repeated by an equally moved President George HW Bush.
The public later found out that the woman was in fact not a nurse, but the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, and the story was concocted as part of the propaganda effort by the PR-Agency Hill & Knowlton.
Mussolini Changes His Mind — Italy Should Join the War
Italy at first stayed neutral, then chose to join the Entente. This turned out to be a really bad decision, killing a generation of young men, and with not many gains to show for it in the peace treaties.
The decision was partially helped by subsidies from English and French intelligence to the Italian press. The Italian journalist Benito Mussolini (picture: in white coat, arrested during a scuffle with police in 1914) had a change of heart, and went from a leading socialist and war opponent to a fierce advocate of Italy joining the war.
According to a note written in November 1922 by the French secret services in Rome, Mussolini (who was described in another note from the same service as «an agent of the French Embassy in Rome») had in 1914 collected ten million francs «to support Italy’s war alongside the allied powers». In 1915, he was one of the founders the Fascist movement, which later took power in 1922.
The Difference Between Declared War Aims and Real Ones
In August 1914, when an almost unanimous German parliament voted yes to war, it was presented to the German public as a defensive Schutzkrieg against conniving enemies. With the exception of one member, Karl Liebknecht, the entire 110-member delegation from the Social Democratic Party bowed to the war euphoria and voted yes to war loans.
The perception presented to the public during the first few years of fighting, was of a Germany fighting a defensive war for survival, not a scheme for imperial aggrandizement. But in reality, already in September 1914, in the first few weeks of the war, a secret plan for an extensive redrawing of Europe’s borders was prepared for Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, the Septemberprogramm (see map).
After the Brest-Litovsk separate peace with the Bolsheviks in 1917, the eastern part of these war aims were achieved, where Germany occupied or created puppet governments in Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Baltic areas, and created a dependent state in Finland.
Although a victory, this led to great disillusionment in the German liberal-left, which so far had supported a war to preserve the country. Now he myth of a defensive war was exposed as a lie, and the treaty showed it to be a war for imperial expansion.
The Sinking of the Lusitania
In May 1915 the British Government was in trouble. The European war was not going well. Instead of reacting to aggressive British blockades by begging for mercy, Germany was sinking more and more British ships with her U-boats.
The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine on Friday May 7 1915, 12 miles off the coast of Ireland, killing 1198 people. The ship was running at two-thirds speed and in a straight line, rather than the recommended zigzag used to avoid torpedoes. The passengers were mostly US citizens (including millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt).
Her cargo consisted mostly of undeclared weapons and explosives, a fact finally confirmed in 1960, and which explained why she sank so fast. She was bound for the UK, sailing all alone, inexplicably without escort from the Royal Navy and right into a known U-boat hunting ground.
No members of the press even considered asking why Lusitania had been steaming so slowly and in a straight line, or why the British Admiralty had chosen to withhold the usual naval escort.
The numerous travel warnings posted by the German government in US newspapers, warning people they traveled on British shipping into British waters at their peril, was left out of the narrative. The German explanation, that the Lusitania was a legitimate target because she carried armaments, was dismissed out of hand.
And totally forgotten was the aggressive policy of starving Germany to its knees that had prompted the U-boat campaign in the first place. After the war began in 1914, Britain immediately began a naval blockade of Germany. Since even food was classified as “contraband,” the Germans had to ration food. By all estimates, several hundred thousand people ultimately died of starvation due to the blockade.
The sinking of the Lusitania was one of the main causes that brought the United States into the war, saving the war for the British.
An Inconvenient Peace Offer: “What Does He Want to Butt In for?”
In July 1915, Pope Benedict XV published the apostolic exhortation «To the Peoples Now at War and to Their Rulers.» Two years later, in 1917, this became The seven-point plan, a peace note presented to the warring parties. It was based on a peace linked to justice rather than military conquest, cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a guaranteed freedom of the seas, international arbitration, and Belgium restored to independence and guaranteed «against any power whatsoever.» (But it tacitly implied that Germany would gain some territory in the east).
The initiative failed: Although the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary) were positive to the mediation after three years of exhausting war, no one on the Entente side showed any interest. (The collapse of the Russian imperial government a few months later reduced the German willingness to negotiate.) Britain did not even show the Holy See the common courtesy of a proper reply. The French and Italian replies were hostile, and the rejection on behalf of the alliance was made by president Woodrow Wilson of the United States, who had initially remarked of the pope’s proposal: “What does he want to butt in for?»
The decision to reject any proposal from the Vatican was already decided in 1915. The threat was that a peace mediation from someone like the Pope might create so much pressure from a war-weary populace that it might just gather enough momentum to force the powers to accept.
The secret Treaty of London (1915), committing Italy to the Entente (Britain, France and Russia) contained a clause, article 15, where Italy is given carte blanche to do whatever is deemed necessary to silence the Church: «France, Great Britain and Russia shall support such opposition as Italy may make to any proposal in the direction of introducing a representative of the Holy See in any peace negotiations or negotiations for the settlement of questions raised by the present war» .
From Women’s Liberation to a Tool for the State
Emmeline Pankhurst addressing a pro-war rally in 1914
There is nothing new about liberal social reformers falling into lockstep when the country goes to war.
British Emmeline Pankhurst was the most prominent member in the Women’s Suffrage movement. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1902. After a remarkable and highly radical campaign for women’s rights, including hunger strikes, arson and window smashings, the group changed from a reformist program to a hard right reactionary nationalism as soon as the war broke out.
In 1914-15, bands of women roamed the cities of England handing out white feathers of cowardice to men wearing civilian clothes. The ‘White Feather Brigade’ was established by admiral Charles Fitzgerald, a war hawk who wished to see Britain institute mandatory military service. The campaign spread through the country with astonishing rapidity.
The highly successful White Feather campaign, shaming British men to enlist.
Not unconnected, the WSPU successfully carried out secret negotiations with the government, and on the 10th August 1914, the government announced it was releasing all suffragettes from prison. After receiving a £2,000 grant from the government, the WSPU organised a pro-war demonstration in London. Members carried banners with slogans such as «We Demand the Right to Serve» and «Let None Be Kaiser’s Cat’s Paws».
Pankhurst founded the Women’s Party in 1917. Excerpts from the program:
(1) A fight to the finish with Germany.
(2) More vigorous war measures to include drastic food rationing, more communal kitchens to reduce waste, and the closing down of nonessential industries to release labour for work on the land and in the factories.
(3) A clean sweep of all officials of enemy blood or connections from Government departments. Peace terms to include the dismemberment of the Hapsburg Empire.
(8) Irish Home Rule to be denied.
In the Suffrage Movement’s defense, many members chose a different and more honorable stance, like her daughter Sylvia Pankhurst. In 1915, Sylvia gave her enthusiastic support to the International Women’s Peace Congress, and she later became a leading international voice in the resistance to Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia.
Edith Cavell – Nurse (And a Hundred Years Later, a Spy After All)
Few incidents created bigger outrage in the First World War than when the British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by firing squad for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium. In the trial, she admitted to leading a people smuggling network.
But the German charges also claimed that Cavell was a spy, sending sensitive intelligence through the same network, a claim which was strongly denied by both Cavell and the British government.
The government’s insistence on her innocence was taken as implicitly true in Britain, and she became a symbol for victims of Hunnic habitual cruelty. This perception also had great impact on public opinion in the still neutral United States. The implicit presumption of innocence lingered for a many years, and was a useful propaganda tool for many decades.
In a BBC-program in 2015, a hundred years after Cavell’s death, Stella Rimington, former head of the MI5, revealed that she had discovered documents in Belgian archives indicating that Cavell was in fact a spy.
This is of course a limited hangout. MI5 would have known this all along, being Cavell’s boss, but naturally chose to keep quiet about it, since the idea of her innocence was so convenient.
Rimington said her evidence showed «that the Cavell organisation was a two-pronged affair» and that espionage was the other part of its clandestine mission.
The documents included an account by Herman Capiau, a young Belgian mining engineer who had brought the first British soldiers to Cavell in 1914 and was an important member of her network.
He wrote: «Whenever it was possible to send interesting intelligence on military operations, this information was forwarded to the English intelligence service punctually and rapidly.»
Capiau referred to information about a German trench system, the location of munitions dumps and the whereabouts of aircraft.
Since she was in fact guilty, it would make her case similar to the famous spy Mata Hari, who was unceremoniously executed by the French in 1917, without any international outcry. Of course, Cavell’s case is worse, since she used a humanitarian cover for her activities, putting all medical personnel under suspicion.
Most of Our Opinions Are Formed by Men We Have Never Heard of
A young man, Edward Bernays, started working for it, and quickly learned his trade there. He later became known as «the father of public relations», and a pioneer in the modern PR-industry, where he, among other things, arranged the media part of the CIA-regime change operation in Guatemala in 1954. The full quote from him is as follows:
«The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.»
The Invasion of 1910 — A Book Commissioned to Tell the Public Who the Next Enemy Is
Ad in The London Times for the book (1906)
Describing an imagined German invasion of England, the book The Invasion of 1910 was written by William le Queux on commission from the press magnate Lord Northcliffe and serialized in his newspaper the Daily Mail in 1906. After the detente with France and friendlier relations with Russia, British elites circles agreed on who the next likely enemy would be. But the British public still wasn’t ‘with the program’, and a large campaign was started to prepare them mentally. In the years 1906-1914, a torrent of books and articles on the terrible Hun menace poured out from a number of authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle.
Bits by Bits a War Memorial Day Gets a New Meaning
Cadets march in the 2014 ANZAC day parade (Picture: Flickr/Chris Phutully)
World War 1 was a bloody affair for the Commonwealth countries. Most Australian country towns or even small villages have a cenotaph or monument with a shockingly long list of local men lost in WW1. ANZAC-day (on 25th of April, the anniversary of the Anglo-French campaign to conquer Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, where Australia played a part) was decided as a holiday in 1921 to commemorate these war dead, in a rather sombre spirit. The holiday and ceremony was a quiet affair for most of last century, apart from the usual right-wing forces trying to capitalize on it. It reached it’s nadir in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam war.
A marked change started in the 1990s, with a concerted and very well funded campaign from the government to militarize Australian history. Now the ceremonies are huge, military-political events, full of pathos, cant and sentimentality. By spending huge sums to connect the public idea of Australianness to a glorification of its military glory, it seems Australian participation, like in 1914 by choice, in the next bloody world war is inevitable – nothing learned Down Under.
Neutral Countries Are the Winners
This Swiss cartoon by Karl Czerpien, is captioned «The wooing of the Neutrals», where orators from the warring countries are trying to entice neutrals to join them. The different alliances spent large efforts to tangle neutral countries into their imperialistic intrigues (see the case of Italy above). For smaller neutral countries, war between the great powers is always a dangerous time, but by trying to stay neutral, they are rather better off than by joining an alliance. A lesson for our time, when small countries in Europe seem very eager to get the honor of being the battlefield in the next war.
1924 — The Pacifist Ernst Friedrich Shows the Real Faces of War
In 1924, in the book War against War, the German anti-war activist Ernst Friedrich breaks a taboo in war reporting, by showing real war injuries. Such horrific pictures were – and still are – generally very rarely shown in war reporting, both in the corporate media and in anti-war literature.
This unwillingness contributes, intentionally or just because the pictures are too shocking to handle, to an almost idealized image of war, where our dead are always beautifully serene and the wounded well wrapped in bandages.
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This article was also published on the author’s blog site: Midt i fleisen.
Terje Maloy is a Norwegian/Australian blogger and translator.
All images in this article are from Creative Commons unless otherwise stated.
As long as he’s around in public or private life, Trump is unlikely to go quietly into that good night.
While the jury is out on whether significant evidence of election fraud in key swing states will turn defeat into a second term of office, chances of the latter are slim if deep state dark forces decided otherwise.
Whatever happens ahead, over two months remain before inauguration day on January 20.
Much can happen between now and then.
From November 7 through Thursday, Trump regime envoy for regime change in Iran and Venezuela/convicted felon Elliott Abrams is visiting Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE “for consultations on Iran,” according to the State Department.
Over the weekend, Axios reported that he’s discussing “a plan to slap a long string of new sanctions on Iran” from now through January 20 inauguration day.
On Sunday, he met with Netanyahu and Israeli national security advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat on the scheme.
The following day, he discussed it Israeli war minister Benny Gantz and foreign minister Gabi Asjeknazi — both figures former IDF chiefs.
Pompeo, Abrams and other Trump regime hardliners apparently believe that “flood(ing)” more sanctions on Iran will prevent Biden/Harris from returning to the JCPOA.
Years of sanctions on Iran achieved nothing but hardships for its people.
Because of likely unacceptable Biden/Harris demands for returning to the JCPOA by the US that relate to weakening Iran militarily, chances of reversing Trump’s pullout are greatly compromised already.
Last week, Abrams reportedly said that the Trump regime intends new sanctions on Iran weekly through January 20, according to Axios, adding:
They’ll target Iran’s legitimate ballistic missile program, its nonexistent aid to “terrorist organizations,” and phony accusations of human rights violations.
Next week, Pompeo will be in Israel and likely other regional countries, following up on Abrams’ visits — to pile on further (failed) “maximum pressure” on Iran.
If Biden/Harris succeed Trump in January as expected, US policy toward Iran will remain hardline as it has for decades.
Chances of returning to the JCPOA in its current form are slim.
Illegal US sanctions will likely remain in place unchanged.
As long as the Islamic Republic remains independent of US control and Israel wants the country checked, whoever serves as US president — and in key congressional posts — will remain hostile toward Iran.
Pompeo, Abrams, and other Trump regime hardliners may succeed in making it too hard for Biden/Harris to rejoin the JCPOA.
As explained many times before, Iran abhors nuclear weapons, wants them eliminated everywhere, and has no intention of developing them.
No evidence refutes what’s well-known in Washington and throughout the West.
The issue with Iran for the US is wanting control over its vast oil and gas reserves, along with neutralizing Israel’s main regional rival.
Decades of US hostility toward Iran has nothing to do with any threats posed by its ruling authorities because none exist.
Claims otherwise are baseless propaganda — no doubt to continue if Biden/Harris succeed Trump in January.
Since its 1979 revolution, Iran withstood every hostile action committed by the US against the country and its people.
It continues being a force of resistance against US imperial lawlessness in the region that’s weakening over time, not strengthening.
Iran has been around for centuries. It’ll still be around when imperial USA enters history’s dustbin— where it rightly belongs.
A Final Comment
On Monday, the Trump regime imposed more illegal sanctions on Syria.
As on Iran and other targeted countries, they aim to inflict hardships on their people — based on Big Lies.
A statement by Trump’s Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) falsely claimed new sanctions on Damascus aim “to achieve a peaceful, political resolution of the Syrian conflict (sic).”
Endless war in the country was made in the USA by the Obama/Biden regime.
It’ll no doubt continue under Biden/Harris.
Both right wings of the US war party reject world peace in favor of smashing countries to control them by hot and other means.
That’s what the scourge of US imperial rage is all about.
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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.”
Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.
To be sure, some neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having been fired by the president and written a book.
Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they have been maintaining relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.
It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini. The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to U.S. national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum are favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s recent resignation. Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC.
The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Zionist neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication The Weekly Standardvirtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon support for an aggressive policy against Russia due to its involvement in Syria and has led to repeated calls for the U.S. to attack Iran and destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively sought “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective.
The neocons are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are funded by Jewish billionaires. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University. The neocon opposition has been sniping against Trump over the past four years but has been biding its time and building new alliances, waiting for what it has perceived to be an inevitable regime change in Washington.
That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland.
Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. His wife Victoria Nuland is perhaps better known. She was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.
A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.
And, to be sure, beyond regime change in places like Ukraine, President Barack Obama was no slouch when it came to starting actual shooting wars in places like Libya and Syria while also killing people, including American citizens, using drones. Biden appears poised to inherit many former Obama White House senior officials, who would consider the eager-to-please neoconservatives a comfortable fit as fellow foot soldiers in the new administration. Foreign policy hawks expected to have senior positions in the Biden Administration include Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power and, most important of all the hawkish Michele Flournoy, who has been cited as a possible secretary of defense. And don’t count Hillary Clinton out. Biden is reportedly getting his briefings on the Middle East from Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who now lives in the Jewish state and is reportedly working for an Israeli government supported think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies.
Nowhere in Biden’s possible foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to a new cold war with major competitor powers like Russia and China. In fact, Biden himself appears to embrace an extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with both Moscow and Beijing “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language is unrelenting, so much so that it is Donald Trump who could plausibly be described as the peace candidate in the recently completed election, having said at the Republican National Convention in August “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended.”
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: TRUMP SPEAKS IN WINSTON-SALEM, NC, SEPT. 8, 2020. SCREENSHOT FROM NBC NEWS VIDEO.
Analysts are still grappling with the fallout from the US election. Trumpism proved a far more enduring and alluring phenomenon than most media pundits expected. Defying predictions, Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women.
But most significantly, he almost held his own against Democratic challenger Joe Biden at a time when the US economy – the incumbent’s “trump” card – was in dire straits after eight months of a pandemic. Had it not been for Covid-19, Trump – not Biden – would most likely be preparing for the next four years in the White House.
Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning – on the rare occasions he appeared – suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth.
But then again, if Trump could lead the world’s only superpower for four years, how hard can it really be? He showed that those tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists might be right after all: maybe the president is largely a figurehead, while a permanent bureaucracy runs much of the show from behind the curtain. Were Ronald Reagan and George W Bush not enough to persuade us that any halfwit who can string together a few cliches from a teleprompter will suffice?
No return to ‘normal’
The narrowly averted Trump second term has at least prompted liberal pundits to draw one significant lesson that is being endlessly repeated: Biden must avoid returning to the old “normal”, the one that existed before Trump, because that version of “normal” was exactly what delivered Trump in the first place. These commentators fear that, if Biden doesn’t play his cards wisely, we will end up in 2024 with a Trump 2.0, or even a rerun from Trump himself, reinvigorated after four years of tweet-sniping from the sidelines. They are right to be worried.
But their analysis does not properly explain the political drama that is unfolding, or where it heads next. There is a two-fold problem with the “no return to normal” argument.
The first is that the liberal media and political class making this argument are doing so in entirely bad-faith. For four years they have turned US politics and its coverage into a simple-minded, ratings-grabbing horror show. A vile, narcissist businessman, in collusion with an evil Russian mastermind, usurped the title of most powerful person on the planet that should have been bestowed on Hillary Clinton. As Krystal Ball has rightly mocked, even now the media are whipping up fears that the “Orange Mussolini” may stage some kind of cack-handed coup to block the handover to Biden.
These stories have been narrated to us by much of the corporate media over and over again – and precisely so that we do not think too hard about why Trump beat Clinton in 2016. The reality, far too troubling for most liberals to admit, is that Trump proved popular because a lot of the problems he identified were true, even if he raised them in bad faith himself and had no intention of doing anything meaningful to fix them.
