Anti-Chinese Racism Sets Stage for New McCarthyism

October 14th, 2020 by John V. Walsh

More than a dozen young visiting scholars from China had their visas abruptly terminated in a letter from administration of the University of North Texas (UNT), Denton, on August 26, in a letter dated …August 26! The letter informed the students that they could return to campus from their lodgings to pick up belongings, but all other access was closed to them. The students and fellows were given no explanation. They were left with no legal basis to be in the U.S. and began scrambling for the very few and very expensive flights back to China.

At first the UNT administration simply stated that all those funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) were terminated. According to Wikipedia, the CSC is the main Chinese agency for funding Chinese students abroad (currently 65,000 with 26,000 of them in the US) and an equal number of foreign students in China, some from the US. (Americans interested in CSC scholarships to study in China can easily find information here. There is nothing secret or nefarious about CSC; the US has agencies that offer similar aid to scholars.)

The University at last offered an explanation of sorts in a statement by its spokesperson, the Vice President for Brand Strategy and Communication (VP for BS and C) as reported on September 10 by the North Texas Daily: “UNT took this action based upon specific and credible information following detailed briefings from federal and local law enforcement.” The VP for BS and C was “unable” to provide more details. Local police later denied any role in such briefings. It was the feds who provoked the discharges.

If these young students were doing something illegal or in violation of University rules, then they should be told what it is and presented with evidence so they could answer such charges. That is what we in the US claim to believe in. If their crime is simply soaking up ideas, that is what education is all about and most assuredly that is what science is all about. If certain areas of research are classified, then scholars working in those areas should be screened and get classifications. And if the US does not want CSC-sponsored students here, then reasons should be given and no more visas allowed. None of that has been done. The students were found guilty of something, they know not what, and dismissed!

Although UNT may not be well known nationally, it is rated as an “R1” or top tier research university, one of about 130 institutions falling into that top category and receiving federal research funding. It is troubling that such action by an institution in this category and the beneficiary of federal largesse has not drawn more condemnation for its action. And it is even more troubling that this occurs in an atmosphere of anti-Chinese hostility in the wake of Covid-19, marked by physical attacks on Chinese Americans.

Have we forgotten the racism directed against Chinese and codified into federal law the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882, the only US law ever enacted to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating to the US? Other such legislation followed, such as the Immigration Act of 1924 which effectively barred all immigration from Asia, including of course Chinese. The rationale given by the politicians for all such heinous legislation was that Chinese were stealing “our jobs”. Sound familiar? Notoriously the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 gave rise to the “Driving Out” period where Chinese were physically attacked to the point of brutal massacres designed to drive Chinese out of unwelcoming communities, the most infamous being the Rock Springs and Hells Canyon Massacres.

The anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment has continued down the years in one form or another but it has had a resurgence recently with the meme that China’s prosperity has been at the expense of Americans. This narrative does not remind us that US corporations and investors offshore jobs for greater “returns,” but claims that Chinese are pilfering our technology.

Some time back The Committee of 100, a prestigious organization of leading Chinese Americans, commissioned a study on Chinese and other Asians charged under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA)., covering a period from 1996 to 2015 Some of its conclusions are as follows:

  1. Up to 2008, Chinese were 17% of the total defendants charged under the EEA; from 2009-2015 under Obama this percentage tripled to 52%.
  2. 21% of Chinese were never convicted of espionage, twice the rate for non-Asians.
  3. In roughly half the cases involving Chinese the alleged beneficiary of the espionage was an American entity; roughly one third had an alleged Chinese beneficiary.

In sum a much higher rate of indictment for Chinese but a lower rate of convictions. So the additional “attention” given Chinese was not warranted. It seems that something changed after 2009. What was it? This time was the period when Obama’s Asian Pivot was put into play. The Pivot targeted China both militarily by moving 60% of US Naval forces to the Western Pacific and economically with the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) designed to isolate China from its neighbors. Is the increased harassment of Chinese under the EEA another aspect of the strategy expressed openly in the Pivot?

This legal attack on Chinese has continued under the present administration, but the NTU case adds a new wrinkle. Here there was no legal action, but an action apparently taken by the University. However, hidden pressure to oust the students came from a federal agency or agencies. This should be no surprise since it fits in with FBI Director Christopher Wray’s “Whole of Society” approach to confronting China unveiled last February and reiterated din July when he said, “We’re also working more closely than ever with partner agencies here in the US and our partners abroad. We can’t do it on our own; we need a whole-of-society response. That’s why we in the intelligence and law enforcement communities are working harder than ever to give companies, universities, and the American people themselves the information they need to make their own informed decisions and protect their most valuable assets.” (Emphasis, jw) It looks like the FBI and or its “partner agencies” gave UNT officials “the information they needed” to throw out the Chinese students without any reason given or charge made.

Consider the position of those UNT officials when they found themselves visited by federal “authorities” and “asked’ to cooperate. When the FBI “asks” for cooperation, it is making an offer that is perilous to refuse. It would take considerable courage to say “no”. But that is precisely what the UNT administrators should have done if they were to live up to the presumed values and ideals of our society and universities. The question also arises as to how many other universities have been approached to take similar steps. It seems unlikely that UNT is alone. But it is very likely that other Universities, wealthier and with a bevy of VP’s for BS and C, might have handled the whole matter in a discrete way and in a way that makes it appear that such suspensions are not a wholesale matter. Perhaps other more “polished” university authorities would not own up to the dirty deeds but keep them as secret as possible.

Let us take it a step further. What if you were approached by one of these federal agents and “requested” to keep an eye on a Chinese colleague, friend, neighbor or co-worker. Would you have the courage to refuse? And as the confrontation with China heats up, a peace movement is arising to counter it. In fact, anti-interventionists are popping up across the spectrum on left and right to oppose policies that take us on the road to war with China. Will the peace advocates be targeted in the same way, on the sly as well as within a “legal” framework by the FBI and other federal agencies? And will the precedent established in cases like the UNT case make such federal actions more acceptable? Will those working for peace be labeled as puppets of Xi?

“First they came for the Chinese,” it might be said. And in the future, under the “Whole of Society” approach, they may come for anyone who chooses to work for peace with China rather than take a path to war. Anti-Chinese racism, repugnant in and of itself, is also one part of setting the stage for a new and more dangerous McCarthyism. It is time to stop the madness before it devours us all.

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John V. Walsh, an antiwar activist, can be reached at [email protected].

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Trump Regime/Russia New START Talks at Impasse

October 14th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chance of their use ahead — as once before unjustifiably — is ominously high.

Humanity has a clear choice. Eliminate these weapons entirely or risk their eliminating us.

The history of warfare shows that warring sides use whatever weapons exist in their arsenal, if necessary, to win.

If two nuclear armed nations clash one day — notably the US v. Russia or China — these WMDs may be used by both sides to defeat the other.

Nuclear wars if waged are unwinnable. If these weapons used in future warfare, planet earth and humanity will lose.

Arms control is essential for humanity’s survival.

New START is the last remaining Russia/US agreement to prevent unconstrained expansion of nukes that can kill us all if detonated in enough numbers.

In 1959, Stanley Kramer’s chilling film “On the Beach” portrayed the aftermath of nuclear war — deadly radiation spreading worldwide.

The film’s location is Australia, the last part of the world to be irradiated. Its last scene is chilling.

Earlier Melbourne streets showed normal life.

The end shows them empty, devoid of life and windblown.

A church banner ironically reads: “There is Still Time…Brother.”

No longer. Radiation poisoning is unforgiving. It has final say.

Kramer’s film explains the madness of nuclear war. Yet it’s almost never shown in the US.

Its lesson is that if nuclear war is waged, there’s no undoing what happens, no second chance, no salvation from slow painful irradiated death.

Famed dancer, singer, actor, choreographer Fred Astaire played an Australian scientist in the film — the role far removed from his usual ones.

He commits carbon monoxide suicide to avoid the agony of death by radiation poisoning.

Extending New START for another five years with no preconditions — as Putin proposed — should be a no-brainer.

Things aren’t working out this way. On February 5, 2021, the landmark agreement will expire as long as unacceptable Trump regime demands remain unchanged.

In February 2017 during a Putin/Trump phone conversation, Russia’s president urged DJT to extend New START.

Reportedly, Trump paused the discussion to ask aides what New START is all about. He didn’t know.

With scant understanding of its details, he subsequently called it a “bad deal” — his faulty indictment similar to other landmark agreements he abandoned, notably the JCPOA and INF Treaty.

Russia/US New START talks are at impasse. As things now stand, the agreement will expire unextended in February.

As a result, the world will be far less safe than already. The risk of nuclear war one day will be greater than now.

Reportedly last month, Trump asked the US Strategic Command to assess how quickly nuclear weapons could be readied for use via bombers, submarines, and missiles (short and long-range) if New START expires.

Trump’s envoy for arms control Marshall Billingslea said if Russia doesn’t agree to US demands pre-election, “the costs (will) go up.”

Russia’s chief arms negotiator Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov called chances for extending the agreement “minuscule” because of unacceptable US demands, adding:

“It is up to the United States. The ball is in their court.”

“Either they give up their ultimatums and then we can start the talks about something or there’s no deal.”

Impasse between both sides continues because of the Trump regime’s unbending position.

Ryabkov stressed that “there are no grounds for any kind of deal in the form proposed” by Washington.

Trump regime unwillingness to extend New START for another five years with no pre-conditions, as Putin proposed, shows it’s not serious about preserving the landmark agreement.

The cost of its expiration is a hugely dangerous arms race.

It’s unclear what a Biden/Harris regime will do if succeeds Trump in January.

Their campaign website says Dems will pursue New START’s extension, “us(ing) that as a foundation for new arms control arrangements.”

Time and again, politicians say one thing — notably when campaigning — then do something entirely different if elected.

In September, Billingslea said if Russia doesn’t agree to Trump regime demands, the US will increase its strategic arsenal “immediately after the expiration of (New START) in February.”

Last July, Sergey Lavrov said if the US doesn’t agree to extend the agreement, “we will not insist.”

Billingslea’s undefined short-term extension proposal is unacceptable to Moscow because it would give the US wiggle-room around maintaining what New START stipulates.

Russia wants the agreement preserved in its current form.

With New START as a foundation, Moscow calls for including nuclear armed Britain and France in future arms control talks.

It want related issues negotiated for maintaining strategic stability, including missile defense, ground-based short-and intermediate-range missiles, space and hypersonic weapons.

Billingslea rejected talks on these issues, including removal of US nuclear weapons from Europe, some close to Russia’s border.

China expressed unwillingness to join in nuclear arms control talks unless the US decreases its arsenal to match numbers the PLA maintains.

The US has around 6,000 nuclear weapons, China two to three hundred, the latter according to a DOD estimate.

Deputy US Strategic Command’s head Admiral David Kriete disagreed with Billingslea’s claim about significant New START verification loopholes, saying:

“(V)erification procedures (in place give the US) great insight into Russia’s capabilities, numbers, and all kinds of things associated with their nuclear weapons.”

Without them, “we would have to go look for other ways to fill in the gaps.”

Chief New START negotiator Rose Gottemoeller said its verification procedures used what worked in previous treaties.

The US “got what it wanted in the New START verification regime: streamlined inspection procedures at a sufficient level of detail to be effectively implemented.”

Trump regime claims otherwise are false.

If things don’t change well before February, New START will likely expire.

If Biden succeeds Trump, it’s unclear if he’ll urge renewal with no pre-conditions or pursue an arms race instead.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

US and France on the Brink of Trade War

October 14th, 2020 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

The geopolitics of the cyber world is again influencing the global political and economic order. Now, a new international tension arises around a digital tax, known as the ‘Google tax’. Such tension could trigger a trade war, this time between the United States and France, which would reduce world GDP, warned the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), after confirming that there will be no agreement between both countries in 2020.

The need to tax virtual services has generated controversy all over the world and has caused the distancing of interests in some of the main world powers. This is precisely the case in the dispute between Washington and Paris. In July 2019, the French Parliament approved the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) Tax, which obliges these companies to pay a 3% tax on their revenue with the provision of cyber services. The United States, however, strongly rejected French law and threatened to respond with a tax on wines from the European country. Thus began the discussions that continue to agitate both countries to this day.

The dispute has recently gained even more attention with the rapid advance of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many technology giants have benefited from the extraordinary increase in the use of virtual services, mainly due to the social isolation measures adopted by several countries in all the continents. The situation reached an intolerable level of dispute of interests, with the two parties becoming increasingly irreducible and resistant to giving up their proposals. On October 12, the OECD confirmed that there will be no agreement this year and warned that countries must reach it soon or risk further damaging the world economy.

The result of the failure in reaching an agreement can lift a mere tension of interests for an intense fiscal war. The American restrictions will certainly not be restricted to French wines and will later be applied to other products coming from the European country, which, in turn, should include more companies in the list of the “Google tax”. The result would be detrimental to all sides since the relations between two major global powers would be undermined at a time of great fragility for the world economy.

According to the OECD, the absence of a consensual solution between the US and France could lead to a proliferation of unilateral taxes on digital services and an increase in harmful tax and trade disputes, which would damage tax security and investment in international business, thus creating a chain of sanctions and an obstacle to the development. In other words, we would have the appearance of a new trade war, as significant or more than the current dispute between the US and China, considering that it would affect business between two nations that are members of the “capitalist west” and not two great ideological opponents such as Washington and Beijing.

In its recent statement on the subject, the OECD further confirmed that there is a danger that tensions are not restricted to the US and France, but that they can generate a global trade war. The Organization’s great fear is that the attitude will serve as an example for other nations with conflicts of interest, thus creating a worldwide trend. At the same time, the Organization ensured that the international community agreed to continue working to reach an agreement in mid-2021.

The OECD’s concerns seem somewhat “innocent” when we look at the world scenario in depth. Is it still possible to talk about measures to contain the advance of a more protectionist trend and the proliferation of fiscal and trade wars around the planet? The legacy of the dispute between the US and China is insurmountable: a global trend has been generated that puts an end to the neoliberal ideal of a world without borders and tax barriers. Economic nationalism is on the rise because this is the way in which nations have always tried to overcome moments of crisis: greater economic fluidity – less intervention, greater instability – greater intervention.

At a time of global crisis, with structural changes in the world economic order occurring in an accelerated way, how to talk about stopping tax barriers? Still, with virtual services taking on an increasingly important role for the world economy, how can we prevent nations from taxing them? There is only the possibility of mediating an agreement, but the fight against the proliferation of trade wars is absolutely in vain because this is the way in which the superpowers resolve their conflicts of interest in the contemporary world.

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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.

In an astonishing direct connection to the Imperial College professor who has been roundly denounced for his model which linked success in minimizing COVID deaths to “mitigation” measures such as lockdowns, records show that the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation directly funded that professor in March and April to the tune of $8 million. Gates has been one of the most vociferous proponents of lockdowns, and the idea that they cannot end until a vaccine is available.

The epidemiology model provided the basis on which all governments requested or imposed, by controversial executive branch orders, a period of 15 days to “flatten the curve” of the inevitable spread of a virus, which has morphed into a daily drumbeat of “new cases.” It is on this drumbeat that governors base extended powers, into a never-ending “dark winter.” Gates largess also included a separate, unrelated grant of $79 million to Imperial College in March.

The CDC now accepts an overall survival rate for COVID of about 99.8%, versus flu which is 99.9%. (For Fatality Rate also see here and here.) Although COVID can have serious after-effects, this is true of any severe case of a respiratory illness, including severe cases of flu.

Professor Neil Ferguson has been called “one of the most wrong” scientists in the world, by other scientists.

Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former Chief Science Officer for Pzifer, said to an interviewer in September:

“It’s important that you know most scientists don’t accept that his [Ferguson’s model] was even faintly right…but the government is still wedded to the model.” (See: “Former Chief Science Officer for Pfizer Says “Second Wave” Faked on False-Positive COVID Tests, “Pandemic is Over”)

Now as Sweden, which skipped lockdowns, records a death rate that is 11% lower than the US, the Swedish model supports Ferguson’s critics. Other countries which still employ even more draconian, police-state lockdowns than the US show much higher death rates – deaths per capita – than either Sweden or the US. The data now shows no correlation between lower death rates and strong lockdowns, and in the case of Sweden, even show an opposite correlation.

Sweden early on decided to simply allow the human immune system to do its work, while sheltering the vulnerable. It never closed restaurants, bars, most schools, sports, or movie theaters. The Swedish government was roundly condemned for being reckless.

In Belgium, hundreds of citizens have filed both a civil lawsuit and a criminal complaint against Gates and Ferguson.

image.png

Sweden During International “Lockdowns”

Swedes do not and have never worn masks.

Hospitals in the US have received as much as $306,000 per declared COVID case (not deaths,) as reported in Becker’s Hospital Review. Michigan Public Radio reported that the national average was $160,000 per case, for the first round of $175 billion in hospital aid from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The poll-watching website Real Clear Politics argues that the COVID death toll is inflated.

Dr. Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, called Professor Neil Ferguson’s model justifying the world lockdowns “the most influential scientific paper” in memory. He also called it “one of the most wrong.”

According to The National Review

Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Charlotte Reid, a farmer’s neighbor, recalls: “I remember that appalling time. Sheep were left starving in fields near us. Then came the open air slaughter. The poor animals were panic stricken. It was one of the worst things I’ve witnessed. And all based on a model — if’s but’s and maybe’s.”

Ferguson’s nicknames in the science community have been reported to be “Master of Disaster” and “Professor Lockdown.”

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A small, loss-making firm run by a Conservative councillor in Stroud was given a £156m contract to import PPE from China without any competition, openDemocracy has learned.

Steve Dechan’s company, P14 Medical, signed the huge contract to supply medical gowns in May, even though the firm suffered significant financial losses in 2019, and its previous track record in PPE procurement is unclear. Transparency campaigners say the deal “reeks of cronyism”.

Dechan, who stood down from Stroud town council in late August, had previously made headlines when it emerged that P14 Medical had landed a contract worth almost £120m to supply face shields to the Department of Health and Social Care.

The £156m gowns deal was signed in late May, but details were only published at the end of September. Government contracts are supposed to be made public within 30 days.

Questions have also been raised about large contracts awarded to other small firms with limited experience of supplying PPE, including many with links to the Conservative party.

Shadow Cabinet Office secretary Rachel Reeves told openDemocracy: “There have been growing worries about the lack of transparency and effectiveness of the government’s approach to awarding public contracts throughout this pandemic, and how many contracts have been given to businesses with clear links to the Conservative Party.

“It is crucial that the public has total confidence that the best decisions are being made for the right reasons and that no-one has been advantaged in any way because of their party political relationships.”

In late September, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Tyler submitted a written question in the House of Lords asking “what due diligence and tendering process” was followed in awarding contracts to Steve Dechan’s firm, P14 Medical. A response was due by October 7 but at time of writing had not yet been received.

Government departments contracts are usually awarded after a tender process which allows multiple providers to compete to provide the best value. But since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the government has used an exemption in procurement laws to avoid having to open up public contracts to competition. The lack of transparency around pandemic outsourcing has been branded a “national scandal”.

Losses

Steve Dechan was elected to Stroud Town Council as a Liberal Democrat but defected to the Conservatives in 2018. During last year’s general election, he campaigned for the local Tory MP Siobhan Baillie.

P14’s experience in PPE procurement is unclear. The company – which is also known as Platform 14 – describes itself as an “experienced medical device distributor”. A section on the business’s website about ‘PPE gowns/masks’ appears to have been added recently. Searches on the internet archive reveal no mention of personal protective equipment in previous years.

Under terms of the £156m contract, P14 Medical would import isolation gowns from a Chinese firm called Xinle Huabao Medical Supplies, based in Hebei province. P14 was handed the contract despite recording significant losses in 2019.

P14 previously told the Financial Times that the losses were owing to heavy investment in new chronic pain technology that it plans to market in Europe and the Middle East this summer.

‘Reeks of cronyism’

Earlier this week it emerged that a company run by the former business associate of Tory peer Baroness Mone won a £122m contract to supply PPE to the NHS just seven weeks after it was set up.

Previously a firm co-owned by a Conservative donor that supplied beauty products to high street chains was given a £65m contract to provide face masks to the NHS.

Meanwhile Ayanda Capital, a private equity company, was handed a £252m contract to provide face masks that were subsequently not used, after concerns were raised that they may not provide an “adequate fixing” around the face. The deal was brokered by an advisor to International Trade secretary Liz Truss who was also a senior board advisor at Ayanda.

Transparency International’s senior research manager Steve Goodrich told openDemocracy: ‘When one politically-connected company is awarded uncompetitive public contracts it smells a bit off, but when this happens again and again it reeks of cronyism.

“Continuing to award major public contracts without competitive tender fuels the perception that political patronage matters more than suitability for the job. In order to ensure best value for money is being secured, the government should return to open, competitive tendering in all but the most exceptional cases.”

Steve Dechan could not be reached for comment but he previously told the BBC:

“We are an expert company that has been in medical supplies for eight years including PPE that has managed to deliver on a big contract that the ‘big companies’ could not.

“I only know a couple MPs through local campaigning on issues, only met ministers (no current ones) on [general election] campaign trails. Never discussed PPE.”

He added:

“We are so proud that we stood up and unlike many got it done and protected our customers.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We have been working tirelessly to deliver PPE to protect our health and social care staff on the frontline throughout this global pandemic.

“Proper due diligence is carried out for all government contracts and we take these checks extremely seriously.”

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Syria’s Devastating Forest Fires

October 14th, 2020 by Andrew Korybko

The Syrian people who have already been suffering from nearly a decade of externally waged Hybrid War are now forced to deal with the environmental devastation caused by the 156 forest fires that recently ravaged the Arab Republic, though most Western environmentalists couldn’t care less despite acting concerned whenever similar events happen in the Amazon, Southern Europe, or the US’ West Coast.

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Syrian Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform relieved his compatriots by announcing on Sunday that the 156 forest fires that recently ravaged his country had finally been extinguished. Except for a few Mideast media outlets, most of the world has largely ignored this environmental catastrophe and the consequences that it’ll have for the Syrian people who have already been suffering from nearly a decade of externally waged Hybrid War. These forest fires devastated some of the most important agricultural regions of the Arab Republic, which could worsen food insecurity, unemployment, and living standards.

Considering how proudly they often virtue signal their concern whenever similar events happen in the Amazon, Southern Europe, or the US’ West Coast, one might have naively expected most Western activists to at least comment on this tragedy, yet they’ve mostly remained silent. This raises the question of why they could seemingly care less, which can be answered with a few theories. The first is that they’re Western-centric, whether consciously or otherwise, despite many of them sometimes professing anti-imperialist and leftist rhetoric. To them, the “Global South” doesn’t matter as much as the “Imperial Core” where they live.

Secondly, there’s a visible overlap between Western environmental activists and those that sympathize with liberal causes abroad. Syria is the target of liberal-driven information warfare which alleges that it “deserves” the regime change war that’s been waged against it for so long because its government is led by a “dictator”, not a democratically elected and legitimate leader like President Assad truly is.

Sympathizing with the Syrian people who lives in areas of the country currently under the writ of Damascus might wrongly be seen by them as tacitly endorsing the same state which many of these activists condemn and not as humanitarian solidarity.

The third theory combines the prior two and speculates that some Western activists might secretly cheer these forest fires if they believe that the worsened living conditions that the victims will be forced to endure might make them more susceptible to supporting anti-government goals. This Machiavellian mindset is predicated on the belief that the victims might be more easily manipulated into acting as “useful idiots” in support of the same regime change cause that external actors such as many of these same Western activists endorse. It’s an inaccurate reflection of reality, but it might nevertheless be what at least a radical few of them are thinking.

There’s also the chance that all this speculation is amiss, though it must be objectively recognized that conjecture of this sort will naturally arise whenever there’s a clear inconsistency in the activist community. Those who closely follow certain topics such as the examined one of environmental devastation are expected to be aware of major events like the Syrian forest fires, especially since some leading Mideast outlets reported on them, so their silence is deafening and makes one wonder whether it’s driven by ulterior motives. Even the famous environmental activist Greta Thunberg is strangely silent about this tragedy.

Her lack of any public commentary about Syria’s devastating forest fires is all the more hypocritical since it was just last month that she told the world that the similar tragedy unfolding on the US’ West Coast at the time “needs to dominate the news. All the time.” It’s unknown why she’s ignoring the exact same thing that recently happened in Syria, but those who feel passionate about raising global awareness of it and exposing the double standards of Western environmental activists are strongly encouraged to share this article under her social media posts in order to attract her followers’ attention in the hopes of pressuring her to finally say something.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

A Reuters article republished by Bangkok Post titled, “Thailand to make, supply AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine” would claim that Thailand has agreed to make AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.

This is despite the vaccine not only not having passed clinical trials or having been determined to be safe or effective yet – but despite AstraZeneca’s long history of corruption, bribery, and the overall danger of Western pharmaceutical giants who use lobbying to push dangerous, unnecessary products past regulators and onto the public.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine has already made news by possibily creating neurological disorders in patients involved in clinical trials.

CNN in an article titled, “Internal AstraZeneca safety report sheds light on neurological condition suffered by vaccine trial participant,” would report (emphasis added):

CNN has obtained an internal safety report by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca that sheds light on the neurological condition suffered by one of the participants in its coronavirus vaccine clinical trial.

The report details how the study volunteer, a previously healthy 37-year-old woman, “experienced confirmed transverse myelitis” after receiving her second dose of the vaccine, and was hospitalized on September 5.

While both AstraZeneca and Western regulators dismissed the incident – it is not certain whether this is because the condition was truly unrelated to the ongoing vaccine trial – or because AstraZeneca simply bribed regulators to ignore it.

It is unclear because AstraZeneca along with the entirety of the Western pharmaceutical industry are notoriously corrupt and each investigated and fined multiple times around the globe for massive bribery campaigns aimed at everything from boosting sales, to having dangerous products approved for sale, to money paid to close investigations into their business practices or the dangers their products present to the public’s health.

Reuters Report on AstraZeneca 

AstraZeneca – developing its candidate for a COVID-19 vaccine with billions in US government funding – is guilty – not suspected of or accused of – but guilty of bribery in multiple countries and has been fined by the US government itself.

Reuters in its article, “AstraZeneca to pay $5.52 million to resolve SEC foreign bribery case,” would report:

U.S. regulators said on Tuesday that AstraZeneca Plc (AZN.L) will pay $5.52 million to resolve a foreign bribery probe into improper payments by its sales and marketing staff to state-employed healthcare officials in China and Russia.

The article further explained (emphasis added):

Sales and marketing staff in those countries as far back as 2005 provided gifts, conference support, travel, cash and other benefits to the state-employed healthcare providers to buy or prescribe the company’s products, the SEC said.

The company’s Chinese subsidiary also paid healthcare providers speaker fees, sometimes for “totally fabricated” engagements, and in 2008, paid local officials to get reductions or dismissals of proposed financial sanctions it faced, the SEC said. 

More recently, FiercePharma in a 2018 article titled, “Justice Department probes claims that AstraZeneca bribed Iraqi terrorists to win contracts,” would report (emphasis added):

More than 100 veterans last year filed a bombshell lawsuit against several drugmakers, alleging they financed terrorism by paying bribes to win contracts with the Iraqi Ministry of Health. Now, the Department of Justice is investigating similar claims, according to an AstraZeneca securities filing that says it’s part of the probe.

Illustrating how AstraZeneca’s corruption is hardly an isolated case among the Western pharmaceutical industry – it  was being probed alongside two other pharmaceutical corporations working on US government-funded COVID-19 vaccines including Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ official website, AstraZeneca has already received $1.2 billion in funds from the US government for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. It – like others involved in the US-funded campaign – will profit whether or not their vaccines are safe, work, or are even produced.

Legal measures have been put in place to protect pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca from lawsuits that will arise if their COVID-19 vaccine fails to work, or even harms the health of those given it.

AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine rewrites genetic information in human cells – and would be the first and widest distribution of such technology. This is an unimaginably reckless rollout for what is completely unproven technology with no long-term studies on safety available because no such technology has been used before or on such a large scale.

Considering AstraZeneca’s background – no corporation could be less qualified or less trustworthy to rollout such a risky product.

Surely there are other alternatives for Thailand [and any other nation] regarding COVID-19 vaccine programs – the nation itself having had fewer than 60 COVID-19 related deaths in the many months the virus has been circulating through the global population. And surely there are better partners Thailand can find – partners without criminal records or a history of dangerous impropriety for something as important as human health.

The Thai public will most likely need to get involved and raise the issue because those involved in creating this “partnership” with AstraZeneca – like in the many other countries AstraZeneca and other Western pharmaceutical corporations operate – likely did so because of personal gain and certainly not based on AstraZeneca’s nonexistent credibility.

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Note from Land Destroyer’s Editor: While this article was originally written in regards to AstraZeneca’s partnership with Thailand, the information applies to anyone in the world exposed to AstraZeneca’s products including – and especially – the incredibly dangerous roll-out of its COVID-19 vaccine.

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This article was originally published on Land Destroyer Report.

Tony Cartalucci is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from LDR

House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters and Senator Elizabeth Warren have introduced the Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Equity Act. This legislation directs the Federal Reserve to eliminate racial disparities in income, employment, wealth, and access to credit.

Eliminating racial disparities in access to credit is code for forcing banks and other financial institutions to approve loans based on the applicants’ race, instead of based on their income and credit history. Overlooking poor credit history or income below what would normally be required to qualify for a loan results in individuals ending up with ruinous debt. These individuals will end up losing their homes, cars, or businesses because banks disregarded sound lending practices in an effort to show they are meeting race-based requirements.

Forcing banks to make loans based on political considerations damages the economy by misallocating resources. This reduces economic growth and inflicts more pain on lower-income Americans.

The Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act has already shown what happens when the government forces banks to give loans to unqualified borrowers. This law played a significant role in the housing boom and subsequent economic meltdown. The Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Equity Act will be the Community Reinvestment Act on steroids.

This legislation also requires the Fed to shape monetary policy with an eye toward eliminating racial disparities. This adds a third mandate to the Fed’s current “dual mandate” of promoting a stable dollar and full employment.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has already publicly committed to using racial disparities as an excuse to continue the Fed’s current policy of perpetual money creation. Since inflation occurs whenever the Fed creates new money, Powell and his supporters want a policy of never-ending inflation.

Supporters of this scheme say that inflation raises wages and creates new job opportunities for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. However, these wage gains are illusory, as wages rarely, if ever, increase as much as prices. So, workers’ real standard of living declines even as their nominal income increases. By contrast, those at the top of the income ladder tend to benefit from inflation as they receive the new money — and thus an increase in purchasing power — before the Fed’s actions cause a general rise in the price level. The damage done by inflation is hidden and regressive, which is part of why the inflation tax is the most insidious of all taxes.

When the Fed creates new money, it distorts the market signals sent by interest rates, which are the price of money. This leads to a bubble. Many people who find well-paying jobs in bubble industries will lose those jobs when the bubble inevitably bursts. Many of these workers, and others, will struggle because of debt they incurred because they listened to “experts” who said the boom would never end.

The Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the money supply lowers the dollar’s value, creates a boom-and-bust business cycle, facilitates the rise of the welfare-warfare state, and enriches the elites, while impoverishing people in the middle and lower classes. Progressives who want to advance the wellbeing of people in the middle and lower classes should stop attacking free markets and join libertarians in seeking to restore a sound monetary policy, The first step is to let the people know the full truth about the central bank by passing the Audit the Fed bill. Once the truth about the Fed is exposed, a critical mass of people will join the liberty movement and force Congress to end the Fed’s money monopoly.

As of October 13, clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces continue in the southern part of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, while on the other parts of the frontline Baku and Yerevan limited their military activity to exchange of artillery and aerial strikes. The humanitarian ceasefire signed by the sides in Moscow formally remains in force, but the terms of the ceasefire are not fulfilled by both sides.

The main point of instability is the town of Hadrut, which Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced to have been ‘liberated’ from ‘Armenian occupants’. However, Armenian forces apparently forgot to read his tweet and withdraw from the area. So, now, the Azerbaijani leader is forced to explain what’s going on.

On October 12, he sated that a large group of Armenian special forces attacked the town to make a few selfies for Armenian propaganda, but the attack was repelled. “Although from a strategic point of view, it does not matter so much for Armenia. They just take such a step to go there and take a selfie or report to their population. The Azerbaijani Army neutralized this large group,” Aliyev stressed.

The Armenian military says that the town is still in the hands of its forces and that it has successfully repelled another Azerbaijani attack there.

Turkey has been openly threatening Armenia with a joint Turkish-Azerbaijani advance if it does not surrender the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region to Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said that “Baku cannot wait for justice for another 30 years” claiming that “Turkey is ready to support the fair position of the Azerbaijani side.” According to Akar, if the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is not resolved in the near future, then the next step will be “the Azerbaijani-Turkish movement aimed at returning their land.”

Sources affiliated with Turkish-backed militant groups in Syria say that Ankara has been preparing a new deployment of militant groups’ members to Azerbaijan to support its war with Armenia. If the numbers of 1,500-2,000 fresh militants that are set to come to Azerbaijan are confirmed, this will not only make the estimated number of Turkish proxies deployed there from 4,000-6,000, but also confirm that Ankara is set to use its influence to motivate Azerbaijan to opt for the scenario of a further escalation.

Likely, the Turkish leadership seems the war in Karabakh as an important turning point, which, in the event of military success, will turn into the leading power in the Southern Caucasus and give additional momentum to its geopolitical expansion. It will also boost the popularity of Recep Tayyip Erdogan that positions himself as the leader of the Turkic world and a de-facto Sultan of his own Neo-Ottoman Empire.

According to the Armenian side, the Turkish military is already directly involved in the war. In particular, the presence of Turkish F-16s, Turkish special forces, military advisers and Turkish-backed Syrian militants in Azerbaijan are hardly deniable facts.

It is interesting to observe how for example the main version from Turkish and Azerbaijani sources about the Turkish F-16 jets switched from public denial of their presence to claims that they are not involved directly in the conflict and are just needed to deter Armenian aggression. Reports from the ground and the diplomatic posture of the sides indicate that Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey, is preparing a new military push against Armenian forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh region to consolidate and expand its initial gains before the winter.

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This is a politically desperate distraction which hints that the Democrats aren’t as confident about former Vice President Joe Biden’s supposedly impending victory as their media surrogates are trying to convince everyone is bound to happen in a few weeks’ time.

US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently said that she’ll seek to promulgate a bill mandating the formation of a Congressional commission tasked with deciding whether the 25th amendment should be applied to US President Donald Trump. That amendment creates a mechanism for removing the President from office if they’re unable to continue their duty. It’s been previously discussed before considering Trump’s erratic behavior, but this time Pelosi says that it’s relevant in regards to his supposed lack of recovery from COVID-19.

This is a politically desperate distraction which hints that the Democrats aren’t as confident about former Vice President Joe Biden’s supposedly impending victory as their media surrogates are trying to convince everyone is bound to happen in a few weeks’ time. Instead of focusing on the issues that matter to most Americans, chiefly socio-economic ones, the most powerful elected Democrat in the country right now decided that it’s better to once again speculate about whether Trump is mentally fit to continue serving as President.

There are several reasons why she decided to go this route. Firstly, the series of scandals that the Democrats tried to trap Trump in have thus far failed to remove him from office. These are “Russiagate”, “Ukrainegate” (for which he was officially impeached by the House of Representatives), and what can be described as the first variation of “COVIDgate”, which pertains to his administration’s alleged cover-up of when it learned just how dangerous this virus is and the government’s seemingly irresponsible response to it afterwards.

This second variation of “COVIDgate” is less credible than the first since it can be interpreted as little more than a personal attack against Trump. Not only that, but it also risks stigmatizing other COVID-19 victims and survivors. As it stands, the international medical community doesn’t know much about the long-term consequences of COVID-19. There isn’t any consensus concerning Pelosi’s innuendo that certain treatments make patients mentally unfit to continue their professional activities.

Her malicious speculation might also be motivated by the party’s desire to cover up for their presidential and vice presidential candidates’ less than stellar performances at the recent debates. Although reviews of these events are mixed, it can objectively be said that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had impressive showings and made some pretty valid points against their opponents. Pelosi seems desperate to distract from any further discussion about those debates, hence another reason why she’s now pushing the 25th amendment bill.

There’s a near-universal expectation among experts that her efforts are bound to fail. It’s unrealistic to expect the bill to pass, let alone a majority of Cabinet members and the Vice President to agree that Trump is unable to remain in office. She’s therefore doing this for purely political purposes, which makes a mockery out of that amendment, risks stigmatizing COVID-19 patients and survivors all across the world, and raises uncomfortable questions about just how confident the Democrats really are about Biden’s possible victory.

Americans have long had enough of political theater over the past four years since the 2016 presidential campaign catalyzed the descent of domestic politics into madness. They deserve better from both parties considering what’s at stake in this election. The Democrats cannot convincingly claim that Trump’s tweets are a tactic to distract from domestic issues when Pelosi is pushing her 25th amendment bill for that exact same purpose. Both the Republicans and Democrats are guilty of emotionally manipulating the American people.

Many argue that this election is the Democrats’ to lose after taking into account Trump’s low approval ratings and the multitude of scandals that have accompanied his time in office. That’s a provocative, yet nevertheless largely accurate, assessment, which makes it all the more disappointing (though not necessarily surprising) to see Pelosi resort to her latest scheme. The Democrats have the chance to show Americans that they’re everything that Trump isn’t, yet here they are applying similar tactics in order to distract voters, which is a pity.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

During the press briefing outlining Russia’s program of work for their October Presidency of the UN Security Council,  I mentioned the offer by Dr. Kee B. Park, Director of the Korea Policy Project at Harvard Medical School, and renowned Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine,  who stated he is willing to address the Security Council and inform them of the horrifying human consequences suffered by the ordinary citizens of the DPRK, as a consequence of the sanctions that the Security Council is relentlessly and savagely inflicting upon North Korea.  Dr. Park was born in South Korea, and at the age of ten years his family brought him to the United States, where he now lives.  He is impeccably objective, and intimately aware of the devastation that these sanctions are wreaking upon the entire health care system of the DPRK, where he has helped, as a neurosurgeon, in several humanitarian organizations and programs.

