Global Research

Video: Caliphate in Miniature: Rift Between Turkey and Al-Qaeda in Idlib

By South Front, May 20, 2020

The escalated tensions even led to a military incident on the M4 highway, near the town of Nayrab, when the Turkish Army and militant groups directly controlled by Ankara clashed with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its supporters. At least 11 members and supporters of the al-Qaeda-linked group were killed by live fire from Turkish troops and strikes by Turkish unmanned combat aerial vehicles.

China Updates Its ‘Art of Hybrid War’

By Pepe Escobar, May 20, 2020

Unrestricted Warfare was essentially the PLA’s manual for asymmetric warfare: an updating of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. At the time of original publication, with China still a long way from its current geopolitical and geo-economic clout, the book was conceived as laying out a defensive approach, far from the sensationalist “destroy America” added to the title for US publication in 2004.

Washington’s Tell Tale of Iranian-Al Qaeda Alliance Based on Questionably Sourced Book ‘The Exile’

By Gareth Porter, May 20, 2020

The U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January touched off a new wave of disinformation about the top Iranian major general, with Trump administration allies branding him a global terrorist while painting Iran as the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Much of the propaganda about Soleimani related to his alleged responsibility for the killing of American troops in Iraq, along with Iran’s role in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

The Case of General Michael Flynn: The Use of Law as a Political Weapon

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, May 20, 2020

US Department of Justice (DOJ) documents that the department was forced to turn over to General Michael Flynn’s attorney reveal that the FBI found no wrongdoing by Flynn in its investigation of him and recommended the investigation be closed.  Corrupt FBI official Peter Strzok, a leader of the anti-Trumb cabal in the FBI, intervened. Strzok convinced the official managing the investigation not to close the case as it was the wishes of the “7th floor” (top FBI officials) to keep the case open. In the absence of evidence against Flynn, released FBI documents prove that the FBI leadership decided to frame General Flynn. The documents reveal that the FBI’s plan is “to get him (Flynn) to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired. . . . we should try to frame them in a way we want.”  General Flynn was forced to incriminate himself with a guilty plea. Otherwise, the corrupt DOJ prosecutors threatened to indict Flynn’s son. 

Is the Lockdown the Greatest Policy Disaster in U.S. History?

By Mike Whitney, May 19, 2020

Donald Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people”, but it’s much worse than that. The media is a national security threat. Just look at the way they’ve handled the coronavirus. The hysterical 24-7 coverage has people so terrified they’ve locked themselves in their homes inflicting catastrophic damage on the economy. That disaster never would’ve taken place if the media hadn’t focused all their energy on scaring people to death. Now the damage is done, millions of people have lost their jobs, tens of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses are facing bankruptcy, and the world’s biggest economy has been reduced to a smoldering wastelands. And what was gained? Nothing.

Another U.S Bank Bailout Under Cover of a Virus

By Ellen Brown, May 19, 2020

Many economists in the US and Europe argued that the next time the banks failed, they should be nationalized – taken over by the government as public utilities. But that opportunity was lost when, in September 2019 and again in March 2020, Wall Street banks were quietly bailed out from a liquidity crisis in the repo market that could otherwise have bankrupted them. There was no bail-in of private funds, no heated congressional debate, and no public vote. It was all done unilaterally by unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.

The Warp Speed Push for Coronavirus Vaccines

By F. William Engdahl, May 19, 2020

The US White House has appointed a coronavirus “Vaccine Czar” from Big Pharma to oversee something dubbed Operation Warp Speed. The goal is to create and produce 300 million doses of a new vaccine to supposedly immunize the entire US population by year-end against COVID-19. To be sure that Big Pharma companies give their all to the medical Manhattan Project, they have been fully indemnified by the US government against liabilities should vaccine recipients die or develop serious disease as a result of the rushed vaccine. The FDA and NIH have waived standard pre-testing on animals in the situation. The US military, according to recent remarks by the US President, is being trained to administer the yet-to-be unveiled vaccine in record time. Surely nothing could go wrong here?

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Apache helicopters of the US occupation forces flew low Sunday morning, according to residents of the Adla village, in the Shaddadi countryside, south of Hasaka, as they dropped ‘thermal balloons’, an incendiary weapon, causing the wheat fields to explode into flames while the hot dry winds fanned the raging fire.

After delivering their fiery pay-load, the helicopters flew close to homes in an aggressive manner, which caused residents and especially small children to fear for their lives.  The military maneuver was delivering a clear message: don’t sell your wheat to the Syrian government. Head of Hasaka Agricultural Directorate Rajab Salameh said in a statement to SANA that several fires have broken out in agricultural fields in Tal Tamer countryside, as well.

The US illegal bases in Syria fly Apache helicopters.  US President Trump portrays himself as a champion of the American Christians, and he has millions of loyal supporters among the Christian churches across the US.  However, the Christian Bible states in Deuteronomy 20:19 that it is a sin against God to destroy food or food crops even during times of war.

Bread is the most important staple in Syria, and two weeks into the annual wheat harvest, Damascus is keen on securing its supply of grain, while beset by the global pandemic.  On May 4, President Assad said in a meeting with his COVID-19 team that “our most difficult internal challenge is securing basic goods, especially foodstuffs.”

Since the beginning of the US-NATO attack on Syria in 2011, wheat production has fallen from an average of 4.1 million tons per year to just 2.2 million tons in 2019. Syria had been a wheat importer but switched to being an exporter of grain in the 1990s.

According to the UN, Syria was hit by acute food insecurity in 2019, with approximately 6.5 million people considered food insecure.

The northern provinces of Hasakah, Raqqa, Aleppo, and Deir e-Zor, in addition to Hama in central Syria, accounting for 96% of total national wheat production. Using fire as a weapon of war, 85,000 hectares of grain were burnt in 2019, and the Syrian government was forced to import 2.7 million tons to cover the losses. Destroying the Syrian agriculture has been a war strategy used by various enemies of Syria, and has resulted in a mass migration of residents in the villages to Germany, by way of Greece, via the smuggler-boats in Turkey.

The Syrian ‘breadbasket’, the northeastern region, is now controlled by the Kurdish-dominated Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AA). In 2019, almost half of the country’s domestic wheat production was produced within the AA territory, and they managed to buy it from farmers at a price lower than offered by Damascus, which suggests that Damascus may be denied the current harvest.

On May 9, Raqqa began its wheat harvest and photos of fires spread rapidly across various social media.  Competition between the AA and Damascus means the Syrian government will be forced to import grains to meet the domestic demand of about 4.3 million tons.

Youssef Qassem, the General Director of the Syrian Grain Establishment, said 200,000 tons of wheat from Russia has been ordered, and a ship carrying 26,000 tons of wheat coming from Russia had arrived at the port of Tartus, with further shipments to arrive. He added that the wheat is immediately moved from the port to the mills, and said “Preparations are underway to receive the wheat when the harvest season begins next month where 49 centers have been equipped to facilitate the reception of wheat and pay the farmers,” while pointing out that the reopening of the Aleppo-Damascus road has contributed greatly to reducing the costs of transporting wheat.

The AA has talked repeatedly to the Syrian government in Damascus, concerning the future of the northeast, but has not resolved their differences. Ilham Ahmed, co-president of the Executive Council of AA, has been negotiating with Damascus and she is also working closely with the US government representatives in Syria.  Ilham Ahmed is rumored to be the one who gave the idea recently for the US military to target a specific farm in Hasaka, after she had met with Syrian Arab tribal leaders, and found some opposition to selling to the AA.

The armed wing of the AA is the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish YPG militia, who partnered with the US occupation forces in the fight against ISIS, which ended in 2017. Even though Trump allowed President Erdogan of Turkey to invade Syria, the US military is still working in support of the SDF and AA on many levels. The Kurds and their US ally hold the wheat as a trump card in ongoing negotiations.

“Assad needs access to cereal crops in northeast Syria to prevent a bread crisis in the areas of western Syria that he controls,” Syria analyst Nicholas Heras said. “Wheat is a weapon of great power in this next phase of the Syrian conflict,” said Heras, and he added that the Kurds and their US ally “have a significant stockpile of this wheat weapon. It can be used to apply pressure on the (Syrian government), and on Russia, to force concessions in the UN-led diplomatic process.”

In June 2019, the AA stopped wheat from going to territory controlled by the Syrian government. Three provinces which account for nearly 70 percent of the country’s wheat production lie mostly in the hands of the SDF.  “We will not allow any grain of wheat to get out” this year (2019), Barodo said in an interview in Qamishli city. However, the plan bowed to pressure from farmers, who demanded to be able to sell to the Syrian government at a better price than the AA was paying.  The Syrian government operates three wheat collection centers in Hasaka, which allows farmers the choice to sell to the ‘Kurdish authorities’, or the Syrian government.

The Kurds are a minority in Syria, and even in the northeastern region, they are a minority, despite being in ‘control’. The non-Kurdish population is a mix of Syrian Arabs, Syrian Christians, Syrian Armenians and many of them have suffered under the Kurdish administration, which saw non-Kurds being ethnically cleansed, as they lost homes, shops, and farms at the hands of the SDF.

Syria was before 2011, one of the world’s most important agricultural sources of hard durum wheat.  Italy, famous for its pasta, bought hard durum wheat from Syria for decades. During the occupation of Reqaa by ISIS, they shipped by truckloads the wheat stores, which amounted to the equivalent of 8 years of Syrian wheat.  ISIS turned to their trusted business partner, President Erdogan of Turkey, and Erdogan bought the wheat from them.  Erdogan sold the stolen Syrian wheat to Europe and Italy once again had its favorite Syrian wheat running through its industrial pasta machines. The Italians have eaten pasta made of the stolen Syrian wheat.  Perhaps it has left a bitter taste in their mouths.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

The Syrian Ambassador to Russia slammed the US’ sanctions against his country as a form of medical terrorism that prevents it from importing much-needed “medicines, and medical goods, and other means to combat [COVID-19]”, which strongly suggests that America wants more Syrians to die in World War C out of the mistaken belief that this dark scenario would facilitate Washington’s failed geostrategic agenda.

In the second half of April and early May, the Syrian province of Idlib became the epicenter of a military political drama developing between Turkish forces and their al-Qaeda-linked allies.

The escalated tensions even led to a military incident on the M4 highway, near the town of Nayrab, when the Turkish Army and militant groups directly controlled by Ankara clashed with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its supporters. At least 11 members and supporters of the al-Qaeda-linked group were killed by live fire from Turkish troops and strikes by Turkish unmanned combat aerial vehicles.

This incident happened during a failed attempt to remove the camp of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham supporters, which had been established to block the highway and prevent the movement of joint Russian-Turkish patrols in the area. The creation of a security zone along the M4 highway, the withdrawal of radical militant groups from the zone and joint patrols in the area were among the key provisions of the Idlib ceasefire deal reached by the Turkish and Russian presidents in Moscow on March 5. Since the start of the implementation of the deal, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkistan Islamic Party and other radical groups have been working to sabotage them. Seven joint Russian-Turkish patrols took place in a small area between Saraqib and Nayrab, as the situation in southeastern Idlib was moving closer to conditions in which the resumption of full-scale open military hostilities there would become inevitable. The number of ceasefire violations increased and both the Syrian Army and Idlib radicals were blaming each other for the apparent collapse of the de-escalation deal.

However, by May 5, the situation had changed. The protest camp near Nayrab disappeared. The Russian Military Police and the Turkish Army held their first extended joint patrol along the M4 highway passing the location of the former camp. On May 7, the sides held their second extended patrol, which became the longest one since the signing of the ceasefire deal in March. For the first time, the Russian Military Police reached the eastern entrance to the town of Ariha. These extended patrols became an important breakthrough in Turkish-Russian cooperation over the situation in southeastern Idlib despite the fact that the security zone agreement was still far from its full implementation.

The interesting fact is that this step forward was not due to Ankara’s anti-terrorist efforts in Greater Idlib, but came as a result of a deal reached by Turkey and the leadership of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The terrorist group de-blocked the M4 near Nayrab. In turn, Turkey reportedly agreed not to oppose Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s decision to open a commercial crossing between the militant-held part of Idlib in western Aleppo near Maaret Elnaasan. Earlier, Ankara and militant groups directly controlled by it had sabotaged this initiative. Turkey seeks to control all economic and social life in northwestern Syria. Meanwhile, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham sees the commercial activity between Greater Idlib and the rest of Syria as an important source of income through various fees and trafficking of goods.

Neither Turkey nor Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are interested in military operations by Syria, Russia and Iran in Idlib. Therefore, in face of the threat of the new Syrian Army advance and the resumption of the Russian air bombing campaign, they reached a tactical agreement to prevent this scenario. However, this did not annihilate their mid- and long-term contradictions.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham enjoys the direct protection of the Turkish Armed Forces and indirectly receives financial support from Ankara. But the group is too large and too influential to be an ordinary Turkish puppet. In fact, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leadership and its close allies are working to turn Greater Idlib into their own ISIS-style emirate. While publicly they make loud statements about the goals of the so-called Syrian revolution and the need to ‘liberate’ Damascus from the ‘bloody Assad regime’, in fact, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has long since abandoned any plans of major expansion through direct attacks on the Syrian Army. They have been tightening their military, security and political grip over the militant-held part of Greater Idlib. If the situation develops in this direction, Idlib will have every chance of becoming a foothold for international terrorist groups operating all around the world, primarily in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. A network of training camps, weapon trafficking and financial flows for terrorist organizations recruiting new members and planning terrorist operations will all contribute to the growing influence and wealth of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Some global and regional players would be happy to use this opportunity to pursue their own geopolitical goals.

Turkey, which controls the border and is a key regional player keeping ties with Idlib militant groups, may become one of the main beneficiaries of this scenario and the Erdogan government could have agreed on this if the world were the same as it was back in 2011. However it is not.

The weakening of US influence in the Middle East, the shrinking global economy, the fragmentation of global markets and the collapse of the remote chance of Turkey joining the European Union as well as Turkey’s own diplomatic and political pretensions towards regional leadership turned Moscow into its key economic, diplomatic and security partner. Therefore, Ankara is forced to consult the interests of Moscow in its policy because without the military technological, diplomatic and economic cooperation with Russia Turkey has no chances to turn its own geopolitical ambitions into reality.

The current agreement between Turkey and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is rather a result of the tactical convergence of interests rather than a solid alliance. Even if they are able to prevent the resumption of the Syrian Army advance on Idlib, the tensions between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Turkey will increase because they have different strategic interests. It is likely that within the next half year, Ankara will increase pressure on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) and their allies in order to undermine their influence and bring most of the political, administrative and military influence in the Greater Idlib region to ethnic Turks and representatives of groups directly controlled by Ankara.

All of this would be done under the pretext of restoring peace and stability as well as securing democratic elections to form the ‘legitimate’ local authorities. In the event of success, Turkey will consolidate control over northwestern Syria and form a controlled group of persons that will represent the militant-held area in negotiations with the Damascus government. This group must have no links to radicals. The goals of these possible negotiations are to reach a peace agreement and guarantee a wide autonomy for the militant-held part of northwestern Syria in the framework of the comprehensive agreement between Ankara and Damascus. The characteristics of this autonomy will depend on the military political situation in the country at that moment. However there is no doubt that control of the Syrian-Turkish border will be among the key points of contradictions.

On the other hand, Ankara and Damascus may reach no comprehensive agreement because of the complicated military political situation in Syria. This could happen if the security situation deteriorates in the government-controlled part of Syria and Damascus starts losing control over particular regions; for example, due to the increasing activity of ISIS. In these conditions, Ankara will return to the idea of a direct annexation of the northwestern part of Syria. It will justify this move by the need to protect civilians and claiming that Damascus is not able to effectively battle the international terrorism.

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In 2005, Israel virtually installed Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian president and PLO chairman.

A rigged election with no legitimacy assured it. His mandate is serving as Israel’s enforcer.

He’s kept in power as long as remaining submissive to Israeli interests at the expense of long-suffering Palestinians whose fundamental rights he long ago abandoned for special benefits afforded him by the Jewish state.

Like all politicians, ignore his rhetoric. Follow his actions alone.

His policies never deviated from collaborating with the enemy. A former aide called him the “sultan of Ramallah,” describing him as thin-skinned and vengeful, tolerating no opposition.

As long as he knows who’s boss, he’s allowed to continue as a figurehead president, a puppet of Israeli interests.

Throughout his tenure, Israel expanded illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land exponentially with no opposition from Abbas and his inner circle — other than meaningless rhetoric.

It’s hard recalling how many times he vowed no longer to go along with Israel/Palestinian agreements — actions never following rhetoric.

Time and again, he says one thing and does another, a duplicitous figure since involvement in the Oslo Accords.

Virtually all PLO agreements with Israel since Oslo in September 1993 benefitted the Jewish state exclusively at the expense of fundamental Palestinian rights – over a generation of betrayal by PLO officials.

Chances for turning a new page ahead are virtually nil. Abbas and other key PLO officials have much to lose by going this way – including their lives.

In November, he’ll be age-85. According to Israel’s Hebrew-language Israel Today broadsheet, its most widely read, “he won’t be in office much longer,” his replacement unclear.

PA intelligence chief Majid Faraq may be his most likely successor, an Israeli collaborator like Abbas.

On Tuesday, once again he disingenuously vowed to renounce all agreements with Israel, an empty threat like countless times before.

According to the Palestinian Wafa news agency, he announced his empty intention at a Ramallah emergency session to discuss relations with Israel, reportedly saying:

“The Palestine Liberation Organization and the state of Palestine are absolved, as of today, of all the agreements and understandings with the American and Israeli governments and of all the obligations based on these understandings and agreements, including the security ones,” adding:

“The Israeli occupation authority, as of today, has to shoulder all responsibilities and obligations in front of the international community as an occupying power over the territory of the occupied state of Palestine.”

If he meant the above and followed through with policy changes, his remaining time as puppet president would likely be greatly shortened.

Perhaps his tenure would end in a way similar to Yasser Arafat’s elimination by Ariel Sharon in November 2004 — death at age-75 in a Paris hospital from polonium poisoning.

Analysis of his clothing, other personal belongings, even his toothbrush, showed traces of the deadly poison.

According to Medical News Today.com:

“Polonium-210 is a rare radioactive metal discovered by Marie Curie in the late 19th century.”

“If polonium-210 enters the body, through inhalation, swallowing, broken skin, the results can be fatal.”

“By mass, polonium-210 is one of the deadliest toxins, around 250 billion times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide.”

It’s not how Abbas wants his tenure to end, nor a similar fate — why he’ll continue serving as Israel’s enforcer as long as remaining in office.

Collaborating with Israel kept him as Palestinian puppet leader for over 15 years.

He won’t risk leaving office horizontally by disobeying its authorities.

In remarks broadcast by Palestinian television, he left himself wiggle room by saying he’s willing to negotiate an end of conflict based on a two-state solution.

Long ago it was possible, no longer, a one-state solution for all its people the only viable option because Israel virtually controls the Occupied Territories in their entirety.

If Israel annexes unlawful settlements, the Jordan Valley, and northern Dead Sea (around 30% of the West Bank) as Netanyahu vowed, it’ll drive a final stake into the heart of two-state discussion.

With or without annexation, the notion of two states is pure fantasy, a colossal hoax like decades no-peace/peace plans — Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” the most outrageously unacceptable of all, why it was dead before arrival.

Israeli control of historic Palestine won’t change through diplomacy. Only sustained longterm resistance is a viable option.

People power is the only chance for Palestinian liberation one day. It’s pure illusion to believe otherwise.

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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.

These are not only rapidly changing times; they are revolutionary times. The people are awakening not only to a new situation of living under Coronavirus, but a situation in which the hot spotlight is shining on the ongoing injustices, incompetence, and uncaring attitude and actions of our government toward the plight of the people at large. This is what makes for revolutionary times.

There are people trying to form alternative parties of varying sorts and kinds. But unless they can unify under a common banner, the further splintering of populist groups and organized actions will never be galvanized sufficiently to exact the change they seek.

Here is a suggestion for that common banner for unity of the People: use the Declaration of Independence. Since our leaders in all branches and levels of government have shown their lack of concern for and even hostility to the People and our needs, especially seen now more obviously (but in fact already their well-established and ongoing modus operandi) in the Coronavirus “stimulus” packages that gave the people next to nothing, we are undoubtedly back to that revolutionary moment that prompted the founding document that declared that the People were no longer servants of the oppressive government holding them under its thumb.

So why not use that same document, update it, and in that way craft a new banner to unify all populist parties? At this moment in time, we cannot allow the disagreements between specific party ideas to dissuade us from uniting together under the name of the People and our rights. We must learn to work together for the same general principles that will result in the fall of the current form of government, and something more akin to the rule of law, of rights, and of justice to found our rule. To that end, I have proffered a re-writing of Jefferson’s famous document, with full honor and respect being given to the original, as a suggestion for a Populist banner that will be a platform of unity, rather than independent and isolated small parties of division. Here is a suggestion for a new Declaration of Independence of the People from the current government, which is now on the border of being the type of tyranny that so concerned the Founders. Just like in their time, so in ours: we need a declaration of the unity of the People against the current oppressive government, which has completely refused to be concerned with the needs or good of the People, and has sided completely with the wealthy at all levels of government. So now to Jefferson, with a twist:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are equal, that as human they have certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted to protect and serve the People, 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 Parties and a 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.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Objects of money and power, evinces a design to reduce the People under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of the People; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present form of government in the United States is a history of repeated ignorance, injuries, and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the People. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world, that show that each or all of the instituted branches of government have either singly or one and all, failed to protect and preserve the good of the People.

They have refused their Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

They have refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, thereby forcing the People to relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

They have bypassed Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. The Representative Houses, for their part, acknowledge and cooperated in this surrender of their Constitutionally designated power, and permitted its usurpation by the Executive Branch.

They have refused for a long time to allow others to be elected by free, open, and verifiable vote, allowing the People in the meantime to be exposed to all the dangers of invasion of their individual and collective economic and social good from within and without the country.

They have endeavoured to prevent the population of these States by non-native others; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to permit their migrations hither, and refusing and obstructing the conditions for safe harbor for those immigrants.

They have obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing their Assent to Laws for limiting Judiciary powers.

They have kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies which influence and even involve themselves by plan in the affairs of the People, all with the Consent of our legislatures, but not the People.

They have affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

They have combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution (Wall Street), and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

• For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
• For abolishing the free System of Laws in neighboring Provinces, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments;

They have abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of their Protection and waging War against us by removing our fair and safe voting to all citizens, and by diminishing our rights.

They are at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the leaders of a civilized nation, by attacking and preparing to attack leaders of other countries as well as their people and geographical territory.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. An Oligarch ruling class whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

We, therefore, the People of the united States of America, in full and unbreakable unity, and appealing to the universal good of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of this United States, solemnly publish and declare, That the People are and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent from such authoritative and unresponsive government; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to this government, and that all political connection between them and the government, is and ought to be totally dissolved until and unless our grievances are met with just response; and that as Free and Independent, the People have full Power to control the way we are governed. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Justice herself, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Some have said that history is cyclical. If that is true, the current times certainly mirror our founding times in many ways. Why not use the truths that the Founders held, and make them once again our own? Why not unite all Populists under some version of a banner such as this? Without it, there can be no unity and no overcoming of the current authoritarian oligarchy under which we now live.

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Dr. Robert Abele is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in Pleasant Hill, California in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of four books: A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment (2009); and eleven chapters for the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Global Justice. He and has written numerous articles and done interviews on politics and U.S. government foreign and domestic policies.

La Fondazione Rockefeller ha presentato il «Piano d’azione nazionale per il controllo del Covid-19», indicando i «passi pragmatici per riaprire i nostri luoghi di lavoro e le nostre comunità». Non si tratta però, come appare dal titolo, semplicemente di misure sanitarie.

Il Piano – cui hanno contribuito alcune delle più prestigiose università (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins e altre) – prefigura un vero e proprio modello sociale gerarchizzato e militarizzato.

Al vertice il «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia, analogo al Consiglio di produzione di guerra che gli Stati uniti crearono nella Seconda guerra mondiale». Esso sarebbe composto da «leader del mondo degli affari, del governo e del mondo accademico» (così elencati in ordine di importanza, con al primo posto non i rappresentanti governativi ma quelli della finanza e dell’economia).

Questo Consiglio supremo avrebbe il potere di decidere produzioni e servizi, con una autorità analoga a quella conferita al presidente degli Stati uniti in tempo di guerra dalla Legge per la produzione della Difesa.

Il Piano prevede che occorre sottoporre al test Covid-19, settimanalmente, 3 milioni di cittadini statunitensi, e che il numero deve essere portato a 30 milioni alla settimana entro sei mesi. L’obiettivo, da realizzare entro un anno, è quello di raggiungere la capacità di sottoporre a test Covid-19 30 milioni di persone al giorno.

Per ciascun test si prevede «un adeguato rimborso a prezzo di mercato di 100 dollari». Occorreranno quindi, con denaro pubblico, «miliardi di dollari al mese».

La Fondazione Rockefeller e i suoi partner finanziari contribuiranno a creare una rete per la fornitura di garanzie di credito e la stipula dei contratti con i fornitori, ossia con le grandi società produttrici di farmaci e attrezzature mediche.

Secondo il Piano, il «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia» viene anche autorizzato a creare un «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia»: una forza speciale (non a caso denominata «Corpo» come quello dei Marines) con un personale di 100-300 mila componenti.

Essi verrebbero reclutati tra i volontari dei Peace Corps e degli Americorps (creati dal governo Usa ufficialmente per «aiutare i paesi in via di sviluppo») e tra i militari della Guardia Nazionale. I componenti del «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia» riceverebbero un salario medio lordo di 40.000 dollari l’anno, per cui viene prevista una spesa statale di 4-12 miliardi di dollari annui.

Il «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia» avrebbe soprattutto il compito di controllare la popolazione con tecniche di tipo militare, attraverso sistemi digitali di tracciamento e identificazione, nei luoghi di lavoro e di studio, nei quartieri residenziali, nei locali pubblici e negli spostamenti. Sistemi di questo tipo – ricorda la Fondazione Rockefeller – vengono realizzati da Apple, Google e Facebook.

Secondo il Piano, le informazioni sulle singole persone, relative al loro stato di salute e alle loro attività, resterebbero riservate «per quanto possibile». Sarebbero però tutte centralizzate in una piattaforma digitale cogestita dallo Stato Federale e da società private. In base ai dati forniti dal «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia», verrebbe deciso di volta in volta quali zone sarebbero sottoposte al lockdown e per quanto tempo.

Questo, in sintesi, è il piano che la Fondazione Rockefeller vuole attuare negli Stati uniti e non solo. Se venisse realizzato anche in parte, si produrrebbe una ulteriore concentrazione del potere economico e politico nelle mani di élite ancora più ristrette, a scapito di una crescente maggioranza che verrebbe privata dei fondamentali diritti democratici.

Operazione condotta in nome del «controllo del Covid-19», il cui tasso di mortalità, secondo i dati ufficiali, è finora inferiore allo 0,03% della popolazione statunitense. Nel Piano della Fondazione Rockefeller il virus viene usato come una vera e propria arma, più pericolosa dello stesso Covid-19.

This week, massive Turkish military support has finally allowed the Government of National Accord to achieve some breakthrough in the battle against the Libyan National Army (LNA).

On May 18, GNA forces and members of Turkish-backed militant groups from Syria supported by Turkish special forces and unmanned combat aerial vehicles captured the Watiya Air Base in the northwestern part of the country. LNA troops urgently retreated from it after several days of clashes in the nearby area. They left behind a UAE-supplied Pantsir-S1, an Mi-35 military helicopter and a notable amount of ammunition. The LNA defense at the air base was undermined by a week-long bombardment campaign by artillery and combat drones of Turkish-backed forces.

Additionally, pro-Turkish sources claimed that drone strikes destroyed another Pantsir-S1 air defense system near Sirte and even a Russian-made Krasukha mobile electronic warfare system. According to Turkish reports, all this equipment is being supplied to the Libyan Army by the UAE. Turkish sources regularly report about successful drone strikes on Libyan convoys with dozens of battle tanks. Some of these ‘military convoys’ later appeared to be trucks filled with water-melons.

In any case, the months of Turkish military efforts, thousands of deployed Syrian militants and hundreds of armoured vehicles supplied to the GNA finally payed off. The Watiya Air Base was an operational base of the LNA used for the advance on the GNA-controlled city of Tripoli. If the LNA does not take back the airbase in the near future, its entire flank southwest of Tripoli may collapse. It will also loose all chances to encircle the city. According to pro-Turkish sources, the next target of the Turkish-led advance on LNA positions will be Tarhuna. Earlier this year, Turkish-backed forces already failed to capture the town. Therefore, they seek to take a revanche.

This will lead to a further escalation of the situation in northern Libya and force the UAE and Egypt, the main backers of the LNA, to increase their support to the army. The UAE-Egypt bloc could bank on at least limited diplomatic support from Russia. Until now, Moscow has preferred to avoid direct involvement in the conflict because it may damage the delicate balance of Russian and Turkish interests. Russian private military contractors that operate in Libya represent the economic interests of some Russian elite groups rather than the foreign policy interests of the Russian state.