Trump was right about the need for the US to stop interfering in the affairs of the rest of the world under the pretence of humanitarian concern and a supposed desire to spread democracy at the end of the barrel of a gun. In practice, however, lumbered with that permanent bureaucracy, delegating his authority to the usual war hawks like John Bolton, and eager to please the Christian evangelical and Israel lobbies, Trump did little to stop such destructive meddling. But at least he was correct rhetorically.
When I’m speaking to foreign leaders, I’m telling them: America is going to be back. We’re going to be back in the game.
The Guardian declares: 'A new start', with a 'Free 16-page Joe Biden souvenir supplement inside'.
Before we get too dewy-eyed, look at how the Guardian did exactly the same job of rebranding the US in 2008. Obama went on to bomb seven Muslim countries:https://t.co/ah4NIgIbtVpic.twitter.com/Hp8olGzcpo
Equally, Trump looked all too right in berating the establishment media for promoting “fake news”, especially as coverage of his presidency was dominated by an evidence-free narrative claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the election. Those now bleating about how dangerous his current assertions of election fraud are should remember they were the ones who smashed that particular glass house with their own volley of stones back in 2016.
Yes, Trump has been equally culpable with his Twitter barrages of fake news. And yes, he cultivated rather than spurned support from one of those major corporate outlets: the reliably rightwing Fox News. But what matters most is that swaths of the American public – unable to decide who to believe, or maybe not caring – preferred to side with a self-styled maverick, Washington outsider, the supposed “underdog”, against a class of self-satisfied, overpaid media professionals transparently prostituting themselves to the billionaire owners of the corporate media.
Once voters had decided the system was rigged – and it is rigged towards the maintenance of elite power – anyone decrying the system, whether honestly or duplicitously, was going to prove popular.
Endebted to donors
Trump’s appeal was further bolstered by styling himself a self-made man, as his campaign riffed on the long-standing myths of the American Dream. The US public was encouraged to see Trump as a rich man prepared to gamble part of his own fortune on a run for the presidency so he could bring his business acumen to USA Ltd. That contrasted starkly with Democratic party leaders like Clinton and Biden who gave every appearance of having abjectly sold their principles – and their souls – to the highest-bidding corporate “donors”.
And again, that perception – at least in relation to Clinton and Biden – wasn’t entirely wrong.
How can Biden not end up trying to resurrect the Obama years that he was so very much part of during his two terms as vice-president and that led directly to Trump? That was why corporate donors backed his campaign. They desire the kind of neoliberal “normal” that leaves them free to continue making lots more money and ensures the wealth gap grows.
It is why they and the media worked so hard to pave Biden’s path to the presidency, even doing their best to bury political stories embarrassing to the Biden campaign. Maintaining that “normal” is the very reason the modern Democratic party exists.
Even if Biden wanted to radically overhaul the existing, corporate-bonded US political system – and he doesn’t – he would be incapable of doing so. He operates within institutional, structural constraints – donors, Congress, the media, the supreme court – all there to ensure his room for manoeuvre is tightly delimited.
Had his main rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, been allowed to run instead and won the presidency, it would have been much the same. The important difference is that the existence of a President Sanders would have risked exposing the fact that the “world’s most powerful leader” is not really so powerful.
Sanders would have lost his battles trying to defy these structural constraints, but in the process he would have made those constraints far more visible. They would have been all too obvious had someone like Sanders been constantly hitting his head against them. That was precisely why the corporate class and the technocratic leadership of the Democratic party worked so strenuously to make sure Sanders got nowhere near the presidential race.
Resistance posturing
Biden will do his best to achieve what his donors want: a return to the neoliberal “normal” under Obama. He will offer a sprinkling of initiatives to ensure progressive liberals can put to rest their resistance posturing with a clear conscience. There will be some “woke” identity politics to prevent any focus on class politics and the struggle for real economic justice, as well as some weak, corporation-friendly Green New Deal projects, if Biden can sneak past them past a Republican-controlled Senate.
And if he can’t manage even that … well that’s the beauty of a system tailor-made to follow the path of least financial resistance, to uphold the corporate status quo, the “normal”.
But there is a second, bigger problem. A fly in the ointment. Whatever Biden and the Democratic party do to resurrect the neoliberal consensus, the old “normal”, it isn’t coming back. The smug, technocratic class that has dominated western politics for decades on behalf of the corporate elite is under serious threat. Biden looks more like a hiccough, a last burp provoked by the unexpected pandemic.
The neoliberal “normal” isn’t coming back because the economic circumstances that generated it – the post-war boom of seemingly endless growth – have disappeared.
Plutocracy entrenches
A quarter of a century ago, the Cassandras of their day – those dismissed as peddlers of false conspiracy theories – warned of “peak oil”. That was the idea that the fuel on which the global economy ran either had peaked or soon would do. As the oil ran out, or became more expensive to extract, economic growth would slow, wages would fall, and inequality between rich and poor would increase.
This was likely to have dramatic political consequences too: resource wars abroad (inevitably camouflaged as “humanitarian intervention”); more polarised domestic politics; greater popular dissatisfaction; the return of charismatic, even fascist, leaders; and a resort to violence to solve political problems.
The arguments about peak oil continue. Judged by some standards, the production peak arrived in the 1970s. Others say, with the aid of fracking and other harmful technologies, the turning-point is due about now. But the kind of world predicted by peak oil theory looks to have been unfolding since at least the 1980s. The crisis in neoliberal economics was underscored by the 2008 global economic crash, whose shockwaves are still with us.
On top of all this, there are looming ecological and climate catastrophes intimately tied to the fossil-fuel economy on which the global corporations have grown fat. This Gordian knot of globe-spanning self-harm urgently needs unpicking.
Biden has neither the temperament nor the political manoeuvre room to take on these mammoth challenges and solve them. Inequality is going to increase during his term. The technocrats are again going to be exposed once again as impotent – or complicit – as plutocracy entrenches. The ecological crisis is not going to be dealt with beyond largely empty promises and posturing.
There will be lots of talk in the media about the need to give Biden more time to show what he can do and demands that we keep quiet for fear of ushering back Trumpism. This will be designed to lose us yet more valuable months and years to address urgent problems that threaten the future of our species.
The age of populism
The ability of the technocratic class to manage growth – wealth accumulation for the rich, tempered by a little “trickle down” to stop the masses rising up – is coming to an end. Growth is over and the technocrat’s toolbox is empty.
We are now in the age of political populism – a natural response to burgeoning inequality.
On one side is the populism of the Trumpers. They are the small-minded nationalists who want to blame everyone but the real villains – the corporate elite – for the west’s declining fortunes. As ever, they will search out the easiest targets: foreigners and “immigrants”. In the US, the Republican party has been as good as taken over by the Tea party. The US right is not going to repudiate Trump for his defeat, they are going to totemise him because they understand his style of politics is the future.
There are now Trumps everywhere: Boris Johnson in the UK (and waiting in the wings, Nigel Farage); Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; the Le Pen dynasty in France; Viktor Orban in Hungary. They are seeding the return of xenophobic, corporate fascism.
The corporate media would have us believe that this is the only kind of populism that exists. But there is a rival populism, that of the left, and one that espouses cooperation and solidarity within nations and between them.
Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US are the first shoots of a global reawakening of class-conscious politics based on solidarity with the poor and oppressed; of renewed pressure for a social contract, in contrast to the worship of survival-of-the-fittest economics; of a reclaiming of the commons, communal resources that belong to us all, not just the strongmen who seized them for their own benefit; and, most importantly, of an understanding, lost sight of in our industrialised, consumption-obsessed societies, that we must find a sustainable accommodation with the rest of the living world.
My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX
This kind of leftwing populism has a long pedigree that dates back nearly 150 years. It flourished in the inter-war years in Europe; it defined the political battle-lines in Iran immediately after the Second World War; and it has been a continual feature of Latin American politics.
Warped logic
As ever, the populism of the nationalists and bigots has the upper hand. And that is no accident.
Today’s globalised wealth elite prefer neoliberal, technocratic politics that keep borders open for trade; that treat the labouring poor as human chattel, to be moved around on a global chess board as a way to force wages down; and that ensure the elite can stash its ill-gotten gains away on island sanctuaries far from the tax man.
But when technocratic politics is on its death bed, as it is now, the corporate elite will always settle for the populism of a Trump or a Farage over the populism of the left. They will do so even if rightwing populism risks constraining their financial empires, because leftwing populism does much worse: it upends the warped logic on which the corporate elite’s entire hoarded wealth depends, threatening to wipe it out.
If the corporate elite can no longer find a way to foist a neoliberal technocrat like Biden on the public, they will choose the populism of a Trump over the populism of a Sanders every time. And as they own the media, they can craft the stories we hear: about who we are, what is possible and where we are heading. If we allow it, our imaginations will be twisted and deformed in the image of the deranged totem they choose.
We can reclaim politics – a politics that cares about the future, about our species, about our planet – but to do so we must first reclaim our minds.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Medical experts and practitioners from around the world have united once again to make clear their concerns regarding the health effects of escalating non-ionising radiation (NIR) exposures.
A staggering 9.2 million jobs could be lost in the U.S. Travel & Tourism sector in 2020 if barriers to global travel remain in place, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) revealed.
Leaving aside his priority of fortifying himself in the White House against any bailiff onslaught by president-elect Joe Biden, he is busy making decisions. One of them is something that this administration will always be remembered for: sackings.
The Biden-Harris administration is good news for corporations, cops, war profiteers and banks too big to fail, but offers nothing to save the people and planet from multiple rises.
The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, currently being criticised for imposing another lockdown based on questionable data, has met with Bill Gates to discuss implementing a global “health security” program using Britain’s G7 presidency to speed up the process.
These remarks were delivered by Abayomi Azikiwe at the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR) Virtual Forum held on November 12, 2020. The event was entitled: “What Now? A Post-Election Town Hall Meeting.”
On 10 November 2020, the United States secretary-of-state Mike Pompeo, he of the ill-famed confession “We lied, we cheated, we stole,” spoke at the Ronald Reagan Institute.
It’s also worth pointing out that Biden leads a neoliberal movement which is inherently Russophobic and which has spent the last few years painting Russia as enemy number one. For many in the US now, Russia has become a dirty word, after the fantasy that was ‘Russiagate’ in which it was alleged, without any real foundation, that Russia had influenced the US elections and Donald Trump was working for Putin.
Redefined along with the concept of society and the space-time sense is the concept of personhood. The human person, in the context of cyberspace, has been essentialized while the physicality of being is set aside.
Earlier this year, I traveled that ochre-dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in the African Sahel once known for having the largest film festival on the continent. Now, it’s the site of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
Less than a year after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military operation against the country’s northern Tigray province. Ethiopia is often described as the Horn of Africa’s pillar of stability and has become a hub of Chinese infrastructural and economic expansionism into Africa – but this can all be threatened now with the descent of what appears to be a civil war.
With the world distracted by the U.S. Presidential Elections and its post-vote drama, as well as the war in Artsakh (more commonly known as Nagorno-Karabakh), Abiy alleges he launched a military operation in Tigray province on November 4 in response to an attack by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) against an Ethiopian military base that resulted in wounded soldiers and the looting of their belongings.
On Monday, the Ethiopian military reported that they were “hitting targets with precision” in Tigray province to “re-establish constitutional order.” Despite the Tigrayans making up only about 6% of the country’s population, the TPLF have dominated Ethiopian politics for decades. With the arrival of Abiy, belonging to the Oromo ethnicity, Tigrayan political domination began to recede, including through deliberate efforts by the central government.
Abiy’s decision to postpone the country’s parliamentary elections because of COVID-19 was the last frustration for the TPLF. Abiy postponed the elections because it was likely he would not be able to achieve a majority to remain in office. The TPLF argue it was an anti-democratic decision made possible by the pandemic. The TPLF decided to hold elections in Tigray province, even without authorization from the central government in Addis Ababa. Having been marginalized from power that it once held, Tigrayans used this chance to accuse the prime minister of violating democratic principles and, despite federal laws, conducted their own parliamentary elections.
Abiy came to power in 2018 as a new leader willing to undertake profound political and economic reforms in Ethiopia and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for concluding the armistice between his country and Eritrea, bringing a final conclusion to the conflict that waged between 1998 and 2000. His reforms, however, are rekindling old ethnic nationalisms and tensions between different states in this multinational republic.
According to the 2007 Ethiopian census, the Tigray region is 96% ethnically Tigrayan and is wedged between Eritrea and Sudan, as well as the Amhara and Afar regions of Ethiopia. The Tigrayans accumulated considerable military experience because of the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Although the TPLF defend the autonomy of different ethnic groups in Ethiopia through ethnic federalism, from the 2000s onwards the group started to be accused of exercising authoritarianism, resulting in its political power decreasing.
There is no evidence however that the TPLF are receiving international military support at the moment as they appear to be a separatist movement. The TPLF believe this is a civil war while the central government claims that the battle is an operation to re-establish the constitutional order. If Addis Ababa succeeds in quickly achieving constitutional order, it will certainly be a political victory.
But more crucially, Addis Ababa need to achieve peace before the war spreads as it can expose many other volatilities in the region. The Horn of Africa, made up of Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti, is considered one of the most volatile regions in the world.
The battles in Tigray could directly influences neighboring countries. Eritrea for example only became independent from Ethiopia in the 1990s, and the TPLF fought alongside the Eritrean liberation movement. Eritrea and the TPLF could rekindle their relations. Another example is that the waters of the Nile, which 86% of its flow comes from Ethiopia, is of critical importance to the survival of countries like Egypt and Sudan.
Any internal problem in Ethiopia can lead to drastic crises throughout the region.
For China, such an unravelling of instability in the region will affect their growing influence and economic expansion into Africa. Ethiopia is often described as “China in Africa” as Chinese companies are heavily investing in Ethiopia’s textile, pharmaceutical, construction and manufacturing industries – more so then anywhere else in Africa. According to the Ethiopian Investment Commission, by the end June 2020, Ethiopia approved over 1,500 investment projects from China, amounting to around $2.7 billion, accounting for 25% of the total direct investment projects in Ethiopia this year.
Having turned Ethiopia into China’s Africa hub, Chinese economic planners can take advantage of Ethiopia’s 110 million population for manufacturing and consumption as its middle class grows. But more importantly, from Ethiopia, Chinese companies can penetrate into nearby resource rich countries like Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda, and use this to springboard deeper into Africa.
Chinese investments and contracts in sub-Saharan Africa totalled $299 billion between 2005 and 2018, according to the China Investment Global Tracker. In 2018, Chinese president Xi Jinping vowed to invest a further $60 billion into African nations. However, China’s deep penetration into the economic development of Africa is tied to its hub in Ethiopia.
Although Abiy emphasizes that the operation in Tigray is not a civil war but a rapid response to re-establish constitutional order, it still threatens to unravel Ethiopia and return it to the dark days when it was simultaneously fighting a civil war along with Eritrean and Somali separatists between the 1970s and 2000. In fact, the battles in Tigray have the potential to encourage other separatist movements in Ethiopia, particularly in Afar, Gambela, Ogaden, Oromia and Sidama.
For China, such a devastating war and the potential further fracturing of the Ethiopian state would be a catastrophic blow to its Africa policy. Ethiopia was selectively chosen by China to become its main Africa hub because of its central position in Northeast Africa and for being a center of stability in an otherwise chaotic region. In fact, it was China that financed and built the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa because of its confidence in Ethiopian stability and potential.
If the TPLF’s uprising continues for long it might not only deter China’s continued economic expansion into Africa, but also threaten the very existence of the Ethiopian state if the many other separatist movements in the country become emboldened.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
A new era is beginning in bilateral relations between Brazil and the US. Unlike Donald Trump, who demonstrated greater neutrality in environmental and humanitarian issues and always avoided pronouncements about the Amazon, the presumptive president-elect, Joe Biden, is marked by a much stronger ideological aspect with regard to the great agendas of contemporary times, such as Human Rights and the Environment. And this can deeply shake the structures of relations with the Bolsonaro government in Brazil.
In the election campaign, Biden made several pronouncements about the Amazon. During the first electoral debate in early October, Biden promised to join with other countries and offer 20 billion dollars to help to preserve the region. Previously, the Democrat had already said during an interview that if Bolsonaro did not understand the value of the Amazon, he would bring the world together to protect it. These words were considered outrageous by several Brazilian experts, who saw there a threat of an international coalition against Brazil.
But Bolsonaro was not exasperated in his responses to Biden until the presidential elections were over. Now, with Biden’s looming victory and the possibility that the Democrat’s threats materialize, Bolsonaro responds in a tone of extreme aggressiveness. During an event in Brasilia on Tuesday (November 10), Bolsonaro said that, in the face of the threat of imposing economic barriers, diplomacy is not enough, and “gunpowder” is needed. With the word “gunpowder”, Bolsonaro clearly refers to the firepower of the armed forces, which in practice means that the Brazilian president threatened to go to war with the US.
This situation would have been utterly impossible until months ago, when ties between Brasilia and Washington were more stable due to diplomacy between Bolsonaro and Trump. However, with a Democrat president absolutely unwilling to tolerate Bolsonaro’s irresponsible environmental policies, the friendship between these countries is ruined. Biden will try to isolate Brazil more and more in its international relations, applying an economic suffocation tactic to provoke internal changes. The Bolsonaro government will be forced to adopt a new strategy in its foreign policy, as automatic alignment with Washington can no longer work.
As for his threat of war, Bolsonaro has no choice but to change the tone of his speech in the next statements. The Brazilian president’s revolt is, from a certain point of view, understandable, considering that Biden made several previous provocations against Brazil. Undoubtedly, Bolsonaro’s environmental policy is reprehensible, but this does not justify that Biden threatens to “unite the world” against Brazil. The imposition of sanctions can be fair and correct, as long as it takes place within the parameters of international law and seeks to solve a real problem for the benefit of global society – it is not a decision that can come unilaterally from the President of the US. However, Brazil does not have the material conditions to carry out a project as bold as a war against the US – this would be the end of the Brazilian National State.
Biden will not understand Bolsonaro’s words as a real threat at the military level, but he will certainly step up the measures against Brazil, further affecting bilateral relations. Still, with that Biden can recover the global campaign for the internationalization of the Amazon even more aggressively and, at some point, propose a “humanitarian intervention” in Brazil for environmental purposes. The scenario of possibilities is immense, having as common point the increase in mutual hostilities between Brazil and the US.
As we can see, in a few days, the basis of relations between Brazil and the US has been completely reversed. This is largely the result of the irresponsibility of the Bolsonaro government, which placed too much trust in its northern ally, without any strategic sense. The close relationship that Bolsonaro established with the US will be used by Biden against Bolsonaro himself. The joint strategies waged with American and Colombian officials on Amazonian soil to surround Venezuela will now be used to intimidate Brazil itself. The Bolsonaro government simply seems to have forgotten that the American elections would take place halfway through the Brazilian president’s term, and the entire alliance sealed in two years could collapse suddenly.
