Global Research

My neighbor is a Vietnam vet suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. He is in his early 70s and looks at least 10 years older. In and out of hospitals with lapses in memory, the guy still maintains a ‘gung ho’ Amerikan exceptionalist mindset. Will he ever learn the truth about how his life and that of millions of others, military and civilian, was damaged or destroyed by our country? On Monday he will both display and salute our flag, the one that the Military Industrial Empire had hijacked long ago. With the exception of WW2, Memorial Day will be an endless bunch of hogwash celebrations and remembrances to honor men and women who dutifully followed orders while never questioning the evil ones who controlled them. Ignorance is most certainly bliss!

We already see that over 50% of our taxes goes down this rabbit hole of bloated, obscene and unnecessary military spending. Having nearly 1000 bases replete with advanced weapons systems, and of course those poor kids in uniform, in over 100 countries we should NOT be in, does not make us safer. Matter of fact, it has and will make us LESS safe! Too many afflicted people in the Middle East despise us for what we have done to them in recent years. All the honor guards and pomp and circumstance that this empire throws at us does not save the day. The con job of being in a ‘War with Terror’ tells only half the story. The other half is listing what we have done to terrorize the people in the Middle East! Dropping the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ or drone missile strikes only exacerbates things, doesn’t it?

I salute our young service people, not the ones who randomly or without just cause have murdered women, children, the elderly or innocent Arab men in places they should never have been sent to. During the Vietnam War era, we peace activists never pointed fingers at the overwhelming majority of our returning G.I.s. We only took issue with those who professed such animus for the Communist gooks they were so proud to have killed, tortured or burned alive. Many guys from our neighborhood signed up, hoping to ‘ fight the good fight’, only to return home in a box. These 18, 19 and 20 year old kids did not know what the hell this war was all about. They, including this writer, believed, in the early stages of it all, that we were doing a noble thing to help the South Vietnamese fend off the invading North Vietnamese communists. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis gave us the hype and spin that we were protecting our great nation from a possible Communist attack. The Russians, like the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, never played fair… only we did! That was the Kool- Aid that most of us drank at the time.

In this baby boomer’s lifetime I have never seen such a militaristic mindset amongst so many citizens. Too many car license plates have those military logos on them. Too many parents have those signs on the back of their cars “Proud Parent (Grandparent) of a Marine (Soldier)”. Every sporting event has to now have the honor guard with the flag before the National Anthem is sung. Football fields will have one giant flag cover the whole field! The fans stand there with their hands over their hearts, and faces down in reverence. It seems the Amerikan way of war is now the norm. This Military Industrial Empire has won over the hearts and minds of too many good people! If it doesn’t stop our nation will not only become bankrupt fiscally, but morally as well!

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This article was originally published on Information Clearing House in May 2017.

Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Recently, several phone calls made four years ago between former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden were revealed. The content of the talks is profound and controversial and reveals the high degree of American influence in the coordination of Ukrainian domestic politics, showing the advanced state of submission of Kiev to Washington.

According to the deputy of the Ukrainian Parliament (Supreme Rada), Andrei Derkach, the audio recordings were received from an anonymous investigative journalist. Derkach revealed the content of the recordings and declared full confidence in his informant.

On audio recordings, we can hear the former US Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry demanding that the leader of a formally independent state make decisions that are convenient for them, as well as a totally submissive posture by the part of Poroshenko, who is absolutely oblivious to Ukrainian national interests.

The demands made during the talks are diverse and impress by the American boldness to interfere so deeply in other states. In one of the recordings, dated from 2015, it is possible to hear John Kerry demanding the resignation of Ukrainian attorney general Viktor Shokin, for not meeting American expectations. In another record, Poroshenko communicates with Biden saying he has “good news for him”. In the recording, Poroshenko says that while there was no charge or complaint against Shokin, he managed to convince the attorney to resign. The interlocutor replies: “Excellent”. So, Poroshenko reports that the dismissal of the attorney general is yet another “step in fulfilling his obligations” to the US.

In another phone call, the topic of appointing a new attorney is discussed. After a conversation between Poroshenko and his American counterparts, Yuri Lutsenko is chosen to be appointed to the office. Washington’s interlocutors make it clear that Lutsenko’s appointment is an essential condition for Kiev’s receipt of a loan of one billion dollars. Totally submissive, Poroshenko agrees with the terms of the agreement and the fees imposed without any dispute, consolidating the “partnership”.

In Washington, assistants of the former Vice President and current candidate Joe Biden informed The Washington Post that the recordings have been edited and are being used improperly to put pressure on the parties involved in the talks. However, the veracity of the existence of such telephone conversations has not been contested, which in itself is enough to create an atmosphere of tension and distrust towards the figures involved.

The fact is that the matter is still far from over. Whether or not they were edited, the recordings are apparently real. And, although the content of the conversations is contested, in truth, one billion dollars were withdrawn from the American public coffers and handed over to the president of another country, without anything being informed to the American population. After all, what will be the reaction of the American people when they understand that this money comes from their taxes and, instead of being invested in improvements to the national infrastructure, it is being used in obscure political maneuvers with other countries?

This all tends to strengthen Donald Trump in the elections. The current American president until recently had an absolute majority of voting intentions and is now starting to weaken due to the way he has been dealing with the new coronavirus pandemic in the US – the global epicenter of the infection. Biden, although much less popular, progresses little by little and is already showing the ability to become a real opponent to Trump. However, as the scandals spread, it is likely that there will be a drop in the Biden’s voters or, at least, a greater atmosphere of collective distrust for him.

Still, Joe Biden’s reliability is not the main issue that comes up with the revelations of these recordings, but the level of American interference in the domestic politics of other national states. With these telephone records, Kiev proved to be a zone of foreign interference, where a president is coerced by members of the government of another country to make decisions that he would not like to make. This is not just an extremely demoralizing fact for Ukraine, but it also deeply destroys the myth of “Ukrainian nationalism”, so defended by the militias involved in the Euromaidan coup in 2014. However, more than that, the case may take Petro Poroshenko to the court. The recordings are sufficient evidence to accuse the former president of national treason. If formally accused and condemned, Poroshenko will have ended his political career in the worst possible way for a former president: being remembered as a traitor to his own country.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international Law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) and Syrian militants supported by the Turkish military have achieved more gains in their battle against the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

GNA forces have captured the areas of Asabiah and Mazdah from the LNA and besieged the town of Tarhuna. On May 23, pro-Turkish sources even claimed that alleged Russian private military contractors operating on the side of the LNA were withdrawn from Tarhuna to Bani Walid and then were evacuated from the country. arlier, the GNA claimed that a Russian military contractor was killed in the area of Salah ad-Din. On top of this, the LNA lost two Chinese-made Wing Loong II combat drones supplied by the UAE which crashed near Bani Walid and Qaryat. The total number of LNA fighters killed or injured in recent clashes in Libya’s northwest, according to pro-GNA sources, is over 100.

However, clashes that erupted north of Tarhuna early on May 24 demonstrated that LNA forces are not going to surrender the town without a battle. Meanwhile, the number of Turkish-backed Syrian militants killed in Libya reportedly reached 311. Additionally, the LNA claimed that its forces had shot down 13 Turkish unmanned combat aerial vehicles during the last 3 days. According to the LNA spokesperson, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Mesmari, the army is now relocating its troops and preparing for a push to once again take an upper hand in the battle against Turkish-backed forces.

The LNA also shared a video documenting Turkish actions to supply military equipment and deploy members of Syrian militant groups in Tripoli. The scale of the Turkish military involvement in the conflict grows on a daily basis. Just recently, Ankara reportedly deployed a MIM-23 Hawk medium-range air defense system and military specialists in the city of Misrata.

Turkish military actions are a cornerstone of the recent GNA successes on the ground. At the same time, the very same approach is instigating instability in the region. Egypt and the UAE, which support the LNA, see the Turkish expansion and the strengthening of the GNA as a direct threat to its vital interests. Cairo is also concerned that, if radical militant groups operating under the brand of the GNA reach the Egyptian-Libyan border, they will become a constant source of the terrorist threat in Egypt itself.

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When the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) withdrew from a Huawei-sponsored Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) webinar – the ethical grounds it allegedly did so on were ill-defined at best.

The NABJ seemed to hint it was actually pressure on it from various other groups to cancel the webinar that spurred the decision and not any concerns the NABJ itself had with Huawei.

Articles like the Washington Examiner’s, “‘Become a distraction’: National Association of Black Journalists cancels webinar sponsored by Huawei,” would report:

Huawei, a Chinese-based telecommunications firm that has been indicted for racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets, was partnering with the NABJ on an event called “The Rise of Misinformation,” which was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. After receiving pushback for the partnership, the NABJ released a statement on Tuesday announcing the webinar’s cancellation after it had “become a distraction.”

The article would also complain regarding Huawei that:

The Department of Justice has been wary of Huawei and has urged allies not to work with the company, which the United States alleges violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In its February indictment, the DOJ pointed to the company’s “long-running practice of using fraud and deception to misappropriate sophisticated technology” from US counterparts and revealed new details about Huawei’s deceptive efforts to evade US sanctions when doing business in North Korea and Iran.

Of course – besides being baseless – US accusations against Huawei stem from the fact the Chinese tech-giant is overtaking US corporations – outperforming them technologically and taking over market shares around the globe from once deeply entrenched US monopolies.

Another complaint is Huawei’s alleged violation of illegal sanctions the US has levelled against Iran as part of its attempts to trigger war against Tehran or overthrow the government residing there, triggering yet another endless and destructive – not to mention costly – war in the Middle East.

“Woke” Personalities Suspiciously Mindless, Racist Regarding China 

More confusing was political commentator and CNN contributor Van Jones chiming in – applauding the decision to cancel the webinar and insisting he would not have agreed to participate had he known Huawei was a sponsor.

Jones never explains why Huawei’s sponsorship was a problem.

For a man who works for a news network guilty of lying the American people into serial wars over the past three decades costing the lives of thousands of US soldiers, the lives of millions of innocent people from North Africa to Central Asia, and squandering trillions of  US tax dollars – political motivations rather than any sort of “ethical” concern likely spurred Jones’ stance.

Ultimately what the cancelled panel proves is that rather than actually discussing COVID-19 and the impact Washington’s mismanagement of it is having on communities around the United States – attention has been redirected to a “common enemy” overseas – with white and black Americans uniting in scapegoating China for their collective woes. It is something that can only be described as decidedly “un-woke.”

A nation with this sort of mindset – or at least a nation with media conglomerates promoting such a mindset – is a nation mired in the murkiest of swamps. The irony of US President Donald Trump promising to “drain the swamps” of US special interests only to see them at their thickest, deepest, and boggiest amid the COVID-19 outbreak speaks volumes as to why Huawei may have seen it necessary to support an event combating disinformation within the US and why it was ultimately cancelled.

Of course, foreign sponsors involving themselves in the internal affairs of any other given nation is problematic. But that was not the concern expressed regarding Huawei – nor is it a concern mentioned by people like Van Jones or CNN when the US likewise meddles abroad in a similar or much more intrusive manner.

As many others have pointed out and as is becoming increasingly self-evident – COVID-19 isn’t breaking America – America is already broken. COVID-19 is simply amplifying and accelerating problems long rotting the foundation of American society. Those like Van Jones and CNN are committed to maintaining a status quo allowing this rot to continue and organizations like the NABJ find themselves subjected to irresistible pressure to likewise ignore the rot and focus attention elsewhere.

The NABJ’s decision, the agenda of those that pressured it to make that decision, and Van Jones’ dishonesty will neither address the damage COVID-19 hysteria is having across America nor do anything at all to address the reality that China is overtaking the US economically and upon the global stage.

Until Americans are ready to have a real conversation about what needs to be done and until Americans are ready to do it – China’s rise and America’s decline will only continue – with crises like COVID-19 accelerating the process exponentially.

Finally, the “woke” movement in the US appears to be little more than another brand of mainstream corporate propaganda, simply repackaged to appeal to yet another target market. In this example, we see the “woke” movement dovetailing in with mainstream anti-Chinese sentiment based entirely preserving US hegemony and attacking anything at all that threatens it.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Leaving crises to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s management skills will never disappoint those who favour chaos and the attractions of vague direction.  The double standard is to be preferred to the equal one.  With the United Kingdom sundered by death and the effects of COVID-19 (the PM himself having had his battle with the virus), the population was hoping for some clarity.  When, for instance, would the lockdown measures be eased? 

On May 10, Johnson delivered an address from his comically staged desk which had the appearance of being trapped in the door during a bungled removal effort.  “We have been through the initial peak – but it is coming down the mountain that is often more dangerous,” he tried explaining.  “We have a route, and we have a plan, and everyone in government has the all-consuming pressure and challenge to save lives, restore livelihoods and gradually restore the freedoms that we have.”  Seeds of confusion were sowed with promise.  People would be allowed to do “unlimited amounts of outdoor exercise”, and the “Stay Home” message had changed to “stay alert, control the virus and save lives.”  The broader citizenry were puzzled.

Mixed messaging was not the only problem facing Johnson, whose preferable default during any emergency is the behaviour of the reasonable Briton, characterised by patience and common sense.  Within his own circles, abiding by the rules has been a lax affair.  His chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has been defiant before the lockdown rulebook.

In a statement and press address, Cummings laid out his explanation for his recent bad behaviour.  The heart-tugging element was important.  So was the ignorance that he had done nothing to niggle the ethical.  Johnson had just been found out to have contracted COVID-19.  Arrangements of how to handle the emergency were discussed. Then came the urgent call from Cummings’ wife. “She’d vomited and felt like she might pass out.  And there’ll be nobody to look after our child.  None of our usual childcare options were available.” 

What followed that April, with most of the UK in mandated self-isolation, was travel – some 260 miles in all – that involved leaving his London home on a trip to County Durham, accompanied by his wife and child.  The decision had been made to stay in a cottage on the farm of Cummings’ father.  It was there that Cummings fell ill, as did his son, who spent a stint in hospital.  It subsequently surfaced that Johnson’s aide had also repaired to Barnard Castle, a visit reported to Durham police by Robin Lees, a retired chemistry teacher.  That visit raised eyebrows for falling within the category of non-essential travel.

The aide’s conclusion for breaching such rules were self-exculpatory, which cannot excite any surprise from those familiar with those behind the law and policy of the state apparatus.  The higher up the food chain of power, the more likely the powerful will misbehave and change the meals.  Andre Spicer puts it in a dull though accurate manner: “a large body of research […] shows that it is people in positions of power that are most likely to take excessive risks.”  Such risks are minimised, if not ignored altogether. The one who assumes, and presumes to be in a position of power, is likely to cheat, bend and break the order.

Cummings, in his reasoning, might have done unreasonable things in the past, but thought that what had transpired over those 14 days was reasonable.  “The regulations make clear, I believe the risks to the health of small children were an exceptional situation, and I had a way of dealing with this that minimised risk to others.”

Such a statement of behavioural latitude, in times when those in the United Kingdom, for the most part, have complied with the coronavirus lockdown, looks politically indulgent.  Johnson has added to that indulgence, claiming that Cummings merely “followed the instincts of every father and every parent, and I do not mark him down for that.”  The “right kind of childcare” was not available” at that time; both Cummings and his wife “were about to be incapacitated by coronavirus”.

Staying with Cummings is courting a grand risk.  And such risks compound when they are given the Johnson touch.  Professor Stephen Reicher of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) furnishing Downing Street with advice on how the public might best respond to the lockdown measures, seethed on hearing about the prime ministerial defence. “I can say that in a few short minutes tonight, Boris Johnson had trashed all the advice we have given on how to build trust and secure adherence to the measures necessary to control Covid-19.”  Honesty had been “trashed”, as had respect for the public, equity, equal treatment, consistency and the message “we are all in Fthis together”. 

Even conservative commentary on the subject is wary of the prime minister’s loyalty to Cummings, showing that this is no ordinary row in the halls of Westminster.  Former Johnson adviser Tim Montgomerie expressed embarrassment for having “ever backed Boris Johnson for high office.”  Chair of the Northern Ireland select committee, Simon Hoare, was baffled.  “With the damage Mr Cummings is doing to the government’s reputation, he must consider his position.  Lockdown has had its challenges for everyone.”  The prime minister “is a populist who no longer understands the populace,” suggests Nick Cohen in The Spectator. “Dominic Cummings pretends to be an anti-elitist but cannot see how lethal the slogan ‘one rule for me and another for everyone else’ is to him and the elite her serves.”  That about sums it up.

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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 Bolivarian republic of Venezuela denounced through a communique the decision of the Delaware District Court, United States, which intends to carry out the procedures for the judicial sale of the shares of the Venezuelan state-owned company Citgo Petroleum belonging to PDV Holding, a company owned de Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA).

It mentioned the existence of a plan by the US government to confiscate the assets of PDVSA in the United States, an action ordered by the deputy Juan Guaidó and his accomplices, so that from a fraudulent representation of the Republic and PDVSA, he acts to the detriment of the national interest, for the benefit of interventionist intentions.

#COMMUNIQUE Venezuela denounces the decision by a Delaware Court in the US to liquidate the shares of CITGO Corporation belonging to PDVSA in a modern piracy maneuver with no legitimacy. https://t.co/Yr288Zrprh

— Orinoco Tribune (@OrinocoTribune) May 24, 2020

It repudiates the judgment that intends to execute an award issued by the Arbitration Court of the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), for a value of 1.2 billion dollars, based on a claim made by the Canadian company Crystallex against the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela, even though neither PDVSA, Citgo, nor PDV Holding are debtors of Crystallex nor were they subject to the procedure before the ICSID Arbitration Tribunal.

Below, OTs translation of the communique:

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela denounces [the ruling] that on May 22, 2020, the District Court of Delaware, United States, issued, a decision by which it ordered the execution of procedures for the judicial sale of shares of the Venezuelan state company Citgo Petroleum belonging to PDV Holding, a company owned by Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA).

With this ruling, the existence of a plan by the US government to confiscate PDVSA assets in the United States is clear. For such purposes, they have delegated to the deputy Juan Guaidó and his accomplices, the establishment of a fraudulent representation of the Republic and PDVSA, which is not only illegal, but acts to the detriment of the national interest, to the benefit of interventionist intentions.

The judgment seeks to execute an award issued by the Arbitration Tribunal of the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), for a value of 1.2 billion dollars, based on a claim made by the Canadian company Crystallex against the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela, even though neither PDVSA, Citgo, nor PDV Holding are debtors to Crystallex nor were they subject to the procedure before the ICSID Arbitration Tribunal.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela once again warns that judicial representatives who have tried to act on behalf of the Republic and PDVSA in US courts lack any legitimacy. On the contrary, Venezuela has denounced the very serious fact that the lawyer who fraudulently pretends to represent the republic, has actually worked as a legal adviser to the Crystallex company, and is the one who has promoted the thesis according to which he intends to confuse as one the assets of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the assets of PDVSA.

Faced with this act of arbitrariness and modern piracy, the international community, particularly those with investments in the United States, should remain very vigilant in this case, since it is indicative of the actions that the United States is willing to carry out, even against of the international and internal legal order, to assert their interests on strategic foreign investments.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, through its legitimate representatives, will continue to carry out the defense of the heritage of all Venezuelans, anywhere in the world, for which it reserves all actions that may take place at the international level and in the jurisdiction of the United States, to assert their sovereign rights.

Caracas, May 24, 2020

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Featured image: Citgo gas station in the US. File photo

O Exército dos EUA na Europa, “após cuidadosa avaliação e planificação”, decidiu que efectuará na Polónia, de 5 a 19 de Junho, o exercício  Allied Spirit , no âmbito da grande manobra estratégica Defender-Europe 20 (Defensor da Europa 2020). Participarão 4.000 soldados americanos de unidades blindadas e de infantaria, apoiados por 2.000 polacos.

O exercício, que deveria ter acontecido em Maio, foi adiado porque, devido ao Covid-19, o Defender-Europe 20 foi parcialmente modificado. Mas, especifica o US Army Europe, quando em Março, foi suspenso o envio de forças dos Estados Unidos, “mais de 90% dos equipamentos destinados ao Defender-Europe 20 já estavam a bordo de aviões e navios com destino à Europa”.

No total, chegaram mais de 3.000 equipamentos, a começar por tanques, aos quais foram adicionados mais de 9.000 veículos blindados e outros veículos provenientes dos depósitos “pré-posicionados” que o Exército USA mantém na Alemanha. Dos Estados Unidos chegaram mais de 6.000 soldados, incorporados por milhares de outros estacionados na Europa.

Apesar do “ajuste devido ao Covid-19”, comunica o Exército o US Army, “muitos dos objectivos de prontidão estratégica foram ralizados”. Anuncia portanto, que, para compensar o tempo perdido, “o US Army Europe está a planear exercícios complementares nos próximos meses, baseados em muitos dos objectivos originais do Defender-Europe 20 para aumentar a prontidão e a interoperabilidade das forças USA e aliadas”.

O Allied Spirit   faz parte de uma série de exercícios nesse quadro estratégico de nítida função anti-russa. Não é por acaso que ocorre na Polónia. Segundo, o que se estabeleceu na Declaração Militar assinada pelo Presidente Trump e pelo Presidente Duda da Polónia, em Setembro passado – os Estados Unidos estão a aumentar fortemente a sua presença militar. O número de soldados que mantém em permanência, através de um sistema de rotação, foi acrescido de 4.500 para 5.500.

Em Poznan, o US Army instala um verdadeiro quartel general de divisões numa base avançada.

Em Drawsko Pomorskie, as forças armadas USA abrem um Centro de Treino de Combate.

Em Wrocław-Strachowice, a US Air Force constrói um grande aeroporto de desembarque.

Em Lask, a US Air Force transfere uma equipa de aviões pilotados remotamente, incluindo drones Reaper.

Em Powidz, uma brigada aérea de combate.

Tanto em Powidz como em Lubliniec, as Forças USA de Operações Especiais estabeleceram as suas bases.

Num localidade ainda a ser determinada, será destacada em permanência a equipa de combate de uma brigada blindada USA. Todo o equipamento já está armazenado em Bergen-Hohne, na Alemanha. O US Army Europe também comunica que a 173ª Brigada Aerotransportada, com sede em Vicenza, está a planear operações nos Balcãs e na região do Mar Negro, enquanto o 10º Comando de Defesa Aérea e de Mísseis participará em exercícios no Báltico.

A US Air Force comunica que os três tipos de bombardeiros estratégicos convencionais e nucleares de dupla capacidade USA – B-2 Spirit, B-1B Lancer e B-52H – realizaram em Maio, missões na Europa, a partir dos Estados Unidos. O que demonstrou que “a pandemia do Covid-19 não comprometeu a prontidão e o alcance dos bombardeiros estratégicos dos EUA”.

Estes factos, ignorados pelo principais meios de comunicação social que tinham anunciado o cancelamento do Defender-Europe 20 devido ao Covid-19, confirmam que os USA não cancelaram, mas remodelaram, apenas, a operação estratégica, prolongando-a.

Permanece o objectivo de Washington de aumentar a tensão com a Rússia, usando a Europa como primeira linha do confronto, o que permite aos Estados Unidos reforçar a sua liderança sobre os aliados europeus e orientar a política externa e militar da União Europeia, na qual 22 dos 27 membros pertencem à NATO, sob comando USA.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

L’esercito Usa riprende le grandi manovre in Europa

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Lo US Army Europe (Esercito Usa in Europa), «dopo attenta valutazione e pianificazione», ha deciso che effettuerà in Polonia, dal 5 al 19 giugno, l’esercitazione Allied Spirit  nel quadro della grande manovra strategica Defender-Europe 20 (Difensore dell’Europa 2020). Vi parteciperanno 4.000 soldati Usa di unità corazzate e di fanteria, affiancati da 2.000 polacchi.

L’esercitazione, che avrebbe dovuto svolgersi in maggio, è stata posticipata poiché,  a causa del Covid-19, la Defender-Europe 20 è stata parzialmente modificata. Ma, precisa lo US Army Europe, quando in marzo è stato sospeso l’invio di forze dagli Stati uniti, «oltre il 90% degli equipaggiamenti destinati alla Defender-Europe 20 era già a bordo di aerei e navi diretti in Europa».

In totale sono arrivati oltre 3.000 pezzi di equipaggiamento, a partire dai carrarmati, cui si sono aggiunti oltre 9.000 mezzi corazzati e altri veicoli provenienti dai depositi «preposizionati» che l’Esercito Usa mantiene in Germania. Dagli Stati uniti sono arrivati oltre 6.000 soldati, integrati da altre migliaia di stanza in Europa.

Nonostante «l’aggiustamento dovuto al Covid-19», comunica lo US Army, «molti degli obiettivi di prontezza strategica sono stati realizzati». Annuncia quindi che, per recuperare il tempo perso, «lo US Army Europe sta pianificando esercitazioni aggiuntive nei prossimi mesi, basate su molti degli obiettivi originali della Defender-Europe 20 per accrescere la prontezza e interoperabilità delle forze Usa e alleate».

La Allied Spirit  è quindi la prima di una serie di esercitazioni nello stesso quadro strategico in chiara funzione anti-Russia. Non a caso si svolge in Polonia. Qui – secondo quanto stabilito nella Dichiarazione firmata dal presidente Trump con il presidente polacco Duda lo scorso settembre –  gli Stati uniti stanno fortemente aumentando la loro presenza militare. Il numero di soldati che vi  mantengono in permanenza, attraverso un sistema di rotazione, viene accresciuto da 4.500 a 5.500.

A  Poznan lo US Army installa un proprio quartier generale di divisione su base avanzata.

A Drawsko Pomorskie le forze armate Usa aprono un Centro di addestramento al combattimento.

A Wrocław-Strachowice la US Air Force realizza un grande scalo aeroportuale di sbarco.
A Lask la US Air Force disloca una squadra di aerei a pilotaggio remoto, compresi droni Reaper.

A Powidz, una brigata aerea da combattimento.

Sia a Powidz che a Lubliniec, le Forze Usa per le operazioni speciali costituiscono proprie basi.

In una località ancora da definire, verrà dislocata in permanenza la squadra da combattimento di una brigata corazzata Usa. L’intero equipaggiamento è già stoccato a Bergen-Hohne in Germania. Lo US Army Europe comunica inoltre che la 173^a Brigata aviotrasportata, di stanza a Vicenza, sta pianificando operazioni nei Balcani e nella regione del Mar Nero, mentre il 10° Comando di difesa aerea e missilistica parteciperà a esercitazioni nel Baltico.

La US Air Force comunica che tutti e tre i tipi di bombardieri strategici Usa a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare –  B-2 Spirit,  B-1B Lancer e B-52H – hanno compiuto in maggio, partendo dagli Stati uniti, missioni in Europa. Ciò ha dimostrato che «la pandemia del Covid-19 non ha compromesso la prontezza e la portata dei bombardieri strategici Usa».

Questi fatti, ignorati dai grandi media che avevano annunciato in marzo la cancellazione della Defender-Europe 20 a causa del Covid-19,  confermano che gli Usa non hanno cancellato ma solo rimodulato l’operazione strategica, prolungandola.

Scopo di Washington resta quello di accrescere la tensione con la Russia usando l’Europa quale prima linea del confronto. Ciò permette agli Stati uniti di rafforzare la loro leadership sugli alleati europei e di orientare la politica estera e militare dell’Unione europea, nella quale 22 dei 27 membri appartengono alla Nato sotto comando Usa.

Manlio Dinucci

Foto : ilmanifesto.it. Esercito tedesco in esercitazioni Nato© Stato Maggiore Difesa

First some facts about international maritime law.

No nation may interfere in the right of other states to engage in international trade.

No nation may enact legislation, regulations, or take other actions that contravene international agreements, treaties, or a body of customs that comprise the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

High seas interdiction of nonthreatening vessels is what piracy is all about. UNCLOS defines it as follows:

“(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed:

(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft;

(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

(b) any act of voluntary participation in the operation of a ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft;

(c) any act of inciting or of intentionally facilitating an act described in subparagraph (a) or (b).”

Under UNCLOS, world community nations are obligated to act against pirate actions.

They have universal jurisdiction on the high seas to seize pirated vessels, arrest responsible parties, and detain them for prosecution.

On Sunday, the first of 5 Iranian tankers docked at the Venezuelan port city of El Palito.

In a series of tweets, Venezuela’s UN envoy Samuel Moncada reported the news, saying:

“Iranian gasoline reaching Venezuela is a landmark in the struggle for sovereignty, independence, and peace.”

“Trump and his minions are thinking of a military attack against the tankers amidst the pandemic. His experts advise(d) him otherwise.”

“A group of 14 (retired) experts of the US intelligence community sent an open letter to Trump alerting him against a military attack on Iranian tankers with gasoline en route to Venezuela. They argue that the act of war does not serve US interests.”

“It could trigger unpredictable responses in any part of the world; the language of “maximum pressure, all necessary means, and options are on the table.”

“(W)armongering generals & advisers in Washington are playing with fire in a dangerous situation and exploiting Venezuelan extremists.”

“They are seeking a war with Iran in the Middle East contrary to US interests.”

“They’ve have attempted this many times in the past.”

“Trump, Admiral Faller from the Southern Command, and the National Security Council are increasing tensions with threats that won’t weaken President Maduro.”

“(O)n the contrary, they will strengthen him while unifying the majority of Venezuelans against the aggressions.”

“In their long experience in defending the US, they do not understand how could attacking legal trade between two countries that do not pose a national threat serve their own interests.”

“Venezuelans, meanwhile, want no war either, but dialogue.”

“Trump’s policy thus far has been a failure and, even with the pandemic, it seems to have no chance of success in the near future.”

“Avoiding a war resulting from the wrong advice of adventurers in Washington and Venezuela is the best option for the US.”

The docked Iranian tanker carries a reported 1.53 million barrels of gasoline and alkylate.

According to Science Today, citing Toxicology Letter, alkylates “are a mix of high octane, low vapor pressure branched chain paraffinic hydrocarbons that can be made from crude oil through well established refinery processes, and are highly favored as streams for blending into gasoline.”

It’s used to produce premium, high octane, gasoline. Reportedly, the supply on board the first Iranian tanker will provide Venezuelan needs for around 50 days.

Much larger supplies are scheduled to arrive in Venezuela this week.

Despite Trump regime threats, suggesting possible high seas interdiction of Iranian tankers by Pentagon warships, no US action was taken so far.

The White didn’t comment on the first tanker’s arrival over the weekend.

What US designated puppet/usurper in waiting Guaido and pro-Western OAS secretary general Luis Almagro falsely called an “unacceptable provocation” is free and fair trade between Iran and Venezuela as defined under UNCLOS.

Late Sunday, a second Iranian tanker entered Venezuela’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) — met by Venezuelan naval vessels that will escort it to shore.

Commenting on possible US interdiction of Iranian tankers, President Hassan Rouhani said

“(i)f our oil tankers face problems in the Caribbean Sea or anywhere in the world by the Americans, they will face problems reciprocally.”

IRGC Chief of Staff General Hossein Bagheri warned that

“(w)e stand firm and decided to give the US an appropriate response for any miscalculation against the national interests of Iran.”

Iranian Defense Minister General Amir Hatami said

“our policy is fully clear and we have clearly announced that we will not tolerate any disturbance.”

“The Americans and others know that we certainly do not hesitate to react to any such move and if the disturbances increase and continue, they will certainly face a firm response.”

Reuters quoted an unnamed White House official, saying “we’re looking at measures that can be taken.”

No interference by the Trump regime against lawful trade between Iran and Venezuela by no means rules it out ahead.

Unlawful US war by other means rages against both countries and many others.

What’s ongoing will likely escalate ahead, risking possible confrontation — because of US rage to transform all nations it doesn’t control into vassal states.

That’s the stuff that wars and related hostile actions are made of — what the US repeats time and again against one country after another.

Iran and Venezuela are prime targets because of their immense hydrocarbon resources the US seeks control over.

They’ve withstood US war by other means for decades — defending their sovereign territory and rights successfully.

Seeking peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other countries by their ruling authorities is worlds apart from US war on humanity — an unparalleled threat to its survival.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Alliance for Global Justice

Next June the United Nations Assembly will hold elections at its 74th session for five non-permanent seats on the UN Security Council (UNSC) starting on January 1, 2021 for the period 2021–22.

The UNSC has 15 members five of which are permanent veto-wielding members: U.S., Great Britain, France, Russia and China. The remaining ten seats are elected for a two-year term in five seats at a time every year according to internal rotating rules. There are five geopolitical regions where the world countries are fitted into: African Group, Asian & Pacific Group, Western European & Others Group, Eastern European Group, Latin American & Caribbean Group.

Canada is promoting its candidacy for the “Western European and Others Group” in competition with Ireland and Norway. But many Canadians strongly reject the candidacy because they believe that the government of Justin Trudeau has gained a negative reputation for its warmongering foreign policy. On the international stage Canada has also lost its traditional peacekeeping image.

Canada has been on the UNSC six times once every ten years. In 2010 the Conservative Harper government withdrew its candidacy for fear of not getting the sufficient number of votes required.

A newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced as far back as 2016 his bid for a seat in 2021 on a platform of “bringing people together”, a renewed “peacekeeping” role in the world, respect for human rights, and a commitment to tackling climate change.

Following a widely considered disappointing performance on those issues, Canadians may have at first welcomed hopeful promises by the new Liberal government. But, alas, four years later, those and other government policies are questioned to the point of considering Canada unfit to have a seat at the UNSC.

A recent article in the Canadian media outlet The Star raises the question “Does Canada deserve a UNSC seat?” Arguments are presented to make the case for the “Yes” and the “No” sides. In the poll embedded in the media, at the time of writing, about three quarters of respondents voted “No. Canada has failed on too many fronts, from human rights to climate”. This is not a scientific survey but The Star is a daily of wide circulation and considered a mainstream outlet.

Ottawa’s full platform for its bid as a candidate at the UNSC can be seen on the Foreign Relations website. Prime Minister Trudeau is quoted saying,

“Canada is committed to working with partners around the world to build a better future for all of us – from growing economies that benefit everyone, to fighting climate change, to creating a safer, more peaceful world. That’s the kind of progress we make when we work together.”

A petition launched by the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, a non partisan organization that “seeks to bridge the gap between government policy and public perception”, is titled “Canada does not deserve a seat on the UNSC” and states, “Despite its peaceful reputation, Canada is not acting as a benevolent player on the international stage.” Details are listed. Among others, Canada is portrayed as a large exporter of weapons to conflict zones and countries that allegedly violate human rights, like Saudi Arabia; as well as having refused to join 122 countries represented at the 2017 UN “Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons”; in the region, the Trudeau government has led efforts to unseat Venezuela’s UN-recognized government, while propping up repressive, corrupt and illegitimate governments in Haiti and Honduras.

The petition has been signed by a large number of Canadian and international personalities including Nobel Peace Prize winners Setsuko Thurlow and Mairead Maguire, and will be delivered to UN member states prior to the vote for the UNSC seat in June with this final call: “The international community should not reward bad behaviour. Please vote against Canada’s bid for a seat on the UNSC.”

How much the Canadian request will influence the decision on the vote is uncertain. Ultimately, the final decision will be made by the individual countries’ ambassadors to the UN according to all political and geo strategic considerations.

Canada, Ireland and Norway bidding for two seats at the UNSC will leave one of them out. Which one is hard to tell. But here are some pointers by group.

African Group

This is the largest group with 54 member States. In general terms, Canada has increased its international visibility thanks to former Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland’s presence in international affairs, albeit not always positive. Justin Trudeau has traveled to Africa earlier this year to attend the Africa Union meeting, but this may be seen as an opportunistic move to garner votes for the UNSC considering that Canada missed the 2019 meeting. The founding of the Africa Union is attributed to Muammar al-Gaddafi.

Ireland, in turn, seems to be developing a new relationship with Africa with its “Global Ireland 2025” plan promising “to advance shared values and to ensure priority for African issues at the United Nations.” Whereas, Norway’s relationship with Africa is deepening with Norwegian trade with African countries on the rise. Oslo has also recently established a permanent mission to the African Union.

But a critical factor must be taken into account: Africa-China relations. China is by far the strongest economic partner in the African continent with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Analyst Andrew Korybko stated, “The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the answer that Africans are looking for.”

Given that Washington has slammed the BRI and taking into account the fact that Ottawa is politically and ideologically close the Washington, most of the African countries may deny a vote to Canada.

Asian & Pacific Group

For the second largest region with 53 States, Asian & Pacific Group, any prediction of their pick among the three countries under consideration is quite complex. China is by far the largest country with a permanent seat on the UNSC and therefore weighs some influence on the other countries also thanks to the promotion of the BRI. However, in this group the geopolitical spread is quite large. There are countries like India (also seeking a seat at the UNSC), Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia who would welcome Canada, and then countries like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iran, Iraq, State of Palestine and the Syrian Arab Republic who may not be as receptive to the presence of Canada on the Council. It is particularly exemplary to cite the reportedly appalling Canadian record on Palestine, and the lack of diplomatic relations with Iran.

Western European & Others Group

A similar level of complexity is present in the Western European & Others Group. This group of 28 nations is quite diverse including not only Canada but also Australia and Israel. The United States of America is not formally a member of any group, but attends meetings of this group as an observer and is considered to be a member of the group for electoral purposes. The two NATO members, Canada and Norway, may be their favorite choice. However, the  mediation efforts by Norway aimed at resolving Venezuela’s political crisis might not go unnoticed as an obstacle.

Eastern European Group

The Eastern European Group with the smallest number of 23 nations is dominated by another permanent member, the Russian Federation. Several are former Soviet Union States and have since become members of the European Union, but, more importantly, some have become NATO members. If the loyalty to the NATO membership is “required” in casting the UNSC vote then Canada and Norway again may be the winning choices within this group.

Latin American & Caribbean Group

The last region to be considered is the Latin American & Caribbean Group of 33 nations. This is a group that is more compact geographically and mostly more uniform historically and culturally. However, the undue influence of the U.S. and more recently Canada, has created deep political divisions and regional instability. The persistent push for unconstitutional regime change that succeeded in Bolivia, and escalates in Venezuela, has polarised the region. Canada’s involvement has managed to split the region by helping create the so-called Lima Group of a dozen nations in 2017 with a single mandate to overthrow the legitimate Maduro government in Venezuela.

It is quite conceivable that the vote involving Canada will coincide with the nations political stand around Venezuela. If that is the case, many members of this regional group may not give Canada their vote and would rather vote for Norway and Ireland who have a different position vis-à-vis Venezuela within the EU. After all, Norway made a positive attempt to mediate in the internal crisis, and Ireland maintains that the crisis must be resolved by Venezuelans and has taken the UN position that irecognises states, not governments.