Additionally, Turkey, which is supported by Qatar and some NATO member states, has already announced its plans to begin oil and gas exploration off Libya’s coast. Ankara has ceased to hide the true intentions and goals of its military operation in Libya. Thus, the internal political conflict turned into an open confrontation of external actors for the natural resources of Libya.

The interesting fact is that the increasing military activity of Turkey in Libya goes amid the decrease of such actions in Syria. Thousands of Turkish proxies have been sent from Syria to Libya. This limits Ankara’s freedom of operations in the main Syrian hot point – Greater Idlib. In these conditions, Turkish statements about some mysterious battle against terrorism in Idlib look especially questionable. Indeed, in the current conditions, Ankara will be forced to cooperate with Idlib terrorists, first of all al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham even closer to maintain its influence in this part of Syria. The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham plan to create a local quasi-state in the controlled territory and expand its own financial base by tightening the grip on the economic and social life in the region will gain additional momentum.

As to the Turkish government, it seems that in the current difficult economic conditions President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to exchange his “Neo-Ottoman” foreign policy project for expanding in some not so rich regions of Syria for quite tangible additional income from the energy business in Libya.

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In 1999, Qiao Liang, then a senior air force colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, and Wang Xiangsui, another senior colonel, caused a tremendous uproar with the publication of Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America.

Unrestricted Warfare was essentially the PLA’s manual for asymmetric warfare: an updating of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. At the time of original publication, with China still a long way from its current geopolitical and geo-economic clout, the book was conceived as laying out a defensive approach, far from the sensationalist “destroy America” added to the title for US publication in 2004.

Now the book is available in a new edition and Qiao Liang, as a retired general and director of the Council for Research on National Security, has resurfaced in a quite revealing interview originally published in the current edition of the Hong Kong-based magazine Zijing (Bauhinia).

General Qiao is not a Politburo member entitled to dictate official policy. But some analysts I talked with agree that the key points he makes in a personal capacity are quite revealing of PLA thinking. Let’s review some of the highlights.

Dancing with wolves

The bulk of his argument concentrates on the shortcomings of US manufacturing: “How can the US today want to wage war against the biggest manufacturing power in the world while its own industry is hollowed out?”

An example, referring to Covid-19, is the capacity to produce ventilators:

“Out of over 1,400 pieces necessary for a ventilator, over 1,100 must be produced in China, including final assembly. That’s the US problem today. They have state of the art technology, but not the methods and production capacity. So they have to rely on Chinese production.”

General Qiao dismisses the possibility that Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India and other Asian nations may replace China’s cheap workforce:

“Think about which of these countries has more skilled workers than China. What quantity of medium and high level human resources was produced in China in these past 30 years? Which country is educating over 100 million students at secondary and university levels? The energy of all these people is still far from being liberated for China’s economic development.”

He acknowledges US military power even in times of epidemic and economic difficulties is always capable of “interfering directly or indirectly in the Taiwan straits question” and finding an excuse to “block and sanction China and exclude it from the West.” He adds that, “as a producing country, we still cannot satisfy our manufacturing industry with our own resources and rely on our own markets to consume our products.”

In consequence, he argues,

it’s a “good thing” for China to engage in the cause of reunification, “but it’s always a bad thing if it’s done at the wrong time. We can only act at the right time. We cannot allow our generation to commit the sin of interrupting the process of the Chinese nation’s renaissance.”

General Qiao counsels,

“Don’t think that only territorial sovereignty is linked to the fundamental interests of a nation. Other kinds of sovereignty – economic, financial, defense, food, resources, biological and cultural sovereignty – are all linked to the interests and survival of nations and are components of national sovereignty.”

To arrest movement toward Taiwan’s independence,

“apart from war, other options must be taken into consideration. We can think about the means to act in the immense gray zone between war and peace, and we can even think about more particular means, like launching military operations that will not lead to war, but may involve a moderate use of force.”

In a graphic formulation, General Qiao thinks that,

“if we have to dance with the wolves, we should not dance to the rhythm of the US. We should have our own rhythm, and even try to break their rhythm, to minimize its influence. If American power is brandishing its stick, it’s because it has fallen into a trap.”

In a nutshell, for General Qiao,

“China first of all must show proof of strategic determination to solve the Taiwan question, and then strategic patience. Of course, the premise is that we should develop and maintain our strategic force to solve the Taiwan question by force at any moment.”

Gloves are off

Now compare General Qiao’s analysis with the by now obvious geopolitical and geo-economic fact that Beijing will respond tit for tat to any hybrid war tactics deployed by the United States government. The gloves are definitely off.

The gold standard expression has come in a no-holds barred Global Times editorial:

“We must be clear that coping with US suppression will be the key focus of China’s national strategy. We should enhance cooperation with most countries. The US is expected to contain China’s international front lines, and we must knock out this US plot and make China-US rivalry a process of US self-isolation.”

An inevitable corollary is that the all-out offensive to cripple Huawei will be counterpunched in kind, targeting Apple, Qualcom, Cisco and Boeing, even including  “investigations or suspensions of their right to do business in China.” 

So for all practical purposes, Beijing has now publicly unveiled its strategy to counteract US President Donald Trump’s “We could cut off the whole relationship” kind of assertions.

A toxic racism-meets-anti-communism matrix is responsible for the predominant anti-Chinese sentiment across the US, encompassing at least 66% of the whole population. Trump instinctively seized it – and repackaged it as his re-election campaign theme, fully approved by Steve Bannon.

The strategic objective is to go after China across the full spectrum. The tactical objective is to forge an anti-China front across the West: another instance of encirclement, hybrid war-style, focused on economic war.

This will imply a concerted offensive, trying to enforce embargoes and trying to block regional markets to Chinese companies. Lawfare will be the norm. Even freezing Chinese assets in the US is not a far-fetched proposition anymore.

Every possible Silk Road branch-out – on the energy front, ports, the Health Silk Road, digital interconnection – will be strategically targeted. Those who were dreaming that Covid-19 could be the ideal pretext for a new Yalta – uniting Trump, Xi and Putin – may rest in peace.

“Containment” will go into overdrive. A neat example is Admiral Philip Davidson – head of the Indo-Pacific Command – asking for $20 billion for a “robust military cordon” from California to Japan and down the Pacific Rim, complete with “highly survivable, precision-strike networks” along the Pacific Rim and “forward-based, rotational joint forces” to counteract the “renewed threat we face from great power competition.”

Davidson argues that,

“without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China and Russia will be emboldened to take action in the region to supplant US interests.”

Watch People’s Congress

From the point of view of large swathes of the Global South, the current, extremely dangerous incandescence, or New Cold War, is mostly interpreted as the progressive ending of the Western coalition’s hegemony over the whole planet.

Still, scores of nations are being asked, bluntly, by the hegemon to position themselves once again in a “you’re with us or against us” global war on terror imperative.

At the annual session of the National People’s Congress, starting this Friday, we will see how China will be dealing with its top priority: to reorganize domestically after the pandemic.

For the first time in 35 years, Beijing will be forced to relinquish its economic growth targets. This also means that the objective of doubling GDP and per capita income by 2020 compared with 2010 will also be postponed.

What we should expect is absolute emphasis on domestic spending – and social stability – over a struggle to become a global leader, even if that’s not totally overlooked.

After all, President Xi Jinping made it clear earlier this week that a “Covid-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available,” won’t be subjected to Big Pharma logic, but “will be made a global public good. This will be China’s contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” The Global South is paying attention.

Internally, Beijing will boost support for state-owned enterprises that are strong in innovation and risk-taking. China always defies predictions by Western “experts.” For instance, exports rose 3.5% in April, when the experts were forecasting a decline of 15.7%. The trade surplus was $45.3 billion, when experts were forecasting only $6.3 billion.

Beijing seems to identify clearly the extending gap between a West, especially the US, that’s plunging into de facto New Great Depression territory with a China that’s about to rekindle economic growth. The center of gravity of global economic power keeps moving, inexorably, toward Asia.

Hybrid war? Bring it on.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: A Chinese anti-US propaganda poster from the Korean War era. Photo: Facebook

COVID-19 can be prevented, and it can be cured. Important preventative measures, argues Prof. Dolores Cahill, include vitamins C, D, and Zinc, which boost immunity. If preventative measures had been taken, claims Cahill, “no one would have died.”

The cure includes Hydroxoquine, which has been clinically tested and has proven successful in treating SARS patients in 2003.

Cahill claims there is no need for new drugs and there is no need for vaccines. People are dying unnecessarily. Furthermore, she says lockdowns are unnecessary, and indeed counterproductive.

If all of this is true, then the global lockdowns, well-orchestrated and pre-planned, did much harm, and continue to do so. In fact, they might well be crimes against humanity, since the intent to create widespread and systematic harm against civilian populations is evident.

Excess deaths would include not only those in Intensive Care Units, but also those who did not get treatments for other ailments such as heart disease, cancer etc. due to Fear campaigns and lockdowns. Excess deaths would also include those linked to state-demolished economies globally. Poverty kills.

If all of this is true, then judicial inquiries should be launched.

So, who is Prof. Cahill? Her career, says interviewer Dave Cahill, “has been steeped in data integrity, transparency, and trying to engage in good, high quality science.”

Unlike Bill Gates, the WHO, CDC, and corrupt Western politicians, she is also free from conflicts of interest.

Watch the video below before Youtube bans it:

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

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Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

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this is an article by NYP. Selected excerpts

Big Tech companies are aggressively tamping down on COVID-19 “misinformation” — opinions and ideas contrary to official pronouncements.

Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, says YouTube removed a video of him talking about the virus that had racked up more than 1.3 million views.

Wittkowski, 65, is a ferocious critic of the nation’s current steps to fight the coronavirus. He has derided social distancing, saying it only prolongs the virus’ existence, and has attacked the current lockdown as mostly unnecessary.

Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to create “herd immunity,” and that short of a vaccine, the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.

“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he says in the now-deleted video.

“I was just explaining what we had,” Wittkowski told The Post of the video, saying he had no idea why it was removed. The footage was produced by the British film company Journeyman Pictures.

“They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”

To read complete article click here

 

In articles and interviews across the web, he has likened COVID-19 to a “bad flu.” That likely made him a target for YouTube, which said in April it would be “removing information that is problematic” about the pandemic.

“Anything that goes against [World Health Organization] recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so removal is another really important part of our policy,” CEO Susan Wojcicki told CNN.

Wittkowski’s argument is a minority opinion among his colleagues, but still well within mainstream thought and currently is the basis for Sweden’s non-lockdown approach to the pandemic.

The embattled WHO, however, is not a fan, with the group’s executive director of health emergencies, Mike Ryan, this week calling it “a really dangerous, dangerous calculation.”

Rockefeller University — Wittkowski’s employer for 20 years — also released a statement sharply distancing itself from him last month.

While the doctor might have been too hot for YouTube, he has found a home at the American Institute for Economic Research, which is currently hosting the video online.

Across social media, censors have been racing to limit the flow of verboten information.

“We have broadened our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information,” Twitter said in April shortly after removing two tweets by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

That same month, Facebook conceded it had been working with state governments in California, New Jersey and Nebraska to remove pages for anti-quarantine events.

“It’s the kind of totalitarian thinking and conduct that has cost millions of lives in recent world history. The fact that it’s being done by private companies and not government doesn’t change that,” Ron Coleman, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, told The Post.

Wittkowski, however, says history has already vindicated his earlier position that the old and immunocompromised alone should have been strictly isolated, which The Post reported in March.

Roughly one-third of all US COVID-19 deaths have been among nursing home patients and staff, a problem that Wittkowski says was deeply exacerbated in New York by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 executive order requiring nursing homes to accept individuals with the virus.

He dismissed a new order from the governor this week requiring regular COVID testing for staff as a farce.

“Cuomo can’t undo his mistake of forcing nursing homes to take in infected people when the horse is out of the barn,” he said.

If nothing else, Wittkowski has made a point of practicing what he preaches.

The German national flouts New York’s coronavirus restrictions, walking around his Upper East Side neighborhood maskless and eating in underground restaurants.

“We don’t have to fear anything but fear,” he said. “Wasn’t that an American who said that?”

Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, told The Post in a statement:  “We quickly remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. We are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”

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Turkish media has been full of speculation of a potential coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, including from state-run Anadolu Agency, and other major outlets like Sabah and Haberturk. Erdoğan already survived a 2016 coup attempt against him that he blames on his ex-ally, Fethullah Gülen, who leads the FETÖ Islamic movement. It is likely that Erdoğan will conduct another purge of the Turkish military.

Although the 2016 coup was orchestrated mostly by the Air Force, it appears that one of the first victims could have been Rear Admiral Cihat Yaycı. On May 15, Yaycı was demoted from the Chief of Staff’s to the General Staff, prompting him to resign from the military completely on Monday. Although some speculated it could have been because of the coup rumors circulating, Yaycı proved to be one of the most loyal Chief of Staff’s to Erdoğan and played a significant role in purging so-called FETÖ elements from the Turkish military.

It is likely that Yaycı was actually demoted because of Turkey’s complete failure to project its power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yaycı is known as the architect of Turkey’s “Blue Homeland” theory that aims to annex Greece’s Eastern Aegean islands and maritime space. To achieve the “Blue Homeland,” Ankara in November 2019, with recommendation from Yaycı, sealed the “Marine Jurisdictions” maritime boundary delimitation deal with Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood Government of National Accords (GNA) to split Greek maritime space between Turkey and Libya.

However, since the signing of the deal with the Tripoli-based GNA, Ankara’s power projections in the Eastern Mediterranean has only weakened Turkish influence. Turkey had not expected for Greece to expel the GNA ambassador from Athens, one of the first NATO and EU countries to do so. In reaction, Greece recognised the GNA’s rival, the Tobruk-based Libyan House of Representatives who appointed Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar to command the Libyan National Army against Turkish-backed jihadists who fight for the GNA.

Greece’s shift in recognition shows another flashpoint in rivalry with so-called NATO ally Turkey and rapidly changed dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean. Haftar currently controls about 90% of territory and 60% of the population, prompting Turkey to send 5,000 Syrian jihadists to support the GNA, who have regained some lost territory in recent weeks.

But this is going to change as it appears massive simultaneous operations against the GNA and Turkish-backed jihadists in Syria’s Idlib province are set to begin in the coming weeks. Turkey as the sole backers of jihadist forces in Libya and Idlib will find this extremely difficult to deal with as it faces an economic crisis.

A detailed report by New Economy found that “Turkey’s probability of bankruptcy is extremely high,” along with its three big banks of Garanti, Akbank and the Mustafa Kemal Atatürk-founded İşbank. “The country’s commercial banks, its last stronghold, have dried up from foreign exchange currency,” meaning that Turkey has nearly no money for its import and export companies.

Another report found that failed wars against Libya and Syria have been a major problem for its economy, making Turkey’s bankruptcy probability over 30% in the forthcoming period, putting them behind only Venezuela and Argentina, but “without having the US embargo that Venezuela has, nor the vast debt that Argentina brings.”

Most startling however for Turkey is that it has to find $80 billion by August, according to New Economy, or else it faces bankruptcy.

“There is also the additional 0.5-1 billion dollar cost per month for the wars in Syria and Libya, which seems to exacerbate the existing situation, leading to a huge state budget hole and escalating the probabilities of bankruptcy,” the report said.

With major economic problems in Turkey, Ankara paid Syrian jihadists in Libya only one month’s worth of wages and then ended all payments. This has prompted the jihadists to make videos urging other Syrians not to go to Libya and fight. Meanwhile, Turkey’s aggression has prompted Greece to renew diplomatic relations with Syria, become actively involved in Libya, and strengthen relations with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who oppose Turkish influence in the Arab world.

Yaycı’s ambitious “Blue Homeland” project forced Greece to become involved in Libya and Syria that it previously had no interest in, and it is now actively a part of an alliance that is opposing Turkish influence in the region. With Greece actively opposing Turkish influence in Libya, France has also taken a stronger interest and openly opposes the GNA now. What began as a plan to carve up Greece’s maritime space has now turned into a debacle that sees French involvement against the GNA and EU recognition of the Muslim Brotherhood government waning.

Egypt is now threatening to directly use its military to defeat the GNA rather than just supply Haftar’s forces. The UAE has promised to continue airstrikes against the GNA and funding mercenaries for Haftar. Saudi Arabia is also funding mercenaries. Greece and France are involved in the EU’s Operation Irini to stop maritime deliveries of arms to Libya. In March, Haftar’s political representatives signed with Syria a Memorandum of Understanding to start diplomatic relations. Syria and the Libyan National Army are also preparing likely simultaneous operations against jihadists in their respective countries.

This is all happening while Turkey faces a very serious threat of bankruptcy and rumors of a coup attempt. Therefore, it is likely that Yaycı was demoted by Erdoğan for masterminding and pushing for the “Blue Homeland” that has ended in catastrophic failure for Turkey.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

A disinformation campaign aimed to justify the assassination of Qassem Soleimani by painting him and Iran as willing enablers of al-Qaeda. The propaganda operation relied heavily on a shoddily sourced book, “The Exile.”

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The U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January touched off a new wave of disinformation about the top Iranian major general, with Trump administration allies branding him a global terrorist while painting Iran as the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Much of the propaganda about Soleimani related to his alleged responsibility for the killing of American troops in Iraq, along with Iran’s role in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

But a second theme in the disinformation campaign, which has been picked up by mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio, was the claim that Soleimani deliberately unleashed al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s campaign to kill Shiites in Iraq. That element of the propaganda offensive was the result of the 2017 publication of “The Exile,” a book by British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, which spun a new version of the familiar U.S. propaganda line of a supposed Iranian terror alliance with al-Qaeda.

Levy and Scott-Clark introduced the theme of secret collusion between the two open adversaries with an article in the The Sunday Times in early 2018, dramatically entitled “Tehran in devil’s pact to rebuild al‑Qaeda.” Soleimani, they claimed, “first offered sanctuary to bin Laden’s family and al-Qaeda military leaders,” then proceeded to “build them a residential compound at the heart of a military training center in Tehran.”

But those two sentences represented a grotesque distortion of Iran’s policy toward the al-Qaeda personnel fleeing from Afghanistan into Iran. Virtually every piece of concrete evidence, including an internal al-Qaeda document written in 2007, showed that Iran agreed to take in a group of al-Qaeda refugees with legal passports that included members of bin Laden’s family and some fighters and middle- and lower-ranking military cadres – but not Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda military leaders — and only temporarily and under strict rules forbidding political activity.

The crucial fact that Levy and Scott-Clark conveniently failed to mention, moreover, was that Iranian officials were well aware that al-Qaeda’s leadership figures, including military commanders and with their troops, were also slipping into Iran from Afghanistan, but Iranian security forces had not yet located them.

Keeping the legal arrivals under closer surveillance and watching for any contacts with those illegally in the country, therefore, was a prudent policy for Iranian security under the circumstances.

In addition, having bin Laden’s family and other al-Qaeda cadres under their surveillance gave Iran potential bargaining chips it could use to counter hostile actions by both al-Qaeda and the United States.

Al-Qaeda documents undermine narrative of cooperation with Iran

Careful study of the enormous cache of internal al-Qaeda documents released by the U.S. government in 2017 further discredited the tall tale of Iranian facilitation of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Nelly Lahoud, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation and former senior research associate at the West Point Combating Terrorism Center, translated and analyzed 303 of the newly available documents and found nothing indicating Iranian cooperation with, or even knowledge about the whereabouts of Zarqawi or other al-Qaeda military leaders prior to their detentions of April 2003.

Lahoud explained in a September 2018 lecture that all actions by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran had been “conducted in a clandestine manner.” She even discovered from one of the documents that al-Qaeda had considered the clandestine presence of those officials and fighters so dangerous that they had been instructed on how to commit suicide if they were caught by the Iranians.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark were well aware that those al-Qaeda operatives living in Tehran’s military training center were under severe constraints, akin to a prison.  Meanwhile, senior figures like Zarqawi and Saif al-Adel, the head of the al-Qaeda shura council, were far away from Tehran, planning new operations in the region amid friendly Sunni contacts. These plans included Zarqawi’s campaign Iraq, which he began organizing in early 2002.

Nevertheless the authors declared,

“From [the Iranian training center], al-Qaeda organized, trained and established funding networks with the help of Iran, co-ordinated multiple terrorist atrocities and supported the bloodbath against Shi’ites by al-Qaeda in Iraq….”

Anti-Iran think tanker Sadjadpour jumps on the conspiracy bandwagon

Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a reliable fount of anti-Iran spin, responded within days of the Soleimani assassination with an article in the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorial section that reinforced the budding disinformation campaign.

Entitled “The Sinister Genius of Qassem Soleimani,” Sadjadpour’s op-ed argued that in March 2003, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “Soleimani’s Quds Force freed many Sunni jihadists that Iran had been holding captive, unleashing them against the U.S.” He cited “The Exile” as his source.

Levy and Scott-Clark did indeed spin a tale in the book of Zarqawi’s troops — and Zarqawi himself — being rounded up and locked to the same prison as those al-Qaeda members who entered with passports in March 2003. The authors claimed they were released within days. But the only sources they cite to support their claims were two people they interviewed in Amman, Jordan in 2016.

So who were these insider sources? The only identifying characteristics Levy and Scott-Clark offer is that they were “in Zarqawi’s group at the time.” Furthermore, neither of these sources is quoted to substantiate the claim that Zarqawi was arrested and then released from prison, and they are mentioned only in a footnote on the number of Zarqawi’s troops that had been sent to the prison.

Sadjadpour offered his own explanation — without the slightest suggestion of any evidence to support it — of why Soleimani would support an anti-Shiite jihadist to kill his own Iraqi Shiite allies. “By targeting Shiite shrines and civilians, killing thousands of Iran’s fellow Shiites,” he wrote, “Zarqawi helped to radicalize Iraq’s Shiite majority and pushed them closer to Iran—and to Soleimani, who could offer them protection.”

In late January, on National Public Radio’s weekly program “Throughline,” Sadjadpour pushed his dubiously sourced argument, opining that Soleimani had figured out how to “use the al Qaeda jihadists of Zarqawi … to simply unleash them into Iraq with the understanding that you guys do what you do.”

The BBC promotes “The Exile” as the book’s narrative crumbles

In a BBC radio documentary broadcasted in late April, titled “Iran’s Long Game” (an allusion to Iran’s alleged long-term plan for domination of the entire Middle East), Cathy Scott-Clark told a story intended to clinch the case that Iran had helped Zarqawi: Other prisoners “heard conversations in the corridors” in which Iranian authorities allegedly assured Zarqawi, “You can do whatever you want to do … in Iraq.”

That story does not appear in her book, however. Instead, Adrian Levy and Scott-Clark related a comment by Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a spiritual adviser to bin Laden, on hearing about the arrest and subsequent release of Zarqawi from another prisoner who eavesdropped by tapping the pipes leading into his room.

That narrative had already been definitively contradicted long before, however, in an account provided by Saif al-Adl, the most senior member of the al-Qaeda top leadership in Iran. Al-Adl had fled with Zarqawi from Afghanistan across the border into Iran illegally in late 2001 or early 2002 and was apprehended in April 2003 — weeks after the alleged events portrayed in al-Mauritani’s story.

In a memoir smuggled out of Iran to Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, which Husayn published in 2005 in an Arabic-language book (but available online in an English-language translation), Saif al-Adl described an Iranian crackdown in March 2003 that captured 80 percent of Zarqawi’s fighters and “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan”.

Because of that round-up, al-Adl wrote, “[T]here was a need for the departure of Abu-Mus’ab and the brothers who remained free.” Al-Adl described his final meeting with Zarqawi before his departure, confirming that Zarqawi had not been caught prior to his own apprehension on April 23, 2003.

Levy and Scott-Clark cited Saif al-Adl’s memoir on other matters in “The Exile,” but when this writer queried Scott-Clark about al-Adl’s testimony – which contradicted the narrative that underpinned her book – Scott-Clark responded, “I know Fuad Hussein well. Most of his information is third hand and not well sourced.”

She did not address the substance of al-Adl’s recollections about Zarqawi, however. When asked in a follow-up email whether she challenged the authenticity of Saif al-Adl’s testimony, Scott-Clark did not respond.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

The audacious corruption of the FBI and the US Department of Justice (sic) is demonstrated by their frame-up of the three-star general, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump. 

US Department of Justice (DOJ) documents that the department was forced to turn over to General Michael Flynn’s attorney reveal that the FBI found no wrongdoing by Flynn in its investigation of him and recommended the investigation be closed.  Corrupt FBI official Peter Strzok, a leader of the anti-Trumb cabal in the FBI, intervened. Strzok convinced the official managing the investigation not to close the case as it was the wishes of the “7th floor” (top FBI officials) to keep the case open. In the absence of evidence against Flynn, released FBI documents prove that the FBI leadership decided to frame General Flynn. The documents reveal that the FBI’s plan is “to get him (Flynn) to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired. . . . we should try to frame them in a way we want.”  General Flynn was forced to incriminate himself with a guilty plea. Otherwise, the corrupt DOJ prosecutors threatened to indict Flynn’s son. 

When this proof of egregious government misconduct came to light, the DOJ had no choice but to drop the case against General Flynn.  Otherwise it would be clear that law in the US is a weapon in the hands of government. This would mean that control of government would be a life and death matter for the two political parties as it is in Ecuador and Bolivia where incoming presidents arrest or attempt to arrest outgoing presidents.

But we didn’t hear a word about the frame-up of General Flynn from the corrupt presstitutes.  On May 7 the editorial board of the New York Times published the largest and most egregious collection of lies in the entire history of the disreputable organization.  The editorial— “Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guillty. Twice.” —claimed the lies coerced from Flynn proved Flynn’s guilt, and that Attorney General William Barr is a “personal fixer for the president” and used the Department of Justice to protect friends and to go after political enemies.

The New York Times has it backwards. Going after political enemies is precisely what the Obama Regime’s concocted case against General Flynn (and Trump) was all about.  Remember, it was General Flynn who said on television that it was a “willful decision” of the Obama Regime to send the mercenary jihadists to attack Syria, a decision Obama made in the face of contrary advice by General Flynn, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. When Flynn revealed this, it blew up the fake news story spread by the Obama Regime and the presstitutes that the Obama-supported invasion of Syria by CIA mercenaries was an uprising by Syrian moderates fighting for democracy.  Flynn’s blood is blood that the corrupt Obama Regime wanted very badly.

Obama’s role in the frame-up of Flynn and the orchestration of the Russiagate hoax is now coming to light, making the former president nervous.  On May 10 the Wall Street Journal editorial board asked if Obama’s nerves are getting in the way of his judgment:

“Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn.  Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.”   

The Democrats’ frame-up of General Flynn and their two attempted frame-ups of President Trump show an extraordinary audacity and a corruptly compliant FBI and DOJ.  They thought that they could get away with it, and, of course, they had all the help possible from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the presstitute scum for whom lies are the currency of their fake news realm.  The presstitutes have made clear that the US media is devoid of integrity.

After high officials such as James Clapper, Susan Rice, Samatha Power, and others repeatedly claimed evidence of Trump and Flynn’s guilt, when under oath their story changed 180 degrees.  Here is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: 

 “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

Susan Rice, Obama’s incompetent National Security Adviser, and Samatha Power, Obama’s Russia-baiting ambassador to the UN, along with the rest of the disreputable Obama cabal, have admitted that they saw no specific evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia. The entire thing was an orchestrated hoax that proves beyond all doubt that the Democrat Party and the US media are corrupt beyond redemption.

When the case against Flynn was dropped as a result of the damning evidence of egregious government misconduct in framing a senior official of the US government, the corrupt prosecutors who had prosecuted the innocent Flynn all resigned in a huff, pretending that it was Barr, not them, who used the Department of Justice for self-interested political purpose.

Two Georgetown University law professors, Kean K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer, totally discredited themselves and the Obama contingent in the DOJ, by alleging in the New York Times that the dropped charge against Flynn has resulted in the “utter demoralization” of “the law enforcement community.”  In other words, for these law professors and “the law enforcement community” for which they claim to speak, dropping a case consisting entirely of an orchestrated frame-up, a contrived perjury trap, and threats against family members is demoralizing.  The professors are so thoroughly dishonest that they use the lies coerced from Flynn—the price of his “cooperation with the investigation” in order that his son would not also be framed-up—as “evidence” of Flynn’s guilt and proof of the political use of the Justice Department by Trump and Barr in dropping the contrived case.  

The frame-up of Flynn is not acknowledged by the law professors as political use of the Justice  Department. See this. 

Instead the law professors describe the vindication of an innocent man  on the basis of undeniable evidence as political use of the Justice Department. 

If this is the kind of law Georgetown University teaches, the law school should be promptly shut down.

The question that demands an answer is how do people as corrupt and devoid of integrity as Comey, Mueller, and Strzok get into top FBI positions?

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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.

Following its defeat in the second war on Lebanon, Israel discovered that its only way to suppress Hezbollah would be to close the supply line between Lebanon and Syria. That could only be achieved by removing President Bashar al-Assad from power, disrupting the “Axis of the Resistance” that extends from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Gaza. But Israel and the US, supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, Turkey, Europe and many other countries all failed to achieve their goal of making Syria a failed state. President Assad called upon his allies whose own national security was in jeopardy. If Syria were to fall, jihadists of al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State” would be fighting in the streets of Beirut, Baghdad and Tehran. The jihadists would also be powerful enough to remove Russia from its Syrian naval base and to export the war beyond the Levant’s borders. So, Israel and the US failed to destroy Syria and to corner Hezbollah. On the contrary, Hezbollah has become stronger than ever. The Resistance has reaped the harvest of its victory. It has become the decision-maker with key institutions in Lebanon.