It is important to remember that this year the Brazilian military released an intelligence report that was extremely criticized for placing France as the greatest threat to Brazil. The main reason was Macron’s campaign for the internationalization of the Amazon, which is now recovered by Biden. Once again, Brazilian strategists were wrong: The Amazon remains the focus of attention, but now the main threat to Brazilian national security comes from Washington, not Paris.
In any case, Bolsonaro must immediately reform Brazilian environmental policies.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
November 13th, 2020 by Physicians' Health Initiative for Radiation and Environment
Medical experts and practitioners from around the world have united once again to make clear their concerns regarding the health effects of escalating non-ionising radiation (NIR) exposures. NIR is electromagnetic energy ranging from Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves right the way up to Ultraviolet (UV). In particular, they are concerned about radiofrequency (RF) emissions from mobile phone networks, Wi-Fi, and the rollout of 5G.
Whilst such emissions were historically presumed to be biologically inert, and are still purported to be safe by many to this day, there is now highly credible evidence to the contrary. The main risks associated with exposure to such (wireless) non-ionising radiation in the peer-reviewed scientific literature include: increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damage, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans.[1]
Mounting human epidemiological evidence of increased cancer has now been corroborated by ‘clear evidence’ of carcinogenesis from animal studies. These include the two largest investigations ever undertaken globally, from the widely respected National Toxicology Program (USA)[2,3] and Ramazzini Institute (Italy).[4] What is more, law courts are now validating such links with compensation for health damages from mobile phone radiation being won in a growing number of cases internationally.[5] Some legal teams are so certain of negative health effects that civil suits for Wi-Fi/other wireless injury are now being brought on a ‘no win no fee’ basis,[6] and insurance underwriters consider related risks to be ‘high’.[7,8]
Hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies have demonstrated adverse biological effects occurring in response to a range of NIR exposures below current safety guidelines;[9] however emissions continue to escalate. Medical evidence of harm has now reached the critical mass necessary to inspire the medical community to step out of their usual roles, stand up and speak out regarding their concerns.
“This is an important statement that should be read by all concerned with public health. Those responsible for exposing children to non-ionising radiation, especially in schools, should take immediate action to reduce exposure to non-ionising radiation of the children entrusted to their charge. There is sufficient evidence to now classify radiofrequency radiation as a human carcinogen. Action must be taken now to reduce human exposure to non-ionising radiation to as low as can be achievable, including a moratorium on the introduction of 5G.” Anthony B. Miller, MD. Professor Emeritus, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto (UofT).**
What is the opposition to their warning? Industry … in its many forms. Early warning experts have been ridiculed and silenced so many times before and yet as we continue to witness preventable deaths from smoking and asbestos, it seems we have learnt nothing. Industrial influences on public health policies continue to sacrifice evidence-based medicine in favour of revenue, which ultimately leads to those funds being reabsorbed in escalating health and social care costs. This is unsustainable as well as unethical.
The message from these doctors and scientists is a simple one:
“Progress is not progress when the cost to be paid is our health and the health of our children … Let us stop, take a breath and use our human genius for true evolution that enhances our lives rather than sabotages them.” Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe – Founding Director of Physicians’ Health Initiative for Radiation and Environment (PHIRE) and author of the Consensus Statement.
The document has been signed by medical groups representing over 3,500 medical doctors so far, including experienced clinicians and widely published and respected scientists who are experts in this field. It declares current safety levels to be inadequate and highlights some of the disease processes linked with NIR exposure in peer-reviewed publications; it points out the vulnerabilities of children[10] and other hypersensitive groups, whose symptoms may include sleep problems, impaired concentration, headaches, and mood disturbance;11 it also highlights the contravention of Human Rights and Equalities acts and requests urgent responses from governments and health authorities to halt further deployment of emitting technology and address current public health failures.
“In my lifetime our exposure to radiofrequency radiation has increased by up to a billion billion times. There is no excuse any more for pretending this is not harmful – to us and to all life on the planet. Radiofrequency radiation is the new tobacco. Anybody sincerely reading the science should be deeply, deeply concerned.” Dr. Damien Downing – President of The British Society for Ecological Medicine (BSEM).
The statement is now open for signing by further experts, medical doctors and scientists in agreement, together with members of wider society who wish to register their concern. To read: click here. To sign: click here.
Potentially harmful personal exposure can be reduced by taking simple steps, such as:
Mobile phones: Do not use mobile phones except for emergencies. Store them in ‘airplane’ or ‘flight’ mode (with all wireless services disabled) and switched off. They can also be used to connect to the internet via wired Ethernet adaptors whilst in airplane mode. If you feel you must use them wirelessly then using speakerphone or an air tube headset will allow you to keep the phone at a greater distance from your body, reducing the intensity of radiation exposure.
Wireless internet: Swap your wireless internet for a hardwired system by using wired Ethernet connections (adaptors are available for tablets also). Remember that because RF radiation is emitted from both devices and routers, you’ll need to disable all wireless services on your router, as well as your devices. You can reduce emissions from computers by disabling the wireless card in the device manager, by using airplane/flight mode, or by turning off wireless services (e.g. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) in network settings.
Landline phones: Swap your cordless landline for a corded speakerphone. If you must have wireless capability, get an ECO DECT phone with a good quality speakerphone, so that it can be used away from your brain, and use ECO mode. This will at least ensure that wireless radiation is emitted only when the phone is in use, rather than continuously, as with other models.
Smart meters: Request a hardwired (non-RF emitting) smart meter or analogue meter to ensure you and your neighbours are not subject to additional wireless radiation.
Other sources in the home: Other common household exposures may come from wireless: baby monitors and security systems, headphones/earphones, smart speakers and virtual assistants, smart TVs, TV boxes, and sticks, media players and printers, games consoles and controllers, and smart watches and fitness monitors – among various other ‘smart’ appliances, IoT devices, and wearables. In most cases there are hardwired alternatives which can be used instead, or flight modes which disable emissions when desired.
Sources outside the home: Emissions from publicly placed antennas and neighbours’ homes might be possible to shield against, but expert advice and metering is recommended to best help reduce exposures.
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**Professor Miller, MD, FRCP, FRCP (C), FFPH, FACE, is an eminent physician and expert in preventative medicine, a scientific advisor to various scientific and health authorities, and a former Senior Epidemiologist and Senior Scientist at the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).
Notes
1 The 5G Appeal, 2017. Over 400 scientists and medical doctors have now signed this appeal.
2 Wyde, M.E. et al., 2018. National Toxicology Program Technical Report on The Toxicology and Carcinogenesis Studies in Hsd:Sprague Dawley SD Rats Exposed to Whole-Body Radio Frequency Radiation at a Frequency (900 Mhz) and Modulations (GSM And CDMA) Used by Cell Phones, National Institutes of Health Public Health Service U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
3 Melnick, R, L., 2018. Commentary on the utility of the National Toxicology Program study on cell phone radiofrequency radiation data for assessing human health risks despite unfounded criticisms aimed at minimizing the findings of adverse health effects. Environ Res. 2019 Jan;168:1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2018.09.010. Epub 2018 Sep 20.
4 Falcioni et al., 2018. Report of final results regarding brain and heart tumors in Sprague-Dawley rats exposed from prenatal life until natural death to mobile phone radiofrequency field representative of a 1.8 GHz GSM base station environmental emission. Environ Res. 2018 Aug;165:496-503. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.037.
5 The Court of Appeal of Turin full judgment, 13 January 2020 (904/2019 of 3.12.2019, Romeo v. INAIL).
9 Biolnitiative Working Group, Sage, C. and Carpenter, D, Editors (2012). Biolnitiative Report: A Rationale for a Biologically- based Public Exposure Standard for Electromagnetic Radiation at www.bioinitiative.org. As updated in 2014, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
10 Morgan et al., 2014. Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults: The consequences. Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure. 2(4):197-204. doi: 10.1016/j.jmau.2014.06.005.
11 Belyaev et al, 2016. EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems and illnesses. Rev Environ Health. 2016 Sep 1;31(3):363-97. doi: 10.1515/reveh-2016-0011.
I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Some firewood, rugs, woven mats, rolled-up clothing or sheets, a dark green plastic tub, and an oversized plastic jerry can were lashed to the bed of the cart. Three goats tied to the rear of it ambled along behind.
They found themselves, as I did, on a hot, dusty road slowly being choked by families who had hastily hitched up their donkeys and piled whatever they could — kindling, sleeping mats, cooking pots — into sun-bleached carts or bush taxis. And they were the lucky ones. Many had simply set out on foot. Young boys tended small herds of recalcitrant goats. Women toted dazed toddlers. In the rare shade of a roadside tree, a family had stopped and a middle-aged man hung his head, holding it in one hand.
Earlier this year, I traveled that ochre-dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in the African Sahel once known for having the largest film festival on the continent. Now, it’s the site of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Those people were streaming down the main road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population has almost doubled this year, due to the displaced. Across the country’s northern stretches, other Burkinabe (as citizens are known) were making similar journeys toward towns offering only the most uncertain kinds of refuge. They were victims of a war without a name, a battle between Islamist militants who murder and massacre without compunction and armed forces that kill more civilians than militants.
I’ve witnessed variations of this wretched scene before — exhausted, upended families evicted by machete-wielding militiamen or Kalashnikov-carrying government troops, or the mercenaries of a warlord; dust-caked traumatized people plodding down lonesome highways, fleeing artillery strikes, smoldering villages, or towns dotted with moldering corpses. Sometimes motorbikes pull the carts. Sometimes, young girls carry the jerry cans on their heads. Sometimes, people flee with nothing more than what they’re wearing. Sometimes, they cross national borders and become refugees or, as in Burkina Faso, become internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in their own homeland. Whatever the particulars, such scenes are increasingly commonplace in our world and so, in the worst possible way, unremarkable. And though you would hardly know it in the United States, that’s what also makes them, collectively, one of the signature stories of our time.
At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world.
By the end of June, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an additional 4.8 million people had been uprooted by conflict, with the most devastating increases in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso. Yet, as dismal as these numbers may be, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change.
Already, shocking numbers have been put to flight by fires, derechos, and super storms, and so much worse is yet to come, according to experts. A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.
Worse Than World War II
Women, children, and men driven from their homes by conflict have been a defining feature of modern warfare. For almost a century now, combat correspondents have witnessed such scenes again and again. “Newly routed civilians, now homeless like the others with no idea of where they would next sleep or eat, with all their future lives an uncertainty, trudged back from the fighting zone,” the legendary Eric Sevareid reported, while covering Italy for CBS News during World War II. “A dust-covered girl clung desperately to a heavy, squirming burlap sack. The pig inside was squealing faintly. Tears made streaks down the girl’s face. No one moved to help her…”
The Second World War was a cataclysmic conflagration involving 70 nations and 70 million combatants. Fighting stretched across three continents in unparalleled destructive fury, including terror bombing, countlessmassacres, two atomic attacks, and the killing of 60 million people, most of them civilians, including six million Jews in a genocide known as the Holocaust. Another 60 million were displaced, more than the population of Italy (then the ninth-largest country in the world). An unprecedented global war causing unimaginable suffering, it nonetheless left far fewer people homeless than the 79.5 million displaced by conflicts and crises as 2019 ended.
How can violence-displaced people already exceed World War II’s total by almost 20 million (without even counting the nearly five million more added in the first half of 2020)?
The answer: these days, you can’t go home again.
In May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. By the beginning of September, the war in the Pacific was over, too. A month later, most of Europe’s displaced — including more than two million refugees from the Soviet Union, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Poles, and others — had already returned home. A little more than a million people, mostly Eastern Europeans, still found themselves stranded in camps overseen by occupying forces and the United Nations.
Today, according to UNHCR, ever fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that, in its multiple iterations, is now in its sixth decade.
War on (of and for) Terror
One of the most dramatic drivers of displacement over the last 20 years, according to researchers from Brown University’s Costs of War project, has been that conflict in Afghanistan and the seven other “most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001.” In the wake of the killing of 2,974 people by al-Qaeda militants that September 11th and the decision of George W. Bush’s administration to launch a Global War on Terror, conflicts the United States initiated, escalated, or participated in — specifically, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — have displaced between 37 million and 59 millionpeople.
While U.S. troops have also seen combat in Burkina Faso and Washington has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of “security assistance” into that country, its displaced aren’t even counted in the Costs of War tally. And yet there’s a clear link between the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libya’s autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and Burkina Faso’s desperate state today. “Ever since the West assassinated Qaddafi, and I’m conscious of using that particular word, Libya has been completely destabilized,” Chérif Sy, Burkina Faso’s defense minister, explained in a 2019 interview. “While at the same time it was the country with the most guns. It has become an arms cache for the region.”
Those arms helped destabilize neighboring Mali and led to a 2012 coup by a U.S.-trained officer. Two years later, another U.S.-trained officer seized power in Burkina Faso during a popular uprising. This year, yet another U.S.-trained officer overthrew yet another government in Mali. All the while, terrorist attacks have been ravaging the region. “The Sahel has seen the most dramatic escalation of violence since mid-2017,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.
In 2005, Burkina Faso didn’t even warrant mention in the “Africa Overview” section of the State Department’s annual report on terrorism. Still, more than 15 separate American security assistance programs were brought to bear there — about $100 million in the last two years alone. Meanwhile, militant Islamist violence in the country has skyrocketed from just three attacks in 2015 to 516 in the 12 months from mid-2019 to mid-2020, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.
Compounding Crises to Come
The violence in Burkina Faso has led to a cascade of compounding crises. Around one million Burkinabe are now displaced, a 1,500% increase since last January, and the number only keeps rising. So do the attacks and the fatalities. And this is just the beginning, since Burkina Faso finds itself on the frontlines of yet another crisis, a global disaster that’s expected to generate levels of displacement that will dwarf today’s historic figures.
Burkina Faso has been battered by desertification and environmental degradation since at least the 1960s. In 1973, a drought led to the deaths of 100,000 people there and in five other nations of the Sahel. Severe drought and hunger struck again in the mid-1980s and aid agencies began privately warning that those living in the north of the country would need to move southward as farming became ever less feasible. By the early 2000s, despite persistent droughts, the cattle population of the country had doubled, leading to increasing ethnic conflict between Mossi farmers and Fulani cattle herders. The war now tearing the country apart largely divides along those same ethnic lines.
In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns — droughts followed by flash floods — increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.
In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”
Sitting at the edge of the Sahara Desert, the country has long faced ecological adversity that’s only worsening as the frontlines of climate change steadily spread across the planet. Forecasts now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food — a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.
On the Road to Kaya
I don’t know what happened to the mother and two children I spotted on the road to Kaya. If they ended up like the scores of people I spoke with in that market town, now bulging with displaced people, they’re facing a difficult time. Rents are high, jobs scarce, government assistance all but nil. People there are living on the edge of catastrophe, dependent on relatives and the kindness of new neighbors with little to spare themselves. Some, driven by want, are even heading back into the conflict zone, risking death to gather firewood.
Kaya can’t deal with the massive influx of people forced from their homes by Islamist militants. Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people — nearly the population of China or India — likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?
In the decades ahead, ever more of us will find ourselves on roads like the one to Kaya, running from the devastation of raging wildfires or uncontrolled floodwaters, successive hurricanes or supercharged cyclones, withering droughts, spiraling conflicts, or the next life-altering pandemic. As a reporter, I’ve already been on that road. Pray you’re the one speeding by in the four-wheel-drive vehicle and not the one choking in the dust, driving the donkey cart.
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A sense of redundancy might encourage calm. The job is done, however well or poorly. The legacy charted. But in the case of President Donald Trump, there is still much to be done. Leaving aside his priority of fortifying himself in the White House against any bailiff onslaught by president-elect Joe Biden, he is busy making decisions. One of them is something that this administration will always be remembered for: sackings.
The sacking of Defence Secretary Mark Esper was in keeping with a recently minted tradition. Trump has made a habit of cycling through appointees, notably those in the Defence Department. Five acting or confirmed defence secretaries during the course of a presidential term is a spanking record and unlikely to be outdone for some years.
It was Esper who showed alarm at the possibility that troops would be deployed against protesters and did little to hide that fact. As he explained in the Pentagon briefing room on June 3,
“The option to use active duty troops in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”
Solid stuff from someone the president had mocked for undue subservience as Yesper, a tag he expressed resentment over in an interview given to Military Times a few days before his sacking.
“My frustration is I sit there and say, ‘Hm, 18 Cabinet members. Who’s pushed back more than anybody? Name another Cabinet secretary that’s pushed back.”
He was hardly top of the cabinet pops, and so, the beleaguered commander-in-chief, wishing for some gratuitous blood, found Esper’s exposed head. “Mark Esper,” came the president’s tweet, “has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.” His replacement: Christopher C. Miller, Director of the National Counterterrorism Centre.
I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately..
What makes this unusual is that transitions are usually periods of dull resignation and tidying up. Job massacres do not tend to figure. But Trump was rarely ordinary in anything concerning White House business, often reprising his role from The Apprentice as firer-in-chief.
Talking heads have found such moves not merely poor form but disconcerting. Former assistant Secretary of Defence during the Reagan administration, Lawrence Korb,was concerned with appearances. “This is purely an act of retaliation by a president thinking more about his petty grievances than about the good of the country.” It conveyed a “message… that Trump is going to continue his disruptive policies for the rest of his time in office.”
House speaker Nancy Pelosisaw a continuing pattern of behaviour. “The abrupt firing of Secretary Esper is disturbing evidence that President Trump is intent on using his final days in office to sow chaos in our American Democracy and around the world.” Nothing new on that front, then.
Similarly, Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat, was concerned that others – namely the enemies of the United States – might be enthused by such cavalier sackings. “Dismissing politically appointed national security leaders during a transition is a destabilizing move that will only embolden our adversaries and put our country at greater risk.”
Conservative think tankers such as Kori Schake at the American Enterprise Institute agree, suggesting that Trump was not living up to the expectations of the imperial military establishment. “Firing a competent defence secretary within two months remaining in his term is exactly the kind of petty recklessness that made so much of the Republic defence establishment support Joe Biden for president.”
Given the tenure of the Trump administration, and the propensity to prevent appointees from resting on their laurels, it is doubtful whether these adversaries would care one way or the other. But the psyche of the imperium not only demands lusty enemies, but demands that they take interest, gazing across oceans and deserts at what Freedom’s Land will be up to next. Democratic Senator from Virginia Mark Warnerpromotes the worn view that “our adversaries are already seeking vulnerabilities they can exploit in order to undermine American global leadership and national security during this transition period.”
In the radio chatterverse, NPR’s Greg Myre was also worried about what the sacking would do to confidence in the already nerve shattered ranks of US allies. “[T]he world doesn’t take a timeout during a US presidential transition.” This speculation tends to forget that such allies have generally adapted to Trump’s tongue lashings over defence expenditure or pulling their weight, and anticipate the next erratic move as a matter of course. The rickety US alliance system has also come in for some suggested revisions, notably in the form of French President Emmanuel Macron’s notion of strategic autonomy.