Russian Ambassador Nebenzia immediately responded with profound and moving concern about this tragic situation, and emphasized that Russia has raised this issue for a long time, calling on the Chair of the Sanctions Committee of the DPRK to hold a briefing, which for some reason was postponed and postponed so, as Ambassador Nebenzia stated, “We have a debt that they owe us, and we want them to repay”! Ambassador Nebenzia stated that he has been approached by another  distinguished scientist who is completely unbiased, and is very familiar with this problem, and confirmed that the situation is appalling, and completely unacceptable. Ambassador Nebenzia reiterated:

“Indeed it is!!  I will approach the Chair of the Sanctions Committee, and tell him that there is a distinguished neurosurgeon willing to brief the Security Council.  Please provide me with his coordinates.”

Ambassador Nebenzia continued:

“This is a problem causing great suffering in other countries in addition to the DPRK.  The sanctions take a great toll on the general population in Syria.  Our partners say these sanctions are very targeted, very refined, and do not harm the general population.  This is disproved by numerous humanitarian actors, including even Western NGO’s, who are saying they are also victims of the sanctions, and state that the secondary effects of the sanctions cause many humanitarian providers to fear retaliation by the sanctions watchdogs of the Western countries that introduced them.”

Ambassador Nebenzia continued, stating that the Secretary-General called for a global ceasefire, and lifting of the sanctions. The General Assembly Omnibus Resolution on the 2030 Agenda contains a paragraph on the adverse effect of sanctions on achievement of the 2030 agenda, and this paragraph is a part of the Resolution.

In addition to the other brutal deprivations the general population suffers as a result of the sanctions, the sanctions deprive doctors of crucial medical equipment necessary to restore to heath and restore to life a huge number of citizens in the targeted countries, including the most vulnerable, the elderly, disabled, and women and children. I have also discussed this with Ambassador Olof Skoog, currently Ambassador of the European Union, formerly Ambassador of Sweden. Ambassador Skoog is also concerned about this situation, and one hopes he can awaken his colleagues to this emergency.

The great human concern about these egregious human rights violations caused by the Security Council sanctions,  concern so eloquently expressed by the Russian Ambassador, is phenomenally important. It is in staggering contrast to the almost psychopathic indifference with which other Security Council Ambassadors have reacted when I mentioned the tragic human suffering caused by the sanctions.

Their indifference is both immoral and obscene.  These Ambassadors whose lives are so privileged do not care if a human being in Pyongyang dies in agony because the Sanctions a white European supported deprived the people of the DPRK of the medical equipment necessary to cure his illness, and save his life.  These sanctions constitute Crimes against Humanity, and one day a court of law may hold the Security Council accountable for these crimes.  The Security Council is not above the law, and it behooves them to face the reality that they cannot continue imposing these genocidal sanctions with impunity.

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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. 

The Malevolent Encirclement of Russia

October 14th, 2020 by F. William Engdahl

Over recent weeks a series of events in the states surrounding the Russian Federation has erupted that certainly are not being greeted with joy in the Kremlin. Each crisis center of itself is not a definitive game-changer for future Russian security. Taken together they suggest something far more ominous is unfolding against Moscow. A recent RAND study prepared for the US Army suggests with remarkable accuracy who might be behind what will undoubtedly become a major threat to Russian security in coming months.

The Turkish-backed attacks by Azerbaijan against Nagorno-Karabakh, igniting a territory after almost three decades of relative stalemate and ceasefire, the ongoing destabilization of Lukashenko in Belarus, the bizarre EU and UK behavior surrounding the alleged poisoning of Russian dissident Navalny and most recently, the mass protests in Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, bear the fingerprints of the MI6 of Britain, the CIA and an array of regime-change private NGOs.

Nagorno-Karabakh

On September 27 military forces from Azerbaijan broke the 1994 ceasefire with Armenia over the conflict in predominantly ethnic- Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh. The heaviest fighting in years ensued on both sides as confrontation escalated. Turkey’s Erdogan came out openly in support of Baku against Armenia and Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh, leading Nikol Pashinyan, the Prime Minister of Armenia, to accuse Turkey of “continuing a genocidal policy as a pragmatic task.” It was a clear reference to the 1915-23 Armenian charge of genocide of more than a million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire. Turkey to this day refuses to acknowledge responsibility.

Image on the right is from South Front

While Armenia blames Erdogan for backing Azerbaijan in the present conflict in the Caucasus, Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, sometimes called “Putin’s chef” for his catering empire as well as his close ties to the Russian President, has said in an interview with a Turkish paper that the Armenia-Azeri conflict was provoked by “the Americans,” and that the Pashinyan regime is essentially in the service of the USA. Here it gets interesting.

In 2018 Pashinyan came to power via mass protests called the “Velvet Revolution.” He was openly and heavily supported by the Soros Open Society Foundation-Armenia which since 1997 has been active funding numerous “democracy” NGOs in the country. As Prime Minister, Pashinyan has named recipients of Soros money to most key cabinet positions including state security and defense.

At the same time it is unthinkable that Erdogan’s Turkey, still in NATO, would so openly support Azerbaijan in a conflict that potentially could lead to a Turkish confrontation with Russia, without prior backing in some form Washington. Armenia is a member of the economic and defense association Eurasian Economic Union together with Russia. This makes the comments of Prigozhin especially interesting.

It is also worth noting that the head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, and the recently-named head of Britain’s MI-6, Richard Moore, are both seasoned Turkey hands. Moore was UK Ambassador to Ankara until 2017. Haspel was CIA Station Chief in Azerbaijan at the end of the 1990’s. Before that, in 1990 Haspel was a CIA officer in Turkey, fluent in Turkish. Notably, although it has been scrubbed from her official CIA bio, she was also CIA Station Chief in London just prior to being named Trump Administration CIA head. She was also specialized in operations against Russia when she was in Langley at the CIA Directorate of Operations.

This raises the question whether the dark hands of an Anglo-American intelligence operation are behind the current Azeri-Armenia conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Adding further gunpowder to the Caucasus unrest, on October 5 NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO’s security interests are synonymous with those of Turkey, despite Turkish purchase of Russian advanced air defense systems. Washington until now has been conspicuously silent on the Caucasus conflict or Turkey’s alleged role.

And Belarus…

The eruption of the simmering Nagorno-Karabakh conflict near Russia’s southern border is not the only state where Washington is actively promoting destabilization of vital Russian neighbors these days. Since August elections, Belarus has been filled with orchestrated protests accusing President Lukashenko of election fraud. The opposition has been active in exile from neighboring NATO Baltic countries.

Image below is from InfoBrics

In 2019, the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) listed on its website some 34 NED project grants in Belarus. All of them were directed to nurture and train an anti-Lukashenko series of opposition groups and build domestic NGOs. The grants went for such projects as, “NGO Strengthening: To increase local and regional civic engagement… to identify local problems and develop advocacy strategies.” Another was to “expand an online depository of publications not readily accessible in the country, including works on politics, civil society, history, human rights, and independent culture.” Then another NED grant went, “To defend and support independent journalists and media.” And another, “NGO Strengthening: To foster youth civic engagement.” Another large NED grant went to, “training democratic parties and movements in effective advocacy campaigns.” Behind the innocent-sounding NED projects is a pattern of creating a specially-trained opposition on the lines of the CIA’s NED model “Color Revolutions” template.

As if the unrest in the Caucasus and Belarus were not enough to give Moscow migraine headaches, on September 29 in Brussels, Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg told him that, “NATO supports Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty within its internationally recognized borders. We call on Russia to end its recognition of [Georgia’s breakaway] regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and to withdraw its forces.” Stoltenberg then told Gakharia, “And I encourage you to continue making full use of all the opportunities for coming closer to NATO. And to prepare for membership.” Of course NATO membership for Russian neighbor Georgia would amount to a strategic challenge for Russia as would that of Ukraine. The NATO comments add to the tensions facing the Kremlin recently.

Kyrgystan’s Third Color Revolution?

Then former Soviet Union Central Asian republic, Kyrgyzstan, has also just erupted in mass protests that have brought down the government for the third time since 2005, over opposition allegations of election fraud. USAID, a known cover often for CIA operations, is active in the country as is the Soros Foundation which has created a university in Biskek and funds the usual array of projects, “to promote justice, democratic governance, and human rights.” It should be noted that Kyrgyzstan is also a member of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union along with Armenia and Belarus.

Then to increase the heat on Russia we have the bizarre charges by the German Bundeswehr intelligence and now the OPCW that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned in Russia using “a Soviet-era nerve agent,” said by the Germans to be Novichok. While Navalny since has evidently emerged quite alive and out of hospital, the German officials as well as British, do not bother to explain such a miraculous recovery from what is reputed to be the most deadly nerve agent ever. Following the OPCW statement that the substance was Novichok, the German Foreign Minister is threatening severe sanctions against Russia. Many are calling for Germany to cancel the Russian NordStream-2 gas pipeline as response, a blow that would hit Russia at a time of severe economic weakness from low oil prices and corona lockdown effects.

Nor does Germany bother to investigate the mysterious Russian companion of Navalny, Maria Pevchikh, who claims to have rescued the “Novichok-poisoned” empty water bottle from Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk Russia before he was flown to Berlin on the personal invitation of Angela Merkel. After delivering the poisoned bottle to Berlin in person, she apparently swiftly flew to London where she lives, and no German or other authorities apparently tried to interview her as a potential material witness.

Pevchikh has a long association with London where she works with the Navalny foundation and is in reported close contact with Jacob Rothschild’s friend, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the convicted fraudster and Putin foe. Khodorkovsky is also a major funder of the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK in Russian). There are credible reports that the mysterious Pevchikh is an asset of MI-6, the same MI-6 that ran another ludicrous Novichok drama in 2018 claiming that Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal were poisoned in England by Russian intelligence using the deadly Novichok. Again there, both Skripals miraculously recovered from the deadliest nerve agent and officially were discharged from hospital whereupon they “disappeared.”

A RAND Blueprint?

While more research will undoubtedly turn up more evidence, the pattern of NATO or Anglo-American active measures against key Russian periphery countries or against strategic Russian economic interests all within the same timespan suggests some kind of coordinated attack.

And it so happens that the targets of the attacks fit precisely to the outline of a major US military think tank report. In a 2019 research report to the US Army, the RAND corporation published a set of policy recommendations under the title, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground.” They note that by extending Russia they mean “nonviolent measures that could stress Russia’s military or economy or the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” All of the above stress points certainly fill that description. More striking is the specific elaboration of possible stress points to “extend Russia,” that is to over-extend her.

The report specifically discusses what they call “Geopolitical Measures” to over-extend Russia. These include providing lethal aid to Ukraine; promoting regime change in Belarus; exploiting tensions in the South Caucasus; reduce Russian influence in Central Asia. It also includes proposals to weaken the Russian economy by challenging its gas and oil sectors.

Notably, these are the same areas of geopolitical turbulence within Russia’s strategic sphere of influence today. Specifically, on the Caucasus, RAND states, “Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia were part of the Soviet Union, and Russia still maintains significant sway over the region today…” They note that, “Today, Russia recognizes both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as separate countries (one of the few governments to do so) and is committed to their defense…. The United States might also renew efforts to bring Georgia into NATO. Georgia has long sought NATO membership;…” ix Recall the cited remarks of NATO’s Stoltenberg to encourage Georgia joining NATO and demanding Russia give up recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The RAND report also highlights the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan:

”Russia also plays a key role with Azerbaijan and Armenia, particularly over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh… the United States could push for a closer NATO relationship with Georgia and Azerbaijan, likely leading Russia to strengthen its military presence in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, and southern Russia. Alternatively, the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia.”

In relation to current massive protests in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, RAND notes, “Russia is part of two economic ventures related to Central Asia: the EEU and the Belt and Road Initiative.” A pro-NATO regime change could throw a big barrier between Russia and China as well as within its EEU. As to economic pressures, the RAND report cites the possibility of pressuring the EU to abandon the NordStream-2 gas pipeline from Russia direct to Germany. The recent Navalny incident is creating growing pressure within the EU and even Germany to stop NordStream-2 as sanction for the Navalny affair. RAND notes,

“In terms of extending Russia economically, the main benefit of creating supply alternatives to Russian gas is that it would lower Russian export revenues. The federal Russian budget is already stressed, leading to planned cuts in defense spending, and lowering gas revenues would stress the budget further.”

If we examine the growing pressures on Russia from the examples cited here and compare with the language of the 2019 RAND report it is clear that many of Russia’s current strategic problems are being deliberately engineered and orchestrated from the West, specifically from Washington and London. How Russia deals with this as well as certain future escalation of NATO pressures clearly presents a major geopolitical challenge.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

Featured image is from NEO


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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

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Latakia: Friday morning in the coastal city of Latakia, Syria seemed normal at first. Even though the October weather was still far hotter than normal, not many noticed the unusually strong winds wiping through the countryside, filled with olives, citrus, and various fruit and nut trees. The usual cooler, humid breezes blowing eastwards from the Mediterranean were replaced by a westerly wind blowing out to sea in a sudden reversal of normal weather patterns.

The olive trees were heavy and ready to be harvested. In a usual year, there would already have been at least one prior drenching rain, and that last rain before harvest adds moisture to each olive. However, this year was different, as global climate change took deadly hold in the eastern Mediterranean region.

Syrians face the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, economic despair, lack of electricity, severe gasoline shortages, and now the loss of olive crops which not only bring income but are a traditional food source for farming families along the Syrian coast.

The Ministry of Agriculture had previously expected to produce 850,000 tons of olives this season from more than 87 million trees, said Engineer Muhammad Habu in August. Possibly more than 9,000 hectares of forests and agricultural lands burned between Friday and Saturday, while three people had died due to the fires, and 70 were treated at local hospitals with breathing difficulties.

Areas in the provinces of Latakia, Tartous, and Homs were affected, with an estimated 140,000 persons impacted.

The Syrian government response

President Bashar Assad, accompanied by various local officials, as well as those from the Ministry of Agriculture, visited areas in Latakia province which were affected in the fires.  Plans are afloat to assist farmers in replanting lost trees.

The mountain village of Qardaha was heavily hit by the fires, while the state-owned tobacco warehouse there became engulfed in flames, and the local hospital was threatened by the fires.

Syrian Agriculture Minister Mohammed Hassan Qatana said “a total of 156 fires” had broken out, most of them in Latakia and Tartus, in an unprecedented disaster, which was echoed by the Latakia fire brigade.

Bassem Douba, director of the forestry department in Latakia’s agricultural department, said villagers were forced to evacuate their homes and had sought shelter in Latakia and Tartus.

Latakia Governor Ibrahim Khader al-Salem said that “civil defense teams, supported by army units and the population, are now in control of all the fires in the province”.

Previous fires in September

Forest fires in the Hama region last month involved dozens of wildfires in the agricultural areas of Hama and Jisr Al Shughour, as well as near the coastal regions of Latakia, which consumed several square kilometers of forests. A severe heatwave caused nearly 60 bushfires.

Lebanon on fire

To the south in Lebanon, there have been more than 100 fires across the country since Thursday, according to George Abu Musa, head of operations for the country’s civil defense.

Dozens of fires hit Lebanon in mid-October 2019, amid unusually high temperatures and strong winds, which were the same conditions in Syria on Friday.

The Lebanese government faced heavy criticism over its response to the 2019 blazes, which contributed to the mass protests of the population against the ruling class. The fires last October burned through the countryside near the Chouf mountains for days, during a heatwave that saw the highest recorded temperatures for that month, while hospitalizing and displacing dozens of people.

Palestine

While Syria and Lebanon were burning on Friday, the authorities in the occupied West Bank, areas in central occupied Palestine, as well as along the north reported several fires as well, forcing thousands to evacuate.

United Nations

Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said Monday has coordinated with authorities in Syria to develop a contingency response plan to those areas affected by the wildfires.

Niklas Hagelberg, a climate change expert with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), says a fast-warming planet will likely lead to more wildfires.  He said in an interview that climate change is present now, and the planet is already 1.1°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times and that is changing the world around us.

When asked about the wildfires raging in California and Oregon this fall, Hagelberg said forest fires are natural, but the rise in the average temperature has increased the frequency and intensity of fires.

California and Syria in simultaneous wildfires

LeRoy Westerling, professor of management of complex systems at the University of California, said

“It’s not as simple as saying the fire season is longer. It’s also much more severe.”

Westerling said climate change is a big factor in the ever-increasing number of wildfires, while climate change is also responsible for more extreme weather conditions than we experienced in the past.

“The weather systems slow down and linger longer; there are longer dry spells and longer wet spells,” said Westerling.

Besides climate change, high winds can knock down power lines or blow-dry grasses into them which causes them to ignite, and the gusting winds and dry heat spreads the fires rapidly. This is true in both Syria as well as California where more than 12,000 firefighters continue to work on 14 major fires or complexes of fires around California, which have resulted in 31 fire-related deaths and more than 9,200 structures have been destroyed.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist.

Featured image is from MD

The African Bar Association wishes to express deep concern about the recent threats to the life and person of Dr. Denis Mukwege. This misguided threats arising from the activist activities of the Nobel Laureate in seeking for justice in the plunder of the DRC and murders of innocent citizens of that country by vested local and international interests is not only condemnable but must be resisted by all democratic forces across the globe.

The sagacious African who has spent most of his life championing the cause of justice and recognized for his diligent work in the DRC should not only be celebrated but emulated. The 2018 Nobel Prize Winner, Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese, on July 26, 2020 unreservedly condemned the gruesome killing of 220 individuals in the village of Kipupu, South Kivu, Congo, which massacre registered a similar pattern, having been adopted by same perpetrators since 1996.

In expressing his unbreakable resolve to make public the atrocities committed in the Bukavu region, he stated thus:

“No intellectual malfeasance, no threat, no use of fear will prevent me from expressing myself on the reality of the atrocities experienced by the populations of my country and the consequences of which I treat every day in my hospital in Bukavu”

Dr. Mukwege has since 2017, worked tirelessly to give the United Nations concrete proofs to spur the establishment of a Criminal Tribunal for the trial of war criminals in East Congo in accordance with the United Nations 2010 Mapping Report on crimes
committed in the Congo between 1993 and 2003 which include but not limited to invasions and wars leading to the untimely death of many.

In response to this fearless, vibrant and outspoken stance taken by Dr. Mukwege, on July 18, 2020, General James Kararebe, on Rwandan television issued statements veiled in death threats against Dr. Mukwege and his family which attempted to incriminate the Nobel Peace Prize Winner in the alleged inhuman acts culminating in the Hutu genocide, a claim that is refuted by hundreds of residents in Bukavu. The African Bar Association finds this distasteful and regards as unconventional the veiled death threats directed at the Nobel Prize Winner, Dr. Denis Mukwege. In upholding the tenets of the Rule of Law the AFBA hereby demands for the establishment of a United Nations Tribunal for Eastern Congo to unveil the truth in respect of the war ravaging Congo, forestall the use of force and completely eliminate the prevailing extrajudicial killings and craves the indulgence of all Bar Associations and African governments to support this position.

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Featured image: Denis Mukwege. Torleif Svensson/Panzi Hospital, CC BY

The $1.4 billion increase in Taiwan’s military spending next year is still not enough to achieve effective defense, said David Helvey, Principal Director for East Asia in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. He made the comments during a two-day video conference hosted by the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Industry.

Reuters reported on October 7 that Helvey asked Taiwanese authorities to invest in “large numbers of small capabilities” that would signal to China that an “invasion or attack would not come without significant cost.” This was in reference to mainland China supposedly wanting to militarily capture Taiwan as Beijing considers the island to be a “rebel province” of the People’s Republic of China. A U.S. Department of Defense official listed the following weapons that they can sell to Taiwan: cruise missiles used to defend the coast, water mines, fast ships, self-propelled artillery, and modern surveillance and reconnaissance equipment.

It was learned in September that the U.S. plans to sell several weapon systems to Taiwan. Reuters today broke further news, claiming that pending Congressional approval, the U.S. is moving forward with three sales of advanced weaponry to Taiwan.

“The informal notifications were for a truck-based rocket launcher made by Lockheed Martin Corp called a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), long-range air-to-ground missiles made by Boeing Co called SLAM-ER, and external sensor pods for F-16 jets that allow the real-time transmission of imagery and data from the aircraft back to ground stations,” Reuters reported earlier today.

This in turn has sparked a war of words with Taiwanese foreign ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou saying

“China continues to use military provocation to undermine cross-strait and regional stability, highlighting the importance of Taiwan’s strengthening of self-defense capabilities.”

In turn, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian stated that Beijing will respond “appropriately and necessary in accordance with the development of the situation,” without giving further explanation what a response could be. The Chinese spokesperson also pointed out that Washington should “fully recognize the serious harm” the U.S. arms sales to Taiwan has, abide by the one-China principle, immediately cancel any arms sales to Taiwan and end U.S.-Taiwan military contacts.

This is unlikely to occur because arms sales are very beneficial to the US as Taiwan’s military industrial capabilities can only produce a small part of the range of weapons listed. The economic benefit to the U.S. will be huge, whilst simultaneously pressurizing Washington’s main 21st century geopolitical rival, China. The U.S. is determined to contain China, and of course is interested in using Taiwan as an outpost for this containment policy. Therefore, everything the Americans allow Taiwan to purchase is in line with the overall strategy of confronting China, especially at sea.

If Taiwan helps block the Chinese navy, it will be in support of U.S. strategy. The Americans are therefore deliberately pushing Taiwan to confront Beijing. This policy has been implemented for more than a decade and precedes President Donald Trump, and will likely continue after him, whether that will be after the 2020 elections or after the 2024 elections. The Americans are trying to force Taiwan to bear most of the costs of serving this strategy to contain China, but leaders in Taipei are showing signs they are more than willing to pay.

The idea of building a “Fortress Taiwan” is in the U.S.’ own interests but is actually not feasible for Taiwan today. Not only do Taiwanese companies continue to get rich by trading and investing with China, but using profits and taxes to build a “fortress” aimed against China will not be tolerated by Beijing. Taiwan increases its participation in policies to contain China, however its benefits from trade with the mainland will begin to decline significantly.

The production of weapons will not help Taiwan to ensure its security from a perceived mainland Chinese threat either. Many of Taiwan’s rational politicians and analysts understand that if things develop unfavorably, the price to further strengthen Taiwan’s security from a perceived threat will be a heavy cost on its economy whilst enriching American military corporations.

Despite this reality, at a two-day meeting hosted by the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, Taiwan’s Deputy Minister of National Defense Zhang Guanqun stated that Taiwan needs U.S. weapons and equipment to meet its combat needs. Judging from the content of his speech, Taiwan and its defense projects on the island, including the construction of submarines, fighter jets, and warships, depend on a large extent on strengthening its defense capabilities through U.S. assistance.

However, although this may antagonize Beijing, the truth is that it still cannot prevent Chinese activities and power projections in the South China Sea. Rather, Taiwan’s ambitions can see it lose trade deals with the mainland which will be far more devastating and impactful than the island’s conversion into an American fortress to pressurize China.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Trump Seeking New START Deal Pre-Election?

October 13th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has been a deal-breaker, not maker.

Hardliners surrounding him obstructed efforts to extend New START.

The last remaining Russia/US arms control agreement expires on February 5, 2021.

Unacceptable US demands on extending New START were made to be rejected, not accepted.

That’s where things now stand.

On Sunday, The Hill reported that Russian Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev and Trump regime national security advisor Robert O’Brien met in Geneva on October 2.

Claims of progress made toward extending New START were way overblown.

No agreement in principle was reached between both officials.

According to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov,

“there are still huge differences in approaches, including to the central elements of such an agreement.”

After frittering away nearly four years without extending New START, chances for resolving major differences between now and February 5 are slim at best.

If Biden defeats Trump and takes office on January 20, they’ll be scant time remaining to extend New START before its expiration date.

While extending it for another five years can be accomplished by agreement between the US and Russian presidents, nothing is ever simple in bilateral relations between both countries.

Without New START and the INF Treaty (the latter abandoned by the Trump regime on August 2, 2019 for phony reasons), nothing legally will stand in the way of unrestrained US expansion and deployment of its nuclear arsenal.

This action will force Russia and likely China to respond defensively, given a greater threat posed by Washington to their security.

According to Russian international security experts Andrey Pavlov and Anastasia Malygina, abandonment of New START “could create high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability.”

“A complete collapse of (stabilizing arms control) foundations, coupled with the deepening conflict between Russia and the West, could create a situation” fraught with dangers.

“Maintaining parity with the United States in strategic nuclear armament remains essential to Russian” security.

Moscow’s “longstanding definition of strategic stability (is) a situation in which no party has an incentive to initiate a nuclear first strike.”

If one super-power has a strategic advantage over another, there’s a heightened risk of potential conflict.

Russia is greatly concerned about US plans to deploy weapons in space, likely including nukes.

US political and military hardliners want nothing that deters their pursuit of a strategic advantage over all other nations, notably Russia and China.

If New START expires next year for failure of Washington to agree on extending it, a hugely dangerous arms race will likely follow.

Trump’s arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea falsely called New START “deeply flawed.”

It stood the test of time for nearly a decade.

So far, Russia’s chief arms control negotiator Sergey Ryabkov called Trump regime demands “absolutely unrealistic…a nonstarter for us.”

The US unacceptably combines demands and threats.

According to Billingslea, Washington “will be extremely happy to continue…without the START restrictions,” adding:

The US will begin expanding its nuclear arsenal straightaway.

He also threatened to impose new (unlawful) sanctions on Russia by the November election if its authorities don’t bend to the Trump regime on this issue.

Like countless times before, the US blames other countries for its own wrongdoing and failures to reach bilateral and multilateral agreements — along with phony reasons for abandoning existing ones.

On October 5, Ryabkov and Billingslea met in Helsinki, Finland.

In response to the Trump regime’s claim of significant progress from the meeting, Russia’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the claim, saying:

“(F)urther prospects on the track of bilateral cooperation on arms control” were discussed — no agreement reached.

Separately, Sergey Lavrov said based on where things stand now, New START “is going to die,” adding:

“The conditions (that the Trump regime) set are absolutely unilateral and do not take into account either our interests or the experience of many decades, when arms control was enforced to everyone’s satisfaction and was welcomed by all countries.”

Allowing New START to expire by the US will more greatly strain relations with Russia and China — along with increasing the threat of conflict between the US and these countries.

Washington upgraded but didn’t increase the size of its nuclear arsenal for decades.

Expanding it ahead if New START expires will be a major and hugely dangerous change in longstanding US policy.

Billingslea notably threatened to spend Russia and China “into oblivion” if a new arms race begins.

Arms control talks should focus on reducing numbers of nukes toward eliminating them altogether one day before they eliminate us.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Dal Recovery Fund 30 miliardi per il militare

October 13th, 2020 by Manlio Dinucci

Foto : Conte e Profumo con il nuovo Falco Xplorer, il drone più grande mai realizzato da Leonardo

Mentre la «crisi del Coronavirus» continua a provocare anche in Italia devastanti conseguenze socioeconomiche, una parte ingente del «Fondo per la ripresa» viene destinata non ai settori economici e sociali più colpiti, ma ai più avanzati settori dell’industria bellica.

In base al Recovery Fund l’Italia dovrebbe ricevere nei prossimi sei anni 209 miliardi di euro, di cui circa 81 come sovvenzioni e 128 come prestiti da rimborsare con gli interessi.

Nell’attesa, i Ministeri della Difesa e dello Sviluppo Economico hanno presentato un elenco di progetti di carattere militare per l’ammontare di circa 30 miliardi di euro (Analisi Difesa, Fondi anche per la Difesa dal Recovery Fund, 25-09-2020).

I progetti del Ministero della Difesa prevedono di spendere 5 miliardi di euro del Recovery Fund per applicazioni militari nei settori della cibernetica, delle comunicazioni, dello spazio e dell’intelligenza artificiale.

Rilevanti i progetti relativi all’uso militare del 5G, in particolare nello spazio con una costellazione di 36 satelliti ed altre. I progetti del Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico, relativi soprattutto al settore militare aerospaziale, prevedono una spesa di 25 miliardi di euro del Recovery Fund.

Il Ministero intende investire in un caccia di sesta generazione (dopo l’F-35 considerato di quinta generazione), il Tempest, denominato «l’aereo del futuro».

Altri investimenti riguardano la produzione di elicotteri/convertiplani militari di nuova generazione, in grado di decollare e atterrare verticalmente e volare ad alta velocità. Si investirà allo stesso tempo in droni e unità navali di nuova generazione, e in tecnologie sottomarine avanzate. Grossi investimenti si prevedono anche nel settore delle tecnologie spaziali e satellitari.

Diverse di queste tecnologie, tra cui i sistemi di comunicazione in 5G, saranno a duplice uso militare e civile. Poiché alcuni dei progetti di carattere militare presentati dai due dicasteri si sovrappongono, il Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico ha redatto un nuovo elenco che permetterebbe di ridurre la propria spesa a 12,5 miliardi di euro.

Resta comunque il fatto che si sta programmando di spendere a fini militari tra 17,5 e 30 miliardi di euro tratti dal Recovery Fund, che vanno rimborsati con gli interessi.

Oltre a questi vi sono più di 35 miliardi stanziati a fini militari dai governi italiani per il periodo 2017-2034, in gran parte nel bilancio del Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico. Essi si aggiungono al bilancio del Ministero della Difesa, portando la spesa militare italiana a oltre 26 miliardi annui, equivalenti a una media di oltre 70 milioni di euro al giorno, in denaro pubblico sottratto alle spese sociali.

Cifra che l’Italia si è impegnata nella Nato ad aumentare a una media di circa 100 milioni di euro al giorno, come richiedono gli Stati uniti. Lo stanziamento a tal fine di una ingente parte del Recovery Fund permetterà all’Italia di raggiungere tale livello.

In prima fila, tra le industrie belliche che premono sul governo perché aumenti la fetta militare del Recovery Fund, c’è la Leonardo, di cui il Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico possiede il 30% dell’azionariato.

La Leonardo è integrata nel gigantesco complesso militare-industriale Usa capeggiato dalla Lockheed Martin, costruttrice dell’F-35 alla cui produzione partecipa la stessa Leonardo con l’impianto di Cameri.

La Leonardo si autodefinisce «protagonista globale nell’Aerospazio, Difesa e Sicurezza», con la missione di «proteggere i cittadini». Dimostra come intende farlo usando la sua influenza e il suo potere per sottrarre ai cittadini risorse vitali dal «Fondo per la ripresa», per una ulteriore accelerazione nella «ripresa» dell’industria bellica.

Risorse che saremo sempre noi a pagare. maggiorate dagli interessi. Pagheremo così «l’aereo del futuro», che ci proteggerà assicurandoci un futuro di guerra.

Manlio Dinucci

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In this Spectator report, the representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) states the need to combat the virus while restoring economic activity.

The Irish government dismissed the recommendations of the medical experts who are calling for restoring the lockdown. 

Recent developments in England and Scotland are reviewed.

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Andrew Neil is joined by David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for Covid-19; Andy Preston, mayor of Middlesbrough; Pat Leahy, political editor of the Irish Times; and a team of Spectator journalists.

In this week’s episode, we cover:

  • Ireland’s decision to ignore the science (01:42)
  • The WHO’s response to coronavirus (15:00)
  • Local lockdowns (26:52)
  • The vice presidential debate (44:50)

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Turkey’s Involvement in Nagorno-Karabakh

October 13th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Wannabe sultan Erdogan’s involvement in Azerbaijan’s war on Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh (NK below) is another example of his aim for greater regional influence and control.

In July and August, Turkey and Azerbaijan conducted joint ground and aerial military exercises, what they’ve done many times before.

Turkey reportedly kept F-16 warplanes in the country as a deterrent against possible Armenian attacks on its territory.

Have they been involved in Azeri NK fighting? Armenia claimed a Turkish warplane downed one of its own. Ankara and Baku deny involvement of Turkish warplanes in the conflict

Last week, Azerbaijan admitted using Turkish supplied weapons.

Erdogan expressed support for Azeris in NK, saying he’ll provide what they need to seize control of the enclave.

Along with supplying weapons, Turkish supported jihadists are involved in Syria, Libya, and NK.

If conflict escalates between Azerbaijan and Armenia to their territories, Russia — despite remaining neutral and seeking a halt in fighting — will be forced to aid Armenia militarily to fulfill its Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) obligations.

That could draw the US and other Western countries into the conflict, escalating it dangerously — clearly what Russia wants avoided.

Military support by Turkey (along with Israeli supplied heavy weapons) for Azerbaijan risks escalation — the danger of a local conflict becoming a wider regional and international one.

Sharing borders with Armenia and Azerbaijan, Iran could get involved if fighting spreads to its territory, what Tehran very much wants avoided.

It has good relations with Ankara and has a large Azeri population.

Iran fosters regional peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries.

If it gets involved in the Armenian/Azeri conflict unavoidably in self-defense, it could give the US a pretext — under either wing of its war party — to strike Iran militarily.

Throughout years of US aggression in Syria, especially since Russia’s direct involvement for the past five years at the behest of Damascus, Moscow has gone all-out to avoid confrontation with Pentagon forces.

Sergey Lavrov is using his considerable negotiating skills to convince Armenia and Azerbaijan to halt fighting and resolve their longstanding differences diplomatically.

Turkey is a major obstacle to restoration of peace in NK because of its direct involvement in fighting.

US, NATO, and Israeli hardliners would very much like to draw Russia and Iran into the NK conflict directly, aiming to destabilize both countries.

In the case of Iran, it would be a pretext for US war on the country, what Israel has long sought.

If Russia is unable to convince Armenia and Azerbaijan to halt fighting in NK, it could escalates into a broader, much more serious conflict.

A Final Comment

On Monday, political analysts Maria Armoudian and Serj Tankian slammed Erdogan’s “neo-imperial ambitions” in the region, saying his involvement in NK “must be stopped,” adding:

Supporting Azerbaijan against Armenia in the enclave continues Turkish “terror that Armenians have suffered for more than a century” — including Ankara’s Armenia genocide, responsible for around 1.5 million deaths a century ago.

Azeri President Aliyev said he’ll only cease fighting if Armenians  “leave our lands unconditionally, completely and immediately.”

Erdogan supports his agenda, saying “our Azerbaijani brothers are waiting for the day they will return to their land” — promoting conflict instead of urging resolution.

Turkey is a major internal and regional human rights abuser.

Erdogan has neo-Ottoman ambitions to extend his influence far beyond Turkey’s borders.

The US prioritizes endless wars over world peace and stability. Key NATO countries and Israel operate the same way.

Because of their imperial aims, the Middle East and Central Asia are powder kegs.

Conflict in NK that could escalate further made a hugely dangerous part of the world a potentially far more serious hot spot.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Political Cartoonist Steve Hunter

A virus appears that is so deadly and contagious,

you have to be tested to even know you had it

A pandemic is declared while hospitals sit empty 

You have entered the COVID ZONE

Source: Think-right

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Boris Johnson at Sea: Coronavirus Confusion in the UK

October 13th, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The tide has been turning against UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.  Oafishly, he has managed to convert that tide into a deluge of dissatisfaction assisted by the gravitational pull of singular incompetence.  Much of this is due to such errors of communication as committed last month, when he got into a tangle over new coronavirus restrictions in England’s northeast.   

In responding to a question on these new regulations, the prime minister erred in stating that the rule-of-six limit on gatherings did not apply to people meeting outdoors.  “It is a six in a home or in hospitality but not six outside.”  The government’s official guidance stated something rather different.  “When meeting friends and family you do not live with (or have formed a support bubble with) you must not meet in a group of more than 6, indoors or outdoors.”  This would be “against the law and the police will have the powers to enforce these legal limits, including to issue fines (fixed penalty notices) of £200, doubling for further breaches up to a maximum of £6,400.”  Stiff consequences tend to follow from such misunderstandings.

Having fallen into his own trap, the prime minister had to concede his error.  “Apologies,” he tweeted, “I misspoke today.”  Having corrected himself on the regulations limiting such socialising both indoors and out, he tried to wave the much tattered flag of patriotic encouragement.  “This is vital to control the spread of coronavirus and keep everyone safe.  If you are in a high risk area, please continue to follow the guidelines from local authorities.”  But evidently be wary of what the prime minister tells you. 

It was all part of a push combining sterner measures in attempting to control coronavirus transmission while keeping some semblance of economic normality.  “What we don’t want is to have to take even more severe measures as we go through Christmas,” warned Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on LBC radio.  “And that’s why we need to take the proportional, targeted measures we are taking now.”  As a result, the laws and regulations have pleased no one and confused everyone.

Any balanced assessment would have to conclude that there is no uniform UK strategy on coping with coronavirus.  Within the sceptred isle are such figures as Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who feel that Johnson has been all too timorous in dealing with the virus.  Her own scientific advisers had warned her that Johnson’s approach was inadequate in reducing the rate of transmission.  “I’ve made a judgment that we are again at a tipping point with COVID and I’m looking at data that alarms me, frankly.”  (The number of infections is currently hovering between a 15,000 to 20,000 cases a day.)

Members of Johnson’s own scientific advisory team tend to agree, feeling that the public health hammer needs to be brought to bear.  Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was distinctly disapproving of government policy on BBC radio.  “Overall, I don’t think the measures have gone anywhere near far enough.  In fact, I don’t even think the measures in Scotland have gone far enough.”

None of this was encouraging, even to a conservative magazine Johnson once edited.  Fraser Nelson, who now holds the reins at The Spectator, conceded that “Johnson’s overall COVID policy is now a mystery.”  Did he intend to “flatten the curve”?  Was he attempting “to eliminate COVID altogether?  We might think his strategy is inspired; we might think it insane – but need to know what it is.”  In Fraser’s view, the very man is an absentee, as is his government, “adrift, defined by its avoidable mistakes: COVID policy, Brexit party discipline…  In all these things there is a conspicuous – and baffling – lack of leadership.”