Israel sought to destroy Hezbollah because it is an obstacle to Israel’s expansionist plans in Lebanon, namely to steal Lebanon’s water and some of its territories, to force a peace deal of unconditional surrender, to break Lebanon’s alliance with Iran and deprive Tehran of its strongest ally in the Middle East. For the last forty years, since the victory of the “Islamic Republic” in 1979 led by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini which unseated the US proxy ruler, the Shah of Iran, Washington has imposed sanctions, because Iran has refused to submit to US power and because it supports its allies in the Middle East, mainly Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, to stand against Israel.

In 2006, the US was involved in the planning of Israel’s war on Lebanon. At the 2006 G8 Summit, President George W. Bush described the relationship between Hezbollah, Iran and Syria as one of the root causes of “instability”: “The World must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria, and continue to work to isolate Iran.” (Roshandel J. & Lean C.N. (2011) Iran, Israel and the United States, ABC-CLIO, CA, p. 109).

US Secretary Condoleezza Rice refused to mediate a ceasefire unless “the conditions are conducive”, thinking Israel would win the war. Hezbollah was not only left on its own to face the US and Israel, but Lebanese US-Saudi proxies (Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Druse leader Walid Jumblat) supported the position of the US and Israel, and argued that there was “no point in a ceasefire.” (Wilkins H. (2013). The Making Of Lebanese Foreign Policy: understanding the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War, Routledge, Introduction).

When Israel failed to achieve its objectives, the US agreed to mediate an end to the war. Negotiations concentrated on ceasing all hostilities (not a ceasefire) between the two countries. Tel Aviv and Washington failed to obtain the deployment of United Nations Forces in Lebanon, UNIFIL, on the borders with Syria. The US sought to accommodate Israel in its attempt to gain by negotiation what it failed to achieve using its huge war machine in 33 days of the war in 2006. “Israel’s objective was never realistic”, said Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

When its attempt to control the Lebanese-Syrian borders failed after its defeat in the 2006 war, Israel had one remaining option with which to counter Hezbollah: close the road via Damascus and find a way to curb Hezbollah’s supply line. This required war on Syria.

Since confronting Hezbollah face-face was no longer an option, Syria became the next target in the campaign to isolate Iran, as President Bush declared. The motives behind the war in Syria have been erroneously described by many researchers and analysts around the globe, who have depicted the war as the outcome of an “Arab Spring” against a dictatorial regime. Yet Saudi Arabia, Bahrein and other Gulf countries have been ruled by dictatorships and the same family members for decades and indeed are considered by the west as its closest- oil-rich- partners!

Actually, the war on Syria started just after the al-Qaeda 9/11 attack on the US. Four-star US general Wesley Clark disclosed Washington’s plan as he learned of it in the days after 9/11: “occupy Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finish with Iran.” Just a few months after the US invasion of Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited President Bashar al-Assad and warned him that the US would invade Syria if he refused to interrupt his support for the anti-Israel organisations, Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups: the Syrian president would share the same fate as the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was far from being a piece of cake. The US occupation generated new resistance among both Sunni and the Shia. This encouraged President Assad to rebuff the US threat, unaware of what the future held for Syria. Dozens of states, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, the Emirates, Europe and the US all supported a regime change operation via Takfiri proxies. But the consequences of destabilising Syria gave a unique opportunity for al-Qaeda to blossom in Syria and a more lethal group emerged, the “Islamic State” ISIS. President Assad called upon his few allies, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, to stand against the massive coalition gathered to create this failed state in Syria. The Syrian war which ensued offered unprecedented experience to the Syrian army, gave birth to a new Syrian resistance and offered unique warfare knowledge to Hezbollah, with a base for Iran that Tehran could never before have dreamed of having in the Levant.

Hezbollah had forced unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the year 2000 and challenged all those Israeli-US plans for a “new Middle East” after the second Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. And the long nine years of war in Syria Hezbollah forced Hezbollah to refine its tactics and armaments and provided Hezbollah with an unprecedented victory. Just as Israel had boosted the creation of Hezbollah, it taught this quasi-state actor all manner of skills and forced it to acquire more training and weapons to repel wars and dismantle the enemy’s objectives. Israel’s former Chief of Staff and Prime Ministerial candidate Benny Gantz believed that Hezbollah had become one of the strongest irregular-organised armies in the Middle East, capable of imposing its rules of engagement and its “balance of deterrence” on the strongest classical army in the Middle East.

“Show me four or five states with more firepower than Hezbollah: they are the US, China, Russia, Israel, France, & the UK,” Gantz said when speaking at the 2014 Herzliya Conference.

That was Israel’s assessment in 2014. Six years later, last February, Israel’s minister of defence Naftali Bennet said:

“For every convoy you hit, you miss five convoys and slowly Hezbollah accumulates the critical mass of rockets [missiles] that threaten us.”

Hezbollah has become stronger than many armies in the Middle East. Hezbollah is no longer the organisation that clashes with the Israelis on a hill or site or ambushes a patrol behind an alley. Rather, in Syria and Iraq, it has successfully experienced different warfare scenarios. It has acquired many advanced weapons and became a strategic threat to Israel if it ever contemplated waging outright war on Lebanon and Syria.

Israel set as its goal bringing down Assad in Syria and separating Syria from the “Axis of Resistance.” Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon said that “Israel prefers ISIS on its borders over Assad.” But Israel, America, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates have lost the war. Israel has now chosen to maintain the conflict because it fears that America would let go. This is why Israel is hitting hundreds of targets in Syria, -most of the time without no strategic value whatsoever.

Sources in the “Axis of Resistance” in Syria say that

“Israel targeted the Iranian HQ at Damascus airport (a building with green glass where Israel destroyed two floors). The following day, Iran restored it and it is back in operation.  Israel has repeatedly targeted warehouses with Iranian weapons but also an abandoned training centre in the Kiswa area that has been empty for years. Their aim is to signal to the US that Israel is threatened and that the departure of the US forces would constitute a threat to Israel’s national security. It is indeed too late for Israeli jets to make any difference to Syria’s capabilities. Iran is not exporting weapons but manufacturing them. If it took Israel 9 years and 300 bombing raids to destroy Iranian warehouses in Syria, it took Iran only one year to refill and equip the Syrian army with much more sophisticated precision missiles- and all strategic missiles are in underground warehouses.”

Iran has only a few hundred advisers and officers in Syria, but it leads some tens of thousands of allies from Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and auxiliary Syrian forces that resemble irregular-organised military formations.

In Syria, Hezbollah was able to operate in an area ten times the size of Lebanon, which gave it a unique experience any army in the world would have wished to have. It was also subjected to attacks by a NATO member, Turkey, which used armed drones on the battlefield. That provided Hezbollah with a wealth of experience and taught them lessons that have become integrated into curricula at military schools and colleges in Iran with Hezbollah and their allies.

President Assad does not say that it is time for his allies (especially Hezbollah) to leave Syria. Rather, he says – according to this source – that “Syria has a debt to Hezbollah. Wherever Hezbollah wants to be, it will be also Syria’s wishes.” America and Israel created an unbreakable alliance between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has started to harvest its gains. Hezbollah was able to impose the name of the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, despite repeated opposition from Saudi Arabia and the US, the losers in the Syrian war. Lebanon remained without a president for several months until General Aoun assumed the presidency.

Hezbollah rejected multiple offers from different countries by giving the Presidency of the Parliament to anyone other than President Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement, who has been on this throne for decades. Hezbollah holds the real power – though not all of it – in Lebanon to call for the appointment of the President of the Republic and the Speaker of the Parliament.

As for the premiership, it cannot be assumed without Hezbollah’s approval of the candidate. Hezbollah has sufficient political weight within the House of Representatives and the Presidency of the Republic to nominate or accept the nomination or direct the appointing of a prime minister. Former prime minister Saad Hariri is making sure his daily friendly contacts with Hezbollah are maintained because he would very much like to return to power. Hariri knows that the door to the premiership goes through one gate: Hezbollah.

This does not mean that Hezbollah wants to take control of Lebanon as a whole. Hezbollah leaders are aware that the Druse leader Kamal Jumblatt, Sunni leader Rafic Hariri, the Maronite Christian leader Bashir Gemayel and the Palestinians have all failed in controlling Lebanon and seizing the country. Hezbollah does not want to succumb to the same mistakes and doesn’t wish to control all of Lebanon. This means that the counter influence of other countries exists and is well-rooted in Lebanon. For example, the US ambassador in Beirut is threatening the Lebanese government with a warning not to remove the Central Bank Governor Riad Salama. Also, the US removed a Lebanese-Israeli agent, Amer Al-Fakhouri, via a plane which landed him at the US embassy without taking into consideration Lebanese sovereignty. The US supports the Lebanese army and internal security forces to maintain its dominance over certain key figures.

Syria has given the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, powers in Lebanon that he would not have obtained without the intervention of Israel and the allies in Syria. Hezbollah has managed to preserve its military pipeline via Syria by defeating the Takfiris (al-Qaeda and ISIS) and has prevented them from establishing an “Islamic emirate” in Lebanon and Syria.

Hezbollah’s victory comes at a price: thousands of martyrs and thousands of wounded. However, the resulting harvest is so abundant and strategic that the Lebanese Shiites now enjoy more power in Lebanon and Bilad al-Sham than they have since the year 661 when the fourth caliphate’s Imam Ali bin Abi Talib was killed.

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All images in this article are from the author

Cyber ​​warfare is one of the main bellicose activities of contemporary times. Through technologically advanced and powerful weapons, the great world powers face each other on the international stage in an invisible field, far from media attention, where the most complex networks of information and state secrets circulate. The fundamental nature of the cyber field for modern warfare is currently undeniable. More and more cases of virtual clashes between world powers are confirmed, with secret cyber warfare units being revealed day after day. Now, this confrontation seems to have definitely come to rivalry between Iranians and Israelis in the Middle East.

On May 9, a major cyberattack was registered against Iran. The main victim of the operation was the network in the port area of ​​Bandar Abbás, in the south of the country. An unidentified source, who claims to be “an official of a foreign government”, said in an interview that the attack was “very accurate”, causing “total disorder” in Iranian authorities, with almost irreparable damage. He further claims that the damage was much greater than was officially reported by the Iranian government. It is possible that much information of precious strategic value was captured with this virtual attack.

Now, a recent article in The Washington Post, bringing together information from several sources – many of which are classified – states categorically that the attack was led by Israel, which reportedly carried out the operation as part of a cyberwarfare scheme.

“The attack, which snarled traffic around the port for days, was carried out by Israeli operatives, presumably in retaliation for an earlier attempt to penetrate computers that operate rural water distribution systems in Israel, according to intelligence and cybersecurity officials familiar with the matter”, writes the newspaper.

Israel recently formally accused Iran of being behind a series of “daily cyberattacks” against Tel Aviv. In his speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that such attacks occur on a daily basis and are constantly monitored and repelled by Israeli security forces. Tehran not only denies involvement in the case but claims to have no participation in cyber wars. The May 9 attack was supposed to have been a retaliation for these attacks against Israel.

The director of the Iranian Maritime and Port Organization, Mohammad Rastad, confirmed on May 10 that a recent cyberattack could “damage several private operating systems in ports”. Some foreign intelligence sources cited by The Washington Post on May 8 pointed out that Iran was linked to the April 24 cyberattack against at least two rural water distribution networks in Israel – part of the attacks mentioned in the previous paragraph.

In September last year, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohamad Yavad Zarif, said Iran is facing a cyberwar. The minister mentioned the so-called Operation Olympic Games, which the United States and Israel reportedly launched in 2006 against the Iranian nuclear program, and the acts of sabotage carried out with the cyber weapon “Stuxnet worm”. Identified in 2010, this virus is malicious code that attacks Windows operating system computers through various vulnerabilities. It was used in 2009 and 2010 to infect computers at various Iranian entities, including the Iranian nuclear plant at Bushehr, and has been detected in other countries such as Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and the USA, and is apparently a cyberweapon in common use by various armed forces and intelligence agencies worldwide.

The most interesting and important of all this is not to identify who actually committed such attacks, but to recognize the problem of cyber wars in contemporary geopolitics. The current world cannot be understood by the simple duel of “visible” forces, as it was in the Cold War, where the nuclear race marked the struggle for power between nations. Today, most weapons are outside this scope of easy identification and great damage can be done to entire nations through absolutely invisible and immaterial attacks. This new reality raises the complexity of the debate about everything we know about international relations, geopolitics and international law to a new level and brings deep reflections on the world in which we live.

Apparently, the confrontation between Iranians and Israelis has reached a new stage, in which nations also face each other in cyber reality. And this will be a stage to which all armed confrontations and geopolitical rivalries on the planet will be elevated until there is a definitive international consensus on the nature of cyberspace. Perhaps, more than ever, it is necessary to think about the possibility of creating a “cyber nomos”, a legal status for cyberspace in international law, where specific limits on war, crimes, espionage and terrorism in cyberspace are established. Only then, cyberattacks can be combated with formal sanctions and condemnations, without rebuttal and without the perpetuation of the conflicts.

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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.

Federal, state and local agencies have teamed up to operate a warrantless cellphone tracking program to monitor compliance with COVID-19 social distancing requirements.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the program provides information on people’s movements in over 500 U.S. cities. According to the report, the CDC spearheads the program known as the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network with assistance from state and local governments. Tech companies and data providers have reportedly been cooperating with the effort.

This information has been fed to law enforcement agencies. For instance, according to a report from the Daily Mail, “one source shared that researchers learned that a huge number of New Yorkers had been visiting Brooklyn’s Prospect Part and handed the information over to authorities.”

Emergencies create the perfect excuse for government power to expand.

The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. The spread of coronavirus and the fear generated has opened the door to all kinds of government actions that would be intolerable in normal times. Once established, these government powers never go away. In fact, the 9/11 emergency allowed the federal government to create the foundation for the surveillance state that exists today with the passage of the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 “authorities.”

Since then, the federal government has been constructing an integrated national surveillance state with the cooperation of state and local agencies. The COVID-19 “emergency” provides an excuse to put that system to “good use.” it also sets the stage for further expansion and abuse of the system in the future.

Some have pushed back against further expansion of the surveillance state during the pandemic, recognizing the inherent danger of letting that particular cat out of the bag. The New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) released a statement opposing the expanded use of location data to track coronavirus.

“Even as we battle this unprecedented public health threat, we still have to uphold the Constitution. Warrantless cellphone location tracking has been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and this surveillance program poses dire consequences for Americans’ privacy. We are deeply concerned that this data was not only collected in secret, but that it’s apparently being shared with no protections against being used by police or even ICE. While it’s unclear if this sort of surveillance state helps prevent the spread of COVID-19, it’s quite clear that it undermines our most fundamental rights and risks driving countless Americans into the shadows.”

The COVID-19 tracking program reportedly strips records shared with government agencies of identifying information. But as a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out, it’s virtually impossible to truly anonymize location data.

Practically speaking, there is no way to deidentify individual location data. Information about where a person is and has been itself is usually enough to reidentify them. Someone who travels frequently between a given office building and a single-family home is probably unique in those habits and therefore identifiable from other readily identifiable sources. One widely cited study from 2013 even found that researchers could uniquely characterize 50 percent of people using only two randomly chosen time and location data points.

It is possible to aggregate data in a way that protects individual identities, but once the pandora’s box is open, how do you keep everything inside? By its nature, government pushes the boundaries. It’s only a matter of time before police agencies are using this information to identify individuals.

Other countries have already used location data to identify specific people. China was particularly aggressive in using mass surveillance of phones to classify individuals based on their health status and to then restrict their movements. Those who claim “that can’t happen here” are naive. In fact, police have already used mass location tracking to hunt down fugitives.

Judges across the U.S. are issuing search warrants that effectively authorize police to search broad geographical areas to determine who was near a given place at a given time. In practice, these warrants give police permission to use Google location data to engage in massive fishing expeditions and subject hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people to police location tracking.

In practice, “geofence” warrants authorize police to search Google’s massive location tracking database for all of the phones within a given geographical area during a specific timeframe. According to the New York Times, federal agents first utilized the practice in 2016.

According to the Times, these broadly construed warrants help police pinpoint possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Google employees said the company often responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.

North Carolina produced the first public reports of this investigative tactic last year after detectives obtained warrants to obtain location data for all the phones that were in the area of two shootings. According to WRAL, “On a satellite image, they drew shapes around the crime scenes, marking the coordinates on the map. Then they convinced a Wake County judge they had enough probable cause to order Google to hand over account identifiers on every single cell phone that crossed the digital cordon during certain times.”

Geofencing could also be accomplished in real-time using celt site simulators, commonly known as “stingrays.” These devices essentially spoof cell phone towers, tricking any device within range into connecting to the stingray instead of the tower. This allows law enforcement to sweep up communications content, as well as locate and track the person in possession of a specific phone or other electronic device.

Some argue that this kind of mass surveillance is necessary to catch “bad guys.” But what happens when the government defines a person stopping at the gun store or attending a church a “bad guy?”

Government powers never shrink. They only expand. Each expansion begets new expansions. It is imperative to place absolute limits on surveillance. We can’t trust government agents to limit themselves. As Patrick Henry warned, “Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed in the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty.”

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Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is from the original home of the Principles of ’98 – Kentucky and currently resides in northern Florida.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

A Fundação Rockefeller apresentou o “Plano de Acção Nacional Covid-19”, indicando os “passos pragmáticos para reabrir os nossos locais de trabalho e a nossa comunidade”. No entanto, como aparece no título, não se trata apenas de medidas de saúde.

O Plano – para o qual contribuíram algumas das universidades de maior prestígio (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins e outros) – prefigura um verdadeiro modelo social hierárquico e militarizado.

No topo, o “Conselho de Controlo da Pandemia, análogo ao Conselho de Produção de Guerra que os Estados Unidos criaram na Segunda Guerra Mundial”. Seria composto pelos “‘leaders’ do mundo dos negócios, do governo e do mundo académico” (assim enumerados por ordem de importância, em primeiro lugar, não os representantes do governo, mas os das finanças e da economia).

Este Conselho Supremo teria o poder de decidir produções e serviços, com uma autoridade semelhante à conferida ao Presidente dos Estados Unidos em tempo de guerra pela Lei de Produção de Defesa.

O plano prevê que sejam submetidos semanalmente ao teste Covid-19,  3 milhões de cidadãos dos EUA e que esse número deve ser elevado a 30 milhões de testes por semana, dentro de seis meses. O objectivo, a ser alcançado dentro de um ano, é atingir a capacidade de testar Covid-19 em 30 milhões de pessoas por dia. Para cada teste, prevê-se “um reembolso adequado, ao preço do mercado, de 100 doláres”. Assim, serão necessários, em dinheiro do erário público, “biliões de dólares por mês”.

A Fundação Rockefeller e os seus parceiros financeiros ajudarão a criar uma rede para o fornecimento de garantias de crédito e a assinatura de contratos com fornecedores, ou seja, com grandes empresas produtoras de medicamentos e equipamentos médicos.

De acordo com o Plano, o “Conselho de Controlo de Pandemia” também está autorizado a criar um

“Corpo de Resposta à Pandemia”: uma força especial (não é por acaso que é denominada “Corpo” como o dos Marines/Fuzileiros Navais) com uma equipa de 100 a 300 mil componentes. Seriam recrutados entre os voluntários do Peace Corps e  dos Americacorps (oficialmente criados pelo Governo dos EUA para “ajudar os países em desenvolvimento”) e entre os militares da Guarda Nacional.(1)

Os membros do “Pandemic Response Corps” receberiam um salário bruto médio de 40.000 dólares/ano, para o qual está prevista uma despesa estatal de  4 a12 biliões de dólares por ano.

O “Corpo de Resposta à Pandemia” teria, sobretudo, a tarefa de controlar a população com técnicas do tipo militar, através de sistemas de rastreio e identificação digital, nos locais de trabalho e estudo, nos bairros residenciais, nos locais públicos e de deslocação. Sistemas deste tipo – recorda a Rockefeller Foundation – são fabricados pela Apple, Google e Facebook.

De acordo com o Plano, as informações sobre os indivíduos, relacionadas com o seu estado de saúde e com as suas actividades, permaneceriam confidenciais “na medida do possível”. No entanto, todas seriam centralizadas numa plataforma digital co-gerenciada pelo Estado Federal e por empresas privadas. Com base nos dados fornecidos pelo “Conselho do Controlo da Pandemia”, seria decidido, periodicamente, quais as áreas que estariam sujeitas a ‘lockdown’ e por quanto tempo. Este é, em resumo, o plano que a Fundação Rockefeller deseja concretizar nos Estados Unidos e não só.

Se fosse efectivado, ainda que parcialmente, haveria uma maior concentração do poder económico e político nas mãos de elites ainda mais reduzidas, em prejuízo de uma maioria crescente que seria privada dos direitos democráticos fundamentais. Operação realizada em nome do “controlo Covid-19”, cuja taxa de mortalidade, segundo dados oficiais, até agora tem sido inferior a 0,03% da população dos EUA.

No Plano da Fundação Rockefeller, o vírus é usado como uma arma real, mais perigosa do que o próprio Covid-19.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original em italiano :

Piano Usa: controllo militarizzato della popolazione

 

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos 

 

(1) Mencionado na pag. 17 do PDF da ‘The Rockefeeler Foundation’.

Every regional trade bloc could put this strategy into practice so that the final phase of this plan could see them all eventually opening up with one another. Be it the East African Community (EAC) or Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) in Africa, the EU, the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, South America’s Mercosur, South Asia’s SAARC, or North America’s USMCA (formerly NAFTA), among others, they can all come together within the next 1-2 years in order to return the world to its pre-COVID-19 status quo.

The “gate” suffix has been wearing thin since the break-in scandal that gave it its birth.  Since Watergate, virtually anything dubious and suggestive, and much more besides, is suffixed.  Which brings us to the issue of President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Finding himself in hot water (did he ever leave it?) Trump has been sowing the seeds of “Obamagate”, a fairly grotesque measure that serves to fill the shallow spaces of the social mediaverse. 

Obamagate is a show without much of a script, supported by the faintest of threads.  Supposedly, they revolve around the merrily murky former national security advisor Michael Flynn, a serial perjurer who was “unmasked” as an American talking to foreigners under the routinely engaged eyes of the intelligence community.  The revelations emerged from the declassification by acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell of unmasking requests made by the Obama administration in 2016.  The exercise raised eyebrows, at least among certain Trump critics who detected a heavy accent of politicisation. 

On the surface, the move was distractingly galvanic.  The declassified document listing officials keen to identify Trump associates and any relevant ties to Russia suggested that Trump was going to embark upon yet another one of his exercises in mass distraction.  The president duly hopped on the Twitter train to drive a narrative of criminality, making his Mother’s Day a special one.  126 tweets and retweets featured, making it the second most prolific single-day posting of the Trump presidency.  Interspersed in the scatter were a few favourites: the QAnon conspiracy theory on Democrats being tied to a paedophilia cult; punchy counterattacks on those critical of his coronavirus non-policy.  The retweets also featured monumental errors of judgment, including messages critical of the Trump administration.  But something new had emerged in the smoke, all shinily suffixed.

Obama had, supposedly, committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far”, one that made “Watergate look small-time.”  When pressed for details by such individuals as Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, Trump was not particularly forthcoming, suggesting it was patently obvious. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that is being released – and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning – some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.” 

Russia, yet again, features. But this is not Democratic demonization in the Hillary Clinton mould so much as a claim of Deep State antics gone awry.  Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists sees it as a ploy to seize the Russia narrative by the throat. “It is putting the spotlight on the investigators rather than the investigated.  It is saying what is irregular here is not the extraordinary contacts with the Russian government but the attempt to understand them.”  Obamagate has taken the place of “Crooked Hillary” as a call to arms.  As Fox News host Brian Kilmeade observed, reflecting on the November election, “it’s not gonna be Biden against Trump. It’s gonna be Obama against Trump.” 

Terms such as Obamagate only exist because thinking of it makes it so.  It is the conjuring trick of a few words, fed by supposition and even superstition.  It is the howl and bark of the social media echo chamber. In a sense, such terms do not matter, though they do exercise such individuals as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer.  The “idea of Obamagate”, he writes despairingly, grew “in Trump’s diseased mind and springing like a virus to his compromised and unjust Justice Department, his propagandists on Fox News’ quasi-state-media, and millions of truth-decayed supporters”. 

As with so many assessments of Trump’s time in office, these are only some aspects of a broader, decaying Republic for which Trump’s opponents also have to answer for.  He is the excremental reminder of a state in ruins, of an imperium gasping on a respirator. Bunch gives Trump too much credit for killing “the very idea of objective truth”, suggesting a certain monopoly on criminality.  He even reserves some criticism for Obama, who he accused of being “too timid in looking into Trump and Russia.”  And there, the Russian bogeyman makes yet another appearance.

How catching will this noise prove to be?  Attention has turned to prosecutor John H. Durham, who examined the initial leak of information to the Washington Post on phone calls that took place between Flynn and the Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak to the United States in 2016.  The Grenell list could, in turn, be leaked.  A fittingly messy turn that would be.

A sense that this will go nowhere is already being floated by Trump’s most loyal of deputies, the Attorney General William Barr.  “As to President Obama and Vice-President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.”  There is still time, but Obamagate is already expiring.

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

Featured image is from The Ecologist

New 5G cellular wireless technology is already rolling out in some states. But as a country, there is little to no research on the health effects of the new technology. As one United States’ senator put it, we are “flying blindly” and a group of scientists agreed calling for an immediate moratorium on the installation of 5G until proper research on the health effects are conducted.

More than 250 scientists and medical doctors signed the 5G Appeal claiming that 5G, or 5th generation, wireless technology “will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF), that has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment,” the appeal reads.

“NUMEROUS RECENT SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS HAVE SHOWN THAT EMF AFFECTS LIVING ORGANISMS AT LEVELS WELL BELOW MOST INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL GUIDELINES. EFFECTS INCLUDE INCREASED CANCER RISK, CELLULAR STRESS, INCREASE IN HARMFUL FREE RADICALS, GENETIC DAMAGES, STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL CHANGES OF THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, LEARNING AND MEMORY DEFICITS, NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS, AND NEGATIVE IMPACTS ON GENERAL WELL-BEING IN HUMANS. DAMAGE GOES WELL BEYOND THE HUMAN RACE, AS THERE IS GROWING EVIDENCE OF HARMFUL EFFECTS TO BOTH PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE.”

— The International EMF Scientist Appeal,

While the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer labeled RFR as a possible carcinogen to humans in 2011, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it would “soon reaffirm the RFR exposure limits that were adopted by the commission in the late 1990s,” Scientific American reported. But the FCC’s RFR exposure limits are based mostly off of research from the 1980s and only regulates the intensity of exposure and frequency of the carrier waves, yet dismisses the “signaling properties” of RFR, Scientific American reported. Signaling properties are important because they have an effect on the exposure, therefore, increasing the health impacts, scientists said.

In 2018, the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) conducted a study that concluded that exposure to cell phone RFR over a two-year period had “increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes.” The FDA recently “concluded that no changes to the current standards are warranted at this time,” and the “NTP’s experimental findings should not be applied to human cell phone usage.”

The new 5G cellular technology will use “millimeter waves for the first time in addition to microwaves that have been in use for older cellular technologies, 2G through 4G,” Scientific American reported. The new technology will require “small cell” antennas every 300 to 600 feet because of the limited reach exposing even more people to radiation.

“THE WIRELESS TELECOM INDUSTRY INTEND TO OUTFIT NEARLY EVERY LAMP POST OR UTILITY POST AROUND THE COUNTRIES WITH THESE WIRELESS SMALL CELL ANTENNAS BEAMING HAZARDOUS RADIATION NEXT TO, OR INTO OUR HOMES, SCHOOLS, WORKINGPLACES AND EVERYWHERE, 24/7.”

—5G Appeal

According to a scientific paper published in 2017 by the Department of Electrical Engineering, Georgia Southern University:

“Our results show that 5G downlink RF fields generate significantly higher power density (PD) and specific absorption rate (SAR) than a current cellular system.”…Thus,when a larger phased antenna is used or when a user moves closer to the AP, the PD value becomes a major health concern which inevitably requires more research about health effects of 5G before it is deployed successfully by strictly following the RF emission standards.”

Not only is cancer an overall harmful risk, according to scientific evidence, RFR also causes many neurological disorders and reproductive harm. Scientists and doctors are now urging governments worldwide to put “safety guidelines” in place to protect the health of the people, not the industry.

“Instead, we should support the recommendations of the 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G and demand that our government fund the research needed to adopt biologically based exposure limits that protect our health and safety,” Joel M. Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

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On April 21st the Washington Post savaged Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to begin opening his state after locking down for weeks. “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” sneered the headline.

The author, liberal pundit Dana Milbank, actually found the possibility of Georgians dying to be hilarious, suggesting that, “as a promotion, Georgia could offer ventilators to the first 100 hotel guests to register.”

Milbank, who is obviously still getting paid while millions are out of work, sees his job as pushing the mainstream narrative that we must remain in fear and never question what “experts” like Dr. Fauci tell us.