Esper’s removal is part of a transition spring clean in the dying days of the Trump presidency. Anthony Tata, a retired brigadier-general, former superintendent of Wake County Schools and North Carolina Department of Transportation chief, has been shoehorned into the role of Pentagon’s policy chief. Tata struggled with Senate confirmation earlier in the summer, a situation aided by past statements of some factual elasticity. (Neither he, nor the truth, tend to trouble each other.) In 2018, he accused President Barack Obama for being a Muslim “terrorist leader”. He has also had his sights on former CIA Director John Brennan, giving firm advice on Twitter that has since been removed: “Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as a prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol.”
In all this clouded mess, acting undersecretary of defence for policy, James H. Anderson, also handed in his resignation papers, along with Joseph D. Kernan, undersecretary of defence for intelligence. To make the picture that more interesting, Tata had been, in effect, Anderson’s deputy, in circumvention of Senate confirmation protocols. Not only has Trump proven to be the firing boss par excellence; he continues to fiddle protocol and muddy convention. Expect more heads to roll.
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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 13th, 2020 by World Travel & Tourism Council
A staggering 9.2 million jobs could be lost in the U.S. Travel & Tourism sector in 2020 if barriers to global travel remain in place, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) revealed.
The new figure comes from WTTC’s latest economic modelling, which looks at the punishing impact of COVID-19 and travel restrictions on the Travel & Tourism sector.
According to the latest data, 7.2 million jobs in the U.S. have been impacted. If there is no immediate alleviation of restrictions on international travel, as many as 9.2 million jobs – more than half of all jobs supported by the sector in the U.S. in 2019 – would be lost.
WTTC has identified the four top priorities which should be addressed, including the adoption of a comprehensive and cost-effective testing regime at departure to avoid transmission, the re-opening of key ‘air corridors’ such as between New York and London, and international coordination.
The challenge of restoring safe travels in the new normal is one of the biggest issues facing the U.S. as it grapples with a depressed economy devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit the Travel & Tourism sector particularly hard.
The WTTC Economic Impact Report for 2019 revealed that Travel & Tourism contributed $1.84 trillion to the U.S. economy and was responsible for more than one in 10 (10.7%) American jobs.
Gloria Guevara, WTTC President & CEO, said:
“Firstly, we would like to take this opportunity to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and we wish them every success in these challenging times. The U.S. government has a real opportunity to lead the international coordination and save millions of jobs globally and across the U.S.
“In 2019, Travel & Tourism was responsible for almost 17 million jobs, which is more than one in every 10 jobs across the U.S., so it’s vital we recover as many as possible to power the economic recovery of the country.
“Globally, eight out of 10 businesses within Travel & Tourism are SME’s, employing millions of people around the world, and all of which rely on a thriving Travel & Tourism sector. It is also one of the most diverse sectors, employing people from all socio-economic backgrounds regardless of age, gender or ethnicity, with and up to 30% youths.
“WTTC, has been at the forefront in leading the private sector in the efforts to restore international travel and rebuild global consumer confidence with several major initiatives. We launched our ‘Safe Travels’ stamp, to enable travellers to recognise destinations around the world which have adopted health and hygiene global standardised protocols.”
“We offer to work closely with the U.S. government to recover international travel whilst avoiding transmission, through a four-point list of top priorities.
“We need to learn to co-exist with this virus and measures should be in place to reactivate both inbound and outbound travel responsibly and avoid further economic and social hardship.”
Across North America, WTTC research shows that between 10.8 million and 13.8 million jobs within Travel & Tourism are at serious risk.
Roger Dow, U.S. Travel Association President and CEO, said:
“The numbers show that restarting global travel is an absolute must from an economic and jobs standpoint, and it can be done safely by embracing health and safety guidance and technologies, which have been widely deployed across the travel industry.
“Moving away from quarantines and implementing the practices that we know will work—chief among them rapid, reliable and efficient testing, the universal wearing of masks in public, and the use of contactless technologies—will help restore confidence and growth.”
The resumption of international travel will act as a catalyst to re-energise the global economic recovery. According to WTTC, the four main priorities for the new U.S. administration should be:
The re-opening of ‘air corridors’ on vital routes, especially those across the Atlantic to re-establish crucial business travel between major economic hubs
The introduction of a testing regime at airports, with globally recognised standards to avoid exporting and importing the virus
A commitment to ensure safe and seamless travel, with enhanced health and hygiene measures as well as contactless touchpoints
Ensure international coordination to adopt standards that will allow international travel to restart and rebuild consumer confidence.
During 2019, the report detailed how Travel & Tourism was responsible for one in 10 jobs (330 million in total), making a 10.3% contribution to global GDP and generating one in four of all new jobs.
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The Biden-Harris administration is good news for corporations, cops, war profiteers and banks too big to fail, but offers nothing to save the people and planet from multiple rises.
“Social movements must become the focus of politics, not the electoral process.”
Biden managed to defeat Donald Trump by a razor thin margin in yet another quadrennial contest over which section of the ruling class will exploit the people and the planet. But the results burst asunder the two most popular assumptions among Democrats about the 2020 election. Polls predicted that Biden would defeat Trump by a large margin in the electoral college. The opposite was true. Biden’s near defeat proved that no set of conditions exist where the Democratic Party can mount a resounding defeat of their duopoly counterpart.
More importantly, a Biden victory was always assumed by Democrats to be a victory for humanity. Think again. Biden and the Democrats did nothing to shake the halls of Congress in their favor. Nor did the Democratic Party offer anything to the masses to secure what should have been an easy victory over Donald Trump. With over 200,000 people dead from COVID-19 and tens of millions more left unemployed , Biden’s lackluster performance is more of an indictment of the Democratic Party’s legitimacy than it is a victory for humanity.
“No set of conditions exist where the Democratic Party can mount a resounding defeat of their duopoly counterpart.”
Humanity will suffer many losses under a Biden administration. Black America will likely suffer the worst. While Trump and his GOP allies waged open war with Black Lives Matter activists, Biden has promised to provide more than $300 million in federal funding for police departments to put down Black uprisings in a manner more palatable to the Black misleadership class and its white corporate masters. Black wealth plummeted rapidly under Obama and Biden’s administration . The current economic crisis, compounded with Biden’s lack of any plan to relieve the prolonged suffering of the working class, has already worsened the living standards of millions of Black American workers who never recovered from the 2007-2008 crisis.
There are many on the leftish wing of the Democratic Party that have argued Trump’s ouster will alleviate the suffering of humanity in several key areas. Some cite Biden’s willingness to enter back into the Paris Climate Accords, the JPCOA agreement with Iran, and the World Health Organization (WHO). This makes Biden more progressive than Trump. The argument has one fatal flaw. Biden is much more likely to use his institutional backing to change the form, not the scale of the suffering that the U.S. imposes worldwide.
Biden’s possible re-entrance into the Paris Climate Accords will be canceled out by his commitment to fracking . The possibility of eased sanctions with Iran, while extremely important, is not guaranteed and will be offset by Biden’s own commitment to imperialist plunder in the region. One cannot forget that Biden helped the Obama administration increase U.S. wars from two to seven. In eight years, Biden assisted in the coup of Honduras , the overthrow of Libya, and the ongoing proxy war in Syria . Biden’s commitment to the WHO should not negate his firm opposition to any single-payer model of healthcare and the large sums of money he receives from the very healthcare industry which has ensured the U.S. is without a public health system all together.
“Biden helped the Obama administration increase U.S. wars from two to seven.”
Biden and the Democratic Party are joint partners with the GOP in the facilitation of the ongoing Race to the Bottom for the working class. Wall Street donated heavily to Biden with full knowledge that his administration will continue to support the right of corporations to drive down wages, increase productivity (exploitation), and concentrate capital in fewer and fewer hands. Boeing’s CEO stated clearly clear that his business prospects would be served regardless of who won the election . Prison stocks rose after Biden announced Kamala Harris as his vice president . On November 4th, Reuters announced that the lords of capital were quite pleased that no major policy changes were likely under the new political regime elected to Congress and the Oval Office.
Biden will inevitably rule as a rightwing neoconservative in all areas of policy. His big tent of Republicans and national security state apparatchiks is at least as large as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Over 100 former GOP war hawks of the national security state endorsed Biden in the closing weeks of the election. Larry Summers, a chief architect of the 2007-2008 economic crisis, advised his campaign . Susan Rice and Michele Flournoy are likely to join Biden’s foreign policy team —a key indication that trillions will continue to be spent on murderous wars abroad.
The question remains whether Biden can effectively govern like prior Democratic Party administrations. American exceptionalism is the Democratic Party’s ideological base, but this ideology is entangled in the general crisis of legitimacy afflicting the U.S. state. Biden’s ability to forward a project of “decency” that restores the “soul of the nation” is hampered by his attitude that “nothing will fundamentally change” for the rich. Biden also lacks charisma and talent. While millions were ready to vote for anyone and anything not named Donald Trump, four years of austerity and war under a president with obvious signs of cognitive decline is guaranteed to sharpen the contradictions of the rule of the rich and open the potential for further unrest on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
“Biden’s big tent of Republicans and national security state apparatchiks is at least as large as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.”
To maintain social peace, Biden will use the Oval Office to consolidate its corporate forces to suffocate left wing forces inside and outside of the Democratic Party. The graveyard of social movements will expand to occupy the largest plot of political territory as possible. A “moderate” revolution will be declared for the forces of progress in the ruling class. Perhaps the best that can be summoned from a Biden administration is the advancement of consciousness that the Democratic Party is just as opposed to social democracy and the interests of the working classes as Republicans. Plenty of opportunities exist to challenge the intransigence of the Democrats but just as many obstacles will be thrown in the way of any true exercise of people’s power.
The 2020 election is yet another reminder that social movements must become the focus of politics, not the electoral process. This is where an internationalist vision of politics is especially important. Social movements in Bolivia returned their socialist party to power after a year living under a U.S.-backed coup. Massive grassroots mobilizations in Cuba, Vietnam, and China contained the COVID-19 pandemic in a matter of months. Ethiopia and Eritrea have agreed to forge peace rather than wage war. The winds of progress have been blowing toward the Global South for more than a century. The most progressive changes that have ever occurred in the U.S. have been a combined product of the mass organization of the U.S.’ so-called internal colonies such as Black America and the external pressures placed on the U.S. empire by movements for self-determination abroad.
The 2020 election has come and gone. What we know is that Biden is a repudiation of revolutionary change. Humanity will suffer many losses even if more of the oppressed and working masses become aware of Biden and the DNC’s hostile class interests. Trump was rejected by a corporate-owned electoral process just as Clinton was rejected in 2016. Politics in the U.S. remain confined to the narrow ideological possibilities offered by neoliberalism and imperial decay. Oppressed people must create and embrace a politics that take aim at the forces of reaction currently pushing humanity to the brink of total destruction. The only way this can happen is if Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party become the primary target of the people’s fight for a new world.
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Danny Haiphong is co-coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace Supporter Network and organizer with No Cold War. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News–From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing). His articles are re-published widely as well as on Patreon at patreon.com/dannyhaiphong. He is also the co-host with BAR Editor Margaret Kimberley of the Youtube show BAR Presents: The Left Lens and can be reached on Twitter @spiritofho, and email at [email protected].
Featured image is by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
The social network is the third-wave (1) redefinition of the concept of society via the highest stage of technological evolution achieved so far in the present era which is also known as cyberspace age. It is the actual realization of what Marshall McLuhan calls “the global village” in his The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man published in 1962 (2) and Understanding Media: The Extension of Man published in 1964 (3). It is a transcendence of space-time, not that our sense of space and time is vanished but is likewise redefined as society has passed through the same process of reconfiguration. For one individual person to connect with another, geographical location is immaterial. Someone in the US may have a live virtual conversation right now with another in Ukraine in real-time. This is virtual reality. The reality of the shrunken world figuratively spoken of some decades ago is an absolute actuality here and now.
Redefined along with the concept of society and the space-time sense is the concept of personhood.The human person, in the context of cyberspace, has been essentialized while the physicality of being is set aside. It makes some real philosophical sense in a way as it has been classically held that the core of humanness is fundamentally defined in non-material/non-physical terms and hence a distinguishing factor that separates the human being from the animals.
It is our material/physical reality that links us with the animal world. It is, however, our self-consciousness, creativity, and spirituality that put the demarcation line between our humanity and the animal world. In cyberspace, such a non-physical/non-material core is magnified and has redefined personhood as an instance of dematerialization. The human person is essentialized in a dematerialized state of affairs. While converging on a social network (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.), human physicality is a secondary consideration and what matters to a large extent is virtual presence manifest in the articulation of thoughts and expression of feelings as well.
The ontological configuration of cyberspace or virtual-world reality is all in the mind. It is the “post-modern” realization of the subjective-idealist theorizing of the Irish philosopher of the early modern period, George Berkeley.
“In terms of the digital technology of our contemporary world which Alvin Toffler calls the ´third wave´ era, the Berkeleyan paradigm is closest to the notion of ´virtual reality´. . . .
“Berkeley´s conception of reality denies the existence of matter. He simply believes that matter, as this concept is used in physics, does not exist. . . . .
“Berkeley´s reality—the world we experience around us on a daily basis—is virtual reality. In this reality, the ´computer´ that processes data is God whose power is far more immense than what we limited humans could come up with directly absorbing and processing all our experiences and sensations in our minds. We, in fact, actually explore and move around in the world that God has created in the same manner and capability that we can explore and move around in the Spatio-temporal milieu of a man-made virtual reality. Yet both these worlds—in the Berkeleyan sense—are nothing but illusory. Reality, therefore, rests alone on one´s experience of them and on the power that processes information to generate them.” (4)
Virtual reality in its post-Berkeleyan rendering is no longer particularly concerned with the denial of material/physical reality but more especially concentrated on the importance of the mental, dematerialized aspect of being. In other words, cyberspace ontology capitalizes on the de-emphasis or de-signification of spatio-temporal materiality. Cyberspace is, therefore, a landscape of boundless possibilities that stretches on in self-generating dimensions whose regulating factor is the infinite flexibility of the imaginative and creative expanse of the human mind.
A social network, whose operational arena is cyberspace, is a dematerialized system of human interactive energies that forge relationships regardless of locational instant. Facebook as a case in point is a social network where people can relate with each other without having necessarily been acquainted physically, i.e., as warm bodies concretely present at a certain space-time point called paramount reality. In fact, friendships ranging from the most superficial type to the most intimate are established, nurtured, and sustained even without necessarily getting into an actual face-to-face encounter in the so-called paramount reality. Information from the most banal to the most essential in terms of personal or social importance is exchanged, disseminated, shared, discussed, and debated on in a social network. A pressing issue can get viral online through a social network and draw the attention of prospective advocates of different degrees of commitment and detractors of varying levels of dissatisfaction.
A social network is a post-personal conduit that is capable to yield the most detailed information or hide the most guarded facts about individual persons depending on the degree of their relational intimacy with or level of impersonal alienation from each other. Its functional base is in the hands of individual operators engaged within agreed-upon parameters wherein one does not only have the power to control her/his limitations but also the possibilities that could be triggered by the degree of her/his openness towards the other. At a certain point, social networking is a power game.
A social network is also utilized as an effective tactical channel of profitable business or commercial enterprises, both small-scale and big-time, to advertise/endorse/promote goods and services on a virtual person-to-person deal where travel time and transportation cost are non-issues as far as salesman-customer meet-up is concerned. This is post-modern salesmanship where even a well-furnished business office with an actual location address is a thing of the past. In this case, a social network makes a business appointment less businesslike and more personal. Online deals via social networks bridge the gap between, and hence dissolve, the traditionally held personal-formal divide in interactive engagement.
Social networking in many instances is a potent medium that raises issues and advocacies of political import on a local, national even global scale. It is an effective tool to upgrade the awareness of stakeholders in a particular setting by way of substantial and detailed information dissemination. A social network is an operative agency to rally people to decisive action based on principled platforms aimed to effect an imminent event to change a social order. As a political tool, it could be reasonably inferred that social networking is both creative and destructive. It should not, therefore, be underestimated as a basic means able to topple a government and inaugurate a new one.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen (15) years at Trinity University of Asia , an Anglican university in the Philippines.
(4)From Ruel F. Pepa´s ¨The Matrix Movie Series: A Berkeleyan Affirmation of Reality¨ pp. 171-173 in Introduction to Philosophy: Readings in Academic Philosophy (with Logic) . . . http://issuu.com/ruel56/docs/intro_to_philo
Note: These remarks were delivered by Abayomi Azikiwe at the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR) Virtual Forum held on November 12, 2020. The event was entitled: “What Now? A Post-Election Town Hall Meeting.” The program featured Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire and former Chairperson of the MCHR Board of Directors, now a board member-at-large, as moderator. In addition, there were presentations by Prof. Charles Simmons, retired educator at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) and currently the Co-Director of the Hush House in Detroit; Merissa Kovach, Political Strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan, and Kim Redigan, Vice Chairperson of the MCHR Board of Directors and a member of the Meta Peace Team of Michigan.
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At the time of this meeting we are nine days past one of the most confrontational and contested presidential and congressional elections in United States history.
Although the results illustrate a clear victory for the Democratic presidential ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, the current administration of President Donald J. Trump is refusing to concede defeat and is challenging the outcome through a conspiratorial propaganda campaign and spurious legal challenges to electoral commissions and state canvassing boards in several key states including Michigan.
Trump has been saying for months that if the results of the presidential election did not favor him and the Republican Party members holding seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives, it would be due to massive voter fraud. The president has cast doubt and aspersions on the process of mail-in and early voting saying these methods would leave the electoral system open to irregularities.
In all of the lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, there has been no concrete proof of a nationwide attempt to deny the president another term of office. There are ample reasons why Trump lost the popular vote and is poised to be defeated in the electoral college.
However, the Trump campaign is seeking a favorable federal court ruling which would be the basis for nullifying the outcome of one of the state elections in order take this issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. The campaign is still raising funds to continue the legal efforts to, in essence, disenfranchise millions of voters across the U.S.
Cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, among others, were crucial in turning the tides against a second Trump administration. Hopefully, people within MCHR and other fraternal organizations noticed the explicit and vicious attacks on Detroit during the president’s address on November 5. He accused the electoral process in the city as “lacking integrity” and that Republican sympathizers were denied access to the areas within the TCF Center located downtown, where ballots were being tabulated.
Detroit and State of Michigan election officials have vigorously denied these allegations of deliberate fraud. It is important to mention that these municipalities which played a critical role in the presidential and congressional elections have majorities and near-majorities of Black, Brown and other communities of color. Such statements from the administration further exposes its racism and lack of respect for the democratic rights of the oppressed peoples in the U.S.