By refusing to vote for Canada may also be a way to stand up against U.S. intervention in the region.

Final thought

It is a futile task attempting to foresee the outcome of a vote at the UNSC. The previous sketch is not a pretension to achieve such a prediction. There are too many players and a very fluid political situation that can change daily until election day. There are also many more issues and important factors that individual States will consider at the time of casting their vote in June besides the very few mentioned above. For instance, at the time of writing, Iranian tankers attempt to deliver much needed fuel to Venezuela. The Iranian government promises to retaliate if the U.S. government follows through with its threat to forcefully stop the delivery. A much larger conflict is brewing that surely will not escape to the attention of voting countries: the escalating U.S. information warfare on China. Those and other facts will entrench some of the positions of the voters at the UN. Some may agree with many Canadians: “The international community should not reward bad behaviour.”

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Nino Pagliccia is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.” ― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee^[1]

In the last 50 years agrotoxins have spread and are pushing bees to extinction.

The choices before humanity are clear, a Poison Free Future to save Bees, Farmers, our Food and Humanity. Or continue to use poisons, threatening our common future by walking blindly to extinction through the arrogance that we can substitute bees with artificial intelligence and robots.

“Robotic bees could pollinate plants in case of insect apocalypse”, ran a recent Guardian headline reporting how Dutch scientists, “believe they will be able to create swarms of bee-like drones to pollinate plants when the real-life insects have died away”.^{[2] [3]}

“We see a crisis in 15 years where we don’t have enough insects in the world to actually do pollination and most of our vitamins and fruits are gone,” said Eylam Ran, CEO of Edete Precision Technologies for Agriculture. His company says its artificial pollinator can augment the labours of – and eventually replace – bees. Its system mirrors the work of the honey bee, beginning with a mechanical harvest of pollen from flowers and ending with a targeted distribution using LIDAR sensors, the same technology used in some self-driving cars”.^[4]

There is no substitute for the amazing biodiversity and gifts of bees.

Every culture, every faith has seen the bees as teachers – of giving, of creating abundance, of creating the future of plants through pollination, and contributing to our food security and welfare.The next generation of seed is transformed into the next generation of seed only through the gift of the pollinator.

Navdanya’s research has shown that more than 30% of the food we eat is produced by bees and pollinators.

Nature’s economy is the gift economy. In every tradition the bee has been exemplified as a teacher in giving.

Buddhist texts note that from a multitude of living things, bees and other pollinating animals take what they need to survive without harming the beauty and vitality of their source of sustenance. For humans, to act in the manner of bees is an enactment of compassionate and conscious living.

St. John Chrysostom of the Catholic Church wrote,

“The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.” (12th Homily)

In the Islamic tradition, the Quran’s 16th chapter is titled ‘The Bee’.  This chapter is known to be the revelation of God.

In the Hindu tradition, there is a wonderful quote in the scripture Srimad Mahabhagavatam which reads,

“Like a honey bee gathering honey from all type of flowers the wise men search everywhere for truth and see only good in all religions.”

Let us together as diverse species and diverse cultures and through poison free organic food and farming, rejuvenate the biodiversity of our pollinators and restore their sacredness. We have the creative power to stop the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe without the need for these false technocratic solutions.

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Dr Vandana Shiva is President of Navdanya International.

Notes

^[1] Maurice Maeterlinck is a Nobel Prize winner from Belgium https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1911/maeterlinck/biographical/

^[2] https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/18543

^[3] https://seedfreedom.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/The-Future-of-Our-Daily-Bread-_-LowRes-_-19-11-2018-REVISED.pdf

^[4] With bees on decline, mechanical pollination may be solution

Featured image is by extradeda

Boris Johnson and his trusty advisor Dominic Cummings are finished. That’s the consensus much of the country has come to as people from all sides of the political spectrum joined together over the weekend to demand Dominic Cummings’ resignation. Twitter was swamped by the hashtag #CummingsMustGo, as politicians and the public alike questioned why it was that the Prime Minister’s advisor was able to breach the strict lockdown conditions and get away with it? Further still, the Prime Minister and his entourage even went as far as to defend his actions.

The advice from the government at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in the UK was clear: stay at home, and only travel if absolutely essential. People were allowed out once a day for exercise and to buy groceries. And if you experience symptoms of Covid-19, you must stay at home for 14 days.  But it emerged on Friday that Dominic Cummings, the controversial right-hand man of the Prime Minister, had travelled 250 miles north of his London home in late March this year, to stay with his parents in Durham. Over the course of this weekend, further evidence has emerged that Mr Cummings, far from staying at home, was out and about in the north of England, far away from his London home, where he should have been self-isolating, as according to the government’s own guidelines.

On Sunday night a video was published by the Guardian newspaper on Twitter showing police officers approach Mr Cummings’ London home, and it has been reported that the aide may be investigated for breaching the lockdown restrictions, after yet another witness came forward claiming to have seen him in town of Barnard Castle on 12th April. If witness statements to date are correct, then Mr Cummings made two separate trips in the 14 day period when he should have been self-isolating from coronavirus.

In his defence, Mr Cummings has said that he needed to visit his parents for childcare reasons, but since then other grounds have been given for why he decided to visit his elderly parents, including the death of a relative. But the reality is that the reasons so far given by Cummings, and cabinet ministers, who have all rallied around him in his defence, are not in keeping with lockdown restrictions. Many have pointed out that Cummings’ sister-in-law lives nearby in London and that there are childcare services available in the area where he lives for key workers – which of course he is, as a government employee.

The issue is only escalating. For a public already weary and frustrated after weeks and weeks of lockdown, Dominic Cummings has become a figure of hate. Why should the public adhere to these rules if the elite themselves do not? And at the very moment when the Prime Minister should have put public trust before his advisor’s position, he did not. No apology, no condemnation, only excuses from Boris Johnson. The PM at the daily coronavirus briefing even went as far as to say he believed Cummings had acted with ‘responsibly, legally and with integrity’ – words that surely Johnson will come to regret. At a time when the country very badly needed to hear that the public were being put before Dominic Cummings, it was told the opposite. A huge PR fail for Boris Johnson.

‘Failed’ was the very word used by opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who put out a video message on Sunday evening, saying ‘This was a test of the Prime Minister and he has failed it. It is an insult to sacrifices made by the British people that Boris Johnson has chosen to take no action against Dominic Cummings.’  However it was not just opposition MPs turned against Johnson over this issue. One Tory MP told Sky News’ Beth Rigby much the same: ‘Frankly I feel disgusted on how a Conservative PM can treat decent people who have sacrificed so much with such contempt.’ Another Minister said that during Johnson’s press conference they saw ‘‘the PM’s authority with the British people drain away before [their] very eyes’.

This is the major point here – that Boris Johnson has now lost the confidence of the British people at a time when it is needed most, when we are being asked to comply with the strictest of measures during a pandemic. Cabinet colleagues have expressed deep concern that the decision to back Cummings could actually ‘cost lives’ as people no longer feel it necessary to adhere to a lockdown being breached by its very designers.  Politically, it’s clear that Johnson is ‘done’. How can he possibly survive a scandal where he put an advisor before the interests of the public?

There are also questions being raised as to why the PM is so vehemently defending this unelected colleague, who is not even a member of the Conservative party? It’s been suggested that in fact, without Cummings, Johnson is nothing, that all along it has been Dominic Cummings calling the shots. He was the Leave campaign strategist who ‘secured’ a Brexit win, he created the ‘Get Brexit Done’ message which saw Johnson elected in December. However, these successes have come at a price. On Cummings’ watch, the Leave campaign was accused of making up statistics, Johnson effectively lied to the Queen to prorogue parliament during the Brexit negotiations and even before this current scandal, he was facing criticism for reacting slowly to the coronavirus pandemic, favouring instead a policy of ‘herd immunity’ advocated by Cummings. It is therefore debatable just how helpful Cummings’ advice is to Boris Johnson. What is clear though, is that Johnson values it deeply, to the extent of sacrificing his own career as a result.

If Johnson is to have any possibility of a recovery, he simply has to sack Dominic Cummings. But so far there is no sign of this happening. On Monday morning it was reported in the Daily Telegraph there was a ‘cabinet reshuffle’ to limit Dominic Cummings’ influence. However this is not enough for an angry British public, tormented after weeks incarcerated at home. The man who only a few weeks ago was being prayed for as he lay in intensive care is at risk of turning himself into the enemy the British people. He needs to act now, if he is to have any change of saving his legacy.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

During the COVID-19 pandemic, not only will the U.S. military have the largest maritime military maneuvers in the world, with Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) coming to the waters off Hawaii August 17-31, 2020 bringing 26 nations, 25,000 military personnel, up to 50 ships and submarines and hundreds of aircraft in midst of a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, but the U.S. Army is having a 6,000 person war game in June 2020 in Poland. The State of Hawaii has the most stringent measures to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all persons arriving in Hawaii — returning residents as well as visitors. This quarantine is required until at least June 30, 2020.

If these weren’t too many military operations during an epidemic in which personnel on 40 U.S. Navy ships have come down with the hyper-contagious COVID-19 and military personnel and their families have been told not to travel, plans are underway for a U.S. Army division-sized exercise in the Indo-Pacific region in less than a year — in 2021. Known as Defender 2021, the U.S. Army has requested $364 million to conduct the war exercises throughout Asian and Pacific countries.

The pivot to the Pacific, begun under the Obama administration, and now under the Trump administration, is reflected in a U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS) that sees the world as “a great power competition rather than counter-terrorism and has formulated its strategy to confront China as a long-term, strategic competitor.”

This month, May 2020, the U.S. Navy in support of the Pentagon’s “free and open Indo-Pacific ” policy aimed at countering China’s expansionism in the South China Sea and as a show of force to counter ideas that the capabilities of U.S. Navy forces have been reduced by COVID-19, sent at least seven submarines, including all four Guam-based attack submarines, several Hawaii-based ships and the San Diego-based USS Alexandria to the Western Pacific in what the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force announced publicly that all of its forward-deployed subs were simultaneously conducting “contingency response operations.”

The U.S. military force structure in the Pacific will be changed to meet the National Defense Strategy’s perceived threat from China, beginning with the U.S. Marine Corps creating new infantry battalions that will be smaller to support naval expeditionary warfare and designed to support a fighting concept known as Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. U.S. Marine forces will be decentralized and distributed across the Pacific on islands or floating barge bases. As the Marine Corps eliminates much of its traditional equipment and units, the Marines plan to invest in long-range precision fires, reconnaissance and unmanned systems, doubling the number of unmanned squadrons.

To effect this change in strategy, marine infantry battalions will go down to 21 from 24, artillery batteries will go to five down from 2, amphibious vehicle companies will be reduced from six four and F-35B and F-35C Lightning II fighter squadrons will have fewer aircraft per unit, from 16 aircraft down to 10. The Marine Corps will eliminate its law enforcement battalions, units that build bridges and reduce the service personnel by 12,000 in 10 years.

The Hawaii-based unit, called a Marine Littoral Regiment, is expected to have 1,800 to 2,000 Marines carved out mainly one of three infantry battalions based at Kaneohe Marine Base. Most of the companies and firing batteries that will make up a littoral anti-air battalion will come from units not currently stationed in Hawaii.

The III Marine Expeditionary Force, based in Okinawa, Japan, the main Marine unit in the Pacific region, will be changed to have three Marine littoral regiments that are trained and equipped to operate within contested maritime areas. The region will also have three Marine expeditionary units that are globally deployable. The other two Marine expeditionary force units will provide forces to the III MEF.

The U.S. military war games in Europe, Defender Europe 2020 is already underway with troops and equipment arriving at European ports and will cost about $340 million, which is roughly in line with what the U.S. Army is requesting in FY21 for the Pacific version of the Defender series of war maneuvers. Defender 2020 will be in Poland June 5-19 and will take place at Drawsko Pomorskie Training Area in northwestern Poland with a Polish airborne operation and a U.S.-Polish division-size river crossing.

More than 6,000 U.S. and Polish soldiers will participate in the exercise, named Allied Spirit. It was originally scheduled for May, and is linked with Defender-Europe 2020, the Army’s largest exercise in Europe in decades. Defender-Europe was largely canceled because of the pandemic.

U.S. Army Europe is planning additional exercises over the coming months focusing on training objectives originally outlined for Defender-Europe, including working with equipment from pre-positioned stocks in Europe and conducting airborne operations in the Balkans and Black Sea region.

In FY20, the Army will conduct a smaller version of Defender Pacific while Defender Europe will get more investment and focus. But then attention and dollars will swing over to the Pacific in FY21. Defender Europe will be scaled back in FY21. The Army is requesting just $150 million to conduct the exercise in Europe, according to the Army.

In the Pacific, the U.S. military has 85,000 troops permanently stationed in the Indo-Pacific region and is expanding its longstanding series of exercises called Pacific Pathways with extending the time Army units are in countries in Asia and the Pacific, including in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. A division headquarters and several brigades would have a South China Sea scenario where they will be around the South China Sea and the East China Sea over the course of a 30- to 45-day period.

In 2019, under the Pacific Pathways exercises, US Army units were in Thailand for three months and four months in the Philippines. The U.S. Army is discussing with the Indian government about expanding military exercises from roughly just a few hundred personnel up to 2,500 for a duration of up to six months which “gives us a presence in the region longer as well without being permanently there,” according to the US Army of the Pacific commanding general. Breaking from the larger exercise, smaller US Army units will deploy to countries such as Palau and Fiji to participate in exercises or other training events.

In May, 2020, the Australian government announced that a delayed six-month rotation of 2,500 US Marines to a military base in Australia’s northern city of Darwin will go ahead based on strict adherence to COVID-19 measures including a 14 day quarantine. The Marines had been scheduled to arrive in April but their arrival was postponed in March because of COVID-19. The remote Northern Territory, which had recorded just 30 COVID-19 cases, closed its borders to international and interstate visitors in March, and any arrivals must now undergo mandatory quarantine for 14 days. U.S. Marine deployments to Australia began in 2012 with 250 personnel and has grown to 2,500.

The Joint US Defense facility Pine Gap, the U.S. Department of Defense and CIA surveillance facility that pinpoints airstrikes around the world and targets nuclear weapons, among other military and intelligence tasks, was also adapting its policy and procedures to comply with Australian government COVID-19 restrictions.

(Image by Photo by EJ Hersom, US Sports Network)

As the U.S. military expands its presence in Asia and the Pacific, one place it will NOT be returning to is Wuhan, China. In October, 2019, the Pentagon sent 17 teams with more than 280 athletes and other staff members to the Military World Games in Wuhan, China. Over 100 nations sent a total of 10,000 military personnel to Wuhan in October, 2019. The presence of a large U.S. military contingent in Wuhan just months before the outbreak of the COVID-19 in Wuhan in December 2019, fueled a theory by some Chinese officials that the U.S. military was somehow involved in the outbreak which now has been used by the Trump administration and its allies in the Congress and the media that the Chinese deliberately used the virus to infect the world and adding justification for the U.S. military build-up in the Pacific region.

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Ann Wright is a 29-year US Army/Army Reserves veteran, a retired United States Army colonel and retired U.S. State Department official, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War.

Featured image is from Hawaii Peace and Justice

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USA Plan: Militarized Control of Population. The “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan

”By Manlio Dinucci, May 24, 2020

The Rockefeller Foundation has presented the “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan”, indicating the “pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”. However, it is not simply a matter of health measures. The Plan prefigures a real hierarchical and militarized social model.  At the top, the “Pandemic Testing Board (PTB), akin to the War Production Board that the United States created in World War II“. The Pandemic Testing Board would “consist of leaders from business, government and academia”. 

According to Dr. Anthony Fauci the Reopening of the US Economy Would Endanger People’s Heath

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 23, 2020

“The only tool we have right now for fighting the coronavirus is social distancing” says Dr. Fauci. And of course confinement, “stay at home”. Neither of these “recommendations” are medical solutions, i.e. drugs which can be used to prevent and inhibit the infection. Fauci is opposed to the treatment of COVID-19 using chloroquine.  What he wants is for all of us to be vaccinated.

Two Fictions of Mainstream Economics. 45 Million US Workers Unemployed

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, May 25, 2020

One of the favorite myths they perpetrate is that ‘wages are sticky downwards’. That means that in conditions of recession or worse, because workers won’t accept lower wages the recession tends to continue. If only workers would allow wage reductions it would mean business would have more disposable income (from wage cost savings) on hand. Business would then reinvest the extra income. Investment would rise. Workers would be rehired. Wage income would then recover and the economy would grow from more investment and consumption.

The “Lockdown” Has Turned America Into a Despotic, Cash-Strapped Basket-Case

By Mike Whitney, May 25, 2020

Economic activity across the country has collapsed, GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace on record, and the economic data is worse than anytime in history. Every sector of the economy is contracting and every economic indicator is pointing down. According to economist Nouriel Roubini, the country is headed towards a decade of “depression and debt”, and that is probably an understatement.

What Next if US Exits From Open Skies Treaty?

By Kester Kenn Klomegah, May 25, 2020

The Open Skies Treaty is the third important military pact that Trump has withdrawn from since coming to office in January 2017. He also dropped the 2015 JCPOA agreement to prevent Iran from advancing its nuclear weapons program and the 1988 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. In both cases, Trump accused the other side of violating treaty requirements.

The Cuban Revolution’s Survival in the Face of Six Decades of US Attacks

By Shane Quinn, May 25, 2020

Examining the introduction of communism to Cuba over 60 years ago, and the revolution’s survival despite large-scale American attacks, one can conclude these occurrences would likely not have been possible without the involvement of Fidel Castro, the country’s former head of state. The Cuban revolutionary performed a central role in firstly overthrowing the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 through guerrilla warfare, and he then held sway over Cuba for half a century, making him one of the world’s longest serving government leaders.

US Blocks UNSC Draft Resolution Denouncing Paramilitary Incursion into Venezuela

By Ricardo Vaz, May 25, 2020

During a virtual session of the UNSC on Wednesday, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy presented a resolution calling on member-states to reject the “use of force… terrorism in all its forms and manifestations… [and] the use of mercenaries.”

American Hubris Robust in a Cataclysmic Global Pandemic

By Askiah Adam, May 25, 2020

The economic scenario unfolding in the United States, indicates that unemployment will hit 30 percent soon, one that is broader when compared to that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. One in three will be without a means to life and needing to be saved. Retrenchments and layoffs by the thousands have been announced. Airlines are suffering almost without exception and all will benefit from the US 2.2 trillion dollars rescue package but the workers have been neglected. The economic disruption is of at a global level.

Canadian Cities Hit by Pandemic Lockdown. Vulnerable to BlackRock’s Privatization Agenda

By Joyce Nelson, May 25, 2020

On May 20, CUPE Ontario (representing 80,000 municipal employees) and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (representing about 440 municipal councils) joined forces to appeal for immediate federal and provincial emergency funding. Their appeal backs a similar call put out by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in mid-April, urgently asking the federal government for $10 billion in emergency aid.

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Mainstream economics consistently fails to predict the future. I’m talking about those ‘schools’ of mis-thought, ranging from Paul Krugman on the ‘left’ to Glenn Hubbard and other apologists of business and neoliberalism on the ‘right’.

One of the favorite myths they perpetrate is that ‘wages are sticky downwards’. That means that in conditions of recession or worse, because workers won’t accept lower wages the recession tends to continue. If only workers would allow wage reductions it would mean business would have more disposable income (from wage cost savings) on hand. Business would then reinvest the extra income. Investment would rise. Workers would be rehired. Wage income would then recover and the economy would grow from more investment and consumption.

This fiction has ruled for more than a century. The economist John Maynard Keynes debunked it in the 1930s. But it was retained by the mainstream economics profession nonetheless, even to this day. Just read most of the entry college level textbooks. It’s still there. Along with at least a dozen other false propositions (like free trade benefits all; inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods; income inequality is due to workers not educating themselves and making themselves more productive; business tax cuts create jobs–and a host of other nonsense statements with no support in reality.

The notion that ‘wages are sticky downward’ is a clever way to argue that workers are responsible for the lack of a quick recovery from a recession. If they only would reduce their wages it would all be ok in a short while.

But take a look what’s going on right now. As of late May 2020 at least 45 million American workers are unemployed. In just two months they have lost $1.3 trillion in income. More than $1 trillion due to unemployed. Another $260B due to shorter hours of work. That’s a wage reduction of -$1.3 trillion! As in all recessions, workers do experience severe wage reduction–in joblessness (no wages), shorter hours of work, cuts and loss of benefits, lower pension contributions by employers, wage theft, etc. etc. So wages do fall, and are falling today faster and deeper than ever. And is business and investors spending and investing given the wage reductions? No. They’re hoarding the $1.74 trillion in Congressional loans and grants bailouts. And hoarding the $650 billion in business tax cuts also in the bailout legislation thus far (which one hears very little about in the media, I might add).

As journalist David Cay Johnson just revealed in a piece today, the short term cash deposits by business in just institutional money funds (only one source) has risen from $2.3 trillion before March 1, 2020 to $3.3T today. That’s a $1T rise in cash deposits by businesses, just in institutional money funds. More is being deposited in commercial banks. The long run average of business deposits in commercial banks has been around 5% (6% under Obama and 4.6% under Trump 2016-19) to 15.8% since March 1. Businesses and investors are hoarding their cash and stuffing it in their short term accounts in banks, funds, and who knows where else, on and offshore. No doubt some of that will be committed at some point to stock buybacks, dividend payouts, mergers & acquisitions, derivatives speculation, and all the rest of the financial gambling that in the 21st century defines capitalism. Don’t expect much to get into real investment that increases production, requiring the rehiring of workers, that generates wage incomes.

So wage cuts and reductions, now underway, will not result in renewed business investment and general rehiring of the 45 million laid off. Wage cuts don’t result in real investment and growth.

The nonsense economics notion that wages are sticky downwards is just pure economic bullshit today, as it has always been! And so is the parallel mainstream idea that if you can just find a way to boost business cash (via tax cuts or bailout loans) it will lead to economic recovery as well.

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Dr. Rasmus is author of the recently published book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, January 2020, where the empirical record on wages, investment, taxes, employment thoroughly debunks the various myths and misrepresentations of mainstream economics. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“… and when we look back on this in two years time, from the ruins of our economy and the ruins of our liberty, we will want to see some kind of justice, that the people who made this decision should pay a penalty for what they’ve done.” – Peter Hitchens

Economic activity across the country has collapsed, GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace on record, and the economic data is worse than anytime in history. Every sector of the economy is contracting and every economic indicator is pointing down. According to economist Nouriel Roubini, the country is headed towards a decade of “depression and debt”, and that is probably an understatement.

What prompted our leaders to follow the path of China? Were they bullied into it by Dr. Fauci and the Vaccine Gestapo or were they simply reacting to the sudden rise in Covid cases that skyrocketed overnight? Whatever the reason might be, the country is now headed for either a short-but-severe “U” shaped recession or an excruciating-and-protracted 1930s-type slump. Small and mid-sized businesses are folding by the thousands, the states are drowning in red ink, and more people are currently unemployed than anytime in the country’s 244 year history. The lockdown has effectively obliterated the economy and left the country in ruins. Here’s some background from an article at Yahoo Finance:

“Permanent job losses are likely to be a feature of the eventual U.S. recovery, according to University of Chicago research, which estimates that 42% of recently unemployed workers will not return to their jobs amid the “profound” shock stemming from coronavirus lockdowns.

The pandemic has taken a brutal toll on the world’s largest economy, with at least 36 million people thrown out of work over the last two months….The lockdowns have cratered activity in an economy that consists of 70% consumer spending, while undoing all of the jobs created since the great recession ended….

“It will likely take a number of years for the labor market to recover from its pandemic-induced meltdown.”…researchers extrapolated their findings that over 100,000 restaurants are expected to be permanently shuttered in the near-term…”

Some employers will shift resources to other roles, while many laid off workers may have to find new positions or careers.”
(“‘Major reallocation shock’ from coronavirus will see 42% of lost jobs evaporate: Study” Yahoo Finance)

The American people have yet to grasp the magnitude of the devastation caused by the lockdown but, soon, it will be the only topic of conversation. Most people left their jobs thinking they would return to them in a matter of weeks. They never imagined that a policy blunder would put the economy into a vicious death spiral that would terminate their livelihoods, dampen their prospects for the future, and reduce them to hopelessness and destitution. They never thought that such a nightmare was possible, especially since they were just following the orders of their governors and the affable Dr Fauci. They trusted these people. They put their lives in their hands and they were misled, duped into believing that these “experts” knew what they were doing when, all-along, they were making it up on the fly. Now we’re all going to pay for the mistakes for which they alone are responsible. This is from abc7news:

“Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.…The head of the trauma in the department believes mental health is suffering so much, it is time to end the shelter-in-place order.

“We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time,” he said. “I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”

Kacey Hansen has worked as a trauma nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek for almost 33 years. She is worried because not only are they seeing more suicide attempts, she says they are not able to save as many patients as usual.

“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”The trauma team is speaking out because they want the community to be aware, for people to reach out and support each other and for those who are suffering to know they can get help.” (“Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say”, ABC News 7)

Here’s more from an article at the Washington Examiner:

“A study published in early May suggested that the coronavirus could lead to at least 75,000 deaths directly brought on by anxiety from the virus, job losses, and addiction to alcohol and drugs. Another study conducted by Just Facts around the same time computed a broad array of scientific data showing that stress is one of the deadliest health hazards in the world and estimated that the coronavirus lockdowns will destroy 7 times as many years of human life than strict lockdowns can save….

Earlier this week, more than 600 doctors signed their names on a letter to President Trump, referring to the continued lockdowns as a “mass casualty incident” and urging him to do what he can to ensure they come to an end….By late March, more people had died in just one Tennessee county from suicide than had died in the entire state directly from the virus.” (“California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns”, Washington Examiner)

So the lockdown is a “mass casualty incident”?

Of course it is. What else would you call it? People are locked in their homes indefinitely while the predatory media does everything in its power to terrorize them with one appalling horror story after the other. Did anyone consider this grim scenario before the lockdowns were imposed? Did anyone think that, perhaps, fragile people — that are cut off from the world, their friends and their families– might become so depressed that they’d take their own lives? Of course none of this matters to the media that measures its success in terms of its ratings not the number of people they’ve killed with their relentless fearmongering. For that, they accept no responsibility at all. Here’s more:

“Researchers warn that socially isolated people are over 40% more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event. Moreover, the socially isolated are nearly 50% more likely to die from any cause….The study was conducted by Dr. Janine Gronewold and Professor Dirk M. Hermann from the University Hospital in Essen, Germany. They analyzed data on 4,316 people (average age: 59 years old) who had been recruited for research between 2000 and 2003…

“We have known for some time that feeling lonely or lacking contact with close friends and family can have an impact on your physical health”, Dr. Gronewold explains in a release. “What this study tells us is that having strong social relationships is of high importance for your heart health and similar to the role of classical protective factors such as having a healthy blood pressure, acceptable cholesterol levels, and a normal weight.”…

“We don’t understand yet why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes, but this is obviously a worrying finding, particularly during these times of prolonged social distancing,” Dr. Gronewold says.” (“Social Isolation Increases Risk Of Heart Attack, Stroke, & Death From All Causes,” Study Finds)

Repeat– “We don’t understand why people who are socially isolated have such poor health outcomes??”

Yes, we do. It’s because they’re desperately lonely and cut-off from normal human-to-human contact. That, in turn, effects their overall health and well being. Of course if it was up to the malevolent Dr. Fauci we’d never even shake hands again. Fauci would like to repeal 5 thousand years of normal, social interaction and remake the world according to his own ghoulish specifications. Unfortunately, we are now seeing the blowback from that delusional world-view in the form of growing mental health problems, depression, anxiety and suicide. Should we tally the suicides alongside the Covid deaths to see whether Fauci’s strategy is working or not or should we simply ignore the horrible human costs of this twisted lockdown experiment? Some day, the American people will demand an accounting for the last 10 weeks, but we’re not there just yet. Here’s more from Bloomberg News:

“Retail landlords are sending out thousands of default notices to tenants, a situation that could tip already-ailing retailers into bankruptcy or total collapse….Department stores, restaurants, apparel merchants and specialty chains have been getting the notices as property owners who’ve gone unpaid for as long as three months lose patience, according to people with knowledge of the matter and court filings.

…“The default letters from landlords are flying out the door,” said Andy Graiser, co-president of A&G Real Estate Partners, whose firm works with retailers and other commercial tenants. “It’s creating a real fear in the marketplace,” Graiser said.” (“Default Notices Are Piling Up for Retailers Unable to Pay Rent”, Bloomberg)

More bad news. The lockdowns have triggered a tsunami of defaults and bankruptcies. With no source of revenue, merchants cannot pay the rent nor can landlords roll over their debts. The economy is an interlocking row of dominoes that tumble in sequence once the first block is set in motion. The American people were sold the idea that the economy could be turned “on and off” like a light switch. Now they can see that the theory has no basis in reality. As the bankruptcies pile up, the job losses will continue to increase pushing the country deeper into recession. Fauci’s directives have turned the country into a economic wastelands, that much is certain. Check out this excerpt from an article by is a clip from an article by Naomi Klein:

“…. former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation….

” Schmidt called for “unprecedented partnerships between government and industry…

At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies….

If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles — their Screen New Deal — there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs…

For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but t he deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied.” (Screen New Deal, Naomi Klein, The Intercept)

Can you see what’s going on?

The fact that tens of thousands of people are dying and the nation’s economy has been reduced to rubble, doesn’t matter to the tech giants. For them the crisis is a “golden opportunity”, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to further subsume the government, to garner more government funding for their futuristic projects, to assert greater influence over public policy, and to wrap their tentacles more tightly around the levers of state power.

The tech giants are using the pandemic as a vehicle for imposing their own vision on the country and for promoting their own malign police state agenda. Just as Corporate America is using the crisis to restructure the labor market, and Wall Street is using the crisis to garner lavish multi-trillion dollar bailouts, and Fauci and Co are using the crisis to push for universal vaccines, so too, the tech giants are using the crisis to grab more power, more money and more integration with the state until the US government is nothing more than a trifling subsidiary of the ever-expanding Google octopus. That’s the ultimate goal, privatizing the state so the corporations rule the world. It is a Mission (that is nearly) Accomplished!

So how are the people going to respond to these developments? What will the reaction be when ordinary working people realize that their lives have fundamentally changed for the worse, that their living standards will continue to slide, that full-time work and job security have gone the way of the Dodo, that the middle class is going to be reduced to the size of an acorn, and that the social safety-net has been replaced by higher taxes, fewer public services, a weaker dollar and years of grinding, demoralizing austerity? Should we expect social unrest, rioting and street violence in the near future or should we assume that that those outbursts are inevitable now that personal liberty has been strangled while the economy was vaporized?

No country that willingly destroys its own economy should expect anything different. No people that abandon their liberty for the faux-security of state protection should expect anything different. Peter Hitchens sums it up perfectly in an article at the Daily Mail:

“I hate this word, (“lockdown”) because it does not seem to me to be fitting to describe free people in a free country. But we are no longer such people, or such a country. We have become muzzled, mouthless, voiceless, humiliated, regimented prisoners, shuffling about at the command of others, stopping when told to stop, moving when told to move, shouted at by jacks-in-office against whom we have no appeal. We are learning, during this induction period, to do what we are told and to become obedient, servile citizens of a new authoritarian State. We are unlearning the old rules of freedom.” (“Peter Hitchens: The New Authoritarian State’s Dream”, Daily Mail)

Well put. Bravo, Peter Hitchens!

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

President Donald Trump sudden or unexpected decision to withdraw from the 1992 Open Skies Treaty has posed unprecedented challenges, generated extensive debates among Russian politicians and experts, and equally worried are leaders in Europe and Asia.

Trump administration notified international partners on May 21 that it was pulling out of a treaty that permits 30-plus nations to conduct unarmed, observation flights over each other’s territory – overflights set up decades ago to promote trust and avert conflict.

The administration explained that it wanted to fall out of the Open Skies Treaty because Russia has been violating the pact, and imagery collected during the flights could be obtained quickly at less cost from United States or commercial satellites. Exiting the treaty, however, is expected to strain relations with Moscow and upset European allies and some members of Congress.

President Dwight Eisenhower first proposed that the United States and the former Soviet Union allow aerial reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory in July 1955. At first, Moscow rejected the idea, but President George H.W. Bush revived it in May 1989, and the treaty entered into force in January 2002. Currently, 34 nations have signed it; Kyrgyzstan has signed but not ratified it yet.

The Open Skies Treaty is the third important military pact that Trump has withdrawn from since coming to office in January 2017. He also dropped the 2015 JCPOA agreement to prevent Iran from advancing its nuclear weapons program and the 1988 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. In both cases, Trump accused the other side of violating treaty requirements.

Russian Foreign Ministry issued an official statement May 22, describing the exit decision a deplorable development for European security. That said, Moscow was not surprised by Washington’s decision, which characterizes its approach to discarding the entire package of arms control agreements and trust-building measures in the military sphere.

It said that “the US administration’s strategy is to cover up its own destructive actions by accusing Russia,” and that Russia has been collecting information on critical US and European infrastructure with a view to targeting its precision weapons.

The statement suggests that Washington make public the full list of Russian facilities that it has filmed in the past few years. Using its rights under the treaty, Russia has acted strictly in line with its provisions, and American colleagues have previously made no claims against Russia.

Russia’s policy on the treaty is based on its national security interests and in close cooperation with its allies and partners. The policy to discard the Open Skies Treaty calls into question Washington’s negotiability and consistency. Apparently, lacking any real argument in justifying its actions, the treaty’s opponents have resorted to this far-fetched allegation.

Besides the official statement, Moscow further indicated it would continue observing the treaty even if the US pulls out. “As long as the treaty is in force, we intend to fully follow all the rights and obligations that apply to us from this treaty,” Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told the RIA Novosti News Agency.

Fellow Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denounced the “absolutely unacceptable” conditions set by Washington, accusing the US of sowing “discord and uncertainty.”

In addition, Grushko warned that the US pullout would damage European security and harm the interests of US allies. China, which is not a party to the treaty, expressed “deep regret” over the US move, calling it a display of the United States’ entrenched Cold War mentality.

The Europeans said they would work to resolve “outstanding questions” with Moscow, including “unjustified restrictions” imposed on flights over Kaliningrad — a Russian exclave bordered by Poland and Lithuania. China, which is not a party to the treaty, expressed “deep regret” over the US move, calling it a “display of the United States’ entrenched Cold War mentality.”

The United States will gain nothing by withdrawing from the Treaty on Open Skies, Chairman of the Russian Federation Council (the upper house of parliament) Foreign Affairs Committee Konstantin Kosachev wrote on Facebook.

According to him, the Trump administration’s move is harmful to the US interests so it is hard to understand its logic.

“One can only suspect that the US authorities seek to destroy the current world order. The White House has sent another signal to US allies. Will they show unconditional support, like they always do?” Kosachev said.

In his view, the US president is determined to dismantle the entire mechanism of ensuring global security.

“There is no other way to explain this not only destructive but in many ways clumsy step that the White House has taken,” the Russian senator stressed.

Experts have shown much interest. There is no reason for Russia to remain a party to the Open Skies Treaty after the US withdrawal since this gives Washington an advantage in obtaining data on Russia’s Armed Forces, Deputy Director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics National Research University, Dmitry Suslov told TASS.

“It is not advisable for Russia to keep its own participation in the agreement after the United States pulls out of this agreement, because European countries of NATO within the framework of this agreement will still be able to fly over Russian soil,” Suslov said.

“If Russia remains a party to the agreement, the zero-sum game will go on, because the United States will continue receiving information on the state and deployment of the Russian Armed Forces from its European allies in NATO remaining in the agreement, while Russian planes will not be able to fly over the United States. Certainly, Russia will not receive relevant information about the US army from the Europeans,” Suslov added.

In the meanwhile, Moscow is awaiting an official notice from Washington on its decision to pull out of the Treaty on Open Skies. According to the terms of the agreement, the official withdrawal from the treaty will happen six months after the US officially notifies other participants. Experts interviewed by the Izvestia newspaper agree that Washington’s looming exit from the treaty is another step towards the collapse of the international arms control system. The New START Treaty, which expires in 2021, could be next.

“The agreement was in line with the course towards strengthening trust and security measures. And trust is now needed more than ever, since its lack thereof is close to complete. Washington may be content with it, but in general I don’t see any benefit from the collapse of the system of international agreements for the United States,” Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Office and other International Organizations in Geneva, Alexander Alimov told Russian newspaper Izvestia.

German Federal Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer stated that Germany would continue to fulfill its obligations within the Treaty Open Skies Treaty, despite the US’s intention to abandon it. Her statement was published in the ministry’s twitter account.

“I deeply regret the US’s announcement on abandonment of the Treaty. All sides must take efforts to preserve this important agreement and prevent the US’s withdrawal. We will continue to adhere to the Treaty,” the Minister said.

According to Agence France-Press (AFP), NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the US decision to quit the agreement would not come into effect for six months, leaving Moscow time to change course.

“All NATO allies are in full compliance with all provisions of the treaty,” Stoltenberg said, adding that Russia has, for many years, imposed flight restrictions inconsistent with the treaty, including flight limitations, over Kaliningrad and restricting flights in Russia near its border with Georgia.

EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell said he regretted the US decision, calling the Open Skies treaty “a key element of our arms-control architecture” which serves as “a vital confidence and security-building measure” and called on Washington to reconsider and for Moscow to “return immediately to the full implementation of the Treaty.”

Earlier, the local media also reported that a group of 10 European nations said in a joint statement they regretted Trump’s threat, — Trump’s latest in a string of withdrawals from international agreements.

China is equally troubled by the new developments. The withdrawal “will have a negative impact on the international arms control and disarmament process,” China Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

The Open Skies Treaty was signed in March 1992 in Helsinki by 23 member-nations of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was drafted with Moscow’s active participation. The treaty is a major tool of strengthening trust and security.

The Open Skies’ main goals are to build transparency, render assistance in monitoring compliance with existing or future arms control agreements, broaden possibilities for preventing crises and managing crisis situations. The accord establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. Now, the treaty has more than 30 signatory states. Russia ratified the Open Skies Treaty on May 26, 2001. ).

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Kester Kenn Klomegah writes frequently about Russia, Africa and the BRICS.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Avoiding Hostilities Over Iranian Fuel Shipment to Venezuela

Mr. President:

Recent U.S. rhetoric and actions against Venezuela — most immediately regarding Iran’s shipping of gasoline desperately needed during the pandemic — puts the U.S. at risk of an outbreak of dangerous and almost certainly counterproductive hostilities, not only in the Caribbean, but also in waters closer to Iran. As five Iranian tankers approach Venezuela, with the first due to arrive Sunday, hardliners in both Washington and Iran would relish a chance to give a bloody nose to the other side, but it may not be that simple. 