Well it’s been three weeks since Milbank’s attack on Georgia and its governor, predicting widespread death which he found humorous. His predictions are about as worthless as his character. Not only has Georgia not seen “coronavirus…burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” as Milbank laughed, but Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have seen a steep decline since the governor began opening the state.

Maybe getting out in the fresh air and sunshine should not have been prohibited in the first place!

In fact, as we now have much more data, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US states and the countries that locked down the tightest also suffered the highest death rates. Ultra locked-down Italy suffered 495 Covid deaths per million while relatively non-locked down South Korea suffered only five deaths per million. The same is true in the US, where non lockdown states like South Dakota were relatively untouched by the virus while authoritarian-led Michigan, New York, and California have been hardest hit.

In those hardest hit states, we are now seeing that most of the deaths occurred in senior care facilities – after the governors ordered patients sick with Covid to leave the hospitals and return to their facilities. There, they infected their fellow residents who were most likely to have the multiple co-morbidities and advanced age that turned the virus into a death sentence. Will these governors be made to answer for this callous disregard for life?

Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar admitted the obvious: “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases.” So why not open everything? Because these petty tyrants cannot stand the idea of losing the ability to push people around.

Shutting down the entire United States over a virus that looks to be less deadly than an average flu virus – particularly among those under 80 who are not already sick – has resulted in mass unemployment and economic destruction. More Americans may die from the wrong-headed efforts to fight the virus than from the virus itself.

Americans should pause and reflect on the lies they are being sold. Masks are just a form of psychological manipulation. Many reputable physicians and scientists have said they are worthless and potentially harmful. Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny. This is no empty warning – it’s backed up by history. Time to stand up to all the petty tyrants from our hometowns to Washington DC. It is time to reclaim our freedom.

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Capitalism is a system to accumulate capital. People are only a commodity in this system. The Coronavirus crisis has enabled the capitalists to pay less for the healthy laborers to make more profit. The rest are left to their own demise. 

-Massoud Nayeri, May 19, 2020

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Chile’s economic crisis unleashed by President Sebastian Piñera’s neoliberal policies and exacerbated by the pandemic revived images that had not been seen in Chile since the time of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

Thousands of people living in poor neighborhoods eat every day thanks to the “common pots”, a solidarity mechanism that allows families to access some food.

Over the last weeks, this form of social organization has proliferated in the periphery of Santiago city where thousands of families have been left without income because of the closure of shops and the suspension of construction works.

“The most immediate memory of the common pots dates back to the crisis that hit the country in 1982,” the University of Chile professor Nicolas Angelcos said.

After 38 years, in Puente Alto, one of Santiago’s poorest communes, social leader Susana Castillo prepares 250 servings of rice with chicken.​​​​​​​

🔹 Efecto coronavirus: pobreza en Chile podría llegar a los dos dígitos durante este añohttps://t.co/BxwKyjf1du

— T13 (@T13) May 13, 2020

Coronavirus effect: poverty in Chile could reach double digits this year. The meme reads, “according to an ECLAC report, poverty will increase significantly in Latin America.”

“More families are coming, especially since the quarantine has been extended. There are more and more people who are losing their jobs,” she said at a site where the Puente Alto municipality delivers food to some 5,000 people.

“We lived on the salary of my partner, who was a merchant, and now we are left with nothing,” a mother of five children Guacolda Bueno said and added that the common pot has allowed her at least to “have lunch.”

by Massoud Nayeri

According to the Health Ministry, Puente Alto is the second Chilean neighborhood with the highest number of COVID-19 cases (1658), only behind Santiago downtown (1873).

In this South American country, unemployment increased to 8.2 percent in the first quarter of 2020 and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) estimates that the economy will fall by 4 percent and poverty could rise to 13.7 percent this year.​​​​​​​

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Featured image: Women prepare food for the people of the Los Troncos neighborhood, Chile, May 13, 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @ComunOlla

Al Jazeera reports Monday: “Afghan intelligence officials killed in Taliban car bombing.”

He said today: “With the recent spate of attacks in Afghanistan, the so-called ‘peace agreement’ between the U.S. and the Taliban signed just a few weeks ago seems to be in tatters. The purported truce that was to be had went to shreds the moment the negotiations ended in some resolution. The only provision that seems to have been implemented is a prisoner exchange.

“After dragging its feet” in the prolonged war, the U.S. government “was now willing to meet the principal Taliban demand: withdrawal of all U.S. forces, gradually over the next fourteen months. However, the absence of, and indifference toward, the Afghan government itself was glaringly visible in these U.S.-Taliban peace talks.

“Observers now widely believe that an Afghan ‘puppet’ government, utterly reliant on U.S. protection, is outraged by these negotiations. President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, along with his close Indian allies, do not seem to be keen on any U.S. withdrawal that would almost certainly lead to the Taliban, or what is more appropriately considered the ethnic Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, to win over both more territory and loyalties from the other ethnic forces in the country. The latter has already begun to happen.

“The latest Taliban attack on Afghan intelligence personnel in the city of Ghazni rests upon a strong belief that the Afghan intelligence services, alongside their Indian counterparts, are engineering a number of spectacular attacks within the country precisely to prevent the Americans from considering to withdraw. All of the attacks are routinely condemned by the Afghan government as the work of the Taliban, who on the surface of it, would have no interest in breaking the truce and peace accord since the Americans agreed to their main demand.

“What began as a hopeful sign of the ending of the two-decade bloody American occupation of the country, torn by internecine warfare for four decades now, has now (re-)turned into a chaotic war zone where the geopolitics of the region, and outside actors, prevent any steps toward reconciliation and peace.”

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This article was originally published on the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Ahmad is director of the Center for Global Dialogue and professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Lahore, Pakistan. See his interviews on The Real News.

The following article published by the British Medical Journal provides a critical perspective on the health impacts and political implications of  the Lockdown. 

Lockdown is a crude instrument. On its own it can’t eliminate covid-19, but it buys a country time to prepare its health systems and to mount a public health response. Tragically, the UK government has squandered much of the precious eight weeks bought at such great social and economic cost. The question now is whether it is willing to admit mistakes and do what’s really needed to suppress the virus (See this).

It seems clear the UK locked down late and too gradually, that we lacked basic preparedness despite clear warnings of a likely future pandemic (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1879), and that our healthcare and public health systems were already reeling from lack of investment and the unnecessary disruptive reorganisations of the previous decade (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1284). In the past frantic few weeks the NHS has responded magnificently (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1444), but it has survived only by discharging people back into the community and by stopping everything other than covid related care. The resulting loss to health and life will become clear, as will the impact on staff who have shouldered the covid burden. Despite these exceptional efforts it is therefore wrong to say that the NHS has not been overwhelmed.

The government’s public health response has been exceptional in a far less glorious way. Especially shambolic has been its approach to testing and contact tracing. What little community testing had been achieved by mid-March was abandoned for lack of capacity. Failure to test patients transferred into the community fuelled the devastating outbreaks in care homes, and inability to test patients being admitted to hospital now makes it almost impossible to prevent hospital infection. While the tests themselves need to be interpreted with caution (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1808), and there is continuing uncertainty about how long a person remains infectious (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1724), lack of community testing makes it hard to estimate the true prevalence of the virus (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1891).

Much promised “ramping up” of testing has failed to deliver a workable system (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1922). Rules for who could be tested made no practical sense and, even with the help of misleading statistics (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1863), have failed to hide the extent of the gap between what was needed and what could be achieved. Rather than build on existing locally integrated systems, testing has been contracted out to four large private “Lighthouse” laboratories. GPs and emergency departments can’t order tests and don’t get sent the results (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1881). The top-down vertical system has been fraught with operational problems and delays. And that’s before we get onto the urgent need for contact tracing and isolation (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1859), without which we stand no chance of suppressing the virus sufficiently to safely exit lockdown (https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/05/01/we-urgently-need-to-start-contact-tracing-to-stop-the-spread-of-covid-19).

Many of these concerns have been raised in the first report of the independent scientific advisory group for emergencies (iSAGE) (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1917). It is well argued, wide ranging, and evidence based, and refreshing in its openness about uncertainties, disagreements, and debate on key issues. The government is buying more time with continued lockdown. It will be good for all of us if it spends some of that time absorbing and acting on this advice.

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There are two stories that seem to have been under-reported in the past couple of weeks. The first involves Michael Flynn’s dealings with the Russian United Nations Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. And the second describes yet another bit of espionage conducted by a foreign country directed against the United States. Both stories involve the State of Israel.

The bigger story is, of course, the dismissal by Attorney General William Barr of the criminal charges against former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn based on malfeasance by the FBI investigators. The curious aspect of the story as it is being related by the mainstream media is that it repeatedly refers to Flynn as having unauthorized contacts with the Russian Ambassador and then having lied about it. The implication is that there was something decidedly shady about Flynn talking to the Russians and that the Russians were up to something.

In reality, the part left out of the story is that the phone call to Kislyak on December 22, 2016, was made by Flynn at the direction of Jared Kushner, who in turn had been approached by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu had learned that the Obama Administrating was going to abstain on a United Nations vote condemning the Israeli settlements policy, meaning that for the first time in years a U.N. resolution critical of Israel would pass without drawing a U.S. veto. Kushner, acting for Netanyahu, asked Flynn to contact each delegate from the various countries on the Security Council to delay or kill the resolution. Flynn agreed to do so, which included a call to the Russians. Kislyak took the call but did not agree to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, which passed unanimously on December 23^rd.

In taking the phone calls from a soon-to-be senior American official who would within weeks be part of a new administration in Washington, the Russians did nothing wrong, but the media is acting like there was some kind of Kremlin conspiracy seeking to undermine U.S. democracy. It would not be inappropriate to have some conversations with an incoming government team and Kislyak also did nothing that might be regarded as particularly responsive to Team Trump overtures since he voted contrary to Flynn’s request.

The phone call made at the request of Israel was neither benign or ethical as the Barack Administration was still in power and managing the nation’s foreign policy. At the time, son-in-law Jared Kushner was Trump’s point man on the Middle East. He and his family have extensive ties both to Israel and to Netanyahu personally, to include Netanyahu’s staying at the Kushner family home in New York. The Kushner Family Foundation has funded some of Israel’s illegal settlements and also a number of conservative political groups in that country. Jared has served as a director of that foundation and it is reported that he failed to disclose the relationship when he filled out his background investigation sheet for a security clearance. All of which suggests that if you are looking for possible foreign government collusion with the incoming Trumpsters, look no further.

And it should be observed that the Israelis were not exactly shy about their disapproval of Obama and their willingness to express their views to the incoming Trump. Kushner went far beyond merely disagreeing over an aspect of foreign policy as he was actively trying to clandestinely subvert and reverse a decision made by his own legally constituted government. His closeness to Netanyahu made him, in intelligence terms, a quite likely Israeli government agent of influence, even if he didn’t quite see himself that way.

Kushner’s actions, as well as those of Flynn, would most certainly have been covered by the Logan Act of 1799, which bars private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments on behalf of the United States and also could be construed as a “conspiracy against the United States.” But in spite of all that the investigation went after Flynn instead of Kushner. As Kushner is Jewish and certainly could be accused of dual loyalty in extremis, that part of the story obviously makes many in the U.S. Establishment and media uncomfortable, so it was and continues to be both ignored and expunged from the record as quickly as possible.

The second story, which has basically been made to disappear, relates to spying by Israel against critics in the United States. The revelation that Israel was again using its telecommunications skills to spy on foreigners came from an Oakland California federal court lawsuit initiated by Facebook (FB) against the Israeli surveillance technology company NSO Group. FB claimed that NSO has been using servers located in the United States to infect with spyware hundreds of smartphones being used by attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, critics of Israel and even of government officials. NSO allegedly used WhatsApp, a messaging app owned by FB, to hack into the phones and install malware that would enable the company to monitor what was going on with the devices. It did so by employing networks of remote servers located in California to enter the accounts.

NSO has inevitably claimed that they do indeed provide spyware, but that it is sold to clients who themselves operate it with the “advice and technical support to assist customers in setting up” but it also promotes its products as being “used to stop terrorism, curb violent crime, and save lives.” It also asserts that its software cannot be used against U.S. phone numbers.

Facebook, which did its own extensive research into NSO activity, alleges that NSO rented a Los Angeles-based server from a U.S. company called QuadraNet that it then used to launch 720 hacks on smartphones and other devices. It further claims in the court filing that the company reverse-engineering WhatsApp, using an program that it developed to access WhatsApp’s servers and deploy “its spyware against approximately 1,400 targets” before “…covertly transmit[ting] malicious code through WhatsApp servers and inject[ing]” spyware into telephones without the knowledge of the owners.”

The filing goes on to assert that the “Defendants had no authority to access WhatsApp’s servers with an imposter program, manipulate network settings, and commandeer the servers to attack WhatsApp users. That invasion of WhatsApp’s servers and users’ devices constitutes unlawful computer hacking.”

NSO, which is largely staffed by former (sic) Israeli intelligence officers, had previously been in the news for its proprietary spyware known as Pegasus, which “can gather information about a mobile phone’s location, access its camera, microphone and internal hard drive, and covertly record emails, phone calls and text messages.” Pegasus was reportedly used in the killing of Saudi dissident journalist Adnan Kashoggi in Istanbul last year and it has more recently been suggested as a resource for tracking coronavirus distance violators. Outside experts have accused the company of selling its technology and expertise to countries that have used it to spy on dissidents, journalists and other critics.

Israel routinely exploits the access provided by its telecommunications industry to spy on the host countries where those companies operate. The companies themselves report regularly back to Mossad contacts and the technology they provide routinely has a “backdoor” for secretly accessing the information accessible through the software. In fact, Israel conducts espionage and influence operations both directly and through proxies against the United States more aggressively than any other “friendly” country, which once upon a time included being able to tap into the “secure” White House phones used by Bill Clinton to speak with Monica Lewinsky.

Last September, it was revealed that the placement of technical surveillance devices by Israel in Washington D.C. was clearly intended to target cellphone communications to and from the Trump White House. As the president frequently chats with top aides and friends on non-secure phones, the operation sought to pick up conversations involving Trump with the expectation that the security-averse president would say things off the record that might be considered top secret.

A Politico report detailed how “miniature surveillance devices” referred to as “Stingrays” were used to imitate regular cell phone towers to fool phones being used nearby into providing information on their locations and identities. According to the article, the devices are referred to by technicians as “international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.”

Over one year ago, government security agencies discovered the electronic footprints that indicated the presence of the surveillance devices near the White House. Forensic analysis involved dismantling the devices to let them “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” One source observed afterwards that “It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible.”

So two significant stories currently making the rounds have been bowdlerized and disappeared to make the Israeli role in manipulating and spying against the United States go away. They are only two of many stories framed by a Zionist dominated media to control the narrative in a way favorable to the Jewish state. One would think that having a president of the United States who is the most pro-Israel ever, which is saying a great deal in and of itself, would be enough, but unfortunately when dealing with folks like Benjamin Netanyahu there can never be any restraint when dealing with the “useful idiots” in Washington.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

“Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny.” —Ron Paul

Donald Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people”, but it’s much worse than that. The media is a national security threat. Just look at the way they’ve handled the coronavirus. The hysterical 24-7 coverage has people so terrified they’ve locked themselves in their homes inflicting catastrophic damage on the economy. That disaster never would’ve taken place if the media hadn’t focused all their energy on scaring people to death. Now the damage is done, millions of people have lost their jobs, tens of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses are facing bankruptcy, and the world’s biggest economy has been reduced to a smoldering wastelands. And what was gained? Nothing. Check out this excerpt from an article by economist Jack Ramsay:

“The magnitude and rapidity of the shutdown of the real economy in the US is unprecedented. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the contraction of the real economy occurred over a period of several years—not months….

…once the contraction in the real economy accelerates and deepens, it inevitably leads to defaults and bankruptcies…. The defaults and bankruptcies then provoke a financial crisis that feeds back on the real economy, causing it to deteriorate still further. Income losses by businesses, households and local government thereafter in turn cause a further decline. Once negative feedback effects within the economy begin, it matters little if the health crisis is soon abated. The economic dynamic has been set in motion. ….The Fed.. can make a mass of free money and cheap loans available, but businesses and households may be reluctant to borrow, preferring to hoard their cash—and the loans as well. In other words, the deeper and faster the contraction, the more difficult and slower the recovery” (“The Myth of V-Shape Economic Recovery“, Jack Rasmus)

Every sector of the economy is shrinking and shrinking fast. Oil prices have plunged, activity in all 50 states is slumping badly, business confidence is at record lows, personal spending continues to shrivel, consumer confidence is dropping sharply, the service sector is tanking, restaurant traffic, industrial production, manufacturing, corporate earnings, business investment, personal consumption, bank lending, imports-exports; are all down, down, down and down. There’s not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere. The economy is in freefall while people remain hunkered down inside their homes thinking they are stopping the spread of a deadly virus. But lockdowns don’t stop infections, at best they postpone them to a later date, and even that is doubtful.

The whole idea of isolating the healthy members of the population to counter the spread of a highly-contagious virus is delusional. There’s no historical precedent to the policy at all. There was no lockdown during the Spanish Flu in 1918 (when 50 million died), no lockdown during the Asian Flu in 1957, no lockdown during the Hong Kong Flu in 1969, no lockdown during SARS in 2002, no lockdown during the Swine Flu in 2009, no lockdown during MERS outbreak in 2012, and no lockdown during Ebola epidemic in 2014.

Get the picture? There was no lockdown, no time, NEVER.

But just ask someone about the lockdown today and they’ll announce with absolute certainty, “It’s the only way to beat this thing”. Right, by locking yourself indoors and waiting for the economy to crash, is that it?

Three bulletpoints you won’t see in the MSM:

1–There is no historical precedent for lockdowns

2–There is no scientific basis for lockdowns

3–A number of infectious disease experts, like Swedish Professor John Giesecke, believe that lockdowns are the wrong policy to contain the spread of the virus, they’re politically dangerous and they’ll be difficult to end. Here’s what he said:

“When you start looking around now at the measures that are being taken by different countries you find that very few of them have a shred of evidence-based [support] … border closures, school closures, social distancing – there’s almost no science behind most of these.”

Lockdowns are not science-based policy. They’re a faith-based catch-as-catch-can concoction that’s accepted as Holy Writ by the vast majority of Americans who are so terrified by the virus that they have allowed themselves to be duped by a manipulative, agenda-driven media that has convinced them that hibernating while the economy disintegrates is somehow performing their civic duty. But they’re wrong. One’s real civic duty is to engage their own critical thinking skills, skeptically analyze the idiocy that government passes off as social policy, and resist those directives that are clearly destructive to the interests of the American people and the country. Lockdowns certainly meet that criteria. Here’s a clip from Pepe Escobar’s latest article that helps to put things in perspective:

“The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed, delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the Munich Security Conference.

Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in 2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation….

Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11…That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.

As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.

The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has defined as a medical-military dictatorship.” (“How Biosecurity Is Enabling Digital Neo-Feudalism” Unz Review)

So, there is no “medical justification, or leading epidemiological research” to support lockdowns. It’s all made-up out of whole cloth. Lockdowns are the result of political manipulation (of a public health crisis) intended to simulate martial law. “Go home and stay home,” that’s the message not “Go home and be healthy” . That doesn’t factor into the government’s calculus at all.

So on whose behalf are these lockdowns being imposed? Certainly not Trump who’s wanted to lift them from Day 1. No, it’s his surrounding cast, like the affable Dr Anthony Fauci who just recently appeared before the Senate and ominously cautioned them against lifting restrictions too soon. His warnings closely resembled those of his colleague and perhaps, benefactor, Bill Gates, whose tentacles are wrapped tightly around the global health network and who, many think, uses philanthropic initiatives as a vehicle for advancing his own malign vision of the future. As for the lockdowns, we’ll let Gates speak for himself:

“First, we need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down. Despite urging from public health experts, some states and counties haven’t shut down completely. In some states, beaches are still open; in others, restaurants still serve sit-down meals….

The country’s leaders need to be clear: Shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere. Until the case numbers start to go down across America — which could take 10 weeks or more — no one can continue business as usual or relax the shutdown. Any confusion about this point will only extend the economic pain, raise the odds that the virus will return, and cause more deaths….

To bring the disease to an end, we’ll need a safe and effective vaccine. If we do everything right, we could have one in less than 18 months — about the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed. But creating a vaccine is only half the battle. To protect Americans and people around the world, we’ll need to manufacture billions of doses.” (“Bill Gates: Here’s how to make up for lost time on covid-19“, Washington Post)

Here’s one more from Gates in case there’s any doubts about his intentions:

“One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID–19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” (“Bill Gates — Gates Notes)

What the heck is he talking about? Gates isn’t a doctor, a scientist, an epidemiologist, or an elected official who sets policy. He’s a rich-guy dilettante who made zillions by ruthlessly dominating the software industry. That’s all. Does that make him an expert on infectious diseases? Does that give him the right to order the summary lockdown of 328 million Americans? No, it doesn’t, but Gates’s tentacles are also wrapped around the media (which helps him to shape public opinion) as this clip from an article at Lew Rockwell points out:

“The Gates Foundation gives grants in the hundreds of thousands and often millions to such media organizations as NBCUniversal, Al Jazeera, BBC, Viacom (CBS) and Participant Media …Both Gates and the Gates Foundation are sizable shareholders in Comcast,… as well as….MSNBC and NBC News…In 2009, the New York Times reported that the Gates Foundation was partnering with media companies to write and shape stories to ‘embed’ messages in primetime dramas:”

“’It [the Gates Foundation] is less well known as a behind-the-scenes influencer of public attitudes toward these issues by helping to shape story lines and insert messages into popular entertainment like the television shows ER, Law & Order: SVU and Private Practice…..

“His enormous wealth and the reach of media parent corporations seem to exempt Gates from routine disclosure requirements. …. He is given softball interviews in Comcast-backed Vox without disclosure that he’s a major Comcast investor. Because his stake in media companies is laundered enough times, it’s assumed not to merit mention.” (“Bill Gates, HR6666, Remdesivir, Deaths in Italy“, Lew Rockwell)

Bill Gates has critical contacts across the spectrum of media, global health care and politics. If he wants to his views widely disseminated, all he has to do is say the word. That said, we may never know if the lockdowns were his idea, but he certainly has the power to have them implemented if he so chooses. And for those who remain skeptical on this point, consider these words of warning from James Corbett’s excellent three-part video series on the Microsoft mucky-muck titled “Bill Gates and the Population Control Grid”:

“The takeover of public health that we have documented in How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health and the remarkably brazen push to vaccinate everyone on the planet that we have documented in Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World was not, at base, about money.

The unimaginable wealth that Gates has accrued is now being used to purchase something much more useful: control. Control not just of the global health bodies that can coordinate a worldwide vaccination program, or the governments that will mandate such an unprecedented campaign, but control over the global population itself.”(James Corbett, The Off-Guardian)

The lockdowns are all about power; raw, political power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable “do goodie” oligarchs who are determined to save humanity whether we like it or not.

God help us.

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Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

Following the demise of the communist regimes, and the collaboration of so many social-democratic parties in neoliberal, capitalist globalization, a strong anarchist sensibility emerged, quite understandably, on the radical left, and remained influential for a considerable period of time. From the continent-spanning anti-globalization protests at the turn of the millennium to the rapid spread of Occupy Wall Street from New York to other US and international cities, the predominant mood reflected a widespread suspicion, if not disdain, for any political strategy that involved going into the state.

And then, rather suddenly, there seemed to be a widespread realization that you can protest until hell freezes over, but you won’t change the world that way. That realization came during the very short time bridging the occupations of the squares in Madrid and Athens and the rapid electoral breakthroughs of Syriza and Podemos. It also seeded the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies inside the dominant center-left parties of the United Kingdom and the United States.

John Holloway’s work Change the World Without Taking Power, inspired by the Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico, famously summed up the earlier mood on the Left. An important new book, inspired by a very different Latin American example, has captured today’s contrasting zeitgeist: Rebecca Tarlau’s Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers’ Movement Transformed Brazilian Education.

Tarlau is a DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) activist who teaches at Penn State and just happens to be the daughter of long-time CWA (Communications Workers of America) union leader Jimmy Tarlau. She presents the movement’s “long march through the institutions” of Brazil’s educational system in vivid detail, from grade schools to universities, and all the way from Rio Grande do Sul up to Pernambuco in the northeast, drawing even more upon her undergraduate training in anthropology at University of Michigan Ann Arbor than upon her graduate studies in education at UC Berkeley. The result is one of the most profound analyses ever written of what it means to be “in and against the state” as a strategic practice.

Forged in the crucible of struggle against the Brazilian military regime during the 1970s, the cadres of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) were closely aligned with those of the new Workers’ Party (PT). The PT’s distinctive strategic orientation at the time could be expressed as follows: “We are organizers. That’s what we’re good at. But we need to get into the state. Once we get into the state, we have to continue to be organizers. We have to use state resources to help organize those who remain unorganized.”

It was this orientation that inspired the famous Porto Alegre experiment in participatory budgeting, where a PT mayor had already been elected by the late 1980s. As I can personally attest, when activists attending the World Social Forums at the turn of the millennium heard about the achievements of this experiment, most of them returned from Porto Alegre sounding much like Lincoln Steffens after he went to the USSR in 1919 and came back declaring, “I have seen the future, and it works.”

In fact, the participatory-budget process was full of contradictions and limitations, as was already quite clear to those who had launched the experiment a decade before — not least in the sense that participants at the base never got to decide upon the most important strategic questions with which the local PT government had to deal. Yes, the representatives from the favelas were allowed to choose whether to put resources into building a sewer rather than a road, but they were never involved in addressing the strategic questions of how to deal with the landlords who were reclaiming the land once those roads and sewers were built. By contrast, the MST actively engaged in developing political and strategic capacities in its encampments and settlements (as well at its national cadre school just south of São Paulo). MST activists also devoted themselves, as Rebecca Tarlau shows so well, to fostering such capacities through the public-school system.

When the PT elected its first mayors in the late 1980s, the party discovered that it faced accusations of clientelism if it hired a bus to take demonstrators to Brasília to challenge the way federal state expenditure on services was being off-loaded onto the cities. Since party leaders had committed themselves to doing away with clientelist practices, they didn’t know how to answer that criticism, so they simply stopped doing it. The MST didn’t have to face the same political contradiction. But its own long march through the weak educational structures of clientelist state and municipal governments soon left those governments relying on the MST to help run the schools, even as the MST was able to radicalize many of the teachers who were initially suspicious of it.

What made the MST distinctive in this respect as a social movement was, and remains, its status as an explicit class movement — and, no less explicitly, a socialist movement. Most of the literature on social movements in recent decades took shape in hostility to class analysis, not to mention the “grand narrative” of replacing capitalism with socialism. Tarlau’s achievement is to turn social-movement analysis back toward class analysis. She also foregrounds the type of socialist strategy that involves working “in and against” the institutions of the state so as to transform them — rather than merely protesting outside of them, still less “smashing” them in the old insurrectionary sense.

Yet this remarkably sober book is by no means an exercise in cheerleading. Indeed, Tarlau’s close study of the MST’s involvement in “contentious co-governance” of Brazil’s educational institutions contrasts sharply with most of the existing literature on Brazil’s participatory-budgeting institutions, which so often presented them as “real utopias.” The MST has not transformed the whole of the Brazilian educational system. It has only changed those educational apparatuses in closest proximity to its own spaces of occupation and settlement, and those higher-education institutions directly involved in teacher training for rural areas. As Tarlau shows, the Ministry of Education itself has hardly changed at all.

This raises the further question of what it would mean to go beyond transforming state structures that are primarily involved in social reproduction, by bringing into question those institutions that are centrally involved in capitalist economic reproduction, like central banks and departments of finance or commerce. And insofar as this speaks to the very different experiences of the MST and PT in Brazil, it raises yet another question: Namely, what strategic capacities should a mass political party be trying to develop, if its aim is to occupy the whole terrain of the state in order to transform it? This is the key question facing the socialist left in our time. That Rebecca Tarlau’s important book induces us to ponder it is yet another of its considerable achievements.

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Leo Panitch is a professor of political science at York University and the co-editor of the Socialist Register. His latest book, with Sam Gindin, is The Making of Global Capitalism.

Despite its peaceful reputation, Canada is not acting as a benevolent player on the international stage.

Rather, Canada ranks among the twelve largest arms exporters and its weapons have fueled conflicts across the globe, including the devastating war in Yemen.

In a disappointing move, Canada refused to join 122 countries represented at the 2017 UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination.

Ottawa has also been an aggressive proponent of the nuclear-armed NATO alliance, and currently leads coalition missions in Latvia and Iraq.

Echoing Trump’s foreign policy, Canada has backed reactionary forces in the Americas. 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. Canada also lent its support to the economic elites and Christian extremists who recently overthrew the democratically elected indigenous president of Bolivia.

In the Middle East, Canada has sided with Israel on almost every issue of importance. Since coming to power the Trudeau government has voted against more than fifty UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights backed by the overwhelming majority of member states. The Canadian government has refused to abide by 2016 UN Security Council Resolution 2334, calling on member states to “distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied in 1967.” On the contrary, Ottawa extends economic and trade assistance to Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise. Should it win a seat on the UNSC, Ottawa has stated that it will act as an “asset for Israel” on the Council.