Since the defeat of the Trump-Pence ticket at the polls, demonstrations have taken place demanding the counting of all votes particularly in highly contested areas as well as after November 7, there were numerous celebratory rallies and marches which viewed the Biden-Harris victory as a repudiation of not only Trump as a political figure, these actions represented the rejection of the policies which blatantly favor the rich and further impoverish the working class. The much-championed low jobless rate in the U.S. is directly connected with the proliferation of minimum wage (and near that level) employment largely in the service and hospitality sectors. However, even within manufacturing there has been the phenomenon of production outsourcing and multiple-tiered wage structures which have systematically undermined collective bargaining.
Detroit demonstration celebrates the defeat of Trump administration on Nov. 7, 2020 (Abayomi Azikiwe photo)
One other factor which can never be overlooked, is the 71 million people in the U.S. who voted for the Trump-Pence ticket thinking that the current administration was accomplishing economic improvements for workers, the middle and upper classes. This was the narrative articulated by the Trump campaign going as far as to say that everything was going smoothly until the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in February and March. Since the administration has accepted no responsibility for the mismanagement of the medical and public health responses to the pandemic, they have laid complete culpability on the People’s Republic of China along with the Geneva-based and United Nations affiliated World Health Organization (WHO).
Implications of the Current Crises on a Domestic Level
The public health status of the U.S. at present is firmly linked to the burgeoning economic crisis. Tens of millions of people have lost jobs and income since March. The government was able to agree on a relief package which provided some assistance to the working families and retirees around the country. Nonetheless, the bulk of the multi-trillion dollars package known as the CARES Act was given to the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the U.S. Since April there has been essentially no relief to the millions of working families, people living with disabilities, children and small businesses leaving many imperiled by the lack of healthcare coverage, the threat of foreclosure and eviction and the difficulties within the educational system. For more than six months the Congress and the administration has failed to agree on additional relief. The Heroes Act and CARES II remain stalled in the Senate where right-wing Republicans dominate.
Several companies voluntarily returned the funds from Congress because they were not suffering from the impact of the pandemic. Some firms have enhanced their profitability since the advent of the virus. Consequently, the widening gap between the upper class and the workers is growing rapidly. The Trump administration has favored the capitalist class through massive tax breaks and the deregulation of corporate conduct related to environmental and social justice concerns. Police agencies formerly under consent decrees in relationship to a history of misconduct were absolved of oversight through an executive order from the administration. The demand for the defunding of police and the redirecting of resources to alleviate social problems was ridiculed by the Trump campaign. Even moderate elements within the Democratic Party chided the utilization of these demands which have grown out of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations since late May after the police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The mass response to the police killing of Floyd of course was pivotal in the mobilization of the electorate which voted against Trump.
Foreign Policy Implications in the Struggle for World Peace
Many world leaders are communicating congratulatory messages to Biden and conveying their pleasure with the change of administration. These heads-of-state include presidents and prime ministers from numerous nations in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement on November 10, saying they were committed to a second Trump administration, has created bewilderment and alarm internationally.
Trump has often spread the myth that his administration has kept the U.S. out of major conflicts around the globe. This could be no further away from the actual truth. Military budgets under the current administration are rising where the Pentagon and intelligence agencies combined are costing the U.S. taxpayers well over a trillion dollars annually. The administration has not withdrawn U.S. forces from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, South Korea, among other geo-political regions. Routine bombing operations are continuing in Somalia and other regions of Africa where the AFRICOM (U.S. Africa Command) units are administering drone stations, conducting military maneuvers with compliant governments as well as engaging in targeted intelligence gathering operations and assassinations.
The military budget and foreign policy orientation of the U.S. which transcends successive Republican and Democratic administrations must be changed fundamentally. Whether there is a Biden or a Trump administration, the antiwar and peace movements are compelled to continue the work of ending wars of occupation and exploitation.
Our Commitment to Halting the Attempted Coup
As MCHR and other organizations, we must work tirelessly to prevent the consolidation of the attempted coup by the Trump forces which are dedicated to overturning the outcome of the elections. There are many avenues of struggle in this regard. Nevertheless, it is clear in regard to what the stakes are in the immediate crisis.
For it is not just Trump and his administration as personalities which constitute the major threat to working people and the oppressed in the U.S. and worldwide. The consequences of the triumph of a Trump coup would undoubtedly result in even more reversals of the gains made in the fields of Civil Rights and Labor Relations. Environmental degradation would accelerate along with the attacks on healthcare workers and scientific inquiry.
Consequently, under these troubled circumstances we have no other alternative than to escalate our campaigns connected with the objectives of achieving full human rights, while concurrently, seeking solidarity with all progressive forces in U.S. We are fighting not just for ourselves. Our efforts will play an instrumental role in the genuine liberation of billions around the world who have the same interests as the majority of those living in the U.S.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Detroit demonstration after the election Nov. 2020 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
On 10 November 2020, the United States secretary-of-state Mike Pompeo, he of the ill-famed confession “We lied, we cheated, we stole,” spoke at the Ronald Reagan Institute.
The liar Pompeo can even speak candidly,
“I’ve talked about American exceptionalism. I did so in Brussels; I did it in Cairo; I did it in Jakarta, and every opportunity that I’ve had in my public life. Sometimes it was met with a resounding thud as well. I’ve walked out of quiet ward rooms.”
Imagine a US secretary-of-state admitting that people walked out on American exceptionalism.
The cheater Pompeo boasted,
“In the Middle East, American strength has replaced leading from behind. We destroyed the caliphate, the ISIS caliphate. We killed Baghdadi and Soleimani, and we have restored substantial deterrence.”
It is a bizarre form of exceptionalism to brag about assassinations carried out by one’s country. The US created Daesh and later killed their associate, the Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the major destroyer of Daesh, Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani, commander of its Quds Force.
Speaking of theft, Pompeo chortled,
“And by just simply recognizing Jerusalem – candidly recognizing Jerusalem – as the capital of Israel and acknowledging that the Golan Heights are part of Israel, we’ve helped secured our ally, the Jewish state, as central to the region’s future.”
The colonial-settlers managed to wipe out many Indigenous nations in what is now called the United States, and they later aided European Jews in stealing the land of Indigenous Palestinians. But as the events in Armenia and Azerbaijan indicate, territory conquered in the past can be regained in the future. Sitting on stolen land can be like sitting on a ticking time bomb.
Finally Pompeo got to the crux of his speech where he identified the “foundation for America’s policy towards the world’s number-one threat to freedom today: the Chinese Communist Party.”
Liars, cheaters, and thieves count on their audience to accept their proclamations and not probe into the background of the speaker and the glasshouses in which they reside. Thus Pompeo could smugly assert of China, without an iota of evidence presented:
And it also means no more illegal claims in the South China Sea, no more coercion and co-optation of American businesses, no more consulates used as dens of spies, no more stealing of intellectual property, and no more ignoring fundamental human rights violations. And the party’s atrocities in Xinjiang, Tibet, and elsewhere will not be tolerated.
Is China a paragon of virtue? No. And the US is no paragon of good either. Illegal claims? Do settler-colonialists have a legitimate legal claim to the landmass of the US? To the Hawaiian islands? To Puerto Rico? To Guam? Where is the evidence that US corporations were co-opted or coerced by the Chinese? One hears such claims over and over but never with evidence. Why? Because entry to the Chinese market was conditioned on access to technology, a decision that US corporations could have refused. This is not coercion. That a former CIA head speaks of dens of spies is risible. Theft of intellectual property? And what was the forced sale of China’s social media TikTok in the US supposed to represent? US protesting human rights violations? Like the occupation and oppression of Palestinians by the Jewish state? Like the Muslim holocaust?1 Like the police murders of Blacks in the US? How about the human right to freedom from poverty and to have a roof over one’s head?
Pompeo said, “The fight is between authoritarianism, barbarism on one side and freedom on the other.”
Among other items “proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “… human beings shall enjoy freedom … from want.”
The UDHR preamble goes on to state that “fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person … have [been] determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
China is the country that addresses the fundamental dignity and worth of the human person. The US falls abysmally short of addressing dignity of all citizens. Chinese have freedom from homelessness and poverty. Consequently lying and cheating is required by US politicians to hide their thievery.
China conquered COVID-19 while Americans suffer. Americans are warring in several countries while the Communist Party of China calls for peace. Who are the barbarians? If it is a choice between two countries, it seems an easy choice to make.
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen.
Note
1. Gideon Polya, US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide (Korsgaard Publishing, 2020).
Russian President Vladimir Putin is no stranger to changes in the US administration. In the last couple of decades, as a member of Boris Yeltsin’s office, then as both President and Prime Minister he has dealt with Republican and Democrat administrations in equal measure. And every four years, around the time of the US elections, he is asked what he expects from the new American President and his government. In response, he gives pretty much the same answer every time: US administrations come and go, but the policies remain the same.
Prior to his election in 2016, there was some hope and expectation, from Russia included, that Donald Trump’s foreign policy would be different from previous administrations. There was a view that Trump, having expressed dissatisfaction with America’s ‘nation-building’ abroad and with the ‘disaster’ of the Iraq war, would end the never-ending cycle of regime change wars embarked on by the US military-industrial complex. Given Trump’s previous positive rhetoric on Russia and Putin, and experience of doing business in the country, it was also thought that his presidency could mark the start of a new beginning in US-Russia relations. Thanks to the Democratic lobby and weight of the US neoliberal establishment however, Trump found himself powerless to control the narrative around him in which he would be punished for four years for having defeated Hillary Clinton in the election. For what real influence can a president have when even his tweets are censored by Twitter?
Being merely a pawn in the hands of hawks around him (Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to start with) Trump therefore proceeded to make certain moves which only worsened the relationship with Russia further. Arming Ukraine, maintaining a presence in Syria, piling sanctions on Russia and using every possible leverage to prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, are just some of the ways the Trump administration has ‘contained’ Russia. In addition, the US withdrew from both the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and has declared no interest in renewing the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) when it expires in 2021.
The moral of the story? The US President is actually quite limited in his ability to realize his own policies. President Putin in a recent interview cited the example of Barack Obama, who when he came to power, expressed his intention to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay military prison. Did he end up doing it? No. There are many such examples of US Presidents having to toe the party line, and Donald Trump has been no different. Therefore, when it comes to Joe Biden, it’s likely that we will see a continuation of the anti-Russian rhetoric, and to an even greater extent. For Joe Biden has been decisively critical of Russia throughout his presidential campaign, and worked in previous governments who took a harder line. He himself is a relic of the Cold War and therefore fails to shake off the mindset that goes with it. Biden has even gone as far as to say that Russia is the ‘biggest threat’ to the liberal international order, making baseless accusations that it is attempting to destroy both the EU and NATO.
Trump was of course not a fan of NATO, which he referred to as ‘obsolete’, with the businessman in him telling him it was a waste of money, along with WHO membership, which he also gave up. Biden, on the other hand, has referred to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which reads that an attack on one member of the transatlantic military alliance is considered an attack on all, as a “sacred obligation”. Indeed, Biden has always been a staunch supporter of the organization. In one notorious video he bragged about calling for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: ‘I was suggesting that we bomb Belgrade; I was suggesting we send in American pilots and blow up all the bridges on the Drina’. Doesn’t bode well for Russia, does it?
When it comes to the personal relationship between Biden and Putin, it has been said that the two don’t like each other, which could hamper any cooperation. This could be due in part to Biden’s labelling of the Russian President as a ‘tyrant’ and ‘dictator’, rhetoric which the Kremlin has no doubt got used to from its western ‘partners’ but which nevertheless will not be forgotten. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov is amongst those who remember the role played by Biden in the Obama administration and speaks of the ‘ugly behaviour’ staged by the White House after Trump won the 2016 election. Indeed, the Russian government has yet to congratulate Biden with his victory, which although is understandable given the controversy surrounding the result and Republican allegations of voter fraud, is significant.
It’s also worth pointing out that Biden leads a neoliberal movement which is inherently Russophobic and which has spent the last few years painting Russia as enemy number one. For many in the US now, Russia has become a dirty word, after the fantasy that was ‘Russiagate’ in which it was alleged, without any real foundation, that Russia had influenced the US elections and Donald Trump was working for Putin. Russia and its president have become such useful scapegoats in the political arena that we are unlikely to see this tactic abandoned by the Democrat camp.
The road ahead for Russian-US relations is therefore likely to be rocky. The current ‘cold war’ in which we find ourselves will no doubt remain the status quo for some time, and possibly even intensify under Biden’s leadership. Unfortunately in these circumstances, the chance of it transforming into a hot war, by some unforeseen event, is therefore high. As the late Stephen F Cohen asserted in his book ‘War with Russia’, the current confrontation between the two powers is more dangerous than at any time during the previous cold war. We can only hope that Russia’s coolheaded pragmatism will be enough to keep this cold war from hotting up.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War is a documentary short reviewing the role of then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) in leading the United States into the most devastating foreign policy blunder of the last twenty years.
Produced and directed by Mark Weisbrot and narrated by Danny Glover, the film features archival footage, as well as policy experts who provide insight and testimony with regard to Joe Biden’s role as the Chair of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2002.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Former Chief of Staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell; Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary; U.S. Army Colonel, Retired
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It’s the destruction of people’s lives. It is the destabilization of civil society. And for What? The Lies are sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and repetitive “Covid alerts” for the last ten months. … It is a process of social engineering.
You have to hand it to governmental health experts: All are uniformly “on message”. Meanwhile, abundant medical expertise from around the world at odds with official messaging is rendered invisible.
What are the programmatic foreign policy lines that Joe Biden will implement when he takes office in the White House? He announced it with a detailed article in Foreign Affairs magazine (March / April 2020), that formed the basis of the 2020 Platform approved in August by the Democratic Party.
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.
Trump has not yet accepted electoral defeat, and his remaining days as U.S. presidency until Biden’s inauguration may represent the period of greatest threat of armed intervention in Venezuela, especially before December 6, the date of the country’s next legislative elections.
Trump will push annexation of West Bank, and if Netanyahu sees it as in his political interest to be antagonistic to Biden, he will accede, say two prominent Israel lobbyists.
Trump accuses Biden of defrauding the election results and calls for a new count. In this sense, Trump has judicialized the elections and hopes to remain in the presidency by the Court’s decision, which makes the scenario open to several possibilities, without a “clear victory” for Biden, as many media agencies have reported worldwide.
Bad things are happening on Samos. At the end of October the earthquake hit with all its devastating consequences as hundreds lost their homes. The damage is still being assessed. And now some 12 days later the aftershocks continue. One this morning registered as 4.1 R.
In essence – the US State Department is simply removing a known and still very active terrorist organization from its lists to both politically attack and undermine China further – but to also likely provide more direct support to the group and those affiliated with it in Washington’s widening conflict against Beijing.
If Biden steals this election, it will be Obama 2.0. If Biden’s mental health declines, Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris, one of the most unpopular democrats in modern history will be the President at least for the short term. The question is who will be her vice-president?
Both of the US political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are a one-party system controlled by special interests no matter who is president.
It’s fair to say that Trump’s foreign policy was heading towards a dangerous path to a world war as I have written about in the past.
Many of Trump’s foreign policies are similar to past administrations whether they were Democrats and Republican, the only difference that I can say is that he did not start any new wars, he continued ongoing wars that was launched by his predecessors.
Trump’s domestic policies are mixed at best with an economy built on debt through its Federal Reserve’s printing press that can never be repaid jeopardizing the US economy and it’s US dollar-based hegemony which are already in a steady decline. However, on a good note about the Trump presidency is that he secured America’s 2nd amendment rights (an important right to have during uncertain times), expanded school choice for families and he cut taxes for individuals’ and small businesses. Despite a handful of successes on the domestic front, his foreign policy is dangerous for world peace. However, it’s fair to say Trump is a different type of politician, one who openly expressed how he felt about certain people in politics or in Hollywood and the mainstream-media (MSM) hated all of it, they despised Trump. The Democratic party has been planning this scenario the day after Hillary Clinton lost the elections to Donald Trump in 2016 with the Russia-Gate Hoax, allegations of sexual assaults, racism and other anti-Trump shenanigans to remove the President. The Democrats were going to steal the 2020 elections no matter what with help from the MSM. If the Supreme court reverses Biden’s election win to a loss, giving Trump the victory by January 20th,violence will erupt on US streets leading to a civil war among the American people, and that is certain.
Stolen Elections and Biden’s Voter Fraud Organization
This election was rigged by the Democratic party, plain and simple. The so-called “President-Elect” Joe Biden has admitted unconsciously that they put together an extensive “voter fraud” organization in U.S. history:
One of Trump’s lawyers fighting the election fraud, Sidney Powell, said that 450,000 ballots was found in several key states with “only votes for Biden and no down-ballot selections, which she regarded as suspicious” according to a recent New York Post article who also said that Powell claimed that “two pieces of software called Hammer and Scorecard were used to flip votes from Trump to Biden in some pre-election voting ballots.”
In Michigan, the vote had increased at one point to over 130,000 votes for Biden in the middle of the night, without a single new vote for Trump while most people were asleep:
In Pennsylvania, former New York City Mayor and Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani made a press statement on the fact that dead people were voting in Philadelphia:
There will be many more whistleblowers, pollsters that were denied the access to observe the vote count and average voters who will be exposing Biden’s election as a fraud in the coming days, weeks and months. This is just the beginning.
Mainstream Media Censorship In Your Face
This is perhaps the most in your face evidence that media censorship has been legitimized against President Trump. The MSM now is fact-checking Trump in real-time claiming that he is stating false-facts:
A Coming American Coup D’état?
The Biden regime had issued a warning to President Donald Trump “declaring that trespassers will be removed from the White House.” Former sportscaster Keith Olbermann has even called for a coup against President Trump:
The 2020 election was stolen from Trump, no doubt about that,
However, Trump and his administration knew that the Democrats were going to commit fraud through mail-in ballots.
The US just became a banana republic, a dictatorship with Orwellian overtones that will ensure a Democratic and the Neocon Republican establishment that will move forward with an American-style scientific based-dictatorship.
Biden has prematurely announced a Covid-19 task force that will include planned lockdowns, vaccine mandates and mandatory facemasks due to an increase in Covid-19 cases. The US is surely heading towards what George Orwell has warned the world about. Make no mistake about it, there will be a resistance, a human resistance that will ultimately prevail, and that I can say with certainty.
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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.
Arayik Harutyunyan, President of the de-facto state of Artsakh, has called on the region’s Armenians to stop looking for traitors and return to the region.
In a video message on November 11, Harutyunyan revealed a number of moral issues that led to the collapse of Armenian forces in Karabakh.
On October 3, when the enemy reached Matagis, part of the military retreated from the Yehniker area, there were not enough resources to provide the rear.
When we were supposed to go to Yehnikner with our elite units and the Armenian special forces, our units refused to go there. I asked, begged, said that I would go ahead, but received a negative answer! They didn’t go with me, they left the President of their country alone.