With his popularity suffering, Johnson’s reaction is one of blithe disregard, if not wilful blindness.  His October 6 speech concluding the Conservative Party Conference promoted a charge of Light Brigade optimism.  He decried the “nonsense” that his own battle with COVID had “somehow robbed me of my mojo.”  It was “self-evident drivel,” even “seditious propaganda” from saboteurs wanting the government to fail.  He did concede to getting a fright, and being too fat; but he had found an inner, thinner hero.

He promised, instead of going back to the good old pre-COVID days in 2019, “to do better: to reform our system of government, to renew our infrastructure; to spread opportunity more widely and fairly and to create the conditions for a dynamic recovery that is led not by the state but by free enterprise.”  He promised 48 hospitals.  “Count them,” he dared critics sceptical of the government’s numeracy skills.  “That’s the eight already underway, and then 40 more between now and 2030.”

With waffly ambitiousness, he promised more teachers, more funding for education, more police, better resources to improve rusted skills.  There was even an aspirational moment of greening: that the UK would “become the world leader in low cost clean power generation – cheaper than coal, cheaper than gas”. Guilt free power generation, he called it.

Such a performance would have done little to inspire confidence even amongst the Tory faithful.  Ahead of the speech, Andrea Thorpe, Conservative Association chair in Kent, spoke of the prime minister’s “lost focus,” and frustration at those “insanely complicated rules which are creating acrimony and exasperation”.  Economic damage arising from the new coronavirus regulations, she feared, might exceed that of the virus.

The report cards of most nation states towards COVID-19 have been mixed, ranging from the modest to the terrifically horrible.  Initial star performers have tumbled into second waves of infection.  Lashings of dark eugenic theory have kept company with police truncheons and handcuffs backed by medical decree.  The United Kingdom, if it has anything to boast about, can point to the world’s fifth highest death toll and the worst contraction in GDP of any G7 nation.  But to all of this can also be added the steady, consistent confusions about regulations newly passed and newly misunderstood.  A very Boris outcome.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

On August 21st, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready U.S. B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe. Although the actual weapons load of those giant bombers was kept secret, each of them is capable of carrying eight AGM-86B nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) in its bomb bay. Those six planes, in other words, could have been carrying 48 city-busting thermonuclear warheads. (The B-52H can also carry 12 ALCMs on external pylons, but none were visible on this occasion.) With such a load alone, in other words, those six planes possessed the capacity to incinerate much of western Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The B-52 Stratofortress is no ordinary warplane. First flown in 1952, it was designed with a single purpose in mind: to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and drop dozens of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Some models were later modified to deliver tons of conventional bombs on targets in North Vietnam and other hostile states, but the remaining B-52s are still largely configured for intercontinental nuclear strikes. With only 44 of them now thought to be in active service at any time, those six dispatched to the edge of Russian territory represented a significant commitment of American nuclear war-making capability.

What in god’s name were they doing there? According to American officials, they were intended to demonstrate this country’s ability to project overwhelming power anywhere on the planet at any time and so remind our NATO allies of Washington’s commitment to their defense. “Our ability to quickly respond and assure allies and partners rests upon the fact that we are able to deploy our B-52s at a moment’s notice,” commented General Jeff Harrigian, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. “Their presence here helps build trust with our NATO allies… and affords us new opportunities to train together through a variety of scenarios.”

While Harrigian didn’t spell out just what scenarios he had in mind, the bombers’ European operations suggest that their role involved brandishing a nuclear “stick” in support of an increasingly hostile stance toward Russia. During their sojourn in Europe, for example, two of them flew over the Baltic Sea close to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania that houses several key military installations. That September 25th foray coincided with a U.S. troop buildup in Lithuania about 65 miles from election-embattled Belarus, a Russian neighbor.

Since August 9th, when strongman Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in a presidential election widely considered fraudulent by his people and much of the international community, Belarus has experienced recurring anti-government protests. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country might intervene there if the situation “gets out of control,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has implicitly warned of U.S. intervention if Russia interferes. “We stand by our long-term commitment to support Belarus’ sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as the aspiration of the Belarusian people to choose their leader and to choose their own path, free from external intervention,” he insisted on August 20th. The flight of those B-52s near Belarus can, then, be reasonably interpreted as adding a nuclear dimension to Pompeo’s threat.

In another bomber deployment with no less worrisome implications, on September 4th, three B-52s, accompanied by Ukrainian fighter planes, flew over the Black Sea near the coast of Russian-held Crimea. Like other B-52 sorties near its airspace, that foray prompted the rapid scrambling of Russian interceptor aircraft, which often fly threateningly close to American planes.

At a moment when tensions were mounting between the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebel areas in the eastern part of the country, the deployment of those bombers off Crimea was widely viewed as yet another nuclear-tinged threat to Moscow. As Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), tweeted, “Extraordinary decision to send a nuclear bomber so close to contested and tense areas. This is a real in-your-face statement.”

And provocative as they were, those were hardly the only forays by U.S. nuclear bombers in recent months. B-52s also ventured near Russian air space in the Arctic and within range of Russian forces in Syria. Meanwhile other B-52s, as well as nuclear-capable B-1 and B-2 bombers, have flown similar missions near Chinese positions in the South China Sea and the waters around the disputed island of Taiwan. Never since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 have so many U.S. nuclear bombers been engaged in “show-of-force” operations of this sort.

“Demonstrating Resolve” and Coercing Adversaries

States have long engaged in military operations to intimidate other powers. Once upon a distant time, this would have been called “gunboat diplomacy” and naval vessels would have been the instruments of choice for such missions. The arrival of nuclear arms made such operations far more dangerous. This didn’t, however, stop the U.S. from using weaponry of this sort as tools of intimidation throughout the Cold War. In time, however, even nuclear strategists began condemning acts of “nuclear coercion,” arguing that such weaponry was inappropriate for any purpose other than “deterrence” — that is, using the threat of “massive retaliation” to prevent another country from attacking you. In fact, a deterrence-only posture eventually became Washington’s official policy, even if the temptation to employ nukes as political cudgels never entirely disappeared from its strategic thinking.

At a more hopeful time, President Barack Obama sought to downsize this country’s nuclear arsenal and prevent the use of such weapons for anything beyond deterrence (although his administration also commenced an expensive “modernization” of that arsenal). In his widely applauded Nobel Peace Prize speech of April 5, 2009, Obama swore to “put an end to Cold War thinking” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” Unfortunately, Donald Trump has sought to move the dial in the opposite direction, including increasing the use of nukes as coercive instruments.

The president’s deep desire to bolster the role of nuclear weapons in national security was first spelled out in his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review of February 2018. In addition to calling for the accelerated modernization of the nuclear arsenal, it also endorsed the use of such weapons to demonstrate American “resolve” — in other words, a willingness to go to the nuclear brink over political differences. A large and diverse arsenal was desirable, the document noted, to “demonstrate resolve through the positioning of forces, messaging, and flexible response options.” Nuclear bombers were said to be especially useful for such a purpose: “Flights abroad,” it stated, “display U.S. capabilities and resolve, providing effective signaling for deterrence and assurance, including in times of tension.”

Ever since, the Trump administration has been deploying the country’s nuclear bomber fleet of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s with increasing frequency to “display U.S. capabilities and resolve,” particularly with respect to Russia and China.

The supersonic B-1B Lancer, developed in the 1970s, was originally meant to replace the B-52 as the nation’s premier long-range nuclear bomber. After the Cold War ended, however, it was converted to carry conventional munitions and is no longer officially designated as a nuclear delivery system — though it could be reconfigured for this purpose at any time. The B-2 Spirit, with its distinctive flying-wing design, was the first U.S. bomber built with “stealth” capabilities (meant to avoid detection by enemy radar systems) and is configured to carry both nuclear and conventional weaponry. For the past year or so, those two planes plus the long-lived B-52 have been used on an almost weekly basis as the radioactive “stick” of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

Nuclear Forays in the Arctic and the Russian Far East

When flying to Europe in August, those six B-52s from North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base took a roundabout route north of Greenland (which President Trump had unsuccessfully offered to purchase in 2019). They finally descended over the Barents Sea within easy missile-firing range of Russia’s vast naval complex at Murmansk, the home for most of its ballistic missile submarines. For Hans Kristensen of FAS, that was another obvious and “pointed message at Russia.”

Strategically speaking, Washington had largely ignored the Arctic until a combination of factors — global warming, accelerated oil and gas drilling in the region, and increased Russian and Chinese military activities there — sparked growing interest. As global temperatures have risen, the Arctic ice cap has been melting at an ever-faster pace, allowing energy firms to exploit the region’s extensive hydrocarbon resources. This, in turn, has led to feverish efforts by the region’s littoral states, led by Russia, to lay claim to such resources and build up their military capabilities there.

In light of these developments, the Trump administration, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has called for an expansion of this country’s Arctic military forces. In a speech delivered at the Arctic Council in Rovaniemi, Finland, in May 2019, Pompeo warned of Russia’s growing military stance in the region and pledged a strong American response to it. “Under President Trump,” he declared. “We are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area.”

In line with this, the Pentagon has deployed U.S. warships to the Arctic on a regular basis, while engaging in ever more elaborate military exercises there. These have included Cold Response 2020, conducted this spring in Norway’s far north within a few hundred miles of those key Russian bases at Murmansk. For the most part, however, the administration has relied on nuclear-bomber forays to demonstrate its opposition to an increasing Russian role there. In November 2019, for example, three B-52s, accompanied by Norwegian F-16 fighter jets, approached the Russian naval complex at Murmansk, a move meant to demonstrate the Pentagon’s capacity to launch nuclear-armed missiles at one of that country’s most critical military installations.

If the majority of such nuclear forays have occurred near Norway’s far north, the Pentagon has not neglected Russia’s far eastern territory, home of its Pacific Fleet, either. In an unusually brazen maneuver, this May a B-1B bomber flew over the Sea of Okhotsk, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by Russian territory on three sides (Siberia to the north, Sakhalin Island to the west, and the Kamchatka Peninsula to the east).

As if to add insult to injury, the Air Force dispatched two B-52H bombers over the Sea of Okhotsk in June — another first for an aircraft of that type. Needless to say, incursions in such a militarily sensitive area led to the rapid scrambling of Russian fighter aircraft.

The South China Sea and Taiwan

A similar, equally provocative pattern can be observed in the East and South China Seas. Even as President Trump has sought, largely unsuccessfully, to negotiate a trade deal with Beijing, his administration has become increasingly antagonistic towards the Chinese leadership. On July 23rd, Secretary of State Pompeo delivered a particularly hostile speech in the presidential library of Richard Nixon, the very commander-in-chief who first reopened relations with communist China. Pompeo called on American allies to suspend normal relations with Beijing and, like Washington, treat it as a hostile power, much the way the Soviet Union was viewed during the Cold War.

While administration rhetoric amped up, the Department of Defense has been bolstering its capacity to engage and defeat Beijing in any future conflict. In its 2018 National Defense Strategy, as the U.S. military’s “forever wars” dragged on, the Pentagon suddenly labeled China and Russia the two greatest threats to American security. More recently, it singled out China alone as the overarching menace to American national security. “In this era of great-power competition,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper declared this September, “the Department of Defense has prioritized China, then Russia, as our top strategic competitors.”

The Pentagon’s efforts have largely been focused on the South China Sea, where China has established a network of small military installations on artificial islands created by dredging sand from the sea-bottom near some of the reefs and atolls it claims. American leaders have never accepted the legitimacy of this island-building project and have repeatedly called upon Beijing to dismantle the bases. Such efforts have, however, largely fallen on deaf ears and it’s now evident that the Pentagon is considering military means to eliminate the island threat.

In early July, the U.S. Navy conducted its most elaborate maneuvers to date in those waters, deploying two aircraft carriers there — the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan — plus an escort fleet of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. While there, the two carriers launched hundreds of combat planes in simulated attacks on military bases on the islands the Chinese had essentially built.

At the same time, paratroopers from the Army’s 25th Infantry Division were flown from their home base in Alaska to the Pacific island of Guam in what was clearly meant as a simulated air assault on a (presumably Chinese) military installation. And just to make sure the leadership in Beijing understood that, in any actual encounter with U.S. forces, Chinese resistance would be countered by the maximum level of force deemed necessary, the Pentagon also flew a B-52 bomber over those carriers as they engaged in their provocative maneuvers.

And that was hardly the first visit of a nuclear bomber to the South China Sea. The Pentagon has, in fact, been deploying such planes there on a regular basis since the beginning of 2020. In April, for example, the Air Force dispatched two B-1B Lancers on a 32-hour round-trip from their home at Ellsworth Air Force Base, North Dakota, to that sea and back as a demonstration of its ability to project power even in the midst of the pandemic President Trump likes to call “the Chinese plague.”

Meanwhile, tensions have grown over the status of the island of Taiwan, which China views as a breakaway part of the country. Beijing has been pressuring its leaders to foreswear any moves toward independence, while the Trump administration tacitly endorses just such a future by doing the previously unimaginable — notably, by sending high-level officials, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar among them, on visits to the island and by promising deliveries of increasingly sophisticated weapons. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has upped its military presence in that part of the Pacific, too. The Navy has repeatedly dispatched missile-armed destroyers on “freedom of navigation” missions through the Taiwan Strait, while other U.S. warships have conducted elaborate military exercises in nearby waters.

Needless to say, such provocative steps have alarmed Beijing, which has responded by increasing the incursions of its military aircraft into airspace claimed by Taiwan. To make sure that Beijing fully appreciates the depth of American “resolve” to resist any attempt to seize Taiwan by force, the Pentagon has accompanied its other military moves around the island with — you guessed it — flights of B-52 bombers.

Playing with Fire

And where will all this end? As the U.S. sends nuclear-capable bombers on increasingly provocative flights ever closer to Russian and Chinese territory, the danger of an accident or mishap is bound to grow. Sooner or later, a fighter plane from one of those countries is going to get too close to an American bomber and a deadly incident will occur. And what will happen if a nuclear bomber, armed with advanced missiles and electronics (even conceivably nuclear weapons), is in some fashion downed? Count on one thing: in Donald Trump’s America the calls for devastating retaliation will be intense and a major conflagration cannot be ruled out.

Bluntly put, dispatching nuclear-capable B-52s on simulated bombing runs against Chinese and Russian military installations is simply nuts. Yes, it must scare the bejesus out of Chinese and Russian officials, but it will also prompt them to distrust any future peaceful overtures from American diplomats while further bolstering their own military power and defenses. Eventually, we will all find ourselves in an ever more dangerous and insecure world with the risk of Armageddon lurking just around the corner.

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Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Featured image is by Pete Linforth/Pixabay


Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

Distrust of the United Nations is a feeling that transcends political ideologies. Even many who view the UN as an essential institution gripe about the composition of its councils and its mounting listlessness over the last few decades. From charges of appeasement to accusations of moral relativism and beyond, the UN is regularly decried as an ineffectual circus of multinational bureaucrats, purposely or unwittingly promoting the interests of a global elite and undermining the sovereignty of nations. Conspiracy theorists, rarely inclined to subtlety, see it as a Trojan horse for a New World Order, paving the way for a supranational world government.

Nevertheless, many of those complaints (and some of those suspicions, at least circumstantially) are justified. Despite its foundational goal of “maintain[ing] international peace and security” the U.N. has clung to an increasingly desultory role since its formation after World War II, adding mostly ineffective missions along the way.

Although the monitoring of human rights has been a part of the U.S. mission since its founding, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drawn up in 1948; during the 1980s it began picking up steam. With the adoption of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action at the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, that focus was formalized and infrastructure (a High Commissioner, with an office and staff) added.

Yet the U.N. has never failed to the extent that it has throughout 2020. This year, the United Nations has effectively stood as a bystander and partial accomplice amid the most widespread violations of human rights at any time in its seven-decade history.

A Pantheon of Dysfunction

Proponents of the UN often cite the relative stability, despite smaller regional conflicts, which prevailed between its 1945 founding and the early 1990s. Yet the ineffectiveness of the UN seems to have increased since the end of the Cold War, strongly suggesting that the (again, relative) interim calm has more to do with a clearly demarcated, two-power world than anything the UN can lay claim to.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the organization has proven unable to stop bloody conflicts in Syria, Myanmar, Yemen, Libya, and Eastern Ukraine, to name a few, while mounting ineffective responses to atrocities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was called “illegal” by the UN, bringing to mind an old Robin Williams bit. And where peacekeeping missions have been effective, they tend to develop the character of foreign policy ‘heirlooms:’ the average age of the 14 active United Nations missions is 26 years. Accounts of abuse and corruption have further tarnished its idealistic facade, as have legendary stories of diplomatic abuse in New York City, where the UN Headquarters occupies 18 acres of priceless Manhattan real estate. Incompetence and retaliatory policies are part of the mix as well.

There are plenty of reasons not to take the United Nations seriously. But those should be set aside for the most recent abdication of its charter. It claims to “protect human rights through legal instruments and on-the-ground activities;” the latter permitting U.N. officials to “examine, monitor, publicly-report, and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective.”

And yet despite a handful of vacuous comments, the United Nations has stayed virtually silent during global lockdowns by its member states.

Looking the Other Way

In 1984, the Forty-first session of the Commission on Human Rights met at a high-level conference in Siracusa, Italy. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the situations under which the observation of human rights by governments can be either reduced or suspended as contemplated by “professors, practitioners, and other experts in human rights from all regions of the world.” The official deliverable of that meeting is entitled “The Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” and can be found here.

The participants included

[a] group of 31 distinguished experts in international law … from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, the United Nations Center for Human Rights, the International Labor Organization, and the sponsoring organizations … agreed … upon the need for a close examination of the conditions and groups for permissible limitations and derogations [of civil and political rights].

UN guidelines stipulate that in the event that the integrity of a member state is threatened, meaning if a disease outbreak or other health emergency arises that poses the risk of state collapse, the suspension of certain human rights can be limited or removed, temporarily. Any such moratorium is, per the Siracusa Principles, proscribed in the following ways:

  1. It must be based upon scientific evidence;
  2. It must exist for a finite, predetermined amount of time;
  3. It must be proportional to the effort;
  4. It must be subject to review;
  5. It must respect human dignity

Let’s set aside that a group of international attorneys drew up guidelines for when human rights can be suspended in the interest of preserving governments – which in terms of U.N. membership runs from democratically-elected officials to totalitarian regimes. During the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020, other than a handful of mealy-mouthed, sanctimonious press releases and speeches, the leadership of the UN stood by – not even deploying their classically impotent, symbolic measures.

There were no legal actions, no threats of sanction, no requests for additional information, and no deployment of observation teams. Open-ended lockdowns, threats against civilians, and a wide range of other human rights violations were undertaken the world over. Many endure to this day, all but neglected by the appointed global watchdog for “peace” and “dignity.”

Expert Dithering

Comments from the Office of the Secretary General (SecGen) of the UN predictably wove a noncommittal, contradictory path as brutal policy responses to the pandemic drew on from weeks to months:

  • On Feb 28, 2020, the SecGen said in a press conference: “Now is the time for all governments to step up and do everything possible to contain the disease – and to do so without stigmatization, and respecting human rights. We know containment is possible, but the window of opportunity is narrowing.”
  • One week later on March 6, 2020, a spokesperson for the Rights Chief at the UN Office of the High Commissioner warned that “people who are already barely surviving economically, may all too easily be pushed over the edge by the measures being adopted to contain the virus.”

By April 2020, roughly half of Earth’s population – 3.9billion people in no less than 90 countries or territories – were ordered to stay at home.

  • On April 20, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros urged caution in lifting lockdowns: “So-called lockdowns can help to take the heat out of a country’s epidemic, but they cannot do it alone,” adding that other methods including test and trace should be initiated as well. (The WHO is the directing and coordinating authority for health matters within the United Nations system.)
  • On April 27, 2020 – well over a month after many of the lockdowns went into effect – came a statement from the UN Human Rights Office: Countries must “not use the COVID crisis as a pretext for repressive measures[.]”
  • On May 14, 2020, the UN Human Rights Commissioner again urged governments to be cautious when lifting lockdowns, adding that allowing “politics or economics” to drive decisions is unwise. Unsurprisingly, in mid-July UNICEF announced that the food security of some 132 million people could be in jeopardy by the end of 2020.

And on it went, until on September 24th the SecGen blamed the failure to control the virus on a “lack of global preparedness, cooperation, unity, and solidarity.” And less than a week later with no shame or irony, he commented that “[t]he economic and social consequences [of the pandemic] are as bad as we feared, and in some cases, worse.”

It’s not news that for the United Nations, economics are a distant consideration of any discussion, not least of which is human rights. But in light of this year’s colossal failings, the time is right for an U.N.-free world; at the very least, a U.S.-free U.N.

Enough Is Enough

Defenders of the United Nations have a number of parries at the ready against the standard array of criticisms. They argue that in a world where so much instability is created by nonstate entities – terror networks, for example – the impactfulness of a multi-state organization is blunted. Those excuses don’t apply here: this wasn’t a global terror group or a regional threat. The political response to the pandemic took the wholly undisguised form of governments threatening, imprisoning, and in some cases attacking their own citizens.

If, as politicians are fond of saying, the battle against the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a “war,” UN member firms have been engaged in war crimes on a scale not seen since World War II. Now: no one would (or should) make the argument that the scope of death camps, forced labor, and summary executions in the first half of the 1940s matches that of tyrannical, widespread disease mitigation policies. Yet the depraved indifference with which the global scale of lockdowns, and in particular the wholesale economic destruction of communities has been received by the named invigilator warrants comparison. Add in the likelihood of widespread hunger and such inevitable costs as worldwide increases in stress disorders, spikes in suicides, and widespread substance abuse and the comparison becomes even more reasonable.

Of the U.N.’s “myriad failings and…glaring inadequacies” – and whether explained by cowardice, corruption, or indecision – the failure to speak clearly in favor of human rights (with science and history squarely on the side of standing up for human rights) is low from which the United Nations should not be permitted to recover. That is to say, not in its present or any other form.

It’s bad enough that the United States government has a history of supporting brutal regimes with taxpayer dollars. American taxpayers financing an estimated 22% of the U.N. operating budget and just south of 30% of the so-called peacekeeping budget for an organization that won’t stand up for our human rights, let alone that of billions of others, has never more clearly been indefensible.

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Peter C. Earle is an economist and writer who joined AIER in 2018 and prior to that spent over 20 years as a trader and analyst in global financial markets on Wall Street. His research focuses on financial markets, monetary issues, and economic history. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, NPR, and in numerous other publications. Pete holds an MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA (Finance), and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Follow him on Twitter.

Being Made Invisible

October 13th, 2020 by Stephen Sefton

Over thirty years ago, the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre[1] noted that an inability to engage competing rationalities critically disables the proponents of the moral and intellectual tradition failing to do so. That kind of fundamental, banal critical failure has always characterized the societies of the Western imperialist powers, in every sphere of intellectual and moral life. It may have been less noticeable before the current advent of a challenging multi-polar world, but the resulting crisis of Western elites’ power and prestige has highlighted their innate moral and intellectual bankruptcy as never before.

Anyone challenging the moral and intellectual bad faith of entrenched corporate elite interests gets attacked or ignored. Various otherwise quite well-known figures defending Julian Assange against US and allied NATO country governments’ efforts to destroy him, have experienced this, finding themselves attacked or marginalized even more than usual. Slightly different, but ultimately just as sinister, has been the treatment of dozens of very eminent scientists questioning received wisdom about the current COVID-19 outbreak. In both cases, justice and freedom of speech are important underlying motifs.

Few are surprised that defenders of Julian Assange (image on the right) against the UK injustice system are misrepresented or excluded by imperialist country governments supported by all the disinformation outlets their countries’ oligarchs control. However, scientists questioning public policy on COVID-19 find themselves marginalized not only by dominant liberal opinion but also by majority progressive opinion too. Eminent scientists like John Ioannidis, Sunetra Gupta, Sucharit Bhakdi, Alexander Kekulé, Dolores Cahill and dozens of others find themselves in effect, if not disappeared, certainly generally excluded from public discussion.

Overall, Western liberals and progressives have failed to engage, let alone credibly refute, the arguments of this very significant, unquestionably well-qualified body of scientific opinion. Nor do they engage  the savage class attack enacted as public policy on COVID-19 to impose a corporate capitalist economic reset on the peoples of North America and Europe.  In a similar way, the West’s disinformation lynch media have misrepresented the case against Julian Assange, lying about the facts and unjustly smearing him at every turn while also burying the massive attack on free speech his probable extradition to the US represents.

Image below: Leonard Peltier, Ana Belén Montes, Mumia Abu Jamal

In general, prescribed untruths are propagated and imposed not just via corporate news and entertainment media, but also by almost all the main international information sources. These include practically all the high profile international non governmental organizations and practically every international institution in the United Nations system, the European Union or the Organization of American States. Sincere witnesses to truth have little to no chance of surviving uncompromised in these morally and intellectually corrupt organizations and systems. Sinister political power and corporate money smother and suffocate efforts to challenge the cynical, mendacious status quo. Extreme historical examples in the US include the murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the subsequent persecution of the Black Panther movement. A great number of anti-imperialist heroes like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Ana Belen Montes or Simon Trinidad, among many others, remain unjustly imprisoned. Among current examples of Western information perfidy, the Assange show trial, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons scandal and the prolonged Russiagate farce stand out.

Everyone will have their own experience of this reality. For example, efforts to suppress the “Planet of the Humans” film highlighted how corporate money moulds, manipulates and corrals opinion in favor of a phony Green New Deal which environmentalists like Cory Morningstar have challenged for years against systematic suppression of their arguments. Liberal and progressive environmentalists mostly exclude incisive class-conscious analysis while celebrating pseudo-progressive, corporate-friendly pap. Across the board, systematic disinformation deliberately negates democratic process by denying people fair access to vitally relevant factual appraisal and analysis. Knowledgeable people presenting well attested evidence find themselves effectively disappeared.

For people in countries targeted by the North American and European imperialist powers none of this is new. In most Western foreign affairs reporting on countries from Russia and China, to Iran and Syria, to Venezuela and Cuba, intellectual and moral honesty are almost entirely absent. In the majority world, this experience of being practically invisible extends to whole peoples. Most people in North America and Europe could hardly care less about people far away in distant, usually culturally very different countries. Very few people know enough to be able to effectively challenge the unending deceit of most official Western accounts of events in those countries targeted by North American and European oligarchies and the governments they direct.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, Haiti is perhaps the most egregious example, or maybe Honduras, or perhaps Bolivia… Unquestionable though, is the vicious, psychopathic hatred propagated by Western media, NGOs and institutions against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. These are the last three revolutionary governments in Latin America left standing after the wave of US and EU promoted coups and lawfare offensives of the last fifteen years. In Cuba’s case, the hatred is occasionally dressed up as grudging recognition of the Cuban Revolution’s great example of international solidarity and love between peoples, embodied in so many ways, but above all by its unparalleled international assistance during the ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks.

If influential media outlets, NGOs and international institutions in the West really admired Cuba’s infinitely-far-beyond-their-reach example of human love and solidarity , they would campaign relentlessly demanding an end to the criminal US coercive measures attacking Cuba’s people’s basic well-being. Of course they do not, because they are cynical hypocrites who detest Cuba’s revolutionary commitment to and defence of the human person as the centre and focus of the country’s national development. The same is true of Venezuela and Nicaragua. On these two countries, Western disinformation media, NGOs and institutions have sunk to previously unplumbed depths of in-your-face criminality and odious falsehood.

Despite everything, Venezuela continues resisting outright violation of basic UN principles by North American and European elites who have directed their countries’ regimes and institutions to steal Venezuela’s wealth and attack the country’s people, just as they did successfully to Ivory Coast and Libya up to and including 2011. They have attempted to do the same to Iran, without success. Despite every indication to the contrary, they believe the delusion that by destroying Venezuela they stand a better chance of overthrowing the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and crushing the nationalist revolutionary impulse in the region for good. They can barely tolerate even the social democrat versions of that impulse in Mexico and Argentina.

Nicaragua is still in the early stages of Western attempts to attack its people so as to weaken support for the country’s Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega. That is likely to change through 2021, which is an election year here in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua’s case, the big lie is that the country is a brutal dictatorship that has failed to protect its people from COVID-19. Precisely the opposite is true. Nicaragua has been the most successful country in Latin America and the Caribbean in protecting both its people’s health and their economic well being during the international COVID-19 crisis. Similarly, it is the country’s political opposition, bankrolled, trained and organized by the US government and its European Union allies, which has brutally attacked Nicaragua’s people. They did so using armed violence in 2018 and they have done so by demanding more and more illegal coercive economic measures against their own country from both the US and the EU. Likewise, they promote an endless international disinformation war.

Not one international human rights NGO or any international human rights institution has researched the experience of the thousands of victims of Nicaragua’s opposition violence in 2018. Not Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch nor the International Federation for Human Rights nor the Inter-American Human Rights Commission nor the Office of the UN High Commisioner for Human rights, nor any European Union institution, none of them have. To do so would reveal the big lie that the opposition protests were peaceful. Every single one of those institutions has falsely claimed the Nicaraguan government brutally repressed peaceful demonstrations in 2018. All the Western corporate media and alternative information outlets covering international affairs have parroted that lie. The truth about Nicaragua and the events of 2018 is available in independently produced texts, audio visual material and testimonies like these:

So far, virtually none of this substantial material or other available material has been publicly addressed or seriously analyzed by any academic, anywhere, comparing, contrasting and appraising official accounts, witness testimony and audio-visual and documentary evidence. Practically every single academic writing on Nicaragua has been content to regurgitate the same lies and misrepresentations spread about by all Western media, NGOs and institutions who have relied absolutely exclusively on US government funded opposition sources. None of them have done genuine original honest research on the issue of opposition violence. Not one. All the abundant material documenting the truth of what happened in Nicaragua in 2018 is invisible.

Being made invisible by Western media, NGOs and academics is nothing new. It just means becoming subsumed in the anonymous masses of the majority world whom the Western elites have always looted, murdered and abused. Despite this reality, the overwhelming majority of people in North America and Europe hold the irrational, ultimately self-destructive belief that their rationality is morally superior to their rivals’. To make sure they hold on to that demented false belief, their ruling classes have to disappear the truth, whether it’s to do with an individual like Julian Assange or a whole country, like Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Stephen Sefton is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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[1] “Whose Justice? Which rationality?” (PDF 21Mb)

All images in this article are from TCS unless otherwise stated

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Not Completely a Company Town

October 13th, 2020 by Herman Rosenfeld

Peter Findlay’s documentary film Company Town provides a welcome opening to initiate discussion and debate about the closure of General Motor’s once massive (it had 23,000 workers at one time) and historically central auto and truck complex and supplier plants. Behind the film’s basic narrative is a countdown from the period between the announcement (November 2018) of the closure and the actual end of production (December 2019). It creates space to raise issues such as the power and strategic orientation of the union and its leadership, the nature of the industry and competition in this era of late neoliberal capitalism, the consciousness and lives of auto and parts workers, and the possibilities of alternatives.

The story line is told on a number of different levels: the failed efforts of the national union leadership to deal with the crisis (particularly focusing on Unifor national president Jerry Dias); a group of individual workers affected by the closure; and an alternative movement championed by a small group of activists, personified by one of the GM workers, Rebecca Keetch.

Follow the Leader

In a series of narrative segments, the film follows Unifor president Jerry Dias’s attempts to prevent the closure and ultimately negotiate severance packages for GM and supplier workers. It copies the format of earlier Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) documentaries, with snippets of interviews and comments, and cuts of internal union meetings, peppered by dramatic-sounding musical scoring, but it uses written narration rather than the dramatic voiceover provided in earlier films.

While it’s supposed to portray a dramatic effort to stop the closure, what it actually does is expose the utter impotence, systemic weakness, and lack of political perspective of the union and its leader. Unlike the iconic Final Offer (1984) and other early CAW documentaries such as No Looking Back (1985), this is no picture of a strategically sophisticated group of leaders debating and strategizing how to defeat a larger US-based auto company. We don’t see them fighting against moves to deepen and institutionalize concessions, or organizing for an independent Canadian union. There is no strategy to undermine employer efforts to, in turn, undermine union independence from employer competitive schemes, or to gain the confidence and deepen the understanding of the membership, and in the process, build the union.

Instead, it is a story of defensiveness, strategic myopia, an absence of confident and sophisticated leadership, empty rhetorical threats, seemingly more concerned with putting on a show and pacifying the membership than providing leadership in struggle. In this, the pseudo-dramatic hoopla of the score and the intimate comments of the president and his lieutenants often sound hollow.

What the film reveals is a series of retreats, each punctuated by ineffectual tactical approaches and rhetorical threats about waging “a helluva fight.” First, Dias and company attempt to force GM to provide a promised new product for the facility. Then they initiate a campaign to convince car buyers not to purchase vehicles made in Mexico. When that doesn’t work, they negotiate a “footprint” for a small number of after-market jobs and a series of severance and other benefits and retraining promises. Even with that, it left Dias with a clear defeat, blaming GM’s very real betrayal.

Next, Dias and his assistants are pictured demanding better severance and benefits for the orphaned workers from the supplier companies. There is an embarrassing moment when supplier union leaders and workers are demanding action, and Dias’s assistant can only promise that they will set a “deadline.” And, after a lot of bluster and bluff, we are presented with an intention to get GM workers to slow down and thereby pressure the company to force the suppliers to enrich their benefit packages. But there is no word about whether that ever happened – or whether anything was gained.

Next, we are presented with… nothing. Dias claims (rightly so) that they have been betrayed by GM and that the next round of negotiations could provide some kind of new opportunity.

With all of the dramatic scene splicing and musical score (with the brilliant harmonica playing of Roly Platt), there is really nothing left here, other than lots of sadness, sympathy, and a refusal to consider more radical or imaginative alternatives.

Workers as Victims

The film also follows the fortunes and attitudes of four, and later, a fifth worker. They include two supplier workers, the local union president who works at GM, a woman GM worker, and later, another woman GM worker activist who leads a movement to challenge the corporation’s and union’s perspective.

For the most part, these workers are seen as victims – which, on one level, they are – of the callousness and greed of the corporation, and the lack of leadership and collective organization of the union. They articulate their frustration with the company’s dishonesty and betrayal, their fears about their finances and job prospects, and their anger with the union’s inability or unwillingness to organize any serious resistance. The supplier workers are particularly angered by what they perceive as the union’s neglect of their concerns and apparent surrender without a fight.

One supplier worker, Kevin, who becomes involved in an alternative movement, is asked, “Are you angry with GM?” and his response is “Not surprised that GM is greedy, but I was angry about how I was treated by the union.”

While there is a lot of anger and frustration here, what is missing is any collective push from below for action to limit GM’s and the suppliers’ options, or for leadership from above to build any confidence in a strategy to pressure the employers. With 3,000 workers at GM and 2,000 more at the suppliers, nothing more than a series of short work refusals – at first encouraged, but then shut down by the union – ever took place. The inability of these workers to influence the union is obvious, as well.

This reflects the accumulated pressures on workers over the past couple of decades, the enhancement of employer power in the era of free trade and neoliberalism, the intense levels of competition in the auto industry, and the clear decline of fossil fuel vehicles on the horizon. In addition, there is the lack of any real alternative voice putting forward political alternatives to the constant increase in plant closures and disinvestment in Canada. The union has served only to reinforce these trends as it accepted the ongoing drumbeat of closures of the Oshawa complex over the year. They included fabrication, truck, and car plant closures – bringing only symbolic or no challenge, as well as its lack of vision that could take it beyond dependence on the competitive decisions of US auto companies.

The union consistently met each setback with increased concessions to lower costs and encourage future investment, and by going along with the corporation as partners, of a sort. This meant begging governments to subsidize investments (often, euphemistically engaging in campaigns such as “manufacturing matters” promising to address disinvestment with progressive industrial policies, but in reality, supporting their employers’ push for government bribes). Some of the more odious concessions accepted by the union included allowing GM to outsource various jobs to lower-wage contractors and hiring different categories or “tiers” of workers, with different wage levels, benefits, seniority, and job security, performing the same jobs as “legacy” workers with traditional rights and benefits. (During the last set of GM bargaining, the union made major concessions in exchange for the promise of a new product that never came.)

Over time, experiences such as these affect the thinking and confidence of workers. They reinforce an existing sense of isolation, weakness, and defeat, not to mention the real dependence of workers on the employer, without a sense of independence and struggle from the union. Adding to the problem was a lack of a socialist political movement, building or posing alternatives to corporate power.

These experiences also reinforce a sense that high quality levels and community support would somehow cement GM’s allegiance to Oshawa. The old notion of “Generous Motors” has its roots in identification with the employer’s fortunes rather than the rest of the working class. This is linked to a more recent tradition of conservatism within Local 222, which has never really been effectively challenged by progressives within the leadership of the CAW, Unifor, or a working-class-based socialist left. (It was no accident, for example, that the Oshawa local was home to a relatively large group of supporters of Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution” in the late 1990s and was, significantly, not picked as a site of one of the Ontario one-day general strikes during that period.)

Workers as Protagonists – Alternative Voices

The film points beyond this dismal scenario. It actually features an alternative perspective. Although not one of the “original” workers identified in the initial story of the closure narrative, Rebecca, one of the second-tier workers at GM, is given a voice that is absolutely critical to this documentary. She, along with Kevin, the worker at a parts supplier, got involved with and helped to build an organization called Green Jobs Oshawa (GJO). It argues that the Oshawa complex should be nationalized, and could produce battery electric vehicles for use by governments and public transit for various transportation needs, separate from the private competitive markets that rule the operation of private auto producers.

Even more, as one can see from Rebecca’s interviews, her speeches to environmental rallies and demonstrations, and her conversations at Green Job Oshawa meetings (all filmed for the documentary), GJO is both a workers’ political movement, and an effort to address the climate emergency. She calls for provision of well-paying, secure union jobs as part of what the environmental movement calls “just transition” – workers transitioning away from a fossil-fueled economy, instead of subsisting on support payments, and ultimately, having to accept precarious employment of various sorts. The alternative use for the GM plant would not be based on producing individual passenger vehicles in competition with corporate rivals, but rather, providing vehicles for public use and serving as a potential hub for further manufacturing projects in a new green economy, producing for collective, community needs. Moreover, production of new personal vehicles is ruled out – regardless of what materials they are made of – because it would contribute to the climate crisis.