Canadian mining companies are responsible for countless ecological and human rights abuses around the globe. Still, Ottawa defends the most controversial mining firms and refuses to restrict public support for companies responsible for abuses. The chair of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights criticized the Trudeau government for refusing to rein in mining abuses while the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes has decried the “double standard” applied to Canadian mining practices domestically versus internationally.

Falling short of its responsibilities as a global citizen, Canada continues to oppose the Basel Ban Amendment on the export of waste from rich to poor countries, which became binding in late 2019 after ratification by 97 countries. Ottawa also failed to ratify the United Nations’ Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Ottawa has refused to ratify more than 50 International Labour Organization conventions. In November 2019, Canada once again refused to back a widely supported UN resolution on “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Violating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Trudeau government sent militarized police into unceded Wet’suwet’en Nation territory to push through a pipeline. The UN Human Rights Committee recently documented various ways Canada is failing to live up to its obligations towards indigenous people under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Ignoring front-line victims, Ottawa refuses to keep Canada’s dirty oil in the ground. Canada is on pace to emit significantly more greenhouse gases than it agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement and previous climate accords. Already among the world’s highest per capita emitters, the Canadian government is subsidizing further growth of heavy emitting tar sands, at the expense of impoverished nations who’ve contributed little to the climate crisis but bear the brunt of its impacts.

The international community should not reward bad behaviour. Please vote against Canada’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.

Signatories

David Suzuki, Award winning geneticist/broadcaster

Roger Waters, co-founder Pink Floyd

Noam Chomsky, linguist, author & social critic

Ellen Gabriel, artist and activist

Roméo Saganash, former MP Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou

Sid Ryan, former president of Ontario Federation of Labour and CUPE Ontario

Rawi Hage, novelist

Amir Khadir, former Quebec National Assembly member

Pam Palmater, Chair in Indigenous Governance, Ryerson

Judy Rebick, activist and author

Jord Samolesky, Propagandhi

Steve Ashton, long-serving member of the Manitoba legislature and cabinet minister

George Elliott Clarke, poet and professor

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize co-winner (1976)

Trevor Herriot, author and activist

John Clark, activist

Charles Demers, comedian & author

Alain Deneault, essayist and philosophy professor

Martin Duckworth, laureate of the 2015 Albert-Tessier Prix du Quebec for cinema

Cy Gonick, former Manitoba NDP MLA and founding editor of Canadian Dimension

John Greyson, film-maker & professor

Syed Hussan, Migrant Workers Alliance

El Jones, activist, educator, journalist and poet

Gordon Laxer, author/founding Director Parkland Institute

Monia Mazigh, PhD, author and activist

Jim Manly, Member of Parliament 1980-88

Kanahus Manuel, activist

Tim McCaskell, educator & activist

Sheelah Mclean, co-founder Idle No More organizer

Serge Mongeau, author & editor

Mike Palecek, former National President of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers

Dimitri Roussopoulos, author, and long-time peace movement activist

Clayton Thomas-Müller – Director, Author, Senior Campaign Specialist – 350.org

Rinaldo Walcott, professor

Ingrid Waldron, author & professor

Harsha Walia, author & activist

Antonia Zerbisias, journalist & activist

Greg Albo, Professor of Politics, York University

August Arnold, journalist and author

Antonio Artuso, Front uni contre le fascisme et la guerre

Corey Balsam, National Coordinator, Independent Jewish Voices Canada

Nik Barry-Shaw, author

Corey Balsam, National Coordinator, Independent Jewish Voices Canada

Susan Bazilli, PhD – Director, International Women’s Rights Project

Ron Benner, artist

Karl Beveridge, artist

Raul Burbano, activist

Nancy Brown, teacher/librarian, peace/human rights activist

David Camfield, activist and academic

Stefan Christoff, artist & activist

Carole Condé, artist

Gerry Condon, Veterans for Peace (US), former president

Deborah Cowen, Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Raju J Das, York University

Judith Deutsch, academic

Gord Doctorow, educator

Martine Eloy, antiwar and human rights activist

Darren Ell, Photographer

Gary Engler, author

Yves Engler, author & activist

Joe Emersberger, author

Richard Falk, Professor of International Law emeritus, Princeton University

Kiran Fatima, co-chair Toronto Association for Peace & Solidarity

Richard Fidler, Author and Activist

Miguel Figueroa, President, Canadian Peace Congress

Don Foreman, Canadian Union of Postal Workers

Alan Freeman, author & economist

Gavin Fridell, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in International Development Studies Saint Mary’s University

Dr. Todd Gordon, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University

Peter Gose, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Carleton University

Harry Glasbeek, Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School

Tracy Glynn, activist and writer

Cory Greenlees, activist

Malcolm Guy, documentary film director/producer

Michael Harris, author

Jamelie Hassan, artist

David Heap, teacher-researcher; peace & human rights advocate

Evert Hoogers, CUPW (retired)

Pierre Jasmin, artiste pour la paix

Dru Jay, author & activist

David Kattenburg, University instructor & journalist

Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence (USA)

Gary Kinsman, activist and author

Harry Kopyto, legal activist

Jonathan Kuttab, International human rights lawyer

Dimitri Lascaris, lawyer/journalist/activist

Ed Lehman, Regina Peace Council

Raymond Legault, activist, Collectif Échec à la guerre

Tamara Lorincz, PhD candidate and member of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace

Martin Lukacs, journalist

Eva Manly, retired filmmaker

Robin Mathews, author

Amy Miller, filmmaker

David Mivasair, retired rabbi

Bianca Mugyenyi, activist, former Co-ED The Leap

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Dr. Susan O’Donnell, researcher, writer and activist

Nino Pagliccia, activist and freelance writer

Dr. Idrisa Pandit, academic

Brent Patterson, activist

Justin Podur, author and professor

Judi Rever, journalist and author

Karen Rodman, human rights activist

Richard Roman, retired professor, writer

Reuben Roth, Professor

Herman Rosenfeld, Socialist Project

Grahame Russell, Co-Director – Rights Action

Joan Russow, activist

Cory Greenlees

Sakura Saunders, activist

Harold Shuster, Independent Jewish Voices-Winnipeg

Ken Stone, President – Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War

Donald Swartz, Carleton University

Koozma J. Tarasoff, peace activist

Marianne Vardalos, PhD Department of Sociology

Jay Watts, co-chair Toronto Association for Peace & Solidarity

Paul Weinberg, author

Barry Weisleder, federal secretary, Socialist Action

Elizabeth Whitmore, activist

Ellen Woodsworth, writer, organizer and former Vancouver City councillor

Dwyer Sullivan, board member – Conscience Canada

Dr. Thom Workman, professor, University of New Brunswick

Ann Wright, retired US Army Colonel and former US diplomat.

Organizations

Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) – Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain

Mining Watch

Independent Jewish Voices/ Voix juives indépendantes

Mouvement Québécois pour la Paix

Solidarité Québec-Haïti

Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War

Council of Canadians – London Chapter

Canada Palestine Association-Vancouver

International League of Peoples’ Struggle

Just Peace Advocates/Mouvement pour une Paix Juste

Socialist Project

Canadian BDS Coalition

Socialist Action

Canadian Boat to Gaza,

Leap Montreal

CAIA Victoria

Freedom Flotilla Coalition

Gaza Freedom Flotilla Australia

Regina Peace Council

Al-Haadi Musalla

The petition will be delivered to UN member states prior to the vote for the security council seat in June.

If your group or organization would like to endorse the open letter, please write to us at [email protected].

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La Fondazione Rockefeller ha presentato il «Piano d’azione nazionale per il controllo del Covid-19», indicando i «passi pragmatici per riaprire i nostri luoghi di lavoro e le nostre comunità». Non si tratta però, come appare dal titolo, semplicemente di misure sanitarie.

Il Piano – cui hanno contribuito alcune delle più prestigiose università (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins e altre) – prefigura un vero e proprio modello sociale gerarchizzato e militarizzato.

Al vertice il «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia, analogo al Consiglio di produzione di guerra che gli Stati uniti crearono nella Seconda guerra mondiale». Esso sarebbe composto da «leader del mondo degli affari, del governo e del mondo accademico» (così elencati in ordine di importanza, con al primo posto non i rappresentanti governativi ma quelli della finanza e dell’economia).

Questo Consiglio supremo avrebbe il potere di decidere produzioni e servizi, con una autorità analoga a quella conferita al presidente degli Stati uniti in tempo di guerra dalla Legge per la produzione della Difesa.

Il Piano prevede che occorre sottoporre al test Covid-19, settimanalmente, 3 milioni di cittadini statunitensi, e che il numero deve essere portato a 30 milioni alla settimana entro sei mesi. L’obiettivo, da realizzare entro un anno, è quello di raggiungere la capacità di sottoporre a test Covid-19 30 milioni di persone al giorno. Per ciascun test si prevede «un adeguato rimborso a prezzo di mercato di 100 dollari». Occorreranno quindi, con denaro pubblico, «miliardi di dollari al mese».

La Fondazione Rockefeller e i suoi partner finanziari contribuiranno a creare una rete per la fornitura di garanzie di credito e la stipula dei contratti con i fornitori, ossia con le grandi società produttrici di farmaci e attrezzature mediche.

Secondo il Piano, il «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia» viene anche autorizzato a creare un

«Corpo di risposta alla pandemia»: una forza speciale (non a caso denominata «Corpo» come quello dei Marines)  con un personale di 100-300 mila componenti.  Essi verrebbero reclutati tra i volontari dei Peace Corps e degli Americacorps (creati dal governo Usa ufficialmente per «aiutare i paesi in via di sviluppo»)  e tra i militari della Guardia Nazionale. (1)

I componenti del «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia» riceverebbero un salario medio lordo di 40.000 dollari l’anno, per cui viene prevista una spesa statale di 4-12 miliardi di dollari annui.

Il «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia» avrebbe soprattutto il compito di controllare la popolazione con tecniche di tipo militare, attraverso sistemi digitali di tracciamento e identificazione,  nei luoghi di lavoro e di studio, nei quartieri residenziali, nei locali pubblici e negli spostamenti. Sistemi di questo tipo – ricorda la Fondazione Rockefeller – vengono realizzati da Apple, Google e Facebook.

Secondo il Piano, le informazioni sulle singole persone, relative al loro stato di salute e alle loro attività, resterebbero riservate «per quanto possibile». Sarebbero però tutte centralizzate in una piattaforma digitale cogestita dallo Stato Federale e da società private. In base ai dati forniti dal  «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia», verrebbe  deciso di volta in volta quali zone sarebbero sottoposte al lockdown e per quanto tempo. Questo, in sintesi, è il piano che la Fondazione Rockefeller vuole attuare negli Stati uniti e non solo.

Se venisse realizzato anche in parte, si produrrebbe una ulteriore concentrazione del potere economico e politico nelle mani di élite ancora più ristrette, a scapito di una crescente maggioranza che verrebbe privata dei fondamentali diritti democratici. Operazione condotta in nome del «controllo del Covid-19», il cui tasso di mortalità, secondo i dati ufficiali, è finora inferiore allo 0,03% della popolazione statunitense.

Nel Piano della Fondazione Rockefeller il virus viene usato come una vera e propria arma, più pericolosa dello stesso Covid-19.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Ok, let me be perfectly clear here. I know, from years of studying the real American history from writers like Parenti, Chomsky, Zinn, Chossudovsky, even Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik, that the fix has always been in. Meaning, that this Two Party/One Party political system has always done the bidding for the Uber Rich… Period!

As a socialist I have come to understand how this Military Industrial Empire operates for the continuance of corporate capitalism. I hold few illusions as to what the Democratic Party can actually do to help us working stiffs. Are we hopelessly held hostage, or is prisoner a better word, by the wizards behind that curtain called Democracy? Well, even prisoners, maybe not hostages, sometimes have a voice through mass protest.

Reminds me of a B- movie from the 1950s regarding working stiffs under the thumb of a corrupt union at the waterfront (No, NOT ‘On the Waterfront’ folks). In this film the union was controlled by a rich shipping magnate, a ‘Mr. Big’, from his penthouse uptown. The working stiffs had enough of the violence and threats from the union bosses, and did a massive ‘Wildcat Strike’. Along with a couple of old style muckraking reporters (this is a fictitious movie guys) the working stiffs closed down the entire pier and were out in the streets in force, demanding to the news cameras ‘Reform’! The next scene is from a penthouse apartment, with ‘Mr. Big’ watching the news coverage on his television. He quickly orders his butler to get the union boss on the phone. “Do you see what is on every local news channel? This is no good! Do what you can to get these people back to work! Give them something, anything, and get this thing to end! This is no good for my business… or for YOU!!”

The moral to this story is not so complex. Sometimes, when things just get so bad for us working stiffs, Frederick Douglass’s words ring out: “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has. It never will.” Well, forget the Democrats for a minute. What we have here in this, the middle of an ‘era changing’ pandemic, is the use of power by this administration and its Republican Party cohorts  going right off the radar screen! If this writer had a few hours to list all the terrible actions (or inactions) of Mr. Trump and his party, maybe then I could accomplish my task. Well, to condense things to a few major items:

A) They did nothing from November 2019 to well into this past March to meet this crisis head on. No, instead of that, all we need do is go to the news clips and videos of them calling this a ‘hoax’ and ‘it is well contained now’. NO moves by them to get us all into secure face masks, or enough ventilators and hand sanitizers, along with rules for social distancing. NO moves to give funds, early on into this pandemic, to the states to help provide the proper equipment for our brave and helpful first providers;

B) The right wing that runs our government, sometimes with ‘silent approval’ by the Dems, did not create enough money for us working stiffs and the sea of small businesses to stay afloat. Instead, most of the electronically created money went, as in 2008-09, to those who need it the least. If they really wanted to prop up this economy, they would have instituted what many (including former presidential candidate Andrew Wang) advocated, that being a Universal Basic Income of anywhere from $ 1000 and up per month for every citizen (and half for each child) TAX FREE. Talk about economic stimulus – put the money in the hands of 320+ million of us and see how all commerce would be stimulated!

C) This desperate president and his crew, as with most politicians, only care about being re-elected. Imagine if you time travelled into the future and studied this: Trump wants to allow electoral college electors to be able to use their own judgment during an election. Translated: They can vote for any candidate they choose, rather than honor their pledge to vote for the candidate they promised to vote for. This is right out of the textbook ‘Elections in Banana Republics.’ In addition to this Trump wants to do away with mail in voting… even though he himself does it! Obvious why he wants this done: If you make folks leave their homes to vote during a pandemic, many, especially the old and informed, WON’T! Pollsters know that higher voter turnout always favors the Democrats. Finally, his boy Kushner has been floating the idea out there NOW that if things are not improved by November, the election may have to be cancelled. Herr Hitler never cancelled elections, only all the opposing political parties. One surmises the Trump crew figured that would be too difficult to accomplish, so just don’t have any vote at all!

We are living in more than just a terrible pandemic. We are living in a culture that former progressive radio talk show host Jay D. has always said is influenced by the rise of right wing talk radio. In many locations throughout Amerika if you stroll the radio dial you may run into Limbaugh or Hannity and their ilk on a slew of stations… at the same time! Jay D. feels that the reality of Uber Rich right wing owned stations flooding our airwaves. along with the ending of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ (whereupon rebuttals by the target of a radio host’s attacks is given air time on that same station), has signaled the end of the ‘Good Old Days’ of balanced talk radio shows. Factor that with another sad reality of the Two Party/One Party System. That being one party, the Democrats, who would have been labeled ‘Moderate Republicans’ in the 60s and 70s. The other party, as this title alludes to, is so far right that it reeks of Proto Fascism, or perhaps something even more frightening than that.

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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].

MLB, the NBA, NFL, NHL, and NCAA tout the surreal idea of playing in empty stadiums.

The roar of the crowd for home teams is part of the game.

I don’t follow sports like I did long ago after my dad introduced me to MLB in 1945 — before WW II ended and many stars in the military returned to the game like Red Sox great Ted Williams, a fighter pilot during the war.

Half the fun of the game was cheering for the home team at Boston’s Fenway Park’s packed ballpark with other fans.

Later I enjoyed watching immovable object Celtics great Bill Russell match up against unstoppable force Wilt Chamberlain in the stands.

Without the roar of the crowd, games would be sterile, no interaction between players and fans that’s part of the game, no atmosphere the way games are supposed to be played, no authenticity, no fun fans in the stands enjoy, what I introduced my children to long ago.

At a time of highly infectious COVID-19 outbreaks, stadiums filled with fans would be petri dishes for spreading them more widely.

Filled stadiums account for a large percentage of team revenues, especially for MLB and the NBA with lengthy regular seasons and playoffs.

A reported MLB document titled “Economics of Playing Without Fans in Attendance” for half the 2020 season, beginning around July 4, would result in $4 billion of lost revenue.

The NY Yankees would lose about $312 million, $232 million for the LA Dodgers, the NY Mets $214 million, Chicago Cubs $199 billion, and Boston Red Sox $188 million.

These teams most often play to sellout crowds, not the case for many other teams.

On May 4, an ESPN reported Coronavirus Lockdown Fan Study conducted from April 17 – 20 showed around two-thirds of respondents favor resumption of sports even with no fans in the stands.

On April 10, Sports Illustrated (SI) magazine predicted no quick resumption of professional and college sports that draw large crowds under normal conditions.

SI downplayed the idea isolating players in a bubble in one or a few venues, saying:

“It all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science,” adding:

Most ideas are “the same: The players live in quarantine, shuttling from the hotel to the stadium, for the duration of the season(s). They undergo daily COVID-19 tests.”

What sounds reasonable on paper may not work in reality.

Epidemiologist Zack Binney, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on NFL injuries, expressed a dim view, saying:

“We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine.”

Chances of developing a safe and effective one is highly unlikely to impossible without some sort of scientific breakthroughs never before achieved, none in prospect.

In February, a soccer match in Bergamo, Italy resulted in widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in the city.

What about resumption of sports in empty stadiums? According to Binney, the idea sounds good in theory.

“(I)t’s a lot harder to pull off in practice than most people appreciate.”

Players, coaches, trainers, the media, referees, and others entering stadiums would have to be initially tested and quarantined for two weeks to assure they’re virus free.

Thereafter, they’d have to be tested daily. When not playing games, they’d be quarantined in hotels or other accommodations — their food and whatever else they need brought to them.

The same goes for hotel and stadium employees. Along with players, they’d be away from families and friends under virtual house arrest.

It’s one thing for highly paid players putting up with these conditions, quite another for workers and most reporters, their pay a small fraction of what professional athletes make.

Would they put up with onerous conditions even with extra pay? Perhaps some would. Many others most likely would not.

Despite regular testing, if some players or others in contact with them become infected, it could spread to many others, especially in teams engaged in close contact football, basketball, and hockey.

Any player suffering an injury that requires outside medical treatment would have to self-quarantine for two weeks before returning to their team.

Another consideration is the value of league championships with an asterik under above conditions. They won’t likely be the same for players or fans.

If an emergency arises at home for players, requiring their return, they’d be self-quarantined again for 14 days before allowed to play.

MLB baseball with minimal contact would have the best chance of operating under the above conditions.

All players on all teams of all sports returning to action would have to agree to live under house arrest throughout their seasons — perhaps in 2021 as well.

Everything explained above working as planned would be a long shot at best.

Anyone becoming infected by COVID-19 with close contact to players could unravel the best laid plans — especially because sports seasons are months long and perfection isn’t a human attribute.

According to SI, even if this never before tried experiment begins, “we almost certainly can’t finish it.”

What can go wrong most likely will. Former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid administrator Andy Slavitt tweeted:

“I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”

According to SI, “(t)hey know how farfetched their ideas are. So do the players’ unions.”

“They continue to explore options because they would be remiss not to. But fans should understand how unlikely this all is.”

Even if tried that may happen, chances of failure are huge.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.

Let’s start with the phrase social distancing, which has mutated into forced human separation. The first I had heard it was in the 2011 movie Contagion. The first time it appeared in the New York Times was February 12, 2006:

If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”

But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.

Maybe you don’t remember that the avian flu of 2006 didn’t amount to much. It’s true, despite all the extreme warnings about its lethality, H5N1 didn’t turn into much at all. What it did do, however, was send the existing president, George W. Bush, to the library to read about the 1918 flu and its catastrophic results. He asked for some experts to submit some plans to him about what to do when the real thing comes along.

The New York Times (April 22, 2020) tells the story from there:

Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.

When they presented their plan not long after, it was met with skepticism and a degree of ridicule by senior officials, who like others in the United States had grown accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry, with its ever-growing array of new treatments, to confront evolving health challenges.

Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing instead that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.

How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.

It required the key proponents — Dr. Mecher, a Department of Veterans Affairs physician, and Dr. Hatchett, an oncologist turned White House adviser — to overcome intense initial opposition.

It brought their work together with that of a Defense Department team assigned to a similar task.

And it had some unexpected detours, including a deep dive into the history of the 1918 Spanish flu and an important discovery kicked off by a high school research project pursued by the daughter of a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories.

The concept of social distancing is now intimately familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.

Notice that in the course of this planning, neither legal nor economic experts were brought in to consult and advise. Instead it fell to Mecher (formerly of Chicago and an intensive care doctor with no previous expertise in pandemics) and the oncologist Hatchett.

But what is this mention of the high-school daughter of 14? Her name is Laura M. Glass, and she recently declined to be interviewed when the Albuquerque Journal did a deep dive of this history.

Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.

Laura’s name appears on the foundational paper arguing for lockdowns and forced human separation. That paper is Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza (2006). It set out a model for forced separation and applied it with good results backwards in time to 1957. They conclude with a chilling call for what amounts to a totalitarian lockdown, all stated very matter-of-factly.

Implementation of social distancing strategies is challenging. They likely must be imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed. If compliance with the strategy is high over this period, an epidemic within a community can be averted. However, if neighboring communities do not also use these interventions, infected neighbors will continue to introduce influenza and prolong the local epidemic, albeit at a depressed level more easily accommodated by healthcare systems.

In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics.

The primary author of this paper was Robert J. Glass, a complex-systems analyst with Sandia National Laboratories. He had no medical training, much less an expertise in immunology or epidemiology.

That explains why Dr. D.A. Henderson, “who had been the leader of the international effort to eradicate smallpox,” completely rejected the whole scheme.

Says the NYT:

Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop. Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall. School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat. Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home.

The measures embraced by Drs. Mecher and Hatchett would “result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems,” Dr. Henderson wrote in his own academic paper responding to their ideas.

The answer, he insisted, was to tough it out: Let the pandemic spread, treat people who get sick and work quickly to develop a vaccine to prevent it from coming back.

AIER’s Phil Magness got to work to find the literature responding to this 2006 and discovered: Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. The authors included D.A. Henderson, along with three professors from Johns Hopkins: infectious disease specialist Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole.

Their paper is a remarkably readable refutation of the entire lock-down model.

There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. … It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration…

Home quarantine also raises ethical questions. Implementation of home quarantine could result in healthy, uninfected people being placed at risk of infection from sick household members. Practices to reduce the chance of transmission (hand-washing, maintaining a distance of 3 feet from infected people, etc.) could be recommended, but a policy imposing home quarantine would preclude, for example, sending healthy children to stay with relatives when a family member becomes ill. Such a policy would also be particularly hard on and dangerous to people living in close quarters, where the risk of infection would be heightened….

Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective. The World Health Organization Writing Group concluded that “screening and quarantining entering travelers at international borders did not substantially delay virus introduction in past pandemics . . . and will likely be even less effective in the modern era.”… It is reasonable to assume that the economic costs of shutting down air or train travel would be very high, and the societal costs involved in interrupting all air or train travel would be extreme. …

During seasonal influenza epidemics, public events with an expected large attendance have sometimes been cancelled or postponed, the rationale being to decrease the number of contacts with those who might be contagious. There are, however, no certain indications that these actions have had any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic. Were consideration to be given to doing this on a more extensive scale and for an extended period, questions immediately arise as to how many such events would be affected. There are many social gatherings that involve close contacts among people, and this prohibition might include church services, athletic events, perhaps all meetings of more than 100 people. It might mean closing theaters, restaurants, malls, large stores, and bars. Implementing such measures would have seriously disruptive consequences…

Schools are often closed for 1–2 weeks early in the development of seasonal community outbreaks of influenza primarily because of high absentee rates, especially in elementary schools, and because of illness among teachers. This would seem reasonable on practical grounds. However, to close schools for longer periods is not only impracticable but carries the possibility of a serious adverse outcome….

Thus, cancelling or postponing large meetings would not be likely to have any significant effect on the development of the epidemic. While local concerns may result in the closure of particular events for logical reasons, a policy directing communitywide closure of public events seems inadvisable. Quarantine. As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences, such as loss of public trust in government and stigmatization of quarantined people and groups, are likely to be considerable….

Finally, the remarkable conclusion:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Confronting a manageable epidemic and turning it into a catastrophe: that seems like a good description of everything that has happened in the COVID-19 crisis of 2020.

Thus did some of the most highly trained and experienced experts on epidemics warn with biting rhetoric against everything that the advocates of lockdown proposed. It was not even a real-world idea in the first place and showed no actual knowledge of viruses and disease mitigation. Again, the idea was born of a high-school science experiment using agent-based modelling techniques having nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine.

So the question becomes: how did the extreme view prevail?

The New York Times has the answer:

The [Bush] administration ultimately sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns — though their victory was little noticed outside of public health circles. Their policy would become the basis for government planning and would be used extensively in simulations used to prepare for pandemics, and in a limited way in 2009 during an outbreak of the influenza called H1N1. Then the coronavirus came, and the plan was put to work across the country for the first time.

[Note: You can read the 2007 CDC paper here. It is arguable that this paper did not favor full lockdown. I’ve spoken to Ajeev Venkayya, MD, who assures me that they never envisioned this level of lockdown.]

The Times called one of the pro-lockdown researchers, Dr. Howard Markel, and asked what he thought of the lockdowns. His answer: he is glad that his work was used to “save lives” but added, “It is also horrifying.” “We always knew this would be applied in worst-case scenarios,” he said. “Even when you are working on dystopian concepts, you always hope it will never be used.”

Ideas have consequences, as they say. Dream up an idea for a virus-controlling totalitarian society, one without an endgame and eschewing any experienced-based evidence that it would achieve the goal, and you might see it implemented someday. Lockdown might be the new orthodoxy but that doesn’t make it medically sound or morally correct. At least now we know that many great doctors and scholars in 2006 did their best to stop this nightmare from unfolding. Their mighty paper should serve as a blueprint for dealing with the next pandemic.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

Featured image is from AIER

About 2 dozen Turkish-backed militants have been killed or wounded in a recent series of clashes in northern Syria. 14 of them were reportedly killed in a failed attack on positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) near Kubrlik overnight on May 17 and up to 10 were killed or injured in clashes near Hazwan on May 15. Reacting to its own failures, Turkish-backed forces carried out a series of mortar and artillery strikes on SDF positions near Ayn Issa, Tall Tamr and Tall Unayb on May 16, May 17 and early on May 18.

Firefights and artillery duels between Turkish-backed forces and the SDF regularly erupt in this part of Syria. However, both sides do not conduct large-scale offensive operations against each other and despite the violations the ceasefire regime formally remains in force.

On May 17, seven former ISIS members fled the SDF-controlled camp of al-Hawl in the province of al-Hasakah, which holds a large number of the former ISIS fighters and their families. Following the incident, SDF security forces in the area were placed on a high alert. The search operation has been ongoing. Some pro-Kurdish sources claim that the fleeing terrorists have been already detained, but these calms remain unconfirmed. This is the second security incident in al-Hawl in less than 10 days. On May 13, SDF security forces foiled a plot of ISIS wives to set the camp on fire and flee to Turkey.

Early on May 18 reports appeared that a drone strike allegedly struck the area near a convoy of the Syrian Army in the district of Maadan in Raqqa province. Several Syrian Army soldiers were reportedly wounded. It remains unclear who was behind the attack, but the two main suspects are Turkey and the US-led coalition.

On May 17, US armoured vehicles chased in the province of al-Hasakah a Russian military convoy with 150 tones of humanitarian aid being sent to civilians in northeastern Syria, but were unable to stop it.

A firefight between the Syrian Army and ISIS members erupted near the town of al-Sukhna, on the Homs-Deir Ezzor highway. According to reports, ISIS cells tried to cut off the road, but were forced to retreat. Regular attacks by ISIS cells operating in the desert area remain a notable security threat for government forces.

At the same time, the situation in Greater Idlib once again de-escalated. After failing to capture Tanjarah in northwestern Hama last week, al-Qaeda-linked groups reduced their activity on the frontline. Despite this, it’s highly likely that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies will conduct more limited attempts to expand their zone of control in southern Idlib and western Hama in the coming weeks.

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How could the Great Patriotic War in which the Soviet people (including many members of my own family) lost at least 25 million lives, have anything in common with the latest outbreak of the novel coronavirus?

You think this is an absolutely insane question?

However, before you dismiss it, think twice. There are similarities how they are being portrayed. There is a dangerous, even deadly pattern.

The storylines of both monumental events have been shamelessly kidnapped, and perverted by Western propaganda!