Harutyunyan said Armenian forces suffered from a severe shortage in human resources since the outbreak of the battle in Karabakh. He reminded of the warnings he issued over this matter on October 3 and 18.
“Every time I was telling that we need human resources,” Harutyunyan said, “Few days ago a Russian military analyst noted that if we wanted to win we needed to mobilize 80-100 thousand people, if not, you lose. I don’t want to say how many people joined, left the troops, and left the 18 years old alone.”
The president added that 18-20-year-old conscripts were the main forces that were fighting against the Azerbaijani military and its allies in Karabakh.
“I bow before them [young conscripts], who are still protecting the borders of our country,” he said.
Harutyunyan acknowledged that Azerbaijani drones inflicted heavy losses on Armenian troops in Karabakh, which were left for days without any air defense.
The president ended his message by calling on residents of Artsakh, who are currently taking refuge in Armenia, to refrain from participating in political revolts and return home.
“Don’t give in to provocations aimed at destroying our county. We need unity, we must be consolidated to fight an external enemy, which continues to wreck our unity,” Harutyunyan said.
The president went on to promise that the infrastructure in the region will be restored in a few days. He also claimed that Artsakh state have enough resources to ensure that there will be no social problems in the region.
Harutyunyan was one of the leaders blamed by the public following the Russian-brokered peace deal that ended the Azerbaijani attack on Artsakh. Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is yet to address the loss in an honest manner.
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As masses of people poured into the streets to celebrate the end of Donald Trump’s fascist rule, the lame duck president’s lawyers were filing frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to nullify Joe Biden’s victory. But none of these suits, even if successful, would change the results of the election.
Shortly after CNN called the election for Biden, Trump said in a statement, “Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated.”
First of all, only prosecutors prosecute cases — in criminal court. Private litigants in civil cases are called plaintiffs. And second, anyone who has the money to hire a lawyer can bring a lawsuit about anything. Thousands of legal actions are filed every day, but very few are taken seriously by judges. It’s unclear whether Trump is even paying his hired guns; Rudy Giuliani once said he works for Trump without pay.
For months, Trump has mounted a concerted strategy to preemptively discredit the election results, spewing unsupported allegations of voter fraud with mail-in ballots. Republicans and the Trump campaign have filed myriad lawsuits, even before the election, all seeking to erect obstacles to voting.
Mindful that many more people than usual would vote by mail to protect themselves from the coronavirus, Trump sowed the seeds of doubt about the validity of mail-in ballots. With no evidence whatsoever, he fabricated claims of massive voter fraud. With no regard for the health risks, Trump encouraged his minions to vote in person, insisting the election results must be known on Election Day. Trump’s supporters obliged and most voted at the polls. It was therefore no surprise that the overwhelming number of mail-in ballots were cast by Democrats.
Early Wednesday morning, as his putative lead began to evaporate, Trump tweeted, “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.” Trump had said in no uncertain terms that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett installed on the Supreme Court to decide the election in his favor. But although counting of mail-in ballots continued, no votes were cast after Tuesday.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. if you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” Trump falsely claimed Thursday night. But as retiring Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Michigan) tweeted, “a legally cast vote does not become ‘illegal’ simply because a candidate does not like the vote.”
The same night, in a White House briefing, Trump said, again falsely, “We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually. And then our number started miraculously getting whittled away in secret.” The tabulations were not conducted in secret; they were witnessed by both Republican and Democratic poll watchers.
Moreover, on election night, the count appeared to favor Trump since most Democrats cast mail ballots, which take longer to count. Some states, including Pennsylvania, forbid the counting of any ballots until Election Day. A Democratic-sponsored bill in Pennsylvania would have allowed mail-in ballots to be opened and counted before Election Day in light of the anticipated surge due to the pandemic. But Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature defeated the bill. Since Trump’s strategy was to declare victory on election night, the GOP forces likely sought to prevent mail-in ballots from diluting Trump’s apparent early lead. Furthermore, election workers didn’t even open mail ballots until November 4, since several counties required all workers to conduct the election on November 3. This explains why it took longer to report the vote counts in Pennsylvania.
On Saturday morning, Trump erroneously asserted, “I won this election, by a lot.” At the time, Biden was leading in the electoral vote — 253 to 214 — and he had received 4,250,184 more popular votes than Trump.
The Pennsylvania Case
It was Pennsylvania that put Biden over the top in electoral votes. CNN and other news outlets called Biden the winner on Saturday morning. Trump falsely tweeted about
“…Pennsylvania, which everyone thought was easily won on Election Night, only to see a massive lead disappear, without anyone being allowed to OBSERVE, for long intervals of time.”
Again falsely, Trump also tweeted,
“Tens of thousands of votes were illegally received after 8 P.M. on Tuesday, Election Day, totally and easily changing the results in Pennsylvania and certain other razor thin states.”
There was nothing illegal about counting ballots that were postmarked by, but received after, Election Day. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled that ballots could be counted if received by Friday, November 6.
Trump’s challenge to mail-in ballots received in Pennsylvania between November 3 and 6 is the only case that the U.S. Supreme Court might review, and even that is unlikely, since those ballots would not alter the election results.
Twice before the election, Republican state legislators and the Republican Party of Philadelphia asked the high court to halt Pennsylvania’s three-day extension for receipt of mail-in ballots. Twice they were rebuffed. The first time, the Court deadlocked 4-to-4, leaving the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision in place. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three remaining liberals — Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — to uphold the state court’s decision. Right-wingers Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to block the ballots.
Although the Supreme Court refused to review the case for lack of time, Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas wrote a statement on October 28, suggesting the Court could still hear the case after the election. They described the plaintiffs’ request as a “last ditch attempt to prevent the election in Pennsylvania from being conducted under a cloud.” Barrett has not yet participated in this case.
On Saturday, Alito ordered Pennsylvania’s secretary of state to segregate, and separately count, mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day. The Pennsylvania attorney general affirmed that the state had already segregated them. But the number of ballots in contention is so small it would not affect the outcome of the election. The Court is thus not likely to review this case.
Trump’s spate of frivolous lawsuits will not reverse the results of the election. In spite of Trump’s pattern of lies about massive fraud from mail-in ballots, his cases don’t allege widespread fraud. Judges have dismissed Trump’s lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan for lack of any evidence to support fraud allegations. The cases Trump has won involve primarily technicalities involving small numbers of ballots. Trump’s cases include closer access of election observers, signature verification on mail ballots, nonresident voting and the mixing of a small number of ballots. Trump’s forces are seeking a recount in Wisconsin, which is unlikely to change the results in that state.
Trump probably thinks the Supreme Court, with his three appointees, will respond to his court challenges by handing him the presidency. That won’t happen. But his flurry of lawsuits is also designed to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. As Robert Reich noted, “Trump backers are trying to push Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint their own slates of Trump electors. That’s why the campaign has launched empty legal challenges to perfectly normal vote counts – trying to sow enough doubt to give the state legislatures political cover to appoint their own electors.”
In his desperation to maintain power, we can expect Trump to pull out all the stops in the next two-and-a-half months before Inauguration Day.
He plans large rallies to rile his gun-toting base. He has enlisted most Republican leaders, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, to collaborate with his attempted theft of the election.
Since the election, Attorney General William Barr told department officials that he didn’t see massive voter fraud or a systemic problem. But on Monday, under pressure from Trump, Barr authorized federal prosecutors to investigate “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.” He limited the investigations to what he described as “clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.” Weeks before the election, the department had removed its prohibition on voter fraud investigations prior to an election.
In response to Barr’s directive, Richard Pilger, the Justice Department official directing voter fraud investigations, immediately stepped down from his job in protest.
Barr’s authorization will give McConnell and other GOP leaders ammunition to oppose Biden’s victory.
Trump is mounting a full-court press to steal the election from Joe Biden. The refusal to accept the election results by Trump and his congressional and Justice Department accomplices, coupled with his obstruction of the transition process, do not bode well for a peaceful transfer of power.
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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.
The controversy surrounding the American elections seems far from over. Although the international media announced Joe Biden’s victory, electoral tensions are only increasing day after day, considering that both candidates are unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of an adverse outcome. Trump accuses Biden of defrauding the election results and calls for a new count. In this sense, Trump has judicialized the elections and hopes to remain in the presidency by the Court’s decision, which makes the scenario open to several possibilities, without a “clear victory” for Biden, as many media agencies have reported worldwide.
While this scenario persists, the decision to recognize Biden or not as the current American president remains optional for each country. Several countries in Europe and the Middle East have already recognized Biden, including France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. On Tuesday, Turkey, a nation that had real and important closeness to the Trump administration, also recognized Biden. However, nations like Russia, China and Mexico remain awaiting a court decision.
As tensions rise inside and outside the country, both candidates continue to articulate strategies to ensure their victory. And such strategies go far beyond mere litigation. Across the country, both parties are calling for protests and a large investment is being made in diplomacy, with the aim of attracting foreign support. Mike Pompeo, American Secretary of State, is scheduled to travel to all countries that have already recognized Biden. The objective is simple: to negotiate possible agreements with such countries in order to reverse this scenario, presenting the “advantages” in supporting Donald Trump.
Mike Pompeo is a central figure in this scenario and cannot be ignored in any way. In a recent speech at a TV conference, the secretary stated that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration (…)”.
It is at least interesting and curious how Pompeo guarantees that there will be such a transition. Pompeo did not give details about how this transition would be, but his professional history shows us how it can be, considering that, having served as director of the CIA and Secretary of State for the greatest world power, Pompeo has extensive experience in advanced intelligence operations, having been the pivot of several events on the international scenario in recent years. Certainly, most of his actions in such operations will never be made public, making it difficult to predict what will happen, but we know that sabotage, coups, color revolutions and other tactics have been common among American intelligence operations abroad – then, would this be the case for us to think about such actions being operated within the American territory itself and against an “internal enemy”?
However, it is important to note that, even during the election campaign, Biden and Trump had already declared that they would not recognize each other. Both candidates are willing to take the dispute to its final consequences, and there may be an exponential increase in the rates of violence and instability across the country. This, coupled with a scenario of inflamed racial tensions with armed ethnic militias fighting across the streets and a pandemic that has already killed more than 240,000 Americans, can only lead to complete social chaos, with total annihilation of the political, economic and legal order of the US.
Pompeo can, in fact, gain important allies on his travels. His focus should be on the Middle East, considering that despite the Arabs’ haste to congratulate Biden, the Democrat has a very aggressive rhetoric with that region, promising to exclude Saudi Arabia from international relations due to human rights violations, in addition to planning send more American troops to Syria. But what most worries the strategists of the Trump administration is the position of the State of Israel, which was one of the first American allies to recognize Biden. Certainly, Pompeo will try in all the possible ways to guarantee Israeli support for Trump if the dispute worsens in America – it remains to be seen, however, which side Netanyahu will prefer.
Thus, in a scenario with two stubborn candidates, unwilling to accept any result other than victory, calling for protests and accumulating international allies, we have the situation of a country with two self-proclaimed presidents, acting simultaneously and in total opposition to each other. In a scenario like this, chaos would be installed in the country, worsening racial tensions, regional separatisms, and popular rebellions, with government institutions unable to act effectively due to the uncertainty about who actually governs the country. This would represent the end not only of American liberal hegemony, but of American democracy itself.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The kinetic phase of the Hybrid War of Terror on Syria has mostly drawn to a close, as evidenced by the milestone event of the country hosting an international conference on the return of refugees, which resulted in several significant outcomes that speak to the masterful execution of its “balancing” strategy and raise hope that the Arab Republic will eventually transform into the Eastern Mediterranean terminal point of China’s visionary W-CPEC+ corridor across Eurasia.
Strategically Disarming “Weapons Of Mass Migration”
Syria’s international conference on the return of refugees is a milestone event for the country’s war which shows that the kinetic phase of the Hybrid War of Terror against it has mostly drawn to a close. President Assad’s keynote speech saw the Syrian leader thanking his Russian and Iranian wartime allies for their help getting to this point and encouraging his compatriots abroad to finally return home. He claimed that some of their host countries are exploiting them for financial and other reasons, strongly hinting that they’re being used against their will as “Weapons of Mass Migration” like Ivy League scholar Kelly M. Greenhill earlier described such a phenomenon. In connection with that, President Assad condemned those states which continue to impose illegal sanctions against the Arab Republic, which has disincentivized some refugees from returning home and thus results in artificially perpetuating this historic humanitarian crisis that was initially sparked by their external war of regime change aggression against his people through terrorist means.
Syria’s “Balancing” Act
Thankfully, Syria can count on its Russian and Iranian wartime allies to help reconstruct the ruined country and thus facilitate the return of millions of refugees to their homeland. To this end, Russia promised to allocate $1 billion as well as open up a trade mission in Damascus while Iran suggested setting up an international fund for this purpose. Both countries seem poised to enter into a “friendly competition” with one another for reconstruction contracts and market space which can only work out to Syria’s ultimate benefit. The Arab Republic is therefore expected to retain its carefully calibrated “balancing” act between them, wisely doing its utmost to prevent the emergence of any complete dependence on either of them in the future. This strategy is consistent with what it’s always pursued over the decades and represents its masterful execution which too many other small- and medium-sized states previously attempted but to no avail. Even worse, many of Syria’s peers saw this strategy backfire on them, thus leading to either their ruin or full dependence on one partner.
Full credit goes to Syria’s world-class diplomats for being able to manage such a difficult policy with such success. Not only are they “balancing” between Russia and Iran, but they also managed to attract the important participation of other countries in their international refugee conference, most curious of which for some observers is Pakistan. Those who only casually follow Syrian affairs might have missed it, but Islamabad recently dispatched massive medical aid to the Arab Republic. This and its participation in the international conference show that the “global pivot state” (which the author previously referred to it as) is capable of bold foreign policy moves independent of its close American, Saudi, and Turkish partners. Pakistan, just like Syria, is also practicing its own “balancing” act between its aforementioned three traditional partners and its three newest ones of Russia, China, and Iran. In fact, it can be argued that Pakistan and Syria are in the process of synergizing their respective “balancing” strategies for the betterment of Eurasia.
“Pakistan’s Serendipitous Chance In Syria”
To explain, not only is Syria “balancing” between Russia and Iran, but also between India and Pakistan too. Although Damascus and Delhi have a long history of close relations, Presidential Advisor Bouthaina Shabaan told the Hindustan Times in August 2017 that her country is becoming hesitant about India’s role in its reconstruction after Prime Minister Modi’s highly publicized trip to “Israel” where he did everything from sign intergovernmental deals solidifying their de-facto alliance to even walking barefoot with Netanyahu along the beach. The author realized at the time that this is “Pakistan’s Serendipitous Chance In Syria” whereby Islamabad could flex its anti-Zionist credentials to present itself as a much more credible partner than pro-Zionist Delhi in pursuit of strengthening the two state’s historic relations that reached their high point in 1974 after a Pakistani pilot flying a Syrian jet shot down an “Israeli” fighter flying over the occupied Golan Heights. Syria’s diplomats were evidently receptive to Pakistan’s outreaches, hence the steady improvement of ties.
The Winding Road To W-CPEC+
It’s not just nostalgia for their Old Cold War-era ties nor their shared hatred of “Israel” that’s bringing them closer together nowadays, but pro-Chinese Silk Road pragmatism. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), and its western branch corridor (W-CPEC+) through Iran has the chance of not only reaching Russia by running parallel with the stalled North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) across Azerbaijan but can also extend as far as Syria via Iraq. China is the little-discussed third economic force apart from Russia and Iran which is engaged in a “friendly competition” with its partners to develop Syria, and the improvement of Syrian-Pakistani relations as is presently happening could result in W-CPEC+ extending from the Pacific Ocean to the Eastern Mediterranean through Iran, Iraq, and Syria, all of which are allied with one another. It’ll of course take a lot of political will from all sides — not least of all Pakistan — to see this ambitious vision through, but if successful, then it could revolutionize Mideast geopolitics.
All five countries — China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and Syria — would benefit from this outcome. The People’s Republic is the world’s second-largest economy and actively eyeing more positions in the Eastern Mediterranean to complement its prospective ones in “Israel”, albeit via more geopolitically reliable mainland routes than the maritime ones connecting it to the self-professed “Jewish State”. Pakistan has an interest in bolstering its credential as the “global pivot state” by having CPEC serve as the platform for integrating Eurasia more closely together. Iran, which is desperately seeking all manner of sanctions relief, is reportedly negotiating a gargantuan economic agreement with China and would certainly benefit by facilitating more East-West trade through its territory. As for Russia, its recent control over Tartus means that it could profit from any Syrian export of Chinese products through that port. As for the Arab Republic itself, its expected benefit is that this vision would accelerate its reconstruction and allow it to finally actualize its pre-war “Five Seas Strategy”.
Concluding Thoughts
All told, Syria’s international conference on the return of refugees was about much more than just its titular topic. Reading between the lines of the details that have since been revealed about this milestone event, it was actually a masterclass in Syria’s “balancing” strategy. The Arab Republic proved that its diplomats are among the most highly skilled in the world after successfully “balancing” between Russia and Iran, as well as India and Pakistan, all with the aim of fulfilling its visionary “Five Seas Strategy” which some argue was partially responsible for provoking the Hybrid War of Terror that’s been viciously waged against it for almost an entire decade already. In the best-case scenario, Syria will eventually serve as the Eastern Mediterranean terminal point of the W-CPEC+ corridor connecting that strategic body of water with the Pacific Ocean via a several-country-long mainland commercial corridor. The successful fulfillment of this vision would revolutionize not only Mideast geopolitics, but also Eurasian geopolitics as a whole, which thus makes it an urgent priority for all.
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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.
The sweeping dismissal of Pentagon officials, an overhaul that began on Monday with President Donald Trump’s sudden firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, has continued. The Intercept has learned that Mark Tomb, the deputy chief of staff to the undersecretary of defense for policy, was ousted from his position yesterday.
Tomb, who declined to comment when reached by phone, was forced into retirement as part of a wave of firings of top Defense Department officials that included James Anderson, the Pentagon’s acting policy chief; Joseph Kernan, the undersecretary for intelligence; and Esper’s former chief of staff Jennifer Stewart.
The Tuesday exodus represents a major shake-up that has been planned for months, according to one Trump administration official briefed on the effort, with more firings to come across the department.
That official, who shared a draft list of other Pentagon officials under consideration for removal, said that Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, would likely be dismissed next.
“The president is taking back control of DOD. It’s a rebirth of foreign policy. This is Trump foreign policy,” said the official, who spoke anonymously and without authorization.
The personnel changes, the official claimed, would help clear the way for a more loyal Pentagon apparatus to carry out Trump’s goals, including the last-minute withdrawal of troops from foreign conflicts. Trump has promised a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Christmas, a pledge that has reportedly rankled senior figures in the military, including several of the Pentagon leaders dismissed this week.