While the U.S. can invoke the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, geography trumps doctrine. True, the U.S. holds the upper hand in the Caribbean. It does not have tactical advantage in the Persian Gulf — despite the formidable amount of U.S. weaponry already deployed in the area. We believe there is a good chance Iran will pick the Gulf as the place to retaliate for any quarantine or more warlike actions off Venezuela.

As former intelligence officers and other national security practitioners with many decades of experience, we understand the frustration your Administration feels as its “maximum pressure” campaign to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro enters its 17th month without much progress. Our purpose is not to defend Maduro, whose economic performance has alienated many and compounded Venezuela’s problems. Rather, we wish to ensure that you are aware of the possible pitfalls of the general threatening to use “maximum pressure” and “all means necessary” to effect “regime change” in Venezuela. In our view, any U.S. attempt to interdict access of the Iranian ships to Venezuela will be widely seen as an act of war. It could conceivably lead to unprecedented retaliation in places as far away as the Persian Gulf — events that the U.S. will not be able to fully control.

Inside Venezuela, U.S. sanctions and other policies are inflicting significant suffering, and the threat to continue “maximum pressure” even during the pandemic has had a significant psychological impact. It has pushed many Venezuelans eager for change to close ranks with the government and blame mostly the U.S. for their troubles. Nationalism and fear of foreign intervention are strong drivers in countries like Venezuela. The Venezuelan economy was already a shambles due to government mismanagement and corruption. But blocking the country’s ability to sell oil, to access accounts and reserves overseas, and to engage in normal trade have had a devastating impact on the Venezuelan people — the more so as the corona virus takes its toll there.

National Assembly President Juan Guaidó, whom some 50 other governments besides the U.S. have supported in his claim to the National Presidency, has been badly discredited.

• His continued calls for ever-tightening economic sanctions – at a time that his countrymen lack food, water, and most basic supplies – is destroying his credibility as a man eager to “save his people.” His direct involvement in several failed coup efforts, most disastrously on 30 April 2019, and his $213 million contract with the obviously inept expeditionary force wrapped up on Venezuelan beaches on 3 May, showed deeply flawed judgment and ineffective leadership. He has also been hurt by his failure to resist pressure from comrades in the extreme opposition to walk away from internal or international negotiations every time they show signs of progress.
• Polling in Venezuela is generally not reliable enough to give high confidence at any particular moment in time, but all polls and all observers in the country point to a steep decline in Guaidó’s support, and many members of the opposition Guaidó claims to lead have abandoned him. Because he ignored the moderate opposition, which is fragmented but has in many cases deep historical roots, they are unwilling to lend him a hand. We understand that many of the countries that joined the United States in recognizing Guaidó now regret doing so.

Locked out of most normal trade by the U.S. sanctions, President Maduro has had to reach out to non-traditional partners to get bare necessities. We do not know the terms of the gasoline deal he struck with Iran, but speculation that he paid in bullion, which the U.S. has called “blood gold,” is not substantiated. The Venezuelan government’s extreme frustration at the United Kingdom’s refusal to release Venezuelan gold in London is one indicator that Caracas has little of the precious metal to throw around.

• Lines for gasoline in Venezuela have been long – sometimes it takes two days to fill a tank – but traffic has dropped precipitously during the coronavirus pandemic. Oil industry observers estimate that the $45.5 million in refined products carried by the five Iranian tankers would satisfy Venezuela’s needs for only a limited time. We have seen no information indicating whether future shipments are planned. (Venezuela produces about 550,000 barrels of oil a day but has only negligible capacity to refine finished product.)

There is no evidence – nor is anyone alleging – that the tankers are carrying military equipment or other sensitive cargo. But we understand the significance of this Iranian delivery into the Western Hemisphere. While Tehran’s purpose appears to be overwhelmingly to help Maduro cover his energy needs – and perhaps make a little profit – the Iranians probably also welcome the chance to tweak the United States’ nose by a) aiding a government that the U.S. wants to overthrow, and b) venturing into our “neighborhood.” Some Venezuelan leaders may actually hope the U.S. does overreact, and has to deal with accusations of piracy, and worse, by many other countries — including some traditional U.S. allies

• Iran has emphasized that the fuel deal is a purely civilian transaction, and that they have no hostile intent. Iranian diplomats have stressed that “this relationship between Iran and Venezuela doesn’t threaten anybody. It’s not a danger to anyone.”
• And yet, U.S. pronouncements that the Monroe Doctrine remains “alive and well,” as then-National Security Advisor John Bolton said in June 2019 (echoing Secretary Rex Tillerson’s statements 15 months earlier) puts down a hoary marker strongly opposed by many nations around the world, including Russia and China. We do not think that poking at the Doctrine is Iran’s primary objective, but it may play a role. And there are many influential hardliners in Iran who would welcome a chance to “retaliate” in waters closer to home for any actions against Iranian ships in the Caribbean.

U.S. rhetoric about preventing the fuel shipments from reaching Venezuela has upped the ante significantly. Coming at a time when the Southern Command has a “counternarcotics” operation with U.S. Navy destroyers, littoral combat ships, Poseidon maritime planes and Air Force surveillance aircraft – a task force twice the size of what’s normally deployed – near Venezuela and in waters that the Iranian tankers will traverse suggests your advisers and four-stars are playing with matches in a literally explosive situation. As you are no doubt aware, many of them would welcome a chance to give Iran a bloody nose.

Most important, perhaps, if the overall objective is to instigate the Venezuelan military to rise up and remove Maduro from office, the record of the past several years has shown that such an attempt is likely to fail. While perhaps not always comfortable with Maduro’s leadership, the officer corps has tended to rally behind him – be it out of sense of obligation, fear of him, or fear of what the radical opposition will do to them if change occurs. This has enabled him to remain in power.

• Your statement to Hispanic leaders on Wednesday that “we’ve got it [Venezuela] surrounded, it’s surrounded at a level that nobody even knows but they know; we are watching to see what happens” gave the impression that the United States was poised for imminent action.
• A member of your National Security Council staff has told the press, “We are going to be closing all the doors. This [the fuel shipment] is another door that will be closed.” A Pentagon spokesman said he was not aware of military plans to stop the tankers, but other “senior Administration officials” refusing to be identified have said that you have “made clear the United States will not tolerate continued meddling by supporters of an illegitimate regime.”
• SouthCom Commander Craig Faller has emphasized that his “preferred” way of effecting regime change in Venezuela is not military, but he has accused Iran of trying to “gain positional advantage in our neighborhood in a way that would counter U.S. interests” – without explaining how the sale of gasoline will achieve that. Last week he also claimed that he’d seen in Venezuela “an uptick in Iranian state-sponsored activity and liaison … that has included Quds Force” — an elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These seem more intended to lay the groundwork for military policies under consideration than statements of fact.
• U.S. officials also are resorting to tough talk regarding the two Americans captured by the Venezuelans during the failed 3 May military incursion. Secretary Pompeo said the United States will “use every tool” needed to bring them home. And, of course, you and the Secretary have on a number of occasions explicitly stated that military options are among those on the table vis-a-vis Venezuela.

National Assembly President Juan Guaidó seems to be trying to egg on the United States into getting involved militarily. He has called for military intervention a number of times in the past, and last week urged the “international community” to stop the Iranian tankers from reaching Venezuela.

• To stir up U.S. concerns about Iran, Guaidó and his advisors have claimed – without evidence – that Tehran is providing materials for a range of covert operations, including a listening post in northern Venezuela to intercept aerial and maritime communications. Guaidó’s senior security aide, Iván Simonovis, said, “For Iran, an enemy of the United States, this means they are almost touching America’s tail.”

We are unable to assess with high confidence exactly how Iran would react to a U.S. effort to stop the tankers before they reach Venezuela. But – if Tehran’s reaction to the U.S. rhetoric so far is any indicator – it seems likely to resist strongly. Iran is laying the groundwork for international condemnation of any such U.S. action. And there probably are many military and civilian officials in Iran now orchestrating plans for tit-for-tat kind of retaliation in the Persian Gulf.

• Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, warned the United States against interfering, stating that U.S. action would be an “illegal, dangerous and provocative move as a kind of marine piracy and a major peril to international peace and security.” Iranian officials have said the country “reserves the right to take all appropriate and necessary measures, including decisive action.” They delivered the same message to the United States through our Swiss representation in Tehran.

About 13 months ago, during a moment in which your Administration appeared to be edging toward confrontation with Russia over a Venezuelan matter, we urged you to avoid the slippery slope toward armed conflict. We were gratified that the hardliners in Washington pushing for confrontation were eventually reined in. We are now at a similar juncture.

• As intelligence officers and national security experts, we have given many years to protecting our nation from a host of threats, including terrorism, narcotics trafficking, Communism, Iran, Russia, and adventurism in Latin America. We also believe, however, that picking fights, interdicting civilian commercial trade, and threatening other countries’ sovereign decision to pursue activities that do not threaten our national security – is rarely the wise way to go.
• As we did last year, we repeat that we are not defending Maduro and his record, while at the same time pointing out that many of his troubles continue to be exacerbated by U.S. sanctions and other actions. And, as we also said last year, we believe that due process and practical, realistic policies better protect our national interests than confrontational rhetoric.

Venezuelans do not want war. They want better lives, and they want the political and economic change that will help them achieve that. The vast majority of Venezuelans would prefer to trade with the United States, not Iran or others from far-off regions. But they don’t want change with a gun pointed to their heads. They don’t want to be your administration’s battleground for the Monroe Doctrine. They know that their political system has long been broken – since before Hugo Chávez’s first election in 1998 – but they know that rebuilding it has to be an evolutionary process with non-coercive international support.

Large segments of political parties opposed to Maduro, and even many members of the Chavista movement, are eager for ongoing domestic negotiations to gain traction so they can start this process. Even more Venezuelans want all sides, including Maduro and Guaidó, to restart negotiations facilitated by the Government of Norway. That’s not going to happen until the United States stops the saber-rattling about Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Cuba, and lets Venezuelans themselves find their way forward. Huffing and puffing hasn’t blown Maduro’s house down, and – despite the immense economic and pandemic challenges it faces – do not seem likely to in the near future.

FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY

Fulton Armstrong, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America & former National Security Council Director for Inter-American Affairs (ret.)

Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer & former Division Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (ret.)

Graham E. Fuller,Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Robert M. Furukawa, Captain, Civil Engineer Corps, USNR (ret.)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq; former Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)

John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Sen. Foreign Relations Committee)

Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East & CIA political analyst (ret.)

Larry Wilkerson, Colonel, U.S. Army (ret.), former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State; Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary

Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War

Michael Lucas (born Lukac in Vysna Jablonka in eastern Slovakia) died on May 4, 2020 in Toronto. Lucas, (born on March 7, 1926) was a political activist, author, advocate of peace and socialism.  

His family stated in his obituary:

“An extremely well-read and accomplished man, artist, musician, author, and internationalist, Michael was very active in cultural and political work for over 75 years while being able to communicate in four languages all while working every day until he was 87. Over the years he had served as Chairman of Carpatho-Russian Youth, General Secretary of the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians, Secretary of the Slav Committee, Chair of the Canada – USSR Association and Chairman of the International Council of Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet people and Editor in Chief of the Northstar Compass.”

Lucas was born into a working-class family. Throughout his life he maintained his commitment to labor rights and workers struggles in Canada and across the globe. He joined the revolutionary movement as a young person and made many contributions to making life better for people in Canada and elsewhere.

Lucas, with his wife Helen, organized many exchanges between people of Canada and the Soviet Union. These exchanges played a big role in breaking down stereotypes that existed about the Soviet Union in the minds of Canadians; thus assisting the development of peace, trade, and the relaxation of tensions between the two countries. The solidarity work Lucas did is continued today in the form of work to end imperialism’s sanctions against Russia, China, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Lucas is survived by his wife, Helen, their two children, and their children and grand child, and cousins, and many friends from around the globe.

Fidel began advocating the development of biotechnology, in the mid-1980s, insisting that the country would be a world power in medicine, despite the doubts of skeptics and taunts from his enemies

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The fact that Cuba’s response to the COVID-19 has been far more effective than most countries in the region, including the United States and also several European nations, is a reality that is becoming evident. A health system based on prevention, with a presence in all communities of medical offices, organized by neighborhood and linked to polyclinics, as well as general and specialized hospitals in all provincial capitals and some of the most important cities, as well as medical schools, along with advanced centers for biomedical research, have made possible active monitoring and surveying to identify asymptomatic patients, to isolate them and provide early treatment with national protocols and medicines, in addition to the creation of our own technology to test patients, requiring a minimum costly reagents in pre-existing laboratories in all the country’s municipalities.

Cuba lost half of its doctors to the United States in the years immediately following the triumph of the 1959 Revolution, leaving barely 3,000, but today has 95,000, with the highest rate of doctors per inhabitant on the planet.

While the majority of therapeutic clinical trials underway around the world are being conducted to identify treatments to contain the so-called cytokine storm in COVID-19 patients, the inflammatory hyper-response triggered by the disease, Cuba has successfully achieved this with a medicine of its own (CIGB-258). Cuba is working urgently, as are great powers like the United States, Germany, China, Russia and the United Kingdom, to produce a vaccine for the prevention of the disease, and has developed its prototype of a pulmonary ventilator for intensive care patients.

The above, as well as the creation of world-class biotechnology research centers, the training of thousands of highly qualified scientists committed to the health of their people – who have remained in Cuba, facing shortages and scarcity, despite systematic “brain drain” policies of northern countries to attract talent from the South, which the U.S. blockade intensifies in the Cuban case – came as the result of Fidel’s vision which, beginning in the early 1980s, encouraged the national production of medicines such as interferon; innovative vaccines against diseases, such as Hepatitis B and meningococcal meningitis; monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of different types of cancer, and remedies that are unique in the world, including one that has prevented innumerable amputations for patients with diabetic foot syndrome, among many other achievements.

To be added to all this are innovative brain research and our own diagnostic tools that allow pre-partum detection of congenital defects, diseases present in the blood such as HIV and others, now including COVID-19. All these treatments are available, free or at a symbolic cost, to Cubans at the community level, along with vaccinations against 13 diseases for children.

It was also in the mid-1980s when Fidel began to speak out, as Cuba’s medical schools were multiplying and the number of students in health-related specialties growing. Despite the doubts of more than few skeptics and taunts from his enemies, he insisted that the country would be a world power in medicine.

When, a few years later, the disappearance of the USSR triggered the deepest economic crisis in Cuban history, scientific research centers remained open, while the Comandante en jefe repeated: “This country will live with the creations of our intelligence.” The export of medical services is today the main source of foreign exchange for the Cuban economy, despite U.S. government persecution, while the development of innovative biomedical products has also made an important contribution.

Cuba is a world leader in health solidarity, present in the most remote regions of poor countries and offering thousands of scholarships for medical students, in addition to the work of the Henry Reeve internationalist contingent for disaster situations.

It is not far-fetched to emphasize Fidel’s role in all of the above. Cubans watched him explain the efforts on television in well-argued presentations, opening doctors’ offices, hospitals, polyclinics and scientific centers, and listened to his speeches at med school graduations, not with the demagogy of a capitalist politician who takes advantage of these occasions for some public relations campaign, but with the knowledge of a person who conceived the project and promoted it down to the last detail; someone who knew the “why and what for” of everything, always thinking of how the most humble citizen would benefit.

If this were not enough, there is the availability of university institutions throughout the country, with accommodations to house students from distant locations free of charge, which have served as isolation centers during the epidemic, among them a University of Computer Sciences, conceived by Fidel, where thousands of professionals have been trained and applications have been developed for cell phones, including the recently launched app allowing individuals to self-report any COVID symptoms or provide information to health authorities.

Likewise, it was Fidel who promoted the creation of educational television with the needed facilities, which today has allowed general and art education students to continue their learning at home.

What about after the pandemic?

All that is very well, an observer could say, Cuba will undoubtedly overcome the health crisis before others, but what will happen after that, when the impact of intensified U.S. sanctions which have battered the Cuban economy is compounded by the global economic crisis, aggravated by the pandemic with its negative impact on activities such as tourism, which play a key role in generating hard currency for the nation. The economic damage caused by the virus has created enormous challenges for all countries and even more so for one facing from the longest economic blockade in history.

As has been stated by the country’s leadership, it is essential to make decisive progress in the implementation of economic transformations agreed upon at the VII Congress of the Communist Party here, despite the new, unfavorable conditions,

The Cuban government has indicated that current economic priorities include national production of food, with the goal of producing most of our food on the island, along with fuel savings; limiting imports given our dwindling reserves of foreign exchange; the promotion of exports of all kinds; and the safe opening of tourism when conditions allow. Here too, Fidel’s ideas could play a very important role.

The intensive cultivation of high-protein crops, to which the Comandante dedicated his efforts in the last years of his life, has great potential to provide animal feed, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Beginning in 2011, alongside Cuban scientists and farmers, Fidel worked on research with moringa, mulberry and tithonia as food for monogastric (chicken, pig) and polygastric (cattle and sheep) livestock. As occurred with his vision for Cuban medicine and biotechnology, some mocked these projects, but scientific research indicates that the three crops exhibit greater productivity per hectare than soybeans, sunflower and alfalfa, allow up to eight harvests a year, and support high density cultivation.

The extensive, innovative, unique knowledge accumulated by Cuba in this field could be very attractive for foreign investment, both associated with supplying the domestic market and for export. Local development projects, facilitated by authorities granted to municipalities in the new Constitution, could find opportunities in this field, especially with the support of the Sierra Maestra Science, Technology and Innovation Institute, founded in 2018 by the Cuban government, to give continuity to this work initiated by Fidel.

It was also the Comandante who conceived developing the keys off Cuba’s coastline for tourism, accessible via roads built over the water during the difficult 1990’s, which today have solid infrastructure, including airports. Practically virgin beaches on islets north of the big island, without resident populations, could provide the initial opening to international visitors, after the epidemic is fully controlled, without putting population centers at risk. Hotel companies such as Meliá and Iberostar are already incorporating health sustainability as a fundamental value in their post-pandemic strategy, and few tourist destinations in the world can compete with what Cuba is able to offer when guarantees and assurances are in place to reopen our borders.

This is not a panacea, which do not exist in economic affairs, more so in times of uncertainty and crisis at a global level, but it is evident that Fidel is far from being “the one responsible for the economic disaster,” as some “Cubanologists” affirm, but rather the contributor of very important ideas for sources of income for a non-oil producing country, without great natural resources or much fertile land, requiring irrigation and fertilization. A country that has not only survived in conditions created by economic siege, but has also developed a project of social justice that provides basic services for all its citizens, that many countries lack, without the problems that are endemic elsewhere, like organized crime and child labor.

In addition to the massive training of highly skilled human resources, clearly an incentive for foreign investment and the export of professional services, as well as globally unique, value added products, which he promoted, Fidel Castro’s tireless work for his people has been not only a decisive factor in ensuring that the humanitarian disaster evident in many other nations, with governments that have opposed his model, has not occurred here. The example he provided of tenacity, service to the people, eagerness for knowledge and scientific rigor, contributes to the development of solutions here that allow Cuba to once again dash the right wing dream of returning our island to the status of “hybrid casino-whorehouse” that some believe possible, in light of the “perfect storm” created by the combination of a tightened economic blockade and the arrival of a virus, which, if anything, has laid bare the unviable nature of the economic, political and social system the Comandante devoted his life to fighting.

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Featured image: Fidel at the National Center of Medical Genetics, with Dr. Juan C. Dupuy Núñez, founding coordinator of the Henry Reeve International Medical Contingent Specialized in Disasters and Serious Epidemics. Photo: Photo: Granma Archives

Examining the introduction of communism to Cuba over 60 years ago, and the revolution’s survival despite large-scale American attacks, one can conclude these occurrences would likely not have been possible without the involvement of Fidel Castro, the country’s former head of state. The Cuban revolutionary performed a central role in firstly overthrowing the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 through guerrilla warfare, and he then held sway over Cuba for half a century, making him one of the world’s longest serving government leaders.

Castro was among the most influential men in living memory. The major figures in history, it can be noted, usually enjoy considerable popularity from the masses that they lead, assisting them greatly in their longevity. There are prominent examples of this over the past century alone: From Hindenburg and Hitler to Stalin, Churchill and De Gaulle, dictators or statesmen all of whom experienced significant support among their respective populations.

From 1959, until Castro’s death 57 years later, he enjoyed the backing of the majority of Cuba’s people. His popularity was highlighted early on by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a secret document since declassified, “he retains widespread support among the poorer classes”, in effect the Cuban population (1). This view is supported by a US National Security Council (NSC) Memorandum, which noted to its dismay how “Castro still has great support at the grass roots”. (2)

Nor was Castro’s popularity restricted to Cuba, as the CIA file even outlines. The longer his revolution survived the more he attained hero status with leftist circles across Latin America, and also in parts of Africa, following his direct intervention in that continent. An analysis of Castro’s career reveals that he produced two notable miracles: First, that he managed to evade over 630 illegal attempts on his life, a number of assassination plots on one person never compiled before or since, and yet – through extreme caution, cunning and some luck – he frustrated his enemies time and again.

The second miracle constitutes the fact that his revolution endured, despite concerted attempts to topple him by governments and special services of America, the world’s most powerful country. This latter miracle increases in scope when reflecting on the 1991 collapse of the USSR, Cuba’s major ally and largest trading partner by far. From the 1960s, it should be realised that Castro had little option but to place his country firmly in the Soviet camp, considering the rising antagonism and financial conundrums presented to Cuba by the White House. It was impossible to ignore too how Washington was ousting one government after another in Latin America and beyond, instituting dictatorships which resulted in widespread harm. (3)

As the Soviet Union was falling apart, Castro was by then aged in his mid-60s and in power for over 30 years. He was faced with what was his greatest challenge. The loss of Soviet support precipitated a level of devastation in Cuba, a small nation, that was worse than the turmoil inflicted by the Great Depression on North America and Europe. Moreover, Cuba remained under a punishing embargo enacted by Washington, which was tightened by the Clinton administration during March 1996 (4). In 1992 the CIA had estimated that Castro would survive for another two years, as recalled later by Wayne Smith, a former US diplomat.

On global issues, Castro was the first leader to address the climate change crisis. His warnings on this planetary threat were expressed as long as 28 years ago, at the June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – where 108 heads of state were present. Ian Angus, the experienced Canadian environmental activist, wrote of Castro’s stance on climate problems that he was the “one head of state who spoke out strongly in Rio and called for immediate emergency action”. Angus recounted that Castro “then returned home to support implementation of practical policies for sustainable, low emission development”. (5)

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) subsequently reported that Cuba’s government implemented highly effective eco-friendly policies, achieving sustainable development (6). This strategy could have partly been out of necessity too, as the USSR’s demise demanded self-sufficiency and diversification of Cuba’s economy. The rest of the world, meanwhile, under the tightening grip of neoliberal globalisation, continued with corporate-engineered goals as carbon emissions reached record levels up to late 2019.

Castro was a vehement critic of neoliberalism, remarking on its lethal effects in speeches, broadcasts and trips abroad. Pertaining to other areas, the Cuban government wasted little time in enacting universal literacy programs in Cuba, while they also developed a remarkable healthcare system. From 1959 to 2005, the average life expectancy of Cuban citizens rose by 15 years, a greater increase by comparison to the US during the same time. This came in spite of an American blockade, which among other things deliberately targeted important medical equipment that Cuba could not obtain as a consequence.

The Canadian journalist and author, Keith Bolender, discerned that Cuban children are especially prone to the embargo’s brutal effects. Some youngsters have needlessly perished through being denied life-saving treatments for illnesses because of the US embargo. Bolender writes that one of the reasons for this strangulation “is to counteract the substantial amount of international political capital Cuba has achieved, with its involvement in sending doctors and staff around the world”. (7)

Havana’s focus on healthcare includes the pursuit of medical internationalism, mainly in the world’s poorer countries. During the coronavirus crisis, Cuba’s medical personnel have been at the frontline in some of the worst affected nations. Cuban doctors and nurses were, for example, flown to Spain and Italy to aid these reasonably wealthy states in their fight against Covid-19. The far-right government in Brazil, failing woefully to handle the virus, has in recent days been forced into a humbling U-turn by rehiring over 150 Cuban medical experts. (8)

Elsewhere, it can be noted that the Castro government played a decisive part in defeating rampant oppression and apartheid in southern Africa (9). From the 1970s, tens of thousands of Cuban troops were flown to the region, along with healthcare workers, teachers, technicians, etc.

While it is important to highlight the Cuban revolution’s commendable achievements, it may be necessary in covering some of its less palatable aspects. In July 2016 the acclaimed American author and activist Noam Chomsky, while at pains to mention the far more destructive US crimes, said “There have also been severe human rights violations” committed by Cuba’s authorities. (10)

This is primarily with regard to the shootings of Batista’s underlings. Many of these ex-Batista henchmen, previously bankrolled by Washington, had grisly records as murderers and torturers. Yet the execution of people, extrajudicially or not, can only be regarded as crimes which any human rights organisation will agree on. Instead of shooting Batista’s former loyalists, lengthy prison sentences should have been handed out which, not only more just and humane, would have acted as an equally firm deterrent.

Image on the right: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

The executions were endorsed with rigour by Castro’s younger brother Raul, and likewise Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who sanctioned in writing some of them. Guevara wrote to a friend in early February 1959 that the shootings were “a necessity for the people of Cuba”. Richard Gott, the left-leaning English historian and Latin American specialist, outlined that “Guevara personally signed at least 50 death sentences, while Raul was alleged to have presided over the mass execution of 70 of Batista’s soldiers, shot down with machine guns in front of an open trench. Always known as a radical, with a toughness that bordered on brutality, Raul’s hawkish reputation was publicly confirmed by his elder brother”. (11)

Fidel commented that if he were killed, someone younger and more radical than himself would take over (Raul). As commander-in-chief, however, the older Castro was ultimately responsible for human rights abuses under his leadership. Gott, who travelled to Cuba on different occasions and had met Guevara, wrote that “Several hundred former Batista associates, policemen and torturers were shot by firing squad after perfunctory trials… the executions took the shine off the Revolution for many outsiders”. (12)

During the 1960s labour camps were erected in Cuba, where homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent in large numbers. Decades later Castro admitted these actions were a “great injustice”, and said that he had been distracted at the time with international emergencies like the Cuban Missile Crisis and repelling American hostility (13). Homosexuality in Cuba was decriminalised in 1979, 15 years before Germany.

In more recent times, complaints of human rights breaches against the Castro government, led by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, have centred mostly on repression of civil liberties; rather than executions which had become increasingly rare. Due to the pressure on Cuba from the American colossus – which is growing again under president Donald Trump – one can at least understand the Cuban government for feeling paranoid, and in clamping down on protests. Extraordinary circumstances clearly exist in Cuba which should be taken into account, and placed into an historical context. Furthermore, HRW and Amnesty’s criticism of Cuba has been undermined by their somewhat dubious and ongoing support for opposition groups, such as the Ladies in White. WikiLeaks divulged evidence in 2011 that the Ladies in White have ties to American government branches, like the US Interests Section, and have received funding from them.

By far the worst human rights violations in Cuba this century, and perhaps in the entire Western hemisphere, have occurred along the country’s south-eastern corner – at the US-run Guantanamo Bay Naval Base – where a military prison was opened in January 2002 under president George W. Bush. Over elapsing years hundreds of prisoners taken from far flung places, many of them mere suspects, have been held at the Guantanamo prison camp without charge, and torture has been committed there on occasion (14). Other detainees have had no access to lawyers or family for extended periods.

The US assumed control of Guantanamo by force in 1903, and in recent decades Washington has refused Cuban requests that they relinquish it. Holding Guantanamo illegitimately has certain advantages for the US government; its occupation hampers Cuban development, as Guantanamo is the country’s biggest port and located in a strategically important area. It does not comprise part of US territory, allowing American authorities to act with impunity there, which they could not do were such a facility on the US mainland.

Focusing on Cuba’s government once more and specifically Castro, he professed himself to be “a Socialist, a Marxist and a Leninist” (15). Yet the latter figure, Lenin, from the beginning of his takeover of Russia had discarded many of the socialist ideals that his supporters had fought for. Chomsky said of Lenin and the Soviet Union,

“I would place the abandonment of socialism much earlier, under Lenin and Trotsky, at least if socialism is understood to mean at a minimum control by working people over production. The seeds of Stalinism were present in the early Bolshevik years, partly attributable to the exigencies of the civil war and foreign invasion, partly to Leninist ideology. Under Stalin it became a monstrosity”. (16)

Examining the system of governance in post-1959 Cuba, one can query whether socialism in reality exists there. Gott wrote that, “Castro allowed the Russians free rein in reorganising the Cuban economy, but in foreign affairs he ran the show himself” (17). From various literature available on Cuba, there is little evidence of public participation in production or economy, nor in decisions on foreign policy ventures, however heroic they were.

Nevertheless there are mitigating circumstances involved in Cuba’s case. This entails the huge blows unleashed on the country by successive US governments. The attacks, from terrorist campaigns and economic warfare to an invasion, rarely receive passing mention in the Western media, who limit their coverage to the apparently amusing assassination attempts on Castro. The US terrorism and other outrages perpetrated against Cuba are a serious matter indeed.

It began in the spring of 1959 with bombing and incendiary air raids, carried out by right-wing Cuban exiles operating freely from Miami, Florida. The aerial raids on Cuba increased in frequency during the winter of 1959-1960, causing some alarm on the island. It can be instructive to learn how the Castro government reacted.

Chomsky wrote that,

“We need not tarry on what the US or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels”. (18)

Overwhelming evidence of attacks emanating from America was provided by Castro to the UN. America’s Ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., assured that “the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba”, which was, to put it kindly, a falsehood. Four months before, in March 1960, the Eisenhower administration had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow Castro as soon as possible. Plans were formulating then for an invasion of Cuba which would take place the following year, in April 1961, at the Bay of Pigs under president John F. Kennedy. It failed dismally for the Americans but there were scores of dead on each side.

From November 1961 to January 1963, a 14 month period encompassing mostly the US terror plan Operation Mongoose, Castro estimated “there were a total of 5,780 terrorist actions against Cuba and, of those, 717 were serious attacks against our industrial facilities” (19). It may be impossible to corroborate these figures but the Italian-born historian, Piero Gleijeses, believes the declassified material available on Operation Mongoose alone is merely “the tip of the iceberg” and has been “heavily sanitised”.

The early terrorist attacks on Cuba – pursued mainly by the Kennedy administration – were a leading cause in the missile crisis occurring in October 1962, that almost resulted in nuclear war. The terrorism continued intermittently until the late 1990s, including also chemical and biological warfare. From a US government viewpoint, these efforts to destroy the Cuban revolution failed because they left virtually unharmed the political and military apparatus established by Castro and his advisers.

The US embargo has had the most devastating impacts overall. Even this cruel tactic did not succeed in attaining its principal goal because, once more, it is the Cuban people who have borne the brunt of suffering. Contrary to what was expected in Washington and Miami, the majority of Cubans were not going to stop supporting Castro just because they were being punished by their superpower neighbour.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 CIA Historical Review Program Release In Full 1997, “Prospects For The Castro Regime”, 8 December 1960

2 Office Of The Historian, “Foreign Relations Of The United States, 1958-1960, Cuba, Volume VI”, US National Security Council

3 J. Dana Stuster, “Mapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has Overthrown”, Foreign Policy, 20 August 2013

4 CNN, “Clinton signs bill aimed at Cuba”, 12 March 1996

5 Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 22 June 2017), p. 167

6 Telesur, “As World Burns, Cuba Number 1 For Sustainable Development: WWF”, 27 October 2016

7 Keith Bolender, Cuba Under Siege (Palgrave Macmillan; 2012 edition, 5 Dec. 2012), p. 86

8 Al Jazeera, “Brazil lets Cuban doctors resume work amid coronavirus struggle”, 19 May 2020

9 Sean Jacobs, “To so many Africans, Fidel Castro is a hero. Here’s why”, The Guardian, 30 November 2016

10 Noam Chomsky, Optimism over Despair (Penguin; 01 edition, 27 July 2017), p. 179

11 Richard Gott, Cuba: A new history (Yale University Press, 20 Aug. 2004), p. 168

12 Gott, Cuba: A new history, p. 168

13 The Globe And Mail, “Fidel Castro takes blame for 1960s gay persecution”, 31 August 2010

14 America Civil Liberties Union, “Guantanamo by the numbers”, May 2018

15 Fidel Castro, My Life: A Spoken Autobiography (Simon & Schuster Ome; Reprint edition, 9 June 2009), p. 157

16 Chomsky, Optimism over Despair, p. 177

17 Richard Gott, “Fidel remembered: a view of the Cuban revolution”, Magill, 29 February 2008

18 Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Penguin, 1 January 2004), pp. 80-81

19 Castro, My life: A Spoken Autobiography, p. 252

The United States rejected a Russia-proposed UN Security Council (UNSC) draft condemning a recent coup attempt in Venezuela.

During a virtual session of the UNSC on Wednesday, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy presented a resolution calling on member-states to reject the “use of force… terrorism in all its forms and manifestations… [and] the use of mercenaries.”

On May 3 and 4, Venezuelan forces neutralized two speedboats carrying armed groups off the country’s Caribbean coast. US special forces veteran Jordan Goudreau claimed to have orchestrated the 60-man incursion together with retired Venezuelan Major General Cliver Alcala, which was aimed at overthrowing the Maduro government. Venezuelan authorities have made dozens of arrests in connection with so-called “Operation Gedeon,” including two former US green berets, Luke Denman and Airan Berry.

Russia’s ambassador later complained that the resolution was “killed” by the US in “nine minutes” despite the draft containing “no accusations, only support of basic common things.”

For its part, China voiced support for Venezuelan sovereignty while blasting US sanctions against Caracas. Other countries, including Indonesia, South Africa and Vietnam, also criticized meddling in foreign countries’ affairs and voiced support for dialogue.

US representative Kelly Craft “categorically” denied any involvement in Operation Gedeon, accusing Russia and Cuba of “violating Venezuela’s sovereignty” by maintaining military cooperation agreements with the Caribbean nation.

The UNSC session came on the heels of fresh revelations concerning the thwarted invasion.

On Monday, Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez disclosed a series of leaked audio recordings allegedly involving Alcala, Gedeon commander Antonio Sequea, and other individuals discussing the plans.

Rodriguez showed testimonies from Berry and Denman revealing the operation’s supposed ties to Colombian drug traffickers. According to the minister, the funding for the paramilitary training camps in Northern Colombia was funnelled through the Futuro Presente NGO belonging to opposition politician Yon Goicoechea.

A longtime leader in the hard-right Popular Will party, Goicoechea was awarded the US $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty in 2008. He was arrested in 2016 for alleged possession of explosives and released a year later. Venezuela’s Attorney General announced a warrant for his arrest on Thursday.

Goicoechea, who is currently outside Venezuela, has denied the charges, claiming he is no longer involved with Futuro Presente and accusing the government of being behind Operation Gedeon.

Opposition leader Juan Guaido had likewise dismissed it as a false flag, before a leaked contract between the opposition and Goudreau led him to shift the blame to his advisors J.J. Rendon and Sergio Vergara. Both have since resigned.

Following his self-proclamation as “interim president” in January 2019, with support from Washington and its allies, Guaido has led several unsuccessful attempts to oust the government. A series of scandals have seen his popularity drop, with other opposition leaders reportedly lobbying Washington for a leadership change.

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Featured image: A host of countries urged respect for Venezuelan sovereignty at the UN Security Council on Wednesday. (UN/Mark Garten)

Few can deny that a perfect storm is brewing and the early foundations for war are being set up by the obvious protagonists. That China has cancelled the dollar peg, in its stock exchange transactions, opting for the Chinese Yuan is an ominous sign. If this unpegging to the US dollar succeeds China will divest itself of US dollar dependence, a move implemented to escape the weaponisation of the dollar. China is, also, developing its artificial intelligence (AI) and 6G for her People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Washington, meanwhile, is fast creating an anti-China sentiment among its population, blaming China for what President Trump calls the “Wuhan virus” aka Covid-19 now afflicting the US, fast and furious, because of President Trump’s initial complacency claiming that the virus will perish as the weather warms up. But in two short weeks thousands have died and nearly a million were infected. As of 16th May 2020, there are 1.52 million confirmed cases. Of these 281,000 have recovered. Unfortunately, there have been 89,939 deaths, the world’s highest. New York has endured some nightmarish scenes of bodies left piled up because the funeral homes are not capable of meeting the spike in demand for their services. China, for her part, is saying it is a US produced virus. According to experts it is near impossible to definitively prove this allegation.

The economic scenario unfolding in the United States, indicates that unemployment will hit 30 percent soon, one that is broader when compared to that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. One in three will be without a means to life and needing to be saved. Of course, there are many, unwilling to see any other than a V-shaped economic recovery, one where despite a sharp economic decline there is a quick, strong recovery. This outlook is causing many to demand an end to lockdowns. Yet prudence suggests that lifting the lockdowns without the necessary care can result in 100,000 deaths by 1^st June, according to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. A massive economic disruption is already on the way. Bankruptcies of High Street businesses are up and with it unemployment. Retrenchments and layoffs by the thousands have been announced. Airlines are suffering almost without exception and all will benefit from the US 2.2 trillion dollars rescue package but the workers are not being given the means to keep consumption healthy as China has done by giving coupons to the population. And, regrettably the economic disruption is of a global dimension. Unless the domestic economy is resuscitated there is noother way.

The pivotal factor is whether an economically ravaged America, hocked to the tune of trillions of dollars, can support a peace that requires immense financial resources. The recent US$2.2 trillion rescue package is coming off the printing presses of the Federal Reserve, an act made possible because the US dollar is not held against guarantees such as gold. Some experts argue that America’s economic strength will pull the country through. But with the world oil industry going negative the petrodollar, too, is under threat. In short it would be true to say the American economy is under severe strain.

That there have been suggestions by some that China must compensate America by writing off its trillion dollar debt for the Covid-19 “invasion”, while definitely embarrassing is more revealing of a weakness. The US economy is unravelling under the lockdown ordeal with small businesses coming unglued and unemployment rocketing within a fortnight of the virus’ arrival. In a nutshell, both the US’ domestic and global economy are being almost torn asunder.

Further, the President is fighting for re-election. He has much to repair in the way of his public image. Nobody is even making a defence of his bungling in hisinitial handling of the Covid-19 virus. He had some 2 months to prepare for the viral onslaught but instead he remarked that it will go away with the heat. That he was prepared to take this risk is suspicious. Who told him this when the virus was already in the tropics and not any less virulent? Trump’s complacency parallels that of the British Prime Minister. The latter, Boris Johnson, was a victim and hospitalised.