The film doesn’t shy away from demonstrating the difficulties worker-activists/organizers face in convincing their co-workers about such alternatives. Workers have little faith in alternatives to employment at the GM’s of the world, or that public ownership and moving outside the orbit of private production of consumer items in competitive markets would offer them real transitions. This has been reinforced by both their personal experiences and the opposition (or derision) by the union to the GJO approach. The film includes a couple of short clips where Jerry Dias dismisses Rebecca’s proposals and those of her colleagues as “textbook socialists” and “academic” and “unreal.” The local union took a similar stand, although it isn’t shown in the film. (It is interesting that while Dias and the Unifor leadership consider the GJO demands to be “unrealistic,” they maintained that somehow pressuring GM to re-invest in Oshawa by presenting advertisements at NFL superbowl and hockey playoff broadcasts would shift public opinion and force GM to invest in Oshawa. This public shaming of GM was warmly greeted by workers in Oshawa, but it hardly constituted a realistic challenge to the corporation’s power.)

Rebecca and her colleagues, including Kevin Cragg, former CAW Assistant to the union’s President and Research Director Sam Gindin, Tony Leah, Tiffany Balducci from CUPE and the Durham Labour Council, Chris White and others (including this reviewer) are clear that they don’t expect to be instantly successful. Gindin says that this is a moment of necessary transformation of both unions and politics, but it remains on the level of potential. Rebecca notes that they may not succeed in Oshawa but just might inspire others to attempt and win similar efforts to convert carbon-based manufacturing facilities into socially useful, worker-managed, publicly owned workplaces.

What Can We Learn From This – What Should We Do?

This film can serve a number of purposes. On one level, it can demonstrate just how difficult, and perhaps impossible, it is to fight for jobs and investment in the traditional manner in this era. Unifor, in the local and National leadership, couldn’t see beyond trying to force GM to invest in Oshawa through various forms of public pressure. The advertisements appealing to consumers not to buy Mexican-made cars only seemed to target Mexican workers and weren’t tied to a plan for building a different auto industry.

There were no plans to organize any real collective resistance in the workplaces of Local 222’s auto sector. Had there been a strategy of demanding government ownership and the building of a different kind of product, the union could have organized plant occupations, demonstrating to GM and the government that after receiving $11-billion in subsidies, the corporation isn’t the ‘legitimate’ owner of the facility. It could have created confidence in the workers to shape the future of the workplace and could have created openings to move further than simply demanding good severance. Like the experience with Caterpillar some years ago, an opportunity was clearly wasted. But this time, there was an alternative voice, and it is still organizing.

Thinking that the only future for the Oshawa facility must include private corporate investment ignores the reality that employers like GM move their investments to address the need to maximize returns on investment, and any new product they make will be subject to cutthroat competition from others doing the same. Given the power of corporations to move where they wish without restrictions (unlike the period when the auto pact forced employers to invest here), traditional forms of pressure won’t really work. Dias and the Unifor leadership know this. It makes their adoption of ad campaigns and their dismissal of the Green Jobs Oshawa demands as ‘unrealistic’ all the more problematic.

Dias’s hypocritical support for the renewal of the NAFTA free trade agreement and his argument that somehow this would bring some level of security for auto workers was also shown to be a failure. Free trade is the problem, not a solution. The embarrassing chumminess with Prime Minister Trudeau at last year’s negotiations with Trump’s representatives only made things worse.

The union had a choice here, presented by the workers who began the Green Jobs Oshawa project, but the union leadership really had no intention of considering it. It really was seen as something way beyond their traditional way of understanding ‘reality’. It makes the union leadership look kind of victimized, not only by GM’s treachery but also by their own limited outlook and understanding.

A Different Story

The comparisons with the story told in the 1984 National Film Board documentary Final Offer are stark and instructive. That film showed the struggles on the shop floor, worker resistance to management pressure, and union support of the members. It framed the battle against concessions as the beginning of a longer war challenging a new corporate effort to get the union to accept a ‘partnership’ for competitiveness that would undermine decades of building and collective struggle. It was effectively the beginning of neoliberalism, and the union, under Bob White’s leadership, was in a position to take it on (as they also, simultaneously fought free trade, which they helped facilitate in 2020). Looming over the struggle was the issue of an eventual break with the US-controlled UAW, and the possibility (and challenges) of ultimately creating an independent Canadian auto union. White and the others didn’t shy away from that or call it “unrealistic.”

They resisted and won the battle against GM in 1984. For over a decade and a half, the CAW continued to oppose neoliberalism, as well as its effects on the union and industries, such as the auto industry. But eventually, the CAW suffered a strategic defeat, as did so many unions in Canada and the world. Plants closed; neoliberal policies engulfed the world.

Without a socialist left presenting an alternative, inside and outside the union movement, the union (and brother and sister unions in Canada and elsewhere) didn’t take up the new challenge of radicalizing its approach and deepening the understanding of the membership. That would have required a transformation, that would position the union to pose alternatives to dependence on corporate power and competitiveness and to challenge the governments to play a role other than that of facilitating free trade and giving subsidies for the promise of investment.

What might have happened if the union had been able to make those changes? If it had continued to struggle, build, and educate the membership? Certainly, we can only speculate – and it’s not certain that such activism would have even been possible to sustain over this period. Yet, even with the loss of so many members and larger productive capacity, it might have left the CAW, and later Unifor, with an openness to the kinds of alternative perspectives that activists around Green Jobs Oshawa propose.

New Possibilities

On another level, the film demonstrates that a different path is possible, although it requires fundamental changes that most likely point beyond the struggle in Oshawa. It certainly requires a change in thinking, rejecting the idea that the future of manufacturing facilities like GM Oshawa depend on private capitalist investment. In order to provide decent, well-paying unionized jobs, produce products and services that serve the interests of the community, the working class as a whole, and the environment, they need to be part of a larger, publicly-funded, planned process. Any new investment (although welcomed) by GM and their cohorts would be subject to the whims of the marketplace and private investors seeking unlimited growth and competitive returns. New investment as part of a battery electric vehicle project for government and community use, publicly owned and democratically managed, would provide a seed for worker security and future efforts.

This is not going to happen in Oshawa in the immediate future, but it can be part of a larger and longer-term effort to build a country-wide movement to convert manufacturing facilities for social use, challenging fossil-fueled production and extraction, based on a larger plan, and involving workers in the process. It requires, first of all, gaining and building local community support. Then, it requires building a network of activists in workplaces and communities across the country; the environmental movement, which before the pandemic struck, organized monthly student strikes that closed schools and involved young people. It means working to build a base in union institutions and labour councils, and creating conversion projects in various workplaces. Links between these nodes are being made now and will inspire more participation and confidence from workers over time.

Hopefully, in the end, many of us involved in this movement see Company Town as an organizing tool that sheds light on the forces, structures, and potentials (as well as the dead ends) that face efforts to create jobs for working people.

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Herman Rosenfeld is a Toronto-based socialist activist, educator, organizer and writer. He is a retired national staffperson with the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor), and worked in their Education Department.

Featured image is from TB

To Rebel Against Necessity and More

October 13th, 2020 by Edward Curtin

“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world, which operates on the basis of necessity.  The laws of necessity are as unexceptional as the laws of gravitation.  The human faculty of compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.  To forget oneself, however briefly, to identify with a stranger to the point of fully recognizing her or him, is to defy necessity, and in this defiance, even if small and quiet  and even if measuring only 60cm. x 50cm., there is a power that cannot be measured by the limits of the natural order.  It is not a means and it has no end.  The Ancients knew this.” – John Berger, “A Man with Tousled Hair,” from The Shape of a Pocket

Autumn is the dying season.  This morning when I came home from a walk, he was lying there on his back.  He was dead.

Yet an autumn day like today in the mountains is so beautiful that everything vibrates with life. The air chimes.  The clouds tango across the blue dance floor above.  The leaves sway to some celestial tune.  And the lake laps in synchronicity to singing hearts.

My heart was singing before I found him.  His blueness and his beauty startled me. I touched him in the hope that he would move, but he stayed still, on his back with his eyes open. A still life.  A life stilled.  Only one of millions of fallen birds, yet I felt an immense sadness at the sight of him, as if he were waiting there to tell me something.  I wanted so badly to resurrect him, for he seemed so alive in death. I felt myself returning to the blues I felt before my walk.

Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo these words:

I feel more and more that we must not judge God on the basis of this world; it’s a study that didn’t come off.  What can you do, in a study that has gone wrong, if you are fond of the artist?  You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue.  But you have a right to ask for something better.  It is only a master who can make such a muddle, and perhaps that is the best consolation we have out of it, since then we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself.

This bluejay was a small creature, and many people hate his kind.  He’s a bully bird, they say.  In the celebrated novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the hero, Atticus Finch says one shouldn’t kill a mockingbird but kill all the bluejay you can hit.

I am wondering who or what killed this beautiful bluejay at my feet, but I will never know.

I do know that “Operation Mockingbird” killed many minds and hearts, and resulted in untold numbers of deaths worldwide.  This CIA media propaganda program in which all the major media were doing the bidding of the CIA was allegedly dismantled after its discovery in the 1970s, but it no doubt operates today under a different name.  Perhaps its code name is Operation Bluejay, since the bluebird was already used for “Project Bluebird,” a predecessor to MKULtra, the CIA’s other massive mind control program.

The bird names migrate, but they seem to return under different nomenclature for people who are in the business of killing singers of songs of freedom.

They are the killers of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

For before my walk, I had started to read an article, with declassified CIA and U.S. government documents, from The National Security Archives, about his death.  For on this date, October 9, in 1967, the Argentinian revolutionary Che, Fidel Castro’s right-hand man in the Cuban Revolution, was executed by the CIA-led Bolivian military, after having been captured in a firefight in the Bolivian mountains. Fascists killed the courageous Che as he fought to inspire the oppressed to rise up against U.S. imperialism.  They executed him in cold blood, consciously and proudly.  They posed with his dead body, like macho hunters who pose holding a bird they have just shot.

Writing in The Nation magazine three year ago, Peter Kornbluh, the director of the National Security Archive‘s Chile and Cuba Documentation Projects, described how he had met in Miami with Gustavo Villoldo, who had been the top Cuban-American CIA operative assigned to assist in tracking down and capturing Guevara,  the iconic revolutionary, in Bolivia. Villoldo told Kornbluh how he cut off the dead Che’s hands and pieces of his hair and beard before secretly burying his body, which was discovered and dug up in 1997, minus his hand bones.  Kornbluh writes:

At one point during the conversation, Villoldo opened the binder and pulled out a white envelope. Inside was a clump of brown hair. As the ultimate souvenir of this Cold War victory, Villoldo proudly stated, he had cut off strands of Che’s hair before disposing of his body. ‘I basically took it because the symbol of the revolution was this bearded, long-haired guy coming down the mountain,’ Villoldo later explained. ‘To me, I was cutting off the very symbol of the Cuban revolution.’

Maybe a hawk killed the bluejay, but if so, it didn’t gloat over its body.  It would have been operating under the laws of necessity, where as far as we know, compassion has no place. Not true for Che’s killers. Here they are posing for the camera, guns still aimed at the dead man, as if he still posed a great danger to them.  They were right, at least in the long term.

Ernesto Che Guevara is also lying on his back, eyes open. Seeing the bluejay in a similar pose an hour after seeing this photograph, which I had studied for many minutes, gave me a jolt. The bird’s blueness entered my soul. Blue blue blue – I felt I was sinking into a deep hole of sorrow and despair.  My sorrow for the bird was nothing compared to the deep rage and anguish I felt when once again I viewed the photo of Che surrounded by cowards, and I thought of all the victims from Bolivia to the Congo and all around the world who have suffered and died – and continue to do so – at the hands of all the ruthless forces he opposed.  I wanted so badly to resurrect him, for he seemed so alive in death.  And his CIA killers so dead by comparison.

Here was a man of immense courage who gave his life for his beliefs, who was the embodiment of the Cuban Revolution, who cared deeply to liberate the world’s oppressed from U.S.-led imperialism.  I kept thinking of another revolutionary on the run from fascist forces, Pietro Spina in Ignazio Silone’s great novel, Bread and Wine, who, disguised as a priest in Mussolini’s Italy, tells a frightened girl who is worried what will ensue if the government captures the rebel leader, who is actually the “priest” she is talking to.  “And if they catch him and kill him?” the girl asked.

Killing a man who says ‘No!’ is a risky business, the priest replied, because even a corpse can go on whispering “No! No! No!’ with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of.  And how can you silence a corpse?

We know Che’s voice has not been silenced where victims of imperialism continue to suffer and be killed around the world.  But here in the United States, the image-makers have fashioned him into a celebrity whose message is lost, another casualty of mind control and the propagandists who control the corporate media.  The people he fought against.

Everyone has seen Che’s image somewhere. Posters of his visage adorn college dormitory rooms. You know, the man with the tousled hair and the beard. The  cool charismatic guy!  The handsome man who road a motorcycle, was articulate, and could write and speak eloquently. The Che on coffee mugs and tee-shirts everywhere.  All derived from one photograph taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda for the revolutionary newspaper Revoluciόn in Havana in 1960.  A photograph that never earned Korda a cent, but has been exploited by countless money vultures, including the artist Andy Warhol. Che wrote in Socialism and Man in Cuba:

A school of artistic inquiry is invented, which is said to be the definition of freedom; but this ‘inquiry’ has its limits, imperceptible until there is a clash, that is, until the real problems of man and his alienation arise. Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honours—such honours as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage.

Then as now, escaping from that invisible cage is our task, a cage that teaches us not to rebel against what is called “necessity,” but to exploit others every way we can. To profit from their suffering, which is the nature of imperialism. To close our eyes and make believe it is possible to live in an imperialistic country abroad and have a democracy at home. Sooner or later, this pipe dream will come crashing down. Perhaps that is happening now.

One does not have to agree with every thought Che expressed more than five decades ago. Or with all his tactics.  But if you read his words, you will see that the conditions for oppressed people throughout Latin American and around the world have not changed very much in all these decades. Of course, the propaganda has become far more sophisticated, and the temptation to play by the rules of the game and pirouette like caged monkeys is stronger than ever.  Now as then, the religion of consumption is a private devotion for the public, and it is not just things that people are consuming but illusory images of a good and decent life. But their pursuit “is a race among wolves; one can win only at the cost of others’ failure,” wrote Che.  Such a system is not necessary but is imposed and must be resisted.

For the little dead bird I encountered this morning, all I can offer is my compassion that opposes the order of necessity – my “supernatural” resistance.  So I buried the blue creature out of respect and reverence.

But war and imperialism are not natural, and so I cannot bury my conscience, but must try to find ways to resist such human cruelty.

I ask myself, says Don Benedetto, the elderly priest in Silone’s Bread and Wine, “what is to be done?”  He pauses and continues:

I am convinced that it would be a waste of time to show a people of intimidated slaves a different manner of speaking, a different manner of gesticulating; but perhaps it would be worth while to show them a different way of living.  No word and no gesture can be more persuasive than the life, and if necessary, the death of a man who strives to be free, loyal, just, sincere, disinterested: a man who shows what a man can be.

Che did that.  Now it’s up to us.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous,” he wrote, “ let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

Is such love and sacrifice supernatural?

If so, let us fly to the heights.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site.

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is the author of the new book: https://www.claritypress.com/product/seeking-truth-in-a-country-of-lies/


Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Author: Edward Curtin

ISBN: 9781949762266

Published: 2020

Options: EBOOK – Epub and Kindle, paper, PDF

Click here to order.

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The Trump administration calls its policy towards Iran one of “maximum pressure.” By its latest move, it would more properly be called “siege and starve,” as the feigned interest in establishing leverage for comprehensive negotiations with Iran has been replaced by a full-throttle push to pulverize Iran’s economy and collapse its social and economic life.

The Trump administration has now designated Iran’s entire financial sector under Executive Order (“E.O.”) 13902, subjecting all Iranian financial institutions — formal or otherwise — to an effective international boycott. Even with the crushing sanctions thus far visited on Iran, this move will have devastating impact, severing the limited ties that connect the Iranian people to the outside world and that allow them to sustain some modicum of economic life. Disconnected from the global financial system, unable to conduct the most basic of cross-border financial transactions, and denied their limited currency reserves abroad, Iran’s economy will be forced into the dark, surviving, if at all, on a subterranean diet of barter and shell companies.

The humanitarian impact could well be significant. The Iranian people deserve more than the most basic of medicines and foodstuffs, but even those will be made difficult to come by as a result of this policy. Even as the Trump administration claims that it will preserve existing humanitarian exceptions, banks that remain linked to Iran’s economy will sever those relationships, unsure of what the future holds, unclear about the financial benefits of maintaining trade with Iran, and fearful of being sanctioned for dealing with Iran’s banks in any capacity, humanitarian or otherwise.

Those who practice U.S. sanctions have long been cognizant of the peculiar challenges conducting trade in humanitarian goods with Iran, which existed even when significant parts of Iran’s economy remained open for business. Those challenges will now not just be exacerbated but will erect a prohibitive bar. No one, in good-faith, could advise that trade in humanitarian goods with Iran is without sanctions risk.

Some, like those at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — the brain trust for the Trump administration’s Iran policy and a group whose views generally align with Israel’s Likud Party — will dispute all this, claiming that the new policy leaves open clear channels for humanitarian trade with Iran. No one need take this argument seriously. Those behind this move have long sought to crush Iran’s economy — and, by implication, its people — including through explicit targeting of Iran’s access to humanitarian goods. That explains the sanctioning of Iran’s central bank and FDD’s latest push to add another layer of sanctions and designate all of the non-designated Iranian banks. Their objective is clear: crush the people to stir political change. In some contexts, we use a word for this tactic: terrorism.

Based on reports, the Trump administration’s new policy came after visits from the Israeli government and FDD’s lobbying efforts. This is par for the course: FDD has long laundered Israeli talking points and intelligence before the U.S. government to make it seem as if there is a natural constituency for the policy being advocated. But there is no sizable constituency, at least not an American one. That is why the policy is being trotted out quietly in the midst of a thunderous presidential election season: to hide from the American people how their government is maliciously targeting Iranians and setting the stage for one last-ditch effort at war. Advocates of this policy know that there will be no referendum on it and that — subsumed by President Trump’s total saturation of the news market — the U.S. public will have little chance to even learn of it.

One can only hope the nightmare is a short-lived one for Iranians. In less than a month, the United States will conduct presidential elections, and there is by now clear indication that former Vice President Joe Biden is the strong front-runner. The Biden campaign has intimated its desire to return to the Iran nuclear deal and to lift U.S. sanctions in return for Iran re-establishing nuclear restrictions. That could herald a quick return to the status quo that existed at the end of the Obama administration, in which Iran was slowly re-integrating itself into the global economy while the United States was secure in the knowledge that Iran’s nuclear program was under wraps.

But a return to the nuclear deal will not address the pathologies that underlie the Trump administration’s “siege and starve” policy towards Iran nor will it compensate what has become a “lost generation” in Iran, struggling under the boot of American economic domination. Washington’s policy community will be quick to forgive those who advocated for this outrage, incorporating them back into the fold and treating them as honest interlocutors for a particular policy persuasion. The Iranian perspective will continue to be ignored, shut out from consideration through the potent combination of an embargo that prohibits meaningful dialogue between Americans and Iranians and an attitude of disregard for how our adversaries see things. In this manner, the wheel is reinvented and lessons go unlearned.

But if the United States seeks a sensible policy towards Iran — one that neither avoids the uncomfortable truths about the Islamic Republic nor seeks to destroy the country or risk war at every turn — there will need to be due consideration for how the U.S. has come to this policy, exacting an economic siege without historical precedent in the modern world and degrading what remains of its tattered moral standing in turn.

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A coalition of doctors and other health professionals in Belgium has issued an open letter calling for an immediate end to every “emergency” policy established in response to the novel coronavirus (covid-19), as well as a full-scale investigation into the World Health Organization (WHO) for allegedly faking a pandemic.

Citing a complete lack of “medical justification” for the continued lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing, the coalition says an open debate is needed to allow all experts with varying perspectives the chance to be represented and have their voices heard, without censorship or retribution.

Forcing people to remain in isolation while prohibiting them from engaging in normal commerce, traveling freely, and even going to work, the letter’s signers warn, is having a greater negative impact both in the short and long term than if there were no restrictions at all – which is why it all needs to end immediately.

In Belgium, at least, health authorities never would have imposed such restrictions were it not for the misguidance of the WHO. The Belgian Supreme Health Council (BSHC) normally takes a minimalist approach, meaning it encourages people to adopt a healthy lifestyle that works for them, rather than try to force them to abide by some one-size-fits-all government prescription such as the one that came down the pipeline from the WHO.

Furthermore, the latest science does not even support the WHO’s approach, which is hurting people more than it is helping them.

“After the initial panic surrounding covid-19, the objective facts now show a completely different picture – there is no medical justification for any emergency policy anymore,” the letter reads.

“The current crisis management has become totally disproportionate and causes more damage than it does any good,” it goes on to explain. “We call for an end to all measures and ask for an immediate restoration of our normal democratic governance and legal structures and of all our civil liberties.”

Having to get vaccinated for the Wuhan coronavirus (covid-19) is another draconian imposition coming down the pike that carries with it permanent health consequences, seeing as how there is no way to effectively detoxify from an mRNA vaccine.

Strict covid-19 restrictions violate the WHO’s own definition of health

Back in 1948, the WHO defined health as follows:

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or other physical impairment.”

According to the letter’s signers, the WHO’s current approach to combating SARS-CoV-2 is a clear violation of this long-established ethic because it impinges upon the emotional and social well-being of humans, all in the name of keeping them “safe” from a virus.

Forcing people to stay at home muzzled with no human contact is also a violation of basic human rights, as is demanding that people “mask up” whenever they decide to venture from their own property – especially since being social actually protects against viral infection.

“Studies have shown that the more social and emotional commitments people have, the more resistant they are to viruses,” the letter explains. “It is much more likely that isolation and quarantine have fatal consequences.

“Fear, persistent stress and loneliness induced by social distancing have a proven negative influence on psychological and general health,” it adds.

Remember when “flatten the curve” was only supposed to last two weeks?

Early on, the WHO warned that if the world failed to “flatten the curve,” up to 3.4 percent of people who contracted the Wuhan coronavirus (covid-19) would die. This process was supposed to take just two weeks, as you may recall, but still persists six months later.

The world was also told by the WHO, which has proven ties to the vaccine industry, by the way, that the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (covid-19) would lead to an abnormal pattern of seasonal infection, another claim that has since been proven false by science.

“The course of covid-19 followed the course of a normal wave of infection similar to a flu season,” the letter explains. “As every year, we see a mix of flu viruses following the curve: first the rhinoviruses, then the influenza A and B viruses, followed by the coronaviruses. There is nothing different from what we normally see.”

So what we continue to face is a “cure” that is far, far worse than the “problem,” the letter contends. Furthermore, flawed testing, fake science, and widespread ignorance about how the human immune system even works are keeping us under medical tyranny, to our own collective detriment.

The full open letter can be read in its entirety at this link.

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The Armenian-Azerbaijani war in the Nagorno-Karabakh region does not show signs of nearing its end despite the humanitarian ceasefire launched in the region. The ceasefire started in the Nagorno-Karabakh region at 12:00 local time on October 10. The ceasefire deal was reached by the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides following long talks in Moscow a day ago. Russia played a key role in forcing the sides to make steps towards the de-escalation.

Azerbaijan and Armenia also formally agreed to begin substantive negotiations of a peaceful settlement of a military conflict over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh that erupted on September 27. These talks will be mediated by the Organization for Security and co-operation in Europe’s Minsk Group of international negotiators. Following the ceasefire agreement, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that the first phase of the military operation in the Nagorno-Karabakh region is completed. The Russian diplomatic intervention allowed to put an end to the hottest phase of the military confrontation and force the sides to halt active offensive operations on the ground.

Despite this, the situation on the ground remained very tense. Almost immediately after the start of the ceasefire regime, the sides simultaneously accused each other of violating the ceasefire and of shelling civilian and military targets, and repeated these claims on October 11 and October 12.

Meanwhile, Armenia and Azerbaijan released a new batch of fresh and few days old footage showcasing casualties of each other and making loud statements. In particular, pro-Azerbaijani sources claimed that at least two more S-300 systems of Armenia were destroyed in Karabakh. The released videos accompanying these claims include the moments of the alleged destruction of 35D6 (ST-68U) radars and a S-300 missile launcher of the Armenian military with Israeli IAI Harop loitering munitions near the village of Khojaly in the Khojaly District and the village of Qubadlı in the Kashatagh District.

The 35D6 is a vehicle-carried three-dimensional air surveillance radar system. The range of the radar’s primary functions includes the detection of low-flying targets protected with active and or passive jamming screens, and also the performance of air traffic control. It can be operated as a separate installation as well as a part of the S-300 air-defense system. Nonetheless, if it was the S-300 batteries, as Azerbaijani sources insist, it still remains unclear what these long-range air defense systems were doing so close to the frontline.

Meanwhile, the Armenian military reported that its forces repelled large Azerbaijani attacks in the northeastern and southern parts of the region. The hottest area of the frontline is the town of Hardut. Azerbaijani President Aliyev officially announced that his forces captured it a few days ago. Nonetheless, videos from the ground show that in fact most of the town remained in the hands of the Armenians. Another part of it is now a gray zone, which is not controlled by any side. According to Armenian sources, Azerbaijani troops, supported by Turkish special forces and Syrian militants, tried to capture the town just a few hours before the start of the ceasefire. After this failed attack, Azerbaijani combat drones and artillery units delivered powerful strikes on Hardut and nearby villages, but were not able to force Armenian troops to retreat.

The Armenian Defense Ministry insists that the Turkish Air Force is leading the aerial operations of Azerbaijan. “Turkish aerial command centers, flying within the Turkish airspace, are commanding the Turkish UAV’s operating in the Azerbaijani air force. UAVs, accompanied by six F-16 units, are directly attacking the peaceful population and civilian infrastructure of Artsakh,” the defense ministry spokesman said.

In its own turn, the Azerbaijani side says that it’s just taking the necessary steps to respond to Armenian violations of the ceasefire and strikes on Azerbaijani settlements. The most widely covered incident of this kind took place on October 11, when an alleged Armenian ballistic missile hit Ganja city.

The active offensive phase of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war was put on pause, but the conflict itself does not seem to be nearing its end. Without the real political will of the Azerbaijani and Armenian leadership to reach a ceasefire, the de-escalation of the conflict, without direct intervention of some third party, remains unlikely. Instead, the war has chances to resume with new power in the coming days.

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COVID-19 in California Prisons

October 13th, 2020 by Ivan Kilgore

My name’s Ivan Kilgore and I am the founder of the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. And I’m calling you from Solano State Prison in Northern California.

click here for audio on Prison Radio

Click to access original text on Prison Radio

Let’s go back to March of 2020. What’s happening in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. At this particular time, what the department is doing is they’re issuing memorandums to the public and in the prison population basically saying that they are providing us with social distancing, soaps, infectants, things of that nature/ Which someone who’s been incarcerated for over 20 years and actually in prison reading this stuff, I’m like, okay, where is this stuff? They weren’t passing out none of that.

And so what happened uh, eventually, I was contacted by the administration and informed that- that had been a VICE News video that was made. I guess it received, you know, three, four thousand reviews, and they were basically saying that, okay, we got you on this video. And this video, what it shows is basically CDC is not holding up on the end of the bargain in terms of social distancing and all that.

So what happens as a result of this whole issue- instance with this video? We start to see the staff retaliate in my particular case. And what they do initially was they go throughout the pod that I live in and they searched like 10 Mexican cells. Now, I don’t know if people understand the nature of race relations in the California prison system, but when they did this on top of it, they said, hey, we did was searching this cell on account  of Kilgore filming a video in the prison. So you can imagine the type of blow-back they created in terms of racial tensions and things of that nature within the prison.

And this is a common practice of the prison administration when they want to retaliate against an alleged whistleblower. So fortunately I was able to defuse that situation, and when that situation didn’t work out to the likings of the department, the next thing I was issued a disciplinary ticket for possession of a cell phone, which was never found in my position or my cell or anything to that effect. And as a result of being found with accused in a cell phone and being found guilty of a write-up I’m now being put up to transfer to a COVID hotspot in Imperial Valley, which is on the other end of the state. Again, this is how the California Department of Corrections operates with regards to whistleblowers.

Now the good thing that came out of this whole situation, apparently this video on VICE News caused a lot of statewide controversy within the Department of Corrections at the headquarters. And they immediately stepped their game up at this prison, which is Solano. And we saw in the aftermath of that release of that in video, they’ll come in through passing them out masks, disinfectants, soap, social distancing, and even going to the extent of making the officers wear a mask and enforcing that. Of course, you know, behind these things, a lot of people get lax with that.

Outside of that, the COVID situation here at this prison has, it’s not like San Quentin where they had that major outbreak. And I say it’s not like that because again, you had that initial instance back in the beginning of April with this VICE News video that kind of sounded the alarm and put a lot of spotlight on this prison. So they’re pretty much ahead of, you know, keeping, keeping the COVID outbreak under control. So we see medical staff that are coming through here and regularly doing temperature checks. We’re seeing isolation know in here for any individuals who may show COVID symptoms, and we’re seeing the administration enforcing both staff and prisoners to wear masks.

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This article was originally published in May 2020.

Neil Ferguson is the British academic who created the infamous Imperial College model that warned Boris Johnson that, without an immediate lockdown, the coronavirus would cause 500,000 deaths and swamp the National Health Service.

Johnson’s government promptly abandoned its Sweden-like “social distancing” approach, and Ferguson’s model also influenced the U.S. to make lockdown moves with its shocking prediction of over two million Americans dead.

Johan Giesecke, the former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has called Ferguson’s model “the most influential scientific paper” in memory. He also says it was, sadly, “one of the most wrong.”

With all of his influence, it’s not surprising British media are making a great deal about Ferguson being forced to resign from the government’s virus advisory board yesterday after revelations he had violated lockdown rules he had championed in order to conduct an affair with a married woman. Ferguson admits he made an “error of judgement and took the wrong course of action.”

Ferguson’s hypocritical violation of his beloved lockdown was the least of his errors in judgment. His incompetence and insistence on doomsday models is far worse.

Elon Musk calls Ferguson an “utter tool” who does “absurdly fake science.” Jay Schnitzer, an expert in vascular biology and a former scientific direct of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center in San Diego, tells me: “I’m normally reluctant to say this about a scientist, but he dances on the edge of being a publicity-seeking charlatan.”

Indeed, Ferguson’s Imperial College model has been proven wildly inaccurate. To cite just one example, it saw Sweden paying a huge price for no lockdown, with 40,000 COVID deaths by May 1, and 100,000 by June. Sweden now has 2,854 deaths and peaked two weeks ago. As Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator, notes: “Imperial College’s model is wrong by an order of magnitude.”

Indeed, Ferguson has been wrong so often that some of his fellow modelers call him “The Master of Disaster.”

Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Charlotte Reid, a farmer’s neighbor, recalls: “I remember that appalling time. Sheep were left starving in fields near us. Then came the open air slaughter. The poor animals were panic stricken. It was one of the worst things I’ve witnessed. And all based on a model — if’s but’s and maybe’s.”

In 2002, Ferguson predicted that, by 2080, up to 150,000 people could die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.

In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.

Last March, Ferguson admitted that his Imperial College model of the COVID-19 disease was based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus. Ferguson declined to release his original code so other scientists could check his results. He only released a heavily revised set of code last week, after a six-week delay.

So the real scandal is: Why did anyone ever listen to this guy?

NR Editor’s Note: This post originally claimed that Ferguson had predicted that 150,000 people could die from foot-and-mouth disease. In fact, that figure was Ferguson’s upper-bound estimate of deaths for mad-cow disease by 2080. It has been corrected and we regret the error.

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The Israeli occupation army issued 63 military orders to close areas and lands planted with olives in separate parts of the West Bank, coinciding with the start of the olive harvest season in the Palestinian territories.

The olive harvest season, one of the biggest events and sources of income for Palestinian farmers, starts on the seventh of October, as announced by the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture.

The military orders bore the signature of the commander of the occupation army in the West Bank on September 17, 2020, and come under the title (Zone Closure – Prevention of Entry and Stay), attached to maps and aerial photos showing the locations of the lands targeted by these orders, which seem to be specific to the current olive season.

Its clauses clarified that its entry into force will be from the date of its signature until the date of 12/31/2020.

This means that many Palestinian families and farmers will not have access to their lands and would be unable to harvest their trees or make olive oil.

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First published on July 16, 2020

This report was brought to our attention by Off-Guardian with the following cautionary note:

“First published on The Bernician, the below statement is allegedly from a senior consultant working for the NHS in a hospital in Surrey. Although we cannot verify his or her identity, we still think our readers should see it 1) because it dovetails with other verified reports, and 2) if it is what it alleges to be, it sheds concerning light on the state of things inside the healthcare system.”

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Here lies an anonymous statement from an A&E consultant in a major hospital in Surrey, in relation to the criminal gagging of all levels of NHS staff, who have been threatened that they will lose their jobs if the speak out about the COVID-1984 scamdemic. (Bernician)

“I am a consultant at a major , regional hospital in Surrey. By major you can take that to indicate that we have an A&E department. I had agreed to give an interview to an anti lockdown activist in which I would have revealed my identity. I have since changed my mind and only feel able to give an anonymous statement. I have changed my mind simply because that all staff , no matter what grade, at all hospitals have been warned that if they give any media interviews at all or make any statements to either the Main Stream Press or smaller, independent press /social media we may, immediately be suspended without pay. I have a family, dependents and I simply cant do it to them. I therefore can not reveal my identity at this time but wish to state as follows:

In my opinion, and that of many of my colleagues, there has been no Covid Pandemic, certainly not in the Surrey region and I have heard from other colleagues this picture is the same throughout the country. Our hospital would normally expect to see around 350,000 out patients a year. Around 95,000 patients are admitted to hospital in a normal year and we would expect to see around a similar figure, perhaps 100,000 patients pass through our A&E department. In the months from March to June (inclusive) we would normally expect to see 100,000 out patients, around 30,000 patients admitted to hospital and perhaps 30,000 pass through A&E. This year (and these figures are almost impossible to get hold of) we are over 95% down on all those numbers. In effect, the hospital has been pretty much empty for that entire period.

At the start, staff that questioned this were told that we were being used as ‘redundant’ capacity, kept back for the ‘deluge’ we were told would come. It never did come, and when staff began to question this, comments like, ‘for the greater good’ and to ‘protect the NHS’ came down from above. Now its just along the lines of, ‘Shut up or you don’t get paid’. The few Covid cases that we have had , get repeatedly tested, and every single test counted as a new case. Meaning the figures reported back to ONS / PHE (Office for National Statistics & Public Health England) were almost exponentially inflated. It could be that Covid cases reported by hospitals are between 5 to 10x higher than the real number of cases. There has been no pandemic and this goes a long way to explain why figures for the UK are so much higher than anywhere else in Europe.

The trust has been running empty ambulances during lockdown and is still doing it now. By this I mean ambulances are driving around, with their emergency alert systems active (sirens & / or lights) with no job to go to. This I believe has been to give the impression to the public that there is more demand for ambulances than there actually is. Staff only wear face coverings/ masks & social distance when public facing, as soon as they are out of public view, the masks come off and social distancing is not observed. Indeed jokes are made about the measures, and I have heard staff express amazement that despite warnings on packets and at point of sales, telling people masks are totally ineffective and dangerous , the public still buy them, because a politician has told them too.

We have cancelled the vast majority of operations and of these ALL elective surgery has been cancelled. That’s surgery that has been pre planned / waiting list. Non elective Surgery, this tends to be emergency surgery or that which is deemed urgent has been severely curtailed. The outcome of this is simple. People are at best being denied basic medical care and at worst, being left to die, in some cases, in much distress and pain.

Regarding death certification. All staff that are responsible for this have been encouraged where possible to put Covid-19 complications as reason for death, even though the patient may have been asymptomatic and also not even tested for covid. I feel this simply amounts to fraudulently completed death certificates and has been responsible to grossly inflating the number of Covid deaths. The fact is that regardless of what you actually die of in hospital, it is likely that Covid-19 will feature on your death certificate. I have included with my statement the detailed published guidance from Government on Death Certification which shows how Covid-19, as a factor is encouraged to at least feature on a death certificate.

Remember Covid-19 itself can not kill. What kills is complications from the virus, typically pneumonia like symptoms. These complications are in reality incredibly rare but have featured and a large amount of death certificates issued in recent months. As long as Covid-19 appears on a death certificate, that death is counted as Covid-19 in the figures released by the ONS and PHE. I genuinely believe that many death certificates, especially amongst the older 65+ demographic have been fraudulently completed so as to be counted as Covid-19 deaths when in reality Covid-19 complications did not cause the death.

There have been Thursday nights when I stood, alone in my office and cried as I heard people cheering and clapping outside. It sickens me to see all the ‘Thank You NHS’ signs up everywhere and the stolen rainbow that for me now says one word and word only; fear.

There are many good people in the NHS and whilst I do not plead forgiveness for myself, I do plead for them. Most are on low pay, they joined for the right reasons and I did and have been bullied and threatened that if they don’t ‘stay on message’ they don’t eat. I know that if a way could be found to assure staff within the NHS of safety against reprisals, there would be a tsunami of whistleblowers which I have no doubt would help end this complete and brutal insanity. I am finding it increasingly hard to live with what I have been involved in and I am sorry this has happened. To end, I would simply say this. Politicians haven’t changed, the country has just made a fatal mistake and started trusting them without question.”