The official’s explanation is at odds with possible explanations discussed around Washington, D.C., that the dismissals are solely designed to punish dissent and to politicize the Pentagon, a charge made by Democratic lawmakers.
The president has replaced political appointees, a right reserved by the president, though no president in recent memory has made such sweeping changes to the Pentagon’s leadership during a presidential transition period. The unusual shake-up has unsettled observers of the military who fear further politicization of the government.
The firings also make way for controversial figures who are seen as far more dutiful in protecting Trump and carrying out his agenda. Anderson was swiftly replaced on Tuesday with Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, a former Fox News contributor who had been previously nominated for the Pentagon’s top policy job. Tata’s nomination stalled in the Senate after old tweets were unearthed showing him criticizing former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader” and sharing an article that depicted Obama as a “Manchurian candidate.”
Esper maintained a rocky relationship with Trump, which degraded further last summer after he publicly opposed Trump’s call to deploy active-duty military in response to street protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. The former Raytheon lobbyist-turned-Pentagon chief was replaced by Chris Miller, the former senior director for counterterrorism and transnational threats at the National Security Council.
Stewart, Esper’s chief of staff, was replaced by Kash Patel, a former National Security Council official who previously served as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. Patel gained a following in the administration for his role in leading the push on Capitol Hill to question intelligence agencies and Democratic lawmakers over the Russian collusion probe.
Kernan was replaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a young former aide to Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Cohen-Watnick, on an acting basis, will now oversee the Pentagon’s intelligence operations.
The Intercept reported in August that Gina Haspel, the CIA director, and Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, were also at risk of replacement, and the New York Times has now reported that they could be next in line to be removed from office.
The rapid firings have raised concern on Capitol Hill as Democratic lawmakers have denounced the personnel changes for stoking tension during an already tense transition period.
“Firing a Secretary of Defense in the last weeks of a lame duck Presidency serves no purpose and only demonstrates an instability harmful to American national defense,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in a statement.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chair of the House Armed Services Committee, decried the firings as an effort by Trump to install Pentagon officials with a focus on loyalty “at the expense of competence,” noting that “during a period of presidential transition, competence in government is of the utmost importance.”
In response, the Trump official said that the moves were solely motivated by implementing foreign policy goals that have been stymied by career bureaucrats obsessed with continuing unending military conflict overseas.
“This is happening because the president feels that neoconservatism has failed the American people,” the official said.
The withdrawal of troops could also set the political conditions for the future Biden administration. Any redeployment, the thinking goes, would establish the Democratic Party as the “forever war” party, while Trump could credibly claim that he was not only the first president in 40 years to avoid launching a new war, but he also was the first to truly wind down the occupation of Afghanistan.
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The Mayor and City Council of Sacramento, California passed a resolution Tuesday night urging the U.S. President and Congress to lift restrictions on access to Cuban medical expertise.
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The capital city of the most populous state in the United States—Sacramento, California—unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday evening calling for increased cooperation and exchange between the people of the United States and Cuba.
The northern Californian city of more than half a million people joins over a dozen U.S. cities—including Oakland, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio and others—in urging state and national leadership to lift restrictons on access to Cuban medical expertise and imports of Cuban biotechnological products, among other demands.
The resolution recognizes not only that the United States, particularly Black and Latinx communities, is suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, but that Cuba “has a long history of providing international medical aid with its medical personnel directly involved in the fight against COVID-19” through its Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade against Disasters and Serious Epidemics.
The City Council of Sacramento, California—the capital city of the largest U.S. state—has passed a resolution calling for biotechnological, medical and public health exchange with Cuba. | Photo: City of Sacramento
Citing Cuba’s proven track record in its fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, as well as its assistance in many worldwide epidemics including dengue fever, HIV, swine flu and hepatitis, the resolution notes that Cuba’s medical system has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2005 as a worldwide leader in biotechnology, having made “significant contributions to the international medical field.”
Despite Cuba’s medical achievments, the resolution states that “the U.S. blockade of Cuba has severely restricted collaboration on scientific and medical research” and that the people of Sacramento “would benefit from Cuban biotechnological, medical and public health expertise in combating the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In concluding, the Mayor and City Council of Sacramento urge the United States’ legislative and executive branches to “lift restrictions on access to Cuban medical expertise to more effectively combat the COVID-19 pandemic by suspending travel sanctions against Cuba; cease ongoing measures deterring Cuba from importing medical equipment and medicines; and cease attempts to prevent other countries from accepting Cuban medical brigades and assistance.”
Sacramento Mayor and City Council urge Congress and the President to lift restrictions on access to Cuban medical expertise … by suspending travel sanctions and cease ongoing measures deterring Cuba from importing medical equipment … #covid19#Cubasalvavidaspic.twitter.com/0H9H9jbkPo
With Tuesday’s resolution, Sacramento becomes the seventh U.S. city to adopt a resolution specifically calling for U.S.-Cuba medical and scientific collaboration in 2020 alone. The California cities of Richmond, Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland—along with Cleveland, Ohio and Cambridge, Massachusetts—have all passed similar resolutions this year.
Recently, the Cuban monoclonal antibody Itolizumab, developed by the Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) in collaboration with the Indian company Bicon, received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorization to start phase III clinical trials in patients with COVID-19 in the United States, Mexico and Brazil.
U.S. support for medical, scientific and clinical collaboration and exchange with Cuba has been growing, as over 200 university professors in the United States released a statement yesterday calling on the Nobel Prize Committee to award the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade, which has to date sent more than 3,700 Cuban nurses and doctors organized in more than 50 medical teams to 39 countries throughout the world to treat people with COVID-19 and prevent further contagion.
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Is silver leading Bitcoin or is Bitcoin leading silver? Well, it depends on which time framing one is looking at.
On this chart comparison below, silver appears to be leading the way higher compared to Bitcoin:
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I have marked out points (A to C and 1 to 5) on both charts to show how patterns on both silver and Bitcoin could be similar. Point C represents the lows for both silver and Bitcoin in March of this year.
Both have exceeded the highs of the marked pattern, but it is the way, and timing of how they have done it that is of interest.
Silver was the first one to breakout of its high. Bitcoin followed suite about 108 calendar days later. If the comparison stays valid, then Bitcoin is currently moving towards a similar point 3 that silver already reached in August of this year.
Bitcoin is currently playing catch up, and this brings us to why Bitcoin is actually leading in the short-term time frame (to catch silver it has to lead in the short-term).
Below, is another comparison of silver and Bitcoin:
Again, I have marked similar patterns on both charts to show how they could be similar. Bitcoin has already exceeded its recent high (point 3) and is much favoured in the short-term.
Silver is still lagging below the recent high (point3), and just like Bitcoin did in the previous comparison, will eventually follow Bitcoin higher than point 3 in this comparison.
In my previous article, I have shown how a certain signal has already prepared the way for higher silver prices. The market is trying its best to shake some weak hands before it goes much higher.
In summary, it is fair to say that based on the above comparisons and the fact that silver and Bitcoin are considered alternatives for a failing dollar, Bitcoin’s recent breakout should give silver bulls hope that silver will soon rise much higher.
Remember the larger cycle:
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Hubert Moolman writes on his blog site, Hubert Moolman on Silver and Gold, where this article was originally published.
Bad things are happening on Samos. At the end of October the earthquake hit with all its devastating consequences as hundreds lost their homes. The damage is still being assessed. And now some 12 days later the aftershocks continue. One this morning registered as 4.1 R.
2 days after the quake a fire in the jungle left over 250 refugees homeless. And now this morning another major fire in the camp. A Somalian friend who has been burnt out this morning told us of her terror at waking up in the smoke, of grabbing a few things and then running for her life. This is the second time she has been burnt out this year. Then on November 9th, between the 2 fires, a refugee boat carrying 27 people arrived from Turkey. This is the first such arrival on Samos for many months. But it ended in tragedy as the boat was thrown onto the rocks on a remote and dangerous part of the coast south east of Vathi. One six year old boy died. 6 people are still missing, 2 of whom are thought to be pregnant.
As is the norm here, the police arrested the young Afghani man steering the boat as being a smuggler. It is a ridiculous charge as nearly all those who steer the boats are those who cannot afford to pay the full fare. He can expect to be found guilty and a significant jail sentence.
Bad enough, but the sadness of these events takes on a new dimension of horror. Not only did the police arrest and charge the boat driver as expected, they also arrested the father of the dead boy and charged him with exposing a minor to danger (law 4619/2019). This is a new law and it is the first time we have seen it used on Samos.
We heard yesterday evening that the father had been to the court and sentenced to 7 years in prison but this has yet to be confirmed. To date the case has not attracted any media attention except the ever reliable AreYou Syrious group which immediately recognised both the cruelty of the arrest and the dangers it poses:
“While the survivors were taken to the camp on Samos to quarantine, the father of the boy was arrested along with the driver of the boat. The father was taken in for “suspicion of endangering a life” and if convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison. CEO of Help Refugees/Choose Love, Josie Naughton said:
“These charges are a direct attack on the right to seek asylum. It is outrageous that a grieving father is being punished for seeking safety for him and his child. Criminalising people who are seeking safety and protection shows the failure of the European Union to find a solution to unsafe migration routes that forced thousands to risk their lives to seek protection.”
Arresting traumatized parents who have just lost their children is not the answer and cannot be accepted. This is a very cruel decision for the Greek authorities to make. This cannot be a new norm.”
This shocking development may not be in the media but I would put money on the fact that every refugee on the island knows and they are outraged and appalled. As Ayoub told me over the phone as I was writing this:
“Everything happening here at the moment on Samos from the earthquake to the fires and now this cruelty to the father whose son died says one thing to me. We are not seen as human. I am so tired from this.”
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Since even before Donald Trump won the 2016 election, it’s been clear that the American deep state has opposed his presidency. And while Trump has deferred to the Pentagon and the CIA by maintaining their forever wars, foreign military empire, foreign interventionism, coups, and assassinations, it’s also been clear that Trump hasn’t been as obsequious to the national-security establishment as presidents are expected to be. The deep state will not be disappointed with Trump’s departure and will be ecstatic with Joe Biden as president.
Now that his term in office is apparently over, Trump can send one parting shot at the national-security establishment and its acolytes as well as to the mainstream press, one that would be based on a pure sense of justice: Issue pardons for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange before Trump walks out the door, preferably now rather than later.
Pardons for Snowden and Assange would send a powerful message to the national-security establishment: Telling the truth about your evil, immoral, and nefarious dark-side activities is not a crime in our country. It’s a badge of honor.
After all, that’s the national-security “crime” that both men are being persecuted for and prosecuted for. Imagine: Being persecuted and prosecuted for telling the truth and for disclosing evil, illegal deep-state actions to the American people. It only goes to show how the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II has warped and perverted fundamental moral values within our nation.
Consider, for example, the CIA’s repeated assassination attempts in the early 1960s against Cuban president Fidel Castro. How many Americans questioned the morality and legality of those assassination attempts? How many Americans questioned the assassination partnership between the CIA and the Mafia to murder Castro, notwithstanding the fact that the Mafia is one of the most crooked, murderous, drug-dealing organizations in the world?
Unfortunately, I would say not very many Americans objected. That’s because of the indoctrination that people receive, primarily in school, that the CIA is a force for good in the world and that action it takes protects “national security.”
Yet, where in the Constitution does it authorize the federal government to murder someone? Indeed, my reading of the Bill of Rights is that it expressly prohibits the feds from murdering people without due process of law and trial by jury.
Where was the moral justification for murdering Castro? That he was a communist? Since when does a person’s beliefs justify his extermination? That Cuba invaded the United States? Don’t make me laugh — it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor against Cuba, not only through assassination but also through an invasion, terrorism, and one of the most brutal economic embargoes in history.
Now, just imagine that someone within the deep state had warned Castro of a certain CIA assassination plot. The deep state would have considered him to be a bad person — a traitor to America — for daring to disclose its evil, immoral, and illegal plot to murder an innocent person. He would be treated the same as Snowden and Assange are being treated. That’s what passes for “patriotism” in a national-security state: Don’t dare disclose our dark-side secrets to the world, no matter how evil, immoral, or illegal they are, or we will destroy you or kill you.
The worst mistake the American people have ever made was permitting the federal government to be converted to a national-security state and then falling for its Cold War racket.The best thing the American people could ever do is restore our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. A good first step in the right direction would be to pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. What a great way for Trump to stick it to the deep state and its supporters in the mainstream press before he departs the presidency.
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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. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation
AFP in an article titled, “US removes group targeted by China from terror list,” would report:
The United States said Friday it had removed from its list of terror groups a shadowy faction regularly blamed by China to justify its harsh crackdown in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region.
In a notice in the Federal Register, which publishes new US laws and rules, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he was revoking the designation of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim) as a “terrorist organization”.
The AFP article also claims:
“Etim was removed from the list because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that Etim continues to exist,” a State Department spokesperson said.
Yet this – according to US State Department-funded sources themselves – is entirely untrue. This includes articles as recent as 2018 from the Department’s own Voice of America admitting the ongoing threat the group still poses not only to China but to the world.
VOA’s 2018 article titled, “Uighur Jihadis in Syria Could Pose Threat,” admits that:
Analysts are warning that the jihadi group Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) in northwestern Syria could pose a danger to Syria’s volatile Idlib province, where efforts continue to keep a fragile Turkey-Russia-brokered cease-fire between Syrian regime forces and the various rebel groups.
In essence – the US State Department is simply removing a known and still very active terrorist organization from its lists to both politically attack and undermine China further – but to also likely provide more direct support to the group and those affiliated with it in Washington’s widening conflict against Beijing.
ETIM has carried out bus bombings, shootings, suicide bombings, mass knife attacks, and other forms of terrorism stretching across a period of more than 20 years. It has been listed by the UN Security Council as a terrorist organization for nearly as long and is still designated as such to this day.
A post on the UN Security Council’s official website titled, “Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement” notes that:
The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement was listed on 11 September 2002 pursuant to paragraphs 1 and 2 of resolution 1390 (2002) as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” or “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” Al-Qaida.
Similar patterns by the US were seen in relation to proxy warfare waged by Washington against the nations of Libya and Syria. Terrorist organizations like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) were likewise removed from US terror lists despite at the time the group still openly carrying out armed violence.
The US State Department – according to its own statements – de-listed LIFG in 2015. The UK also de-listed the terrorist organization.
Yet as recently as 2017, terrorists linked to LIFG continue to carry out terrorism internationally.
The backwash from the 2011 intervention led indirectly to the Manchester bombing. Abedi, 22,, whose parents fled Libya in 1994, returned to the country after Gaddafi’s fall in 2011 only to come back to the UK as the fighting continued in Libya. Abedi and his family developed links to the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, an Islamist group that helped oust Gaddafi.
While the US and its partners remove terrorist organizations from terror lists, claiming it is because the threats from these groups are subsiding – in truth – it is because the US and its partners simply seek to aid and abet their violence further and much more directly.
Just as the US and UK used LIFG to overthrow the Libyan government in 2011 and create social division and fear within their own societies from 2011 onward – the US is removing the East Turkistan Islamic Movement for the very same reasons.
The ETIM serves US interests in many ways – from providing foot soldiers for Washington’s proxy war against Syria to carrying out terrorist attacks against disobedient nations like Thailand (the 2015 Erawan Shrine bombing in downtown Bangkok), to creating violence, unrest, and even fuelling separatism inside China itself. The US is not taking ETIM off its lists because it no longer poses a threat – it is taking it off its lists to sharpen this weapon for further use.
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Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
Regime change is official policy by both wings of one-party rule.
Things began in the mid-19th century by stealing half of Mexico.
Throughout the post-WW II period, US ruling authorities toppled dozens of sovereign governments.
They assassinated legitimate leaders, removed others by color revolutions and old-fashioned coups, besides reigning terror worldwide for control of other nations, their resources and populations.
Things are more ruthless today than ever, both wings of the US war party on the same page in pursuing the nation’s imperial aims.
They also one-sidedly support privileged interests exclusively over governance serving all its people equitably.
The US system is hugely undemocratic by design.
Wealth, power and privilege control things — governance of by and for everyone equitably never a consideration.
The Supreme Law of the Land Constitution was designed to serve the nation’s privileged class that owns the country.
Duopoly rule excludes third (or independent) party surprises.
A single Senate member — or in cahoots with others — can subvert the majority will by filibustering with no time limit on how long.
House and Senate committees are controlled by powerbroker authority — most often a single individual chosen by seniority.
US fantasy democracy is money-controlled — amounting to a one-dollar = one vote system.
According to one analyst, voters are “reduced to the condition of one of Pavlov’s experimental dogs – apathetic, inert, disinterested,” and powerless.
The judiciary is what Michael Parenti called the politicized “aristocratic” branch of government.
Nothing in the Constitution mentions judicial review. The concept derives from two of its articles:
Article VI, Section 2 states that the Constitution, laws, and treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land” — judges bound by them.
Article III, Section 1 states that judicial power applies to cases where courts intervene.
Under this interpretation of the law, judges in theory can override actions by the executive and congressional branches of government.
The notion derived from Marbury v. Madison (1803). Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the (Supreme) Court is the final arbiter of what is or is not the law — a precedent-setting decision.
Yet time and again, presidents by executive power and congressional actions have final say on policymaking — politicized courts to the highest level bowing to their will.
In a nation where foxes guard the henhouse, election theft happens with disturbing regularity — at the federal, state, and local levels.
Today it’s with electronic ease through corporate owned and controlled voting machines.
Voting by mail-in or absentee ballots is vulnerable for fraud on a massive scale.
US Election 2020 is Exhibit A. According to the US Elections Project:
Total early votes totaled 101,423, 318.
Mail-in votes totaled 65,487,735.
Another 35,935,583 Americans voted early in person.
The above are record numbers, far exceeding earlier totals. They’re subject to slight revisions.
They leave unexplained how many ballots were cast by ineligible voters — non-state residents, the deceased, or for other reasons.
When analysis of Election 2020 is completed at a later time by independent individuals and/or organizations — based on what’s already known — it’s highly likely to confirm enough fraud in key swing states for Biden/Harris over Trump.
The notion of a free, fair, and open process was never the American way.
Run by powerful interests, the process is secretive and unreliable.
Americans get the best “democracy” money and influence can buy — popular sentiment never a consideration.
So-called checks and balances are more fiction than fact.
Power brokers running the country assure that individuals chosen for high office and the courts serve their interests — how it’s been from inception.
Corporate-controlled establishment media give “legitimacy” to an illegitimate system.
The notion of free, fair and open elections — what democracy is supposed to be — is pure illusion.
Time and again before voting begins, winners are selected over losers.
Based on how the race for the White House turned out this year — recounts and legal challenges aside — Biden/Harris appear to have been chosen by the nation’s power elites over Trump.
While results aren’t final because of his challenges, they’re very likely to hold — though nothing is certain until nine Supreme Court justices rule by majority vote.