Once it became clear that Trump had erred the “blame China” strategy took a sinister angle. Taking China to court seems almost the better alternative. It preserves peace.

But the global economy suffered from China’s economic shutdown caused by the Covid-19 infection. China is the world’s producer of far too many essential products. Even the global car industry was affected. And then as the world began recognising this global economic problem, the petroleum bombshell erupted. Today the price of oil per barrel has tanked. The shale oil industry is no longer supportable, dashing the US’ oil self-sufficient façade and leaving many firms bankrupt. Part of the recent trillion dollar rescue package was to bail out these companies. Boeing the aircraft producer, too, needed rescuing. The company’s 737 MAX was a dangerous lemon. And, Wall Street, too, was prioritised but not the Main Street. If this is the truth then the people will be left vulnerable.

The US$2.2 trillion Covid-19 rescue package will be another quantitative easing. Printed dollars will be poured into the system by the Federal Reserve. And experts are not expecting the economy to be saved if the money is not accompanied by guidelines for its distribution as the 2008 rescue demonstrated. Unfortunately, it is looking to repeat. Furthermore, if it ends up in stock buy backs the trillions spent will not move the economy. What leaves the observer of the USA perplexed and frightened is that the movers and shakers are looking for profit-taking opportunities instead of beefing up the public health sector. Huge companies like Amazon have made billions in these few short weeks of the Coronavirus tragedy.

There appears to be no real sense of national solidarity in the USA. Capitalism as a socio-cultural phenomenon remains pervasively a consumerist, profit maximisation phenomenon building a culture where the self centres the individual’s preferences. That lockdowns are viewed as an assault on the individual’s freedom is shocking when the aim is to save lives. This is the America that has been bred on crass materialism and even the Covid-19 death rate is proving unable to nurture a social culture of humane caring. An imagery made more heinous when the country’s own President is encouraging the people’s protest against lockdowns.

This is today’s USA in a world facing a massive challenge. With its perpetual war policy still on-going, where regime change remains active, it is difficult to perceive of Washington as part of global solidarity. With an official psyche very much intent on hegemony and superiority, it is difficult to picture an altruistic America. It is easier to see a repeat of the Iraq invasion but China is surely no walkover in this respect, she is a nuclear power; she is ahead in 5G technology; she can communicate with the far side of the moon. China is not Iraq. But how desperate is the USA? Is she really being economically undermined by the loss of her global reserve currency position?

Syria demonstrated the Russian ability to put a spanner in US military aspirations. Will this be the reality that will prevent a world war? After all even Tehran is able to get Washington to be more reticent. The missiles shot in Iraq may have not killed but it did cause damage to the mental well-being of many US soldiers. China has, too, demonstrated its military capability when in 2006, her Song-class submarine surfaced “within 5 miles of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, apparently without being detected”. But a New York Times 21 April 2020 report says, US warships have entered disputed waters of the South China Sea.

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Askiah Adam is Executive Director of the International Movement for a JUST World. (JUST).

Featured image is from The Unz Review

Doctor Barakat requested immediate legal action via the United Nations and the Syrian Foreign Ministry against the United States of America for its inhumane action in ordering and aiding the burning of Syrian wheat fields and other crops necessary to sustain human life within Syria.

His case is as follows: that the USA deliberately with malice and aforethought, ordered the burning by its proxies powers (moderate Rebels) to inflict inhuman suffering on the citizens of Syria using scorch earth techniques in sustainable crop areas of Syria.

On the direct orders of the White House orders were issued by the president Donald Trump himself, knowing full well that the result would cause widespread famine.

The Syrian diet consists of cereal foods wheat barley as do most Mediterranean diets.

Meat is far too expensive for most Syrians and bread is eaten with every meal.

These actions are considered a crime against humanity.

These actions were conducted prior to the introductions of H.R.31 116th Congress 2019-2020 this bill forced through congress with additional amendments later this month by Donald Trump and his war hawks.

This bill establishes additional sanctions and financial restrictions on institutions and individuals related to the conflict in Syria.

The Department of the Treasury shall determine whether the Central Bank of Syria is a financial institution of primary money laundering concern. If so, Treasury shall impose one or more special measures, such as requiring domestic financial institutions to maintain additional records on transactions involving the bank.

The President shall impose sanctions on foreign persons that (1) provide significant support or engage in a significant transaction with the Syrian government or those acting on behalf of Syria, Russia, or Iran; or (2) are knowingly responsible for serious human rights abuses against the Syrian people.

The bill also imposes sanctions on those that knowingly provide various goods or services to Syria, such as aircraft for the military, technology for the government’s domestic petroleum production, items on the U.S. Munitions List, and items that the President believes are being used to commit human rights abuses against the Syrian people.

The sanctions include blocking of financial transactions and barring of entry into the United States. Such sanctions shall not apply to activities related to providing humanitarian aid or supporting democratic institutions in Syria.

The President may suspend the sanctions under certain conditions, including if it is in the United States’ national security interests.

The Department of State is authorized to assist entities that are conducting criminal investigations and gathering evidence to prosecute those responsible for war crimes in Syria.

So the USA is pointing the finger at the Syrian government on war crimes. Destroying crops is a war crime. On the 17th May 2020 the total number of areas whose crops were burned exceeded 300 hectares, spread over the countryside of Aleppo, Raqqa and Hasaka, Daraa and Suwayda, which are rich agricultural land.

Crops in southern Syria, have witnessed similar fires days before, which turned tens of hectares of land planted with wheat and barley into ash.

American forces used Apache helicopters to drop thermal balloons on wheat fields in the Syrian province of Hasaka.

The United Nations officials have expressed concern that this measure comes at a time when the epidemic of the Coronavirus may lead to food insecurity. Days after Syria claimed that American forces in the country had burned large areas of wheat crop fields, a report emerged stating that the destruction of those crops was carried out by the forces on personal orders by President Donald Trump.

USA not content with stealing oil and bombing civilian targets within Syria and supplying terrorists with weapons and training have now committed the cardinal sin of attacking food supplies that this nation needs so badly. The economic war and terrorist war operate hand in hand, causing much suffering to the people of Syria as possible.

The cost of living is so high now that people are starving ,to take away the internal agriculture of wheat and barley is a Haynes crime against humanity.

If people are malnourished there is more opportunity for disease and infection to spread example was Tuberculosis last year which reemerged and the World Health Organization eradicated almost as soon as it appeared.

Now we have a worldwide pandemic covid 19 which attacks the old and the weak ,if people cannot eat then the immune system and defensive mechanism is lowered. Every action has a consequence ,Donald Trump and his war hawks clearly understand this ,
but they remain immune from prosecution, as do Obama, George W Bush, and Tony Blair for war crimes and regime change wars.

I am one of the few people who have visited places inside Syria and witnessed war crimes.

Raqqa 60 thousand civilians buried under rubble from USA bombardment.

Deir Ezzor the air strike by USA on a the bridge.

Douma supply of chemical components for chemical weapons.

Destroying Syrian wheat and barley which is natural strain and not Genetically modified wheat which the USA is so badly trying to introduce to the world is a crime.

A war crime is a war crime and we wish Doctor Barakat and the Syrian Foreign Ministry success in this action.

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“A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.” — Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) The Prince (1513)

Introduction

In 1939 the American director Frank Capra released Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film that was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning for Best Original Story and turned James Stewart into a major star. Stewart plays Junior Senator Jefferson Smith in Washington who launches into a a filibuster talking non-stop for 25 hours and reaffirms American ideals of freedom. Capra’s depiction of manipulating elites is carried out in fine detail as Smith quickly learns the ropes on the Senate floor. This representation of the upper echelons of society is the common link between all of Capra’s major films of the 1930s and 1940s.

Capra exposes the negative behaviour and manipulations of society elites and tries to educate people into ways of dealing with these problems through solidarity and political means. Although Capra’s own politics may have been more conservative I will argue that Capra was in a very difficult position that meant he had to resort to an almost Machiavellian approach of appearing to do one thing but actually doing another. This made Capra’s films very progressive for their time and few directors have managed to do the same since, except, for example, the English director Ken Loach. Through the use of various different types of plot lines Capra turned cinema into a progressive socio-political vehicle for encouraging societal and community unity. I will look at some of Capra’s main films to explore how he achieved this while at the same time struggling to maintain his career against conservative political forces who were not happy with his popularity. I will also look at Capra’s films in the broader historical context of progressive Enlightenment ideas and aims.

Enlightenment traditions

In this series of articles I have been examining the effect of Enlightenment and Romanticist ideas on modern culture. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that emerged in Europe during the 17th to 19th centuries arising out of a European intellectual movement known as Renaissance humanism. Enlightenment ideas centered on reason and science as the basis of knowledge and promoted ideals of progress and liberty.

How did Enlightenment artists and philosophers do this? They tended to focus on the psyche and conditions of everyday life, including poverty, oppression, injustice, and desperation, for example, the writers Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).

These traditions continued on to the nineteenth century with Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in France and John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in England, and by liberal (Mill) and radical Karl Marx (1818–83) social theories. Enlightenment ideas of progressive change crossed all the arts and could be seen in literature, music, art, poetry, architecture and theatre where they would have definite effects on form and content. The new art of cinema in the twentieth century was no different. Directors like Capra used cinema to highlight poverty and injustice, but also the positive social effects of individual acts of courage.

Capra used some of the techniques later developed in the Italian Neorealist cinema of the 1940s and 1950s such as a definite social context, a sense of historical actuality and immediacy and a documentary style of cinematography.

Capra’s main films Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), American Madness (1932), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Platinum Blonde (1931), State of the Union (1948), Meet John Doe (1941), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), all show a commitment to progress and social change. Capra depicts two separate social worlds which rarely come together except to show how different their values and moral systems are. Their relations are depicted two main ways:

(1) Failed attempts to corrupt a good man [Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Platinum Blonde (1931), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), State of the Union (1948)]

(2) Working class solidarity or victory [American Madness (1932), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)]

Capra’s themes – (1) Failed attempts to corrupt a good man

Capra liked to show individuals who are human and have their own problems yet are courageous and morally upstanding. These individuals are bullied, offered well-paid jobs or the chance to retire wealthy but refuse to sell out their friends, class and/or family.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

There are many scenes in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington where Capra shows how corruption and collaboration with the media push through the agenda of corrupt elites on the make. Capra uses an almost documentary style of having characters explaining in detail how they operate while at the same time giving out lots of information on how progressive-minded individuals can resist.

Smith is working on a bill to authorize a federal government loan to buy some land in his home state for a national boys’ camp but the proposed campsite is already part of a dam-building graft scheme included in an appropriations bill framed by Taylor and supported by Senator Paine. Paine is concerned about Smith’s reaction to all this and suggests they drop the bill. Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), responds:

“We can’t drop it now, Joe. We bought the land around this Dam and we’re holding it in dummy names. If we drop it or delay it–we are going to bring about investigations, and investigations will show that we own that land and are trying to sell it to the State under phoney names. No, Joe, in my judgment the only thing to do is push this Dam through–and get it over with.”

In the meantime, Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), who was the aide to Smith’s predecessor and had been around Washington and politics for years explains in detail to Smith how the system in the Senate operates:

“Yes. House. More amendments–more changes–and the Bill goes back to the Senate–and *waits its turn on the calendar again*. The Senate doesn’t like what the house did to the Bill. They make more changes. The House doesn’t like those* changes. Stymie. So they appoint men from each house to go into a huddle called a conference and battle it out. Besides that, all the lobbyists interested give cocktail parties for and against–government departments get in their two cents’ worth–cabinet members–budget bureaus–embassies. Finally, if the Bill is alive after all this vivisection, it comes to a vote. Yes, sir–the big day finally arrives. And–nine times out of ten, they vote it down. (Taking a deep breath) Are you catching on, Senator?”

Capra even goes so far as to have Smith (on the directions of Saunders) give direct quotes from the Senate Manual itself:

“Uh–Mr. President–you and I are about to be alone in here, sir. I’m not complaining for social reasons, but it’d be a pity if the gentlemen missed any of this.(Then, referring to his manual–in a business-like tone) Mr. President–I call the chair’s attention to Rule Five of the Standing Rules of the Senate Section Three. “If it shall be found that a quorum is not present, a majority of the Senators present–,” and that begins to look like me–“may direct the Sergeant-at-arms to request, and if necessary *compel* the attendance of the absent Senators.”(Then-stoutly) Mr. President–*I so direct*.”

As the filibuster starts to attract the reporters attention Taylor ups the ante and grabs the phone:

“Hendricks! Line up all the papers in the State! Don’t print a word of what Smith says–not a word of any news story coming out of Washington! Understand? Defend the machine. *Hit* this guy! A criminal–convicted by Senate–blocking relief bill–starving the people. Start protests coming. Wires. Buy up every minute you can on every two-watt radio station in the State. Keep ’em spouting against Smith! McGann’s flying out–be there in five hours. Stop your presses–yank out the stories you got in ’em
now–and get going–*get that whole State moving*–!”

Senator Jefferson Smith pursues his filibuster before inattentive Senators

Meanwhile, in another documentary-style verbatim moment Smith reads out the United States Declaration of Independence:

” “–certain Unalienable Rights–that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness–” (Finishing with a flourish and putting the book down) Now, that’s pretty swell, isn’t it? I always get a great kick outa those parts of the Declaration–especially when I can read ’em out loud to somebody.”

Of course, The United States Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and the irony of his namesake reading it out loud in the Senate was not lost on the audiences of the time. Thus, in a few short scenes, Capra shows how the Senate is manipulated, the power of the media and how filibusters work.

Platinum Blonde (1931)

Capra’s film Platinum Blonde shows an ordinary person thrown into a rich millieu as a vehicle to show the lives and attitudes of society elites. Stewart “Stew” Smith (Robert Williams) an ace reporter for the Post meets Anne (Jean Harlow) the sister of a rich playboy Michael Schuyler (Donald Dillaway) he is sent to report on. Stew falls for Anne and they get married. However, while Anne tries to turn him into a ‘gentleman’, his workmates make fun of him:

“CONROY: (singing) ‘For he’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see—'(he waves his hand) Tweet, tweet – ha, ha—”

Eventually Stew has enough of his new valet and being pressurised into behaving according to the social norms of the upper class. He refuses to conform and gives it straight to Anne:

“STEW:  Yes, I’ll tell you – for the same  reason I’ve never wanted to go out with those social parasites, those sweet-smelling fashion plates. I don’t like them. They bore me. They give me the jitters.                                    
ANNE’S VOICE:  Do you know you’re talking about my friends?                                    
STEW:  Yes, I’m talking about your friends, and they still give me the jitters.”

He eventually decides to leave Anne and refuses to take money (she offers him alimony) which depicts his incorruptible nature and his working class allegiances.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), the co-owner of a tallow works and part-time greeting card poet inherits 20 million dollars from his late uncle, Martin Semple during the Great Depression. Semple’s scheming attorney, John Cedar (Douglass Dumbrille) tries to get Deeds’ power of attorney in order to keep his own financial misdeeds secret. However Deeds is not easily manipulated and fends off all greedy opportunists. His sincerity also charms minder Cornelius Cobb (Lionel Stander) and star reporter Louise “Babe” Bennett (Jean Arthur) who writes popular articles about him with the nickname “Cinderella Man”. When Deeds meets a dispossessed farmer (John Wray) who comes at him with a gun, he calms him down and decides to give fully equipped 10-acre (4-hectare) farms free to thousands of homeless families. He is taken to court but wins over the people and the judge in the end.

Meet John Doe (1941)

In Meet John Doe Ann Mitchell, a newspaper reporter prints a letter from a fictional unemployed “John Doe” threatening suicide on Christmas Eve in protest of society’s ills. The letter gets much attention and Ann is rehired to exploit the fictional John Doe. She gets John Willoughby, a former baseball player, hired to play the role of John Doe. Ann then writes a series of letters exposing society’s disregard for people in need inspiring ordinary people to start “John Doe clubs” with the slogan “Be a better neighbor”. This philosophy develops into a movement. Willoughby himself becomes inspired by the movement which the newspaper’s publisher, D. B. Norton decides to manipulate to have himself endorsed as a presidential candidate. After Norton exposes the letter fraud John decides to kill himself as the original letter had stated (by jumping from the roof of the City Hall) but the people change his mind when they tell him that they planned to restart the John Doe clubs anyway. As John leaves, the editor Henry Connell turns to Norton and says, “There you are, Norton! The people! Try and lick that!”

[1] Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1992), p.422

[2] McBride, Frank Capra, p.547

[3] McBride, Frank Capra, p.543

[4] McBride, Frank Capra, p.542

[5] McBride, Frank Capra, p.543

For several months, Western mass media called the Hong Kong rioters, “pro-democracy protesters”. It still does. But I began noticing a new, even deadlier terminology. Now, the black-clad ninja-looking men and women that are periodically and violently clashing with the law enforcement forces are once in a while described as “pro-independence”.

Some Hong Kong citizens are defining the rioters, who recently celebrated the Americans’ “Mother’s Day” with further protests and aggressive actions, as a “political virus”.

Now many people living in Hong Kong are calling for the use of force against the predominantly young, badly-informed and poorly educated individuals – those who have been responsible, together with the novel coronavirus, for bringing their city to its knees.

It has become obvious that the soft, reconciliatory approach which has so far been adopted by both the Beijing and Hong Kong administrations, might not be able to stop the conflict between the State and the rioters, who are clearly being financed and ideologically outfitted from abroad.

The more reasonable China is, the more aggressive the actions and threats coming from Washington and its allies are. COVID-19, the situation in Hong Kong, international trade, Taiwan and the South China Sea; all gets thrown into a huge, filthy wok, and stir-fried until it becomes a tasteless, foul smelling mess, which is then thrown straight into Beijing’s face, endangering the global peace, prosperity and well-being.

On May 13, 2020, RT reported:

“Beijing has lashed out at US legislation which seeks to impose sanctions on China if it fails to cooperate with Washington’s investigation into the coronavirus pandemic.

The bill would require the president to notify Congress within 60 days that China had “provided a full and complete accounting” to any US-led probe into the coronavirus outbreak. The rule would also apply to investigations carried out by American allies and UN agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO).

The legislation also demands that China shutter all “wet markets” which can pose a risk to human health. It also calls for the immediate release of Hong Kong activists arrested during ongoing protests in the semi-autonomous territory.”

Neocon politicians in Washington, and even the U.S. President himself, are demanding big concessions from China, without offering anything in return.

The confused, depressed and beaten down citizens of the United States, many of them unemployed, some now even starving, are hardly paying any attention to the foreign policy of their country, let alone trying to stop it.

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The rioters in Hong Kong have to be confronted with one fact, which many of them most likely do not realize: this is a moment when the entire planet as we know it, may go up in flames. The United States, with its economic system collapsing, is dragging China, Russia, but also Iran, Venezuela and other countries, into a conflict, and consequent war.

Such a war could cost millions, even hundreds of millions human lives.

So far, China and Russia are sticking to diplomacy. Of course, it is hard to be restrained, when faced with insults, foul propaganda, and constant military provocations. But global peace, and precisely those millions human lives that would vanish during a confrontation, are making Beijing and Moscow act in subtle, measured, ways.

But anything could happen. Patience is not limitless. If China or Russia were to feel that their existence, or the existence of their people, was in danger, they would have to react, in the name of protecting life itself.

The rioters in Hong Kong are already at the frontline. They may not realize it, in their naïveté or their foolishness, but they are.

Whatever they do, is being monitored, recorded and eventually used against their country.

They are engaged in a battle, now. And they are fighting on the side of the foreign powers which want to fully control the world.

Are the rioters committing treason? Some clearly are. But I also want to believe that most of them don’t. Not yet. I want to give them the benefit of doubt. Most of them are young, confused and even lost.

However, this benefit of doubt should have clear boundaries.

Paradoxically, if the United States decides to push China into a confrontation, the situation in Hong Kong will be one of the justifications given by Washington. At that very moment, the naïve and badly informed kids would be converted, by circumstance, into de facto combatants, fighting against their motherland. With all the due consequences.

Let’s do everything we can, that such a dire situation is avoided!

The rioters should be told: “There is still time. Sit down and talk, negotiate. Do not fight against your country as mercenaries. These are terribly dangerous times, and forgive me for saying it so frankly: I have been observing you for quite some time. You don’t really know what you are doing!”

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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 China Daily Hong Kong.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Six of his latest books are “New Capital of Indonesia”, “China Belt and Road Initiative”,“China and Ecological Civilization” with John B. Cobb, Jr., “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and Latin America, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website, his Twitter and his Patreon. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

We are being utterly transformed. And the world is being utterly transformed around us.

Ostensibly, this is to tackle a simple virus. In reality, it is to achieve an elite design at staggering cost to humanity and to life generally.

If you have not been carefully following what is taking place, let me highlight some recent developments and what we can do about them.

On 26 March 2020, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) granted Microsoft a world patent. Titled ‘1. WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’, this patent gives Microsoft (that is, Bill Gates) extraordinary power over our lives.

As Professor Vandana Shiva evocatively explains in her latest article, ‘My Earth Journey in defence of Biodiversity, Life and Freedom over 5 decades’, this development is ‘robbing us of our deep humanity’:

The patent is dramatically changing the meaning of being human.

Firstly, it is redefining us as ‘mines’ for data – robbing us of our autonomy, our sovereignty, and control over our bodies and minds….  And just being connected through their ‘server’ is giving consent….

Secondly, it is erasing our humanity – as sovereign, living beings, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings, making our decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part; and to which we are inextricably related. We are being reduced to being ‘users’ of tasks assigned to us by the extractive digital mega machine. A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire. Human creativity and consciousness disappear in the world imagined in #patent060606.

Thirdly, the patent is redefining human values, and the value of being human. Human values include ethical, ecological, spiritual values….

Patent 060606 is aimed at robbing us of our deep humanity. We are being transformed from self organised, conscious, creative, autopoetic beings, into external input “users” whose value will be assigned in cryptocurrency through algorithms, by the very machine that gave us the task in the first place.

But it is not just our humanity that is at stake, horrific though this may be. The world, too, is being transformed so that the humanoids who are not killed off or marginalized into extreme poverty and desperation will perform their assigned roles to serve the global elite within the new techno tyranny that is being created around us.

For just a taste of the evidence in this regard, see

‘Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis’,

‘The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of A “Universal Lockdown”’

and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision’.

And if you would like greater insight into the role that individuals like Bill Gates are playing in all of this, see these three recent documentaries produced by James Corbett:

‘How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health’, ‘Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World’ and ‘Bill Gates and the Population Control Grid’.

In addition, this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is instructive:

‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’.

Given the monumental undertaking for global control that this represents, you might wonder how this transformation can be achieved. And, unfortunately, the answer is ‘very simply’. This is because the bulk of the human population has been terrorized into a state of being submissively obedient. And this state is effectively permanent. As a result, mobilizing strategic resistance to what is happening is very difficult.

Why do I write this?

Because the evidence that COVID-19 is a minor health risk, particularly if dealt with appropriately, is overwhelming and extensively documented: ‘According to data from the best-studied countries and regions, the lethality of Covid19 is on average about 0.2%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu) and about twenty times lower than originally assumed by the WHO.’ See ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’.

Having noted that, however, if you want to watch a thoughtful and detailed explanation of why COVID-19 is a ‘fake virus’, try watching molecular biologist Dr Andrew Kaufman’s two hour interview by Brian Rose: ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. In this interview, Dr Kaufman carefully explains:

The scientific procedures that have been utilized in all of these scientific studies… it wouldn’t be possible using those techniques to isolate the virus and purify it and prove that it exists…. Taking into account all of the evidence I have looked at which has been almost entirely from peer-reviewed scientific papers and official government websites, my opinion is that this entire pandemic is a completely manufactured crisis. In other words there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness…. And so what I think is going on… is in line with what might be known as a globalist agenda…. All of these things seem to be moving towards control of the people.

There is not very much about vaccines that makes a lot of sense because if you actually go back and look for the evidence that vaccines have prevented disease you are not going to find any…. Smallpox is an interesting example…. In the mainstream history books the smallpox vaccine has been touted as a major success but that’s not really accurate. If you go back and look at data from the Royal Academy of Sciences what you will see is that the mortality increased substantially while these vaccines were widely used and then when they stopped being used the numbers went back down again.

So it is really difficult to trust what is in a general textbook or mainstream history book without going and looking at the actual data yourself because all of the textbooks that were in medical schools say that vaccines are responsible for preventing many of these major illnesses that people were suffering from and worried about in the first part of the twentieth century. But if you look at some of the same diseases that did not have a vaccine, such as scarlet fever for example, you will find that scarlet fever also went away with all of the other diseases even though there was no vaccine for it.

And when you look at the number of cases of the various illnesses like polio or measles or diphtheria, you’ll see that the prevalence or incidence of those diseases and mortality from those diseases, which in some was substantial, went down almost to the current levels before a vaccine was even available for use so you couldn’t possibly attribute a vaccine for causing that reduction in the illness if it wasn’t even around at the time that the illness was reduced…

If you create a vaccine for an illness [such as COVID-19] that has not been proven to even exist, then the vaccine couldn’t possibly work. But if you do a clinical study and have an imaginary disease and give the vaccine to people and then they never get the imaginary disease it would give the appearance that its very successful.

So this is a real win-win strategy for anyone making these vaccines and which is why there have been companies all over the world racing to be the first one to have a vaccine that’s been proven to be safe or effective using the limited criteria that they require. Because whoever gets there first, according to the plans or proposed policies, they’re going to be selling billions of vaccines. Billions! So they’re going to make billions of dollars as a result of this. So there is such a strong financial incentive.

Some of the technological strategies that they are using to make these vaccines are quite scary and unprecedented…. But obviously it couldn’t prevent a disease that doesn’t exist so there must be some other purpose for it.

Remember, the words quoted above are taken from a two hour interview. If any of these words leave you wondering, watch the interview to consider the evidence that Dr Kaufman cites or check his website: Dr Andrew Kaufman.

In another video Dr Kaufman explains how early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’. Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’– declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientificsources for this explanation of how the COVID-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’.

If you wish to watch a more scientifically-oriented lecture, explaining more of the technical detail of what Dr Kaufman argues ‘is really going on’ and which is consistent with the evidence, then you can view it here: ‘Special Report: Humanity is NOT a virus!’

So while the evidence that there is neither a virus nor a pandemic is grounded firmly in the science, the evidence that the global elite is using COVID-19 as ‘cover’ to implement its coup against humanity is rather overwhelming. In addition to the articles cited above, see these two articles which cite many other extensively-documented sources as well: ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ and ‘COVID-19: Breaking the Lockdown, Defeating the Coup, Averting Extinction’.

But while this evidence is readily available, it requires someone who has not lost the capacity to investigate and think for themself. And that is a huge problem.

Of course, little of the evidence in these regards is available through education systems or the corporate media, given that the purpose of these institutions is to serve elite interests. And controlling access to, and manipulating perception of, the evidence is vital in both regards.

So if, for example, you believe that the corporate media is reporting the ‘news’, you might like to reflect on these words of David Rockefeller spoken at the highly secretive elite Bilderberg meeting held in Germany in 1991 but subsequently leaked:

‘We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government…. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.’ See ‘David Rockefeller at Bilderberg meeting in Baden 1991’ and ‘David Rockefeller’s Chilling 1991 Speech at a Bilderberg Meeting’.

The motto of The Washington Post is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’. What it does not proclaim is that the Post, along with the other corporate media outlets, has long played its part in the global elite’s program to ensure that democracy – and hence any meaningful role in how we are governed – cannot flourish. But for a detailed critique of the corporate media exposing its role in perpetrating elite power by distributing elite propaganda as ‘news’, see Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

Hence, while increasing numbers of people are lamenting the submissive response to elite initiatives to imprison us in our own homes (and strip us of rights and freedoms that it took centuries to win) – see, for example, ‘A Nation of Sheep’ and ‘To All Cowards Who Meekly Succumbed To the Unlawful Lockdown… Hang Your Heads In Shame’– and some authors have written commentaries illustrating and explaining the ways in which people’s fear is manifesting in response to a simple virus – see Dr. Rudolf Hänsel’s explanation in ‘The Diabolical “Game” with Fear as an Instrument of Domination. The Reflex of Obedience’and Dr. Pascal Sacré’s thoughts in ‘COVID-19: An Ocean of Fears and Lies’– my own interest lies in explaining why people are fearfully and submissively obedient in the first place and how we can go about restoring agency to the individual’s life so that they can use their own investigatory and analytical capacities to track down and consider the evidence, and to then act sensibly and powerfully in response.

While, regrettably, this cannot be done quickly, it is an essential component of any strategy to effectively resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedoms and economic security while also acting powerfully to deal with the genuine threats to human survival such as those posed by war, the environmental and climate catastrophes, biodiversity loss and the deployment of 5G, among others. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’and, for astute insight into the disastrous impact that the global industrial shutdown is having on the aerosol masking effect and hence the global climate, see ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

This is because fear suppresses (other) emotional responses (including the anger that would mobilize resistance), distorts sensory perception (so that people disbelieve, rather than consider carefully, evidence that contradicts the elite-driven narrative), inhibits analytical capacity, falsifies memory (to conform with explanations that are less frightening) and thwarts powerful behavioural responses. As a consequence of being victims of their own fear, most people live in a world of delusion and projection and are quite incapable of being anything but submissively obedient.

In brief, fear makes people want to believe, and hence to actually believe, that there is ‘nothing wrong’ with elite directives distributed by international organizations (such as the World Health Organisation), governments, the medical industry, education systems and the corporate media. This means that they do not have to feel and think for themselves, consult their conscience or change their own behaviour, each of which is particularly frightening when their fear and the (unconscious) imperative to obey already have them paralyzed.

So how have we ended up with a population of ‘individuals’ who are so devoid of any sense of Selfhood that they are submissively obedient as Drs Hänsel and Sacré discussed above and which we are now witnessing on a global scale as people are imprisoned in their own homes?

Fundamentally, this has occurred because our parenting and education models are based on terrorizing children into obedience using a combination of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. For the details of how we do this, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

Hence, while we pay lip service to the notion of ‘the individual’, the reality is that we prefer ‘individuals’ who follow the orders of ‘the authorities’, whether at home, school, work, in the military, at a religious gathering or as ‘citizens’ in society generally. After all, our definition of ‘individuality’ long ago ceased to mean any more than that the person clothes themself differently and has their own combination of interests to while away their spare time.

The genuine individual who has an integrated mind, trusts their own (emotional and intellectual) judgment, articulates the truth and behaves powerfully in accord with their conscience, whatever the cost, is only supposed to appear as a fictional character in novels or films. We certainly do not want them in real life. Just ask Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example. Shot dead or imprisoned for having the qualities of a genuine individual.

For further explanations of how we systematically destroy the individuality in our children, see

‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’,

‘Most Attitudes and Beliefs are Outcomes of Fear’ and

‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.

So here we are at the most important moment in human history. At the brink of precipitating our own extinction – again, see

‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’

and ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

– and now imprisoned in our own homes (for those who have them) while the global elite implements more of its plan to reduce us from human individuals to digital identities that are readily tracked and controlled while playing our robotic role in the techno tyranny that is almost upon us.

Even those two writers of the classic dystopian novels of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, would be horrified that we participated so obediently, so submissively, in the destruction of our ‘free’ world (whatever its limitations). And I doubt they would get any solace from knowing just how well they truly understood the terrified and submissive nature of the human condition.

So with virtually everyone ‘distracted’ from the ‘main game’ – the coup in which the global elite is taking vastly greater control of our lives and even dramatically increasing the risk of imminent human extinction – while we sit back, or even ask for, greater restrictions on our rights and freedoms, the only important question remaining is this:

Can we mobilize sufficient people, even at this late moment, to strategically defend our humanity, defeat the elite coup and avert the imminent threats to human survival?

Unfortunately, as recent evidence clearly indicates, with even most activists obviously deceived by the use of COVID-19 as ‘cover’ for the coup and oblivious to its catastrophic environmental consequences,  this is proving far more difficult than I originally hoped.

Nevertheless, in the hope that we can build on the existing resistance, such as that being documented by Professor Chenoweth and her colleagues – see ‘The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism – and they’re flourishing’– while sharpening its focus for greater strategic impact, let me reiterate a previously outlined strategy below, particularly taking into account the insanity of the global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’– and the emotional health issues (including anxiety and depression) that are arising during the lockdown that are now complicating people’s existing compulsion to be obedient in the belief that compliance with COVID-19 (that is, coup) measures will make them ‘safe’.

A Nonviolent Strategy to Fight for our Humanity, Liberty and Future

So, if you wish to address your own emotional health issues arising during the COVID-19 coup, consider ‘Putting Feelings First’ and/or, if you wish to support others, including children, to do so effectively, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

In relation to the coup itself, I have identified the appropriate political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’– and set out a basic list of (now) 28 strategic goals for achieving this purpose (which will also play a vital role in tackling key threats to human survival). The first thirteen of these strategic goals are as follows:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.

(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Google, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by refusing to download the COVID-19 ‘contact tracing’ surveillance app.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by ending their ownership and use of a mobile (cell) phone. See ‘EchoEarth: End Cell Phones on Earth’ and ‘Cancel Your Cellphone Account Day, 20-21 June 2020’.

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(7) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(8) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(9) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(10) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(11) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(12) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(13) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

You can read all 28 of the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.

Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

Given the complexity of the configuration of this conflict, however, which involves the need to fight simultaneously to retain our ‘deep humanity’, defeat the elite coup and avert near-term human extinction, it is important that our tactical choices are strategically-oriented (as the examples I cite in the thirteen strategic goals above illustrate). Hence, three further considerations assume importance.

First, choose/design tactics that have strategic impact, that is, they fundamentally and permanently alter, in our favor, the power relationship between the elite and us.

Second, when tactical choices are made, focus them on undermining the elite coup, not just features of it, such as ‘social distancing’ or the lockdowns. At its most basic, this can be achieved by using tactical choices that mobilize people to act initially, as is happening, but then inviting them to consider taking further, more focused, action as well (such as those nominated in the 28 strategic goals listed or referenced above). This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those being taken by the elite to advance the fourth industrial revolution, which includes reducing us to a ‘digital identity’.

Third, I would choose/design tactics that also have strategic impact on the greatest threats to human survival, including the collapsing biodiversity on Earth, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and the deployment of 5G. Given the incredibly short timeframe in which we are now working to avert human extinction, while people are mobilizing it is important to use this opportunity to give them the chance to perceive the ‘big picture’ of what is taking place – beyond lockdowns and other measures supposedly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

Equally importantly, the Nonviolent Strategy website explains how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression and, as some nonviolent activists are concerned, to contain any risk of damage to their cause by association with, or disruption by, those groups and provocateurs with a very different and possibly violent agenda. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Fortunately, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, the energy to break the lockdowns and resist the coup will gather pace. As I have previously outlined, using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

In addition, as I mentioned above, given the pressing (and, possibly, now uncontainable) threat of human extinction but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider accelerated participation in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

And for those nonviolent activists concerned about tackling the climate and/or other threats to human survival – including those in relation to the environment and war – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

Or, if you want something simpler, consider committing to:

Conclusion

Using COVID-19 as ‘cover’, the global elite is conducting a coup to take vastly greater control of our lives and, in fact, to neutralize our humanity. This is being made very easy by the compulsion to obey that most people acquire in response to the ‘socialization’ experience they suffered as a child.

As a result, there is very little resistance to the coup, and none of which I am aware that is strategically focused. Consequently, the coup is readily measured by the destruction of our rights, freedoms, emotional health, political participation and economic security as well as its devastating impact on the Earth, further complicating the already grave series of interrelated threats to our survival and that of vast numbers of other species with which we share this planet.

As you ponder your response to this coup and the vastly increased threat to our survival, it might be worth remembering the words of David Rockefeller in his autobiography Memoirs, published in 2003:

Some even believe [the Rockefeller family is] part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

If you believe that Rockefeller’s vision is benign from the viewpoint of people like you and me, it might be worth reading more about the Rockefeller family’s interests in our well-being, starting with the report from 2010 titled ‘Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development’ which discusses four scenarios for the human future in which one is based on ‘Lock Step’ following a pandemic: ‘A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback’.

Hence, if you share my concern that the time to act powerfully in defence of our humanity, to defeat this elite coup and to fight vigorously and strategically on the many interrelated crises that threaten human extinction, then you are welcome to become involved in one or more of the ways suggested above.

Whatever we do, however, it is vitally important that we do not submissively obey the global elite and its agents such as international organizations, governments, corporations and the mainstream media. The elite and its agents might wear a benign smile at times but their loyalty is not to us or to the Earth. They are too insane to have loyalty to either; their loyalty is to themselves exclusively and we are expendable.

So I gently encourage you to have a good look at the evidence for yourself and to act while we still have some personal autonomy and political space to do so. If we do not act now, we will not have this autonomy and space for much longer and human extinction will follow imminently.

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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.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to ‘Global Research’.

ANNEX

The Earth Pledge 

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
8. I will not buy rainforest timber
9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

More voices have been added to the urgent call for federal financial help to struggling municipal governments across Canada, hit by the pandemic lockdown.

On May 20, CUPE Ontario (representing 80,000 municipal employees) and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (representing about 440 municipal councils) joined forces to appeal for immediate federal and provincial emergency funding. Their appeal backs a similar call put out by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in mid-April, urgently asking the federal government for $10 billion in emergency aid.

Our cities have taken a huge economic hit from the pandemic lockdown of the last ten weeks, losing necessary income from transit fares, municipal parking, building permits, rents from recreational facilities and civic buildings, land transfer taxes, etc., as everything ground to a halt.

At the same time, municipalities have had to maintain police and fire departments, ambulance and emergency medical services, garbage collection, water and waste treatment systems, temporary housing for the homeless, and other services that keep our cities livable.

Since mid-April, mayors and councillors have been calling for financial help, but the Trudeau Liberals have been strangely quiet about federal assistance for them, although the Toronto Star (May 22) quoted Trudeau as recently saying that “the federal government is eager to hear from the provinces how we can support cities.”

Lots of money has been flying out the door for other sectors of the economy, but so far nothing for municipalities. That situation could actually benefit the company that has been hired to advise the Bank of Canada (BoC) on the use of its massive money spigot to sustain the economy during the pandemic.

BlackRock In Command

On March 27, the BoC (Canada’s publicly-owned central bank) announced that BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory has been hired to advise on monetary policy during the crisis. The announcement came just hours after BlackRock was given a similar role in the U.S., advising the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury on a new (potentially $4.5 trillion) corporate slush-fund to bailout the economy through the CARES Act.

As the world’s largest asset management firm, New York- based BlackRock is a financial titan.  It manages $7 trillion for its global corporate investor-clients, along with another $20 trillion for clients through its financial risk-monitoring software (called Aladdin).

BlackRock’s many investor-clients include most major corporations, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, and private foundations across the planet. With $27 trillion under various forms of its management, BlackRock towers over the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. This much consolidated financial power may be unprecedented.

BlackRock has long been in favour of the privatization of public assets and services, especially through public-private partnerships (P3s). The longer Canadian cities face economic hardship, the sooner they may be forced to privatize.

Now the central banks on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border have placed BlackRock in a primary position for effecting monetary and fiscal policy in both countries. As I wrote in Counterpunch (April 8), that is “flagrant corporatism”.

The EU then hired BlackRock to advise on new environmental rules for banking supervision across Europe. At the same time, BlackRock is also reportedly advising Israel’s central bank. As a result, BlackRock’s billionaire founder and CEO Larry Fink may now be the most powerful man in the world.

Some attention has been paid to the fact that, during the 2007–2010 Wall Street bailout, BlackRock’s Larry Fink played a major role in advising governments and corporations in how to deal with toxic assets from crashing banks. But something important is being overlooked.

As I wrote in my 2016 book Beyond Banksters, these governments and corporations “sought Fink’s advice, despite the fact that (as Fortune reported in 2008) BlackRock’s Larry Fink ‘was an early and vigorous promoter [of] the same mortgage-backed securities’ responsible for the crisis. ‘Now his firm is making millions cleaning up those toxic assets,’ Fortune noted.”

On May 21, the website Wall Street on Parade.com revealed that during the 2007-2010 financial crisis, BlackRock “collected fees from the Fed of at least $212.02 million” for its advice.

Now, during the pandemic, the New York branch of the Fed has signed contracts with BlackRock to run its $750 billion corporate bond buying programs. “The Fed will be allowing BlackRock to buy up its own junk bond and investment grade ETFs [Exchange Traded Funds].”

The Current Canadian Bailouts

When asked in April why BlackRock was selected and what its duties would be, a Bank of Canada Public Information Officer responded by email with a boilerplate answer about the company’s “prominent role in the Canadian financial system” and its “operational capacity” to respond quickly. The Officer emphasized that BlackRock “has been hired to advise only,” while the BoC would make decisions about things like the “pricing parameters and which types of assets to buy.”

Since late March, the BoC has been buying up Canadian Government bonds (at least $5 billion per week), along with various forms of corporate debt – such as mortgage-backed securities and commercial paper (short-term corporate debt).

On April 30, Stephen Poloz, outgoing Governor of the BoC, told the Ivey School of Business in London, Ont. that the past weeks have been “a blur” of efforts to “ensure well-functioning financial markets” through the BoC’s enhanced “liquidity facilities”. Poloz explained, “Central banks can create the needed liquidity by accumulating assets that people don’t want and providing the cash they wish to hold.”

We may never know just how many toxic assets the BoC has purchased to bailout the corporate sector, but by April 25, Poloz stated, “cumulative purchase of assets by the Bank stood at $260 billion, equivalent to well over 10% of Canada’s GDP.”

On May 4, the BoC’s Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins stated that the figure had swelled to $385 billion.

Another term for that “liquidity” money-spigot is quantitative easing (QE), and in May, two more BoC QE programs were launched, also with BlackRock as advisor: 1) a $50 billion program to support the provincial bond market, and 2) a $10 billion corporate bond purchase program.

Banking on Privatization

It’s fair to say that BlackRock has had its eye on privatizations in Canada for a long time, probably since 2013. BlackRock also has had an indirect connection to the Bank of Canada for several years.

In 2008, BlackRock was 49% owned by Merrill Lynch. During the Wall Street crash, Bank of America snapped up Merrill Lynch, thereby becoming a major owner of BlackRock. With its rise in fortunes, BlackRock later became the major shareholder in Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch from 2004 to 2012 was Sheryl King, who subsequently (as of July 2016) became an Advisor to the BoC Governor and represents the BoC in its New York office. The BoC website explains that King “is responsible for promoting and strengthening ties between the Bank and the financial community in New York.”
Sheryl King’s appointment to the BoC coincided with the fact that in the summer of 2016, PM Trudeau was reportedly “courting BlackRock” in hopes that some of its huge torrent of investment money would be directed into Canada for infrastructure.

In 2016, the Trudeau government hired someone from Bank of America Merrill Lynch to design the new Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) – widely known as “the privatization bank”. Just why Bank of American Merrill Lynch was given this role has never been explained, but it may have something to do with the fact that BlackRock is its biggest shareholder. BlackRock’s promotion of privatization and P3s fits with the Trudeau government plan for $180 billion in infrastructure spending, using $35 billion from the CIB to attract and de-risk corporate investment.

In November 2016, BlackRock hosted a private summit in Toronto for “a select group of major international investors” to meet Trudeau and other Cabinet members, but the press was not allowed to be there to record the infrastructure “opportunities” being offered to these banksters. It was later revealed that the federal Privy Council Office had set up working groups with BlackRock in order to prepare the federal presentations. In those groups, BlackRock was represented by Jean Boivin, managing director for BlackRock and a former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.

“Safe” Assets

In mid-April, federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna began calling for the Canada Infrastructure Bank to rapidly finance “shovel-ready” P3 infrastructure projects as part of a post-pandemic stimulus. McKenna’s use of the term “shovel-ready” is somewhat misleading. Global investors are more interested in buying or leasing already-built infrastructure.

As Mark Wiseman (then CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board) told the press in March 2016, global investors “would rather acquire mature infrastructure assets than finance new projects because they’re safer” financially. Wiseman joined BlackRock shortly after making that statement, but was recently dismissed for an “inappropriate” relationship with a staff member.

The CIB’s financial “pilot project” for P3s was launched in Mapleton, Ont. last year. As I wrote in Global Research (October 4, 2019), according to the CIB’s “new model” for structuring and financing P3s, “We taxpayers will subsidize the borrowing costs of the private sector so they can privatize the revenue stream” from municipal assets.

According to CUPE (March 9),

“P3s are usually only pitched for projects costing over $100 million because of the extremely high costs of consultants and lawyers negotiating the deals. The CIB is aiming to remove this barrier.”

Just days after Infrastructure Minister McKenna’s call for P3s, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities put out its urgent call for financial help.

Without such help, municipalities could be forced to privatize assets and services like water and waste systems, transit, electricity transmission and distribution, garbage pickup, municipal parking, ports, roads, bridges, etc., that the private sector wants because of their potential for long-term and reliable financial returns.

As the Globe and Mail reported (May 18),

“With provincial and municipal governments facing major budget pressures because of the pandemic, that could mean a greater role for the infrastructure bank and its effort to attract large outside investors.”

BlackRock subtly noted that same situation more than a month ago. On April 13, BlackRock executives Kurt Reiman and Daniel Donato wrote (on blackrockblog.com) that the “Canadian market may be presenting pockets of opportunities for investors with longer time horizons…”

As I wrote in Beyond Banksters, the goal is to downsize the public sector and privatize. We’ll know soon enough whether that is still the plan.

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Toronto-based freelance writer Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca.

Buried on the 18th page of a recently updated federal government memo defining which workers are critical during the Covid-19 pandemic is a new category of essential workers: defense industry personnel employed in foreign arms sales. 

The memo, issued April 17, is a revised version of statements issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Defense in mid-March. In those, the defense industry workforce was deemed “essential” alongside healthcare professionals and food producers, a broad designation that prompted criticism from a former top acquisition official for the Pentagon, defense-spending watchdoggroups, and workers themselves. The original March memos made no mention of the tens of billions of dollars in foreign arms sales that U.S. companies make each year.

The new text indicates that the federal government deliberately expanded the scope of work for essential employees in the mid-April memo to include the “sale of U.S. defense articles and services for export to foreign allies and partners.” In These Times spoke with numerous workers who instead say their plants could have shut down production for clients both domestic and foreign. The updated April 17 memo was issued as the United States reported more than 30,000 Covid-19 deaths, a number that would come close to tripling in the following weeks.

The new memo, which says essential workers are those needed “to maintain the services and functions Americans depend on daily,” also reflects what defense workers tell In These Times has been a reality throughout the pandemic: Work is ongoing on military-industrial shop floors across the country, including on weapons for foreign sales.

(A memo in March said essential workers are those needed to “meet national security commitments to the federal government and U.S. military.” In April, the government quietly updated the memo to include a new line of essential work: foreign arms sales.)

Arms manufacturing for export has continued at a Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, which has stayed open 24 hours a day during the pandemic and manufactures the F-35 fighter jet. Asked by In These Times if F-35 production for international customers was ongoing in Fort Worth during the pandemic, a Lockheed spokesman responded that “there are no specific impacts to our operations at this time.” The company has a robust slate of domestic and foreign orders to fulfill for the F-35—the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history, one the company now advertises at a price tag of at least $89 million per jet. This slate includes 98 for the United States in the fiscal year 2020 and scores for international buyers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, according to a recent report on the F-35 program from the Congressional Research Service.

An employee at the Fort Worth plant told In These Times, “I don’t think it should be designated essential if we’re not doing it for our own country. I understand these other countries have put money into it. I do understand that. But these other countries are shut down, too,” the worker added, referring to the major disruptions of economic activities across the globe. The employee said they have seen computer monitors indicating jets were destined for Japan and Australia in recent weeks.

In the first weeks after the country shut down, the employee says they and their fellow workers asked themselves, “Why don’t we move these aircraft out of the way for a minute? And we have enough manpower here we could make masks. We could make ventilators.” But the company’s priorities for its essential workers, the employee says, has been: “Let’s get these jets and let’s get them running. Let’s pump them out the door.”

Several defense industry workers told In These Times they believe on-site manufacturing work at weapons plants for both foreign and domestic use could have been suspended at least for a matter of weeks during the pandemic. They also said they worry about the feasibility of keeping busy workplaces safe and sanitary, and that they distrust employers’ methods for handling virus cases that have emerged among workers.

Alarm over the expectation to continue reporting to shop floors for hands-on jobs has opened a rift between defense contractors and their employees, with the latter feeling constrained from speaking out publicly due to the confidentiality surrounding national security work. Several workers, all concerned about the risks of plants staying open, spoke with In These Times on the condition their names not be published, fearing repercussions or losing security clearances.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said at an April 30 press conference that of 10,509 major companies tracked by the Defense Contract Management Agency, just 93 were closed, while 141 had closed and reopened. While many in the defense industry can work remotely—a Lockheed spokesperson told In These Timesby e-mail that about 9,000 of its 18,000 employees in Fort Worth are telecommuting—the thousands that remain on plant floors, workers say, are often blue-collar employees whose jobs are hands-on. On an April 21 earnings call, outgoing Lockheed Martin CEO Marllyn Hewson told investors that “our manufacturing facilities are open and our workforce is engaged.”

Concern for the safety of that workforce prompted Jennifer Escobar—a veteran and wife of a Lockheed Martin employee in Fort Worth who himself is a disabled veteran—to publicly denounce the company for staying open during the pandemic.

More than 5,000 people have signed her petition calling for the Fort Worth site to shut down and send employees home with pay. A similar petition on behalf of Lockheed Martin employees in Palmdale, Calif., garnered hundreds of signatures. Escobar spearheaded the campaign, she says, for “everybody else who couldn’t stand up because they have a fear of retaliation from the employer.”

Escobar also started a GoFundMe page for the widow of the Fort Worth site’s first reported Covid-19 death. Claude Daniels, a material handler, and his wife, also a Lockheed employee, had together spent about seven decades working for the company, according to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union.

The local machinists union reported in late April that the Fort Worth site had 12 confirmed virus cases among Lockheed and non-Lockheed employees. Since the plant has remained open during the pandemic, the company has responded to the outbreak by identifying and informing workers who have been in proximity with an infected employee and asking them to stay home, according to a Lockheed spokesman.

But Escobar and one plant worker said there are gaps in that response. For example, Escobar says there were instances in which a worker was sent home while their spouse, also a company employee, was not, despite the presumably close contact the pair has in a shared living space. One Fort Worth worker also said that while the company will remove an employee who works within six feet of someone who tests positive, there are cases of people who work at greater distances—the employee gave the example of workers on either side of a jet’s wings—who still share items during their shift.

“Even though we were sharing the same workstation, the same computer, the same toolbox, that doesn’t count,” the employee says.

In response to these concerns, Lockheed Martin told In These Times via email,

“Our Facilities teams have increased cleaning schedules within all our buildings and campuses across Lockheed Martin, with a high concentration on common areas like lobbies, restrooms, breakrooms and elevators. Upon learning of probable exposure, a contracted professional cleaning and restoration company sanitizes the employee’s workspace, surrounding workspaces, common areas, and entrances and exits throughout the building.”

Anger at the expectation employees continue working led one to spit on the company’s gate in Fort Worth. Escobar says,

“He was just really upset that the company was treating him like that.”

Lockheed Martin spokesman Kenneth Ross told In These Times that the company’s security team was aware of and investigating the reported spitting incident.

“Obviously, that kind of behavior is not fitting with what we’re trying to do to create a Covid-19 safe environment,” he said.

One Fort Worth employee infected with the virus filmed a video of himself from a hospital bed that went viral and was viewed by many of his coworkers. In sharing his story, he also exposed a gap in the company’s ability to respond to the virus while maintaining its floors open.

In Anthony Melchor’s video, which has been viewed more than 16,000 times, he is interrupted by coughs and wheezy breaths. “I’m cool on my stool, you know me,” he says, warning his fellow workers that “this Covid ain’t no bullshit, man.” He calls on them to sanitize their work areas and not go to work if they feel unsafe.

During a weekend in early April, Melchor, who suspects he was exposed to the virus at work, began to have severe migraines. He woke up the next day in a pool of sweat. His doctor ordered a Covid-19 test, but his first result was a false negative, which Melchor believes happened because his nasal swab was too shallow. After several days passed and his condition worsened, his wife insisted he receive medical attention. A second coronavirus test then came back positive, he said.

Melchor says his delay in informing Lockheed that he was positive for the virus also meant his coworkers were delayed in being removed from the line. Asked whether workers are removed from the plant when an employee shows symptoms of the virus or only after one has tested positive, a Lockheed spokesman wrote that the company “identif[ies] and inform[s] any employees who interacted with individuals exposed to or diagnosed with Covid-19 while maintaining confidentiality.”

At a Lockheed Martin site in Greenville, S.C., where the company is currently producing F-16s for Bahrain—the company appears to have only foreign clients for the fighter jet—one employee expressed concern over how close workers get to one another when they often work in pairs on either side of a jet. The worker also says it is “the nature of our business” to have employees who frequently travel, including out of the country, leading the worker to fear what they may bring back to the workplace when they return.

“From a financial standpoint I know it’s not beneficial for us to be at home,” the Greenville worker says, “but the safety of employees to me should be most important.”

Lockheed’s fighter jets are among many defense products that U.S. companies export.

In addition to Lockheed Martin, In These Times submitted questions to three other defense firms about ongoing exports during Covid-19. Northrop Grumman announced in its April 29 earnings call that the company had delivered two Global Hawk surveillance drones to South Korea that month. Asked about the precautions the company took for the safety of workers handling the drones in the final weeks leading up to the April delivery, a spokesperson wrote that the company is “taking extraordinary measures to maintain safe working conditions.” The U.S. ambassador in Seoul tweeted a picture of the sleek gray drone emblazoned with Korean letters in an April 19 message congratulating those involved in its delivery.

Another contractor, Wichita-based Textron Aviation, told In These Times that, during Covid-19, the company “will continue to support our customers according to our funded contract requirements, which includes foreign customers.”

Jeff Abramson, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Arms Control Association, says the pandemic does not appear to have caused any “deviation” from the Trump administration’s policy of promoting foreign arms sales. He notes that the State Department approved numerous potential sales, including ones to controversial clients like the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines, in the midst of the global pandemic.

“It certainly seems that this administration is trying to get a message to industry that you are important. There will be work for you,” Abramson says.

Despite the essential designation, some Boeing defense-industrial sites buckled under pressure as the virus spread and closed during the pandemic. A day after the death of an employee infected with the virus in Washington State, Boeing announced it would shutter its Puget Sound site, where some 70,000 people work on both commercial and defense aircraft. Boeing also shut down a Pennsylvania site that produces military aircraft for two weeks, saying the step was “a necessary one for the health and safety of our employees and their communities.”

When Boeing partially reopened Puget Sound after about three weeks, the first production it resumed was on defense products. Asked if work was underway on P-6 patrol aircraft for foreign clients such as South Korea and New Zealand, a company spokesperson responded, “We are evaluating customer delivery schedules and working to minimize impacts to our international customers.”

Unlike the United States, some countries have allowed defense production to shut down. Mexico did not declare its defense industry essential, prompting a rebuke from the Pentagon’s Ellen Lord, who wrote to the Mexican foreign ministry regarding interruptions to supply chains. Lord later said she had seen a “positive response” from Mexico on resolving the issue. F-35 facilities in both Japan and Italy shut down for several days in the early weeks of the pandemic.

Melchor, the Fort Worth employee who is now recovering from Covid-19 at home, says he agrees with the defense-industrial base’s designation as essential, including when that involves commitments to customers amongst U.S. allies. “I just also believe that our customers would have understood if there was a two-week delay or even a month delay because of this virus,” he says.

He believes leadership is needed to address the issue in a unified way and says debate about the crisis amongst workers, whom he called on in his video to “pull together,” has become fractious.

“What I found interesting is the very thing that we build [is] to serve and protect, foreign and domestic, to protect us from any type of evil or wrongdoing,” Melchor says. “At what point does our company protect us?”

An original version of this story said that U.S. companies make foreign arms sales in the order of $180 billion a year. While the U.S. State Department says that the U.S. government manages the transfer of approximately $43 billion in defense equipment to allies each year and provides regulatory approvals for more than $136 billion per year in defense sales abroad, others estimates of the volume of U.S. arms sales abroad have differed. A new report from the Center for International Policy says that the United States made at least $85.1 billion in arms sales offers in 2019. The report’s authors call this figure “a floor, not a ceiling” and said the number is “almost assuredly an undercounting” due to lack of transparency in arms sales reporting.

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A report published by the European Commission in late 2019 reveals that the EU has been looking to increase the scope and power of vaccination programmes since well before the current “pandemic”.

The endpoint of the Roadmap is, among many other things, to introduce a “common vaccination card/passport” for all EU citizens.

This proposal will be appearing before the commission in 2022, with a “feasibility study” set to run from 2019 through 2021 (meaning, as of now, it’s about halfway through).

To underline the point: The “vaccination roadmap” is not an improvised response to the Covid19 pandemic, but rather an ongoing plan with roots going back to 2018, when the EU released a survey of the public’s attitude toward vaccines titled “2018 State of Vaccine Confidence”

On the back of this research, the EU then commissioned a technical report titled “Designing and implementing an immunisation information system”, on – among other things – the plausibility of an EU-wide vaccination monitoring system.

In the 3rd quarter of 2019 these reports were all combined into the latest version of the the “Vaccination Roadmap”, a long-term policy plan to spread vaccine “awareness and understanding” whilst counteracting “vaccine myths” and combatting “vaccine hesitancy”.

You can read the entire report here, but below are some of the more concerning highlights [emphasis throughout is ours]:

• “Examine the feasibility of developing a common vaccinationcard/passport for EU citizens“
• “Develop EU guidance for establishingcomprehensive electronic immunization information systems for effective monitoring of immunization programmes.”
• “overcome the legal and technical barriers impeding the interoperability of national immunisation information systems”

On the 12th September 2019, at the joint EU-WHO “Global Vaccination Summit”, they announced the “10 Actions Towards Vaccination for All”, which cover much of the same ground.

One month later, in October 2019, Event 201 was held.

For those who don’t know, Event 201 was a simulated pandemic exercise focusing on a zoonotic novel coronavirus originating in bats. It was sponsored by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The result of the simulation was seven key suggestions.

In November of 2019, these suggestions were published as a “call to action”.

One month later, China reported the first cases of Covid19.

To be clear here (and forestall any below-the-line arguments): this is notabout vaccines, their effectiveness, safety or lack thereof.

The point is that proposed COVID countermeasures, which have been presented to the public as emergency measures thought up on the fly by panicking institutions, have in fact existed since before the emergence the disease.

They already wanted to monitor your vaccination records and tie that to your passport, introduce mandatory vaccinations and clampdown on “misinformation”. They just didn’t have a reason yet.

This was a situation which required a crisis and, fortuitously, it got one.

The exact ratio of contrivance to happenstance will never be known. What we DO know, at this point, is that Sars-Cov-2 is nothing like the threat originally reported, they admit as much themselves.

We also know they keep churning out the fear anyway.

And, thanks to documents like this, maybe now we’re starting to see why.

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The Senate Foreign Relations Committee quietly passed a bill yesterday to give Israel a minimum of $38 billion over the next ten years despite the ongoing devastation to the U.S. economy caused by the coronavirus.

The bill – S.3176 –  will now go before the full Senate. Since the legislation has already been passed by the House of Representatives, if the Senate passes the bill, it will then go to the president to be signed into law.

The bill was passed by the committee under two unusual circumstances and with almost no public awareness.

First, Senate Committee Chairman Jim Risch (R-Idaho) refused to allow a live stream of the meeting, despite the fact that the Senate Rules panel had recommended that extra efforts be taken to ensure public transparency while the Capitol is closed to the public and the presence of reporters is severely limited. The Senate’s Press Gallery Standing Committee of Correspondents had objected strongly to Risch’s decision.

Second, the bill was passed without being named, debated, or even discussed, even though it would set into law the largest such aid package in U.S. history. There has been no mention of the bill by most media in the United States.

The massive package is particularly noteworthy in light of the current devastation to the American taxpayers who will be footing the bill – over $10 million per day. In recent months approximately 30 million Americans have lost jobs, 100,000 small businesses have already closed forever, and over seven million are at risk of doing so.

The bill was voted on as part of a package of 15 bills that were voted on “en bloc” (all together).

After Senator Kaine said he didn’t know what the list contained, Risch responded: “I’m not trying to pull anything here… this was circulated among the staff.”

Risch then rapidly listed the numbers but did not give the titles. There was then a voice vote and the motion passed unanimously.

Democratic members of the committee had voiced strong objections to blocking a live stream of the meeting because of a different agenda item. After the meeting, Committee Ranking Member Robert Menendez (D-NJ) released a video of the meeting.

None, however, voiced any concern for giving a massive aid package to a country widely documented as a major violator of human rights.

Neither did any Democrats on the committee object to requiring American taxpayers to give Israel what amounts to over $7,000 per minute when many Americans are suffering catastrophic financial difficulties.

Democratic committee members Menendez, Ben Cardin, Cory Booker, and Chris Coons, like many of the Republican members, are particularly known for being under the influence of AIPAC and the Israel lobby and receiving pro-Israel campaign donations. Many of the members are co-sponsors of the bill.

The bill, entitled “United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020,” expands and sets into law a memorandum of understanding agreement signed by the Obama administration with Israel in 2016. This agreement is nonbinding and not required by law. It also set the $38 billion as a ceiling.

The legislation just passed by the committee would make this disbursal legally required, and, in addition, it would make the $38 billion a floor rather than a ceiling. In other words, the amount of money could legally go even higher.

Given the power of the pro-Israel lobby, combined with the fact that U.S. media are not informing Americans of this use of their tax money, the likelihood is that U.S. money to Israel will go up in the future – possibly even this year.)

Most Americans say they feel the U.S. is giving Israel too much money. Israel has received more U.S. tax money than any other country – on average, about 7,000 times more per capita than others around the world.

The Council for the National Interest has posted a petition against this year’s installment, $3.8 billion. So far, it has been signed by close to 2,000 people.

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Alison Weir is an author and activist.  Her book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel is an Amazon best-seller and has been called a “must-read for all Americans.” Learn more about it here.

Featured image is from American Free Press

The British health secretary Matt Hancock said during a briefing that he hopes ‘everybody would have the vaccine’, if and when a coronavirus shot is rolled out, and did not rule out making it mandatory for every citizen.

Hancock was asked directly by a reporter if getting the vaccine could be made compulsory, and replied that the question is “not one that we have addressed yet”.

“I would hope given the scale of this crisis and given the overwhelming need for us to get through this and to get the country back on its feet and the very positive impact that a vaccine would have that everybody would have the vaccine.” Hancock said.

Professor John Newton, who is overseeing Britain’s coronavirus testing, then confirmed that mandating vaccinations is on the table.

“Clearly mandation is there, it can be used in some instances.” Newton said, admitting however that “most successful vaccine programmes tend to be by consent.”

“Although some countries have adopted mandatory programmes, the most successful programmes tend to be done on the basis of consent, good information and good delivery mechanisms.” Newton said.

Hancock has previously strenuously criticised anti-vaccination campaigners. Last year he announced that the UK Government was “looking very seriously” at instituting compulsory vaccinations for state school pupils.

In the US, calls have been made to make any vaccination mandatory with the likes of the New York Times expressing concern that half of Americans would refuse to take it.

In Canada, a poll recently revealed that 60 per cent think that when a vaccine for coronavirus becomes available it should be made mandatory.

In addition, Canada’s current Chief Public Health Officer appeared in a recently resurfaced 2010 documentary in which she advocated using mandatory “tracking bracelets” for people who refuse to take a vaccine after a virus outbreak.

Many experts have suggested that a vaccine may not even be successful due to the nature of the coronavirus family and the fact that it can mutate.

In the UK, Scientists have expressed doubts over the effectiveness of a vaccine that has been rushed to human trials, after all of the monkeys used in initial testing later contracted coronavirus.

Meanwhile, greater breakthroughs have been made in anti-body studies, with researchers from Seattle successfully neutralizing the spike proteins of the virus, and researchers in California claiming to have discovered anti-bodies that can completely block COVID-19.

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The government and media have dumped at the doorstep of the coronavirus many of the political, economic and social afflictions that are now ravaging much of the global population. In reality, they need to point the finger at themselves.

As the mainstream media saturates the airwaves with a daily overdose of coronavirus fear porn, the majority of journalists have given their governments a free pass to enact any draconian measure they see fit. From the closure of public beaches to forbidding power boats on waterways, the insanity seems to have no limits or logic. And as the media would have us believe, it was the coronavirus that enacted these measures, as opposed to living, breathing, unthinking humans.

Anti lockdown Protest went well. #Antilockdown #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/ArG1GDExnb

— Dave (@rundaverun93) May 16, 2020

What dirty deeds does the new and improved villain of our times stand accused of? First and foremost, the coronavirus singlehandedly destroyed the global economy as only ‘essential’ businesses may continue to operate. Thus, thousands of small businesses have been ordered shuttered, de facto destroyed, while countless numbers of people around the world have been ordered to ‘shelter-in-place’ with dwindling financial reserves.

Again, this wanton destruction of a large swath of the economy is not due to bad government decision-making, at least according to the media, but Covid-19.

‘Jobless claims jump another 4.4 million — 26 million Americans have lost their jobs to the coronavirus,’ reported MarketWatch. ‘It could take two years for the economy to recover from the coronavirus pandemic,’ screamed another headline.

Perhaps it was also the coronavirus that decided that it would make perfect sense to keep abortion clinics and state-owned liquor stores open during the pandemic, while shutting down houses of worship and gun shops. Clearly, the coronavirus is an equitable and non-partisan distributor of pain and suffering!

As was the case when battling the evil forces of terrorism (which has been strangely quiet lately, by the way), simply uttering ‘coronavirus’ has the same numbing effect as reciting the name ‘Osama bin Laden.’ It justifies every means to an end – up to and including the destruction of civil liberties – without the need for any public debate on the matter. This is reminiscent of the hysteria, complete with mysterious anthrax attacks, which accompanied passage of the PATRIOT Act, the freedom-killing legislation that was rammed through Congress in the weeks following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 without a formal reading by lawmakers. And just like post-9/11, when people question the draconian coronavirus measures they are vilified and accused of being ‘conspiracy theorists’ and even ‘terrorists.’

The result of millions of people struggling to survive without employment and amid ‘shelter-in-place’ orders is a huge spike in the number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

“We see very troubling signs across the nation,” Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, assistant secretary at Department of Health and Human Services and head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, told USA Today. “There’s more substance abuse, more overdoses, more domestic violence and neglect and abuse of children.

In other words, the death and destruction from the draconian measures enacted to defeat the coronavirus, which never came remotely close to being as deadly as the experts predicted it would be, will prove deadlier than the disease itself.

Nearly 5,000 people took part in a rally against #coronavirus restrictions in #Stuttgart on Saturday, #Germany's largest such protest over the weekend.

On March 11, #Merkel said that the #lockdown measures were necessary in order "to win time in the fight against the virus." pic.twitter.com/dP5egTNKBV

— Ruptly (@Ruptly) May 17, 2020

And the asinine regulations are not just being implemented in glorious nation America. Across the pond, Germans, for example, have watched in horror as their beloved Oktoberfest, the annual beer-drinking festival that brings in an estimated 1 billion dollars to the local economy, has been cancelled for the first time since World War II. That is something that not even Al Qaeda in its heyday could accomplish. Now it is all kaput as some 1,600 breweries in Germany are forced to lay off workers and slashed production as dire economic conditions roll across the entire EU. Of course, all of this is the fault of the coronavirus.

#SocialDistancing for #pubs and #terras #horeca #recycling #pool #noodles #Corona #covid19 pic.twitter.com/bwY3ANOb2D

— Silke Conrad (@SilkeCo) May 15, 2020

And much like the post 9/11 days, coronavirus has its own share of ‘covidiots,’ with people going to bizarre, even fascist lengths to enforce social-distancing guidelines. Back in the ‘sane’ days when the world was trembling at the mere sound of ‘Osama,’ some people actually sealed their homes in plastic and duct tape to protect against an anthrax attack that never materialized. Today, masked drivers are literally passing out behind the wheel, inside of locked cars, due to a lack of oxygen, if not brains.

But unfortunately, those aren’t the sort of ‘lawbreakers’ that the ‘Karens’ of our days will be snitching on, exactly as they were doing as we were trying to ‘bend the curve’ on terrorism. These days, members of the citizen Gestapo are peering through closed blinds, counting whether or not the neighbors have more than 10 people in their homes, which is enough to justify the police entering your home in New Zealand without a warrant. The dawn of this ‘snitch state’ largely began in the aftermath of 9/11 psychosis.

Now that the world is staring down the double-barrel of yet another economic depression and all of its attendant symptoms, fear and hysteria continues to be in the driver’s seat. Yet instead of being afraid of bad decisions by bad government officials, the same individuals who led the world on a wild goose chase known as the ‘war on terror,’ we continue to heed their advice, while believing that the coronavirus is responsible for the mayhem. It is not, no more than Osama bin Laden was ‘responsible’ for the destruction of our civil liberties post-9/11. We did that all by ourselves through our passive consent.

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Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist.

Politically-dictated lockdowns and prohibitions have recently destroyed tens of millions of American jobs. Politicians have effectively claimed a right to inflict unlimited economic damage in pursuit of zero COVID-19 contagion. The perverse incentives driving the policy have multiplied the harm far beyond the original peril.

Almost 40% of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost their job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. The Disaster Distress Helpline, a federal crisis hotline, received almost 900% more phone calls in March compared to a year ago. A recent JAMA Psychiatry analysis warned that stay-at-home orders and rising unemployment are a “perfect storm” for higher suicide rates. A California health organization recently estimated that up to 75,000 Americans could die from “despair” as a result of the pandemic, unemployment, and government restrictions.

In the name of saving lives, politicians have entitled themselves to destroy an unlimited number of livelihoods. Politicians in many states responded to COVID-19 by dropping the equivalent of a Reverse Neutron Bomb – something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed. But the only way to assume people were uninjured is to believe their existence is totally detached from their jobs, bank accounts, and mortgage and rent payments.

Politicians have vaccinated themselves against any blame for the economic carnage by touting experts who said it was all necessary. Over the past 90 days, government bureaucrats have become a new priesthood that can sanctify unlimited sacrifices in the name of the public health.

COVID policymakers have written themselves the same letter that Cardinal Richelieu, the 17th century French statesman, purportedly gave to his agents: “The Bearer of This Letter Has Acted Under My Orders and for the Good of the State.” This carte blanche was sufficient to place murders and other crimes above the law and beyond reproach in France. In contemporary America, the same exoneration is achieved by invoking “science” and “data.”  Oregon Governor Kate Brown banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions, and also banned all recreational travel. Six Oregon counties have only one confirmed COVID case, and most of the state has minimal infections. But schools, businesses, and other activities were slammed shut by government command.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. COVID infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, but Whitmer shut down the entire state – including northern counties with near-zero infections and zero fatalities, boosting unemployment to 24% statewide. Her repression provoked fierce protests, and Whitmer responded by claiming that her dictates saved 3,500 lives. Whitmer exonerated herself with a statistical formula that was painfully ethereal compared to the stark physical devastation in Michigan.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s shutdown order resulted in the highest rate of unemployment in the nation – 33%. But according to Sen. Rand Paul, COVID’s impact in Kentucky “has not been worse than an average flu season.” But that did not stop Beshear from banning people from attending church services and sending Kentucky State Police to attach notices to car windshields ordering church attendees to self-quarantine for 14 days and reporting them to local health departments.

Shutting down entire states, including vast uninfected rural swaths, is the economic equivalent of burning witches or sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods. Because politicians have no liability for the economic damage they inflict, they have no incentive to minimize the disruptions they decree. Trillions of dollars of new deficit spending will be vexing American workers for many years.

The state of Missouri has sued the government of China, claiming it is liable for the losses inflicted by the virus that apparently originated in Wuhan, China. Most observers predict that lawsuit will go nowhere. But, thanks to sovereign immunity, it would be even more hopeless for American citizens to sue American politicians for the damage that their shutdown orders have inflicted on their businesses, paychecks, and lives.

Sovereign immunity creates a two-tiered society: those above the law and those below it; those whom the law fails to bind and those whom the law fails to protect. This legal doctrine almost guarantees that no politician will face any personal liability for their shutdown dictates.

Even New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who callously compelled nursing homes to accept COVID patients, will have no legal culpability for a policy that contributed to more than 5,000 nursing home deaths in his state. Pennsylvania Health Czar Rachel Levine issued a similar order, contributing to thousands of nursing home deaths, and then removed her own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home to keep her safe.

Politicians presume they are blameless for destroying jobs as long as the victims receive temporary unemployment compensation. Actually, it is worse than that: politicians claim a right to seize a slice of the paychecks of people still working to recompense people whose jobs they destroyed. Would a private corporation be able to escape punishment for breaking people’s legs by giving free crutches to its victims?

“Better safe than sorry” is damned risky when politicians have no liability for what they ravage. There is no way that politicians can compensate American citizens for all the damage they have inflicted in this pandemic. This COVID shutdown catastrophe should be a permanent black mark against the political class and the experts who sanctified each and every sacrifice.

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James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative.

Featured image is from City News Service

German Medical Doctor Katrin Korb discusses COVID-19, the lockdown and the vaccine during a protest held in Oldeburg.

Below is the transcript of her speech.

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Dear fellow citizens,

I’m thankful for being able to stand here today. My name is Katrin Korb, I have 3 children and I’m a doctor here in Oldenburg.

I’m standing here because I feel the responsibility for the health of my parents, my children and myself.

I stand here because I am furious about the attempts to get more control over people, by attacking them with fear. I am not sure what happens exactly, though I’m sure it has to do with money and power.

Firstly, I recognize this principle.  It’s the principle of our health-care system! A system which unfortunately is guilty of spreading fear in order to earn money. This fear is on both our sides, my side as a doctor, but also my patients.

There are guidelines I have to follow, guidelines for various health problems.  But who is writing these guidelines?

I will give you an example:  There is a European guideline for heart diseases.  There are 25 different authors who draft these guidelines, 19 of which are funded by the pharmaceutical industry.  They call it an ‘advisory fee’.

The guidelines state that I must prescribe medications that have a lot of side effects but that do not make people better.  This makes a lot of money.  If I don’t follow these guidelines and something happens to these people; for example, the situation is deteriorating for whatever reason, then I will be held responsible for that.  So, fear is cultivated so that I have to act against my professional beliefs.

The sick people are also frightened; “if you do not take these pills you will have a heart attack”. “Then you will become even sicker”.  “Listen to me; I can know, I studied for it.”  “You are not sensible enough to think for yourself”.  “There is therefore no room to discuss this.”

As a result, people fear taking this medication day after day, week to week, year to year, which makes a lot of money.  That’s the way.

Since the beginning of this corona virus, we have been kept in a kind of shock from the frightening messages. Our governments say there is a new virus so terribly dangerous that millions will die, if we don’t protect you! “We know best what is good for you because we have experts.” You cannot make a decision for yourself.  You are too stupid for that. ”We have to isolate you, take away your rights and silent you by putting on a muzzle. But we really do this for your protection”. “We frighten you so much every day through the most horrible reports that you won’t even dare to ask yourself if it’s all right”.

The mantra of the authorities is:  Only when we have a vaccination can we return to “a normal”.

In other words, only a vaccination can give us back our fundamental rights.

This week, Mrs. von den Leyen (EU) has collected E 7.4 billion worldwide for the development and distribution of such a vaccine. Also Germany has paid E525,000. Normally, the development of such a vaccination takes years.  That’s because security investigations need to be done.

This new virus from the corona family was discovered less than six months ago but experiments with “MRNA” are already being tried on humans.  This is unknown genetic material that will be injected into our cells. You don’t have to be a doctor to get an ominous feeling about this.  I will not be vaccinated, I will not get my children vaccinated, and I will also advise my patients not to do this!

Paragraph Two of the Constitution does NOT specify: RIGHT TO HEALTH but right to physical integrity.  That is a very big difference.  So there is no right to health!

Being sick is part of our human life, but no one should inflict physical harm on us even with a dubious vaccine.

We are the ones paying for this.  We already pay for the scientific and social impact of the lockdowns.  OUR TAX MONEY is spent for this.   And a vaccine must be financed with our tax money!  Already E 525 million German tax money and this is only the beginning. Are we being asked if we want to do this?  Are we asked if we want to pay for Lockdowns? NO!

All this money, the taxes we’ve paid, we want that to be spent on other things.  For good education for our children, for the development of new technologies for the environment, for decent wages for employees in our “vital” professionals. For immigration of people who fled from the war. For sports, culture, etc., etc… This list is endless. In short, for things that make and keep people healthy. But with this no money can be made.

We are in a crisis.  What is the way out of this crisis?

The victory over fear is the way out of this crisis.

People who can think for themselves, being creative, take responsibility for themselves working on their own health and the health of our world.

People who are positive, who have friends, who enjoy life, do not get sick easily.

And if they do get sick, they eventually unite with death.

Knowing that life in this world will ever end and are at peace with it.

You can’t scare these kinds of people.

You have no power over these people.

This body has only been borrowed and someday I will have to give it back.

But as long as I live in this body, as long as I feel, think and act, it will be MY body! I am responsible for that and no one else.  MY BODY, which I treat in the way I think is right.

I do not wish to return to the old normal.  I wish for a new better normal.   With free and self-determined people, who are responsible for themselves. I believe many of us are here together with the same wish.

This gives me hope and I thank you.

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Remember when you were a kid, locked within that monster called a grade school, at dismissal time? You must recall how the seas just opened and the throng descended on the schoolyard… like , well… ants at a picnic. Thus, the expression becomes almost timeless. So it is with so many of our Amerikan public whenever the opportunity reveals itself for ‘joyous mayhem’ . When the home team scores an upset or anticipated championship the ‘ants’ stream out onto the field of play in massive numbers. Ditto for the streets of the city in question, and how revelry can easily transform into criminal acts of vandalism to the Nth degree. Folks, low culture is low culture, indiscriminate of race, color or creed.

We are, sadly, in the midst of something more horrific than even the hurricane that tore my roof apart in 2016.

Why? Well, the power of such a storm, as terrifying as it can be (and was) will, after an hour or two in most cases, move past us. Not so with this pandemic. Alas, it may be here to stay more than we all can even fathom. Some may get this virus and experience it as no more than a bad chest cold. Others will die from it… Period!

As with the hurricane, this pandemic does not discriminate too much… excepting for those who cannot get the proper equipment to avoid its destructive element. The well off can buckle up their homes with hurricane protection to a degree (though the one that hit my home just snapped a pine tree and sent it into our roof). The well prepared, as to this virus, can wear the protective masks, have the cleaning essentials handy, and social distance as a rule, not a whim. These actions do help to keep many safer than not… until of course….

They open up society along with the economy. And what happens, the forces that see this as just another influenza want to go back to the way things were before it hit. Logic and real science say we may never be able to go back to what was… completely. Sadly, to this writer, if more of my neighbors behave like those kids at dismissal, the boomerang may hit us all! Our genius governor here in Florida, with marching orders from his mentor in Washington, did a really foolhardy thing and allowed Spring Break to go on, with the beaches open and filled with people, like one big sardine can. Then, many of those young people went home to the various states they came down here from. Who knows how many more people became infected with this highly contagious virus? That was a few months ago. Now, we see cities throughout Amerika with bars and restaurants open, and millions of us mingling face to face, beer to beer, with no masks. In late April the really defiant ones in Michigan stormed the statehouse to demand the governor ‘Open up the state’. Some of these characters carried weapons (guns and rifles) and reminded me of the SA minions in Germany circa 1930-33, before and after their Fuhrer took power.

There are many of my neighbors who refuse to wear a facemask when shopping. They do not follow the social distancing guidelines whenever they can get away with doing so. So, what they are doing is placing we who follow these procedures at risk. Even in situations where stores had guards at the door reminding shoppers of the necessity to enter only with a mask on, violent resistance occurred. In more than one instance, death! This is what psychologists call misplaced or displaced anger. Those resistors are not just angry at the rules, they are really angry at the entire pandemic. Connecting that last sentence should be ‘Angry at the government’s reaction to the pandemic… or lack of such’. Those who are pissed off at things being shut down or slowed down should study how this president and his administration reacted from late December to mid March. That answer is simple: Nothing in way of preparing for the worst! Matter of fact, DENIAL is the better word. They called it a HOAX remember? They said it was ‘Contained’ back in February.

People who still support this ‘Genius’ and people who downplay the pandemic, some are the same, some are not. One hopes that none of their family members or loved ones gets this virus, but if that happens, and tragedy occurs, remember this:

If the imbeciles and ‘free market ‘ jackasses in the Trump administration and Republican Congress would have had enough N-95 masks, ventilators, hand sanitizers available in great quantities by February-March….

If shutdowns and social distancing were implemented in January…

If the Congress would have adopted a Universal Basic Income plan with anywhere from $1000 to $2000 per citizen (half the amount for children) per month Tax Free…

We may have been closer by now to having our country ‘Opened’ again.

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian state and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) will no longer adhere to the agreements they signed with Israel and the United States. It is a reaction to Israel’s intentions to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank. If Abbas’s intentions are consistently implemented, it would be a paradox for Palestine to abolish itself.

“The Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian state are rejecting any commitments from all agreements with the US administration and Israel, including those related to security,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in response to the Israeli government’s intention to start on July 1 the process of annexing territories controlled by illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Abbas did not mention any specific agreements, but it is believed he is referring to a series of agreements signed by the Palestinians with Israel in the 1990’s – the 1993 Oslo Accords, the 1997 Hebron Protocol, and the 1998 Wye River Memorandum.

However, by cancelling the Oslo Accords, could the Palestinian Authority be abolishing itself?

If Abbas is referring to the entire Oslo Agreement, it would in a way mean the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority, since they emerged from that agreement. Abbas’s reaction was caused not only by the intention of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex large areas of the West Bank on July 1, but also by the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Israel, who undoubtedly supports the move.

Security coordination with Israel, which Palestine could be giving up, is one of the most important aspects of the Oslo Agreement, which has become a cornerstone of the so-called peace process. Security coordination is essential for the day-to-day functioning of both the Palestinian Authority and Israel. The Palestinian Authority is highly dependent, in daily terms, on this cooperation with the Israeli authorities. And not only on security, but also on economics, as well as on the inflow of financial resources, which come from the Israeli government to Palestinian institutions.

Even in earlier announcements, despite the interruptions, the essential parts of the implementation of coordination were never questioned. Abbas is now more serious than before when he announced and threatened to sever security ties which could be a blow to Israel, even if it means the Palestinian authorities lose the legal basis of its existence in international eyes.

Secretary of the Palestinian Fatah organization, Fayez Abu Aita, said that in these circumstances breaking all agreements, including the Oslo peace agreement, was absolutely necessary – this is the only way to protect their territories.

“It is not our fault that we are now on the edge of a new stage, a new great confrontation with Israel. Only by breaking all obligations with Washington and Tel Aviv, Palestine has the chance to defend its right to exist, the right to own land. After all, we said that we would not allow the implementation of the Deal of the Century. The Israeli government only heard itself and its greed. But this was only the first step: the further the Israeli side goes, the more serious the Palestinian response will be,” he said. “There is nothing else left for us, considering how quickly Israel extends its hands to our land. They were the first to bring the situation to a dangerous dead end.”

If Israel annexes the West Bank, hopes of creating an Arab state within the 1967 borders will be extinguished.

While the U.S. supports Israel’s annexation, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday in a telephone conversation with Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazim confirmed the readiness of Russia to further promote the resumption of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. Russia is trying to prevent the annexation and, through diplomatic means, gather an international quartet with the participation of the UN.

Effectively Russia could be using this as an opportunity to present itself as a peace broker in the Palestine-Israel conflict. Whether this will be successful or not remains to be seen, but is necessary when it appears there is a strong chance that the Palestine-Israel conflict can breakout extremely violent again in the coming weeks amidst the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

First some facts establishment media suppress.

International trade is the sovereign right of all nations — free from restraints imposed by one state against another.

Sanctions on nations is the exclusive prerogative of Security Council members. 

No country may legally impose them on others unilaterally. Taking this step breaches the UN Charter.

The US is an international outlaw state — proved time and again by its actions.

Nations going along with its hostile policies against other nation states are complicit in law-breaking.

The UN Commission on International Trade Law and the General Assembly affirmed the right of all nations to freely trade with others as a way of advancing and sustaining economic development.

International human rights law obligates all nations “to promote universal respect for, and the observance and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.”

Iran and Venezuela respect and observe international law principles.

Both countries are at peace with other nation states, threatening none.

They seek cooperative relations with other countries, respecting their sovereign rights.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was established to end a generation of US-installed fascist dictatorship.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was established by Hugo Chavez’s December 1998 election to end tyrannical rule that preceded it.

Longstanding US policy is all about pressuring, bribing, bullying, and/or bludgeoning other nations to bend to its will.

Operating by its own rules exclusively, the rule of law abandoned, both right wings of the US war party aim to control planet earth, its resources, and populations — by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives, the human cost considered irrelevant.

That’s what the scourge of imperialism is all about, humanity’s greatest threat, especially in the thermonuclear age with WMDs able to end life on earth by unprecedented mass destruction and nuclear winter — the latter creating conditions unable to sustain life.

The Trump regime imposed an illegal economic blockade on Venezuela, a flagrant international and US constitutional law breach.

The Pentagon militarized Caribbean Sea waters to block Venezuelan imports and exports — on the phony pretext of interdicting illicit drug traffic the US, its CIA, and money-laundering Wall Street banks support.

From Bush/Cheney to Obama/Biden to Trump/Pence, the US is waging illegal sanctions war on Venezuela and Iran.

The policy aims to suffocate their economies and immiserate their people.

Trump escalated what his predecessors began, aiming to cause mass casualties in both countries from deprivation.

A medieval siege of Venezuela is similar to Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza.

It was imposed shortly after Hamas’ January 2006 democratic election as historic Palestine’s legitimate government, not the Israeli-installed PA to serve its interests at the expense of fundamental Palestinian rights.

The first of 5 Iranian tankers entered Venezuela’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) late Saturday, reportedly carrying 1.53 million barrels of gasoline and alkylate, 4 other Iranian tankers to arrive in days.

On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned the Trump regime that “(i)f our oil tankers in the Caribbean Sea or anywhere else in the world get into trouble caused by the Americans, they (US) will run into trouble reciprocally,” adding:

“Considering a series of measures, the US has created unacceptable conditions in various parts of the world.  However, we will never start tensions and clashes.”

“We always preserve the legitimate right of defense of sovereignty and territorial integrity and fulfillment of the national interests, and we hope the Americans would not make a mistake.”

Iran’s Defense Minister General Amir Hatami warned the Trump regime that the Islamic Republic “will definitely give a firm and decisive response if harassments continue or escalate.”

High seas interdiction of Iranian vessels by Pentagon warships would amount to international piracy, a bandit action by a belligerent state against a peaceful one.

Hatami stressed that Iran “will tolerate no act of harassment.”

By letter to UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif slammed what he called Trump regime “hegemonic gunboat diplomacy,” risking “a dangerous escalation,” adding:

Iran “reserves its right to take all appropriate and necessary measures and decisive action…to secure its legitimate rights and interests against such bullying policies and unlawful practices.”

US SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Craig Faller falsely accused nonbelligerent Iran of seeking “positional advantage in our neighborhood in a way that would counter US interests (sic),” adding:

“We’re tracking that closely and sharing intel with our partners.”

“I won’t comment any further…but I view the Iranian activity globally and in Venezuelan in specific as a concern (sic).”

Former Trump regime National Security Council official Juan Cruz downplayed an alleged Iranian threat, short of explaining it doesn’t exist, saying:

“I don’t like to overstate it because it’s very convenient to do so,” adding:

“People play around with it, and it’s like a boogeyman. When you want people to get nervous, you pull out Iran.”

The same goes for China, Russia, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, etc.

Their common thread is independence of US control and unwillingness to subordinate their sovereign rights to its interests.

Throughout the post-WW II period, no nations anywhere threatened US security — NONE!

So menaces were invented that didn’t and don’t exist to unjustifiably justify a permanent US state of war on humanity at home and abroad.

On Sunday, Iran’s embassy in Caracas said the first of its 5 tankers reached Venezuela’s coast without incident — expressing thanks “to the Bolivarian Armed Forces for escorting it.”

On Friday by letter to the Security Council and Guterres, Venezuelan UN envoy Samuel Moncada expressed concern about “the threat of imminent use of military force by the United States against Iranian vessels carrying Venezuelan-directed gasoline,” adding:

“(A) naval blockade is aggravated by the fact that it aims to deprive an entire population of its vital means of subsistence. It is a crime of (attempted) extermination.”

On Saturday, AP News reported that the first of 5 Iranian oil tankers “reache(d) Venezuelan waters with no sign of (a) US threat.”

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tweeted the news, saying:

“Today, the first ship with gasoline arrives for our people.”

According to maritime tanker tracking information, the last of 5 Iranian tankers en route to Venezuela is about three days from entering its waters as of Sunday.

In its latest edition, the Washington Post cited unnamed analysts, saying that 5 Iranian tankers carry an estimated 60 million gallons of gasoline, adding:

The Trump regime “invoked the (long ago outdated) Monroe Doctrine” that rejects foreign interference in the Western hemisphere.

It’s a footnote in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

The US interferes regularly in parts of the world not its own by endless preemptive wars and other hostile actions — the highest of high crimes under international and constitutional law.

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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.

Details of the new law are coming in the weeks ahead, likely in June.

The measure aims to counter months of US orchestrated nonviolent and violent protests that rocked Hong Kong last year — led by 5th column elements.

Orchestrated by US dark forces, the move was and remains a scheme to destabilize and weaken China, along with other tactics aiming to accomplish the same thing.

Hong Kong is Chinese territory. It’s no longer an exploited British colony or a political football to be kicked around by the US at its discretion.

On Thursday, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) explained that Beijing tabled a resolution “to craft and pass a new national security law tailor-made for Hong Kong,” adding:

It’ll “proscribe secessionist and subversive activity as well as foreign interference and terrorism in the city – all developments that had been troubling Beijing for some time, but most pressingly over the past year of increasingly violent anti-government protests.”

Beijing is acting to halt them because of failure by Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) authorities to accomplish this objective legislatively.

Under Article 23 of the Basic Law that regulates relations between Beijing and the HKSAR, city authorities are empowered as follows:

It’s their responsibility to “enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.”

None of the above was accomplished by the HKSAR so Beijing is acting on its own to legitimately protect national security from hostile foreign actions that aim to weaken and undermine China’s sovereignty and development — mainly by the US under both right wings of its war party.

China’s move comes at a time when hostile Trump regime actions risk rupturing Sino/US relations altogether.

Beijing’s national security law aims to “fix loopholes (in) the legislative system” that governs Hong Kong, China’s Global Times (GT) explained.

It aims to counter “external forces and local separatists (that) continue to erode the (city’s) foundation…”

The measure is being prepared and finalized during Beijing’s annual Central People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) that began Thursday.

Its National People’s Congress (NPC) began Friday, the national security resolution on its agenda — to be voted on next week, adopted and sent to a Standing Committee to prepare actual details of the measure.

According to an unnamed Beijing source, “(t)he NPC decision will delegate the Standing Committee to draft the new legislation for Hong Kong, which would be included in Annex III of Hong Kong’s Basic Law.”

“The new law will be introduced in Hong Kong through promulgation, without the need for local legislation.”

According to SCMP, “(i)nsiders  said Beijing had reached the end of its tether after the protests against Hong Kong’s now-withdrawn extradition bill morphed into an anti-government movement” — much of it featuring violence and vandalism.

COVID-19 outbreaks halted anti-government protests temporarily. Signs indicate they’ll likely erupt again in the coming days and weeks.

Hong Kong opposition candidates gained control over 17 of 18 district councils last November.

With this success in mind, opposition parties aim for further success in September Legislative Council elections — to gain control of the 70-member legislative body to be able to block measures supported by Beijing.

The notion of pro-US 5th column elements controlling the city is unacceptable to China as it would be to virtually all other countries.

Would authorities in Washington tolerate Chinese control of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles? The answer is self-evident.

Would the US go all-out to prevent this from happening?

It would virtually declare war by other means on disruptive actions to eliminate them — likely charging individuals involved with treason or sedition, arresting, prosecuting, convicting, and imprisoning them longterm.

SCMP noted that Beijing clearly lost patience over failure to quell US orchestrated Hong Kong protests by city authorities legislatively, a Chinese source saying:

“The violence last year and the increasing foreign intervention have triggered the move” — another source saying:

“(N)ational security is under threat, as some in Hong Kong are pursuing independence, waving foreign flags and even resorting to terrorist attacks (and) deeds of secession.”

If legislation becomes law in June as expected, it’ll be the first time for Hong Kong since colonial British rule ended in July 1997.

Enactment needs no approval by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. HKSAR chief executive Carrie Lam reportedly supports the legislation.

So does the pro-establishment Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong.

Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies official Lau Siu-kai explained that the HKSAR was weakened and became ineffective because of increased external pressures — why it’s vital for Beijing to act to counter US orchestrated disruptive actions.

Until now, China held off introducing countermeasures — other than rhetorical criticism of US policies, tariffs in response to ones imposed by Trump, and reductions in US imports, short-term actions.

Trump regime measures to undermine China’s economic, industrial, and technological development, provocative Pentagon military incursions near its territory, anti-Beijing legislation and White House actions, illegal US sanctions with likely more coming, and months of disruptive Hong Kong protests required China to act to protect its sovereign rights and security.

Trump regime hardliners elevated US hostility toward China to an unprecedented level since Nixon visited the country and met with Mao Zedong in February 1972 — almost half a century ago.

Washington’s imperial agenda poses a clear and present danger to China and other sovereign  nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to US interests.

National security legislation may be the first of further steps by Beijing to counter increasingly hostile US actions that aim to marginalize, weaken, contain, and isolate the country.

It won’t work. China is rising, the US declining — heading eventually for the dustbin of history like all earlier empires, despite spending countless trillions of dollars to remain the dominant global superpower, at the expense of vital homeland needs.

Like earlier empires, the US is its own worst enemy.

It’s declining by waging endless wars by hot and other means against invented enemies, pressuring and bullying other nations to bend to its will, along with unacceptable indifference toward the fundamental rights, health, and welfare of the vast majority of its people.

It’s the same dynamic that doomed earlier empires, over time making more enemies than friends, losing public support, along with no end to ruinous military spending, mounting unrepayable debt, and unwillingness to change.

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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.

“How can I confound myself with those who today already find a hearing? — Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.” Friedrich Nietzsche – The Antichrist

Introduction

2019 was a very interesting year in cinema, in particular for the South Korean film Parasite which became the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards. The success of Parasite shows the changing attitude of Americans towards foreign cinema. 2019 also showed three major new films (national and international) with varying depictions of America’s relations with the rest of the world: Knives Out (2019), Bacurau (2019) and The Wandering Earth (2019). All three films present a hardening attitude towards taken-for-granted positive roles and image of the United States. This is unusual for mainstream cinema. In Knives out, an American film, a wealthy American family is depicted as a greedy, grasping lot in contrast to the South American caregiver of their father. Like Parasite, we see class and inequality playing itself out horrendously for the wealthy family as the tables turn against them in this modern whodunit.

In the Brazilian film Bacurau, a group of American adventurists bent on hunting human prey also end up badly as the village unites and fights back. In the Chinese science fiction film, The Wandering Earth, America is more conspicuous by its absence in a story of a world government saving the planet by shifting it off to revolve around another star. It is a film that doesn’t exclude the United States completely, but like its country’s diplomatic attitude of trying not to provoke a head-on confrontation with America, The Wandering Earth shows the Chinese getting on with things on their own initiative.

In all three films there is no negotiation, no crossover, no resolution, no happy ending whereby typically the United States resolves problems resulting in a negotiated, face-saving outcome that makes everyone happy. This is all a far cry from the outcome of an older film, The Day After Tomorrow from 2004, that also depicts the United States’ relationship with a Latin American country, Mexico. The Northern Hemisphere is freezing over and the immigration situation is reversed as thousands of Americans flood across the border into Mexico. While the Mexicans are not particularly happy about this (considering the American attitude to Mexican immigrants and the US border fences) they turn the situation to their advantage and negotiate a debt forgiveness deal. Which begs the question: what would the Mexicans have done if they had not owed the United States a lot of money? Would the Mexicans have kept them out? or would they generously have helped them anyway despite the way they were treated historically? All this shows why it is important to stay on good terms with one’s neighbours. But that was 2004.

In 2019 we see changing attitudes. In Knives Out, Bacurau, and The Wandering Earth we are shown something symbolically different by three different directors: how America sees itself, how Brazil sees the United States and how China perceives America. I will look at each of these three films in turn briefly to examine this changing attitude.

Knives Out

In Knives Out, wealthy crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is a self-made who’s novels have made him rich. His family all depend on, feed off, or siphon off funds from him. However, Harlan has decided he has had enough of keeping his extended family financially afloat. Marta is his low paid caregiver who treats all the family with great respect. She is a south/central American but nobody really knows or cares:

“RANSOM to HARLAN:  To your Brazilian nurse are you goddamn insane.”
“RICHARD: No, Marta your family came from Uruguay but you did it right, she did it legally, I’m saying.”
“LINDA: Uh. There was Fran, the housekeeper.  Marta, Harlan’s caregiver, good girl, hard worker. Family’s from Ecuador.”
“RICHARD: Good kid, been a good friend to Harlan. Her family’s from Paraguay. Linda really likes her work ethic.”

After Harlan’s death, Marta inherits all his property and money. The family use coercion, persuasion, threats and blackmail to try and get the property back. Harlan’s grandson Ransom coerces Marta into confessing to him and offers to help her in exchange for a share of the inheritance. The other Thrombeys try to persuade Marta to renounce the inheritance; Walt threatens to expose her mother as an undocumented immigrant:

“WALT: Marta if your mom came here illegally, criminally, if you come into this inheritance with the scrutiny that entails I’d be afraid that could come to light. That’s what we’re all trying to avoid here. We can protect you from that happening, or if it happens.
MARTA: You’re saying even if it came to light, with the family’s resources you could help me fix it.
WALT: Yes. The right lawyers, none of those local guys but New York lawyers, DC lawyers, enough resources put towards it, yes.  But there’s no need it should ever even come up. But yes.
MARTA: Ok. Good.
WALT: Ok?
MARTA: Cause Harlan gave me all your resources. So that means with my resources I’ll be able to fix it. So I guess I’m going to go find the right lawyers.”

Already Marta sees the advantages of having lots of money in a materialistic world. The family hope to have Marta convicted of Harlan’s death so that slayer law will invalidate the will. However, this does not happen as the whodunit story structure plays itself out. In the last scene the family are all looking up at Marta on the balcony holding a mug bearing the legend: “My house, my rules”. This time there will be no negotiation.

The family have no one to blame but themselves as all their aggressive tactics fail one by one. They lose everything in the process but most of all they lose respect and sympathy. Marta is an immigrant, a symbolic representative of Latin America, of the Third World. The First World is in a serious economic crisis with mounting debts. Is Knives Out a morality tale about the First World and the wider world? After decades of geopolitical manipulation and military action around the world combined with massive national debts, how would the First World be perceived if it all suddenly fell apart? So much of our economy is based on cheap production in Third World countries. If real wealth is rooted in production (and not digitally created fiat currencies) then could we also see a wealth switch some day?

Bacurau

Bacurau is a fictional Brazilian town that becomes the focus for a group of American gamers who want to use real people in a trophy hunting game. The town is cut off, first it disappears from maps and then their WiFi signal disappears. The group uses a drone to spy on the village. Michael, their leader is older and of German origin. When two Brazilian helpers of the gamer group kill locals they are shot for interfering in the ‘white people’s’ game. Their identity cards show that they work for the Brazil state. At first the towns people are confused about the random shootings of their neighbours. However, as they learn what is going on the villagers fall back on their own natural (and historical) survival skills as they remove their old guns from their village museum.

The gamers head to the village but are then abandoned by the leader, Michael (an ageing German played by Udo Kier), who goes to high ground to a sniper position. Without leadership, the first two gamers are outsmarted and killed by a Brazilian old couple who have guns. Michael shoots everything that moves in the village including the gamers (like the Nazi Amon Göth shooting random Jews from his balcony overlooking a concentration camp).

The rest of the gamers are killed by the hiding villagers. All are beheaded and their heads are displayed in front of church, but with no triumphalism. This act reflects the Brazilian folk hero Lampião and his cangaceiros (Cangaço – “social banditry” against the government) who had their heads publicly exhibited in a square.

Michael is captured and buried alive in the street cellar. The gamers have the latest weaponry but are killed by villagers using guerilla tactics and their ancient guns. They operate in self defense and their violence is not glorified. No mercy is shown to their mayor who collaborated with the Americans and he is tied naked to a donkey and sent off to die in the desert.

The clashing contrasts of high tech urbanism and Brazilian semi-desert give the feel of a 1960s science fiction film yet there is always a down-to-earth reason. The flying saucer turns out to be a drone and the two strangely dressed murderous motor bikers turn out to be Brazilians and not so alien after all.

As a metaphor for external influence in Brazil the film shows the resilience of the local people against attack from outside forces, and their merciless revenge on the Brazilians who sold them out for their own profit. Is Michael a metaphor for the Nazis who were sheltered in South America after the Second World War? If so his permanent incarceration in the street cellar has the look of an evil influence being sent down to Hell and covered over to prevent its escape back into society ever again.

In The Wandering Earth the sun is dying and people all around the world build giant planet thrusters to move Earth out of its orbit and bring Earth to revolve around the star Alpha Centauri. However as they pass Jupiter, Earth has a tremor and many of the earth engines stop working. The Earth is pulled in by Jupiter’s gravity and looks to be doomed to fail. However, “a contingency plan exists called Project Helios that involves preserving the crew of the Space Station, 300,000 frozen embryos, 100,000 seeds of basic crops, and digital libraries of all civilizations, should a disaster befall the Wandering Earth.”

Memorial Day weekend should be a time to reflect on why a day was established to commemorate lost lives of US military men and women who were sent to wage preemptive wars against other nations threatening no one.

From before the republic was established to the present day, US authorities proved time and again that America is a belligerent nation — perpetually at war against invented enemies.

All wars are based on Big Lies and deception. The US is like other belligerent nations in world history except that it’s far more powerful, destructive, and operates globally.

Its privileged class lets others do its fighting and dying, notably its underclass and jihadist proxies.

Its airmen terror-bomb from miles in the sky, never seeing the carnage they cause, including mangled corpses dismembered by munition.

Countless trillions of dollars are poured down a black hole of  unprecedented waste, fraud, and abuse to enrich America’s merchants of death and others profiteering from mass slaughter and destruction — while vital homeland needs go begging.

Lessons from two world wars weren’t learned. Is a third one inevitable by accident or design?

Is US rage against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries pushing the envelope toward confrontation that could explode into something much more serious?

If global war 3.0 occurs, will today’s super-weapons be used?

The father of America’s nuclear navy Admiral Hyman Rickover told Congress in 1982 that when nations go to war, they’ll use whatever weapons exist in their arsenal to win, including their most powerful ones if needed.

US confrontation with China and Russia could risk going nuclear, notably because of the bipartisan criminal class in Washington that’s indifferent toward human life and welfare.

Given US rage against China and Russia, the only nations standing in the way of its ability to achieve dominion over planet earth, its resources, and populations, Thucydides trap conditions exist.

Over 2,400 years ago, the Greek historian warned about the risk of war because of an established power’s fear about a rising one.

Because of its unmatched super-weapons and valuable oil, gas, and other resources, the US craves transforming Russia into a vassal state the way it was in the neoliberal 90s.

It’s mostly concerned about China’s  political, economic, industrial, technological and military rise on the world stage — why US dark forces are going all-out to undermine its development, a futile effort doomed to fail.

Do militarists in Washington consider nuclear war a viable option to pursue their imperial agenda?

I was once asked on live television to comment on whether nuclear weapons are dearer than peace.

Because of their immense destructive power, are they unlikely to be used?

Is the US spending one or two trillion dollars on nuclear weapons upgrades over the next 30 years with no intention of using them? Or is it the other way around?

A nation that once used them could do it again. The risk of mass annihilation today is far greater than 75 years ago.

Egged on by militarists surrounding him, Trump once threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Does he feel the same way about China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, etc.?

Loose cannon Pompeo said the following:

“Any decision impinging on Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms as guaranteed under the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law would inevitably impact our assessment of One Country, Two Systems and the status of the territory.”

Separately, he threatened Beijing with other consequences in response to its work in progress national security law.

Does the Trump regime have more sanctions on Chinese enterprises and officials in mind, increased tariffs on Chinese imports, maybe visa restrictions and/or asset freezes, and/or perhaps tougher measures that could escalate to direct confrontation?

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) earlier warned that nuclear war may be just “a temper tantrum away.”

As long as these weapons exist, the threat of their use is terrifyingly real — notably by the US against China, Russia, and/or Iran.

If the US attacks the Islamic Republic with nuclear or conventional weapons, much of the Middle East could explode in conflict that would bring war on Israeli territory and the US regional presence.

Iran could also block oil transport through the Gulf of Hormuz with devastating consequences to the world economy if it continues long enough.

If the US attacks China or Russia with nukes, humanity’s survival would be threatened like never before.

Cold War “mutually assured destruction (MAD)” kept these weapons from being used.

In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, Jack Kennedy said he never had any intention of using these weapons.

Geopolitical know-nothing Trump is no JFK. Nor were the Clintons, Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden.

For the first time in world history, the threat of possible nuclear war is ominously real.

Reportedly the Trump regime may conduct a nuclear test, the first by the US in 28 years if occurs — as a “message” to China and Russia.

According to an unnamed senior White House official quoted by the Washington Post, a possible US nuke test is “very much an ongoing conversation.”

As the nation honors its fallen service members, reflect on why they were sent abroad to fight in the first place when no wars from the 19th to the 21st century needed to be fought.

Wars are waged for wealth and power, threats invented to unjustifiably justify them.

Merchants of mass slaughter and destruction profit hugely. The misnamed “good war” was worst of all.

If the US hadn’t goaded imperial Japan to attack America, Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have happened.

If the US, Britain and France challenged Nazi Germany early after Hitler came to power instead of letting things escalate toward war by doing nothing, peace on the continent could have been maintained instead of WW II.

Wars are all about belligerents wanting them waged. Throughout its history, the US has been and remains a warrior state, abhorring peace and stability.

It shows by forever wars on humanity in multiple theaters, no end of them in prospect — along with a militarized homeland.

Will humanity be consumed by mushroom-shaped denouement because militarists in Washington may go too far?

Memorial Day hypocrisy ignores a nation permanently at war for world peace it abhors and won’t tolerate.

Achieving it would defeat its imperial aims, why forever US wars won’t end in our lifetime — maybe never until they end 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.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tells us that despite the record of destroying in whole or part eight countries in recent years, the US is a “force for good.”  This is the Trump regime’s version of the neoconservative doctrine espoused by President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.” 

The notion that Iraq was a danger to the US shows imbecility.  The inhumanity of Washington’s response to the “danger” was sanctions that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. When asked on national television if a half million dead children achieved a justified purpose, the heartless Albright said that it was “a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

The neoconservatives, with their preference for war uber alles are running the Trump regime.  It appears that the reelection of Donald Trump will be a continuation of the Bill Clinton presidency, the George W. Bush presidency, and the Obama presidency.  Whoever is elected War is the policy.

Philip Giraldi tells us about it. 

What Giraldi forgets to mention is that the “terrorist” groups are Washington’s creations and serve as Washington’s tools to advance the war agenda.  

Giraldi gives away too much when he characterizes the Hussein and Gaddafi governments as dictatorships.  Authority was centralized, as it is in Washington, but the governments had to balance contending forces in the societies and were dependent on a large element of consent. It is not certain that both countries were ruled any worse than the US, a country’s whose FBI and Department of Justice (sic) does not hesitate to frame-up the President of the United States and his National Security Advisor. The extraordinary conflict that Democrats brought to US political life since 2016 exceeds the internal conflict that had to be managed by Iraq’s Hussein and Libya’s Gaddafi.

Washington is certainly exceptional, but not in a good way.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

This week, the Syrian Army, Liwa al-Quds and the National Defense Forces have conducted a series of anti-ISIS raids in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert.

The intensification of the anti-ISIS efforts followed an ISIS attack near Ghabagheb, on the Damascus-Deir Ezzor highway. On May 17, ISIS terrorists set up a fake checkpoint and killed several civilians and soldiers there. On May 18, the NDF and Liwa al-Quds sent reinforcements to the area of al-Sukhna from their positions near al-Rusafah in the province of Raqqah. Coordinated anti-ISIS raids started on May 19. In the following days, the army and its allies destroyed several ISIS hideouts in the area between Haribshi and Faydat Umm Muyni’a, and near Sukhna. The most intense clashes erupted between al-Quds and ISIS in the desert area near Palmyra on May 21.

According to photos and videos released by government sources, several ISIS members were eliminated and at least 3 vehicles were captured in these raids. Despite this, the desert is still infested with terrorists. Early on May 22, terrorists ambushed an army vehicle near al-Rusafah.

Additionally, ISIS cells conducted at least 5 attacks on government forces in the provinces of Daraa and al-Quneitra. On May 18, a soldier was shot and killed on a road between al-Sahoah and al-Musayfrah. On the same day, ISIS killed a local accusing him of being a “spy” for the Military Intelligence Directorate in al-Jeezah. On May 19, two soldiers were shot and killed near the town of Kafr Shams. On May 19, a security officer was shot and killed near the town of al-Harah. On May 19, a soldier was killed near Khan Arnabeh.

These developments demonstrate that terrorists successfully used the timeout that they got thanks to the Turkish-Syrian conflict in Idlib and now government forces will need contribute extensive efforts to neutralize the resurfaced ISIS network in southern and eastern Syria.

On May 20, Ankara and Moscow made another small but important step in implementing the southern Idlib de-escalation agreement. A joint patrol held by the Russian Military Police and the Turkish Army for the first time bypassed the town of Arihah on the M4 highway and reached the village of Kafer Shalaya west of it. It became the longest patrol held by the sides since the reaching of the de-escalation agreement in March.

Earlier in May, Turkish forces managed to remove a protest camp blocking the M4 highway. According to local sources, the removal of the protest was Ankara’s tactical agreement with al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. In any case, this helped to de-escalate the situation along at least a part of the M4 security zone. At the same time, the town of Jisr al-Shughur controlled by another al-Qaeda-linked group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, still remains an important source of instability in the area.

In northeastern Syria, the Syrian Army continues its campaign to limit the freedom of operations of the US-led coalition. On May 20, Syrian troops intercepted a US military convoy near Umm al-Khair and forced it to retreat to its positions near al-Hasakah. US forces in fact found themselves surrounded at their positions near oil fields that the Trump administration wanted so much.

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It has been a withering time for the airlines, whose unused planes moulder in a gruelling waiting game of survival.  The receivers are smacking their lips; administration has become a reality for many.  Governments across the globe dispute what measures to ease in response to the coronavirus pandemic; travel has been largely suspended; and the hope is that some viable form will resume at some point soon. 

For the low-cost airline EasyJet, a further problem has presented itself.  Earlier in the week, the company revealed that it had “been the target of an attack from a highly sophisticated source”, resulting in a data breach affecting nine million customers.  Of those, 2,208 customers (“a very small subset”, as the company wished to emphasise) had had their credit and debit card details “accessed”.    

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office had been informed about the incident but the company only revealed this catastrophic lapse in data security to individuals, as it told the BBC, “once the investigation had progressed enough that we were able to identify whether any individuals had been affected, then who had been impacted and what information had been accessed.”

EasyJet were also quick to douse the fires of this grim chapter in data insecurity. 

“There is no evidence that any personal information of any nature has been misused, however, on the recommendation of the ICO, we are communicating with the approximately nine million customers whose travel details were accessed to advise them of protective steps to minimise any risk of potential phishing.”

This phishing risk entails that opening any suspicious email purporting to be from EasyJet is simply a risk not worth taking.  Naturally, the company will have to inform, and have informed customers of that very risk, resulting in a peculiar circularity: Who to believe and what enables the recipient to detect the suspicious?  As digital privacy expert Ray Walsh opines, “Anybody who has ever purchased an EasyJet flight is advised to be extremely wary when opening emails from now on.”

For the company’s part, customers whose credit card details were compromised have received an email with a unique code, ostensibly to access services provided by a third party. A call centre to deal with concerns arising from the hack has also been established, though service on that has been typically sloppy.

Airline companies have a rather patchy record in the field of data security.  In the cybersecurity department, they seem to be rather thin, a failing that matches a global tendency.  (A 2018 report suggested a shortage of some 2.93 million.)   The implications to both airline companies and aviation infrastructure have been of such magnitude as to prompt warnings that it is merely a matter of time before aircraft are themselves the subject of cyber-attack.

The honour board on compromised customer data is a long one.  Cathay Pacific Airways experienced an attack on the scale of that of EasyJet, with a hacker accessing the personal information of 9.4 million customers over a four-year period.  This was also a case that interested the ICO, resulting in a pre-General Data Protection Regulation fine of £500,000.  The ICO investigation revealed that the airline lacked adequate security controls to ensure the integrity of passenger data within internal IT systems.  This “resulted in the unauthorised access” to “passengers’ personal details including: names, passport and identity details, dates of birth, postal and email addresses, phone numbers and historical travel information.” 

Cathay Pacific’s systems were penetrated via an internet server enabling the installation of data harvesting malware.  It did not help that the data storage regime in place was weak and complacent.  Back-up files were not password protected; internet-facing serves were unpatched; the presence of inadequate and outdated anti-virus protection software was noted.

British Airways was less fortunate in being fined £183 million in 2019 by the ICO, armed with the more punitive powers of the GDPR, for failing to take adequate steps in protecting the personal information of some 380,000 customers.  The 2018 compromise of data took place through bookings made on its website (ba.com) and the British Airways mobile app over the course of a 15 day period.  As with EasyJet, the company adopted a strategy of understating the effect of it all.  Yes, personal details had been stolen, including the names, addresses and financial information of customers, but those cheeky hackers did not make away with passport or travel details.  And, before anybody should get too excited, the cyber incident was, according to a spokesperson for British Airways, “data theft, rather than a breach”. 

None of this impressed the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.  “People’s personal data is just that – personal.  When an organisation fails to protect it from loss, damage or theft, it is more than an inconvenience. That’s why the law is clear – when you are entrusted with personal data you must look after it.” 

Not to be left out, Air Canada also confirmed a data breach on its mobile app in August 2018, though the scale was a more modest 20,000 individuals.  One defective feature of the airline’s operating systems stood out: a mediocre password policy accepting only letters and numbers.

Such patterns of compromise are all too common in the commercial aviation industry, but EasyJet’s Chief Executive Officer Johan Lungren claims to be wiser after the fact.  “Since we became aware of the incident, it has become clear that owing to COVID-19 there is heightened concern about personal data being used for online scams.”  Pressed by the ICO, “we are contacting those customers whose travel information was accessed and we are advising them to be extra vigilant particularly if they receive unsolicited communications.” A fine of some magnitude is expected. 