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Video: COVID-19. Contagion Fear, Corruption of Medical Actors

October 12th, 2020 by Dr. Kevin Corbett

Retired nurse and health scientist Dr Kevin Corbett joins me to discuss Covid-19 / SARS-CoV-2 and the similarities to the 1980s panic over HIV-Aids. These similarities span the scientific investigation, clinical testing, elements of the care, and the governmental approaches employed.

Kevin explains how contagion fears have affected the medical profession, major elements of the scientific community and our political leadership alike.

He explains the rationale behind his view that the current crisis represents the corruption of medical actors and a Nazification of the NHS. He concludes that this is part of a wider move to expand centralised command and control measures across society.

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A New Wall for a New Cold War?

October 12th, 2020 by Andrew Korybko

The head of the prestigious Munich Security Conference warned late last month against efforts to “build a new ‘wall’ between Russia and the West” in light of the Navalny incident and the many other disagreements between both sides, and while it’s unrealistic to expect another Berlin Wall-like physical division of Europe, there’s no denying that their different governing models have created a sharp split across the continent.

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Welcome To The New Cold War

Last month will probably go down in history as the moment when the New Cold War became impossible to deny. The US has been attempting to rekindle its fading unipolarity since the onset of its coordinated Hybrid War “containment” campaigns against Russia and China in 2014, which only intensified in the aftermath of Trump’s election. The leaders of all three countries addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA) by video in a series of speeches that laid bare these two sides’ contradictory assessments of contemporary global affairs and related visions of the future. Their keynote speeches were preceded by UN Secretary General Guterres warning the world that “We must do everything to avoid a New Cold War.” Trump obviously didn’t listen to him, which is why the head of the prestigious Munich Security Conference (MSC) followed up that global representative’s warning with his own at the end of that historic week cautioning that “It will result in nothing if we now try to build a new ‘wall’ between Russia and the West because of Navalny and other sad and terrible events.” It’s his dramatic words that form the basis of the present article.

The US’ Hybrid War On Russia

There are many angles through which the ongoing global competition can be analyzed, but the prospect of a new wall of some sort or another accompanying the New Cold War in Europe is among the most intriguing. The MSC head presumably isn’t implying the creation of a 21st-century Berlin Wall, but seems to be speaking more generally about his fear that the growing divisions between Russia and the West will soon become irreversible and potentially even formalized as the new status quo. The author wrote last month that “The US’ Hybrid War On Russian Energy Targets Germany, Belarus, And Bulgaria”, pointing out how even the partial success of this latest “containment” campaign will greatly advance the scenario of an externally provoked “decoupling” between Russia and the West. That would in turn help secure American grand strategic interests in the continent. This “decoupling” would reverse the progress that was made in bilateral relations since the end of the Old Cold War up until the Ukrainian Crisis. Taken to its maximum extent, the spiritual return of the Berlin Wall seems almost inevitable at this point.

Governing Differences

It’s true that the border between the NATO countries and Russia’s CSTO (which importantly includes Hybrid War-targeted Belarus) represents the modern-day military equivalent of the “Iron Curtain”, but the situation isn’t as simple as that. While military divisions remain (albeit pushed much further eastward over the past three decades), ideological and economic ones are less apparent. Russia no long ascribes to communism but follows its own national variant of democracy within a mostly capitalist system, thus reducing the structural differences between itself and its Western counterparts. Unaware observers might wonder why there’s even a New Cold War to begin with when considering how much both sides have in common with one another, but that overlooks their contradictory worldviews which lie at the heart of their mutual suspicions. Russia strongly believes in safeguarding its geopolitical and domestic socio-political sovereignty so it accordingly follows a more conservative path whereas Western countries mostly submit to the US’ authority and generally regard their liberal position on many social issues as universalist.

The End Of The “Great Convergence”

The reason why the thaw in Russian-Western relations failed to achieve the “Great Convergence” that Gorbachev originally hoped for was because the US wanted to impose its will onto Russia by treating it as just another vassal state that would be forced to follow its lead abroad and accept extreme liberal social mandates at home instead of respecting it as an equal partner. Nevertheless, this policy was actually surprisingly successful all throughout the 1990s under Yeltsin, but its fatal flaw was that it went much too far too quickly by attempting to dissolve the Russian Federation through American support for Chechen separatist-terrorist groups. That inadvertently provoked a very patriotic reaction from the responsible members of Russia’s military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) who worked together to ensure their motherland’s survival in the face of this existential crisis. The end result was that Putin succeeded Yeltsin and subsequently set about to systematically save Russia. This took the form of stabilizing the security situation at home in parallel with reasserting Russia on the world stage.

The “Russian Model”

Putin, though, was always a liberal in the traditional (not post-modern) sense. He never lost his appreciation for Western civilization and sincerely wanted to complete Gorbachev’s hoped-for “Great Convergence”, though only on equal terms and not as a US vassal. Regrettably, the Russian leader’s many olive branches were slapped away by an angry America which feared the influence that a powerful “moderately liberal” state could have on its hyper-liberal subjects. All of Putin’s efforts to take the “Great Convergence” to its next logical step of a “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok” failed for this reason, after which an intense information warfare campaign was waged to portray Russia was a “radical right-wing state” even though it was never anything of the sort. This modus operandi was intended to prevent Europe’s indoctrinated masses from ever countenancing whether a “moderate” alternative exists whereby they’d preserve their domestic and international sovereignty despite remaining committed to traditional liberal values, just like the “Russian model” that Putin pioneered. Understandably, this would pose a serious threat to American strategic interests, hence the campaign against it.

The Rise Of America’s Russian Rival

As time went on, the “Russian model” was partially replicated in some of the countries of Central Europe such as Poland and even within the US itself through Trump’s election, though this wasn’t due to any so-called “Russian meddling” but was a natural result of the ideological interplay between radical and “moderate” liberals. It just so happened that Russia was the first country to implement this model not because of anything uniquely “Russian” within its society, but simply as the most pragmatic survival plan considering the extremely difficult circumstances of the 1990s and attendant limits on the country’s strategic maneuverability during that time. It was considered by the patriotic members of Russia’s “deep state” to be much too risky to reverse the direction of post-Soviet reforms, hence why the decision seems to have been made to continue with them, though doing all in the country’s power to regain control over these processes from Russia’s Western overlords in order to protect national geopolitical and domestic socio-political interests. This struggle led to Russia becoming an alternative pole of influence (in the governance sense) within the “Greater West”, rivaling the US.

Hillary & Trump: Same Anti-Russian Strategy, Different Infowar Tactics

With this insight in mind, the New Cold War was inevitable in hindsight. Had Hillary been elected, then the infowar narrative would have focused more on Russia’s different “values”, seeking to present its target as a “threat to the (hyper-liberal) Western way of life”. Since Trump’s America interestingly enough shares many of the same values as contemporary Russia does, however, the focus is on geopolitical differences instead. From the prism of International Relations theory, Hillary’s angle of attack against Russia would have been more liberal whereas Trump’s is more realist. Either way, both American leaders (theoretical in the first sense and actual in the second) have every reason to fear Russia since it challenges the US’ unipolar dominance in Europe. Hillary would have wanted to portray Russia as being outside of the “Western family of nations”, though Trump can’t convincingly do that given his much more high-profile provocations against obviously non-Western China, hence why he’s basically competing with Russia for leadership of the “moderate” liberal model of Western civilization, ergo accepting their structural similarities but instead over-hyping their geopolitical differences.

Post-Soviet Russia’s Irreversible Impact On Western Civilization

Taking all of the aforementioned into account, it’s understandable why the US wants to build a “new wall” in Europe by “decoupling” its NATO-captive subjects from Russia through a series of Hybrid Wars, though the genie is out of the bottle since some Central European countries like Poland the even the US itself under Trump already implement elements of the “Russian model”. This means that while the physical separation of Russia and Europe along military, geopolitical, and soon perhaps even economic-energy lines is practically a fait accompli at this point, the ideological-structural influence emanating from Moscow is impossible to “contain”. No “wall” will reverse the impact that the “Russian model” has had on the course of Western civilization, though it should be remembered that the aforesaid model wasn’t part of some “cunning 5D chess plan” but an impromptu survival tactic that was triggered in response to American unipolar-universalist soft power aggression on post-Soviet Russia. It’s not distinctly “Russian”, which is why the hyper-liberal Western elite fear it so much since they know very well that it could take root in their countries too, just like in Poland and the US.

Concluding Thoughts

The typical Western mind is conditioned to think in terms of models, especially historical ones, which is why they imagine that the New Cold War will closely resemble the Old Cold War simply because of the effect that neuro-linguistic programming has on their thought process. This explains why the MSC head warned against the creation of a “new wall” between Russia and the West even though no such scenario is realistic. No physical barrier like the Berlin Wall will ever be erected again, and even though the geopolitical, military, and perhaps even soon economic-energy fault lines between them might become formalized through the impending success of the US’ “decoupling” strategy, this will not address the root cause of the New Cold War which lies with Russia’s “moderately liberal” model of state sovereignty in contrast to the US’ (former?) hyper-liberal universalist one of state vasselhood. It’s this difference that’s primarily responsible for every other dimension of their competition since it placed Russia on the trajectory of supporting a Multipolar World Order instead of the US’ hoped-for Unipolar World Order.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

It must be occurring to millions of individuals, upon observing the depressing spectacle of top down politics in action, that in the great majority of cases what are termed ‘governments’ are no longer in any way fit to govern. 

It must be dawning on many millions, possibly billions, that those who have been elected to represent the needs and interests of the people, are spectacularly failing in this role.

It must fast be becoming a reality for the great majority of people still able to think, that our world is in the hands of those who display none of the attributes that would pass for ‘leadership’, but an abundance of almost precisely the opposite attributes.

In fact, thinkers must surely observe that the majority of those holding the reins of power adhere only to their own private narcissistic agendas and have no interest in the health and welfare of the people they are elected to support. What’s more, they will observe that the politician of today is, by and large, a compliant puppet to the deep state whose agenda is totalitarian global dominance and mass depopulation.

The chimera called Covid-19 has been, and remains, extremely effective at highlighting the criminal duplicity of the planet’s leaders in almost all spheres of state and corporate administration. We have witnessed – and continue to witness – individuals in responsible management roles passing on the instructions sent to them by their puppet masters, without ever pausing to reflect on the value of these instructions. Each recipient simply acting as a thoughtless slave within an increasingly robotic technocracy – passing the buck on to whoever might be the unfortunate receiver at the bottom of the pile.

We can no longer hide from the realisation that a high percentage of ‘democratic societies’ are now  under the dominant control of an overtly fascistic regime.

Recognising this triggers a kind of emotional shock-wave. What we realise is not just the extremity of the change taking place, but that we ourselves have allowed such a take-over to happen –  right in front of our noses – and yet (mostly) barely registering a peep of conscious resistance.

Far too many have allowed the moral, ethical and spiritual values that underpin the existence of a healthy society – to be undermined by intellectual laziness, material comforts and the prioritising of the virtual gadgets of ‘convenience’. That is what has opened the door for rule by dictatorship.

To realise one is complicit in some form of treasonous satanic take-over of one’s country is a pretty nasty shock. But, at this eleventh hour, a vitally important one, I think you will agree.

What would be the rational next step to take after arriving at such a realisation? What is the natural emotional response to the threat of living as a slave under a totalitarian dictatorship – a techno- fascist regime with ambitions to reduce humanity to a race of genetically engineered cyborgs?

Is it fear – or is it fight-back?

To succumb to fear is to write one’s own death warrant. We know that the spreading of fear is the key weapon of our opponents. The dark medicine of the satanic anti-life cabal. We must therefore completely reject fear, for it fuels the greater ‘pain body’ that the satanic forces draw upon to maintain their powers. Without this fuel they cannot survive. So let us cut them off here and now – at the very root!

That highly propitious step immediately positions us for the great fight-back. Here we are, finally faced by dire necessity to draw upon those strengths coming to us directly from our intimate connection with the greater source of all life. The Divine source. And what an unprecedented privilege it is, at this critical junction of human history, to be right at the epicentre of a push-back that has the potential to forever change the world for the better!

What a hugely auspicious moment – to be brought face-to-face with the imperative to take action on behalf of Life Itself; to fully engage in fighting for the redemption of the creative adventure we call ‘freedom’ – the absolute birthright of every citizen of the world.

We are not going to be turned-back now. We are primed to go into action for the liberation of our planet and the liberation of all the deeply repressed and mistreated species that reside on it.

The very real responsibility for the future of life on Earth, in as much as already destabilised planetary conditions allow, is now firmly in our court.

Even at this darkest hour, humanity is poised at the edge of an extraordinary break-through; but there is a proviso: we must know that making this break-through come to be depends upon firmly taking hold of the reins we previously rejected – that fateful lack of action which allowed the cult of fascism to stake its hold over the greater part of this planet.

‘The order is rapidly fadin’ penned Bob Dylan back in 1964, but building the new one cannot be left to fate. If it is to be the road of truth and justice for which we long, it can only be built by each one of us individually making a bold commitment to stand strong for the great resistance, and equally – to press forward in helping to put in place the building blocks of a society based on truth, justice and love.

Let us all be aware: there is no future unless we make that future happen, individually and collectively.

This is the clarion call of the moment and we simply cannot shun it. So, swing yourself into the saddle, slot your feet into the stirrups, seize the reins and press the flank of your charger into a powerful gallop – having no other focus than a glorious victory for true humanity!

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

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

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Being that today is Canadian Thanksgiving, I thought I’d rack my brain to come up with seven things to be grateful for that have arisen out of the oppressive COVID-19 scandal:

1. Outdoor Classrooms: “If weather permits, consideration could be given to having classes outside,” SickKids Hospital had advised in a July report. As you can see from the above photo, some schools have taken heed.

2. More Homeschooling: With lockdowns, masking and a forthcoming COVID-19 vaccine, more and more parents are homeschooling their children. As Robert Kiyosaki says, the education system has become “obsolete and out of touch with reality” (from the back cover of John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction).

3. Less Commuting: Rates.ca polled Canadians and found 28% more employees are now working from home compared to last year. This gives people more time for their families, exercise and sleep, while reducing car expenses and traffic fatalities.

4. The Emperor Has Absolutely No Clothes Left: The pure denial of science and common sense regarding lockdowns, masking, social distancing and testing has exposed what is either mass corruption, complete incompetence or gun-to-their-head servitude on the part of politicians, media and the medical system. The Pew Research Center reports that 25% of American adults believe that COVID-19 is an orchestrated conspiracy.

5. Spurred to Courage: Many people who have been aware of mounting deception and malicious intentions on the part of government, media and corporations are no longer staying passively quiet. People are facing their fear of authority and fighting back against tyranny. “Protests over responses to the COVID-19 pandemic” now has it’s own Wikipedia entry, listing rallies in 34 countries.

6. Awakened Discrimination: A year ago people didn’t even know what a coronavirus was or how to spell totalitarianism. Now, lay people are delving into scientific studies, studying history and developing analytic abilities; as they try to separate truth from fiction in this information war. They are heeding evidence instead of experts.

7. More Outdoor Patio Space: As you can see from the photo below, social distancing has led to cities allocating more outdoor patio space for restaurants. Our city built these wooden boardwalks around the front of restaurants in our downtown core….

So while the nutty new normal has had negative intentions, out of even the darkest plots much good must come. If nothing else, I am grateful that the scamdemic has triggered change on a massive scale. The world certainly had enough problems that needed changing. Let’s just make sure the change is positive.

In Richard Wagamese’s novel, Indian Horse, an Ojibway medicine man speaks about the “new normal” that the Zhaunagush (the white men) were bringing upon their land:

“A great change will come. It will come with the speed of lightning and it will scorch all our lives… But we must learn to ride each one of these horses of change. It is what the future asks of us and our survival depends on it.”

One day, may we look back on this nutty new normal with gratitude that it pivoted mankind away from a world ruled by generations of oligarchies into one guided by the unchanging qualities of love, wisdom and courage.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

We bring to the attention of our readers this important study by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Click here to access full report

Introduction

Billionaires dominate our politics, culture, and economy. Their wealth, as this report shows, has concentrated mightily over the last four decades — even as the number of U.S. households with zero or negative net worth is increasing and most of us are living paycheck to paycheck.

The current pandemic is exposing our central economic and social reality: Extreme wealth inequality has become America’s “pre-existing condition.”

In this report, we show how billionaire wealth has grown astoundingly over the last few decades — and, for some “pandemic profiteers,” even more dramatically since the COVID-19 crisis — even as billionaire tax obligations have plummeted.

If this inequality isn’t treated with both short and long-term tax reforms and oversight, America’s “pre-existing condition” of extreme inequality could overwhelm not only our economy, but our democracy itself.

  • Between January 1, 2020 and April 10, 2020, 34 of the nation’s wealthiest 170 billionaires saw their wealth increase by tens of millions of dollars. Eight have seen their net worth surge by over $1 billion.
  • As of April 15, Jeff Bezos’s fortune had increased by an estimated $25 billion since January 1, 2020. This unprecedented wealth surge is larger than the Gross Domestic Product of Honduras, $23.9 billion in 2018.
  • Between March 18 and April 10, 2020, over 22 million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged toward 15 percent. Over the same three weeks, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $282 billion, an almost 10 percent gain.
  • Billionaire wealth rebounded quickly after the 2008 financial crisis. Between 2010 and 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth increased 80.6 percent, more than five times the median wealth increase for U.S. households.
  • Between 1990 and 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth soared 1,130 percent — an increase more than 200 times greater than the 5.37 percent growth of U.S. median wealth.
  • Measured as a percentage of their wealth, the tax obligations of America’s billionaires decreased 79 percent between 1980 and 2018.

The Billionaires and the Rest of Us

Three U.S. billionaires — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett — continue to own as much wealth as the bottom half of all U.S. households combined. The 400 richest Americans on the Forbes 400 list own as much wealth as America’s bottom 64 percent, nearly two-thirds of the nation’s households, combined.

The wealth of America’s billionaires increased 10.6 percent between the Forbes global billionaires lists released in 2017, when Trump was inaugurated, and 2020. That number may be rising even more sharply now.

On April 10, 2020, Forbes’ daily tally showed both an increase in the number of billionaires and a surge in billionaire net worth. Billionaire wealth increased by 9.5 percent in just 23 days during the COVID-19 crisis.

Meanwhile, an estimated 78 percent of households are living paycheck to paycheck, while 20 percent have zero or negative net worth. With unemployment surging under the pandemic, this lack of reserves has once again returned to center stage.

Billionaire Taxes Are Down 79 Percent

Between 1980 and 2018, the taxes paid by America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased 79 percent.

By allowing their tax burden to plummet, policymakers have let the nation’s wealth concentrate obscenely at America’s economic summit. Between 2006 and 2018, nearly 7 percent of America’s real increase in wealth went to just 400 billionaires.

As we emerge from the pandemic with trillions in additional national debt, substantial tax increases will be inevitable. Our super-rich must bear their fair share of these increases.

Billionaire Wealth and the Pandemic

Roiling global markets have had a volatile effect on billionaire wealth. From 2019 to 2020, U.S. billionaire ranks increased from 607 to 614 people, but their total wealth declined from $3.111 trillion in 2019 to $2.947 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes.

But that may already be turning around. This year’s Forbes report examines billionaire wealth as of March 18, 2020. By April 10, their wealth had surged to $3.229 trillion, surpassing the 2019 level.

No one has benefited as much as Jeff Bezos, whose wealth surge is unprecedented in the history of modern markets. As of the publication of this report, Bezos’ wealth has increased over $25 billion since January 1, 2020 and $12 billion since February 21st, 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Billionaire wealth, as these numbers show, tends to rebound from market meltdowns. Within 30 months of the September 2008 crash, most billionaire fortunes had recovered. And between 2010 and 2020, the combined wealth of the U.S. billionaire class surged by a staggering 80.6 percent.

Billionaire Pandemic Profiteers

Since January 1, 34 of the wealthiest 170 U.S. billionaires have seen their total net worth increase by tens of millions of dollars, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. These include eight billionaires who, as of April 10, have seen wealth gains of over $1 billion.

  1. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO: up $10 billion ($25 billion as of April 15, 2020)
  2. Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder and CEO: up $5 billion
  3. MacKenzie Bezos, novelist and philanthropist: up $3.5 billion (and up $8.6 billion as of April 15, 2020)
  4. Eric Yuan, Zoom founder and CEO: up $2.58 billion
  5. Steve Ballmer, Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO: up $2.2 billion
  6. John Albert Sobrato, Silicon Valley real estate mogul: up $2.07 billion
  7. Joshua Harris, Apollo Global Management cofounder and owner of multiple professional sports teams: up $1.72 billion
  8. Rocco Commisso, Mediacom Communications founder and CEO and owner of two professional soccer teams: up $1.09 billion

Recommendations

  • Establish a Pandemic Profiteering Oversight Committee that goes beyond oversight of stimulus funds.
  • Discourage wealth hiding through passage of the Corporate Transparency Act.
  • Levy an emergency 10 percent Millionaire Income Surtax.
  • Unleash a Charity Stimulus to mandate payouts of donor-advised funds and emergency 10 percent payout for private foundations for three years.
  • Make the federal estate tax more progressive and institute a wealth tax.
  • Shut down the global hidden wealth system.

Download the IPS full report here.

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All images in this article are from IPS

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VIDEO: Africa’s Highest Peak, Kilimanjaro Is on Fire

October 12th, 2020 by Florah Temba

Mount Kilimanjaro which Africa’s highest peak is on fire, the cause of the fire which is believed to be at hundreds of metres above sea level is yet to be established.

Eye witnesses said efforts by local communities around the affected to extinguish the wild fires were underway but this was hampered by the altitude at which the fire is.

The flames could easily be seen from as far as Moshi town which is some tens of kilometers away from the mountain.

According to Kilimanjaro National Park (Kinapa) the fire broke out late afternoon on Sunday October 11, the same information was later confirmed by the Tanzania National Parks Communications manager Pascal Shelutete saying they would issue a detailed statement later.

Mountain climbers on the Marangu route who were at Kibo Hut were quoted to have seen the fire in the shrubs that are close to Mandara saying given the nature of the vegetation it could spread further if not contained.

Mount Kilimanjaro has three volcanic cones: Kibo, Mawenzi and Shira. It is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest single free-standing mountain in the world: 5,895 metres above sea level and about 4,900 metres above its plateau base.

Kilimanjaro is the 4th most topographically prominent peak on Earth. The first people known to have reached the summit were Hans Meyer  and Ludwig Purtscheller, in 1889.

It is part of Kilimanjaro National Park and is a major climbing destination. Because of its shrinking glaciers and disappearing ice fields, it has been the subject of many scientific studies.

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Featured image: Fire on Mountain Kilimanjaro as seen from Moshi Town (Source: The Citizen)

Bringing Poverty to Heel

October 12th, 2020 by Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir

October 17 marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The commemoration of this day suggests that the way to end poverty is not a matter shrouded in mystery. In fact, its celebration denotes that, at a minimum, the manner to end poverty is most likely established knowledge. While it could withstand further evaluation, its people-centered methodology is tested as plain as day, and it is as well understood as the brutality of en masse denial of the potential of our humanity.

The process of planning actions that eradicate poverty conditions is synonymous with the experience of designing sustainable development or enterprises in societies that experience long life. In a nutshell, we – the public of all walks – must plan together in consideration of the great range of factors that impact and are impacted by social change.

The intentional and unintentional forces that are leveled by societies, and that manifest due to the natural world, that cause growth or demise of an intervention in promoting our general welfare, are relevant in the different areas where we seek improvement. For example, what are the economic and environmental implications of an agricultural enterprise? What are the political repercussions of ending women’s illiteracy? What are the cultural dimensions that hinder or set free the innovation of youth? What are the technical and financial assessments of rural cooperatives’ product-processing activity? What has history taught us about the future when we establish clean drinking water projects that rid ourselves of water-borne diseases and the loss of infant life?

We must view development from all these lenses and dimensions if we are to establish projects that can, over time, strike the deepest blows into poverty. Most critically, how do we enact this kind of multifaceted dimensional planning, considering that no one person or agency can bring to bear all of these angles to identifying an effective social action? It requires the participation of the people, whose poverty is intended to be eradicated, and who are targeted to be the beneficiaries of change, to engage in their own assessment of what will be best for them, involving the inclusive dialogue among women and men, members of all ages, and sectors. Individually, they combine into the many points of view necessary in achieving the balanced design of poverty-ending projects by and for the people.

I project that the people who experience harsh poverty situations, carried down from the past and transmitted further into the future, will one day rejoice when international and domestic developmental assistance will be applied to accomplish the priorities that they determine through their own analysis, discussion, and consensus-building procedures. The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty will never know its last heralding without a number of key realities, one of them being that the matter of allocation of development finance is a community matter, and not for the strings pulled by external others. Further, the world’s Sustainable Development Goals will finally be a juggernaut on the high-road to their fulfillment, when their composition is the aggregate of all the self-defined needs of local communities and neighborhoods on the planet.

Since most poverty on earth afflicts rural people, we should acknowledge that food growers’ associations must also be processors of their bounty. Growers’ capacities must be invested in, to enable the physical infrastructure of water efficiency, to improve upon cultivation and their abilities, and to forge their cooperatives in partnerships that help attain market reach and sustainability. Many nations see the majority of rural girls not going on to secondary school, yet they can and should be breadbaskets for themselves and the blocs of nations of which they are part. A travesty of rural poverty is that it takes place in the very space where there is the vastest potential for most prosperous shared growth.

An astute truth of this International Day is that it is inextricably bound to human rights. How can we manifest the change in our hearts when we have never been asked what may be our own personal vision for our future? How can we courageously put forward our own interests when they have been denied and unacknowledged for the most part of our lives?

It is so immensely difficult and perhaps unfair to expect that we speak to power – which dominates in hamlets as it does in world affairs – when those groups who wield it have done so for ages. The eradication of poverty must start with dismantling those inhibitions and doubts that prevent the assertion of our self-belief, and instead lead to the questioning and redefinition of those relationships that oppress and control. It is then, when we enter into development planning, that we become most robust in our discovery and achievement of opportunities that will once and for all bring poverty to heel, and give rise to our best days on earth.

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Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is President of the High Atlas Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to sustainable development in Morocco.

Featured image: Agricultural cooperative members planning their local projects in Morocco’s Oujda Region (High Atlas Foundation, 2020).

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Em Ghedi, Prepara-se a Nova Base para os F-35 Nucleares

October 12th, 2020 by Manlio Dinucci

No aeroporto militar de Ghedi (Brescia), estão a inciar-se os trabalhos de construção da base operacional mais importante para os caças F-35A da Força Aérea Italiana, armados com bombas nucleares. A empresa Matarrese spa, de Bari, que se adjudicou ao contrato com uma oferta de 91 milhões de euros, vai construir um grande hangar para a manutenção dos caças (mais de 6000 m2) e um edifício que irá albergar o comando e os simuladores de voo, equipado com um isolamento térmico e acústico perfeito, “a fim de evitar fugas de conversas”.

Serão construídas duas linhas de vôo, cada uma com 15 hangares dentro dos quais estarão caças prontos para levantar voo. Isto confirma o que publicámos há três anos (il manifesto, 28 de Novembro de 2017), ou seja, que o projecto (lançado pelo então Ministro da Defesa Pinotti) previa a fixação de, pelo menos, 30 caças F-35A.

Um F-35 em «exibição» na base  aérea de Ghedi, numa foto de Fevereiro deste ano. 

A área ultra secreta onde os F-35 estarão instalados, cercados e vigiados, estará separada do resto do aeroporto. O motivo é claro: ao lado dos novos caças, estarão localizadas as novas bombas nucleares USB61-12, em Ghedi, num depósito secreto que não consta do contrato.

Como as actuais bombas nucleares B-61 com as quais estão armados os Tornado PA-200 do 6º Esquadrão, as B61-12 serão controladas pela unidade especial americana (704th Munitions Support Squadron della U.S. Air Force), «responsável pela recepção, armazenamento e manutenção de armas da reserva de guerra USA, destinadas ao 6º Esquadrão da NATO da Força Aérea Italiana». A mesma unidade da Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos tem a função de “apoiar directamente a missão de ataque” do 6º Esquadrão.

Os pilotos italianos já chegam treinados, nas bases aéreas de Luke, no Arizona, e Eglin, na Flórida, para usar o F-35A também em missões de ataque nuclear, sob comando USA.

Os caças do mesmo tipo, armados ou, de qualquer maneira, que podem vir a ser preparados com as bombas nucleares B61-12, estão albergados na base da Amendola (Foggia), onde já ultrapassaram as 5.000 horas de voo. Além destes, estarão os F-35 da U.S. Air Force, instalados em Aviano com as bombas nuleares B61-12.

O novo caça F-35A e a nova bomba nuclear B61-12 constituem um sistema integrado de armas: o uso do avião implica o uso da bomba. O Ministro da Defesa, Guerini (PD), confirmou que a Itália mantém o compromisso de comprar 90 caças F-35, 60 dos quais são caças modelo A com capacidade nuclear.

A participação no programa F-35, como parceiro de segundo nível, reforça a ancoragem da Itália aos Estados Unidos. A indústria de guerra italiana, chefiada pela empresa Leonardo que administra a fábrica dos F-35 em Cameri (Novara), está ainda mais integrada no gigantesco complexo militar-industrial dos Estados Unidos, liderado pela Lockheed Martin, a maior indústria de guerra do mundo, construtora dos F-35.

Ao mesmo tempo, a Itália – Estado não nuclear aderente ao Tratado de Não Proliferação que lhe proíbe ter armas nucleares no seu território – desempenha a função cada vez mais perigosa, de base avançada da estratégia nuclear USA/NATO contra a Rússia e contra outros países.

Dado que cada avião pode transportar 2 bombas nucleares B61-12 no porão interno, só os 30 caças F-35 de Ghedi, terão uma capacidade de, pelo menos 60 bombas nucleares. Segundo a Federação de Cientistas Americanos, a nova bomba “táctica” B61-12 para os F-35, que os EUA vão instalar em Itália e noutros países europeus a partir de 2022, sendo mais precisa e estando mais próxima dos seus alvos, “terá a mesma capacidade militar das bombas estratégicas distribuídas nos Estados Unidos ».

Por fim, fica a questão, ainda indefinida, dos custos. O Serviço de Pesquisas do Congresso dos Estados Unidos, em Maio de 2020, estima o preço médio de um F-35 em 108 milhões de dólares, precisando porém, que é “o preço de um avião sem motor”, que custa cerca de 22 milhões. Depois de comprar um F-35, ainda que por um preço mais baixo como a Lockheed Martin promete para o futuro, começa a despesa para a sua modernização contínua, para o treino das tripulações e para o seu uso. Uma hora de vôo de um F-35A – documenta a Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos – custa mais de 42.000 dólares. Quer isto dizer que as 5000 horas de voo efectuadas só pelos F-35 de Amendola, custaram aos nossos cofres públicos 180 milhões de euros.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

A Ghedi si prepara la nuova base per gli F-35 nucleari

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos 

  • Posted in Português
  • Comments Off on Em Ghedi, Prepara-se a Nova Base para os F-35 Nucleares

By handing out a €6.5 billion fine against Gazprom, Warsaw has obviously and massively miscalculated because it did not only antagonize the Russian energy company as was intended, but also European partners of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which the Polish government obviously had not considered. Even leaders within the European Union were shocked at the huge fine that Poland is attempting to impose against Nord Stream 2.

It may very well be that the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) has lost itself when deciding on the price of the fine against Gazprom. But regardless of that, UOKiK has apparently also exceeded its jurisdiction. As the Düsseldorf-based energy supplier Uniper reports, the existing agreements on Nord Stream 2 have nothing to do with a joint venture, which is why the Polish laws on merger controls do not apply to them. The initial plans were to finance the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline through the establishment of a joint venture. For this, however, the companies involved should have received a permit in all the countries in which they operate, as well as from Poland, the only EU state that blocked this decision. The decision for it not to be a joint venture was made without further ado so as not to waste time or money in a dispute with Polish authorities.

The pipeline partners designed an alternative financing model for Nord Stream 2 and instead of joining Nord Stream 2 AG (Company) as a co-partner, the European energy companies are participating in the project as lenders so that Polish antitrust laws do not apply to them. However, Gazprom, the majority shareholder of Nord Stream 2 AG, has given its European partners shares in the company as a mortgage for the financing provided. If the loans from the Russian side are not paid, the European corporations automatically become the owners of Nord Stream 2 AG. Referring to this fact, the Polish antitrust authorities have declared the European partner companies to be quasi-shareholders in the pipeline project.

With this UOKiK also justifies the exorbitant fine against Gazprom and the fines of around €55 million against Uniper (German), Wintershall (German), Engie (French), OMV (Austrian) and Shell (English-Dutch). Neither Gazprom nor Nord Stream 2 are financially at risk at the moment and the Russian group has already announced that it will take the fine to court.

Poland is of course now aware that their attempts to fine the Nord Stream 2 project will amount to nothing. The aim of the Polish government is not so much to force a large sum of money from Gazprom in the long term, but rather to bury the pipeline project entirely. And this is the part where Warsaw has grossly miscalculated, not only European reactions, but Russian determination.

The goal to cancel Nord Stream 2 also explains why Polish authorities published their decision last week. Relations between the EU and Russia are extra strained because of the Navalny case and the situation in Belarus. France and Germany are working on new sanctions against Russia for the Navalny case and continue to apply pressure against Belarus.

Another question is how effective these measures will be. Sanctions have long degenerated into ambiguity as it is the usual way the West deals with Moscow. Russia has learnt how to adjust their economy accordingly, meaning that sanctions have turned into a farce. The West is regularly expanding its blacklists of sanctioned companies and private individuals, but there has been no significant effect. Political forces with a keen interest in the failure of Nord Stream 2 are plentiful in the West and they are currently advancing the Navalny case in the hope that it will cut the EU from Russia more strongly or permanently. This will not occur as Europe desperately needs Russian energy, which is why Nord Stream 2 is such a critical project for all involved.

Poland plays the main role in trying to cancel Nord Stream 2 and the decision by UOKiK is just another push to finally get Europe to abandon the pipeline project. According to a joint declaration by France and Germany, measures are currently being prepared for those alleged to be responsible in the Navalny case and their participation in the so-called Novichok program.

Despite these measures, Western Europe is bringing its energy project which is important for its own future out of the danger zone, while Poland is attracting even more displeasure from EU giants through its own operation. A penalty against Gazprom may be a Russian problem, but fines against leading corporations from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Austria are guaranteed to leave many of Europe’s biggest capitalist angered. The effort Warsaw is making to thwart Nord Stream 2 is visibly turning opposite to what they expected as there is little doubt the Nord Stream 2 project will come to fruition and completion.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The Russia Brokered Armenia-Azerbaijan Ceasefire

October 12th, 2020 by Andrew Korybko

It was a diplomatic coup for Russia to broker a ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan since it restored Moscow’s relevance to the conflict, but for as positive of a development as this was, it’s uncertain whether it’ll last and will thus serve as a litmus test of exactly how much influence the Eurasian Great Power still holds over its “sphere of influence” in the South Caucasus.

Russia’s Diplomatic Coup In The South Caucasus

The world is celebrating the Russian-brokered Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire which went into effect at noon on Saturday following over 10 hours of negotiations between Foreign Minister Lavrov and his two counterparts. Not only is it supposed to serve immediate humanitarian purposes, but it’s also a diplomatic coup for Russia which restored Moscow’s relevance to the conflict. Turkey had hitherto been considered by many to be the most important external party shaping the course of events, yet Russia proved that it’s capable of leveraging its excellent relations with both warring sides in order to bring about at least a temporary halt to the fighting. For as positive of a development as this was, however, it’s uncertain whether it’ll last and will thus serve as a litmus test of exactly how much influence the Eurasian Great Power still holds over its “sphere of influence” in the South Caucasus. What follows is a list of observations about the ceasefire and a brief explanation of each one. It aims to provoke critical thinking among all interested readers, many of whom are still struggling to understand the dynamics of this complex conflict. Without further ado, here are the most important points to pay attention to:

Russia’s “Balancing” Act Brought Both Parties To The Table

Contrary to what many in the Alt-Media Community have been misled into believing about Russia supposedly favoring Armenia over Azerbaijan, Moscow actually has equally strategic relations with both countries as a result of its “balancing” act of the past few years, in particular what the author previously described as its “Ummah Pivot” towards Muslim-majority states. Had the Alt-Media Community’s infowar narrative been accurate, then Azerbaijan wouldn’t have had any reason to trust in Russia’s diplomatic neutrality as a mediator and thus the talks might never have taken place at all. Going forward, observers must recognize that emotional arguments about Russia’s historical and religious connections with Armenia are generally brought up for the purpose of misleading their targeted audience into overestimating the influence that those two factors have on the formulation of Russian foreign policy. The intent is to make others think that Moscow believes Yerevan’s dangerous claim that the war is a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, which isn’t true.

The Political Will Existed On Both Sides To Temporarily Halt The Violence

The cliched phrase that “it takes two to tango” is relevant in light of the latest ceasefire since it wouldn’t have been agreed to had both warring sides not had the political will to temporarily halt the violence. Their motivations in this respect differ since Yerevan needs time to recover from the devastating onslaught of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces while Baku understands the soft power importance of pushing a political solution to this long-running conflict instead of imposing a military one (no matter its legal right to do so). The coming winter also likely played a role as well. It’s already difficult enough as it is to fight in mountainous terrain, and this becomes practically impossible once it starts heavily snowing. Azerbaijan already liberated several lowland villages so it has something of tangible significance to show off to its people while Armenia still holds the highland core of the occupied territories which similarly allows it “save face” as well. That said, there are several of reasons why the war might soon resume, but those points will be discussed later in the article.