Because Republicans most likely will retain Senate control while Dems control the House, the High Court’s ruling on Trump v. Biden should stand — if its justices get to decide, where things appear to be heading.
What deep state dark forces want, they’re almost certain to rubber-stamp.
An earlier article discussed regime change at home.
Until the plot against Trump, removing Richard Nixon from office on trumped up charges was the leading example.
The shameful chapter in US history was all about his social, environmental and geopolitical agenda – world’s apart from how Republicans and undemocratic Dems operate today.
He opened China, recognized Taiwan as part of its territory, and wanted war in Vietnam ended that he earlier escalated before the US April 30, 1975 Saigon embassy rooftop exit, ending America’s longest war in modern times until Afghanistan.
SALT I talks with Soviet Russia (1969) led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty Bush/Cheney rescinded (2002).
Nixon threatened entrenched military/industrial/security and other interests, why he was marked for removal.
After leaving office, he traveled the world, wrote several books, and was respected as an elder statesman and foreign policy expert.
Following his death in April 1994, world figures paid their respects, including co-presidents Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with living former US presidents.
During 1973-74 impeachment proceedings, hostile to Nixon Hillary was a House Judiciary Committee lawyer.
There’s plenty about Trump to criticize.
Because of his unorthodox style, opinionating by tweets, media opposition, and demonizing by Dems, it appears that he was marked for removal by at least most deep state dark forces.
Whatever they want, they get. They have final say — not presidents, key congressional members or High Court justices.
As things now stand, Biden/Harris will succeed Trump in January — though nothing is certain until things play out in full.
They’ll likely conclude before inauguration day on January 20.
In 2016, Trump defied most pundits by defeating media darling Hillary.
A repeat performance this year appears to be the longest of long shots.
His multiple court challenges are unlikely to succeed.
Yet make no mistake. Biden/Harris didn’t win. They were chosen to deny Trump a second term.
That’s how US fantasy democracy works.
The will of dominant interests prevails over public sentiment most always.
At this time, Election 2020 appears no exception.
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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.”
“My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests.” –Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, 2014
“For the world at large, normalcy only returns when we’ve largely vaccinated the entire global population.” –Bill Gates, April, 2020
You have to hand it to governmental health experts: All are uniformly “on message”. Meanwhile, abundant medical expertise from around the world at odds with official messaging is rendered invisible. The Great Barrington Declaration, so critical of governmentally-imposed lockdown strategy (and associated policies, e.g., public masking, quarantine, etc.), has, since October 5, 2020, been signed (as I write) by more than 45,000 medical scientists and practitioners worldwide. But mainstream media figures, savvy to the perks of power, know better than to report this. It’s worthy of note that the founders of the Declaration go to pains to declare their detachment from financial gain, perhaps to stand out against prominent governmental experts with ties to the pharmaceutical industry (e.g. here, here, here).
There are also America’s Frontline Doctors, the many dissenting scientists being discovered by journalists (here, here, here, and just the other day still more here and here), and plenty of others too, trying to be recognized above the din of officialdom, only to be forced to the outer margins of the Internet, where only a small fraction of the public bothers to seek them out. Relatively speaking, it’s lonely out there. Only a select set of officially approved voices conforming to a tightly-controlled narrative are allowed space in mainstream media, and therefore in the larger public mind. By what process, one wants to know, do specific individuals become the “health experts” for government and media?
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the global authority to which the medical institutions of nations look for leadership. WHO opinion and policy informs the NIH, CDC, schools of public health and medical societies in the US and their counterparts in countries all over the world. Visualized as a pyramid, WHO is the apex. Information from there descends through national organizations, schools and institutions to regional and local authorities. Gates and the pharmaceutical industry weave strategy at the apex, with industrial and political players making their impacts all the way down to the base of the pyramid where one finds hordes of frightened, masked citizens.
In this light, consider Margaret Chan’s introductory quote (above) regarding donor impact on WHO policy. Now, scroll down this 2017 list of contributors to the WHO that shows the United States as top contributor at ~$401Million.
But forget that sum, because President Trump thereafter stopped US contributions. That so, further scrolling down reveals that the major contributor is not a nation but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at ~$325Million, seconded by GAVI, the vaccine alliance (itself heavily funded by Gates), at ~$133Million.
The top donors to the WHO are not countries, as is widely believed, but private interests. In fact, in recent decades, private donations to the WHO have continued to grow relative to national contributions, so that by 2017, their total had passed the 50% mark. And the pharmaceutical industry, the vaccine aspect in particular, is primary.
As one peruses the backgrounds of the the government’s (and media’s) chosen health experts, as opposed to the wealth of medical expertise resisting the lockdown and its isolating mandates, there seems within the former a high frequency not only of governmental bureaucrats but also of ties to schools of public health, and therefore to the many connected interests of those schools. Put another way, the commercial involvements of public health schools move quickly and unavoidably into a political realm that a critical eye might conclude is inappropriate for a medical school per se. Considering the inevitable conflicts of interest characteristic of corporate involvement, shouldn’t there be a solid wall of separation between medical schools and schools of public health?
A way to understand what is encompassed within “public health” is to read the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, rated tops in the nation and named for its billionaire donor: “We implement large-scale solutions”, which includes development of “programs” and “interventions” in disaster response, refugee health, evaluation of health insurance programs, human rights and sustainable practice. The site links to Bloomberg’s “Centers and Institutes” which include the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health and four others that are specific to vaccine development, production, education and access. Bloomberg School’s joining with the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation to host Event201, that foretold Covid19 Pandemic five months before the real thing hit, shows the School to be a global power player, and other schools of public health are certainly similarly oriented.
In 2005, in my home state, the School of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison underwent a change to become the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The expanded mission to include public health was, as stated, to emphasize community health needs. A strict focus on medicine, on the one hand, and the vastly expanded array of considerations innate to “public health”, on the other hand, thereby became integrated into a single unit. In Wisconsin, two voices from within that school have been dominant in messaging with regard to the Covid19 Pandemic and how it should be handled, with the result that the Governor instigated a severe lockdown strategy that included a statewide masking mandate.
While it would be natural for a political leader to rely on medical advice, what is problematic is the unanimity of designated experts nation-wide in their conformity to a specific Covid19 policy that is, on many levels, dubious or downright false. For example, the two accepted experts in Wisconsin, cited above, have insisted that scientific evidence has established that public masking is a powerful means of preventing viral transmission, this mirroring the position of the Director of the CDC who told a Senate Committee that masks are more protective than vaccines. This claim is absolutely and demonstrably false. No scientific evidence has shown anything of the sort. A “smoking gun” in the masking issue is the fact that perhaps the finest meta-analysis of public masking, published in 2016 and titled “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review”, was suddenly taken down as “no longer relevant in the current climate”. (Fortunately, it was saved at the Wayback site). What stands out is that the “current climate” referred to has nothing to do with weather. Rather, it mirrors a global project the details of which are hidden to the extent possible.
There is growing awareness that pre-Covid19 life will never return, and that masking, social distancing, and the like, will become normal aspects of daily life, for we — particularly the youngest among us — have been persuaded by officially-designated health experts to see our fellow humans as toxic and threatening. Indeed, Klaus Schwab, guiding light of the Big Reset, confirms the loss forever of life before Covid19, as he and his colleagues of the World Economic Forum put components of their new world order into place.
Putting the pieces together, one recognizes a global medical bureaucracy from the WHO on down, in concert with schools of public health and the pharmaceutical industry, combined into a politically powerful triumvirate dedicated to goals most certainly linked to those of the World Economic Forum, with which Bloomberg School collaborates. The selection process within this triumvirate designates its experts for governmental and academic advancement, and for public display by mainstream media, this to the exclusion of dissenters. The apparatus for social control now being put into place is to involve an unimaginably profitable vaccine-based medical authority touted by certified “health experts” and governmental enforcers, all of whom will assure the public that they “have the science”. There will be discovery of new pathogens threatening epidemic and pandemic waves, complete with spikes and hotspots. One foresees populations nurtured in fear, herded into groupthink and longing for salvation through vaccination.
Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at [email protected]. Read other articles by Bill.
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“Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.” – Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler
At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy. She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one. “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social programming that has made him society’s slave.
When Nora closes the doll’s house door behind her, the sound is like a hammer blow of freedom. For anyone who has seen the play, even when knowing the outcome in advance, that sound is profound. It keeps echoing. It interrogates one’s conscience.
The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?
In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.
Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones. They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them. They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.
They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.
This is not a big secret. Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al. Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.
Both are old men with long, shameful histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office. There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK. Neither has the guts or the intelligence. They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine. They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.
It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.
All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.
Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected, it’s payback time. Palms are greased. Everybody knows this is true. It’s called corruption. So why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
And yet everybody who voted for the two men backed by the super-rich owners of the country knew what they were doing, unless they live under a rock and come out every four years to vote. Perhaps they were out buying stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, so they can give thanks for the farce (stuffing: Latin: farcire ).
They have their reasons. Now the Biden people celebrate, just as Trump’s supporters did in 2016. I can hear fireworks going off as I write here in a town where 90% + voted for Biden and hate Trump with a passion more intense than what they ever could work up for a spurned lover or spouse. This is mass psychosis. It’s almost funny.
At least we have gotten rid of Trump, they say. No one can be worse. They think this is logic. Like Torvald, they cannot begin to understand why anyone would want to leave the doll’s house, how anyone could refuse to play a game in which the dice are loaded. They will deny they are in the doll’s house while knowing the dice are loaded and still roll the die, not caring that their choice – whether it’s Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.
Orwell called this Doublethink:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members “and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox,” today in the U.S.A., it has been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.
To live in the U.S.A. is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.
People often ask: What can we do to make the country better? What is your alternative?
A child could answer that one: Don’t vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State. Which of course they are. Everybody knows.
The so-called left and right argue constantly about whom to support. It’s a pseudo-debate constructed to allow people to think their vote counts; that the game isn’t rigged. It’s hammered into kids’ heads from an early age. Be grateful, give thanks that you live in a democracy where voting is allowed and your choice is as important as a billionaire’s such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Charles Koch. In the voting booth we are all equal.
Myths die hard. This one never does:
“Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.” — Donald Trump, January 20, 2017.
“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.” — Joe Biden, November 7, 2020.
“Above all else, the time has come for us to renew our faith in ourselves and in America. In recent years, that faith has been challenged.” — Richard Nixon, January 20, 1973.
Your voice – our faith – it’s time to unite and heal.
Ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Afghanis, the Libyans, the Palestinians, et al. They sing a different tune, one not heard In the Church of the Good Hustler.
After campaigning hard for the losing presidential candidate in 1972, I nearly choked when I heard Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1973. Clinging to the American myth the previous year, I had campaigned for a genuine anti-war Democrat, Senator George McGovern. The war against Vietnam was still raging and Nixon, who had been first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate,” succeeding the previous “peace candidate” Lyndon Baines Johnson, was nevertheless overwhelmingly elected, despite Watergate allegations appearing in the months preceding the election. Nixon won forty-nine states to McGovern’s one – Massachusetts, where I lived. It was a landslide. I felt sick, woke up, got up, and left the doll’s house.
“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” wrote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in 1965 in Propaganda:
It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness…. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.
In a country where loneliness is widespread, the will to believe and the power of positive thinking are far more powerful than the will to truth. Unlike Nora, who knew that when she left the doll’s house she was choosing the loneliness of the solitary soul, Americans prefer myths that induce them to act out of habit so they can lose themselves in the group.
This is so despite the fact that In the Church of the Good Hustler, when you play the game, you lose. We are all Americans and your vote counts and George Washington never told a lie.
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Trump has not yet accepted electoral defeat, and his remaining days as U.S. presidency until Biden’s inauguration may represent the period of greatest threat of armed intervention in Venezuela, especially before December 6, the date of the country’s next legislative elections.
In addition to trying to judicially question the outcome of the elections – an increasingly remote possibility – Trump may decide, before Biden takes office, to try an armed invasion to oust the Venezuelan government of President Maduro in an attempt to bolster his standing within the U.S., including among Democratic Party members.
Hostility to the Venezuelan government is a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. It was former President Barack Obama who declared Venezuela a “threat” to the U.S. The rising star of the Democratic Party Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized the Venezuelan government as “authoritarian” and “anti-democratic” – which led one of its supporters to send an open letter denouncing her position. This letter – which is worth reading – is here.
And both Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders supported the attempted coup in Venezuela in February 2019 under the guise of ‘humanitarian aid’. On that occasion, Bernie Sanders declared
“The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.”
To this, Roger Waters – from Pink Floyd – replied through twitter:
Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me! if you buy the Trump, Bolton, Abrams, Rubio line, “humanitarian intervention” and collude in the destruction of Venezuela, you cannot be credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1 %.
Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me! if you buy the Trump, Bolton, Abrams, Rubio line, “humanitarian intervention” and collude in the destruction of Venezuela, you cannot be credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1 %.
More on Sanders’ statement, the position of Ocasio-Cortez and Roger Waters’ reaction can be found in this other article.
It is also important to remember that the United States corporate media, virtually in unison, have always been hostile to Venezuela and have supported not only the economic sanctions against the country but also the successive coup attempts that have so far failed.
The upcoming legislative elections in Venezuela are a threat to the empire’s fake narrative about Maduro’s ‘dictatorship’. That a considerable part of the Venezuelan opposition has agreed to participate in the elections, repudiating the self-appointed ‘president’ Juan Guaidó, spreads a shovel of lime over any trace – if there still is one – of legitimacy in the opposition represented by Guaidó and his cronies.
A U.S. military attack before the December 6 Venezuelan elections would be yet another attempt to prevent these elections. Recent joint manoeuvres by the Brazilian and the U.S. navies in the Caribbean region indicate that preparations for an attack are already underway.
If Trump decides on such an intervention, virtually no criticism – much less real opposition – can be expected from the United States corporate media, or from the Democratic Party, or from the United States military cadres. Trump would then be free to move to front and centre stage and once again dominate the news cycle, projecting and affirming to a much wider public than that of his current supporters the image of the ‘strong man’, the ‘presidential’ leader who can recover America’s lost ‘greatness’. And this could bring him the necessary support for a new coup attempt before Biden’s inauguration. He has few options left to remain in power, and for Trump, this may be the only plausible one. Trump’s last days as president may be the most dangerous period ever faced by the Maduro’s Government.
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Featured image: Thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets on the last day of the #NoMoreTrump campaign to reject the unilateral measures against the country. | Photo: Venezuelan Ministry of Communication
What are the programmatic foreign policy lines that Joe Biden will implement when he takes office in the White House? He announced it with a detailed article in Foreign Affairs magazine (March / April 2020), that formed the basis of the 2020 Platform approved in August by the Democratic Party.
The title already speaks volumes: “Why America Must Lead Again / Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump.” Biden summarized his foreign policy program as follows: while
“President Trump has belittled, undermined and abandoned U.S. allies and partners, and abdicated American leadership, as president, I will take immediate steps to renew the alliances of the United States, and ensure that America, once more, leads the world.”
The first step will be to strengthen NATO, which is “the very heart of the national security of the United States.” To this end, Biden will make the “necessary investments” for the United States to maintain “the most powerful military force in the world,” and, at the same time, will ensure that “our NATO allies increase their defense spending” according to their commitments already undertaken with the Obama-Biden administration.
The second step will be to convene a “Global Summit for Democracy” in the first year of his presidency: it will be attended by “the nations of the free world and civil society organizations from all over the world at the forefront of defending democracy.” The Summit will decide on “collective action against global threats.” First of all, to “counter Russian aggression, keeping the military capabilities of the Alliance sharp and imposing real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms;” at the same time, to “build a united front to confront abusive behaviors and human rights violations by China, which is extending its global reach.”
Since “the world does not organize itself,” Biden points out, the United States must return to “playing the leading role in writing the rules, as it did for 70 years under both Democratic and Republican presidents, until Trump arrived.”
These are the main lines of the foreign policy program that the Biden administration is committed to implementing. This program – drawn up with the participation of over 2,000 foreign policy and national security advisers, organized into 20 working groups – is not just the program of Biden and the Democratic Party. It is actually the expression of a transversal party, the existence of which is demonstrated by the fact that the fundamental foreign policy decisions, above all those relating to wars, are taken by the United States on a bipartisan basis.
This is confirmed by the fact that over 130 senior Republican officials (some retired and some in-office) published an explanation of the vote against Republican Trump and in favor of the Democratic Biden on August 20.
Among these officials there is John Negroponte, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004-2007, ambassador to Iraq (his task was to suppress the resistance), then director of the US Secret Service.
This is confirmed by the fact that Democratic Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, supported Republican President Bush’s decision in 2001 to attack and invade Afghanistan, and in 2002 promoted a bipartisan resolution of 77 senators authorizing President Bush to attack and invade Iraq with the accusation (later proven false) that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Also, during the Bush administration, when US forces failed to control occupied Iraq, in the Senate Joe Biden passed in 2007 a plan on “decentralizing Iraq into three autonomous regions – Kurdish, Sunni and Shia”: in other words, the dismemberment of the country functional to US strategy.
Likewise, when Joe Biden was vice president of the Obama administration for two terms, the Republicans supported the democratic decisions on the war in Libya, the operation in Syria, and the new confrontation with Russia.
The transversal party, which does not appear at the polls, continues to work so that “America, once more, leads the world.”
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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.
While vaccine makers insist that any vaccine reaching the market will have undergone rigorous testing, the way trial protocols are designed suggests these vaccines may leave a lot to be desired.
It is a draft of sorts, a trial balloon, to measure people’s reactions. It reads indeed like an executioner’s tale. Many people may not read it – have no awareness of its existence. If they did, they would go up in arms and fight this latest totalitarian blueprint, offered to the world by the WEF.
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.
The trend is clear. When The Times subjected Fisk to one of its full-on hit pieces in April 2018, it wrote: ‘Fisk is no stranger to controversy.’ So why do ‘mainstream’ commentators feel obliged to red-flag Fisk’s journalism with ‘controversial’ in this way, and why is it a ‘weasel word’?
The United States can no longer use the “sunk cost” excuse to perpetuate an unclear mission described in the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers by Douglas Lute, a three-star Army General, when he said, “we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
This matter taken seriously could be construed as an undying extension of the ancient master-slave mentality though with all the modifications necessary to toe the superficial line of “decency” that defines what a modern society is supposed to look like.
Since Azerbaijan forces attacked Armenian ones in Nagorno Karabakh (NK below) on September 27, both sides breached agreed on ceasefires three times.Is this time different?
Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War is a documentary short reviewing the role of then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) in leading the United States into the most devastating foreign policy blunder of the last twenty years.
The New York Times and several experts admitted in late August that up to 90% of positive PCR tests were not indicative of the active illness that could be transmitted to others.As it turns out, Fauci expressed a similar opinion in July.
The Exhibits include documents from scientists and military officers who worked at the United States Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Some of these important documents have never before been publicly seen.
Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies