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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]

I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as “the Houdini of the Hardwood,” yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I never knew, or to be more accurate, in ways I didn’t reflect upon except in superficial ways.  He was the guy who brought professional basketball into the modern era with his bag of fancy tricks that included no-look and behind-the-back passes, uncanny dribbling, and a magical court sense that made the fast break into an exquisite art form. The captain and point-guard of the Boston Celtics from 1950-1963, Cousy led the Celtics to six NBA titles, made thirteen all-star teams, and changed professional basketball from a stodgy, boring, and slow game into a fast-paced spectacle, entertainment as much as sport. He was a wizard with a basketball and set the stage for Guy Rodgers, “Pistol Pete” Maravich, Bob Dylan, Magic Johnson, and Steve Nash, among other tricksters, modern Hermes.

Over the years I have written a great deal on a very wide-range of topics, but it wasn’t until a friend from high school recently sent me Gary Pomeranz’s fascinating book, The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End, that something clicked for me.  A few weeks previously, as the weather had turned spring-like, I had started to shoot hoops at our basket in the driveway. The warm air, the feel of a loose flowing freedom as I dribbled and shot, brought me back to the days when I spent so many hours playing in the Bronx schoolyards of my youth, perfecting my skills in what I can only call a fanatical way. Rushing to the schoolyard after school and on Saturday mornings to be the first there, to command the court, to compete with the older guys and beat their asses. Traveling around the city’s best basketball neighborhoods to play and make my mark. The endless hours in gyms. The search for perfection.  The adrenaline rush, the thrill, the joy of the perfect pass, the sweet swish of the net from a shot you had practiced a thousand times. From the age of eleven until twenty-three, basketball was central to my life and identity. It was my passion.

It was during these recent days shooting around that I started to have almost nightly dreams of my younger years, playing basketball in high school and then in college on a Division I scholarship.  They were very vivid dreams, and at the time, I didn’t understand why I was having them.  And they were starting to annoy me, as persistent and weird dreams can do. Begone, dread spirits!  Yet I knew they were telling me to heed their tales told when no one was looking, only this dreamer in the night.

While this was happening, I wrote an article about Bob Dylan and his recent release of “Murder Most Foul,” his powerful song about the assassination of President Kennedy, wherein he brilliantly accuses elements within the U.S. government and intelligence forces of killing the president in cold blood, while framing Lee Harvey Oswald for the deed. I had written about Dylan before, loved his music, and found him an intriguing if enigmatic character, a Houdini of song. “Murder Most Foul” seemed to burst out of Dylan after decades of avoiding straight-forward political themes. It struck me that with this song he had ripped off the masks he had been wearing for decades, as if he were Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey, shrugging off his beggar’s rags and announcing to the suitors of his wife Penelope that the gig was up and they were going down. It seemed to me that Dylan was coming full-circle, as if he were coming home to take revenge on the killers who had scarred his youth, as they did mine and so many others’.  “Like a musician, like a harper, when/ with quiet hand upon his instrument,” Odysseus lets the arrow sing, Dylan reaches back to sing:

The day they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing
It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
Perfectly executed, skillfully done

Slowly it dawned on me that everyone’s life has a shape, as if it were a drawing or story or song. And that if we pay close attention and see through all the snares and temptations meant to divert us from our true paths, we will find our beginnings in our ends and without directions we will find our way home.

It is very hard to explain to someone who didn’t know you once upon a time long before you met, how important certain activities were to you, what they meant and still mean in the deepest recesses of your psyche.  How they shaped you, or better still, how you used them to bend your life when you strung your bow so effortlessly to hit the target that you aimed for. Or thought you were aiming for.  My life in basketball shaped the man that I became, but my wife only knows the aftermath since she met me when I had taken a long twenty-five-year vacation from basketball.  Like Cousy, sitting and talking with Pomeranz, or Dylan sharpening his arrows and letting them fly in his new song False Prophet, I could say:

You don’t know me darlin’ – you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
I ain’t no False Prophet – I just said what I said
I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

While I am half-way through reading the Cousy book, I get its drift, where it’s heading. In conversations with Pomeranz, he is hoping to be inspired to understand the journey that has left him, an old man, frightened, alone, and approaching death in a large house in Worcester, Massachusetts, trying to understand, not only his fraught relationship with his black Celtic teammate, Bill Russell, but what his life has been all about, the court wizardry and cheers, the years on the road, the applause and awards, the championships and the price they exacted. He went to the basketball wars and won, came home, but now wonders what home really means. Unlike Odysseus, he only has ghosts to slay.  His wife is dead, and no suitors occupy the great house of shades.  There is no one to kill except his regrets.

My friend, Wayne, who sent me the book, spent three years in high school with me studying Greek, and over the course of those years, we translated Homer’s The Odyssey line by line. We were also basketball teammates. Odysseus, of course, was the ultimate trickster, the man of many wiles and disguises, what the nymph Calypso, who held Odysseus captive for seven years on her island Ogygia, called “a rascal.”  Like Houdini, Odysseus was able to escape this phantom island with the help of the messenger and trickster Hermes. Like Cousy, Odysseus was the Houdini of the ancient world, the hero who could escape any trap and thread an arrow through the smallest space to defeat the enemy.  Cousy’s fierceness on the court is legendary; his poker face hid the killer instinct, like Odysseus with his wily habit of standing with downcast eyes to disguise his intent.  Cousy could thread a pass between an opponent’s eyes without them blinking.  They often never knew what hit them.

I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan’s fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, and came upon his memory of hearing the news of the death of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court. Maravich was Cousy’s heir, and the blood line connects to Dylan also, a Houdini with words.  It was January 5, 1988:

My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee.  The radio was playing and morning news was on.  I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up.  I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz.  He was something to see – mop of brown hair, floppy socks – the holy terror of the basketball world – high flyin’ – magician of the court.  The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket – dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass.  He was fantastic.  Scored something like thirty-eight points.  He could have played blind.  Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten.  I hadn’t forgotten about him, though.  Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete’s sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen.  The news of one creative spirit’s death gave birth to another creative spirit’s gift to life.  (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father’s death.) “It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them …. The wind could never blow it out of my head.  This song was a good thing to have.  On a song like this, there’s no end to things.”

No one wants to end, to fade away. To not be recognized. To die and be forgotten. To fail to make their mark. Not Dylan, Cousy, Maravich, me, nor you.  We all wish to become who we feel we were meant to be. To fulfill the creative dreams we had when young and not to waste our lives in trivial pursuits. Years pass and people often ask with Dylan in “Shooting Star”:

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or overstep the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

I keep thinking: who is you for you?  For me?

When I was a young boy, I wanted to stand out, to be exceptional, to be one-of-a-kind, an individual. Basketball became my obsession and Bob Cousy my idol.  I wanted to be a shooting star, a dribbling star, a passing star. I watched him on television, studying him. His every move inspired me to imitate it.  I would spend hours every day practicing behind the back passes, first right-handed, then left, against the wall where I had marked an x in chalk.  I worked on my peripheral vision, so I could see the whole court and control the show. In the hidden recesses of my basement, I used tape to mark spots on the floor where I spent hour after hour dribbling behind my back, first this way and then that, past imaginary opponents. I made dribbling glasses with black tape out of my mother’s old sun glasses.  Worked on circling the ball behind my back either way. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, I devoted myself to perfecting my basketball skills as a point guard. Being like Bob Cousy. Being the one whose magic feats were the talk of the town the following day.

One day, I met and talked with Paul Newman on the street after high school basketball practice. When I was leaving, he called me Fast Eddie, which to my mind added to the mystique I felt as a trickster on the hardwood.  I felt fast and loose like Paul’s character Eddie Felson in The Hustler when he was on a roll with his cue stick, “You don’t have to look, you just Know.  You make shots that nobody has ever made before. I can play that game the way…. Nobody’s ever played it before.” That was my goal and the impetus behind my fanatical devotion to practice. I loved it, there was joy in it, but there was also a driven quality to my quest.

For whom?  Only you?

I was easily bored by conventional life and conventional basketball.  But the conventional world surrounded me. It was in school, church, the way people talked and walked; it seemed like people were straight-jacketed, which they were.  Blake’s mind-forged manacles. I sensed people were dissemblers, and that lies were the essence of social life.

Nowhere was this truer than on the basketball court in high school and college where the coaches had their systems and their rules and discouraged innovation, as if it would reveal them to be artists in disguise, weird, less-than-manly men who couldn’t run a tight ship.  They always rewarded those who obeyed them and kept within the strict rules of the system. Creativity frightened them.  The old ways sufficed.  It was just like society, and though Cousy had broken through and been idolized for doing so, he had retired from the Celtics in the spring of 1963, while the high school and college programs were stuck in the past.

I felt imprisoned. I wanted to bust out and play free.  Be free. It was like the classics that I studied in school: the lesson was always that the exploits you read about were things of the past, and now we were civilized gentlemen who must learn the rules of the game and play by them.  Tradition. But the rules were suffocating me.

The rules of the game had almost brought the world to an end during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The rules of the game had created a system of war and racism that was badly broken, resulting in the savage killing not only a President who had undergone a radical spiritual conversion toward peace-making, but four little black girls in the 16^thStreet Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday September 15, 1963, the week I started college with my trivial young man’s dreams of being the Cousy of college hoops.  The rules of the game would soon be violated by Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, when he would shock Pete Seeger and others with his song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a radical break with strictly political songs in favor of pure dazzling poetry in song.  That was a Cousy moment, poetry in motion, Houdini out of the locked box, dancing “beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.”

Bob Dylan, whose life and career follows Odysseus’ trajectory, ended his 2017 Nobel Award Lecture with the first line of the Odyssey: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.” My friend Wayne and I, together with all our high school classmates, had memorized those lines in Greek.  They were ingrained in us for life, as they have been for Dylan.

But tell what story?  For whom?  Only you?

Dylan has told so many. Here’s one I have for you, one you never heard. Here are the opening lines; let’s call it Book I, not that a Goddess intervened, but it was, in Odysseus’ words, the beginning of the end of my “clean-cut game.”

Shortly after President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on November 22, 1963, I played my first college basketball game.  In those days, all freshman were required by the rules of the game to play one year of freshman basketball before playing varsity.  This was the day I had been waiting for since the sixth grade when my dedication to basketball began.  My blood was flowing fast, I had no fear, and was ready to use all the skills I had spent years honing.  The stands were packed.  My proud family sat a few rows up behind our bench, my parents and four of my sisters, one of whom was eight and the other eleven.

The game was close, back and forth it went.  With about a minute and a half left, we were leading by two points.  The other coach called a time out with the ball in their possession. In the huddle, our coach assigned me to guard the opponent’s best player, a six-foot-four inch jumping jack who was highly acclaimed and a very good player by the name of Albie Grant.  I was five-foot-eleven, and beside my offensive skills, was a tough and tenacious very well-conditioned defender who took pride in sticking to an opponent like glue.  They threw the ball in and screened for Grant. He got the ball and I got in his face.  He went up for a jump shot from about 20 feet out, and since I was not going to block his shot, I did what all good defenders do, I got my hand in front of his eyes.  But he made the shot anyway, and the referee called a shooting foul on me.  But I never touched him.  It was a terrible call, but I could do nothing about it.

Behind my back, I could hear my coach cursing me out with every name in the book – you fucking bastard, you shit, etc.  He could be heard throughout the arena.  The crowd went silent.  He kept cursing me out and my already sweaty, red face must have turned purple.  I felt on fire.  He took me out of the game, a game I had played throughout.  He kept cursing at me.  I sat away from him on the bench and he came down and stood over me, calling me every name in his limited vocabulary, you fucking this, you fucking that.  I looked at him in rage.  The game continued.  Grant made the free throw and we lost by one point.  As we walked off the court to the locker room door at the end, he kept screaming invective at me.  I could feel my rage swelling. My family was descending from the stands and could hear it all.  I noticed others staring in disbelief. To say it was humiliating barely captures what it felt like, but just as I played the game fiercely, I was not one to take such abuse.  But I kept telling myself to control myself.  It was the coach who was making a fool of himself.  Then, when we entered the locker room, he let loose at me again, you fucking idiot, you fucking bastard….when I snapped and grabbed him by his shirt and tie, my hands around his neck, I threw him up against the wall and let him have it, screaming that I’d had enough of his shit and I would kill him if he ever did it again.  All hell broke loose as people were pulling me off him, and my father, who was outside the locker room, came rushing in to intervene.

Years of passionate dedication to becoming the best basketball player I could, came to this.  I had reacted in fury to being humiliated “in my own house” in front of my family.  I think now of Odysseus when he stood on the broad door sill and killed AntÍnoös, the worst of the suitors of his wife, Penelope.  “Odysseus’ arrow hit him under the chin/ and punched up to the feathers through his throat.”  How dare he take revenge and defend his honor, came the shouts from the easily offended but secretly guilty. The other suitors screamed at him: “Foul!  To shoot at a man!  That was your last shot.”

It wasn’t mine, but that is the rest of the story.  My craft changed in the following years.  I no longer tried to imitate other tricksters like Bob Cousy or Bob Dylan.  They have their own tales to tell and dwell upon. Their words are not mine.

Now I play with words in my own way.

But like Bob Dylan, “I return once again to Homer who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’

Our stories often happen behind our backs where we can’t see them. Telling them is the trick.  You need to turn around and see what’s behind you to pass them around.

*

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author’s website here.

The consolidation of the Venezuelan civilian-military union has been key to defeating U.S. led coup attempts. The revolution is holding its ground, not only in Venezuela but throughout the region.

***

In October 2019, when a wave of protest swept over Chile, President Sebastián Piñera called out the army, invoking the “state of emergency” clause of the Constitution. The image of soldiers in the streets and the enforcement of curfew immediately evoked a dark history. Since then, the majority of the bloody repression has been carried out by the national police, which has been reporting to the military commanders in Santiago, Valparaíso and other cities under the state of emergency.

These situations are oppressive not only for Latin America but also for countries like Canada, where Pinochet remains part of the collective memory handed down by a progressive generation that opposed his horror to its descendants. The experience also remains vivid in the minds of the many Canadians and Quebecers of Chilean origin who had to flee the Pinochet dictatorship.

Simultaneously, in Colombia as in Chile, uprisings and strikes have had to confront the armed forces, either directly or indirectly.

In Brazil, the peoples’ resistance to the right-wing Bolsonaro government has been ubiquitous since he won the 2018 elections, following the imprisonment of his main opponent, Lula da Silva.

In Bolivia, the scenario was different: the United States and its allies, backed by the army, fomented a coup d’état based on the lie that Evo Morales’s election had been fraudulent. It is known that the chief army officials involved in the coup were trained at the School of the Americas in the United States.

The experiences of Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia all stand in stark contrast to that of Venezuela. Indeed, they are poles apart: reaction on the one hand, revolution on the other. It is not that the United States has not attempted to subvert the Venezuelan Armed Forces; indeed, much effort has been expended to try and turn them into a replica of their counterparts in those countries where reaction has dominated. The effort has not succeeded.

What is the explanation? Let us compare these different cases. In an online interview, Claude Morin, a professor retired from the Department of History at the Université de Montréal and possibly the most important Latin Americanist in Quebec, stated that the Colombian army is composed of soldiers trained to fight an insurgency, to kill guerrillas and commit massacres against any communities that may be inclined to support them. The recruits have been conditioned to perform these tasks; that is, to see people and civilians as a threat. The officers have been trained with manuals from the US School of the Americas.

In its fight against the guerrillas, the army has built ties with paramilitary groups and has contracted out assassinations. Under the term of former President Álvaro Uribe, the army received bonuses for killing peasants and then dressing them up as guerrillas (the scandal of the “false positives”). This was “an industry of death carried out in bad faith,” concludes Morin.

Until 1973, the Chilean army was considered faithful to the Constitution. But, with the arrival of the Popular Unity government, US opposition to the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende and the polarization of Chilean society caused the army to side against the government. Pinochet succeeded with his coup d’état and established a radically different military government. The coup plotters purged the army of officers and soldiers who had opposed the coup, and subsequent acts of state terrorism left more than 3,000 dead or disappeared.

The Chilean officer corps has always recruited from the elites, while soldiers have generally come from the working class. “I don’t know the extent to which the army could have been someone’s stepping stone to higher social status,” says Morin, “but I believe that the armed forces have inculcated in working-class recruits an ideology favourable to the elites, the oligarchy and the status quo.”

Moving to Argentina, Morin compares the ideology of national security prevalent during the “dirty war” in that country (1976–1984) with that of Colombia. High-ranking officers were recruited from the oligarchy; anti-Communism was the common factor holding all the factions together. “The unrest in Argentina during the 1960s, the anti-Peronist authorities, a succession of military governments between 1954 (Perón’s overthrow) and 1984 (return of civilian government with Alfonsín), and the ‘dirty war’ created a context of repression of all effective or apprehended protest against the established order, which considered the protesters as subversives.”

As a reader of the Argentine press, Morin concludes that under Macri’s presidency, the officers have been able to show their faces once more, taking their places as a bulwark against a mass uprising.

When the coup took place in Brazil, US Ambassador Gordon egged on the Brazilian officers, and the coup perpetrators were reassured by the presence of US warships off the coast. “The United States and the officials involved were concerned by Goulart’s ties to Cuba and the fact that Che Guevara had been inducted into the Order of the Southern Cross. Here again, anti-Communism came on the scene.”

In a 2003 article, Marta Harnecker states that the Venezuelan military had seven defining features that made it not only different from the ones described above, but almost the polar opposite. It served as a natural growth medium for Chavism.

First, Venezuelan officers and soldiers were profoundly influenced by the ideas and thinking of Simón Bolívar on national and people’s sovereignty. Second, soldiers in Chávez’s day were trained at the Venezuelan Military Academy, not the School of the Americas. Third, the historical conditions were different. Guerrilla insurgency was not a big problem, so indoctrination in the Cold War anti-communist ideology was much less necessary. In fact, when Chávez’s generation entered the academy in 1970, guerrilla activity had already been rooted out. Fourth, the Venezuelan military was not controlled by an elite military caste. Fifth, in 1989, the popular uprising known as the “Caracazo” politicized many lower-ranking officers, making them sympathetic to left-leaning ideas and more hostile to the political elite. Sixth, the decade preceding the Caracazo,characterized by an abrupt rise in socioeconomic inequality, had already begun to radicalize lower-ranking officers. Finally, Chávez’s proposal to restructure the armed forces after his election in 1998 gave them a new purpose and a way to channel the frustrations built up in previous decades.

These characteristics have laid a solid foundation for the consolidation of the Venezuelan civilian-military union and efforts to fend off the continual US-led attempts to overthrow the government, from January 2019 until the present, thus confirming that revolution is winning out over reaction, not only in Venezuela but throughout the region.

*

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This article was originally published on Granma.

Featured image is from Sputnik

Read Part I here.

Omnipotence and Omniscience in the 21st century

The contact-tracing platforms – both digital and human-based – being rolled out around the world have their philosophical roots in religious rites of confession, cross-bred with the police-state logic of the National Security Agency (“if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear”) and coupled with the religious notion of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity.

All deviation from lockdown dogma is logged and reported, including consorting with known heretics, and this Panopticon – attacked when it debuted in China allegedly as totalitarian police-state control – is now being embraced in western media as the work of benevolent governments concerned with citizen welfare. While this transformation was laid out chillingly in ‘Lock Step,’ a hypothetical future outlined in 2010 in the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” any discussion of predictive programming is off-limits.

Indeed, Corona Cultists are encouraged to cut off their “conspiracy theorist” relatives, because, in the words of Canadian broadcaster CBC, “conspiracies can be just as infectious, just as dangerous as a virus – so you have to guard against them.”

Parents in Wales are being warned that conspiracy theorists are a greater threat than pedophiles on the internet. Compounding the seriousness of wrongthink, the WHO has popularized the term “infodemic” – implying ideas are as dangerous to one’s health as pathogens – and recommended a “vaccine for misinformation.”

Soon, the Corona Cultist will no longer have to self-report their symptoms on a Facebook survey or confess their sins to a contact-tracer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed clothing with embedded sensors to monitor the wearer’s vital signs. Enabled by the 5G networks being fast-tracked while any potential opposition is locked down, these sensors will communicate in real time with surveillance smart grids, pinpointing the offender and alerting others to give them a wide berth, refuse to serve them, and eventually have them “neutralized.”

Their bank account may be frozen until they return home, or even debited a certain fine based on the degree of disobedience (“that’ll be 20 Hail Bills…or $20 per minute outside the home, your choice”).

Eventually, these sensors will be implanted inside the body – in what sounds like the plot of a science fiction dystopia, Microsoft secured a patent in March for a system that mines cryptocurrency based on physiological signals, theoretically permitting the corporation to ‘reward’ users based on desirable responses to certain stimuli. While the example they gave was banal – a reward for watching an advertisement – it’s no great leap to imagine equivalent punishments for those who respond with disgust to the ruling class’ propaganda.

The all-knowing, all-seeing God micromanaging His followers, a religious trope that has been used to keep large populations in line for millennia, has finally been realized in the form of the Covid-19 police state. Big Brother wields technology as both carrot – gently shepherding His flock toward transhumanist perfection by offering a facsimile of freedom in return for downloading an app, accepting a “quantum dot tattoo,” or showing a “certificate of immunity” on demand – and stick, digitally and literally imprisoning those who deviate from His shining future.

A breathtakingly wealthy coalition of billionaires and their pet statesmen have seized their own slice of the divine by appointing themselves Big Brother’s agents on earth. From the messianic glow of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen as she solicits money from cash-strapped European nations, to the aforementioned sweater-vested Gates channelling Nostradamus with predictions of “Pandemic Two,” to second-generation New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (whose PR people have laid it on thick with hashtags like #Cuomosexual and #CuomoForPresident even as his state leads the world in infections and deaths and his policies of mandating nursing homes accept Covid-19-positive patients literally “kill Grandma”) epitomizing “New York Tough” by acting out #resistance to Trump even as his brother was supposedly laid low by the virus, there’s no end of ruling-class Heroes™ basking in the admiration of the Corona Cultists, who offer up their (and everyone else’s) rights on a silver platter, never to be seen again.

Can constant surveillance stop the virus?

There’s nothing wrong with clinging to ritual in a time of uncertainty – certainly hand-washing doesn’t have a downside, presuming one stops short of wearing the skin off one’s hands. But when that ritual harms others, it must be questioned. Covid-19 zealots would argue that they have science on their side, but the science is far from settled on the effectiveness of social distancing and sweeping economic shutdowns.

Pseudoscience on a rampage

As social media censors tighten the screws on what information is permitted to enter the public sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend the Cult of Corona is based on science.

Actual science relies upon constant inquiry, testing, and hypothesizing, and even those claims generally attested to by its practitioners are considered “theories” as opposed to unchangeable truths. Science-as-religion, on the other hand, denounces those who put forth dissenting theories as heretics, using slurs like “quack,” “charlatan,” and “anti-vaxxer” to marginalize, for example, medical practitioners who heal people without the use of pharmaceutical drugs.

The social media platforms’ decision to unilaterally deplatform content that contradicts the WHO’s narrative is anti-scientific in the extreme, sacrificing the spirit of inquiry for the strictures of groupthink. It’s rendered even more Kafkaesque due to continuing shifts in the WHO’s own narrative, which has changed as more is learned about the virus (as scientific understanding tends to do).

The idea that YouTube’s content moderators know better than a medical doctor how to treat Covid-19 would have been considered laughable just six months ago, yet Google’s video platform has repeatedly removed videos of licensed, practicing clinicians discussing their experiences.

A pair of “rogue” doctors in Bakersfield, California who held a lengthy press conference laying out their findings and questioning the wisdom of prolonged lockdowns – broadcast on a local network TV station – went viral, only for YouTube to remove nearly every copy while pundits denounced the pair as “coronavirus truthers.” Their video did not attempt to project their own experiences onto the world – indeed, where they did cite statistics outside of Bakersfield, they used “official” statistics from health authorities, in Sweden and elsewhere, to support their claim that the fatality rate was being significantly overestimated because most cases were asymptomatic. Their video was literally broadcast on “mainstream media,” an “authoritative source” in the eyes of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. But its incompatibility with prevailing coronavirus dogma meant it had to be destroyed.

The orthodox narrative also jettisons long-accepted science about immunity. Vitamin D – obtained from sunlight absorbed through the skin – has been proven in study after study to be integral to a healthy immune system, and several recent studies have demonstrated its importance in surviving Covid-19 infection. Likewise, loneliness has been linked to diminished immune function and poor health in general, especially in elderly people (i.e. those most susceptible to Covid-19), and even those who are quite content with being alone are experiencing diminished immune stimulation due to not interacting with other people.

The link between isolation and ill health is so strong that even the media establishment has quietly acknowledged it, and solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment in many countries. No less than the World Economic Forum, co-organizer of the notorious Event 201 simulation that served as a dress rehearsal for Covid-19 itself, has called the stay-at-home orders that have confined more than half the world’s population to their homes “the world’s biggest psychological experiment.” The ruling-class conclave warned “we will pay the price” in a secondary mental-illness epidemic, one which its members – heavily invested in the pharmaceutical companies that are among the biggest winners of the pandemic – are no doubt poised to cash in on with antidepressants, benzodiazepines and antipsychotics aplenty. Nevertheless, questioning the wisdom of prolonged isolation in the form of extended lockdowns is still seen as anathema.

Deprogramming

To begin to free humanity from the influence of the Corona Cult, it’s important to understand how its programming took hold. Guilt – environmental guilt, racial guilt, class-based guilt – is the primary route of attack. The media establishment initially attempted to link the coronavirus outbreak to climate change, with even the Pope climbing on board the narrative, though no scientific basis exists to support it and it has since been somewhat de-emphasized. Heretics are repeatedly accused of prioritizing their own convenience over the health of society, especially its most vulnerable members – the elderly, the sick, even poor and non-white populations. Depending on the target audience, anti-lockdown heretics are said to be scientifically-illiterate “covidiots” or heartless monsters consigning the disadvantaged to die for capitalism. Guilt and shame are powerful conversion tools, and even those who remain unconverted are likely to hold their tongues in a sociological phenomenon known as the spiral of silence.

At the same time, humanity’s innate religious tendencies (present in even atheists – millennia of programming don’t vanish just because a person comes to the realization they live in a godless universe) – have been hijacked. It’s no coincidence that governments imposing lockdowns have singled out places of worship for particular animus – anyone attending religious services is presumably content enough with their god(s) that they’re unlikely to ditch their faith for a virus-venerating cult-come-lately. Constantly bombarded with messages of uncertainty and kept from communing with their usual faith, even people normally secure in their religion will reach for the stability the Corona Police State provides – authoritarianism’s flip side is paternalism, and comfort is found in the arms of Big Brother. Among the non-religious, liberal and libertarian populations alike are targeted with the weaponization of medical jargon – a simple “what’s the matter, you don’t believe in science?” sends weak-willed groupthinkers into shameful silence while their freedoms are methodically amputated.

It is supremely ironic that in this Inquisition, the “real” church has been sidelined. Aside from the Pope, who has wholeheartedly embraced the New Normal, a group of Catholic leaders recently issued a statement calling out governments, the media, and public health experts, denouncing the Covid-19 narrative as cover for “infringing on the rights of millions of people around the world.”

Cynical scholars of religious history might suggest they’re motivated by jealousy – “stop using dogma to control people, that’s our job!” – but their concerns are no less valid, and the feeling of envy cuts both ways. The single-minded determination of police to break up even those church services scrupulously observing social distancing with worshipers sitting isolated in their cars can only be explained by eschatological jealousy. To truly force the Cult of Corona down the throats of the people, the competition must be eliminated, whether it’s “traditional” religion or logic, reason and the (real) scientific method.

Deprogramming the world from the Cult of Corona cannot be done by force – its backers have too much power, including total control of both establishment and social media. It must be approached strategically. Just as traditional “deprogrammers” will isolate a cult member from the group, reasoning there’s a much better chance of re-awakening the original personality when the person is not experiencing the pressures of groupthink, deprogramming Corona Cultists is best done one-on-one, keeping in mind that cultists will ferociously defend their dogma with thought-stopping techniques which can be extremely irritating to outsiders trying to convey dissenting information. Former “Moonie” Steven Hassan’s BITE model (above) describes how cults exert undue influence and is useful in approaching deprogramming.

The notion of deprogramming entire societies may seem daunting, but it is the only chance humanity has to retain some semblance of freedom and turn back from the dark path down which our species is heading. The ruling class is imposing a comprehensive, multilayered control grid that has been in the works for decades, and when it is complete, revolution will not be an option. Such a future must be avoided at all costs.

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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on RT, Global Research, Activist Post, Ghion Journal, and Progressive Radio Network. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://helenofdestroy.com or follow her on Twitter at @velocirapture23. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

“Preinfection chloroquine treatment renders Vero E6 cells refractory to SARS-CoV infection”

“Postinfection chloroquine treatment is effective in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV infection”

The drug was rapidly pushed to clinical testing as an experimental treatment in China; on Feb 15, 2020, it was included in the sixth version of the COVID-19 treatment guidelines by the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China. This guideline established the use of chloroquine nationwide for patients with COVID-19, at a recommended adult dose of 500 mg twice per day for no more than 10 days. 1

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ANNEX

For further details on the current SARS-2 coronavirus (alias COVID-19) as well as its relationship to SARS-1 coronavirus, see the peer reviewed  article by Anthony Fauci and co-authors Clifford Lane and CDC Director Robert Redfield  published in March issue  of The New England Journal of Medicine

Excerpt from the VJ article entitled  

Chloroquine is A potent inhibitor of SARS Coronavirus Infection and Spread

Read more here (complete article) 

Primeiro artigo :

COVID-19 – Sobre a “origem” e as “responsabilidades” da pandemia (I), 28 de Abril de 2020

[Continuação]

Prosseguindo-se a reflexão começada na primeira parte deste artigo, consideremos a melhor hipótese para a origem da atual pandemia: a de que o novo coronavírus não foi forjado artificialmente (como arma para a concorrência geopolítica capitalista), mas que foi um “acaso provocado”, um fenômeno zoonótico causado pela destruição intensiva do meio ambiente. 

Esta última possibilidade (parcialmente “natural”), já foi afirmada por vários cientistas de diversas nações, e recentemente reiterada pelo próprio diretor do Programa de Emergências da OMS, Mike Ryan (“El coronavirus no fue hecho en laboratorio”, Notícias ONU, maio/2020). 

É certo, porém, que os Estados Unidos – cujo governo de extrema-direita tenta faturar geopoliticamente com a catástrofe, ao jogar seu ônus para a China – têm um histórico de uso de armas biológicas, em conflitos nos quais seus objetivos militares estratégicos se viram dificultados (casos de Cuba e Coreia, como apresentado no início deste artigo). Por outro lado, vivemos um momento histórico peculiar, em que a economia e poderio militar chineses florescem, e os EUA veem sua vantagem econômica e geopolítica diminuir vertiginosamente. De modo que motivos não faltariam à superpotência dirigida por um presidente dos mais insensatos que já passaram pelo cargo. 

Contudo, diante das pesquisas até agora publicadas, e da própria dinâmica altamente contagiosa (e portanto incontrolável) deste vírus em particular, não parece crível a hipótese de que o novo coronavírus tenha sido fabricado em laboratório.

Neste caso, a doença covid-19 consiste em uma zoonose; o que, entretanto, não modifica a conclusão (a mesma que valeria para a hipótese “proposital”) de que a “responsabilidade” por essa calamidade sanitária é do regime produtivo concorrencial capitalista, um modelo gerido e imposto ao planeta pelas nações “centrais” do capitalismo. E portanto, são as grandes potências econômicas as principais “responsáveis” pela pandemia: especialmente os próprios EUA e as nações, suas subalternas diretas, que compõe o clube dos países dominantes do regime (dito G7). Pois que são estes membros do G7 os “dirigentes” do brutal desequilíbrio do metabolismo homem-natureza, notadamente após a disseminação neoliberal (variação agressiva da prática capitalista, que no fim dos anos 1970 se impõe como resposta conservadora à crise estrutural-lógica do sistema). 

Esta “responsabilidade” é nítida se se tem em conta que são estes países dominantes os que (ainda) dirigem o “sentido da história” – no conceito do filósofo-historiador Caio Prado Júnior. São eles que dão a linha da produção global, condenando o sistema-mundo a um regime desregulamentado (“liberal”), sem planejamento racional e repleto de desperdícios significativos, segundo seu insustentável paradigma de progresso como “eterno crescimento econômico”. 

Como ilustração da falta de racionalidade “liberal”, dentre tantos casos, veja-se a denúncia feita há alguns anos pelo ganhador do prêmio Nobel de Química, Thomas Steitz (da Universidade de Yale, EUA): “os laboratórios farmacêuticos não pesquisam antibióticos efetivos… preferem centrar o negócio em remédios que deverão ser tomados durante toda a vida” – e completa – “muitas das grandes farmacêuticas fecharam suas pesquisas sobre antibióticos porque estes curam as pessoas” (“Indústria farmacêutica não quer curar pessoas”, Terra, 2011). 

Como já o mostraram tantos pensadores (caso de Adorno e Horkheimer, em sua Dialética do Esclarecimento), a ideia de “progresso capitalista” é uma ideologia de controle social e da natureza: longe de consistir em um efetivo “desenvolvimento humano”, o tipo de “progresso” empreendido pelo regime capitalista se reduz a um mero “progresso instrumental”. Seus “avanços” – tão somente “técnicos” –, a despeito de qualquer ética ou senso democrático, visam a sujeição dos seres humanos (“peças” de sua máquina produtiva) e o domínio dos recursos naturais (a Mãe-Terra vista como matéria-prima), em proveito dos lucros de parcas megacorporações. 

É este nosso cenário global hoje: crescentemente conflitivo e insalubre; ademais de sujeito a interesses de cada vez menos monopólios – estes “novos reis do mundo” (donos até mesmo das guilhotinas). 

Pandemia: expressão da crise civilizatória 

Há décadas se adverte que este tipo de “desenvolvimento” não planejado e irresponsável, pautado por uma ideia irracional de (ilimitado) “crescimento econômico”, ameaça a vida no nosso (limitado) planeta.

Conforme João Pedro Stédile, do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (“Esta pandemia é a expressão mais trágica da fase atual do capitalismo”, Brasil de Fato, abril/2020): a atual calamidade é um trágico emblema do capitalismo contemporâneo, “da crise civilizatória que vivemos”; a eclosão de inúmeras novas zoonoses é “parte da consequência de termos desequilibrado as forças da natureza, com o modelo de produção agrícola industrial em alta escala”; “a maioria dos novos vírus tem se propagado através da criação em grandes escalas de animais, aves, suínos, bovinos”. 

Essa advertência de Stédile é corroborada por François Moutou (da Sociedade Francesa para o Estudo e Proteção dos Mamíferos): “Um ecossistema pouco alterado é rico em uma grande diversidade de espécies, ao contrário de uma criação de gado em que se cria uma única espécie e cujos indivíduos são o mais homogêneos possível”. Neste caso, afirma este epidemiologista: “a chegada de um vírus, de uma bactéria, para um indivíduo da criação, se traduzirá provavelmente na invasão de todos os demais, dando lugar a uma epidemia” (“Las zoonosis, entre la especie humana y los animales”, Viento Sur, maio/2020). 

Para se evitar novas catástrofes humanitárias – pondera ainda o líder do MST – é preciso com urgência se pôr em debate o tema da “soberania alimentar”, da “agroecologia”, da necessidade de se investir na “agricultura camponesa-familiar”: a “reforma agrária não é mais um tema [somente] camponês… o que está na pauta agora é a produção de alimentos saudáveis para toda a sociedade”. 

Precisamos portanto, de acordo com o que coloca Stédile, não somente mudar a “estrutura da propriedade” da terra, mas os atuais “paradigmas” produtivos: essa concepção, sujeita ao capital, que nos é imposta desde cima por organizações de manutenção do sistema (como o FMI, o Banco Mundial e o seu braço armado, a OTAN – a que se apela quando a violência econômica encontra alguma resistência física).

***

Em meio a este palco desastroso, Trump e a direita estadunidense atacam a China. 

Já com vistas à campanha pela reeleição, o governo “republicano” tenta assim ocultar sua desastrada resposta à pandemia, bem como o fracasso histórico do sistema de saúde de sua riquíssima e “avançadíssima” nação – aproveitando-se para tanto da agravada xenofobia, do sentimento anti-chinês que, com o apoio da grande mídia conservadora, cresceu com a calamidade sanitária mundial. Por outro lado, Washington busca alastrar argumentos inconsistentes junto à opinião pública e à dita comunidade internacional, para obter respaldo a sua petição por privilégios, na guerra comercial que vem travando contra Pequim. 

Aliás, assessores de Trump já afirmaram que sua campanha será centrada em culpar a China pelo caos, prometendo ressuscitar a economia abalada pela “pandemia chinesa” (“Culpem a China e reativem a economia”, UOL, maio/2020).

Para os EUA, a ascensão econômica da China é uma real ameaça, senão a sua “segurança nacional”, como alardeiam certos extremistas, mas decerto a sua hegemonia planetária – sem competidores desde a derrota da União Soviética. 

Planejamento estatal e solidariedade global

Mas vejamos o exemplo da China: uma nação com estado forte que, longe ainda de ser “comunista” (apesar do nome do partido no poder), tem ao menos capacidade de planejamento social; e que longe de ser “rica” (se analisamos a situação per capita), vem dando seguidas mostras ao mundo de ser menos autocentrada que os EUA. 

Em fevereiro, equipe da OMS constatou que: “deparados com um vírus até então desconhecido, a China efetuou o mais ambicioso, ágil e agressivo plano de controle de transmissão na história”. 

A estratégia do gigante asiático, para enfrentar a doença com a rapidez que o surto exige, foi: 

i) isolar não apenas a província infectada, mas ainda restringir movimentos dentro das cidades, com o uso da tecnologia e da força pública;

ii) direcionar para a saúde recursos materiais e humanos (testes, aparatos de proteção, maquinário hospitalar, equipes médicas e de enfermagem), sem restrições de “tetos orçamentários” (como no economicismo-liberal, de visão curta), conforme fosse exigido pela calamidade, incluindo verba para a construção relâmpago de hospitais completos;

iii) garantia de alimentação e serviços básicos a todos os cidadãos sujeitos à quarentena, e mecanismos para se barrar a propagação de boatos e notícias falsas, evitando o pânico.

(Práticas tão diferentes de nosso apequenado Brasil, este resto do golpe liberal de 2016, que abriu alas para a aventura neofascista de Bolsonaro.) 

A cidade de Wuhan e a província de Hubei, permaneceram em isolamento por 76 dias; a China estancou a pandemia em seu território. E hoje são os Estados Unidos – além do Brasil – que caminham para uma catástrofe. Fenômeno que logo mais há de cobrar sua fatura política interna e geopolítica.

Além disso, na reunião anual da OMS, realizada neste mês de maio, o presidente Xi Jinping declarou que a potência oriental, durante dois anos, destinará dois bilhões de dólares ao combate do coronavirus, verba que será sobretudo dirigida ao desenvolvimento social e econômico dos países pobres afetados. Assegurou ainda que laboratórios chineses já começaram a testar em humanos cinco vacinas, e que assim que se encontre uma que funcione, ela será disponibilizada a todas as nações do globo, como “bem público mundial” (AFP, maio/2020). 

Ideia tão contrastante com a de um Trump que tentou corromper laboratório alemão por patente que desse aos EUA a “exclusividade” da nova vacina a ser criada (RTP, março/2020), e que pirateou respiradores artificiais a caminho do Brasil de seu “amigo” Bolsonaro (The Intercept, abril/2020).

Palavras de um pensador de dentro do redemoinho

Como diz o pensador crítico Noam Chomsky (Diálogos do Sul, abril/2020): a crise do coronavírus é “uma falha colossal do mercado”, “da intensificação neoliberal”. Ou seja, uma falha das práticas produtivas e sociais que vêm ocorrendo especialmente desde que a crise estrutural capitalista deixa de ser teoria – no fim dos anos 1960 (e cujos mais claros efeitos foram as rebeliões populares mundiais de 1968). “Isso era sabido há muito tempo, que a pandemia era altamente provável” – pondera o estadunidense –, uma “modificação” da epidemia da Síndrome Respiratória Aguda Grave, de 2003; este vírus tinha de ter sido “identificado, sequenciado” – “vacinas estavam disponíveis, laboratórios ao redor do mundo poderiam trabalhar diretamente em desenvolver uma proteção para uma potencial pandemia”. Mas não: “entregamos nosso destino a tiranias privadas”, pois pesquisar “novos cremes corporais é mais lucrativo que vacinas”. 

E o nonagenário socialista acrescenta ainda uma observação instigante – espécie de símbolo do patológico individualismo contemporâneo, que se reflete na fragilização da resistência e da organização social: “As universidades nos Estados Unidos têm placas dizendo ‘olhe para frente’”; “as redes sociais” isolam cada vez mais as pessoas; “laços sociais”, “organizações” têm que ser criadas. 

Pois é: produzir mais intensivamente não é preciso, pelo contrário; olhar para a frente é preciso. 

Pandemia: fruto podre da libertinagem do capital

Esta pandemia é, em suma, mais um dos frutos podres da libertinagem produtiva do capitalismo: mais um recorrente “efeito colateral” desse modelo concorrencial destrutivo que não consegue minimamente “olhar à frente”, e que violenta assim os últimos rincões naturais da Terra. 

A calamidade e sua consecutiva crise é o resultado de décadas de pressões globais – dos estados dominantes sobre os periféricos – por “ajustes” neoliberais. Sempre em prol da “cidadania mínima”: com sua ideologia contrária aos investimentos em direitos sociais, com sua falta de planejamento estatal, com sua falácia de “estado mínimo” (que lega cada vez mais os rumos do planeta aos interesses privados, centrados em algumas centenas de famílias-máfias).

A responsabilidade por essa pandemia – e das próximas que provavelmente surgirão – é portanto dos dirigentes de uma “civilização” que faz mau uso dos saberes e tecnologias, pondo-os não a serviço do homem, mas do lucro. É de uma cultura torta, que investe em cosméticos, não em vacinas; que promove o agronegócio desmatador e avança sobre florestas e culturas originárias (destruindo milenares saberes da terra); que exige “estados mínimos” para a saúde, educação, seguridade social, saneamento básico… mas apela ao estado forte para suas guerras de dominação e seus resgates bilionários do mercado financeiro. 

Como é bem-sabido, detrás de todo “estado mínimo”, há “estados fortes” – sempre à espreita.

Yuri Martins-Fontes

O Presidente Trump anunciou a retirada dos Estados Unidos do Tratado Céus Abertos/Open Skies. Assinado em 1992, imediatamente após o final da Guerra Fria e iniciado em 2002, permite que cada um dos 34 Estados Partes sobrevoe os territórios dos demais com aviões de reconhecimento (desarmados), equipados com sensores para recolher dados sobre forças e actividades militares. Cada Estado Parte deve aceitar um certo número de sobrevôos sobre o seu território, a cada ano e tem o direito de realizar o mesmo número nos territórios daqueles que realizaram esses vôos. Nos termos do Tratado, mais de 1.500 vôos foram realizados desde 2002, incluindo vôos recíprocos entre os Estados Unidos e a Rússia. Embora, actualmente, os satélites possam fornecer informações mais detalhadas do que as recolhidas pelos aviões, o Tratado mantém a sua utilidade técnica, pois nem todos os Estados Partes têm as capacidades dadas pela utilização de satélites. O significado político do Tratado permanece importante como um acto de confiança.

Aponta precisamente para um abrandamento, daí a decisão da Administação Trump de se retirar do Tratado, com o objectivo claro de aumentar a tensão com a Rússia. Para esse fim, o mesmo argumento foi adoptado em 1 de Fevereiro de 2019, quando o Secretário de Estado,Mike Pompeo, anunciou que, após seis meses de suspensão, os Estados Unidos se retirariam do Tratado das Forças Nucleares Intermédias, como de facto aconteceu em Julho do mesmo ano. Ao anunciar que os Estados Unidos se retirarão dentro de seis meses do Tratado Céus Abertos, Mike Pompeo usa praticamente as mesmas palavras: declara que “só a Rússia é responsável por estes procedimentos”, acusa-a de “erosão contínua da arquitectura do controlo dos armamentos”, define-a como “violadora obstinada de muitos compromissos assumidos”. Também desta vez, não é apresentada nenhuma prova real destas argumentações.

Declarando que “esta não é uma história que se refira exclusivamente ao Tratado Open Skies”, o Secretário de Estado anuncia outras decisões da Administração Trump na mesma direcção. Durante mais de um ano, o Presidente Trump repetiu que não renovará o novo Tratado Start, concluído em 2010 pelos Estados Unidos e pela Rússia. Este Tratado, como salientamos em 2010, no ‘il manifesto’, tem limites notáveis: estabelece apenas um limite para “ogivas nucleares instaladas”, ou seja, aquelas prontas para serem lançadas por meios de transporte estratégicos com alcance superior a 5.500 km, fixados em 1.550 por cada parte; também não prevê nenhum controlo efectivo sobre o aprimoramento qualitativo das forças nucleares. No entanto, a retirada dos Estados Unidos do novo Tratado Start tornaria o confronto nuclear ainda mais perigoso. O Presidente Trump disse que só poderia renovar o novo Tratado Start se a China também participasse no mesmo, uma possibilidade até agora rejeitada por Pequim. No entanto, se participar, nos termos actuais, a China poderia aumentar o número das suas ogivas nucleares de cerca de 300 para mais de 1.500 (excluindo a hipótese de que Washington e Moscovo estariam dispostos a diminuir as deles para 300 unidades).

Outro tratado do qual os Estados Unidos podem retirar-se é o da Proibição Total de Ensaios Nucleares, que Washington assinou em 1996, mas nunca ratificou, enquanto Moscovo o ratificou em 2000.

Neste contexto, a anunciada retirada dos Estados Unidos do Tratado Open Skies constitui um novo passo em direcção a uma verdadeira e deliberada estratégia de tensão. Visto que aderiram ao Tratado 23 países europeus da NATO, incluindo a Itália, a retirada dos Estados Unidos, aumentando as tensões com a Rússia, envolve automaticamente a NATO. É exactamente o que pretendem em Washington.Num comunicado de imprensa conjunto publicado ontem, 8 países da NATO (Bélgica, França, Alemanha, Itália, Luxemburgo, Holanda, República Checa, Espanha), além da Finlândia e da Suécia, manifestaram o seu “descontentamento” pela intenção da retirada do Tratado Open Skies, anunciada pelo governo dos EUA, “embora partilhemos as suas preocupações sobre a actuação da parte da  Federação Russa sobre as cláusulas do Tratado”. No entanto, declaram: “Continuaremos a dar cumprimento ao Tratado Céu Aberto”. Um sinal de abertura cauteloso, mas apreciável, enquanto a sombra ameaçadora da guerra nuclear cobre cada vez mais os céus.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Trump, Stracciatore Seriale di Trattati

il manifesto, 23 maggio 2020

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos 

Il presidente Trump ha annunciato il ritiro degli Stati uniti dal Trattato Open Skies (Cieli Aperti). Firmato nel 1992 subito dopo la fine della Guerra fredda ed entrato in vigore nel 2002, esso permette a ciascuno dei 34 Stati-parte di sorvolare i territori degli altri con aerei da ricognizione (non armati), dotati di sensori per la raccolta di dati su forze e attività militari. Ciascuno Stato-parte deve accettare ogni anno un certo numero di sorvoli del proprio territorio ed ha diritto di effettuarne altrettanti sui territori di quelli che hanno compiuto tali sorvoli. In base al Trattato, dal 2002 sono stati effettuati complessivamente oltre 1.500 sorvoli, compresi quelli reciproci fra Stati uniti e Russia. Anche se i satelliti possono oggi fornire informazioni più dettagliate di quelle raccolte dagli aerei, il Trattato mantiene una sua utilità tecnica poiché non tutti gli Stati-parte dispongono di capacità satellitari. Importante resta il significato politico del Trattato, quale atto di distensione.

Proprio a questo mira la decisione dell’amministrazione Trump di ritirarsi dal Trattato, con il chiaro scopo di accrescere la tensione con la Russia. A tal fine è stata adottata la stessa sceneggiatura  del l° febbraio 2019, quando il segretario di stato Mike Pompeo annunciò che, dopo sei mesi di sospensione, gli Stati uniti si sarebbero ritirati dal Trattato sulle Forze nucleari intermedie, come in effetti è avvenuto nel luglio dello stesso anno. Annunciando che gli Stati uniti si ritireranno tra sei mesi dal Trattato Open Skies, Mike Pompeo usa praticamente le stesse parole: dichiara che «solo la Russia ha la responsabilità per tali sviluppi», la accusa di «continua erosione dell’architettura di controllo degli armamenti», la definisce «violatore seriale di molti degli impegni assunti». Anche questa volta non viene portata alcuna reale prova per tali accuse.

Dichiarando che «questa non è una storia che si riferisce esclusivamente al Trattato Open Skies», il segretario di stato preannuncia altre decisioni dell’amministrazione Trump nella stessa direzione. Da oltre un anno il presidente Trump ripete che non rinnoverà il nuovo Trattato Start, concluso nel 2010 da Stati uniti e Russia.  Questo trattato, come evidenziammo nel 2010 sul manifesto, ha notevoli limiti: stabilisce solo un tetto per le «testate nucleari dispiegate», ossia quelle pronte al lancio su vettori strategici con gittata superiore ai 5.500 km, stabilito in 1.550 per parte; non prevede inoltre alcun controllo effettivo sul potenziamento qualitativo delle forze nucleari. Nonostante ciò, il ritiro degli Stati uniti anche dal nuovo Trattato Start renderebbe  il confronto nucleare ancora più pericoloso. Il presidente Trump ha detto che potrebbe rinnovare il nuovo Trattato Start solo se vi partecipasse anche la Cina, possibilità finora rifiutata da Pechino. Qualora però vi partecipasse, in base agli attuali termini la Cina potrebbe accrescere il numero delle sue testate nucleari da circa 300 a oltre 1.500 (escludendo l’ipotesi che Washington e Mosca fossero disposte a diminuire le loro a 300).

Un altro trattato da cui gli Stati uniti potrebbero ritirarsi è quello per la completa messa al bando dei test nucleari, che Washington ha firmato nel 1996 ma mai ratificato, mentre Mosca l’ha ratificato nel 2000.

Su questo sfondo, l’annunciato ritiro degli Stati uniti dal Trattato Open Skies costituisce una ulteriore mossa di una vera e propria strategia della tensione. Poiché aderiscono al Trattato 23 paesi europei della Nato, tra cui l’Italia, il ritiro degli Stati uniti, accrescendo la tensione con la Russia, coinvolge automaticamente la Nato. È esattamente ciò che vogliono a Washington. In un comunicato congiunto pubblicato ieri, 8 paesi Nato (Belgio, Francia, Germania, Italia, Lussemburgo, Paesi Bassi, Repubblica Ceca, Spagna), più Finlandia e Svezia, esprimono il loro «rincrescimento» per l’intenzione di ritirarsi dal Trattato Cieli Aperti annunciata dal Governo Usa, «anche se condividiamo le sue preoccupazioni circa l’attuazione da parte della Federazione Russa delle clausole del Trattato». Dichiarano comunque che «continueremo a dare attuazione al Trattato Cieli Aperti». Un cauto ma apprezzabile segnale di apertura, mentre l’ombra minacciosa della guerra nucleare copre sempre più i cieli.

Manlio Dinucci

More and more frequently, government officials, political pundits and self-appointed “global health experts” like billionaire Bill Gates have been instructing the public that mass gatherings and any semblance of “normalcy” will not return until a vaccine for the novel coronavirus Covid-19 is created and subsequently distributed to the masses. In recent weeks, it has quickly become apparent that the leading Covid-19 vaccine candidate is the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine being developed by Boston-based Moderna Inc.

Today, Moderna announced that its vaccine candidate, named mRNA-1273, “appeared to produce an immune response in eight people who received it.” Moderna’s response is odd given that the “study” in question is focused on safety and “is actually not designed to measure effectiveness of the vaccine,” according to a report in TIME. Notably, none of the study’s findings on vaccine safety were reported aside from claims it was “generally safe.” It is also worth noting that this “safety-focused” study only began in March and thus, to date, represents only an examination of the vaccine’s effects in the very short term.

Major media outlets in multiple countries ran with the headlines trumpeting that Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine “shows promising early results” and has presented “encouraging early signs” because of its purported ability to produce Covid-19 antibodies in humans. In addition, these media reports failed to raise other simple yet necessary questions such as how a sample size of only eight people can translate into scientific findings of any real significance without further testing involving larger sample sizes. They also failed to note that the study in question is not even finished as a U.S. government press release noted that the findings in question are merely “interim results.” In addition, the study is being led by the U.S.’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), itself headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is a key figure in the U.S. government’s coronavirus response.

Though it is unclear if these “encouraging early signs” will be replicated in future tests of larger samples that are actually designed to test the vaccine’s effectiveness, the news is surely welcome to Moderna, given that their past mRNA vaccines failed to produce hardly any immune response at all, explaining why the company has never brought an mRNA vaccine to market in its entire history as a company.

However, since at least last fall, Moderna has sought to resolve this issue by adding “nanoparticles” to its mRNA vaccine, a modification financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Moderna is a “strategic ally” of DARPA and has received millions from DARPA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation several years prior to the current coronavirus crisis. DARPA’s plans for nanoparticles and nanotechnology and their potentially Orwellian applications were the subject of a recent The Last American Vagabond report.

Thanks to the “interim results” of this new study, Moderna is set to take the lead in the race to gain government approval for a Covid-19 vaccine. Moderna had already pulled ahead of other Covid-19 vaccine candidates in recent weeks, being the first vaccine in the U.S. to go the human trials (after it was allowed to skip animal trials) and also enjoying strong support from the U.S. government. For instance, Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine recently received fast-track approval from the Food and Drug administration (FDA) after receiving the “green light” to proceed to Phase 2 testing prior to the results of Phase 1 being published. Moderna’s president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, recently said the company now expects to begin the final third phase of testing sometime this summer.

In addition to support from the FDA, Moderna has also received considerable U.S. government funding ($438 million) from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division of HHS overseen by HHS’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Robert Kadlec. Moderna has also stated that it is directly collaborating with the U.S. government to bring its vaccine candidate to market.

Moderna’s considerable lead has also been the result of backing that it received in January from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which was founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine has also received additional millions from long-time Moderna backer Bill Gates. Gates recently authored an article where he described Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for Covid-19 as the “most exciting” and discussed it at length.

Gates’ affinity for Moderna may owe to the fact that Moderna’s co-founder, MIT’s Robert Langer, is a Gates associate whose lab developed the Gates-funded “quantum dot ‘tattoo’” vaccine identification marker that is “visible using a special smartphone camera app and filter” and was described by Science Alert as “a low-risk tracking system.” Another Langer-Gates partnership is a “birth control microchip” inserted to the body that releases contraceptives and can be turned on and off wirelessly.

Gene Editing

With Moderna taking a firm lead relative to the other Covid-19 vaccine hopefuls, it is worth taking a closer look at the man who has overseen its development, Moderna’s current Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tal Zaks. Zaks who began his career at GlaxoSmithKline, oversees “preclinical development, clinical development and regulatory affairs” for Moderna and all of its subsidiaries.

In a 2017 TED Talk, two years after joining Moderna, Dr. Zaks spoke at length about how he views mRNA vaccines and their modality, including those he produces at Moderna. In a speech entitled “The disease-eradicating potential of gene editing,” Dr. Zaks’ description of Moderna’s mRNA products as, making permanent edits to human genes, clashes with  claims that the genetic material in mRNA vaccines “degrade” over time and do not permanently alter human genetics like DNA vaccines.

Beginning his talk, Zaks states that Moderna and similar companies “are actually hacking the software of life and that it’s changing the way we think of and treat disease.” He describes mRNA as “critical information that determines what a cell will actually do” and then states that, if one could “introduce a line of code or change a line of code” in a person’s genome, that has “profound implications for everything.”

The summary of Zaks’ talk encapsulates his view as the following simple question:

“If our cells are the hardware and our genetic material the operating system, what if we could change a few lines of code?”

It also says that Zaks considers the future of “personalized medicine” to be “gene-editing vaccines tailored to each patient’s immune system.”

The Ted Talk recommended after viewing Zaks’ speech on the Ted Talk website notably broaches a key point that Zaks overlooks, namely that gene-editing can “change an entire species – forever.”

Zaks’ statements are noteworthy and concerning for several reasons, including the fact that DARPA — Moderna’s “strategic ally” — is also openly funding research aimed at “reprogramming genes” and “manipulat[ing] genes or control[ling] gene expression to combat viruses and help human bodies withstand infection” caused by Covid-19.

The DARPA-backed project would use a method that is known to cause severe genetic damage that has actually been shown to aggravate the conditions it was meant to cure.

With such permanent gene-altering technology on the fast-track to become the first Covid-19 vaccine widely available for use, it is deeply concerning that this experimental vaccine with potentially far-reaching consequences is being rammed through thanks to fervent support from both the U.S. government and controversial philanthropists that apparently have little interest in studies examining the mRNA vaccine’s long-term effects.

Given that the stage has already been set for mandatory vaccinations that will be “distributed” throughout the U.S. by the military, now is the time to vigorously raise awareness about the Moderna vaccine’s gravely under-reported ability to “hack the software of life” in ways that could harm public health.

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All images in this article are from The Last American Vagabond

Washington is picking yet another fight with China. On top of the trade war we now have the coronavirus war.  China is accused of being responsible for the virus by withholding information about it.  Some in Washington want to make China pay for the cost of the virus by reneging on US debt held by China in the form of US Treasuries.

What information about coronavirus is China supposed to have withheld? 

That China was doing coronavirus research?  How could this information have been withheld when the US State Department knew about it, the N.I.H. was funding it, and US scientists were complaining about the danger?

That coronavirus was ravaging Wuhan?  How was this information withheld when it was in the media every day?

The United States and its vassals knew about the virus outbreak in China two months prior to its outbreak in the West and did nothing. Through either inaction or intent, the US, Canada, and Europe imported the virus. 

The governments refused to stop flights in and out of China and to prevent cruise ships from welcoming passengers from infected areas. Governments did not want to interfere with profits, which came before public health.  Absolutely nothing was done.  No efforts were made to stockpile protective masks and gear, or to protect nursing homes, or to segregate hospital facilities, or to think outside the box about treatments.  The Swedish government was so unprepared that it did not even try to do anything and just let the virus run its course with devastating effects on the elderly.  [Note: There is much disinformation about Sweden from those who believe the virus is a plot to impose police state controls, such as claims that Sweden has kept the economy open without paying for it in a higher death rate and is gaining “herd immunity” against Covid-19.  These claims are contradicted by news reports.  For example: see this and this.]

In an attempt, more or less successful, to reduce the infection rate so that health facilities were not over-burdened, every other country imposed social distancing rules, bans against crowd events, and workplace closures.  As little was known about the disease and the Chinese mortality rate was believed to be vastly understated, there was no responsible alternative to the so-called “lockdowns.”  It remains to be seen whether the concern for profits has produced a premature reopening that will result in a second wave of rapid infection rates. Many suspect that Big Pharma and Bill Gates want to keep the infection spreading in order to panic us into being vaccinated with an inadequately tested vaccine.

The blame China game is really an effort to cover-up the failure of Western governments to deal with a crisis.

The failure of governments to deal with crisis is ubiquitous.  Just think Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.  If you don’t remember or are too young to have experienced the 2005 hurricane via TV, read Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge (see this).

Everyone knew that the levies protecting New Orleans and surrounding areas were unable to withstand a storm of Katrina’s intensity.  The city was a bowl waiting to fill up with the water that wiped out 80% of New Orleans and 150 miles of Gulf Coast communities.   Evacuation orders came too late.  There were no steps taken to evacuate those without cars and resources. The sick and elderly were left in place.  The few steps that were taken to assemble buses, boats, and first responders located the scanty resources in areas that flooded.  The New Orleans Police Department went AWOL. Some joined in the looting. FEMA was a total failure.  President George W. Bush and Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff were not focused on the unfolding tragedy but on their creation of a terrortist hoax that was used to justify 20 years of US bombing and invasions of Middle Eastern and North African countries. As Bush had deployed Louisiana’s National Guard to Iraq, the Louisiana governor had to borrow guardsmen from other states.

The US Coast Guard, Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries personnel, and private individuals formed the force of first responders. People from Louisiana and from other states showed up on their own time, their own money, and with their own boats and began organizing rescues.  There were many heroic and generous people involved in the rescue. As most of the rescuers were white southerners and most of the rescued were black, it put the lie to the propagandistic picture of the white southern racist. For example, Sara Roberts and her husband Buisson, a descendant of Confederate General P.G.T.Beauregard, organized the Cajun Navy.  Sara enlisted clients of her accounting firm who came up with 35 boats and crews to man them.  One of her clients, Ronny Lovett, paid his construction crews triple wages for their rescue time and spent $200,000 of his money equipping the boats with food, water, medical supplies, chain saws, life jackets, spotlights, ropes and whatever else could contribute to successful rescues. It was individual citizens, not the governments in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Washington that rescued many thousands of people who otherwise would have perished. 

From its founding day, New Orleans was a man-made disaster waiting to happen.  Dredging, canals, watercourse alterations, pipelines and a variety of other environmental damaging mistakes had over the years destroyed the wetlands that protected the city and Gulf Coast. In order to serve private profit, failure was built into the system. The Great Deluge is an external cost of a political and economic system that puts private profits first.

We are undergoing it again at this moment as areas of Michigan are inundated from floods caused by dam failures. One of the dams, the Edenville Dam was a long known public safety hazard . Boyce Hydro, the owner of the dam, repeatedly failed despite the intervention of regulators to address the known risk.  Not only was Boyce Hydro negligent, but also were the government authorities that permitted the known risk to persist unaddressed.  The lost of life and property from the flooding is an external cost imposed on third parties by Boyce Hydro whose agenda was limited to its profits.

It is as difficult to understand the liberal and progressive belief in government as it is to understand the libertarian belief in the efficacy of the invisible hand that allegedly causes private greed to serve the public’s interest.  Humans are a built-in failure machine.  Their time perspective is short term.  They are always surprised by the unintended consequences of their own thoughtless actions and inactions.

Throughout America, state, local, and federal government  epitomize  failure. Trillions of dollars have been poured into weapons systems that cannot be used without destroying the United States along with the rest of the world, while dams fail, bridges collapse, communities deteriorate, and homelessness grows. The government in Washington spends time, effort, and money manufacturing enemies to justify the budget of the military/security complex, while  jobs and the US economy are offshored, the environment is degraded, and health care needs go unaddressed.   The US rivals third world countries in terms of the percentage of its population that has no savings, no access to health care, and no prospects for advancement in life.   

But we can blow up the world several times over and make mindless interventions in the natural environment that multiply the destructive power of storms, heavy rains, and other natural phenomena.

Another election approaches and yet again there is no acknowledgement of the real problems our country faces or any interest in discussing what to do about them. America and the Western World in general are simply going to drown in their unaddressed problems just as New Orleans drowned in Hurricane Katrina.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Deadzone (2003, Screenplay Stephen King, Jeffrey Boam): When Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) awakens from a coma caused by a car accident, he finds that years have passed, and he now has psychic abilities. Heartbroken that his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) has moved on with her life, Johnny also must contend with his unsettling powers, which allow him to see a person’s future with a mere touch.

Storyline

While at a school science fair, Johnny gets a disturbing vision of a group of children getting extremely ill. Johnny persuades Walt to quarantine the building and eventually the children begin to get sick. Johnny realizes that without his help the children will die, including JJ. With the assistance of Rev. Purdy, Johnny must help Walt and the local health inspector, Jim Pratt, try to identify as well as find the source of the mysterious virus before it kills off the entire town.

This is a clip summarizing a 2003 episode of a TV show called Dead Zone, the episode name is plague. During the episode, someone takes a flight in from China into the US and they come down with an unknown virus. After identifying the virus as a SARS related Coronavirus, one doctor figures out that they can stop the Coronavirus dead in its tracks using a malaria drug called Chloroquine. The writers have claimed that the information and research used to make this episode came directly from the CDC in 2003. Did the CDC know something in 2003 that they are not telling us now?

Watch below a video clip from the TV series Dead Zone:

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US President Donald Trump issued new threats against Venezuela on Wednesday.

“We’ve got it [Venezuela] surrounded, it’s surrounded at a level that nobody even knows but they know. We are watching to see what happens,” he warned during a conference call with Hispanic leaders.

The president’s remarks come amid escalating tensions over Iranian fuel shipments to Venezuela.

Five Iranian tankers are en route to the South American country carrying at least US $45.5 million in gasoline and other products. According to maritime tracking data, the closest vessel, Fortune, is currently three days from port.

Washington is mulling unilateral sanctions aimed at halting the shipments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Last month, Trump ordered the mobilization of US naval assets to the Caribbean in an “anti-drug” operation targeting Venezuela described as one of the largest military deployments in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama. The US leader had previously threatened Venezuela with a naval blockade.

Caracas and Tehran have rejected US threats against the tankers, which are estimated to contain enough fuel to supply Venezuela for around 50 days.

On Wednesday, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez revealed that naval and air assets would escort the Iranian vessels upon entering Venezuela’s territorial waters.

Venezuela is currently suffering widespread gasoline shortages, with domestic production hamstrung by US sanctions prohibiting the import of vital diluents and spare parts needed to reactivate the country’s refining capacity.

Since 2017, the Trump administration has targeted Venezuela with crushing economic sanctions, including an oil embargo blocking fuel exports to the Caribbean country as well as a blanket ban on dealings with Venezuelan state entities.

In recent months, the US Treasury Department has imposed secondary sanctions on two affiliates of Russian energy giant Rosneft, which had been carrying up to 60 percent of Venezuela’s crude output in addition to supplying diesel and gasoline.

Following the departure of Rosneft, Tehran has stepped in to provide fuel as well as technical assistance in repairing Venezuela’s largest refinery, which has been offline since last year’s nationwide blackouts. The Trump administration has likewise threatened Iran over its technical air corridor to Venezuela, calling on other countries to suspend Iranian overflight rights.

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Featured image: Venezuelan ships and airplanes will escort the Iranian tankers once they enter Venezuelan waters. (Military Watch Magazine)

It’s unimportant whether US nukes will eventually be deployed to Poland or not since the very fact that this scenario is seriously being discussed by both American and Russian diplomats proves that Warsaw trumps Berlin for Washington and that Poland is in the process of replacing Germany as the US’ preferred European partner.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), happily amplified by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States which carries its World News, continues to pump out its regular dreck about the alleged economic chaos in Russia and the imagined miserable state of the Russian people.

As long as the tone remains restrained and dignified, literally any slander will be swallowed by the credulous and every foul scandal and shame can be confidently covered up.

None of this would have surprised the late, great George Orwell. It is fashionable these days to endlessly trot him out as a zombie (dead but alleged to be living – so that he cannot set the record straight himself) critic of Russia and all the other global news outlets outside the control of the New York and London plutocracies. And it is certainly true, that Orwell, whose hatred and fear of communism was very real, served before his death as an informer to MI-5, British domestic security.

But it was not the Soviet Union, Stalin’s show trials or his experiences with the Trotskyite POUM group in Barcelona and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War that “made Orwell Orwell” as the Anglo-America Conventional Wisdom Narrative has it. It was his visceral loathing of the British Empire – compounded during World War II by his work for the BBC which he eventually gave up in disgust.

And it was his BBC experiences that gave Orwell the model for his unforgettable Ministry of Truth in his great classic “1984.”

George Orwell had worked in one of the greatest of all world centers of Fake News. And he knew it.

More profoundly, the great secret of George Orwell’s life has been hiding in plain sight for 70 years since he died. Orwell was in the service of the British Empire during his years in Burma, modern Myanmar. And as a fundamentally decent man, he was so disgusted by what he had done that he spent the rest of his life not just atoning but slowly and willfully committing suicide before his heartbreakingly premature death while still in his 40s.

The first important breakthrough in this fundamental reassessment of Orwell comes from one of the best books on him. “Finding George Orwell in Burma” was published in 2005 and written by “Emma Larkin”, a pseudonym for an outstanding American journalist in Asia whose identity I have long suspected to be an old friend and deeply respected colleague, and whose continued anonymity I respect.But amid all their countless fiascoes and failures in every other field (including the highest recorded per capita death rate from COVID-19 in Europe, and one of the highest in the world) the British remain world leaders at managing global Fake News.

“Larkin” took the trouble to travel widely in Burma during its repressive military dictatorship and her superb research reveals crucial truths about Orwell. According to his own writings and his deeply autobiographical novel “Burmese Days” Orwell loathed all his time as a British colonial policeman in Burma, modern Myanmar. The impression he systematically gives in that novel and in his classic essay “Shooting an Elephant” is of a bitterly lonely, alienated, deeply unhappy man, despised and even loathed by his fellow British colonialists throughout society and a ludicrous failure at his job.

This was not, however, the reality that “Larkin” uncovered. All surviving witnesses agreed that Orwell – Eric Blair as he then still was – remained held in high regard during his years in the colonial police service. He was a senior and efficient officer. Indeed it was precisely his knowledge of crime, vice, murder and the general underside of human society during his police colonial service while still in his 20s that gave him the street smarts, experience, and moral authority to see through all the countless lies of right and left, of American capitalists and British imperialists as well as European totalitarians for the rest of his life.

The second revelation to throw light on what Orwell had to do in those years comes from one of the most famous and horrifying scenes in “1984.” Indeed, almost nothing even in the memoirs of Nazi death camp survivors has anything like it: That is the scene where “O’Brien”, the secret police officer tortures the “hero” (if he can be called that) Winston Smith by locking his face to a cage in which a starving rat is ready to pounce and devour him if it is opened.

I remember thinking, when I was first exposed to the power of “1984” at my outstanding Northern Irish school, “What kind of mind could invent something as horrific as that?”) The answer was so obvious that I like everyone else missed it entirely.

Orwell did not “invent” or “come up” with the idea as a fictional plot device: It was just a routine interrogation technique used by the British colonial police in Burma, modern Myanmar. Orwell never “brilliantly” invented such a diabolical technique of torture as a literary device. He did not have to imagine it. It was routinely employed by himself and his colleagues. That was how and why the British Empire worked so well for so long. They knew what they were doing. And what they did was not nice at all.

A final step in my enlightenment about Orwell, whose writings I have revered all my life – and still do – was provided by our alarmingly brilliant elder daughter about a decade ago when she too was given “1984” to read as part of her school curriculum. Discussing it with her one day, I made some casual obvious remark that Orwell was in the novel as Winston Smith.

My American-raised teenager then naturally corrected me. “No, Dad, ” she said. “Orwell isn’t Winston, or he’s not just Winston. He’s O’Brien too. O’Brien actually likes Winston. He doesn’t want to torture him. He even admires him. But he does it because it’s his duty.”

She was right, of course.

But how could Orwell the great enemy of tyranny, lies and torture so identify with and understand so well the torturer? It was because he himself had been one.

“Emma Larkin’s” great book brings out that Orwell as a senior colonial police officer in the 1920s was a leading figure in a ruthless war waged by the British imperial authorities against drug and human trafficking crime cartels every bit as vicious and ruthless as those in modern Ukraine, Columbia and Mexico today. It was a “war on terror” where anything and everything was permitted to “get the job done.”

The young Eric Blair was so disgusted by the experience that when he returned home he abandoned the respectable middle class life style he had always enjoyed and became, not just an idealistic socialist as many in those days did, but a penniless, starving tramp. He even abandoned his name and very identity. He suffered a radical personality collapse: He killed Eric Blair. He became George Orwell.

Orwell’s early famous book “Down and Out in London and Paris” is a testament to how much he literally tortured and humiliated himself in those first years back from Burma. And for the rest of his life.

He ate miserably badly, was skinny and ravaged by tuberculosis and other health problems, smoked heavily and denied himself any decent medical care. His appearance was always abominable. His friend, the writer Malcolm Muggeridge speculated that Orwell wanted to remake himself as a caricature of a tramp.

The truth clearly was that Orwell never forgave himself for what he did as a young agent of empire in Burma. Even his literally suicidal decision to go to the most primitive, cold, wet and poverty-stricken corner of creation in a remote island off Scotland to finish “1984” in isolation before he died was consistent with the merciless punishments he had inflicted on himself all his life since leaving Burma.

The conclusion is clear: For all the intensity of George Orwell’s experiences in Spain, his passion for truth and integrity, his hatred of the abuse of power did not originate from his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. They all flowed directly from his own actions as an agent of the British Empire in Burma in the 1920s: Just as his creation of the Ministry of Truth flowed directly from his experience of working in the Belly of the Beast of the BBC in the early 1940s.

George Orwell spent more than 20 years slowly committing suicide because of the crimes he committed for the British Empire in Burma. We can therefore have no doubt what his horror and disgust would be at what the CIA did under President George W. Bush in its “Global War on Terror.” Also, Orwell would identify at once and without hesitation the real fake news flowing out of New York, Atlanta, Washington and London today, just as he did in the 1930s and 1940s.

Let us therefore reclaim and embrace The Real George Orwell: The cause of fighting to prevent a Third World War depends on it.

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During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.

The United States Department of Labor reported on Thursday that more than 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, bringing the total number of new claims to 38.6 million since mid-March, when social distancing measures and statewide stay-at-home orders were first implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Even with the push by the Trump administration since then to reopen the economy and the easing of lockdown orders in all 50 states—despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths—the US marked its ninth straight week in which more than 2 million workers filed for unemployment. While this is down from the peak at the end of March when 6.8 million applied for unemployment insurance, it still dwarfs the worst weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.

It is expected that the official unemployment rate for May, which is to be reported by the federal government in the first week of June, will approach 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent last month. This is a significant undercount, with millions of unemployed immigrants unable to apply for benefits, and many other workers who are not currently looking for work and therefore are not counted as unemployed.

Fortune magazine estimates that real unemployment has already hit 22.5 percent, which is nearing the peak of unemployment reached during the Great Depression in 1933, when the rate rose above 25 percent. Millions more are expected to apply in the coming weeks, pushing the numbers beyond those seen during the country’s worst economic crisis.

But even these figures do not capture the extent of the crisis now unfolding across the country. Millions have been blocked for weeks from applying for unemployment compensation because of antiquated computer systems, and a significant share of those who have applied have been denied any payments. On top of this there are significant delays in processing applications in multiple states, including Indiana, Missouri, Wyoming and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Florida, which has some of the most stringent restrictions, has refused to extend its paltry three-month limit on payments for the few who manage to qualify.

Sparked by the pandemic, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s is already having a devastating impact on the millions who have seen their jobs suddenly disappear, while millions more will see wages, benefits and hours dramatically curtailed whenever they are able to return to work. Optimistic projections that the US economy would quickly bounce back once stay-at-home orders were lifted are now becoming much gloomier.

A University of Chicago analysis from earlier this month projects that 42 percent of lost jobs will be permanently eliminated. At the current record number, this will mean a destruction of 16.2 million jobs, nearly double the number of jobs which were lost during the Great Recession just over a decade ago.

“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and one of the co-authors of the study, told the New York Times.

A survey by the Census Bureau carried out at the end of April and beginning of this month found that 47 percent of adults had lost employment since March 13 or had someone in their household do so, and 39 percent expected that they or someone else in the home would lose their job in the next month. Nearly 11 percent reported that they had not paid their rent or mortgage on time and more than 21 percent had slight or no confidence that they would do so next month.

With millions missing their rent or mortgage payments, tens of thousands of families will be thrown out on the street in the coming weeks and months, leading to a dramatic rise in homelessness even as the coronavirus continues to spread. While many states took steps in March to place a moratorium on evictions, and eviction notices were unable to be filed due to court closures, those measures are now expiring and courts are reopening.

The Oklahoma County Sheriff announced Tuesday via their Twitter page that the department would resume enforcing evictions on May 26. Nearly 300 eviction cases were filed in Oklahoma City between Monday and Tuesday. This process is being repeated in cities and counties across the country. Evictions are also set to resume in Texas next week, where many families were ineligible for aid due to the undocumented status of one or another parent. The CARES Act provision, which blocks evictions from properties with federally subsidized mortgages, expires on July 25; in Texas this only accounts for one-third of homes.

Meanwhile, another wave of layoffs and furloughs is expected by the Congressional Budget Office at the end of June, when the multi-billion-dollar Payment Protection Program (PPP) expires. Sold as a bailout which would help small businesses keep workers on their payroll in the course of necessary shutdowns, the PPP was in fact a boondoggle for large corporations, their subsidiaries and those with connections to the Trump administration. Many small business owners have not seen any aid, and many do not qualify for loan forgiveness.

Amid historic levels of social misery in the working class, times have never been better for those at the heights of society, with America’s billionaires adding $434 billion to their total net worth since state lockdowns began. Financial markets have soared, underwritten by $80 billion per day from the Federal Reserve.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.

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