Militant Reports & Iran’s Peace Efforts Accelerated Russia’s Diplomatic Intervention

Russia was already seeking to diplomatically intervene in the conflict, not only because of its excellent relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan but also because it regards the South Caucasus as its “sphere of influence”, though reports about foreign militant activity in the conflict zone and Iran’s peace efforts probably accelerated this development by giving it a renewed sense of urgency from Moscow’s perspective. The author discussed the first factor more in detail in his recent piece “Explaining The Incongruence Between The Iranian & Syrian Stances Towards Nagorno-Karabakh” while the second one was touched upon in his article about how “Iran’s Official Support Of Azerbaijan Proves That Mutual Suspicions Can Be Overcome”. Taken together, Russia was seriously concerned that its security and diplomatic interests would be irreparably harmed if it hadn’t acted when it did. Not only could militancy rekindle the conflict in the North Caucasus if it isn’t contained, but Russia’s post-Soviet role in the region might be replaced by the joint Turko-Persian one which historically precedes it.

The OSCE Retained Its Leading Role Over The Peace Process

The Moscow communique reaffirmed that the OSCE Minsk Group remained the only format for politically resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which importantly reinforced Russian influence after Iranian attempts to replace it as explained in the previous observation and Turkish ones to promote a military solution instead. It’s unclear at this time whether Armenia will abide by the Madrid Principles, but that slate of proposals which was last refined in 2009 represents the most pragmatic way to end the conflict. Azerbaijan’s annoyance at the OSCE Minsk Group’s nearly three-decade-long failure to guarantee Armenia’s military withdrawal from the occupied regions in line with the four UNSC Resolutions on the matter (822, 853, 874, 884) was attributed by many as the reason why it launched its counteroffensive to change the status quo late last month in response to provocations along the Line of Contact (LOC). Without any measurable progress on this front such as agreeing on a timeline for Armenia’s withdrawal, it’s unlikely that the current ceasefire will last all that long.

Armenia’s Second Reported Attack On Azerbaijan’s Ganja Risks Embarrassing Russia

Azerbaijan accused Armenia of shelling its second-largest city of Ganja approximately 12 hours after the ceasefire was supposed to have gone into effect, which Yerevan denied but if proven true would represent the second major attack against this civilian target located outside the conflict zone. That would risk embarrassing Russia after all that the Eurasian Great Power did to get Azerbaijan to halt its counteroffensive. Armenia would therefore have proven itself to be a real “rogue state” in every sense of the word since it would be signaling to Russia that the latter doesn’t have any real influence over it, at least as it relates to the Nagorno-Karabakh Continuation War. Armenia claims that Azerbaijani violated the ceasefire first and that all its forces are doing is responding to its enemy’s provocation, though shelling a civilian location outside the conflict zone is a disproportionate response by any metrics even in the unlikely event that it’s telling the truth about not having started this latest tit-for-tat.

Pashinyan Is Under Immense Pressure From All Sides

Armenia’s erratic behavior can be explained by the fact that Prime Minister Pashinyan is under immense pressure from all sides. Not only did Russia presumably pressure him to order the Armenian separatists to stand down, but radical nationalists are exerting grassroots pressure upon him to continue the war until a “decisive victory” is achieved (which includes reconquering recently lost land). This Color Revolutionary-turned-leader has first-hand experience in weaponizing his society’s hyper-jingoist sentiment for regime change purposes so he understands very well just how risky his political future would be if he abided by the four UNSC Resolutions demanding his country’s military withdrawal from the universally recognized Azerbaijani territory that it illegally occupies. He was also never in Russia’s good graces either so Armenia’s patron has little interest in engaging in any “regime reinforcement” efforts in his support. Pashinyan is also keenly aware that he’d probably go down in Armenian history as its most hated leader ever if he “surrenders” for the “greater good”.

A Winter War Isn’t Preferred, But Is Still Possible

If the ceasefire violations continue and Russia is unable to exert its peacemaking influence over the increasingly “rogue state” of Armenia, then a winter war is indeed possible even such a scenario isn’t preferred. It was already explained how mountainous fighting in these conditions is almost impossible, but both sides could resort to shelling, drone strikes, airstrikes, and missile strikes during this period instead. That might unfortunately worsen the humanitarian hardships placed upon the civilians caught in the crossfire between the warring states, thus compelling another peace push by all relevant regional stakeholders, though it’s unclear whether it would succeed. It’s certainly not in Russia’s interests to have its ceasefire shredded so shortly after its herculean diplomatic efforts to broker it, nor does Moscow want to see Tehran or Ankara’s preferred solutions to the conflict replace its own, yet that might end up being exactly what happens if Pashinyan can’t resist the intense grassroots pressure upon him to continue the war and keeps defying the UNSC Resolutions.

A Russian-Iranian-Turkish Compromise Might Be The Only Way Out Of The War

Russia’s model of maintaining the traditional OSCE Minsk Group diplomatic means for resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict won out for the time being in its unexpected competition with Iran’s efforts to establish an alternative diplomatic platform and Turkey’s desire to do away with diplomacy entirely by focusing solely on supporting a military solution. If the Russian-brokered ceasefire doesn’t hold, then this competition between the three partnered Great Powers will re-erupt with uncertain consequences. It’ll be very difficult for Moscow to argue that the OSCE Minsk Group has any remaining relevance while Tehran and Ankara’s cases would be strengthened by default. In that scenario, a compromise between them might be the only way out of the war. A new diplomatic platform might be created by Iran which includes both Russian and Turkish participation without any role being given to the OSCE Minsk Group’s American and French co-chairs. Its main goal would be to craft a timetable for Armenia’s military withdrawal from Azerbaijan in accordance with UNSC Resolutions.

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The Russian-brokered ceasefire was a diplomatic coup for Moscow which showed that the Eurasian Great Power is still a force to be reckoned with in the South Caucasus even if Turkish influence there has recently grown. The competition between those two countries is manageable for the moment, but their contradictory views on the best way to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are irreconcilable and could lead to a new round of rivalry if the ceasefire fails. Everyone is holding their breath to see whether or not that’ll happen, which unfortunately can’t be discounted after Armenia showed the world just how much of a “rogue state” it’s become after reportedly attacking Azerbaijan’s Ganja for the second time in violation of this weekend’s Moscow communique. If events spiral out of Russia’s control, then it might have little choice but to support the Iranian push to establish an alternative diplomatic platform for resolving this conflict, one which might closely resemble the Astana peace process that those two and Turkey trilaterally lead in Syria. It’ll remain to be seen whether that’s necessary, but the coming week will provide a clearer idea of just how likely that scenario is.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

Today’s newsletter of Lockdown Sceptics features an exclusive interview with a nurse who worked in an NHS hospital throughout the pandemic and says she has never had so little to do. Now she feels compelled to speak out against the “most wilful of lies” she has witnessed, in the hope that “such a grave miscarriage of justice for health can never be allowed to happen again”.

The interview was conducted by Gavin Phillips. The nurse has to remain anonymous because if she’s named she’s likely to lose her job, given the NHS’s draconian policy about not talking to the media. But Lockdown Sceptics has confirmed she is indeed a registered nurse – we’ve seen her NHS id and spoken to her.

She is 100% genuine.

-Will Jones, Lockdown Sceptics, October 10, 2020

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Interview with a Registered Nurse

This is an interview with a nurse with over 20 years’ experience. Jessica (pseudonym) has worked in a large NHS hospital for the majority of the time from February through September.

I have met with Jessica and have verified that she is a registered nurse. She wishes to remain anonymous at this time.

Q. Do you work in the same hospital most of the time?
Answer: Yes

Q. What size is the hospital, how many beds are there?
Answer: Over 800

Q. Different nurses often have different areas where they work in a hospital. In which departments do you usually work?
Answer: All departments. Care of the Elderly, Medicine, Surgical and Emergency area. As well as specialities like Stroke, Gynae, etc.

Q. Please walk us through a typical shift for you. The types of patients you would help and what you would be doing.
Answer: After handover from the night staff lasting about half an hour, I would then begin my morning medication round. This would probably finish between 9am and 9.30am, by which time doctors would be on ward. I would prioritise and attend to my most unwell patients first, making sure they had the fluids or other products they need, like blood transfusions or antibiotic infusions.

If on a surgical ward I would prepare my patients for theatre, liaising with anaesthetists and surgeons to make sure they were prepared safely and all checks completed. After this I would help care assistants with washing other patients and making sure they were comfortable. A round of observations would also need to be done in the morning of blood pressures, temperatures, etc.

My lunchtime drug round would then begin and after lunch it would generally be very much about completing processes for patients’ discharges, care rounds and initiating changes doctors may have made to patients’ care. If on surgical wards, I would then go and collect my patients from theatre and monitor them closely during recovery back on the ward. An evening drug round and copious amounts of paperwork would then complete my day.

Q. I know that different hospitals offer different treatments and surgeries. What types of surgeries does your hospital offer?
Answer:

  • All types of orthopaedic surgery. Plastic surgery, usually from a traumatic wound or a cancerous skin lesion
  • General surgery such as appendicectomy and cholecystectomy
  • Mastectomies and surgery for breast cancer
  • Gynae surgery
  • Vascular surgery
  • General day surgery where invasive diagnostic procedures may be done like endoscopies and biopsies. Also stenting, usually for urology purposes
  • Chemotherapy department
  • Dialysis department

Q. Generally, how busy was your hospital?
Answer: Very busy.

Q. What was your hospital’s busiest time of year?
Answer: I absolutely find the type of patients and the workload the same all year round.

Q. Do you recall any particular winter that was very busy and with what?
Answer: Norovirus is generally more common in winter. So, this would impact on the general hospital workload as, similar to Covid, the wards would be shut to all visitors, no other patients could be admitted to prevent contamination and therefore many beds on norovirus wards would be empty.

Q. When did you first start hearing about COVID-19?
Answer: End of February

Q. What did your superiors say about it early on?
Answer: There wasn’t a great deal of information, other than what was on the news and other media. I think staff’s biggest concern was for their own safety, the main issue being PPE. Certainly, there was some unnecessary hysteria, but generally I think the wards took things day by day. I did not see any superiors.

It seemed to be that whoever was in charge of a shift (this could be a staff nurse, not necessarily a ward sister or manager) would attend a brief Covid daily meeting, but little information would be relayed on their return, maybe just how many Covid patients were in hospital or PPE advice.

Q. Was Covid expected to overwhelm your hospital?
Answer: Staff were generally overwhelmed with fear of what to expect. The world had been warned of this new killer virus and I think many must have felt like lambs fed to the lions.

Conflicting information on PPE, different countries around the world seeming to have more adequate protection and the dilemma of whether staff should separate from their own families to protect them from this transmissible threat to life that was Covid.

Nurses had fewer patients now as there were fewer patients overall and many redeployed staff, so I don’t think staff could have felt overwhelmed from a workload point of view. But working with the pressure that life was no longer as we knew it took its toll on everybody

Q. At what date (approximately) did you start seeing Covid patients?
Answer: Beginning of March.

Q. What were their symptoms?
Answer: Low oxygen levels, sometimes a higher temperature but often no symptoms that would distinguish differently from their other underlying conditions. I did not come across any patient reporting more unusual symptoms like loss of smell or taste. Neither did I see any patients that developed any associated clotting problems.

Any deteriorating patient would develop worsening function in all body organs and systems but these cannot be called symptoms of Covid. It’s just more the fact that a patient was dying in the same way every other failing bodied patient has died.

Q. Were their symptoms any different to other serious respiratory viruses that you had seen and treated in the past?

Answer: The Covid patients presented no differently to any other respiratory illness, which most Covid patients already had a history of anyway. Previous to Covid we would see patients with the same symptoms in conditions like exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, community acquired pneumonia, hospital acquired pneumonia, some types of heart failure, sepsis and general frailty.

Any infection, as we all know, could present with a high temperature and quite understandably if a patient was admitted with a chest infection, we could also see deteriorated respiratory function which would be low oxygen levels. A simple chest infection in the main could look identical to Covid.

Q. Did you see any Covid patients under 20 years old?
Answer: No

Q. Did you see any Covid patients under 50 years old?
Answer: No

Q. What was the general age range of the Covid patients?
Answer: Over 70

Q. Were the elderly moved to Care Homes?
Answer: Not immediately. Most were detained in hospital for a long time, absolutely unable to see any of their family. These patients would not be for resuscitation so essentially their treatment would be palliative. I do not think that hospitals are the best places to find comfort, dignity and symptom control so it was distressing that many patients could not be discharged sooner.

Q. As you mentioned, this virus mainly attacks the elderly. With the lockdown rules and the elderly unable to see their family for months, what effect has this had on their mental health?
Answer: It has affected their mental health enormously. Bewilderment, loneliness and isolation. I know many elderly people who have had to choose between obeying the fear and seeing their own grandchildren, with many hearts creakingly choosing the first.

They should never have been put in this impossible situation, compounded all the more by the fact these could be the final months or years of their lives.

Q. Approximately what percentage of the Covid patients had other serious pre-existing conditions?
Answer: 100%

Q. Please give us some examples of those pre-existing conditions?
Answer: Heart failure, Parkinson’s, strokes, leg cellulitis and leg ulcers, diabetes, kidney disease and general anopia are some examples.

Q. Is it true that other viruses like flu and pneumonia mostly kill the elderly who have at least one pre-existing condition?
Answer: Yes

Q. In your over 20 years of experience, did you see a specific difference between Covid patients and other patients you have treated that had a severe viral infection?
Answer: No

Q. What were the treatments you gave to Covid patients?
Answer: Oxygen therapy and IV fluids. Often antibiotic therapy also.

Q. During the height of this alleged pandemic in April, how many Covid patients were in your hospital?
Answer: I am not sure, maybe 100 to 125.

Q. Was there a point at which you thought that this was not a pandemic?
Answer: I did not think this was a pandemic from the start. I think people were being intentionally frightened and this is what captured my attention. So, I decided to sit back and observe for differences between Covid and normal health problems. But no differences whatsoever were revealed to me.

Q. Were there any other patients in your hospital from April through August?
Answer: A very minimal amount.

Q. How empty was the hospital during those months?
Answer: Extremely empty. Bays that were normally full were completely empty. On several occasions I have had no patients at all for an entire 12-hour shift.

The hospital has speciality wards for medical emergencies such as strokes, which were always full (before Covid). An emergency episode like a stroke can be easily diagnosed and treated with thrombolytic therapy, a hugely vital service preventing death and worsening brain injuries. The stroke ward was virtually empty.

I know there is some belief that hospitals were empty because our usual patients were too afraid to come to hospital because of the pandemic. However, the majority of patients never brought themselves into hospital anyway, being so ill that somebody would need to call an ambulance for them as they had suffered a stroke or an epileptic fit or a fall.

In the main it would be a carer, district nurse or kindly neighbour that phoned for an ambulance on their behalf, but it seems that these calls just weren’t being made. It makes me shudder to think that these people, mainly the elderly again, collapsed and likely died at home as coming into hospital for treatment no longer seemed an option for them.

It is a simple observation and I would welcome any government official to compare hospital records from this year to every other year and examine why this category of patients were suddenly missing.

Q. Were all other serious surgeries postponed during this time?
Answer: I believe all other surgeries were cancelled apart from some orthopaedic trauma and general trauma. I am not sure about chemotherapy but I think all services were very limited if not ceased completely.

I nursed a 50-year-old lady last week who was diagnosed in January with aggressive breast cancer. Her mastectomy was planned for early March but was then cancelled. She had no contact with the Oncology Team and only just had her mastectomy three weeks ago. When I met her, she was waiting on the results of her recent MRI to see if her cancer had spread anywhere else. She has really experienced a lot of fear this year.

Q. What were you and the other nurses doing on your shifts in a hospital that was virtually empty?
Answer: Nothing. Although I did busy myself on one occasion doing an incident form as the stock supply of basic equipment was unacceptable.

Q. Were any other nurses or doctors questioning this?
Answer: No

Q. Could your hospital have coped with the Covid cases and carried on offering regular health care as they have done in previous epidemics?
Answer: Yes

Q. For clarification. Your hospital was nearly empty for five-plus months. People who desperately needed surgeries and other treatments were postponed for many months. Was this necessary in your professional opinion?
Answer: No

Q. Have you spoken to other nurses in different hospitals? What have their experiences been?
Answer: They all agree that hospitals have been empty, but most believe this was necessary to protect the public. But many never question it at all.

Q. While the country was clapping for the NHS, you were sitting in a nearly empty hospital. How did this make you feel?
Answer: I felt a terrible fraud when the whole country was clapping the NHS. Once, when I was on duty at the allocated clapping time, the staff that had had a rather quiet day, then insisted that everybody stand up and clap themselves as well.

I have to say this rather turned my stomach, and I had to make my excuses and lock myself in the toilet. I felt rather desperate to find colleagues that might be questioning it all, like myself, but it was clear to see that everybody was believing the media narrative.

I also felt despairing for my patients. Many were very alone and afraid, unable to see their loved ones. I think my saddest experience in all my nursing career was back in March when I had to lend my mobile phone to a dying man so he could say goodbye to his daughter. It felt utterly unfathomable that myself, this man and his remotely present daughter could find ourselves in this situation, and we all cried.

Q. Has your hospital started to help people in September?
Answer: Yes, services have been reintroduced gradually.

Q. Were you ever told by your superiors not to speak to anybody in the media about the fact your hospital has been virtually empty for five months?
Answer: No, not directly, but that has been my understanding.

Q. In recent weeks the government has been mentioning increasing cases of Covid. Cases of a disease are more serious than someone who only tests positive, but has little or no symptoms at all. But the government has not made it clear to the public the difference between the two, or whether they count all people who test positive as a new ‘case’. Have you seen an increase in Covid patients being admitted to your hospital in the past six weeks?
Answer: No

Q. The Government has been saying that Covid is an unprecedented threat to public health and is a national crisis. It has implemented the most draconian restrictions on people’s liberty this country has ever seen. But your experience tells a totally different story. Was it strange seeing the stories in the mainstream media of a supposed Spanish Flu (1917-1918) type killer virus, but you are seeing nothing like this in your hospital?

Answer: Yes, it felt completely surreal. A wave of disbelief that I found really quite crippling at first. Many people in my family were asking my opinion on the coronavirus in the week or two before lockdown. I confidently reassured them that everything was okay and although much news was being made of it, this was really nothing that new. As always, we should be a little more mindful of the elderly and vulnerable, but compassion and common sense would eventually prevail. How wrong I was.

My partner was furloughed, the schools and high street closed immediately. Any forms of normal recreational escapism disappeared overnight, compounding the fear suddenly unleashed on our lives. I knew far greater health threats were occurring as a side-effect to all the unforgivably irrational management measures of Covid.

I really cannot call them safety measures. Rather than protecting health I in fact saw greater neglect as fearful staff were told to limit their time with patients and the care that these people deserved in the last days and weeks of their lives simply wasn’t there.

Many patients I see now will have stories of how they could not access any services, follow-up appointments or GP appointments. This is not what I became a nurse for and if healthcare has failed them in any way, all I can give them now is my sincerest apology.

Q. What are your reasons for taking part in this interview?
Answer: As a nurse, acting in the best interests of patients and the wider general public has always been the most integral part of nursing for me. Sometimes my views may be opposed by other health care professionals, but I will always advocate for my patients to ensure they have the fairest and best treatment.

When the pandemic began, I certainly did not see action taken in the patients’ best interests. Keeping relatives away from their dying loved ones in hospital must surely be an infringement on basic human rights.

Scared staff were told to limit the amount of care given to patients, all very elderly, thereby compromising their personal hygiene, care and dignity. Doctors paid much less attention to all other health conditions as patients were not for resuscitation and considered “end of life”.

This hospital formula in response to the alleged Covid pandemic I believe is a direct link to increased deaths. If Covid produced different symptoms to other viruses, it would be an undeniable new and frightening virus, but life in hospitals looked exactly the same. If the stories of “this unprecedented new virus” were not constantly flooding all news and media, we would never even have known of its existence.

We must also not forget the patients who have been denied healthcare for many months. The many, many patients that have been unable to access services, outpatient clinics were no longer open, a crucial service of reassurance and possible detection of changes to their health conditions.

This would have caused enormous anxiety to those denied. I have met patients that have had surgery cancelled. A lady that broke her arm in February has had it hanging limply by her side since, losing muscle tone, good circulation, affecting her life and ability to work. She has attended A&E twice begging for surgery, even saying she would sign a disclaimer if she contracted an infection. But of course, she was refused and her despair and desperation ignored.

So, depression sets in. Depression, anxiety and general loss of confidence in our public bodies will all lead to serious mental health problems and therefore increased suicides. Loneliness and isolation experienced in lockdown can affect us all, healthy or otherwise, this too will undoubtedly have devastating consequences on the mental health of individuals.

The speed at which I could see my colleagues buckling against the fear and brainwashing was also hugely unsettling. Orders were simply followed without question, which in turn fills me with fear, as a healthy world can only be achieved where ideas and instructions are studied, challenged and debated.

I can only say the most wilful of lies were being told during the height of the pandemic and continue today. Chief nurse Ruth May has said that nurses were at the forefront of the COVID-19 response and have worked so hard. She has said she is proud of how nurses have stepped up to the challenge. I do not consider this to be truthful at all. Some wards were full, but with no more patients than any other times and lots of redeployed staff. The workload was definitely less. Other wards were rather empty. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the crisis? Where’s this Covid?

I know there are figures upon figures, statistics upon statistics, that the Government is picking and choosing to endorse the fear and create scare tactics, but for me, the numbers do not account for much. They’ve ‘cooked the books’ and the masses have been manipulated.

For me, it’s over 20 years of experience, professional and human instinct and being on the front lines for over six months. I have seen confusion, avoidable suffering and death with my own eyes, so I have no need for the numbers.

I consider this interview to be the greatest practice of patient advocacy I can ever demonstrate. I will do whatever I can, I must raise awareness to the real truth so that questions can be asked and enquiries may begin. My real hope is that such a grave miscarriage of justice for health can never be allowed to happen again.

Q. Thank you for taking part in this interview, I appreciate it and I’m sure many others will appreciate it as well.
Answer: Thank you for giving me an opportunity to inform people about what I have seen over the last six months.

Closing thoughts

As “Jessica” has stated, she has been sitting in a nearly empty hospital throughout this alleged pandemic. Other seriously sick patients have been deprived of medical attention for six months. The entire country has been scared witless by a massive fear campaign orchestrated by this government and spread by the mainstream media.

The suffering that the people of our country have endured is incalculable and unprecedented. This Government needs to be held accountable for its actions. If any police, lawyers, nurses or doctors want to tell their story during this Covid period, or want to help in any way, please contact me at [email protected], Twitter: @photopro28 . The truth must be brought to light.

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This article was originally published in May 2020.

On Friday, Donald Trump announced his appointment of Moncef Slaoui, a former executive with vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, to lead “Operation Warp Speed”, Trump’s plan to fast track the development of vaccines for COVID-19. Slaoui will serve in a volunteer position, assisted by Army Gen. Gustave Perna, the commander of United States Army Materiel Command.

According to the Trump administration, Operation Warp Speed program is focusing on four vaccines, with the hopes of testing and producing 100 million doses by October 2020, 200 million by December, and 300 million doses by January. At Friday’s press conference, Slaoui said he believes the goal of vaccines by January 2021 is a “credible goal”. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was more adamant, stating that, “winning matters and we will deliver, by the end of this year, a vaccine”.

Operation Warp Speed and the calls for public-private partnerships mimic the National Institutes of Health’s recent call for bringing together pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The NIH plan, Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) partnership, emphasizes “a collaborative framework for prioritizing vaccine and drug candidates, streamlining clinical trials, coordinating regulatory processes and/or leveraging assets among all partners to rapidly respond to the COVID-19 and future pandemics.”

The appointment of Slaoui follows previous statements regarding Trump’s desire to have vaccines available to Americans by the fall. “I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year, and I think distribution will take place almost simultaneously because we’ve geared up the military,” Trump said Thursday afternoon. Trump also told the Fox Business Network that because of the “massive job to give this vaccine” the military is now being mobilized. “We’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly,” Trump concluded.

At Friday’s press conference Trump said his team has been working 24 hours a day to develop treatments for COVID-19. Despite the heavy focus on vaccines, Trump did state that his administration is working on other treatments, including “therapeutics”. “It’s not solely vaccine based, other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. I don’t people to think this is all dependent on a vaccine, but it would be tremendous,” Trump stated.

However, the appointment of Dr. Slaoui is an indication that the Trump administration approves of the former executive’s efforts to develop vaccines and his partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Moncef Slaoui and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

An examination of the career and connections of Dr. Moncef Slaoui reveals that Donald Trump’s appointment of a Big Pharma executive is not a cause for celebration.

Dr. Moncef Slaoui’s official biography states:

“Dr. Slaoui was a Professor of Immunology at the University of Mons, Belgium. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers and presentations. Dr. Slaoui earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Immunology from the University Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium and completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.”

Following his education, Slaoui joined the pharmaceutical industry, serving on the board of Directors of GlaxoSmithKline between 2006 through 2015. Slaoui served in several senior research & development (R&D) roles with GlaxoSmithKline during his time with the company, including Chairman of Global Vaccines. GSK has a history of working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on projects such as the development of a malaria vaccine and anti-HIV compounds used as microbicides. In fact, Dr. Slaoui worked for 27 years on the malaria vaccine, ultimately partnering with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a $600 million malaria vaccine. When Slaoui took over at GSK, his predecessor, Tachi Yamada, joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

More recently, Slaoui sits on the boards of pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology organizations. He is also partner at MediciX investment firm, chairman of the board at Galvani Bioelectronics, chairman of the board at SutroVax and sits on the boards of Artisan Biosciences, Human Vaccines Project and Moderna Therapeutics. Each of these companies is involved in vaccine development and the emerging field of bioelectronics.

Galvani Bioelectronics was formed out of an agreement with Verily Life Sciences LLC (formerly Google Life Sciences), an Alphabet company, and GSK. The goal is to “enable the research, development and commercialisation of bioelectronic medicines.”

Bioelectronic medicine is a relatively new research field focused on tackling chronic diseases by using “miniaturised, implantable devices that can modify electrical signals that pass along nerves in the body, including irregular or altered impulses that occur in many illnesses”. GSK has been active in this field since 2012 and has stated that chronic conditions such as arthritis, diabetes and asthma could potentially be treated using these devices. GSK called the partnership an important step in their research of bioelectronics. GSK stated that if they are successful at using “advances in biology and technology” to “correct the irregular patterns found in disease states, using miniaturised devices attached to individual nerves”, this method would be a “new therapeutic modality alongside traditional medicines and vaccines.”

Galvani’s plan to use miniature implantable devices within the body was described by MIT Technology Review as “hacking the nervous system.” In 2016, Slaoui said, “We hope to have approval and be in the marketplace in the next seven to 10 years. It’s not science fiction. And it’s progressing quite well.”

In 2016, Slaoui was appointed to the Board of Directors of Moderna Therapeutics, a biotech company that is leading the way for messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines. TLAV writer Whitney Webb recently reported on Moderna Therapeutics joining the fight against COVID-19:

“The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced that it would fund three separate programs in order to promote the development of a vaccine for the new coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak.

CEPI — which describes itself as “a partnership of public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations that will finance and co-ordinate the development of vaccines against high priority public health threats” — was founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its massive funding and close connections to public, private and non-profit organizations have positioned it to be able to finance the rapid creation of vaccines and widely distribute them.

CEPI’s recent announcement revealed that it would fund two pharmaceutical companies — Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna Inc. — as well as Australia’s University of Queensland, which became a partner of CEPI early last year. Notably, the two pharmaceutical companies chosen have close ties to and/or strategic partnerships with DARPA and are developing vaccines that controversially involve genetic material and/or gene editing. The University of Queensland also has ties to DARPA, but those ties are not related to the university’s biotechnology research, but instead engineering and missile development.”

Webb goes on to detail how Moderna is working with the U.S. NIH to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus and how the project will be entirely funded by CEPI, which in turn was founded and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Moderna’s vaccine is a controversial messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine which was developed with a $25 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

“Moderna’s past and ongoing research efforts have included developing mRNA vaccines tailored to an individual’s unique DNA as well as an unsuccessful effort to create a mRNA vaccine for the Zika Virus, which was funded by the U.S. government,” Webb reported.

To recap: Donald Trump has appointed Dr. Moncef Slaoui to head Operation Warp Speed, his effort to fast track the development of COVID-19 vaccines and other therapeutics. Slaoui has worked in the pharmaceutical industry on vaccine development for decades. Several companies he has worked with or sits on the Board of Directors are funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One of these companies, Moderna, is conducting research on RNA vaccines in partnership with the U.S. government’s creepiest organization, DARPA.

Once again, this should be an indication that Donald Trump is continuing to push the agenda of Big Pharma.

Will the vaccine be mandatory?

Despite the launch of Operation Warp Speed, the appointment of a Big Pharma Executive, and the calls for military involvement in distribution of vaccines, some Trump supporters still maintain that Donald J. Trump is not a part of the Rockefeller-Gates agenda to vaccinate the entire world. However, Trump’s action tell another story.

Although Trump questioned the safety of vaccinations as far back as 2014, since becoming President he has towed the party line. In April 2019, while questioned about alleged outbreaks of measles and whether or not he supports Americans’ right to opt out of the MMR vaccine, Trump stated that Americans “have to get the shots. The vaccinations are so important.” Trump concluded with the support of mandatory vaccinations: “This is really going around now. They have to get their shots.”

We do acknowledge that Donald Trump has made several statements – including during Friday’s press conference – indicating that he is not currently planning to call for mandatory vaccinations of all Americans. However, rather than hanging on the words of the president as if they are gospel, we should judge the man by his actions. When looking at Trump’s actual actions – not his tweets – it’s clear that he has not drained the swamp, but has instead, filled it with familiar Deep State bureaucrats pushing an agenda of their own. The individuals involved in this agenda do not have the best interests of Americans in mind.

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Featured image: Moncef Slaoui, the scientific head of Operation Warp Speed, spent 29 years making vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline. (STUART ISETT CC 2.0)

Israel is facing declining public support in the United States and sees the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign as a key threat to its legitimacy. That’s why Israel is enlisting the US government, American university administrators, and even tech companies like Zoom and Facebook to try to destroy the BDS movement.

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A day before a scheduled San Francisco State University lecture on “gender, justice and resistance” with Black, Palestinian, Jewish, and South African activists, the online meeting company Zoom announced it would not permit the event to take place on its platform. A spokesperson for Zoom cited concerns that hosting the event could violate “applicable U.S. export control, sanctions and anti-terrorism laws,” and the company ultimately threatened to cancel the Zoom account for the entire California State University system if the event went through.

Zoom’s decision to de-platform the event followed a staunch pressure campaign from right-wing Zionist organizations, who took credit online for its cancellation. Tech giants Facebook and YouTube followed suit, cutting the event stream and removing promotional materials from their platforms.

The incident sets a dangerous precedent for private tech companies to censor academic freedoms, university-sanctioned events, and social justice organizing. Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal, explains that the incident is an attack on discussion of Palestinian freedom, “in response to a systemic repression campaign driven by the Israeli government and its allies.” The campaign to censor and de-platform the event exemplifies the growing, coordinated efforts to destroy Palestinian liberation struggles, which have been made even more complicated by the virtual organizing strategies that the COVID-19 pandemic requires.

In recent weeks, the US State Department has committed to “target,” “fight,” and “kill” the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a non-violent political campaign exercising free speech on American soil. The comments, made in a recent interview by a spokesperson for the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, referred to the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to squash the BDS movement, expanding what is already a multimillion-dollar campaign encompassing government and private actors, and deploying counterinsurgency tactics, lawfare, and surveillance operations against activists campaigning for equal rights for Palestinians.

The BDS movement, conceived by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005, seeks to exert pressure on Israel to finally end its more than fifty-year occupation of Palestinian lands, to recognize the right of return for displaced Palestinian refugees, and to grant equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel. The State Department’s commitment to “kill” this liberation struggle, a movement modeled on the international boycotts against apartheid South Africa, is part of a nationwide right-wing push to suppress criticism of Israel.

US State Department Special Envoy’s Elan Carr has claimed that attempts to “economically strangle the state of Israel” are unequivocally anti-Semitic and said that the department’s efforts to clamp down on BDS would include targeting even those campaigns which call for boycotting goods produced by companies profiting from the expansion of illegal settlements in Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Despite citing economics as a justification for their anti-BDS campaigns, the US State Department and its partners in the Israel lobby admit that boycotts do not pose a viable threat to Israel’s economic security. The US government and the Israel lobby instead fear the political motivations of the movement and the growing successes of its capacity to shift public opinion toward Israel’s apartheid regime.

Israel is facing a critical challenge in maintaining stable, long-term public support in the United States. While the alliance of Republicans, the mainstream Democratic Party, and the evangelical Christian movement continue to staunchly support the Israeli State — to the tune of $3.8 billion in annual military aid — this support is notably diminishing among progressives, Black Americans, and young people, particularly young Jews.

Within this context, the US Israel lobby has mobilized to neutralize this threat for many years. Israel lobby groups have invested millions toward derailing BDS organizing, particularly on college campuses, and defaming supporters of the movement. Taking stock of campaigns against the BDS movement offers insight into expanding repression against social-justice movements across the United States. The State Department’s commitment to this agenda isn’t just a threat to pro-Palestinian activism, but to Black Lives Matter solidarity campaigns, free speech, and political dissent more widely.

Lawfare

Among the primary tactics the Israel lobby uses to derail Palestine solidarity movements are legal and legislative processes to turn legitimate criticisms of Israel into expressions of anti-Semitism. At a moment when right-wing anti-Semitic violence is on the rise, this is particularly dangerous. The Israel lobby’s lawfare campaigns are intended to criminalize and sanction anti-apartheid activists for participating in “discriminatory conduct” and even “hate speech.”

In January 2020, the Trump administration bolstered these efforts by implementing the “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism,” cementing federal use of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism which includes criticism of Israel.

The order also expanded the scope of federal Title VI policies to categorize criticism of Israel as a form of academic discrimination against Jews. The order gives Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education power to launch investigations against and ultimately withhold funding for universities that allow BDS organizing on their campuses, on the grounds that the government would be funding “anti-Semitism.”

These legal and legislative projects incentivize academic and institutional censorship of pro-Palestinian voices and strengthen what is sometimes called “the Palestinian exception to free speech.” The consequences of these tactics are not hypothetical.

In 2016, the dean of students at Fordham University, Keith Eldredge, used his veto power — the first time he did so in his tenure — to overturn a student government vote to approve the establishment of a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter on campus.

He explained in an email to students that SJP’s commitment to BDS was a primary reason for his decision to veto the group’s establishment. BDS, he claimed, “presents a barrier to open dialogue and mutual learning and understanding” promoting “polarization rather than dialogue.”

After a four-year legal battle with the university, courts ruled that the university must recognize the student group affirming the right of activists to campaign in solidarity with Palestinians. While the judge ultimately ruled in favor of the students’ free speech, the legal battle consumed years of energy and organizing potential.

This is often the real goal of lawfare operations: entangling organizers in legal and legislative battles is a tried and tested method which eats up activists’ time, energy, and money.

The redefinition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of the Israeli occupation has paved the way for a coordinated national campaign to punish businesses and individuals for divesting themselves from apartheid and settlement abuses. According to Palestine Legal, more than a hundred anti-boycott laws and executive orders have been introduced into state and local legislatures over the past six years alone.These measures, many of which restrict state funding and contracts to proponents of the boycott movement, have already been adopted in thirty states. Seventy-eight percent of people living in the United States now live under such anti-boycott provisions.

The proliferation of anti-BDS laws across the United States has had a chilling effect on political speech, not to mention some bizarre effects. In 2017, for example, hurricane victims in Dickerson, Texas were required to sign a pledgecommitting not to boycott the state of Israel in order to receive access to the city’s relief grants.

Texas ACLU legal director Andre Segura explained the measure was a violation of the First Amendment, noting the incident is “reminiscent of McCarthy-era loyalty oaths requiring Americans to disavow membership in the Communist Party and other forms of ‘subversive’ activity.”

US State Department representatives noted that pushing international allies to replicate similar measures, to condemn the BDS movement, and to adopt comparable redefinitions of anti-Semitism, was a priority strategy.

Surveillance and Smear Campaigns

The Israel lobby is also investing enormously in intelligence-gathering and smear campaign operations targeting critics of Israel, especially students and academics. The evidence is in their budgets.In 2019, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA), an intelligence agency established to map out and combat growing support for BDS around the world, was provided over $35 million in government funding over three years, a budget set to be matched by private donations. Intelligence gathering operations against US university students are being conducted in Israel but are also operated and financed in the United States.

The Lobby USA,” Al Jazeera’s 2016 undercover investigation into America’s Israel lobby, revealed the partnerships between Israel’s MSA and US-based lobby groups. Executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) Jacob Baime admitted in undercover footage that his organization coordinates and communicates with the MSA, boasting about his organization’s rapidly expanding budget and growing intelligence gathering capabilities.

As Baime explains, the ICC’s surveillance strategy is “modelled on General Stanley McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq.” The organization surveils the activities of student Palestine activists and releases online smear campaigns: “if one of these terrorists on campus wants to disrupt a pro-Israel lecture and unfurl a banner or whatever else, we’re going to investigate them and look into bad stuff they’ve done…. The only thing is that we do it securely and anonymously, and that’s the key.”

Baime outlines that what the ICC has found most effective is conducting opposition research and releasing the information online through anonymous websites, alongside targeted Facebook ads. “Every few hours” he explains, “you drip out a new piece of the opposition research. It’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy.”

A 2018 investigation by Forward revealed the ICC has also used their surveillance technologies to monitor the activities of progressive Jewish students, including those taking part in the Open Hillel conference at Swarthmore College.

Canary Mission is an infamous pro-Israel website which publishes profiles maligning Palestine solidarity organizers as “anti-Semites” in an attempt to intimidate people away from such activities, and, as the formerly anonymous organizers of the blacklist make clear, ruin potential future job prospects of those it profiles.

The website, which disproportionately targets Arab and Muslim students and academics, has been used to interrogate, detain, and even bar Americans and Palestinians traveling to Palestine through Israeli territory. “The Lobby USA” alleged, through covertly recorded conversations with an employee at The Israel Project (TIP), that billionaire real estate mogul Adam Milstein was the primary funder and creator of the website. Milstein has denied this allegation.

As with lawfare strategies, surveillance and smear campaigns serve not only as a threat and deterrent to advocating for Palestine, but also consume the time and energy of activists who are defamed for their role in the social justice movement. Jacob Baime explained how targeted activists “either shut down or they spend time responding to it and investigating it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”

Severing Solidarities

Initiatives to disrupt Palestine liberation struggles and the BDS movement include the targeting of Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements which see their freedom struggles as integrally intertwined with Palestinians’. In 2014, Ferguson, Missouri rose up against racist police brutality after the murder of Michael Brown. At the same time, Israel launched its siege of the Gaza Strip, resulting in thousands of casualties.Protesters in Ferguson and Palestine exchanged messages of solidarity on social media, including tips on how to relieve the effects of tear gas. Two years later, the Movement for Black Lives included in its platform a condemnation of Israeli apartheid, a rejection of US military aid to Israel, and a pledge to support the BDS movement.

Speaking at the 2016 Israel American Council conference, Israeli consul-general of Atlanta Judith Varnai-Shorer highlighted the Black Lives Matter movement as a threat to public support for Israel. “The major problem with Israel is with the young generation of the Black community. Black Lives Matter starts there” she says.

Andy David, Israel consul general of San Francisco stated on the same panel, “Martin Luther King would turn in his grave if he saw the anti-Israel tendencies or policies that are starting to emerge within Black Lives Matter.”

Viewed as a threat to Israel’s unchallenged political support in the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement is also subjected to the lawfare, surveillance, and smear campaigns leveraged against proponents of the BDS movement.

A former employee of TIP in Washington, DC revealed that the Israel lobby had worked to disrupt Black Lives Matter events. He admitted TIP called upon its donors to push a New York City nightclub to cancel a Black Lives Matter benefit because of the movement’s stance on Israel.

Effects of State Repression

The State Department, operating in tandem with Israeli intelligence and US-based pro-Israel lobbying groups, have committed to ramp up efforts to disorganize and target BDS and Palestine solidarity organizing. Their tactics are not dissimilar from the strategies of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) or other historical counterinsurgency projects targeting social justice movements and political dissenters.The consequences of these projects aren’t hypothetical. They have consumed the academic and political careers of numerous Palestine solidarity activists across the country. The continued expansion of this state repression is already producing a chilling effect on organizing for Palestinian liberation.

As we move into another academic year of social justice activism at universities, made even more complicated by virtual organizing and the COVID-19 pandemic, activists will need to think critically about the forces working to stop them.

We can take solace, however, in the fact that the State Department’s project to “kill” BDS is nevertheless an indication of the movement’s political influence. This expansion of state repression is evidence of the movement’s ability to threaten the material support for colonialism, apartheid, and occupation that is at the heart of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

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Caren Holmes is a scholar of postcolonial studies and a prison abolitionist organizer based in New York City.

Featured image: Protester holds up a sign supporting the BDS movement. (John Englart / Flickr)

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As the dying Trump administration, literally on a sickbed, contemplates losing power, its hawks are lashing out at Iran in an attempt to ensure that the 2015 international nuclear deal is dead and buried, and that the US and Iran remain on a war footing. Trump’s two main allies in the Middle East, Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, want at the least a rollback of Iranian influence in the region and at best regime change. They are small countries and have no hope of accomplishing the latter. Only a US war on Iran, repeating the 2003 invasion of Iraq could reliably change the regime and end the country’s civilian nuclear energy program.

The US Treasury Department has blocked financial transactions of 18 Iranian banks, and threatened anyone who does business with them with third party sanctions. This means that if a small French firm wanted to sell toasters to Iran, it can’t use these banks to do so. There really aren’t any banks left in Iran that aren’t sanctioned by the Trump administration. So the message is to Europe, don’t trade with Iran.

This policy is unilateral and is ordered by one man, Trump. Congress has passed no such law. The United Nations Security Council is against these sanctions.

Although the announcement is accompanied by the usual demonization of Iran, these sanctions will make no difference to Syria or Iraq in their trade with Iran and will have no effect on the Iranian role in the Middle East. Nor will they force Iran to cease its civilian nuclear energy program, with which the UN Security Council has made its peace.

What the sanctions will do is make it impossible to send humanitarian aid to Iran during a crippling pandemic. They will make it impossible for Iranians to import needed medicines. During a pandemic.

The smarmy Sec State Mike Pompeo alleges that the US is not sanctioning medical supplies, but this is a half-truth that functions as a Big Lie. Sanctioning all the banks means that the medical supplies can’t be imported because Iran has no way to pay for them.

Veteran Iran observer Barbara Slavin called the new measures “sadism masquerading as sanctions.”

The relentless Trump attempt to bend Iran to his will has failed for 3 and a half years, and is unlikely to succeed during the three months he has left in office.

The purpose of this new financial blockade on Iran is to hammer the last nail in the coffin of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal approved by France, the UK, Germany, China, Russia and the United States. Trump breached the treaty in May, 2018, and is attempting to strongarm the other signatories into reneging on it, too.

Iran mothballed 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program in 2015 in order to get total relief from all sanctions. That never happened, because the Republican Congress refused to remove US sanctions, and the US measures threaten third parties. The French automobile firm Renault had had a factory in Iran and planned to restore it, but was dissuaded by US threats of massive fines. The French energy firm Total S.A. had planned to develop Iranian natural gas, but pulled out under US threats.

So Iran gave up most of its latent nuclear deterrence and not only got nothing in return, it got the most crippling sanctions ever applied to one country by another in peacetime.

Iran refuses to go quietly. It has responded to Trump’s economic war on it in several ways:

1. Tehran has made clear that it won’t be strangled while hostile neighbors like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia prosper. It has launched covert operations that are hard to trace directly back to the Ayatollahs against UAE tankers and the Saudi Aqaiq facilities. The more pain the US inflicts on Iran, the more likely it is that there will be a spiral of violence.

2. Iran has cozied up to China in an unprecedented way. With the world’s second-largest economy and a much faster recovery from the pandemic than the US, Beijing appears to believe it can stand up to the US and avoid sanctions. Some of the trade conducted by the two countries is nevertheless in the form of undeclared oil purchases. The US can’t sanction what it can’t prove. In addition, China can spin off companies that have no dollar assets and do no business with the United States. They can use the piles of soft currency China has accumulated from Asia and Africa in selling its goods to developing countries. For Iran to accept payment in e.g. Angolan Kwanzas is a perhaps 30% loss, since Iran will have to convert them to Euros or another non-dollar hard currency at a discount. But that is still substantially better than doing no business at all. The US Treasury Department can’t sanction firms doing business in currencies other than the dollar and which do no trade with and have no assets in the US.

3. Iran has found other countries to do business with that have already been cut off and sanctioned by the US, such as Venezuela. This development demonstrates why broad sanctions are a blunt tool with ever-decreasing returns. Iran has offloaded three tankers worth of natural gas concentrates at Venezuelan ports in the past month. The concentrates are used in refining raw crude into gasoline, and Venezuela has little natural gas of its own. It used to get the concentrates from the US, but has been cut off. So, US sanctions on one country helped undermine US sanctions on another. The US has attempted to stop this trade by engaging in piracy on the high seas and confiscating Iranian tankers, but they have gotten wise and have turned off their satellite communications, making it difficult to track them.

4. Iran has stood its ground. It seems to be forcing the US out of Iraq successfully. Trump just announced all US troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of the year. Tehran will celebrate that it is no longer surrounded by the US military. Iran shows no sign of abandoning its diplomatic and military position in Iraq, Syria or Lebanon. (The Saudis would add Yemen but I don’t think Iran gives any significant amount of money to the Houthi rebels there).

Still, the Iranian currency has collapsed against the dollar, and oil income has fallen from over $100 bn a year to more like $7 bn (non-oil exports are now much larger, over $30 bn a year). The people are under severe economic pressure. The regime is cushioning itself with smuggling to China and Venezuela.

The Trump strangling of Iran could well produce a war. The new sanctions are intended to destroy completely the 2015 nuclear deal, making it impossible for the Europeans to salvage it.

Without that safety valve, a war could be the only response left.

Is Trump attempting to bequeath an Iran conflict to Biden, as a poison pill?

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Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Back on the Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Wins Over Spirit

October 12th, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

In March, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeal upheld an original jury finding that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven did not infringe copyright in Spirit’s 1968 song Taurus.  Michael Skidmore, who had filed the suit in 2014 as trustee of the estate of the late Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, was hoping that the US Supreme Court would take time to hear, and hopefully reverse the decision.  The highest court in the US refused to bite.

Wolfe, known professionally as Randy California, wrote Taurus somewhere between 1966 and 1967.  On composing the song, Wolfe’s publisher armoured Taurus with copyright protection as an unpublished work, though such protection was superficial chainmail rather than full breast plating. Stairway to Heaven, the durable, seemingly ageless fruit of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, was released in 1974 on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album.  That particular song has caused spasms of delight and swooning, along with much reverential acknowledgment in guitar land over the years.  But it has also given much carrion to the legal eagles.  It was a sign that music, as with much else intellectual and even spiritually motivated, could be the subject of a battle to match other lengthy human conflicts. 

The jury in the original district court trial found in special interrogatories that the trust owned Taurus, and that Led Zeppelin had access to it. This did not lead them to conclude that the songs were substantially similar.  Led Zeppelin had argued that any similarities between the songs were for those elements not protected by copyright law; the plaintiffs argued that the “selection and arrangement” of those elements was.   

The outcome at first instance did not deter Skidmore, who took the case to a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit.  Initially, success.  The decision was vacated in September 2018 and a new trial ordered.  Both parties then petitioned for a review of the decision by all the judges of the Ninth Circuit.  This highly unusual request was granted, with an en banc rehearing taking place on September 23, 2019.

Image on the right: Led Zeppelin

Led Zep to release Immigrant Song single in 2021 | Louder

The decision to revisit the case was not universally condemned, though reversing jury verdicts tends to cause more than raised eyebrows.  For one, it resembled, in reverse, the outcome of the Blurred Lines case, where the jury’s flawed conclusion was not deemed worthy of adjustment by the Ninth Circuit.  Copyright lawyer Rick Sanders, writing for Techdirt, noted the “unhelpful legal framework for determining copyright infringement” that had marked the original ruling on Taurus

That framework included an awkward creature of law known as the “inverse ratio rule,” which holds that the greater the similarity between two works, the less proof of access is needed.  Embraced by the Ninth Circuit in 1977, the rule can also be put this way: “the stronger the evidence of access, the less compelling the similarities between the two works need be in order to give rise to an inference of copying.” 

How it is applied is critical.  The “bad framework,” as Sanders suggests, involves proving that the defendant has access to the copyrighted work and “substantial similarity” between those works.  The preferable framework is one where the plaintiff must prove “copying” and “unlawful appropriation”.  To prove the former, access and “probative similarity” must be shown.  Unlawful appropriation amounts to substantial similarity, but probative similarity comes closer to an accurate yardstick than that of “substantial similarity”.

The original district court decision could also be said to be defective on the issue of the jury instructions.  This was less a case of misdirection than no direction at all, rendering it incomplete and sloppy.  What was the jury to make, for instance, of how to approach “works made up of unprotectable elements”?  The issue was never put by the judge.

The en banc ruling restored the original district court’s decision favouring Led Zeppelin.  Significant was the less than ceremonious burying of the inverse ratio rule.  It thrilled lawyers of copyright law, as well as it might have.  Brian Murphy was delighted that attorneys specialising in the field were finally provided with “greater clarity … about the standards for providing copyright infringement.”

The full complement of judges, in training their daggers upon the inverse ratio rule, noted the “confusion about when to apply the rule and the amount of access and similarity needed to invoke it.”  They noted how dealing with the rule had been a struggle, mocked and rejected in the Second Circuit as early as 1961 for being a “superficially attractive apophthegm which upon examination confuses more than it clarifies”.  It was illogical, even nonsensical.  It did not follow that more access “increases the likelihood of copying.”

The judges also noted that the very concept of access had been “increasingly diluted in our digitally interconnected world.  Access is often proved by the wide dissemination of the copyrighted work.”  The very “ubiquity of the ways to access media online, from YouTube to subscription services like Netflix and Spotify, access may be established by a trivial showing that the world is available on demand.”  The inverse ratio rule unfairly advantaged “those whose work is most accessible by lowering the standard of proof for similarity.”

The slaying of the rule did not mean that “access cannot serve as circumstantial evidence of actual copying in all cases.” Evidence of access and probative similarity were still elements to prove in instances of actual copying.

The en banc court also held that the scope of copyright protection for an unpublished work lies in the deposit copy filed with the Copyright Office that forms the copyright application.  The dry wording of Section 11 of the Copyright Act of 1909 states that copyright for an unpublished work is obtained “by the deposit, with claim of copyright, of one complete copy of such work if it be a … musical composition”.  “The purpose of the deposit,” and the fact of the work’s completeness, served to give, the judges claimed, “notice to third parties, and prevent confusion about the scope of the copyright.” 

Central to this was a specific idiosyncrasy adopted by the Copyright Office.  Sheet music, not sound recordings, were accepted as deposit copies.  Somewhat barer, thinner things, such sheets often constitute skeletal matter yet to receive flesh.  When Tauruswas registered, the Copyright Office had in place a practice for applications registering unpublished musical compositions by “writ[ing] to the applicant pointing out that protection extends only to the material actually deposited, and suggesting that in his own interest he develop his manuscript to supply the missing element.”

The consequence of this was significant and, from Skidmore’s perspective, gloomily decisive.  The eight-measure passage commencing the deposit copy of Taurus allegedly infringed by Led Zeppelin is a less fed, extravagant creature than the sound recording released by Spirit.  The deposit copy, not the recording, defined the “four corners of the Taurus copyright”.  The judges accepted that the district court had not erred in declining “Skidmore’s request to play the sound recordings of the Taurusperformance that contain further embellishments or to admit the recordings on the issue of substantial similarity.”

On receiving the deflating news from the Supreme Court, Skidmore’s legal team was more than bruised. “The ‘Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit’ has finally given Hollywood exactly what it has always wanted: a copyright test which it cannot lose.”  Portraying himself as hero fighting major industry defendants and their predatory instincts, Skidmore is adamant about the consequences.  “The proverbial canary in the coal mine has died; it remains to be seen if the miners have noticed.”

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

The Trump administration tightened the noose further around Iran’s beleaguered economy on Thursday, October 8, announcing a fresh round of sanctions that will effectively shut the country out of the global financial system.

The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on eighteen major Iranian banks in one of the most extensive such moves by Washington against Tehran in months. The order will also penalize non-Iranian institutions trading with them, effectively cutting the banks off from the international financial system.

Significantly, the sanctions also target foreign companies that do business with the banks, giving them 45 days to cease such activities or face “third-party sanctions.”

“The United States expects all U.N, member states to fully comply with their obligations to implement these measures,” Mike Pompeo announced in September. “If UN member states fail to fulfill their obligations to implement these sanctions, the United States is prepared to use our domestic authorities to impose consequences for those failures and ensure that Iran does not reap the benefits of UN-prohibited activity.”

It’s noteworthy that the Iran sanctions that were lifted in 2015 after the signing of JCPOA were “third-party sanctions,” implying that any state or business organization doing business with Iran wouldn’t be able to engage in commercial activities with the US government and commercial enterprises based in the US.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has kept his statements deliberately ambiguous in order to fill the gaps in his Iran policy. On the one hand, he made an electoral promise to consider restoring the Iran nuclear deal if elected, but on the other, he tweeted in June last year: “Make no mistake: Iran continues to be a bad actor that abuses human rights and supports terrorist activities throughout the region.

“What we need is presidential leadership that will take strategic action to counter the Iranian threat, restore America’s standing in the world, recognize the value of principled diplomacy, and strengthen our nation and our security by working strategically with our allies.”

Nevertheless, even if we assume Biden is sincere in restoring the nuclear pact, considering the influence of Zionist lobbies in Washington, that forced Trump to abandon the deal in May 2018, Biden would find it impossible to follow through on his bombastic electoral rhetoric with tangible policy decisions.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential elections and during the four years of his presidency that the Iran nuclear deal, signed by the Obama administration in 2015, was an “unfair deal” that gave concessions to Iran without giving anything in return to the US.

Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s statements because the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in July 2015 under pressure, as Washington had bungled in its Middle East policy and it wanted Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to get a face-saving.

In order to understand how the Obama administration bungled in Syria and Iraq, we should bear the background of Washington’s Middle East policy during the recent years in mind. The nine-year conflict in Syria that gave birth to myriads of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian resistance axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iran-allied forces worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the jihadists’ cause, hence they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the horrific Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.

Then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017, and then another truck-ramming atrocity occurred in Lower Manhattan in October 2017 that was also claimed by the Islamic State.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Obama administration desperately needed Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to salvage its botched policy of training and arming jihadists to topple the government Bashar al-Assad in Syria that backfired and gave birth to the Islamic State that carried out some of the most audacious terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Thus, Washington signed JCPOA in July 2015 that gave some concessions to Iran, and in return, former hardliner Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki was forced out of power in September 2014 with Iran’s tacit approval and moderate former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was appointed in his stead who gave permission to the US Air Force and ground troops to assist the Iraqi Armed Forces and allied militias to beat back the Islamic State from Mosul and Anbar.

The Iran nuclear deal, however, was neither an international treaty under the American laws nor even an executive agreement. It was simply categorized as a “political commitment.” Due to the influence of Zionist lobbies in Washington, the opposition to the JCPOA in the American political discourse was so vehement that forget about having it passed through the US Congress, the task the Obama administration faced was to muster enough votes of dissident Democrats to defeat a resolution of disapproval so that it couldn’t override a presidential veto.

The Trump administration, however, was not hampered by the legacy of Obama administration and since the objective of defeating the Islamic State had already been achieved in October 2017, therefore Washington felt safe to unilaterally annul the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s behest, and the crippling “third-party sanctions” have once again been put in place on Iran’s oil and financial sectors.

Another impediment to restoring the Iran nuclear deal is its ballistic missile technology. If Biden is to restore the Iran nuclear deal after being elected president, he would have to renegotiate the pact to also include Iran’s ballistic missile program alongside its nuclear program, which Tehran regards as a “strategic deterrence” against its regional foes and hence off the table.

Washington’s principal objective in Syria’s proxy war was ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report [1] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist principality in northeastern Syria – in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor which were occupied by the Islamic State until October 2017 – in the event of an outbreak of a civil war in Syria.

Under pressure from the Zionist lobbies in Washington, however, the Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria would give birth to radical Islamic jihadists.

The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of nurturing militants in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan in order to weaken the anti-Zionist Bashar al-Assad government.

The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Iranian resistance axis, which is comprised of Iran, Syria and their Lebanon-based surrogate, Hezbollah. During the course of 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah posed to Israel’s regional security.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what would happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel.

Therefore, the Zionist lobbies in Washington persuaded the Obama administration, of which Biden was the vice president, to orchestrate a proxy war against Damascus and its Lebanon-based surrogate Hezbollah in order to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis against Israel.

Over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and material support to the militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of Syrian militants and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the nine-year conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [2] in January last year, Israel’s outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his recommendations in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched against the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [3] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel’s air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purpose of Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report of 2012:

http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/

[2] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/gadi-eisenkot-israel-iran-syria.html

[3] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/benjamin-netanyahu-admits-israel-to-blame-for-damascus-strikes-1.812590

Featured image is from American Herald Tribune


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

The Great Barrington Declaration

October 12th, 2020 by Dr Martin Kulldorff

As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. 

Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.  the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

On October 4, 2020, this declaration was authored and signed in Great Barrington, United States, by:

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.

Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

Co-Signers 

Medical and Public Health Scientists and Medical Practitioners

Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, physician, epidemiologist and public policy expert at the Veterans Administration, USA

Dr. Stephen Bremner,professor of medical statistics, University of Sussex, England

Dr. Anthony J Brookes, professor of genetics, University of Leicester, England

Dr. Helen Colhoun, ,professor of medical informatics and epidemiology, and public health physician, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Dr. Angus Dalgleish, oncologist, infectious disease expert and professor, St. George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, England

Dr. Sylvia Fogel, autism expert and psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, USA

Dr. Eitan Friedman, professor of medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Dr. Uri Gavish, biomedical consultant, Israel

Dr. Motti Gerlic, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Dr. Gabriela Gomes, mathematician studying infectious disease epidemiology, professor, University of Strathclyde, Scotland

Dr. Mike Hulme, professor of human geography, University of Cambridge, England

Dr. Michael Jackson, research fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Dr. Annie Janvier, professor of pediatrics and clinical ethics, Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine University Medical Centre, Canada

Dr. David Katz, physician and president, True Health Initiative, and founder of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, USA

Dr. Andrius Kavaliunas, epidemiologist and assistant professor at Karolinska Institute, Sweden

Dr. Laura Lazzeroni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of biomedical data science, Stanford University Medical School, USA

Dr. Michael Levitt, biophysicist and professor of structural biology, Stanford University, USA.
Recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Dr. David Livermore, microbiologist, infectious disease epidemiologist and professor, University of East Anglia, England

Dr. Jonas Ludvigsson, pediatrician, epidemiologist and professor at Karolinska Institute and senior physician at Örebro University Hospital, Sweden

Dr. Paul McKeigue, physician, disease modeler and professor of epidemiology and public health, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Dr. Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics, expert on vaccine development, efficacy, and safety. Tufts University School of Medicine, USA

Dr. Ariel Munitz, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Dr. Yaz Gulnur Muradoglu, professor of finance, director of the Behavioural Finance Working Group, Queen Mary University of London, England

Dr. Partha P. Majumder, professor and founder of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani, India

Dr. Udi Qimron, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Dr. Matthew Ratcliffe, professor of philosophy, specializing in philosophy of mental health, University of York, England

Dr. Mario Recker, malaria researcher and associate professor, University of Exeter, England

Dr. Eyal Shahar, physician, epidemiologist and professor (emeritus) of public health, University of Arizona, USA

Dr. Karol Sikora MA, physician, oncologist, and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham, England

Dr. Matthew Strauss, critical care physician and assistant professor of medicine, Queen’s University, Canada

Dr. Rodney Sturdivant, infectious disease scientist and associate professor of biostatistics, Baylor University, USA

Dr. Simon Thornley, epidemiologist and biostatistician, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Dr. Ellen Townsend, professor of psychology, head of the Self-Harm Research Group, University of Nottingham, England

Dr. Lisa White, professor of modelling and epidemiology, Oxford University, England

Dr. Simon Wood, biostatistician and professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) today announced it will deny protections for the rare and elusive wolverine under the Endangered Species Act, prompting a coalition of conservation groups to announce an intent to sue.

“Recent scientific information makes clear that wolverines face threats from destruction of their snowy habitat due to climate change,” said Earthjustice attorney Timothy Preso. “We intend to take action to make sure that the Trump administration’s disregard of the real impacts of climate change does not doom the wolverine to extinction in the lower-48 states.”

With fewer than 300 wolverines left in the contiguous United States, there is no justification for the FWS’ decision to deny protection. Listing wolverines as threatened or endangered would trigger new, badly needed conservation efforts.

Earthjustice will represent a coalition of conservation groups — the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Northwest, Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Clearwater, Idaho Conservation League, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, and Rocky Mountain Wild.

“It’s outrageous that the Fish and Wildlife Service has again shrugged off the science showing that wolverines are in trouble and desperately need federal protection,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s sad that after years of inaction, we need to go to court again to ensure wolverines get the protections they need before it’s too late.”

“The wolverines in the Clearwater Basin are in particular trouble, in part, because the Forest Service allows snowmobile use in prime wolverine habitat,” said Gary Macfarlane, with Friends of the Clearwater. “With climate change and preliminary indications that the Forest Service could open up even more wolverine habitat to winter motorized use could spell doom for wolverines in north-central Idaho.”

“Wolverine are rare, wide-ranging carnivores of the high wild country facing growing threats from climate change and winter recreation,” said Dave Werntz, Science and Conservation Director at Conservation Northwest. “Wolverine deserve federal protection and the associated resources and recovery actions to ensure a future for wolverine in the Pacific Northwest.”

“Once again, the federal government has failed the wolverine,” said Brad Smith, North Idaho Director, Idaho Conservation League. Without critically needed conservation efforts that a threatened or endangered listing would trigger, we fear that future generations of Idahoans will never be lucky enough to see the rare and sensitive wolverine.”

“Climate change and habitat fragmentation have not magically disappeared, but in fact continue to push wolverines in the Lower 48 to the brink,” said Jonathan Proctor, Rockies and Plains program director at Defenders of Wildlife. “With this decision, the Fish and Wildlife Service has abandoned its moral and legal obligation to protect these animals, but we will not abandon our ongoing effort to see them legally protected.”

“Now more than ever, we need to speak the truth about the health of our ecosystem and wildlife,” said Skye Schell, Executive Director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. “It is past time for our government to formally recognize the severe threats that wolverines face, and then to take action to protect this rare and significant species. Wolverines embody the spirit of the wild that is in danger from ever-increasing human impacts, and this may be our last chance to maintain a healthy wolverine population for future generations.”

Background

Wolverines, the largest land-dwelling members of the weasel family, once roamed across the northern tier of the United States and as far south as New Mexico in the Rockies and Southern California in the Sierra Nevada range. After more than a century of trapping and habitat loss, wolverines in the Lower 48 today exist only as small, fragmented populations in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wyoming, and northeast Oregon.

In the wolverine’s last strongholds, the species is at direct risk from climate change. Wolverines depend on areas with deep snow through late spring. Pregnant females dig their dens into this snowpack to birth and raise their young. Snowpack is already in decline in the western mountains, a trend that is predicted to worsen with a warming climate.

Wolverine populations are also at risk from traps, human disturbance, habitat fragmentation, and extremely low population numbers resulting in low genetic diversity. Without new conservation efforts the dangers faced by wolverines threaten remaining populations with localized extinctions and inbreeding.

Recognizing these threats and the need for new protection measures, conservation groups petitioned to list the wolverine as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 2000. For two decades, the Fish and Wildlife Service has time and again delayed and obstructed the proposed wolverine listing. These tactics have required public advocates for the wolverine to repeatedly turn to the courts for enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Earthjustice and the groups it represents have won every case they have filed on behalf of the wolverine, either through judicial rulings in their favor or through favorable settlement agreements.

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Malaysia: A Clear Direction for the Present

October 12th, 2020 by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

Malaysians at this moment are concerned about two different types of numbers. The overwhelming majority are worried about the recent spike in Covid 19 infections and the increase in the number of related deaths. There is a much smaller segment of the population that is focussed upon the number of members of Parliament that the leader of the Opposition Anwar Ibrahim can mobilise in his bid to oust current Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and seize the post for himself.

If Covid deaths in Malaysia are small compared to many other countries, the impact of the coronavirus upon lives and livelihoods has been devastating. It has increased the destitution of the poor and vulnerable in our midst. In contrast, Anwar’s pursuit of numbers is linked to one man’s obsessive ambition to become Prime Minister. It is an obsession that has expressed itself on other occasions in the last 22 years. In 1998 he sought to undermine then UMNO president and Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad through certain unscrupulous party functionaries when the nation was facing a massive financial and economic crisis.  In 2008, he attempted to topple the elected government of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi through an unsuccessful bid to engineer cross-overs in parliament though Abdullah’s  Barisan coalition was just 8 seats short of a two-thirds majority. Today, he is trying again encouraged by the fact that Muhyiddin has only a razor thin majority in Parliament. However, he forgets that Muhyiddin is widely perceived as a leader who has managed Malaysia’s  twin health and economic crises with a sincere heart and a steady hand.

For Anwar and his supporters, Muhyuddin still lacks legitimacy because he had set aside his partners in the Pakatan Harapan government and instead teamed up with their foe, namely UMNO. While all these manoeuvres were not illegal, they continue to raise ethical issues. But how can these ethical issues be resolved if Anwar is now willing to collude with tarnished characters in UMNO in order to get rid of Muhyiddin and become Prime Minister ? It is not through morally questionable moves that one will be able to restore integrity to the political process.

Perhaps it is only through a general election that one can re-set the moral barometer. But after what has happened in Sabah, one has every reason to be apprehensive about a general election and how it could lead to an explosion of Covid  cases.  If it is judicious to avoid a general election, then what other avenues are available to ensure that there is a degree of stability in the political system?

One, the Conference of Rulers an entity which commands constitutional authority should at a time like this play a much more active role. As a collective institution it should not only advise and guide the legislature and the Cabinet but also ensure that political actors do not deviate from their entrusted responsibilities. In fact the King and individual Sultans have on a few occasions asked political leaders to concentrate upon the Covid and economic crises and not get embroiled in the constant pursuit of political power.

Two, in concrete terms, the Conference of Rulers could persuade the government and the opposition at both federal and state levels to establish a mechanism that would enable them to cooperate closely in finding solutions to the Covid and economic challenges. Genuine, sincere cooperation between the two could even result in more effective measures especially in the economy which would bring significant benefits to the people.

Three, such cooperation should lead to a situation where the leader of the government, the Prime Minister, and the leader of the Opposition are concerned solely with fulfilling their duties, undertaking their amanah, rather than undermining each other. The well-being of the people — not their own self-serving interests — would be their overriding passion.

Four, their commitment to the people would translate into policies and laws in the next few months which seek to curb certain unsavoury practices which have been detrimental to the national interest. For instance a law to curb ‘party hopping’ which some legislators are working on should be expedited. Similarly, the proposal to create an ‘ Ombudsman, first mooted in the early seventies,  which will endow  the office with autonomous powers to investigate and act against wrongdoings  that have not received due attention from the government department or agency concerned, should be prioritised without delay.

Five, the Dewan Rakyat and the Dewan Negara should also as soon as possible adopt resolutions that will re-affirm the clarion call of the Conference of Rulers to adhere to the 5 Aspirations and the 5 Principles of the Rukunegara as the “ moral compass” of the nation made on the 10th of October 2017. Given the prevailing atmosphere, the Aspirations and Principles serve as laudable guidelines.

If the five proposals made here and other similar ideas are implemented within the next 6 to 9 months, it is quite conceivable that the nation will be able to concentrate upon tackling the Covid challenge and the current economic woes. We would also be able to devote our time, energy and efforts towards implementing the 2021 Budget and adopting the 12th Malaysia Plan early next year. The nation will not be distracted by unproductive politics.

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Dr Chandra Muzaffar has been writing about Malaysian politics since the early seventies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Ironically, while three US presidents have been accused of impeaching the Constitution for relatively minor offenses, including Bill Clinton for perjury and Donald Trump for using political influence to discredit opponents, no US president has ever been charged, let alone convicted, of waging devastating wars of aggression.

Unless impeachment proceedings are initiated against war criminals, including George Bush and Dick Cheney for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and Barack Obama and Joe Biden for waging proxy wars in Libya and Syria, the impeachment provisions in the US Constitution would serve as nothing more than a convenient tool for settling political scores.

The fact is not only the domestic law enforcement and judicial systems of the Western powers but also international institutions, such as International Criminal Court, have been used as tools of perception management for solely prosecuting alleged “war criminals” of former Yugoslavia and impoverished African nations and real war criminals have never been prosecuted for the crimes of destroying entire nations with their militarism and interventionism.

Before being elected as Obama’s vice president in 2008, as a longtime senator from Delaware and subsequently as the member and then the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, alongside inveterate hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, was one of the principal architects of the Bosnia War in the Clinton administration in the nineties.

Reflecting on first black American president Barack Obama’s memorable 2008 presidential campaign, with little-known senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, as his running-mate, Glenn Kessler wrote for the Washington Post [1] in October 2008:

“The moment when Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. looked Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the eye and called him a ‘damned war criminal’ has become the stuff of campaign legend.

“The Democratic vice presidential nominee brings up the 1993 confrontation on the campaign trial to whoops of delight from supporters. Senator Barack Obama mentioned it when he announced he had chosen Biden as his running mate.

“During vice presidential debate with his counterpart on the Republican ticket, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Biden twice gave himself credit for shifting US policy on Bosnia. The senator from Delaware declared that he ‘was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia led by President Clinton.’ At another point he noted: ‘My recommendations on Bosnia — I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives.’”

Instead of “saving tens of thousands of lives,” the devastating Yugoslav Wars in the nineties in the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and then the former Yugoslavia claimed over 130,000 fatalities, created a humanitarian crisis and unleashed a flood of millions of refugees for which nobody is to blame but the Clinton administration’s militarist policy of subjugating and forcibly integrating East European states into the Western capitalist bloc.

Regarding Washington’s modus operandi of waging proxy wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of master strategists at NATO to raise money [2] from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms markets [3] in the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Libya or Syria, the same playbook was executed to the letter.

Raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows the Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from unregulated arms markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists were the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.

Nevertheless, smugly oblivious to the death and destruction caused by Washington’s global domination agenda, national security shill Glenn Kessler further noted in the aforementioned Washington Post article:

“Biden focused on deficiencies in US policy toward Bosnia, he called for NATO expansion before it became fashionable and most recently prodded the Bush administration to back a $1 billion package to rebuild Georgia after the Russian invasion.

“As the incident with Milosevic shows, Biden is hardly shy about emphasizing his own role in world affairs. Biden’s book portrays him frequently confronting Clinton and bucking him up on Bosnia when the president had doubts about his own policy. But the hard legislative work was left to others. Biden did take an early stab at prodding action, writing an amendment in 1992 — opposed by George H.W. Bush’s administration — that authorized spending $50 million to arm the Bosnian Muslims.

“In April 1993, Biden spent a week traveling in the Balkans, meeting with key officials, including a three-hour session with Milosevic. The trip was detailed in 15 pages of the senator’s autobiography.

“By all accounts, the meeting was tense. Milosevic spent a lot of time poring over maps and expressing concerns with peace proposals crafted by a group of international mediators. Milosevic denied he had much influence over the Bosnian Serbs, but then immediately summoned Radovan Karadzic, their leader, with a curt phone call.

“According to Biden’s book, Milosevic asked the senator what he thought of him. ‘I think you’re a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one,’ Biden said he shot back. Milosevic, he said, did not react.

“Upon his return to the United States, Biden issued a 36-page report on the trip, laying out eight policy proposals, including airstrikes on Serb artillery and lifting the arms embargo on Bosnian Muslims.

“Biden continued to make fiery statements on Bosnia, demanding action. Richard C. Holbrooke recalled that when he was nominated as assistant secretary of state for Europe in late 1994, Biden ‘in no uncertain terms made it clear to me that the policy on Bosnia had to change and he would make sure it did. He believed in action, and history proved him right.’

“’When you look back, Senator Biden got Bosnia right earlier than anyone. He understood that a combination of force and diplomacy would revive American leadership and avoid a disaster in Europe,’ said James P. Rubin, a Biden aide at the time who later became spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.”

It’s pertinent to mention that though touted as a “collective defense pact,” the trans-Atlantic military alliance NATO and its corollary economic alliance European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset political and economic influence of the former Soviet Union which was geographically adjacent to Europe.

Historically, the NATO military alliance at least ostensibly was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.

But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the Central and Eastern European states to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or risk international isolation.

It was not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the groundwork for the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to entice the former communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering financial incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of foreign direct investment and grants and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, and by abolishing internal border checks in the common European market, allowing free movement of workers from Eastern European nations seeking employment in prosperous Western European economies.

Naively giving credit to former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden for his supposed “humanitarian interventionism” and for creating a catastrophe in the Balkans in the nineties, Paul Richter and Noam N. Levey, writing for the LA Times [4] in August 2008, observed:

“Biden has frequently favored humanitarian interventions abroad and was an early and influential advocate for the US military action in the Balkans in the 1990s.

“Biden considers his most important foreign policy accomplishment to be his leadership on the Balkans in the mid-1990s. He pushed a reluctant Clinton administration first to arm Serbian Muslims and then to use U.S. air power to suppress conflict in Serbia and Kosovo.

“In his book, ‘Promises to Keep,’ Biden calls this one of his two ‘proudest moments in public life,’ along with the Violence Against Women Act that he championed.

“In 1998, he worked with McCain on a resolution to push the Clinton administration to use all available force to confront Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, a move designed to force the president to use ground troops if necessary against Serb forces in the former Yugoslavia, which was beset by fighting and ethnic cleansing.

“In addition, Biden, who claims close relationships with many foreign leaders, has demonstrated a readiness to cooperate with Senate Republicans in search of compromise — a trait that meshes with Obama’s pledge to reduce the level of partisan conflict and stalemate in Washington.

“He has called his new adversary, presumed Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 elections, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a ‘personal and close friend.’”

Birds of a feather flock together. Not only did Joe Biden collaborate with Joe Lieberman in the Clinton administration to create a humanitarian crisis in the Balkans in the nineties but he also shared the hawkish ideology of late Senator John McCain.

Though a decorated Vietnam War veteran who died battling cancer in 2018, McCain was a highly polarizing figure as a senator and was regarded by many Leftists as an inveterate neocon hawk, who vociferously exhorted Western military interventions not only in the Balkans in the nineties but also in Libya and Syria in 2011.

McCain was a vocal supporter of the 2011 military intervention in Libya. In April 2011, he visited the anti-Gaddafi forces and National Transitional Council in eastern Libyan city Benghazi, the highest-ranking American to do so, and said that the rebel forces were “my heroes.”

Regarding Syria’s proxy war that began in 2011, McCain repeatedly argued for the US intervening militarily in the conflict on the side of the anti-government forces. He staged a visit to rebel forces inside Syria in May 2013, the first senator to do so, and called for arming the Free Syrian Army with heavy weapons and for the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria.

Following reports that two of the terrorists he posed for pictures with had been responsible for the kidnapping of eleven Lebanese Shia pilgrims the year before, McCain disputed one of the identifications and said he had not met directly with the other.

In the aftermath of a false-flag chemical weapons attack in Ghouta in 2013, McCain vehemently argued for strong American military action against the government of Bashar al-Assad, and in September 2013, cast a Foreign Relations Committee vote in favor of then-President Obama’s request to Congress that it authorize a military response, though the crisis was amicably resolved after seasoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov staged a diplomatic coup by persuading Damascus to ship its alleged chemical weapons stockpiles out of Syria under Russian supervision.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Biden Played Second Fiddle to Joe Lieberman in Bosnia Legislation:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/06/AR2008100602681.html

[2] U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/middleeast/us-relies-heavily-on-saudi-money-to-support-syrian-rebels.html

[3] Billions of dollars weapons flowing from Eastern Europe to Middle East.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/27/weapons-flowing-eastern-europe-middle-east-revealed-arms-trade-syria

[4] On foreign policy, he’s willing to go his own way:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-24-na-foreignpol24-story.html

The War on Truth, Dissent and Free Speech

October 11th, 2020 by Professor Piers Robinson

On Saturday 13 June 2020 the Times newspaper published its third attack on academics associated with researching British government propaganda and the war in Syria. This time the attack focused on smearing myself and Professor David Miller with the objective of discrediting an academic organization we established, the Organisation for Propaganda Studies (OPS), designed to foster research and writing on propaganda.

The article contained multiple falsehoods and distortions and was similar in style to previous attacks aimed at character assassination mainly through employment of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ smear. Most prominently the hatchet pieces misleadingly conflated work by members of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), of which myself and Miller are also members, with the OPS. Formal complaints from the OPS are in process and the Times has already been forced to issue a number of corrections.

Of course, character assassination as a propaganda tactic is widespread and there is even a Routledge academic handbook on the subject, the Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management’, which was published in 2019 and contains 30 odd chapters. The attacks by the Times have been amplified by similar pieces written by Chris York for the Huffington Post.

In total, approximately 20 articles have been produced attacking those of us who are working on the war in Syria and questioning important aspects of UK propaganda operations. The bulk of these articles have been written by just two journalists, Dominic Kennedy for the Times newspaper and Chris York for the Huffington Post. This represents an extraordinarily intensive and sustained campaign against us.

Why on earth have we gotten into so much trouble?

A history of the attacks is instructive. Attention first started to be paid by former Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker in February 2018 when he penned a series of crude hatchet pieces on his blog smearing academics associated with the then newly established WGSPM. At that point Huffington Post journalist Chris York had already been attempting for several months to make contact with me, Professor Tim Hayward and journalist Vanessa Beeley.

But it was several weeks after Whitaker’s smears that the attacks started in earnest. Following the now controversial alleged chemical weapon attack in Douma, Syria, on 7th April 2018, the US UK and France bombed Syrian government targets claiming Syria was responsible for the attack. At the same moment these air attacks were underway, the Times of London published four articles which included one on the Front page, photographs of some of us from WGSPM and an editorial.

These articles smeared the academics as ‘conspiracy theorists’ for questioning official narratives regarding chemical weapon attacks in Syria, as ‘Assadists’ and also implied the existence of nefarious links with Russia. Chris York of the Huffington Post then followed the Times attack with multiple articles attacking us. The articles followed a similar pattern to the Times’ hatchet pieces involving allegations of ‘conspiracism’, ‘war crimes denial’, being pro Assad and pro Putin etc. More than two years later, attack pieces are still being published.

The vast bulk of the output of WGSPM has concerned the issues of alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria and, in particular, the Douma event. The working group’s briefing notes documented serious anomalies and issues regarding these attacks and, in particular, critically analysed both the OPCW investigations of these alleged attacks and also identified the involvement of UK-linked actors, including the late James Le Mesurier (founder of the White Helmets) and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon.

The evidence, as the working group briefing notes set out, is that the OPCW Douma investigation was manipulated in order to ensure the finger was pointed at Syrian government responsibility for the alleged chemical weapon attack. In reality, the evidence did not demonstrate an attack had occurred and, in fact, pointed toward the attack having been staged.

Our findings have been presented at an event at the UK House of Commons and at the Harvard-Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons.

The WGSPM has not been alone in raising questions and a wide body of material now corroborates its work. For example, even at the time of the Douma attack credible individuals voiced doubt about the likelihood of the Syrian government launching a chemical weapon attack in Douma just as its forces were on the brink of retaking the enclave.

For example, both retired Major General Jonathan Shaw and Admiral Lord West questioned the tactical logic of any such an attack and the latter raised the possibility the event was carried out by opposition groups.

Following the publication of the final OPCW report on Douma in March 2019, an engineering report was leaked to WGSPM and which concluded that the chlorine gas cylinders had likely been manually placed at the alleged attack scenes rather than having been dropped from a Syrian air force helicopter. This engineering report, it subsequently transpired, had been rejected by OPCW management on spurious grounds.

During the Autumn of 2019 the Courage Foundation hosted a panel at which a former OPCW official briefed a panel of trusted and authoritative individuals, including José Bustani the first Director General of the OPCW, about significant procedural and scientific flaws regarding chemistry, ballistics, toxicology and witness statements.

An open letter addressed to OPCW states parties from the Courage Foundation followed and was signed by eminent voices such as Professor Noam Chomsky, Hans von Sponeck (former UN Assistant Secretary-General), GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter, film director and producer Oliver Stone and John Pilger.

Since then, multiple documents have been published by Wikileaks evidencing irregularities with respect to the Douma FFM investigation whilst journalists such as Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday), Stefania Maurizi (formerly of La Repubblica) and Robert Fisk (The Independent) have reported on the issue.

Peter Hitchens has been a particularly vociferous voice defending the reputations of two OPCW staff who have been subjected to a malicious internal investigation aimed at smearing their reputations. In 2020, further leaks have been published by The Grayzone in the United States including statements from further OPCW persons and, most recently, Aaron Maté published an article in the leading US current affairs magazine The Nation.

Finally, and by no means least, former OPCW inspector Ian Henderson addressed an Arria Formula meeting of the UN Security Council at which he detailed the irregularities and misconduct he had experienced with respect to the FFM Douma investigation. In September 2020, a second Arria Formula meeting was held at which OPCW Syia FFMs and the Douma investigation were again debated and which included, again, the former OPCW Inspector Ian Henderson. And, this week at a UN Security Council meeting, a statement from OPCW First Director-General José Bustani was read out in which yet again raised concerns about the conduct of the OPCW Douma investigation.

To any casual observer it should be abundantly clear that the activities and output of the WGSPM is entirely legitimate. Our work has been at the forefront of an issue that has been discussed by mainstream media journalist and has been corroborated by information from people within the OPCW itself.

Why then has the Times of London and the Huffington Post published approximately 20 articles (including three Times leaders) in 2 years targeting us?

In general, the behaviour of both the Times and the Huffington Post is disturbing and suggestive of a deliberate campaign aimed at suppressing public debate regarding both the war in Syria and the involvement of the UK government in supporting activities aimed at the overthrow of the Syrian government.

UK involvement in the Syrian war has included direct support for opposition groups as well as potentially criminal activity relating to the OPCW and connection with the staging of alleged chemical weapon attacks.

In the last few weeks, a large volume of FCO documents have been leaked which document a vast ‘strategic communication’ operation aimed at supporting the war against Syria. According to Ben Norton from the Grayzone:

[V]irtually every major Western corporate media outlet was influenced by the UK government-funded disinformation campaign exposed in the trove of leaked documents, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, CNN to The Guardian, the BBC to Buzzfeed.

In fact, there are some indications that the media attacks might be the direct result of deliberate media alignment with the UK government position on Syria and its well-established policy seeking to overthrow the existing Syrian government. Specifically, two of the authors of the original Times attack on the academics, Dominic Kennedy and Deborah Haynes, are identified in leaked documents as being associated with the UK government-funded propaganda operation known as the Integrity Initiative.

The Integrity Initiative leaks provided powerful insights on how propaganda operations were being built around “clusters” of journalists. Haynes has subsequently denied involvement with the article whilst Kennedy has repeatedly refused to answer questionsregarding the relationship between his articles and the Integrity Initiative.

Most notably, Times columnist Oliver Kamm has stated in public that the late James Le Mesurier ‘had reached out to this newspaper to urge us to keep on their [the academics] case’.

Regarding Huffington Post, Chris York’s line manager, Jess Brammar, is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committeewhich works with the UK government on influencing and controlling media reporting of defence and security related issues. Further information regarding the organizational details and scale of media-related activities aimed at suppressing criticism of UK Syria policy is still being investigated and information will be published in due course by WGSPM.

However, even if it is, as of yet, unclear whether the attacks are at the behest of those involved in UK government/FCO strategic communication operations related to Syria, it is certainly the case that they have a deleterious impact on open public debate and academic research. People might reasonably expect mainstream media to uphold, defend and encourage research and debate, as opposed to smear honest academics who are simply doing their jobs.

Even more seriously, the available evidence indicates that the alleged attack in Douma involved the murder of captive civilians. That means the event surrounding Douma likely involve an extremely serious, and indeed horrific, war crime. Those seeking to hinder those in pursuit of the truth run the risk of complicity, whether knowing or unknowingly, in a war crime and run legal jeopardy as a result.

A final note. The late Julian Perry Robinson, one of the world’s leading experts on chemical and biological weapons, was in communication with the Working Group. In an earlier era, Robinson played a key role challenging the false claim made by the US government that Soviet-backed forces in Laos and Cambodia were deploying toxins.

At the time of his death, he was completing a chronology regarding chemical weapons and the war in Syria. Writing about the events surrounding alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria and the vicious attacks against WGSPM, he noted that:

It is not immediately clear from their pronouncements that the critics of the WGSPM just quoted have in fact adequately studied the Group’s publications. They certainly seem not to have done their reading with the care that might have been expected ahead of such vicious denigrations.

So is the Group simply becoming a victim of the fake news and other acts of information warfare it has itself been seeking to counter? Is the WGSPM being maliciously targeted by enemies that its principled research and outreach seem to have created?

Part 8: The Chemical Warfare Reported From Syria: a documented chronology detailing reports of events in Syria since 1982 said to have involved use of chemical weapons, by Julian Perry Robinson

It was Julian Perry Robinson who subsequently invited WGSPM member Professor Paul McKeigue to present at the Harvard-Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons roundtable meeting in March 2020.

If a figure of such standing and brilliance wished for his colleagues to hear our analysis, where does this leave the Times and the Huffington Post who have so relentlessly sought to silence us through character assassination and smears?

Not, I would suggest, in a very good place.

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Dr Piers Robinson is a director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Climate Change – A Scam of Global Dimensions?

October 11th, 2020 by Peter Koenig

In the context of the global controversies about the Western narrative on the so-called “Climate Change” – and the ever more visible merging of this narrative with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) declared post-covid “Great Reset”, NTV, Moscow, aske me for an interview on the subject. Founder and President of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, co-authored recently a book “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020) that illustrates in scary details how the Grand Elite of the WEF plans to “transform” the current unfettered capitalism, as we know it, black (for hydrocarbon) and unjust, into a new form of extreme neoliberal capitalism, still black – but painted Green. They call it the New Green Deal. The IMF calls the same “The Great Transformation”.

NTV: You wrote that the noise due to climate change is a terrible fraud. Why do you think so?

Peter Koenig: Interestingly, this absurd but well-established narrative pervades everything in the western climate agenda, and media. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or what is called the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, is composed of renown scientists who are well-paid to continue convincing humanity that climate change is our fault. Actually, the very industry and other culprits, accused of causing global warming, are those who pay for perpetuating the lie, for the propaganda campaign. They have no serious interest in changing the world’s main source of energy, hydrocarbons – into renewable forms of energy. None. “Profit über alles” would be endangered.

There is huge funding behind financing this myth, for example the Soros Open Society Foundation – who finances Greta Thunberg and her travels and organization; and most likely makes sure that her talking points are in line with their interests.

But there are other financiers of this climate myth, like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and so on. They are all working towards a radical societal or even civilizational change – a One or New World Order.

In other words, there is a totally different agenda behind the Climate Agenda. But in a world of lies and deceit, the people are not supposed to know the truth.

The WEF’s declaration, especially Klaus Schwab’s book, “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” – lays it all bare. It’s the idea of a new world with a single government – and a few transnational corporations that control the world and humanity.

NTV: It is interesting that, as many scientists who observe CO2 now record, its concentration has not decreased at all due to the pandemic. Despite the fact that many businesses were forced to stop working, the number of flights significantly decreased, people began to travel less on gasoline transport, that is, the world actually fulfilled the Greta Thunberg program. It turns out that the dream of young climate advocates and their curators – severe measures to limit the carbon footprint – is complete nonsense?

PK: Yes, it is quite astounding that despite all the hype about man-made climate change, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has not changed at all in the last nine covid-stricken months. It is still around 410 ppm, the same as at the end of 2019.

Yet, the 3-months or more of total lockdown, the very limited economic and energy consuming activities up to this day – one would imagine – may have reduced the CO2 levels in the air. Nope. They didn’t.

That already is an indication that the conventional Climate Change narrative is a fraud – and it is knowingly false. The scientists, who are propagating this flawed-to-the-bone theory, know what they are doing and why.

Scientists who speak the truth – and there are ever more whose conscience tells them to inform the public about the truth – such scientists may lose their jobs, their reputation – their income, their livelihood.

Well, it’s a big scam – that is directed by billions and billions of dollars – to bring about a world where yet more capital, more assets are shifted from where they were created, namely by and from the public – to the top few. Algorithms – Artificial Intelligence – help in selecting and gambling with the countless covid-bankrupted small and medium size enterprises, including airlines, most of which are broke and dependent on Government subsidies. They are systematically bought up for pennies on the dollar by the world’s oligarchs.

This is how the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

But it’s all done under the umbrella of protecting Mother Earth and our climate.

NTV: What factors affect climate change? How important is the role of CO2 in this, and are those who claim that an unprecedented climate crisis will occur in 30 years due to an increase in its concentration correct?

PK: CO2 may also influence the climate, but not man-made CO2. Man-made CO2 contributes probably less than 1 % of all CO2 in the air (0.5% – according to an Australian scientist, who once categorized the man-made proportion as about 0.5%). Most carbon-dioxide is released by the seas, and that again varies considerably by water temperatures – which in turn depend largely on sun activities.

The seas both absorb and release CO2 – they are providing an equilibrium which is essential to conserve biodiversity, the very biodiversity that man’s extreme consumerism is destroying.

Because of this balancing act of Mother Earth, we know the cycle of El Niño in the South Pacific. It used to be between 9 and 12 years. In the last few decades, the cycle has become shorter, about 4 to 7 years.

There is a similar cycle in the Atlantic, called the El Niño’s Little Brother, or the Atlantic El Niño (North Atlantic Oscillation Phenomena). Together, the Pacific and the Atlantic “El Niño” are responsible for well over 50% of climate variability on Earth.

This is not because of man-made CO2, but mostly due to the combination of sun activities and unecological farming that seems to increase rather than diminish.

It’s a complex system that few people understand. And because it is so complex and not easily understood by the public at large, it is possible for the environmental fraudsters to sell us man-made climate change – and to force upon humanity what the World Economic Forum, the WEF, calls the Great Rest, a reformation of capitalism from a depredating “black” – like hydrocarbon – neoliberal capitalism, to a new neoliberal capitalism, still based on “black” energy, just painted Green.

Corporate economic interests have so far prevented research into true and efficient alternative and sustainable sources of energy.

NTV: Today you can see two opposite points of view: some say that the rapid increase in temperature due to anthropogenic factors, while others say that warming occurs according to the Milankovich concept, that is based on a constantly changing earth position vis-à-vis the sun.

PK: Both, I believe, influence climate, and it is difficult to say which one more.

On the anthropogenic side – over the past 60 / 70 years, industrialized agriculture, especially in the US, but also to some extent in Europe, has increased drastically; it is mono-culture based agriculture, over-fertilization, abuse of pesticides — the soil can no longer breathe, overuse of carbon in the soil, not leaving the earth enough time to regenerate.

Carbon is one of the keys to life.

A steady variety of plants not only absorbs carbon-dioxide (CO2), but also releases oxygen in the air. We need both in an equilibrium – and our “modern” agriculture destroys that equilibrium; destroys the very soil which then can no longer sufficiently absorb the sun’s UHV rays, and the sun heat which then reflects back into the atmosphere.

But definitely the traditional established and imposed “Climate Change” narrative is false, is a fraud. – And those who perpetuate it, know it’s a fraud.

The other reason – the Milankovitch hypothesis, is also very valid. The earth is changing constantly her position vis-à-vis the sun. Although it is a rotation, it is a slow elliptical rotation – and in men’s short lifespan, we believe every little change is important in our short lives, and unique, and, like in the case of climate, can be made to believe its caused by man.

Another related factor is the sun’s activities. Actually, they are key in influencing weather and climate on earth, as they also influence the two “El Niños”, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Already some 20 or 30 years ago, scientists predicted, increased sun activities in the coming decades – sun explosions, radiations – they impact hurricanes and other extreme weather events.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: People hold signs during the March for Science in Melbourne, Australia on April 22, 2017. (Photo: Takver/flickr/ccc)

Last night The Guardian sent the following email to Professor Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, one of the three initial signatories of the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ calling for a different approach to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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The article is yet to be published, but it looks very much like a move to delegitimise the ideas of these eminent scientists by smearing them by association. As Professor Kulldorff told The Guardian, he had never heard of the ‘Richie Allen show’ before he was invited on, and as a public health expert, he thinks it’s his duty to talk to all audiences in any case, whatever their beliefs.

I hadn’t heard of the show either (the website looks like lots of conspiracy theories), but is the fact that Kulldorff appeared on it really the big story? Surely the right thing for a newspaper to do is to engage in good faith with the arguments being presented, rather than to impugn integrity using Facebook shares as some sort of hard evidence.

This sort of thing is happening more and more often. Professor John Ioannidis at Stanford was subject to an extraordinary smear campaign after his ‘Santa Clara County’ study into seroprevalence. Buzzfeed even went so far as to imply financial wrongdoing on the basis of a $5,000 contribution by someone in the airline industry. The idea that a world-renowned academic would throw away his career for a $5,000 donation is absurd, and Stanford’s own investigation concluded that there was no conflict of interest whatsoever. But the rumour remains — the mud has been thrown and his reputation has been successfully tarnished.

I don’t buy into any of the conspiracy theories around the pandemic. Not 5G, not Bill Gates, not ‘Plandemic’ — I think we got into this mess with lots of frightened people trying to do the right thing with bad information, and lots of weak political leaders without clear values trying to protect their reputations. It’s more banal but, to me, just as alarming as any conspiracy.

Surely it would be better for powerful organisations like The Guardian to accept that these scientists are sincere and accomplished and are simply taking a different view as to how best to defend the greater good. The smear approach is a weak way to attempt to win any argument.

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Covid Experts: There Is Another Way

Three eminent epidemiologists met in Massachusetts to plan a better response to the pandemic

by Dr Sunetra Gupta, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Dr Martin Kulldorff

As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical, and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. 

Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. 

Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. 

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.  the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity. 

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. 

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. 

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 4th October 2020

To sign the declaration, follow this link:
www.GBdeclaration.org

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Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told CBS News [1] in a phone interview Sunday, “We hope he will win the election and wind up US military presence in Afghanistan.” The militant group also expressed concern about President Trump’s bout with the coronavirus. “When we heard about Trump being COVID-19 positive, we got worried for his health, but it seems he is getting better,” another Taliban senior leader confided to reporter Sami Yousafzai.

Although full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was originally scheduled for April next year, according to terms of peace deal reached with the Taliban on February 29, President Trump hastened the withdrawal process by making an electoral pledge this week that all troops should be “home by Christmas.” “We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas,” he tweeted.

The Taliban also noted it thinks highly of President Trump’s “MAGA” creed.

“It is the slogan of Trump from the start that they are not cops for the world and don’t want a single flag and anthem for the globe, but their priority is America first,” Taliban spokesman Mujahid said.

Another senior member of the Taliban praised the president’s honesty. “Honestly, Trump was much more honest with us than we thought, we were stunned by his offer to meet Taliban at Camp David.” Last year, President Trump disclosed that he had invited the Taliban for peace talks at Camp David, but later he canceled the plans after the Taliban killed a US soldier.

Similarly, Swiss-born Noor bin Ladin, the niece of notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden, expressed support for President Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Post [1] on September 5.

The 33-year-old daughter of Osama bin Laden’s half-brother Yeslam bin Ladin and Swiss author Carmen Dufour, speaking in her first-ever media interview, claimed that Trump would prevent another 9/11 terror attack if elected to a second term.

“ISIS proliferated under the Obama/Biden administration, leading to them coming to Europe. Trump has shown he protects America and us by extension from foreign threats by obliterating terrorists at the root and before they get a chance to strike,” she told the conservative news outlet.

“I have been a supporter of President Trump since he announced he was running in the early days in 2015. I have watched from afar and I admire this man’s resolve,” she said. “He must be reelected … It’s vital for the future of not only America, but western civilization as a whole.”

“You look at all the terrorist attacks that have happened in Europe over the past 19 years. They have completely shaken us to the core … extremist ideology has completely infiltrated our society,” Noor bin Ladin added.

As Noor bin Ladin perceptively noted, although ostensibly fighting a “war on terror” for the last couple of decades, Washington has clandestinely nurtured Islamic jihadists and used them as proxies in myriad conflict zones of the Middle East to achieve “strategic objectives.”

Newly released US government documents allege [3] the Islamic State’s new leader Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla identified dozens of fellow militants as well as the structure of al-Qaeda in Iraq, after he was arrested in 2008 and detained at Camp Bucca.

Three Tactical Interrogation Reports (TIR) released by the Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC) allege that al-Mawla, who at the time was an al-Qaeda judge, gave the US occupation forces in Iraq the names of 68 al-Qaeda fighters that led to the deaths of several al-Qaeda members after the US military conducted raids to hunt them down.

One of the persons named by al-Mawla was Abu Jasim Abu Qaswarah, thought to be the second-in-command of al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time. He was killed by US forces eight months after Mawla identified him as a member of the group.

According to the documents, al-Mawla was arrested in 2008 by the US forces and interrogated at Camp Bucca, a facility in Umm Qasr, southern Iraq, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was also incarcerated. Several officials have since referred to it as a “Jihadi university” because of the training provided there.

The CTC said that al-Mawla was released in 2009 and only came to prominence earlier this year when he became the leader of the Islamic State following the death of al-Baghdadi in October.

The US put a $5m bounty last year on the head al-Mawla, also known as Abdullah Qardash or Hajj Abdullah, and he is thought to be in hiding in Syria. Though the mainstream media reports claim he is hiding in eastern Syria, he might as well be hiding in northwest Idlib province like his predecessor.

It’s important to note in the news coverage of the killing of al-Baghdadi that although the mainstream media had been trumpeting for the last several years that the Islamic State’s fugitive chief had been hiding somewhere on the Iraq-Syria border in the east, he was found hiding in northwest Idlib province, under the control of Turkey’s militant proxies and al-Nusra Front, and was killed while trying to flee to Turkey in Barisha village five kilometers from the border.

The reason why the mainstream media scrupulously avoided mentioning Idlib as al-Baghdadi’s most likely hideout in Syria was to cover up the collusion between the militant proxies of Turkey and the jihadists of al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State.

In fact, the corporate media takes the issue of Islamic jihadists “commingling” with Turkey-backed “moderate rebels” in Idlib so seriously – which could give the Syrian government the pretext to mount an offensive in northwest Syria – that the New York Times cooked up an exclusive report [4] on October 30, a couple of days after the Special Ops night raid, that the Islamic State paid money to al-Nusra Front for hosting al-Baghdadi in Idlib.

The morning after the night raid, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported [5] on October 27 that a squadron of eight helicopters accompanied by warplanes belonging to the international coalition had attacked positions of Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, in Idlib province where the Islamic State chief was believed to be hiding.

Despite detailing the operational minutiae of the Special Ops raid, the mainstream news coverage of the raid deliberately elided over the crucial piece of information that the compound in Barisha village five kilometers from Turkish border where al-Baghdadi was killed belonged to Hurras al-Din, an elusive terrorist outfit which had previously been targeted several times in the US airstrikes.

Although Hurras al-Din is generally assumed to be an al-Qaeda affiliate, it is in fact the regrouping of the Islamic State jihadists under a different name in northwestern Idlib governorate after the latter terrorist organization was routed from Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in Syria in 2017 and was hard pressed by the US-led coalition’s airstrikes in eastern Syria.

Notwithstanding, according to “official version” [6] of Washington’s story regarding the killing of al-Baghdadi, the choppers took off from an American airbase in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, flew hundreds of miles over the enemy territory in the airspace controlled by the Syrian and Russian air forces, killed the self-proclaimed “caliph” of the Islamic State in a Hollywood-style special-ops raid, and took the same route back to Erbil along with the dead body of the terrorist and his belongings.

Although Washington has conducted several airstrikes in Syria’s Idlib in the past, those were carried out by fixed-wing aircraft that fly at high altitudes, and the aircraft took off from American airbases in Turkey, which is just across the border from Syria’s northwestern Idlib province. Why would Washington risk flying troops at low altitudes in helicopters over hostile territory controlled by myriads of Syria’s heavily armed militant outfits?

In fact, several Turkish journalists, including Rajip Soylu, the Turkey correspondent for the Middle East Eye, tweeted [7] on the night of the special-ops raid that the choppers took off from the American airbase in Turkey’s Incirlik.

As for al-Baghdadi, who was “hiding” with the blessing of Turkey, it is now obvious that he was the bargaining chip in the negotiations between Trump and Erdogan, and the quid for the US president agreeing to pull American troops out of northeast Syria was the pro quo that Erdogan would hand al-Baghdadi to him on a platter.

Erdogan has been acting with impunity lately in regional conflicts because he has forged a personal bonhomie with Donald Trump, as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Erdogan’s son-in-law and incumbent finance minister of Turkey Berat Albayrak were business partners. So much so that the Trump administration had to comply with Erdogan’s longstanding demand to evacuate American forces from the Kurdish-held areas in northeast Syria in October last year.

Immediately following the announcement of withdrawal of US forces from northeast Syria by the Trump administration on October 6 last year following a telephonic conversation between Trump and Erdogan, Turkey mounted Operation Peace Spring on October 9 in which the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian proxies invaded and occupied 120 kilometers wide and 32 kilometers deep stretch of Syrian territory between the northeastern towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn.

In return, Trump got the most coveted feather in his cap as Turkey let US Special Forces kill fugitive leader of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on October 26, weeks after the Turkish Operation Peace Spring in northeast Syria on October 9 last year.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] The Taliban on Trump: “We hope he will win the election”:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-on-trump-we-hope-he-will-win-the-election-withdraw-us-troops/

[2] Osama bin Laden’s niece says only Trump can prevent another 9/11:

https://nypost.com/2020/09/05/osama-bin-ladens-niece-says-only-trump-can-prevent-another-9-11/

[3] Islamic State’s ‘canary caliph’ gave intelligence to US in 2008:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/islamic-state-leader-intelligence-us-government

[4] ISIS Leader Paid Rival for Protection but Was Betrayed by His Own:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/world/middleeast/isis-leader-al-baghdadi.html

[5] Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed in US raid:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-targeted-us-raid-officials

 
[6] Official story of the night raid killing al-Baghdadi:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/us/politics/baghdadi-isis-leader-trump.html

[7] Trump Confirms ISIS Leader Al-Baghdadi Killed In US Raid:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-make-statement-after-isis-chief-al-baghdadi-killed-turkish-border-while-fleeing

Featured image is from OneWorld

Palestine under siege for 72 years. A UK-prompted UN decision in 1947 allowed David Ben-Gurion, then the head of the Jewish Agency, to proclaim on May 14, 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel.

The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, a UN proposal, recommended a partition of “Mandatory Palestine” at the end of the British Mandate. “Mandatory Palestine” was a geopolitical entity established between 1920–1948 in the region of Palestine, under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan as Resolution 181 (II).

Mandatory Palestine in 1946

Mandatory Palestine in 1946 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This fastidious date and controversial decision in 1948 brought about misery for generations of people – Palestinians – on their own land, inflicted by a tiny country implanted on Palestine – but supported by a super-power to the point that this tiny country, called Israel, has itslef become a super-power – on the verge of expanding herself not only over Palestinian terrirtory, but over the entire Middle-East.

It shall not happen.

This tiny country, ruled by a minority of power-greedy Zionists, linked to a worldwide Zionist-dominated network over the western financial system, and hellbent to rule the world – as the Chosen People, has violated countless UN Resolutions calling for a halt of her deadly aggressions on the Palestinian people. And not only on Palestine, but to stop her interference all over the Middle-East, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran – to mention just a few. To no avail.

The tragic and murderous photo series on the left, depicts the 20th anniversary of just one indescribable crime. But it is also symbolic for Israeli-perpetrated atrocities that have been slaughtering Palestinians for the last 72 years – indiscriminately, children, women, men – and no end is in sight, because the west looks on and tolerates. It tolerates one outrageous brutality after another.

Tolerance with financial gain. Weapons sales to Irael flurish – and trade with Israel is unaffected – as the Jewish people, victims of the Holocaust – that, indeed, shall never be forgotten! – are being used by their Zionist masters to continue instilling guilt on Europe, the world. It’s a strategy that works wonders. The victims cum guilt have become an alabi for today’s Israel getting literally away not just with murder, but with an ongoing genocide.

As things stand today, Irael is about to take over and absorb the Palestinian West Bank without serious opposition from its wester NATO allies, the very hypocrytical west that is officially propagating peace talsk after peace talks – no end. Indeed, no end. Because Peace is not wanted. Thed United States of America wants full domination of the Middle-East. Its one of the planet’s most energy rich areas, but also one of the most strategic gateways between Eurasia and Africa. So, the symbiotic relationship of the tail wagging the dog, between Israel and the US of A will go on.

Should that take-over by Israel of the Westbank happen, then the entire once “Mandatory Palestine” would become Israel. This may be the “geopolitical” strategy, but are the people at large – all over the globe – aware of this diabolical plan?

When the legendary “Crack” – “There is a Crack in Everything, that’s how the Light Gets In” (“Anthem”, Leonard Cohen, London 2008) – will open our minds to the reality of what we humans are doing to ourselves, to humanity – to our fellow sentient beings – we may finally act and choose Justice over Greed, Love over Hate and Peace over War.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

How Can Americans Support Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh?

October 11th, 2020 by Nicolas J. S. Davies

Americans are dealing with an upcoming general election, a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 of us, and corporate news media whose business model has degenerated to selling different versions of “The Trump Show” to their advertisers. So who has time to pay attention to a new war half way round the world? But with so much of the world afflicted by 20 years of U.S.-led wars and the resulting political, humanitarian and refugee crises, we can’t afford not to pay attention to the dangerous new outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a bloody war over Nagorno-Karabakh from 1988 to 1994, by the end of which at least 30,000 people had been killed and a million or more had fled or been driven out of their homes. By 1994, Armenian forces had occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, all internationally recognized as parts of Azerbaijan. But now the war has flared up again, hundreds of people have been killed, and both sides are shelling civilian targets and terrorizing each other’s civilian populations.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been an ethnically Armenian region for centuries. After the Persian Empire ceded this part of the Caucasus to Russia in the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, the first census ten years later identified Nagorno-Karabakh’s population as 91% Armenian. The USSR’s decision to assign Nagorno-Karabakh to the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923, like its decision to assign Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, was an administrative decision whose dangerous consequences only became clear when the U.S.S.R. began to disintegrate in the late 1980s.

In 1988, responding to mass protests, the local parliament in Nagorno-Karabakh voted by 110-17 to request its transfer from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR, but the Soviet government rejected the request and inter-ethnic violence escalated. In 1991, Nagorno-Karabakh and the neighboring Armenian-majority Shahumian region, held an independence referendum and declared independence from Azerbaijan as the Republic of Artsakh, its historic Armenian name. When the war ended in 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh and most of the territory around it were in Armenian hands, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled in both directions.

There have been clashes since 1994, but the present conflict is the most dangerous and deadly. Since 1992, diplomatic negotiations to resolve the conflict have been led by the “Minsk Group,” formed by the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) and led by the United States, Russia and France. In 2007, the Minsk Group met with Armenian and Azerbaijani officials in Madrid and proposed a framework for a political solution, known as the Madrid Principles.

The Madrid Principles would return five of the twelve districts of Shahumyan province to Azerbaijan, while the five districts of Naborno-Karabakh and two districts between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia would vote in a referendum to decide their future, which both parties would commit to accept the results of. All refugees would have the right to return to their old homes.

Ironically, one of the most vocal opponents of the Madrid Principles is the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a lobby group for the Armenian diaspora in the United States. It supports Armenian claims to the entire disputed territory and does not trust Azerbaijan to respect the results of a referendum. It also wants the de facto government of the Republic of Artsakh to be allowed to join international negotiations on its future, which is probably a good idea.

On the other side, the Azerbaijani government of President Ilham Aliyev now has the full backing of Turkey for its demand that all Armenian forces must disarm or withdraw from the disputed region, which is still internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Turkey is reportedly paying jihadi mercenaries from Turkish-occupied northern Syria to go and fight for Azerbaijan, raising the specter of Sunni extremists exacerbating a conflict between Christian Armenians and mostly Shiite Muslim Azeris.

On the face of it, despite these hard-line positions, this brutal raging conflict should be possible to resolve by dividing the disputed territories between the two sides, as the Madrid Principles attempted to do. Meetings in Geneva and now Moscow seem to be making progress toward a ceasefire and a renewal of diplomacy. On Friday, October 9th, the two opposing foreign ministers met for the first time in Moscow, in a meeting mediated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and on Saturday they agreed to a temporary truce to recover bodies and exchange prisoners.

The greatest danger is that either Turkey, Russia, the U.S. or Iran should see some geopolitical advantage in escalating or becoming more involved in this conflict. Azerbaijan launched its current offensive with the full backing of Turkey’s President Erdogan, who appears to be using it to demonstrate Turkey’s renewed power in the region and strengthen its position in conflicts and disputes over Syria, Libya, Cyprus, oil exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean and the region in general. If that is the case, how long must this go on before Erdogan has made his point, and can Turkey control the violence it is unleashing, as it has so tragically failed to do in Syria?

Russia and Iran have nothing to gain and everything to lose from an escalating war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and are both calling for peace. Armenia’s popular Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan came to power after Armenia’s 2018 “Velvet Revolution” and has followed a policy of non-alignment between Russia and the West, even though Armenia is part of Russia’s CSTO military alliance. Russia is committed to defend Armenia if it is attacked by Azerbaijan or Turkey, but has made it clear that that commitment does not extend to Nagorno-Karabakh. Iran is also more closely aligned with Armenia than Azerbaijan, but now its own large Azeri population has taken to the streets to support Azerbaijan and protest their government’s bias toward Armenia.

As for the destructive and destabilizing role the United States habitually plays in the greater Middle East, Americans should beware of any U.S. effort to exploit this conflict for self-serving U.S. ends. That could include fueling the conflict to undermine Armenia’s confidence in its alliance withRussia, to draw Armenia into a more Western, pro-NATO alignment. Or the U.S. could exacerbate and exploit unrest in Iran’s Azeri community as part of its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.

At any suggestion that the U.S. is exploiting or planning to exploit this conflict for its own ends, Americans should remember the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan whose lives are being lost or destroyed every day that this war rages on, and should condemn and oppose any effort to prolong or worsen their pain and suffering for U.S. geopolitical advantage.

Instead the U.S. should fully cooperate with its partners in the OSCE’s Minsk Group to support a ceasefire and a lasting and stable negotiated peace that respects the human rights and self-determination of all the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

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

Selected Articles: Coronavirus Policing and Overreach

October 10th, 2020 by Global Research News

Evidence that the Face Mask does not Impede Viral Transmission

By Prof. Bill Willers, October 09 2020

An Open Letter to Robert Redfield, Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Reimagine and Reset Our World”: “COVID-19, The Great Reset” by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret

By Catherine Austin Fitts, October 09 2020

What surprised me about Covid-19: The Great Reset was the implied confidence that the “official reality” is selling. From their approach, I assume that the authors are targeting young people—helping them establish a framework that feels positive about the future and will support where the global leadership wants to go.

While No One Was Looking: America, Guyana, and Venezuela

By Ted Snider, October 09 2020

On March 2, 2020, the people of Guyana went to the polls. According to the Carter Center, at first things went really well. And then they didn’t. At the close of the day, President David Granger had been re-elected. But, though nine of ten districts reported cleanly, the largest district was mired in confusion. And the promise became chaos.

Colombia Covid Lockdown: Collapse of Healthcare, Social Crisis, Poverty

By Yanis Iqbal, October 09 2020

The present-day shambolic structure of Colombian healthcare is an inevitable consequence of an all-pervasive implementation of neoliberalism.

US Sanctions: Weapons of War by Other Means on Targeted Nations

By Stephen Lendman, October 09 2020

Despite their illegality and ineffectiveness, they’re imposed time and again on numerous countries. According to international security affairs expert Professor Robert Pape, sanctions are only effective around 5% of the time.

Omnibus Collisions: Coronavirus Policing and Overreach in Victoria

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 09 2020

Officers would have the power to detain anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19, or anyone who had been in close contact with a positive case, for a period “reasonably necessary to eliminate a serious risk to public health,” provided it was “reasonably believed” they would fail to comply with a direction of self-quarantine

Over 6000 Scientists, Doctors Sign Anti-lockdown Petition

By Steve Watson, October 09 2020

Over six thousand scientists and doctors have signed a petition against coronavirus lockdown measures, urging that those not in the at risk category should be able to get on with their lives as normal, and that lockdown rules in both the US and UK are causing ‘irreparable damage’.

Video: “Contact Tracing”, A Certified Contact Tracer Exposes the Truth

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, October 09 2020

The US government, the Clinton Foundation and several states are actively creating an army of contact tracers, so in a sense, Obama’s call for a civilian force is becoming a reality.

A Big Move In Silver: Watch The Currency Markets

By Hubert Moolman, October 09 2020

The 2020 silver bottom occurred one month before the April 2020 USD/ZAR top (a similar setup to 2001). Since then, we have had a multi-month silver rally which is very likely just the beginning of a multi-year rally.

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