Those people and countries that fought hard and heroically, have lost the narrative. At the same time, those who negotiated, to twist and to delay their involvement, have managed to re-write history and to even give themselves the credit for ‘saving the world’.

The greatest sacrifice in human history, that made by the Soviet people who fought for the survival of mankind, defeated Nazism, and later helped to de-colonize the world, has been belittled by the professional masters of disinformation in London, Paris and New York. The Soviet Union itself was first smeared, its history rewritten in hostile foreign countries (to the extent that even the Soviet people themselves began doubting their own past), its internationalist duty discounted and dragged through mud. In the end and mostly as a result of such intellectual aggressions, a tremendous country and the bulwark of anti-imperialism, suddenly collapsed.

No shots were fired, except in Afghanistan, which was virtually sacrificed by the West. It has been converted into a playground of radicals and religious fundamentalists. In the end it broke the spine of the Soviet Union, the country that had been skillfully maneuvered into the conflict by Washington, and which, against all practical sense, decided to rush to the rescue of the Afghan people.

This, last chapter of Soviet history, has been twisted and perverted, too, in Washington and London.

In fact, everything pure, heroic and positive that the Soviet Union represented, was spat on.

The anti-Soviet, and even anti-Russian narrative has become absolutely bulletproof.

Manipulative documentary films, books, school curriculums in Europe and North America; they all pass off as facts in simple propaganda gigs, without offering any evidence. Very often, they take historic events and data, twist them, turn them around, and repeat the consequent fabrications again, again and again.

There are thousands of mass media outlets participating in the project. It definitely works. Such an approach is effective. Deadly effective.

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China is now being beaten with the same stick as the Soviet Union, and Russia.

The most populous, successful, and enthusiastic Socialist country still does not fully comprehend, what is being done to it. China is trying to be a good world citizen. It does its best to show kindness and solidarity. And yet, the more positive its deeds, the more it gets antagonized, accused of selfishness and malignancy.

The Western propaganda apparatus is now determinedly smearing the Chinese revolution, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese system. Tiananmen Square ‘events’, which were invented by thoroughly hostile Western mass media outlets, are used as proof of China’s “evilness”. Present-day Hong Kong events, a direct attack on China and interference in its internal affairs, are turned upside down. Beijing is being portrayed as the aggressor, not as the victim!

Newspapers like The New York Times or The Independent have absolutely nothing good to say about the socially most successful country on Earth.

That is quite an impressive show of one-sidedness.

Then comes COVID-19.

Before Western propaganda got involved, kicking into top gear, people in all corners of the world were tremendously impressed with the rapid and determined response of the Chinese system. China isolated one province, quarantined it, and defeated the pandemic within a few weeks. Almost immediately, it began helping the rest of the world.

The Chinese government, Chinese scientists, and the Chinese population in general, had no idea what were they up against. They were all alone, facing the new virus. Intuitively, in a socialist way, they mobilized, won the battle and defeated the pandemic with minimum losses and in the shortest possible time.

While several Chinese officials and scientists believed that the virus was injected into China by the United States, Beijing decided to adopt a conciliatory tone, suggesting there should be cooperation, instead of confrontation.

That is the Chinese, but not Western way.

The Western approach towards the COVID-19; from Italy, UK, Spain to the United States across the Atlantic Ocean, has been grotesque, inconsistent, disorganized and for the common people, deadly. In short, it has been a total fiasco.

Therefore, using its traditional methods, Western propaganda system began doing what it does the best: attacking those who are fighting for the survival of the world. Attacking relentlessly, aggressively and often, vulgarly.

If the numbers were to be compared, the entire affair would look ridiculous, even grotesque. The West would soon run out of arguments. The same, if the Chinese and Western general approaches were placed next to each other and analyzed.

But they are not. What is done in Europe and North America is not really reporting or comparing facts. Instead, it is a constant flow of an ideological, propagandist narrative, of disinformation, full of sarcasm, double speak and mud.

The discourses of the U.S. politicians are increasingly racist, perverse and full of spite. When it comes to China, Western leaders lie, they present no proof, but in this ‘game’, all the above is obviously allowed. One after another, they get on the proverbial podium and spit at China: all of them do – Trump, Pompeo, Navarro, Rubio, and others.

The better China does, the more they shout and spit.

The better the Soviet Union did, the louder the accusations against it were, the more brutal the insults.

Now China says loudly and clearly: “We have pulled almost everyone out of poverty. We are a real Socialist country with Chinese characteristics, governed by the Communist Party of China. We are helping the struggling part of the world through the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative). We fought hard and defeated the new and terrible pandemic.”

Western ideologues shout back: “No you are not helping anyone. You are selfish. You are not even socialist. You misinformed us about the pandemic.”

The problem is, the Western regime owns and controls incomparably more media outlets than do China and Russia combined. And both the Russian and Chinese media outlets, including this magazine – New Eastern Outlook – are constantly censored and blocked in the Western countries, on-line and otherwise. It goes without saying, that the Western propaganda is the biggest, and the mightiest disinformation system on the planet.

In the meantime, tens of thousands are dying from the COVID-19, but now especially from the economic and social manipulation, in Europe, North America and their client states in the poor parts of the world.

The contrast is tremendous, if one is allowed to the see that contrast.

It is obvious which system is better for humanity, but the more obvious it gets, the more disinformation blurs the picture; the compliments of the Western media outlets and ‘educational’ institutions.

While all this is going on, people in the West are increasingly complacent, sheepish, and indifferent.

In his recent interview for the RT, the legendary German film director, Werner Herzog, brought up some essential and relevant philosophical points:

“The atrocities carried out by the Nazis were the result of a lockstep narrative of “demonization” which replaced facts.”

“‘Industrialized mass murder’ only possible when people stop questioning narratives.”

“It is not so much what is factually happening, it’s who owns the narrative. And we have to be very, very careful and watchful about looking at the media. What are the media doing? Is there some sort of almost collective brainwashing going on or not? … [W]e have to be quite vigilant and we should think on our own.”

What we are witnessing or participating in, is a horrific, ideological battle. Not just for China, not just for Russia and for the memory of those who gave their lives for the survival of our human race.

Right now, everything is at stake. Perhaps the very essence of mankind.

It is still possible to win. Partially, because Western propaganda, while effective, is not necessarily innovative. It is relatively primitive. It can be exposed. While it repeats its lies, relentlessly and religiously, we have to repeat that the lies are lies, and offer proof.

Let us do it with determination, and in full voice.

Therefore:

“75 years ago, it was the Soviet Union which defeated Nazi Germany, and saved the world, at an unimaginably high cost!”

And:

“It was China, which was first hit by the novel coronavirus. And it was China, which defeated it rapidly and with tremendous socialist determination!”

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s the creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that has penned a number of books, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

When the Dodd Frank Act was passed in 2010, President Obama triumphantly declared, “No more bailouts!” But what the Act actually said was that the next time the banks failed, they would be subject to “bail ins” – the funds of their creditors, including their large depositors, would be tapped to cover their bad loans.

Then bail-ins were tried in Europe. The results were disastrous.

Many economists in the US and Europe argued that the next time the banks failed, they should be nationalized – taken over by the government as public utilities. But that opportunity was lost when, in September 2019 and again in March 2020, Wall Street banks were quietly bailed out from a liquidity crisis in the repo market that could otherwise have bankrupted them. There was no bail-in of private funds, no heated congressional debate, and no public vote. It was all done unilaterally by unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.

“The justification of private profit,” said President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1938 address, “is private risk.” Banking has now been made virtually risk-free, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States and its people. The American people are therefore entitled to share in the benefits and the profits. Banking needs to be made a public utility.

The Risky Business of Borrowing Short to Lend Long

Individual banks can go bankrupt from too many bad loans, but the crises that can trigger system-wide collapse are “liquidity crises.” Banks “borrow short to lend long.” They borrow from their depositors to make long-term loans or investments while promising the depositors that they can come for their money “on demand.” To pull off this sleight of hand, when the depositors and the borrowers want the money at the same time, the banks have to borrow from somewhere else. If they can’t find lenders on short notice, or if the price of borrowing suddenly becomes prohibitive, the result is a “liquidity crisis.”

Before 1933, when the government stepped in with FDIC deposit insurance, bank panics and bank runs were common. When people suspected a bank was in trouble, they would all rush to withdraw their funds at once, exposing the fact that the banks did not have the money they purported to have. During the Great Depression, more than one-third of all private US banks were closed due to bank runs.

But President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, was skeptical about insuring bank deposits. He warned,

“We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.”

The government had a viable public alternative, a US postal banking system established in 1911. Postal banks became especially popular during the Depression, because they were backed by the US government. But Roosevelt was pressured into signing the 1933 Banking Act, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that insured private banks with public funds.

Congress, however, was unwilling to insure more than $5,000 per depositor (about $100,000 today), a sum raised temporarily in 2008 and permanently in 2010 to $250,000. That meant large institutional investors (pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds) had nowhere to park the millions of dollars they held between investments. They wanted a place to put their funds that was secure, provided them with some interest, and was liquid like a traditional deposit account, allowing quick withdrawal. They wanted the same “ironclad moneyback guarantee” provided by FDIC deposit insurance, with the ability to get their money back on demand.

It was largely in response to that need that the private repo market evolved. Repo trades, although technically “sales and repurchases” of collateral, are in effect secured short-term loans, usually repayable the next day or in two weeks. Repo replaces the security of deposit insurance with the security of highly liquid collateral, typically Treasury debt or mortgage-backed securities. Although the repo market evolved chiefly to satisfy the needs of the large institutional investors that were its chief lenders, it also served the interests of the banks, since it allowed them to get around the capital requirements imposed by regulators on the conventional banking system. Borrowing from the repo market became so popular that by 2008, it provided half the credit in the country. By 2020, this massive market had a turnover of $1 trillion a day.

Before 2008, banks also borrowed from each other in the fed funds market, allowing the Fed to manipulate interest rates by controlling the fed funds rate. But after 2008, banks were afraid to lend to each other for fear the borrowing banks might be insolvent and might not pay the loans back. Instead the lenders turned to the repo market, where loans were supposedly secured with collateral. The problem was that the collateral could be “rehypothecated,” or used for several loans at once; and by September 2019, the borrower side of the repo market had been taken over by hedge funds, which were notorious for risky rehypothecation. Many large institutional lenders therefore pulled out, driving the cost of borrowing at one point from 2% to 10%.

Rather than letting the banks fail and forcing a bail-in of private creditors’ funds, the Fed quietly stepped in and saved the banks by becoming the “repo lender of last resort.” But the liquidity crunch did not abate, and by March the Fed was making $1 trillion per day available in overnight loans. The central bank was backstopping the whole repo market, including the hedge funds, an untenable situation.

In March 2020, under cover of a national crisis, the Fed therefore flung the doors open to its discount window, where only banks could borrow. Previously, banks were reluctant to apply there because the interest was at a penalty rate and carried a stigma, signaling that the bank must be in distress. But that concern was eliminated when the Fed announced in a March 15 press release that the interest rate had been dropped to 0.25% (virtually zero). The reserve requirement was also eliminated, the capital requirement was relaxed, and all banks in good standing were offered loans of up to 90 days, “renewable on a daily basis.” The loans could be continually rolled over. And while the alleged intent was “to help meet demands for credit from households and businesses at this time,” no strings were attached to this interest-free money. There was no obligation to lend to small businesses, reduce credit card rates, or write down underwater mortgages.

The Fed’s scheme worked, and demand for repo loans plummeted. Even J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, has acknowledged borrowing at the Fed’s discount window for super cheap loans. But the windfall to Wall Street has not been shared with the public. In Canada, some of the biggest banks slashed their credit card interest rates in half, from 21 percent to 11 percent, to help relieve borrowers during the COVID-19 crisis. But US banks have felt no such compunction. US credit card rates dropped in April only by half a percentage point, to 20.15%. The giant Wall Street banks continue to favor their largest clients, doling out CARES Act benefits to them first, emptying the trough before many smaller businesses could drink there.

In 1969, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi nationalized 14 of India’s largest banks, not because they were bankrupt (the usual justification today) but to ensure that credit would be allocated according to planned priorities, including getting banks into rural areas and making cheap financing available to Indian farmers.  Congress could do the same today, but the odds are it won’t. As Sen. Dick Durbin said in 2009, “the banks … are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Time for the States to Step In

State and local governments could make cheap credit available to their communities, but today they too are second class citizens when it comes to borrowing. Unlike the banks, which can borrow virtually interest-free with no strings attached, states can sell their bonds to the Fed only at market rates of 3% or 4% or more plus a penalty. Why are elected local governments, which are required to serve the public, penalized for shortfalls in their budgets caused by a mandatory shutdown, when private banks that serve private stockholders are not?

States can borrow from the federal unemployment trust fund, as California just did for $348 million, but these loans too must be paid back with interest, and they must be used to cover soaring claims for state unemployment benefits. States remain desperately short of funds to repair holes in their budgets from lost revenues and increased costs due to the shutdown.

States are excellent credit risks – far better than banks would be without the life-support of the federal government. States have a tax base, they aren’t going anywhere, they are legally required to pay their bills, and they are forbidden to file for bankruptcy. Banks are considered better credit risks than states only because their deposits are insured by the federal government and they are gifted with routine bailouts from the Fed, without which they would have collapsed decades ago.

State and local governments with a mandate to serve the public interest deserve to be treated as well as private Wall Street banks that have repeatedly been found guilty of frauds on the public. How can states get parity with the banks? If Congress won’t address that need, states can borrow interest-free at the Fed’s discount window by forming their own publicly-owned banks. For more on that possibility, see my earlier article here.

As Buckminster Fuller said,

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, create a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

Post-COVID-19, the world will need to explore new models; and publicly-owned banks should be high on the list.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Web of Debt Blog.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Even though it’s being held on its home turf, Beijing will play second fiddle for the next week as thousands of delegates pour into the capital to debate, argue and socialize amid the “Two Sessions”.

The sessions, taking place after being postponed in March due to COVID-19, are the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body drawn from delegates representing a cross-section of society, including the arts, medicine, transport, construction, and the National People’s Congress, the top legislative body.

In reality, the NPC is an exercise in public relations, a supreme example of rubber-stamping. Nothing of any merit will be discussed openly. TV coverage will highlight the mass, synchronized applause of the 2,975 delegates, led by the People’s Liberation Army with the most delegates at 294, followed not by Beijing, or Shanghai but Shandong, the most populous province, with 173 delegates.

Obviously, the COVID-19 outbreak will be presented as a challenge that China met successfully. The catastrophic initial mistakes, the denials, the harassment of doctors trying to publicize its danger, the mass gathering in January that saw tens of thousands of people openly celebrate Chinese New Year in a huge square, will not be mentioned. But neither will there be a sense of triumphalism. The virus remains a concern and seems, at the moment, to be under control but everyone knows it is far too early to declare absolute victory.

The importance of the “Two Sessions” is that it allows leaders of the provincial parties to come to Beijing and discuss, privately, their concerns. China is a one-party state. Ultimate political authority, of course, rests with the Chinese Communist Party, whose Politburo Standing Committee, headed by President Xi Jinping, sets policy. So the NPC deputies to the congress will sit politely, row-upon-row in the Great Hall of the People and choreograph their applause. But in the corridors of power, restaurants and hotel lobbies, there will be forthright discussions on the faltering economy, anti-pollution efforts, international affairs, the Trump presidency and how to recalibrate China’s damaged position in the world.

But one other subject will be raised that makes this Two Sessions intriguing for the outside world is that for the first time since Mao passed away in 1976 China does not expect tomorrow to be better than today. The social contract, the implicit unwritten understanding between the party and the people – acceptance of the party’s political primacy in exchange for growing prosperity – is at risk of unraveling.

Most people in China believe that for this contract to be maintained economic growth would have to be in the region of 5-6 percent minimum per year. No one believes it is anywhere near that today. Even before COVID-19 it was probably around 5 percent. After the outbreak it is much less, probably around 2 percent. Unforeseen circumstances. Sure. But unforeseen circumstances can have unforeseen consequences. Beijing cannot turn on the export taps as it did before to get out of trouble because its major overseas markets are also on their knees. And China as a brand has been damaged. Long after this crisis is over there will be a residue of mistrust for things China. Even before COVID-19 there was a growing sense in the West that China, ironically a communist country once considered just a few years ago as the savior of Western capitalism, could not be trusted. Now there is almost unanimous certainty that it is beyond the pale. Frustration in Beijing at growing international isolation and a restive population demanding better living standards could prove to be a potent mix.

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Tom Clifford is a renowned journalist currently based in Beijing

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The anti-China campaign in the U.S. is nearing its climax. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn wrote a letter to colleagues calling for them to be careful when working with Chinese officials, or better, to avoid contact with them. Last week, Republican senators proposed a bill that would allow President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on China if there is no comprehensive review of China’s role in the spread of coronavirus. Lawmakers requested the investigation within 60 days, as well as confirm the closure of the so-called wet markets in China, in addition to the release of arrested Hong Kong rioters. They also propose to freeze Chinese assets in the U.S., impose travel bans, tighten visas, and restrict Chinese businesses from accessing U.S. banking and capital markets.

Washington continued its online visa war with China by limiting visas to Chinese journalists working in the U.S. for 90 days. Chinese media outlet Xinhua called the decision an unprecedented act of discrimination and pressure on Chinese journalists. This completely exposed the false pretence of the U.S. claims of “freedom of the press,” a spokesperson of the agency said.

Trump’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. could completely end its relationship with China due to the pandemic has seen China harshly reacting, with suggestions that itself might put sanctions on the U.S.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also called on alleged forces related to China to stop stealing coronavirus research data after the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security made the accusation. It is likely however that Trump uses the charges against China primarily for his own political purposes as he lost complete control of the coronavirus that has seen over 1.5 million Americans infected and around 90,000 dead.

For the sake of winning the upcoming election he will continue to target China, but will unlikely break ties with Beijing because American businesses will lose a market of 1.4 billion people. The pandemic has shown that the U.S. has missed an opportunity to be a world leader which will now force Washington to rethink its position in the world.

The U.S. understand they have a long way to go before reaching the end of the pandemic. Meanwhile, China is approaching the end of it. Economically, China is winning which is why Washington is trying to curb China politically. It is for this reason Washington is now using the “Taiwanese card.”

Pompeo said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “chose not to invite Taiwan under pressure from the People’s Republic of China. The Director-General’s lack of independence deprives the Assembly of Taiwan’s renowned scientific expertise on pandemic disease, and further damages the WHO’s credibility and effectiveness at a time when the world needs it the most.”

Washington’s focus on China is a distraction, a relatively simple way to disguise their own faults, and the charges against the WHO serves the same purpose. It is passing on the blame of Trump’s inefficient handling of the pandemic just as we push closer to the next U.S. elections.

Member states of the Five Eyes intelligence structure, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada, or what should be more accurately called the Anglo Five, also contributed to the campaign against China. These countries support the U.S. call for an inquiry into the role of WHO and China in the fight against the pandemic, and some, despite Beijing’s strong opposition, have supported Taiwan’s invitation to join the World Health Assembly. According to Canadian radio company CBC that quoted a senior Canadian government official, French, German and Japanese ambassadors at the United Nations in Geneva, along with Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, British and the American ones at a meeting with senior WHO officials voiced support for inviting Taiwan to join this international organization

Despite the provocations and using Taiwan provocatively, the People’s Bank of China issued a license to Fitch Bohua, owned by U.S. company Fitch Raitings, to conduct business in the Chinese market, according to information released on May 14. The company is allowed to value some bonds in China’s interbank stock market. The acceptance of Fitch Raitings into the Chinese market is part of the first phase agreement of China-U.S. trade. In addition, as part of this transaction, the Chinese government today will cancel additional import duties on the second shipment from the U.S.

However, Chinese state-owned Global Times, considered an influential voice in Chinese policymaking, said Beijing is running out of patience. It appears China could be deliberately leaking information to the media and is planning serious sanctions, particularly against two organizations and several individuals who have sued China in U.S. courts. The Chinese outlet explained how to inflict the most painful economic damage on these American organizations and individuals, and urged Beijing to do this instead of making angry statements and symbolic gestures.

It is unlikely that China, or even the U.S., will sever relations or impose sanctions. Although the U.S. political class may be against China, for the billionaires and major business owners, anti-Chinese actions are against their own financial interests. For this fact, it is likely Trump is only using strong rhetoric in the lead up to the upcoming election to distract Americans from his own mishandling of the pandemic.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Less than two weeks after an abortive mercenary invasion aimed at overthrowing Venezuela’s government and murdering its president that was hatched by the Trump White House, the US State Department on Wednesday renewed it classification of the country as “not fully cooperating” with Washington’s global war on terrorism.

Also added to the list was Cuba, whose embassy in Washington was targeted by a gunman armed with an automatic weapon on April 30, an act that elicited not a word of condemnation from the Trump administration.

This marked the first time that Cuba has been placed on the list since 2015, when it was removed as part of negotiations between US President Barack Obama and Cuba’s Raul Castro on the normalization of relations between the two countries. That move was backed by major American financial and corporate interests seeking to compete with the Chinese and Europeans in and for the Cuban market.

Prior to that, Cuba had been classified for 33 years as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The designation stemmed from Havana’s support for both Nicaragua, at the time under siege by the terrorist “contra” army organized by the CIA, and El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), carrying out an armed revolt against the murderous US-backed juntas that ruled El Salvador. Both the Sandinistas and the FMLN have since transformed themselves into bourgeois parties, leading right-wing governments in their respective countries.

The hypocrisy of Washington branding Venezuela and Cuba as complicit in terrorism is as brazen as it is boundless.

On the same day that the State Department released its list, Venezuela’s delegation to the United Nations filed formal charges with the Security Council and the Secretary General over the armed terrorist attacks carried out on the country’s northern coast on May 3 and 4 by mercenaries organized, trained and financed by the governments of the US and Colombia.

The Venezuelan government reported capturing 39 more armed men on its border with Colombia Thursday, bringing the number detained since the landings in the coastal towns of Macuto and Chuao in the north of Venezuela to 91.

Among those detained are two ex-US special forces operatives, Luke Alexander Denman, 34, and Airan Berry, 41, who have been formally charged with terrorism, facing sentences of between 25 and 30 years in prison.

The two ex-US soldiers were recruited for the operation by a US security contractor, Silvercorp, Inc., run by a former Green Beret, Jordan Goudreau, who was put into contact with Washington’s puppet and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó by Trump’s longtime security chief.

A contract signed between the two of them, along with other members of Guaidó’s entourage, has been posted online, revealing that the US puppet had agreed to pay $212 million for an armed operation that, if successful, would have led to either the capture or murder of President Maduro, along with the killing of an unknown number of other Venezuelans, both civilian and military. Guaidó was named in the contract as the “commander in chief” of the mercenary operation.

While branding Caracas as “uncooperative” in the US war on terror, the Trump administration has shown no inclination to extradite Goudreau to face charges of terrorism in Venezuela. On the contrary, it has vowed to use “all tools” at its disposal to free the two US mercenaries caught red-handed on the beaches of Venezuela.

US terrorism against Venezuela did not begin with the landings on its northern coast earlier this month, but rather has been sustained through a “maximum pressure” regime of economic sanctions tantamount to a state of war, preventing the country from importing food and vital medical supplies in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Washington’s claim that Caracas is “uncooperative” in the so-called US war on terrorism is based on the claim that Maduro and other members of the Venezuelan government are involved in “narco-terrorism.” The Pentagon has deployed warships off the Venezuelan coast on this pretext, even as US intelligence officials acknowledge that the vast majority of drugs coming into the United States are passing through the territories of Washington’s closest allies in Colombia and Central America.

In Cuba’s case, the cynicism of the US decree is equally blatant. Its principal charge is that Havana failed to accede to the demands of Colombia’s right-wing President Iván Duque to extradite representatives of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group, who had come to the Cuban capital as part of a series of peace negotiations that resulted in a settlement between the main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government.

For its part, Cuba has recorded the deaths of 3,478 of its citizens and the wounding of 2,099 as a result of terrorist operations launched from the US and with the aid and complicity of the US government.

Also included on the list of those not “cooperating fully” with Washington’s war on terror were Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Iran responded with a statement from Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi, who said,

“With a history of founding, funding & arming different terrorist groups, a record of state terrorism, and its outright support for another terrorist regime [Israel], US is not a good yardstick for measuring anti-terrorism efforts.”

In January of this year, Washington carried out an act of flagrant state terrorism with the drone missile assassination of one of Iran’s senior state officials, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, as he was making a state visit to Iraq for talks with the country’s prime minister.

As for Syria, the country has been the victim for nearly a decade of a US-organized war for regime change that has utilized Al Qaeda-linked militias as its main proxy ground troops.

US officials have told the media that Washington is preparing to return Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terrorism and to brand various elements of Venezuela’s security forces as terrorist entities. These measures would pave the way for redoubled US aggression against both countries.

While both the Maduro government in Venezuela and that headed by President Miguel Díaz-Canel in Cuba have sought to accommodate themselves to the interests of US and world imperialism, Washington has shown no inclination to compromise. The Trump administration, while currying favor with the right-wing Cuban and Venezuelan exile groups in Florida in advance of the 2020 election, is basing its policy on the drive by American imperialism to roll back the influence of Russia and China in the Western Hemisphere. The charges of failure to cooperate with the “war on terrorism” are being leveled to prepare for a global war that entails unimaginable terror for the population of the entire planet.

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The US White House has appointed a coronavirus “Vaccine Czar” from Big Pharma to oversee something dubbed Operation Warp Speed. The goal is to create and produce 300 million doses of a new vaccine to supposedly immunize the entire US population by year-end against COVID-19. To be sure that Big Pharma companies give their all to the medical Manhattan Project, they have been fully indemnified by the US government against liabilities should vaccine recipients die or develop serious disease as a result of the rushed vaccine. The FDA and NIH have waived standard pre-testing on animals in the situation. The US military, according to recent remarks by the US President, is being trained to administer the yet-to-be unveiled vaccine in record time. Surely nothing could go wrong here?

Warp speed is a term out of the sci-fi Star Trek media, defined as a speed faster than the speed of light. In recent weeks billions of dollars have been pledged from governments, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others to fast-track a vaccine as well as test medical treatments to combat the VODIV19 illness said to originate from a novel coronavirus first discovered late 2019 in Wuhan China. This rush to create a “miracle” vaccine is ominous and suggests some hidden agenda.

The Conflicted Czar

Washington’s Operation Warp Speed is reportedly the brainchild of Presidential Adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. It is being formally run by the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Defense Secretary Mark Esper who will work with a new Vaccine Czar. The Vaccine Czar selected for Kushner’s Operation Warp Speed is former GlaxoSmithKline Chairman of its Vaccines Division, Morrocan-born US citizen, Dr. Moncef Slaoui. From 2006 through 2017 Slaoui was Chairman of Global R&D and Vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline and sat on the company’s Executive team and Board of Directors.

While at GSK Slaoui headed the development of Cervarix. Its Cervarix HPV cervical cancer vaccine was reported tied to multiple deaths or severe crippling effects in many recipients. A 2017 WHO monitoring report revealed that serious adverse effects from Moncef Slaoui’s HPV vaccine included complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) that “exceeds any other vaccine.” That is not reassuring in terms of the new Czar of a rushed coronavirus vaccine.

In 2015 the Indian Supreme Court investigated charges that young Indian village girls died after being given Cervarix from Slaoui’s GSK. It was done in illegal vaccine “human guinea pig” tests of the HPV vaccine where neither the girls nor their parents were told what it was. The study was reportedly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2012 while Slaoui headed GSK global R&D and vaccine development, and sat on the GSK board, the company was fined $3 billion by the US Department of Justice, the largest ever fine against a pharmaceutical company. Among the charges was that GlaxoSmithKline deliberately withheld alarming safety data for its major-selling diabetes drug, Advandia, from the US FDA. After Advandia quietly vanished from the product list of GSK.

Slaoui also has ties to the projects of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He sat on the board of the Gates-funded International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. The IAVI was initiated in 1994 at a Rockefeller Foundation conference and is backed among others by the Gates Foundation, by the US Department of Defense and by Tony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

At a May 15 White House press conference where the President introduced Slaoui as the head of the crash vaccine project, Slaoui stated,

“Mr. President, I have very recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine. These data make me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.”

Though he did not say, he was clearly referring to Moderna and its mRNA gene-edited vaccine, the first US vaccine authorized to enter Phase I human trials after the US government gave the company a staggering $483 million of funding to fast-track the COVID-19 vaccine.

Vaccine Czar Slaoui is well-placed with regard to Moderna. After leaving GSK from 2017 until he joined the Trump Operation Warp Speed, Slaoui was on the Moderna Board of Directors. He also still holds $10 million worth of Moderna stock options, options likely to soar in value as the Warp Speed zooms forward. This would suggest a glaring conflict of interest with Czar Slaoui, but that’s only the start of this saga, where millions of lives are potentially at threat from a novel inadequately-tested or proven genetically edited vaccine.

Moderna and Slaoui

At this point the leading US Government candidate for winning the “warp speed” race to roll out a COVID-19 vaccine is Slaoui’s Moderna Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s surely a coincidence?

Moderna claims that between January 11, when they got the DNA sequence of the virus from China, and January 13–in just two days–working together with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of NIH, they managed to finalize the sequence for mRNA1273 vaccine against the novel coronavirus. At that point Fauci announced unprecedented plans to run human Phase I trials of the vaccine without prior animal studies. The FDA waived animal pretest requirements. The Moderna mRNA1273 tests were funded by the Gates Foundation-funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

The focus by Fauci on Moderna’s mRNA experimental COVID-19 vaccine while Slaoui was heading its development at Moderna is impressive to say the least. The company states that on April 16, Moderna got an award from US government agency BARDA for $483 million to accelerate development of mRNA-1273. This award will fund the development of mRNA-1273 to FDA licensure and manufacturing process scale-up to enable large-scale production in 2020 for pandemic response. At that point the stock value of Slaoui’s Moderna stock options jumped 184%. Then, on May 1, Moderna and Lonza Group announced a worldwide strategic collaboration to manufacture mRNA-1273 at a planned 1 billion doses per year. This is no small deal.

On May 6, Moderna filed a Current Report on Form 8-K with the SEC, which included an interview published by National Geographic with Anthony S. Fauci, Director of NIAID, which described his assessment of the results of testing related to the ongoing Phase 1 clinical study of mRNA-1273. It was quite positive.

So, between January 13 and March 25, Slaoui and his team at Moderna were able to design the vaccine, and to produce it in such a way that it can be injected in humans, Slaoui told a Moroccan magazine, L’Economiste. While with Moderna, Slaoui was fully involved in the development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

On May 7 just days before Slaoui became the Trump Vaccine Czar, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the gene-edited messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, mRNA1273, to go into a Phase II human trial in the summer. On May 12, the FDA gave Fast Track Designation for Moderna’s mRNA Vaccine. Warp Speed, you know.

The FDA with the backing of Tony Fauci’s NIAID in the NIH, granted unprecedented Phase I human trials of the never-before approved mRNA vaccine on April 27. They skipped normal animal, usually rat, testing, to go directly to human guinea pig tests. Moderna says Phase II trial will assess the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of two vaccinations of mRNA-1273 given 28 days apart. They will enroll 600 healthy adults for the experiment and supposedly follow their health for 12 months after the second vaccination. The plan is to begin human vaccinations by year end.

Dangers of mRNA?

All this, despite the evidence of extreme conflicts of interest between NIAID and other agencies of the US Government with Moderna and now-Vaccine Czar and former Moderna director Slaoui, might be treated more lightly, were it not for the fact that Moderna’s mRNA gene-edited vaccine technology is entirely experimental and never before approved for use as a vaccine. The company itself admits as much. It says, “mRNA is an emerging platform… we are still early in the story. Our most advanced vaccine program (CMV) is in Phase 2 clinical testing and we have no approved drugs to date.”

Moderna and others working with the experimental gene-edited mRNA vaccines claim they are safer than the admittedly unpredictable gene-edited DNA vaccines. DNA vaccine research is thirty years old but to date, has failed to produce a single licensed DNA vaccine. Moderna is only 11 years old and the CRISPR gene-editing technology it uses is barely 5 years old. We are told mRNA is completely different and safe.

However, numerous scientists warn that once inside the cell nucleus, mRNA vaccines have a risk of permanently changing a person’s DNA in unpredictable ways. Tony Faudi’s own NIH published a scientific paper regarding the new mRNA vaccine prospects. It read in part, “innate immune sensing of mRNA has also been associated with the inhibition of antigen expression and may negatively affect the immune response. Although the paradoxical effects of innate immune sensing on different formats of mRNA vaccines are incompletely understood, some progress has been made in recent years in elucidating these phenomena.” This is highly experimental science.

Another scientific paper funded by several Chinese universities and republished by the NIH in 2019, reviewing the development of the new messenger RNA technique for vaccines sounded some sober warnings. It noted that there were “Concerns with instability and low immunogenicity.” Further that, “mRNA vaccines are efficient at antigen expression, but sequence and secondary structures formed by mRNAs are recognized by a number of innate immune receptors, and this recognition can inhibit protein translation.” Not only that, but “…several of these delivery vehicles demonstrated toxicity in vivo, which may limit their use in humans.”(emphasis added). The authors concluded that “The immune response mechanism instigated by mRNA remains to be elucidated. The process of mRNA vaccine recognition by cellular sensors and the mechanism of sensor activation are still not clear.”

The US government, in a tight-knit circle all tied to Tony Fauci’s NIAID, the Gates Foundation, WHO are moving with not warp, but rather warped human priorities to deliver us a vaccine that no one can assure is in any way safe. Were Moderna so certain it is safe, they should offer to be legally liable for any mRNA damage. They don’t, nor do any vaccine companies. We need to decide if the scale of the worldwide deaths, inflated or not, alleged to be of COVID-19, warrant such a human experiment that could alter our genetics in unpredictable and possibly toxic ways.

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

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

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

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

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

Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, stating in January 2017 that there will be a “surprise outbreak” the coming administration will face.

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Apparently, Washington is helping to increase the violence in the Donbass. In the midst of a pandemic and the civil war at a softer stage, Kiev is promoting a gradual increase in the actions of pro-Maidan paramilitary groups in the region and receiving international support for this.

The United States has delivered more than $ 25 million worth of night vision devices, thermal cameras, portable communicators and medical equipment to Ukraine for use in the combat zone in Donbas, the US Embassy in Kiev reported.

In its account on a social network, the American Embassy to Kiev published the following note in English and Ukrainian:

“Despite COVID-19, our security assistance to Ukraine continues! This week, the Office of Defense Cooperation received more than $ 25 million in night vision devices, thermals, radios, and medical equipment for Ukraine to use in the JFO zone. The United States stands strongly with Ukraine in support of its sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression”.

The US, according to the note, supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. As we know, since April 2014, Ukraine has carried out an operation against militias in the east of the country – Donbas region – where the popular republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were proclaimed in response to the violent change of government that took place in Kiev in February of the same year. However, the Minsk agreements, signed in September 2014 and February 2015, laid the foundation for a political solution to the conflict. Unfortunately, so far they have not led to a definitive cessation of violence, the outcome of which the UN estimates at around 13,000 deaths.

Despite not putting a real end to the confrontation, the Minsk agreements managed to establish some bases for a peaceful future, so that, since then, the war has reduced the intensity of the fighting and presented a drop in the number of victims. But, since then, Kiev has been constantly denounced for tightening its policies in the region again and promoting an escalation of violence, not only through direct confrontation with separatists, but also through terrorist attacks, secret missions and intelligence operations. In a sense, the Accords have changed the face of war, from being a direct confrontation conflict to becoming a scene of constant tensions and intermittent fighting.

A few weeks ago, the Ukrainian government announced that it will build a naval base in the Sea of Azov. Shortly before, a series of murders had been reported in the regions of the autonomous republics, including the systematic killing of several civil people not involved in the conflicts. Now, everything indicates that the situation will worsen and there will be, possibly, a return to direct war.

The timing of the announcement of the acquisition of new US equipment by Ukrainian forces is extremely strategic; after all, in the midst of a global pandemic that increasingly erodes the foundations of the capitalist system, who will care about an apparently “regional and peripheral” conflict like the Civil War in Donbass? However, we must divide our focus and pay more and more attention to the increase in violence and insecurity anywhere in the world.

In fact, the acquisition of this equipment by Ukraine indicates that Kiev plans to resume direct combat and, most likely, policies of political and ethnic persecution against Russian minorities and political groups opposing the regime established during the Euromaidan in 2014. Without drawing the attention of international society, the Ukrainian government, in international cooperation with the USA, plans a total war. Most likely, the United Nations will not comment on the case until something more serious happens – when, certainly, it will be too late.

It is worth remembering that, in February, the United States delivered tents worth US $ 1.5 million to Ukraine. In the meantime, attacks through explosions, shootings and systematic killings in the vicinity of Lugansk and Donetsk have become increasingly frequent and brutal. With the recent donation of equipment, American investments in the war have increased by tens of millions of dollars; so what’s next now? An even greater aggravation of the conflict with even more frequent attacks and murders of greater magnitude?

Ukraine expects a stance on the part of the rebels, which certainly will not happen. The greater Kiev’s aggression, the greater the rebellious response, with an increasingly strong resistance front. However, the rebel militias do not have much international support and world powers financing their actions and providing ultra-advanced war equipment, which means that, however much the rebel resistance strengthens, it is possible that there will be a major massacre in the Donbass. The faster the international society’s express condemnation to this escalation of violence, the lower the risk of genocide in eastern Ukraine. Coronavirus cannot be used as a smokescreen for international attacks.

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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 Stars and Stripes

For many years, the situation of the South American integration project has been moving slowly and with strong signs of decay. The various political, economic and social changes that have taken place in recent years – marked by a strong neoliberal shift in South America – have contributed to the weakening of the bloc.

South American countries face enormous difficulties in several areas, such as health, security and the economy – especially now, with the global pandemic of the new coronavirus. The Mercosur Parliament seeks to find integrated solutions to the current problems, but internal differences can compromise not only the negotiations, but the very existence of the bloc.

The board of directors of the Mercosur Parliament met on May 12, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the integration of South American countries to combat COVID-19 and economic recovery being extremely important, the contradictions between the countries of the bloc threaten the future of all members, which is why the meeting was necessary. However, its result was not very promising, and the answers to the continent’s current demands were not found.

International Relations professor at ESPM-SP, Denilde Holzhacker, who is a specialist in politics in the Americas, explained that the recent meetings that have been held to expand democratic dialogue between members are insufficient, so it is “difficult to think about this moment that Parlasul can act in order to increase cooperation”. These are her words: “On the one hand, we have the weakening of cooperation instruments with Argentina’s decision to leave the negotiations in progress […], on the other hand, Parlasul itself has not yet had the nominations of parliaments from two countries. Last year there was a change in the form and nomination of parliamentarians and at that moment there are no representatives from Argentina and Uruguay”.

According to Holzhacker, the continuity of the bloc’s existence is currently uncertain. Argentina announced that it will renounce the bloc’s negotiations to focus on the recovery of its national economy, which makes the country an inactive member of Mercosur, making it even more difficult to resume cooperation that was practically paralyzed. For the specialist, there are clear signs that the bloc may have its activities officially closed.

“One of the actions discussed was the cooperation action, using one of the Mercosur funds to allocate to joint research, for actions aimed at raising awareness, working in the health area. So, they have some initiatives. Even so, they have low effectiveness, given the issues I raised earlier”.

The growing distance between Brazil and Argentina affects the attempt at integration and the cooperative dialogue between countries. This is a situation already well known, however, as highlighted by the expert:

“It comes from a process of distancing since the election of Alberto Fernández and that becomes even more acute at a time of differences between countries. Distancing not only in dialogue, but about a series of issues. (…) We have a situation of distancing between the two central countries in the region, which makes it more difficult to dialogue and build joint actions at this time”.

In fact, the future of the bloc is, like that of all countries, subordinated to the uncertainties of the pandemic. The speeches of the member countries, mainly Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, emphasize the progress of the trade agreements that were already under negotiation, but also seek to defend their domestic markets. In the case of Argentina, there is great concern in negotiating its foreign debt, “with a strong protectionist bias”. The pandemic came to hit these countries in a period of great fragility and economic crisis, which further hindered the negotiations and the possibility of Mercosur’s rebuilding.

Denilde Holzhacker does not believe that there will be an environment for commercial cooperation in Mercosur, considering the behavior of the member countries seen so far: “From what we have seen and observed in terms of the countries’ discourse, the emphasis is on domestic markets, building processes protection of their industries and markets, which makes it more difficult to advance these trade agreements “.

Everything seems to be heading towards a substantial decline in the development agenda of the South American States. The Argentine decision, however, is not reprehensible; on the contrary, it is the most sovereign decision ever made, prioritizing saving its own economy. However, this is not the case for all members and much less for other countries on the continent that relate to the bloc. South America is heading towards total poverty and towards the structural crisis of national economies. Brazil continues with a serious process of deindustrialization and strides towards social, political and economic chaos. The other countries are unable to play a decisive role in the bloc – which, at the mercy of Brazil and Argentina, is rapidly sinking.

The fall of Mercosur will be a political, economic and geopolitical tragedy; a real delay in the struggle for a multipolar world. However, it will be an opportunity to restart a stronger and more coherent project for the integration of the peoples of the South.

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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

Aided by establishment media fear-mongering, the public mind is being manipulated to support COVID-19 mass vaxxing as a way to protect against coronavirus infections.

Unmentioned is that all vaccines are toxic and hazardous to human health.

Taking them risks contracting the disease they’re supposed to protect against, along with developing other serious diseases later in life.

In other words, the promoted cure can be worse than the disease.

Rushing development of COVID-19 vaccines for mass vaxxing amounts to playing Russian roulette with human health.

Instead of warning the public of the dangers, establishment media are complicit in ignoring them.

On Tuesday, the NYT touted limited phase one tests of biotech company Moderna’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine, claiming results showed it was “safe and provoked a strong immune response.”

Eight test subjects were vaxxed, given two low doses in a test for “safety.”

Ignored by the Times and other media reports were potential longer-term adverse reactions and known hazards of all vaccines. Little is learned about experimental ones based on short-term results with a handful of subjects.

News about Moderna’s drug sent its stock price soaring about 25% on Monday.

After the market closed, the company announced a $1.25 billion public offering of its common shares. Their valuation slumped in after-hours trading.

Reportedly its CEO Stephane Bancel has been dumping large numbers of shares.

Moderna’s largest shareholder Flagship Pioneer has been doing the same thing — cashing in while the stock is hot, notably before it may cool down or crash if later experimental vaccine tests show negative results.

The Times also promoted the false promise of a “return to normal” ahead, claiming Monday’s strong market rally reflected the “prospect,” adding:

“Vaccines are now seen as the best and perhaps only hope of stopping or even slowing” COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths.

Monday’s rally was more about market manipulation than the prospect of restoration of economic health.

On the same day, Tass reported over “93,000 confirmed” COVID-19 cases worldwide in the last 24 hours, around 4,500 more deaths — showing no letup in the global public health problem.

Are vaccines to the rescue the solution? Despite years of research, no successful coronavirus vaccines were ever developed.

Is it likely that a never before achieved breakthrough will change things by yearend?

Is a miracle vaccine coming in the months ahead?

Weeks earlier, Nature magazine and other scientific journals explained warnings by researchers that rushing COVID-19 vaccine development for widespread use in the coming months could increase the risk of infection rather than protect against it.

Earlier research on coronavirus vaccines showed they risk vaccine enhancement, worsening infection if gotten, not protecting vaxxed individuals.

How this happens is yet to be understood. It’s a major stumbling block to developing coronavirus vaccines — what may never be achieved, notably because the virus mutates into many new forms, each different from others in characteristics.

On Tuesday, Thailand Medical News (TMN) reported that University of Hong Kong researchers found the following:

“(A)lthough individuals infected with either severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) or SARS-CoV-2 (that causes COVID-19) produce antibodies that bind to the other coronavirus, the cross-reactive antibodies are not cross protective, at least in cell-culture experiments.”

It suggests that developing coronavirus vaccines may not be possible — at least not unless or until there are research breakthroughs never achieved before.

According to Hong Kong University researcher Dr. Chris Mok:

“Since coronavirus outbreaks are likely to continue to pose global health risks in the future, the possibility of developing a cross-protective vaccine against multiple coronaviruses has been considered.”

“Our findings, albeit limited at present, would suggest that broadly cross-neutralizing antibodies to coronaviruses might not be commonly produced by the human immune repertoire.”

“Moving forward, monoclonal antibody discovery and characterization will be crucial to the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in the short-term, as well as a cross-protective coronavirus vaccine in the long term.”

No breakthroughs exist toward achieving these objectives — nor in developing a miracle COVID-19 cure.

The virus is likely to be around for a long time, maybe forever like season flu that results in millions of infections, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths in the US annually.

It’s a forever epidemic and pandemic — unaccompanied by establishment media fear-mongering headlines, despite the global harm to countless millions annually like clockwork.

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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.

On Friday, Trump sacked State Department Inspector General Steve Linick — reportedly for launching an investigation into how Pompeo runs things.

A White House statement said Pompeo “recommended the move” — to quash an inquiry into his management of the department not explained.

Pompeo has 2024 presidential ambitions. He wants no potential dirty linen airing that could harm his chance to become a future GOP standard bearer.

The possibility should terrify everyone. His extremism makes Trump almost look mild by comparison.

According to Politico, Pompeo’s policies at State above all are “designed to bolster his…standing with the GOP base.”

Linick began investigating improper actions by him and his wife.

In response to his sacking, House Dems indicated they’ll open their own investigation into the issue.

By letter to the White House and State Department, they requested documents related to Linick’s sacking.

According to the US Hatch Act (1939), executive branch officials are prohibited from engaging in certain forms of political activity — the president, vice president, and designated members of their staff excluded.

Critics accused Pompeo of numerous violations, including involvement in partisan events.

In February, he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference, a must venue for Republicans with presidential aspirations.

Like Mike Pence, Pompeo is an evangelical Christian. Time and again, both figures unacceptably cross the line between church and state by their rhetoric and actions.

Appointed State Department inspector general by Obama in 2013, Linick’s justifiable criticism of Hillary’s use of her private server for Foggy Bottom business aroused the ire of Dems.

In 2019, he criticized mistreatment of State Department staffers under Pompeo and his subordinates.

By letter to congressional leaders, Trump failed to state reasons for sacking Linick, saying only that he “no longer (has the) fullest confidence” in the inspector general.

He was involved in impeaching Trump by House Dems — by providing them with documents, not by testifying.

Other officials involved in the process were sacked by Trump.

They included former intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson, former Trump regime envoy to the UK Gordon Sondland, former National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and war department IG Glenn Fine.

Separately in early May, Trump nominated a replacement for HHS deputy inspector general Christi Grimm in response to her criticism of his mishandled COVID-19 outbreak response.

The surest way to be sacked by him is to serve the public interest responsibly over political interests.

Former White House director of government ethics Walter Shaub (2013 – 2017) called mass Trump regime IG firings a sign of “corruption-driven authoritarianism (and a) collapsing republic.”

State Department office of foreign missions head Stephen Akard is replacing Linick as department inspector general in June.

He formerly served as Indiana Economic Development Corporation chief of staff when Pence was governor.

According to the State Department, the office of inspector general is a nonpartisan position involved in “determin(ing) whether policy goals are being achieved and whether the interests of the United States are being represented and advanced effectively.”

The office is also mandated to investigate “instances of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that may constitute either criminal wrongdoing or violation of Department and USAGM (US Agency for Global Media) regulations.”

A politicized House Dem probe into Linick’s sacking will be conducted in the coming weeks.

It’s at a time when both wings of the one-party state should focus like a laser on improving public health, reviving the economy, and aiding growing millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans in need.

A Final Comment

Thomas Jefferson believed America’s founding document couldn’t stand the test of time.

He urged a new convention every 20 years to fix problems and make the Constitution relevant to the times.

Most important is obeying the core law of the land, its statutes, and international law — clearly not how its ruling authorities and lawmakers operate.

America’s deplorable state reflects Benjamin Franklin’s warning about “(a newly formed) republic, if you can keep it.”

He understood significant challenges ahead, likely never imagining how bad things would get.

The nation is on a slippery slope toward full-blown tyranny — compounded by its forever wars, at the expense of vital homeland needs gone begging.

It’s why the hardest of hard times in US history are unfolding in real time — a protracted public health crisis compounded by economic collapse, a perfect storm.

There’s a war going on by the nation’s ruling class against the vast majority of the people.

The extent of human pain and suffering will best be understood in the fullness of time.

No matter which right wing of the one-party state runs things, the nation’s privileged class benefits exclusively by exploiting most others at home and abroad.

That’s the disturbing truth about the dismal state of the nation with no prospect for relief ahead for the vast majority of Americans.

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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.

In an interview with Mehr News Agency, Rabbi Weiss said the Israeli regime was established in Palestine by committing all kinds of crimes against its people, which is a violation of Jewish religious laws towards fellow human beings, adding that the anti-Zionist Jews support “the return of the entire land to the Palestinian people”

His interview was conducted on the occasion of the Nakba Day (the Day of Catastrophe) and on the eve of Quds Day when back in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their homeland and Israel proclaimed existence. The refugees were forced to seek refuge in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, often without citizenship being granted.

Here is the full text of his interview:

Morteza Rahmani: 72 years have passed since the Israeli regime’s occupation of the Palestinian lands; where is the regime standing today in terms of identity as well as the political and social status?

Rabbi Weiss: Before I answer the question I’d like to state our viewpoint as traditionally Orthodox Jews. We oppose Zionism because it is an anti-Jewish philosophy of building a sovereign homeland for Jews while in a divinely decreed exile, which is forbidden by the Jewish religion. Also, this homeland was established in Palestine by committing all kinds of crimes against its people, which is a violation of Jewish religious laws towards fellow human beings.  We don’t support “two states for two peoples”; we support the return of the entire land to the Palestinian people. We believe that peaceful non-militant Jews will be able to live under a Palestinian state in peace.

During the 72 years of occupation, there have been different phases, from wars with neighboring countries to negotiations with Palestinians with the goal of a two-state solution (of course these negotiations were never meant to lead anywhere, and at the same time the Zionists built more and more settlements). With the future of two states completely undermined, we will be seeing more of a push for one democratic state, in which Jews will soon be a minority. The Israelis know this and that is why Netanyahu and his party have been passing laws to declare Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people. Of course, this is ridiculous because he can’t claim to represent Judaism or the Jewish people, whether they reside in or out of their state.

MR: What do the current political crises and rifts among the Israeli authorities, as well as the regime’s undermined security, suggest?

RW: First let’s not forget what the Almighty states in the holy Torah: “Why do you transgress the word of the Almighty? It will not be successful!” (Numbers 14:41). Going against the Torah’s command by forming a Jewish state and/or oppressing others, will not succeed in the end.

Part of the rift in politics is over the drafting of religious Jews into the army. All the secular parties are determined to draft the religious; their dispute is over whether to do it by force or to “accustom” them to it slowly. The religious have always refused to serve in the army because they are opposed to the state and its wars.  There have been constant protests over this subject, and we have appealed to the UN.

As I said earlier, the Torah view is opposed to all the Israeli political parties and to the state as a whole. Our communities living in the Holy Land refuse to take any part in the State of Israel and constantly protest its illegal existence and the crimes it commits. We promote that the illegal occupation should be speedily and peacefully dismantled in its entirety.

MR: Based on the available data on the US and Britain’s arms and financial support to the Israelis, how do you see the role of Washington and London in the formation and realization of the Zionist regime?

RW: Unfortunately, the Zionists have succeeded in getting many countries to support them. They misused the Holocaust and the long history of anti-Jewish persecution to convince people that Jews need their own state. This is what gave them the ability to establish their state and keep it going with world support to this day while ignoring the position of authentic religious Jews in the Holy Land and around the world. We hope that this false narrative won’t be accepted much longer, but rather the world will see the truth and end the support for this unacceptable criminal State. This, with the help of the Almighty, will certainly help and accelerate the end of the occupation, speedily and peacefully.

MR: The Israeli regime has been struggling to repel the Palestinians’ and Lebanese’ resistance movement in the past years; have the Zionists been successful in this regard? And will these efforts help Tel Aviv survive?

RW: They have been unfortunately partially successful militarily, so to say, inflicting terrible casualties and damage. But they will never be able to stop the liberation of the Palestinian people and enjoy a truly successful occupation. They will never reach true success in their rebellion against the Almighty, as mentioned above.

Let us look at the recent history of the Palestinian people. What other people have been exiled for so long and still maintains refugee status, and (on the whole) refuses to accept citizenship or a comfortable life anywhere else? From a religious Jewish point of view, seeing the hand of the Almighty in world events, the Palestinian’s steadfast resolve shows that the Almighty is not letting the Zionists succeed. This is because of the same verse in the Torah I quoted earlier (question 2): rebellion against the Almighty will not succeed.

MR: The normalization process of Arab-Israeli ties has been accelerated in recent years, and they are not hiding it anymore; what are the main reasons behind such measures by the Israeli regime?

RW: We can’t comment, nor do we know, the Zionist political motives. But it is clear that one benefit to them is to make peace with one part of the Arab and Muslim world at a time so that they don’t have everyone against them at once.

MR: The US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem al-Quds in 2017; how much did this measure favor the legalization process of the Zionist regime?

RW: We feel that the moving of the embassy was a tragic move. It does give the Zionist regime a feeling of impunity that it can now proceed to annex more and more land and get the American rubber stamp. But many Americans are not happy with this and it can eventually be reversed if enough Americans become aware of the injustice.

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Fear and uncertainty have dominated the media coverage of the Covid-19 epidemic.

The novel coronavirus is depicted not as a pedestrian pathogen certain to be beaten into submission by the miracles of modern science any day now, but as an invisible evil lurking everywhere, formidable enough to inspire a respectful terror even in the leading lights of the medical establishment.

And in case Americans had any doubt about how they were supposed to regard this new viral threat, the establishment talking heads many rely upon for the self-assured delivery of their news have swapped their usual swagger for apprehension. Amid this ‘confidence vacuum,’ the popular response to the pandemic has taken on a religious cast. Protective measures like masks have taken on a talismanic quality, hand-washing has been elevated to a ritual performance, and a cult built on naming and shaming ‘heretics’ has seized the minds of many – while their rights are quietly stripped away and a paternalistic police state substituted in their place.

Unable to see the microscopic “enemy” they are told threatens the lives of them and their family and deprived of a scientifically proven cure, individuals seeking deliverance from Covid-19 are left with only their faith that the protective measures prescribed by health experts –our scientific priest class– can keep it at bay. If it ended there, the Corona Cult would merely be a curiosity – humans have turned to religion in troubled times since before written history began. But its dark side has already reared its ugly head – those who buck the new orthodoxy are already being blamed for the plague.

We’ve been here before. In the Middle Ages, pious peasants were kept in line by priests who told them God was watching their every move. When a plague appeared, it was interpreted as divine punishment, the wrath of God visited upon a sinful population. Those who wished to stand out as especially devout whipped themselves in public, or wore painful garments called “hair shirts” – in both cases with the aim of ‘mortifying the flesh,’ literally ‘putting to death’ their sinful natures.

It’s no coincidence that self-flagellation reached its height of popularity during the Black Plague. It was assumed by its practitioners that if they underwent penance by inflicting pain on themselves, they would be spared the God-given pain of the plague. Those who publicly refused to participate in the religious rituals of the day were called out as infidels, heretics, witches or other servants of the devil. They might be chased out of town; many were tortured and even killed, often in shockingly gruesome ways, as the centuries progressed and the Inquisition rose to power. The pious were regularly told their misfortunes were due to the presence of a satanic influence among them, with complex problems declared to be solved by simply casting out the offending presence.

While western society may tell itself it has left those Dark Ages far behind, the lure of simplistic explanations is as potent as ever.

Mask of the red death

Face masks have become both the visual symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic and the dominant religious fetish for the Cult of Corona. While cities from New York to Laredo, Texas have adopted regulations mandating them in public places and chain stores like Costco have barred unmasked customers from their premises, it’s hard not to notice those individuals so devoted to the mask-wearing ritual that they sport the face-coverings in their own cars (with the windows rolled up) and when running down epidemic-emptied streets. Poor messaging is partly to blame – the Centers for Disease Control has repeatedly changed its narrative on who should wear masks, from “sick people” to “only healthcare workers” to “everyone.” However, the Cult of Corona’s devotion to the mask extends far beyond following the recommendations of a mere public health agency.

The mask has taken on a supernatural significance that far outweighs its utility in disease protection. Even the N-95 masks health authorities have recommended to protect society from virus-positive individuals have been found largely ineffective in protecting the uninfected from carriers in their surroundings, and the flimsy surgical masks that have become ubiquitous for sale on American street corners are next to worthless in stopping virus transmission. Indeed, some doctors have even warned that wearing a mask is counterproductive due to the false sense of security it creates. Yet it’s impossible to walk into a supermarket in many cities without something covering the mouth – even as one’s eyes remain unprotected and ready to receive whatever viral particles are lingering in the air. Mask requirements thus have nothing to do with health and everything to do with religious faith. They provide a way for the faithful to telegraph their virtue at a distance and recognize one another instantly, while flagging the non-compliant as infidels to be avoided.

In the same way that garlic and a cross were supposed to ward off vampires in times past, the face mask is supposed to fend off the “invisible enemy” lurking everywhere at once. One might feel a little silly driving around with a mask on (or stringing a clove of garlic above one’s window), but better safe than sorry – and if you haven’t been infected, or had any vampires show up at your bedside, who’s to say it isn’t working?

Ritual, snitchual

A bevy of rituals has sprung up among Corona Cultists, from the benign if eccentric (swabbing all exposed surfaces with Lysol wipes) to the sinister (reporting neighbors for perceived violations). Even the simplest, most scientifically-sound measures like hand-washing have taken on a ritualistic cast, as the virus-fearing infuse them with a terrified zeal. How else to explain the popularity of the dozens of “hand-washing apps” available for smartphones but that the shock of the epidemic has caused us to question that which we once took for granted? Just as peasants of a previous era might have been spooked into regular church attendance by the specter of the Black Death, their descendants pore over videos of hand-washing on YouTube, determined to live a “cleaner” life.

But another holdover from the Dark Ages has risen its ugly head. While our ancestors might have turned in their oddball neighbor as a “witch,” claiming to have seen the merry old spinster cavorting with Satan under the full moon, modern-day snitches are picking up their smartphones and dialing specially-designated lines to report violations of social distancing orders. These services are disturbingly popular – New Zealand’s snitch site crashed repeatedly within its first week in late March as over 4,000 people scrambled to turn in their neighbors for violating that nation’s harsh lockdown regulations, which separated people into “bubbles” based on their living arrangements and forbid them from interacting with those outside their “bubble.”

Snitches come in several stripes.

There have always been busybodies who call the police when their neighbor’s music is too loud rather than knocking on their door and politely asking to turn it down. But in the Cult of Corona, these miscreants are joined by those driven half-crazy with fear, convinced that the act of turning in rule breakers will somehow protect them from contracting the virus. They’d never say such a preposterous thing out loud, of course – if asked, they merely claim to be concerned for the community, or worried their victim’s irresponsible behavior is spreading Covid-19 willy-nilly, perhaps even stating that their decision to turn their neighbor in was “for their own good.” Just as the Inquisitor’s concern for those they tortured on the rack was supposedly for their victim’s “immortal soul,” so does the modern snitch rationalize their betrayal of their neighbors by reasoning that the virus police are concerned only for the health of the heretics they rat out – while secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t the ones being tortured (or placed on a ventilator), this time. Following orders becomes a source of comfort for the snitch deprived of life’s normal pleasures by the lockdown – providing an avenue for transformation from victim to hero.

Fueling this schadenfreudisch frenzy are media headlines celebrating the karmic punishment of lockdown violators. Whether it’s spring-breakers testing positive for Covid-19 after throwing caution to the wind and partying down on the beach or social-media showoffs boasting about refusing to social-distance, the public smiting of heretics has been a popular topic among Corona Cultists isolated in their homes. John McDaniel, an Ohio man who criticized his governor for shutting down the state, reportedly died in April of coronavirus only for social media mobs to dance on his grave and use his death to attack other “doubters” (including Donald Trump, whose insufficient reverence at the altar of the virus continues to set zealots frothing with rage). CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed that “practically every day” he read about a corona doubter succumbing to the virus, blaming conservative media and politicians for their deaths – heresy, apparently, is as contagious as the virus. The New York Post, which ran a moralizing story free of any identifying details about a nameless Kingston, New York barber who’d caught the virus after supposedly flouting lockdown for several weeks to cut hair, also rushed to connect a spike in coronavirus cases in Kentucky with an anti-lockdown protest a few days earlier – even though the virus’ lengthy latency period (and the fact that a significant chunk of the new cases were in nursing homes) made it next to impossible the two events were linked. And Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most fanatical government figures in the US’ corona cult, implied in a press conference that protests were more likely to contribute to the spread of the virus than other forms of “congregating.”

UK PM Boris Johnson was perhaps the most public example of the “divine punishment” phenomenon – his conversion to the Corona Cult (after a few days of timidly suggesting herd immunity might be a better path to public health) came too late to keep him out of intensive care at the hands of the NHS his party has so ruthlessly sought to privatize. When actress Miriam Margolyes declared following his recovery that she had wanted to see BoJo dead, some in the media appeared to agree with her – while making a point of casting such agreement as gleefully subversive. Not only do Corona Cultists find a commonality in rooting for the virus against the dissidents who challenge their worldview, but their own adherence to an exhaustingly cognitively-dissonant dogma is affirmed as the correct path by the heretics’ misfortune. Enforced austerity tends to be unpopular with its victims, but when that privation is reframed as a noble sacrifice made by all [except the wealthy] for the common good, it becomes easier to bear the suffering – and much more difficult to tolerate those who refuse to go along.

The real danger comes when zealots feel compelled to “help” the virus smite the heretics (sure, I could wait for God to punish this evildoer in the afterlife, but why not take some of that work off His hands?). The Daily Mail cheered on an elderly woman who threatened to “kick the ass” of a stranger for merely calling the pandemic a “hoax.” A Brooklyn couple attempted to discipline a trio of Hasidic Jewish men for failure to maintain social distancing, supposedly blaming them for the spread of the virus – but instead of moving further apart, the men and their neighbors beat the couple up, sending them to the hospital (and slapping them with a hate-crime charge as insult added to injury). The violence need not be physical – a British woman told SkyNews she was “named and shamed” by neighbors on Facebook when she accidentally slept through her town’s weekly “clap for the NHS” ritual, in which participants lean out their windows and applaud at a fixed time every week in a choreographed celebration of the healthcare workers they believe protect them from the virus. Even viral videos of police abuses, which have been a dime a dozen during lockdowns that embolden the worst elements on the force, have been deluged with comments in support of the cops, charging the unarmed man/woman/child being arrested or brutalized “deserved it” because they were out without a mask/protesting/not standing 6 feet away from the nearest human. Never mind that the cops in the videos are almost never masked themselves, or that it’s impossible to maintain six feet of distance while making an arrest – certainly never mind the Kafkaesque paradox of arresting someone for not social-distancing, only to throw them in a jail cell with several other humans per square foot – these poor souls have sinned, and they must be punished. Don’t agree? You might end up in there with them.

Gotta have faith

For those whose faith is flagging after two months of lockdowns sapping both their bank accounts and health, polls are being churned out confirming upwards of 80% of Americans and nearly 9 out of 10 Britons support continuing the lockdowns, which combined with social media’s growing censorship of anti-lockdown speech gives the false impression of a universal public consensus that government policies are both popular and lifesaving. Fanatical religious adherence is required to enforce belief in such absurdity, given the appalling track records of the High Priests of Lockdown. Imperial College corona czar Neil Ferguson was caught gallivanting with his mistress in defiance of his own policies after two months lecturing Brits about the importance of staying home, but his wildly irresponsible disease model – produced using a defective computer program that was more glitch than code – lives on, haunting the minds of lockdown-lovers who screech BoJo is letting Brits leave home too soon. Indeed, based on his resumé, Ferguson never should have been allowed near public policy. His terrible miscalculations regarding foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 led to the unnecessary destruction of over 6.5 million livestock, decimating the nation’s farming industry, while a similar but fortunately unheeded prediction in 2002 that mad cow disease would kill as many as 150,000 Britons was shown up by the reality of 178 killed. As the years went on, his apocalyptic visions only intensified – in 2005, he declared bird flu would kill some 200 million people worldwide – when reality saw some 455 people, total, killed over the past 15 years according to the WHO. His hysterical 2009 prediction that 65,000 Brits would die of swine flu encouraged the government to embrace GlaxoSmithKline’s unsafe Pandemrix vaccine, which caused permanent brain damage in thousands of people (mostly children, plus a good deal of NHS workers conned into taking the jab with false claims of its safety and effectiveness) – quite a bit more than the 283 killed by the actual swine flu.

Not that the UK is alone in embracing faith-based “science” as health policy. Trump even appointed the man who led GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division during the Pandemrix debacle to lead “Operation Warp Speed,” his unhinged program to develop a vaccine by the end of 2020 (a process that normally takes five years being crammed into eight months). Like Ferguson, Anthony Fauci – the face of the US’ pandemic response – has decades of epidemic failures under his belt at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Starting with the thousands of otherwise-healthy HIV positive people who died in the 1980s thanks to Fauci’s shameless advocacy for AZT, which refashioned the toxic drug (too poisonous for terminal cancer patients) into a miracle pill for AIDS, and passing through at least one episode of perjury that saw him deny the existence of encephalitis as a possible side effect of the MMR vaccine (before remembering he was under oath and acknowledging it was “rare”), Fauci has displayed such breathtaking avarice and incompetence at the helm of the NIAID that the US life expectancy has actually declined noticeably under his watch for the first time in history. Yet like the followers of an end-times cult leader who remain loyal even as the appointed date for the end of the world comes and goes, devotees of these public health priests have not dared to learn their lesson. Instead, they ramp up their predictions of doom for heretical countries like Sweden and Belarus that have refused to fall in line with the universal lockdown doctrine.

One level above the public health priesthood is Microsoft billionaire and Pandemic Pope Bill Gates, whose lack of medical credentials or even a college diploma have not stopped the world from hailing him as a prophet based on his “prediction” of a pandemic in 2015 – and his claim to have both the answers and the ability to pay for them. Gates’ deep pockets – he’s the number-one funder of the WHO, ever since Trump pulled US support – have given him the power to almost singlehandedly direct global health policy, steering it into a pharmaceutical iceberg even as real doctors protest his many conflicts of interest. Since diving into the money-pit of “philanthropy,” Gates has more than doubled his fortune; his foundation is heavily invested in the drug companies that make the vaccines that other groups he funds purchase for poor countries. He’s also very, very generous with the media, buying the silence of establishment outlets around the world – big names like the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, and National Public Radio – so their journalists don’t recoil when he can barely keep from gibbering and squealing while discussing the economic hurt his lockdown policies are inflicting on hapless populations – or research the trail of suffering his foundation has left through the Global South.

Yet even the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex – vaccine advocates like Peter Hotez, the bowtie-sporting tropical disease specialist who was ubiquitous on TV during the 2018 “measles epidemic” attacking so-called “anti-vaxxers” – have expressed alarm at the decision to scrap the animal-testing phase for the Covid-19 vaccine that is supposed to save the world, noting that “there is a risk of immune enhancement” with vaccines for any coronavirus. During animal trials for an aborted SARS vaccine, mice who got the shot developed a severe version of the virus when exposed to it after they were inoculated, while ferrets similarly challenged post-vaccination with the virus suffered “enhanced liver damage.” Perhaps trying to get around these roadblocks, Moderna, the drugmaker currently leading the vaccine pack, is banking on a totally new kind of vaccine, one which, rather than lob a softball at the immune system in the form of a dead or weakened form of the virus, will attempt to reprogram our genetic material to create the pieces of the virus, so that the immune system can learn to fight them off. That’s how Gates himself describes this “promising” method, at least. Did we mention Moderna has never brought a vaccine to market before? What’s the matter – where’s your faith?

We may not be turning our eyes heavenward and praying for deliverance, but the leaders of the western world have declared society cannot fully return to normal until a magical perfect vaccine arrives from on high, an absurd one-stop solution that carries echoes of the “duck and cover”-type prescriptions for surviving a nuclear blast, drilled into people’s heads during the Cold War. The effect of instilling a powerful capacity for cognitive dissonance – teaching children to hide under their desks even as they were taught the laws of physics, i.e. an understanding that their desks couldn’t protect them – turned Americans into gold medalists in cognitive dissonance. Were it an Olympic sport, no one would even come close.

To be continued…

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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

The ongoing global systemic transition is transforming international relations from its erstwhile unipolarity to what experts agree is either multipolarity or, less popularly, bipolarity. However one chooses to describe the present world order, it’s clear that the US and China are the main global players, which places Russia and India – decades-long strategic partners – in a junior position vis-a-vis both of them, especially their mutual Chinese neighbor with whom they share membership in BRICS and the SCO. The neorealist school of International Relations Theory preaches the need to pursue national interests, which sometimes align with others’, and it is argued in the article that it is with this idea in mind that both countries have a motivation to jointly improve their strategic positions relative to the People’s Republic, albeit in a non-hostile manner that avoids the risk of inadvertently triggering a security dilemma and reversing the recent gains made in Eurasian integration.

Two articles published by Russia’s Valdai Club in 2019 indicated the possibility of creating a new Non-Aligned Movement, with the most recent one proposing that it be jointly led by Russia and India in order to advance the aforementioned neo-realist objective of balancing China. This suggestion is very intriguing and deserves some further elaboration, to which end the present research was conducted in order to place the new Non-Aligned Movement proposal in a strategic context relevant to the ongoing global systemic transition. Nearly a dozen articles and reports by Russian experts were analyzed, resulting in the conclusion that the proposal is a promising one but requires much more research into its challenges and opportunities in order to become more than just a proposed concept. In the event that any tangible progress is made on it, however, it must be done so extremely carefully in order for China not to misunderstand its intentions.

Click here to read the full text.

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

If you cannot discover or create something, best steal it.  It has been the operating principle for everything from wealth to technology.  With the efforts to discover a vaccine to the novel coronavirus being all but bound by solidarity, the race on plundering secrets has already begun in earnest.  No one party can claim particular innocence in this endeavour.  All states engage in economic espionage and old-fashioned secret pinching to advance their interests.  Finding the building blocks for a COVID-19 vaccine is proving no different. 

As with such accusations, the cloak is procured with the dagger.  The case is probable, and plausible enough, but confirmation tends to come in rations.  In the business of hacking, what is acceptable in torrid love and hideous war tends to be a hard one to pin down. 

In 2015, the US and China reached an accord to, in the words of President Barack Obama, refrain from conducting or knowingly supporting “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage.”  At the time, an assessment by Wired came to the conclusion that the agreement did not prevent traditional, full blown espionage, focusing, instead, on such efforts as those to pinch company source codes for competitive advantage.  

In addition to Obama’s main point, Beijing and Washington agreed to furnish timely responses to requests for information and assistance dealing with malicious cyber activities; engage in “efforts to further identify and promote appropriate norms of state behaviour in cyberspace” and “establish a high-level joint dialogue mechanism on fighting cybercrime and related issues.”

In 2018, the National Counterintelligence and Security Centre (NCSC) reported that “the Intelligence Community and private sector security experts continue to identify ongoing Chinese cyber activity, although at lower volumes than existed before the bilateral September 2015 US-China cyber commitments.”  Not all bad then, especially given that cyber activity designed to pilfer intellectual property for other non-competitive purposes continued to be de rigueur.

During the pandemic crisis, the niggles and pinches caused by cyberactivity have reportedly increased in number.  Academic and research programs are being scrutinised.  The US Justice Department has taken a particular interest in the PRC-sponsored Thousand Talents program.  One of their latest targets is University of Arkansas’ professor of engineering, Simon Saw-Teong Ang, accused of concealing his ties to the Chinese government and universities while he worked on projects with NASA funding. 

The United States, while not exactly leading in its response to dealing with COVID-19, now claims that its efforts to identify treatments and a vaccines are being targeted by others, with the PRC leading (naturally), the keen pack.  “The PRC’s behaviour in cyberspace,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued in a statement last Thursday, “is an extension of its counterproductive actions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”  Senator Marco Rubio, one of the noisiest of China hawks, has also been squawking on what he claims is an adjustment in Chinese tactics.  “Beijing has shifted its recruitment efforts for the Thousand Talents Program online, and it has increased efforts to hack US medical research institutes for COVID-19 information.”

On May 13, a joint statement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was published.  It alleged “the compromise of US organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by PRC-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors.”  Allegedly, such actors had “been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property (IP) and public health data related to vaccines, treatments, and testing from networks and personnel affiliated with COVID-19-related research.” 

The statement warned that organisations “conducting research in these areas” should “maintain dedicated cybersecurity and insider threat practices to prevent surreptitious review or theft of COVID-19-related material.”  Systems should be patched for “critical vulnerabilities”; web applications for authorised access should be actively sought out.  Users “exhibiting unusual activity” should be suspended.

The warning is skimpy in details, notably on the issue of how treatments will be hampered. Nor are many researchers blind about similar pinching efforts from the US side of the fence.  Jason Healey, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs makes a few valid points on this.  “If the US is wanting to argue for norms, I look forward to us doing it directly and saying here’s what we think the playing field lies, because certainly we’re being active in many of these areas as well.”

China has also been the subject of cyber interest in this particularly busy playing field.  In April, a Vietnamese hacking group known as APT32 is said to have taken interest in the PRC’s Ministry of Emergency Management and the government of Wuhan.  According to Ben Read of the cybersecurity firm FireEye, “These attacks speak to the virus being an intelligence priority – everyone is throwing everything they’ve got at it, and APT32 is what Vietnam has.”  Not a good time, it seems, to find a vaccine in solidarity.

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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]

Coercion: the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner by use of threats or force.

Over the course of the Covid-19 ‘crisis’, scientific advice to the UK Government has been co-ordinated by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). SAGE is co-chaired by Sir Patrick Vallance (the Government Chief Science Advisor) and Professor Chris Whitty (the Chief Medical Officer).

We have already seen how SAGE has used external advisors to help direct the medical and social response. But the UK government also claims that “many issues around the coronavirus response relate to behaviour”.

SPI-B

During the 2009/10 ‘swine flu’ pandemic, SAGE received advice from a subgroup called the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour and Communications (SPI-B&C).

That group was reconvened on 13 February this year. This time, its remit was limited to behaviour and it was renamed the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour, or SPI-B.

SPI-B takes no part in discussion about which interventions are effective in dealing with the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’, or their timing. The group is tasked with providing advice on how to ‘help’ people to adhere to the interventions which government demands.

By the beginning of March, there had been three meetings of SPI-B to discuss specific topics requested by SAGE: the risk of public disorder; the use of behavioural and social interventions; and how to give guidance to people who are asked to self-isolate.

Increasing the Public’s Compliance with Social Distancing

On 22 March, in preparation for a SAGE meeting to be held the following day, SPI-B published a document (pdf, mirrored here) entitled Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures.

“What are the options for increasing adherence to the social distancing measures?”, it asks.

It considers the two social distancing measure seen to be most important at that time: general social distancing by everyone, and shielding of vulnerable people for at least 12 weeks.

There are nine “broad ways” of achieving behaviour change, they write: Education, Persuasion, Incentivisation, Coercion, Enablement, Training, Restriction, Environmental restructuring, and Modelling.

Persuasion and Coercion

The advice given by SPI-B is immediately aggressive. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened,” they write. “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

In other words, SPI-B recommended to SAGE that levels of fear needed to be increased in order to bring levels of compliance with so-called ‘lockdown’ up to desirable levels.

“To be effective,” they continue, “this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”

Here, SPI-B is making it clear that it can’t be left to individuals to decide which actions are appropriate; they have to be told.

Another option for managing behaviour which SPI-B recommends is the harnessing of “social disapproval”.

“Social disapproval from one’s community,” they write, “can play an important role in preventing anti-social behaviour or discouraging failure to enact pro-social behaviour. However, this needs to be carefully managed to avoid victimisation, scapegoating and misdirected criticism. It needs to be accompanied by clear messaging and promotion of strong collective identity. Consideration should be given to use of social disapproval but with a strong caveat around unwanted negative consequences.”

There is a recognition here that following this approach could result in physical harm to individuals in a community who aren’t following the same behaviours as the community as a whole.

But it should be recognised that in order to make use of disapproval, government has to get into the community in question to stir up that disapproval.

This type of cynical breaking-up of communities is not a new technique to the UK government.

During the Foot and Mouth Disease ‘epidemic’ in 2001, when the UK government slaughtered millions of farm animals unnecessarily, it made sure to minimise any organised community opposition to the “slaughtered on suspicion” policy by only compensating some of the farmers in any community. This resulted in bitterness and envy within communities, and did permanent damage.

A free media is essential

Various government ministers have expressed the view that a free media is essential. A question which immediately springs to mind is, free to do what?

In this case, what ministers evidently mean is freedom to act as a conduit for government propaganda.

In an appendix to their main recommendation, SPI-B produced a table which they entitled APEASE (Acceptability, Practicability, Effectiveness, Affordability, Spill-over effects, Equity). They describe it as an “evaluation grid for options to rapidly increase general social distancing.”

Here, they make clear how they see the role of the media: not to hold government to account, but to act as a conduit for the ‘behavioural’ message (propaganda).

They recommend that the media is used:

• to increase sense of personal threat
• to increase sense of responsibility to others
• to promote positive messaging around actions

Everyone following mainstream media since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak must surely have noticed the inflammatory language used in the mainstream press, which can have only increased the sense of personal threat felt by the general public.

Articles from the BBC, such as To snitch or not to snitch — a discussion on the pros and cons of reporting your neighbour for breaking Covid-19 guidelines — fulfil that need to “increase a sense of responsibility to others”, otherwise known as ‘social disapproval’.

It is clear, therefore, that this SAGE advice has been taken.

Why would the media cooperate in this way?

It was announced on 17 April this year that the Government and the newspaper industry have formed a three-month advertising partnership called All in, all together to help “keep the public safe and the nation united” throughout the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’.

So news media have a commercial interest in providing a propaganda service to the UK government. Indeed, it has been noticed that the government is becoming the UK media’s most important client.

SPI-B methodology

The SPI-B report was “drafted by two members of the SPI-B panel and nine further members commented, following which the report was revised.”

They offer a caveat to that:

Much of the evidence that has been drawn on is very recent and has not been subject to peer review. In some cases, the source is a SPI-B paper that involves expert opinion. This report has been put together rapidly and been subject to limited scrutiny and review.

As a result of this level of work, the population of the UK has been kept in their homes and the whole of UK industry has been shut down, resulting in the worst economic decline in 300 years.

It is extremely difficult to see how this can be viewed as anything other than a direct psychological attack on the UK population. In light of clear signs of increasing mental illness, resulting in suicide and failure to seek timely medical help, it is also difficult to see how this attack can be anything other than criminal.

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This article was originally published by The Aspen Times in 2011.

Eisenhower’s legendary warning that the industrial-military complex could engender a “disastrous rise of misplaced power” has obviously come true. Notably, in the same speech, Eisenhower also advised of “equal and opposite danger.” Back in the 1960s, Ike insisted “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” However, his second warning was hushed by the deafening silence of the mainstream media.

The following was spoken by David Rockefeller at the Bilderberger Meeting, Baden Germany, June 1991. Rockefeller has devoted his life to one world government, i.e. the New World Order (NWO). He founded the Trilateral Commission and is integral to the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great 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 subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. 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.”

Later, he notes:

“Some even believe we are 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 is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

The primary obstacle blocking the “sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers” is a strong, democratic, sovereign America. Both cannot exist simultaneously. Therefore, our mortal enemy has been decimating America for decades, the battlefield littered with the middle class, dazed soldiers wandering in despair, jobs lost, pockets empty, homes foreclosed, dreams crushed and forced to bow to their oppressors if they travel by air. America is on the verge of losing our battle for freedom and has not yet even identified who the real enemy is.

The age-old dream of world domination is alive and well. Our real enemy are the globalists, scientific-technological elites who, as Eisenhower warned, are attempting to establish the NWO. Their primary weapons are perpetual war and central banks, i.e. the Fed which is a cartel of international bankers, including Rockefeller, who control our economy and, astoundingly, have not been audited during the 98 years they have systematically destroyed the dollar while becoming inconceivably powerful. Jefferson, Lincoln, Andrew Jackson – the list is long and distinguished – all scream as to the lethal danger of a central bank.

Never audited, until a few weeks ago, when a partial audit finally revealed some of their treachery. While America was held hostage by a phony debt ceiling debate that pretended to help resolve our annual $1.7 trillion deficit, we learned that the Fed secretly bestowed more than $16 trillion to American and foreign banks over the past three years. Two trillion dollars, more than our annual deficit, was dumped into the vaults of the Bank of America.

Ron Paul forced the audit and is the only presidential candidate campaigning against the Fed, international bankers and the NWO. Against those who are swiftly establishing and would be masters of “one world if you will.”

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The current pandemic is wreaking havoc with the US and global economy, accelerating and deepening the general economic crisis–and threatening to provoke a global financial crisis that will exacerbate the decline and usher in a great depression no doubt even worse than the 1930s. We are now somewhere between the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the depression in the 1930s in depth of contraction and duration. Today’s Great Recession 2.0 is no doubt already worse than 2008-09 and approaching (and in some already exceeding) the depression of the 1930s.

As 40 million plus of US workers find themselves unemployed and barely able to cover their rents, food and other bills, their ability to afford or even secure fundamental health care services is a growing problem. Most of the 40 million will lose their employer health insurance coverage. Millions more will be unable to afford it, or to acquire even minimal ACA or Medicaid health services.

This writer was asked the following questions by an International News Agency about what happens to health care services in the near future, given not only the health but the economic crisis.

Here’s the questions, followed by my commentary and analysis where US health care is likely going in the foreseeable future:

Question

“We’re discussing the US health insurance crisis. Millions of Americans have been hit by a double blow, being out of work and without health insurance if they get sick. Prior to the pandemic, 160 million Americans received their medical insurance through their job. The wave of layoffs triggered by quarantine measures now threatens that coverage for millions. Up to 7 million of those people are unlikely to find new insurance as poor economic conditions drag on, researchers at the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation think tanks predict. Such enormous insurance losses could dramatically alter America’s healthcare landscape, and will probably result in more deaths as people avoid unaffordable healthcare.

In this respect, we’d be happy if you could share your opinion in a short commentary on the pros and cons of Obamacare: 1. why the system failed to cope with multiple healthcare issues, 2. what prevented it from being as successful as was expected and 3. what do you think could have been an alternative, especially now, when the pandemic is ruining the already fragile healthcare system.”

My reply and commentary

Obamacare should be understood as a program that attempted to resolve the decades-long growing health care system crisis in America by means of privatization. In the early 1990s Bill Clinton’s effort to pass legislation to correct a national insurance program was defeated by massive lobbying by the healthcare industry (insurance companies, hospital chains, clinics, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, etc.). Clinton’s response was to pass what was called Health Maintenance organizations, or HMOs. But also part of his market solution was to allow insurance companies to merge with other financial institutions (previously prevented) and allow hospitals to acquire each other without anti-trust liabilities, which were exempted in this industry. A concentration of insurance and hospital chains followed. Concentration led to oligopoly and higher prices. In order to buy up each other, hospitals and insurers went to Wall St. for financing of the deals. Wall St. demanded higher profit margins, at least 22% of revenues, in order to provide the merger financing. That led to still further price increases after the mid-1990s, and insurers dropping from coverage households with pre-existing conditions. Prices rose and coverage (costs) fell. As insurance prices rose, companies providing health insurance shifted more and more of the rising cost burden to its workers in the form of higher monthly premiums, more co-pays, more deductibles. Big companies that used to provide retirement health care benefits to their workers (e.g. AT&T, IBM, etc.) began dropping those benefits. The courts supported them. Millions of retirees lost benefits, while for the still employed prices rose, as insurers expanded price increases while reducing coverage. BY 2000, 50m workers were without health insurance coverage; and those that still had it were paying higher prices for less coverage. In 2000, Clinton arbitrarily redefined what it meant to not have insurance coverage, reducing the total without health insurance from 50m to 40m. This was a repeat of what he had done to reduce poverty: he simply defined it lower, if not away.

The dynamic of health insurers and hospital chain concentration—driving oligopoly and inflation higher as coverage declined—continued in the 2000s decade under George W. Bush. More and more were dropped from coverage by insurance companies for dubious reasons like pre-existing conditions, in order to satisfy Wall St. they were attaining 22% margins as a qualification for getting loans to buy up their competitors. As insurers gouged the public and got away with it, other sectors of the health industry followed suit “to get their share” as they said. Hospitals raised prices. So then did doctors and clinics and medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.

In 2005 the big pharma companies got a second boost from government policy. George W. Bush passed the addition to Medicare called ‘Part D’ that meant the government provided drug prescriptions in part to seniors on Medicare. The problem, however, was that the politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, did not pass any funding for Part D. The cost of the program was paid out of general tax revenues, not a specific addition to the payroll tax earmarked just for Part D. That would add $50b a year to the US budget deficit and debt every year thereafter. Big Pharma got $50B a year more customers. Big Pharma and health insurance companies are among the top 3 or 4 biggest campaign contributors and lobbyist spenders in Washington. Part D became a big subsidy program to the industry.

The economic crash of 2008-09 then exacerbated the problem of ever escalating health care costs amid falling affordability by households. On top the above secular trends driving up prices and the uninsured, cyclical collapse of the economy drove tens of millions more households into the ranks of the uninsured. A major healthcare reform package was proposed in 2010 to try to rectify this. It was called Obamacare, or officially the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.

It should be noted that the historic Democrat Party proposal for health care reform and accessibility to all since the 1930s, which was called Medicare, was not allowed even for discussion in the then Democrat controlled US House of Representatives and Senate. Medicare for seniors was passed in 1965 and the party’s platform always called for extending it to all,but when the opportunity came in 2010, Obama and his business advisers prevented it from even being discussed. Instead, Obama offered what was called the ‘public option’ in lieu of Medicare for All. The public option was simply to have the federal government offer its own competing health insurance to the private insurance companies. But the private insurance industry demanded Obama pull it from proposed legislation as a condition for their support for the legislation. Obama quickly then pulled the public option. There would be no government competitive offering—even if in the form of an insurance solution and not a Medicare for All solution. What resulted was an ACA (Obamacare) that was in effect a proposal to subsidize the health insurance industry to the tune of nearly $1 trillion a year more revenue by having the US government and states manage private health insurance offerings with certain restrictions concerning price changes and health coverage minima and guarantees. Under the ACA, pre-existing conditions requirements were ended. Students up to age 26 could now also get coverage under parents’ insurance plans. The big improvement under the ACA was expanded coverage for the working and non-working poor under the Medicaid (not Medicare) program. This is a bare bones minimal doctor and hospital access provided to the poor who could not afford an insurance plan. There are few doctors who will provide services to Medicaid patients (who are mostly single mothers with children, minorities households earning less than $20k a year, and homeless, and some students). Typically only one hospital in a county accepts Medicaid patients. But it was better than nothing. However, more than a dozen states, run by Republican governors or legislatures, refused to participate in the expansion of Medicaid benefits to the poor, mostly for ideological reasons. These were Trump ‘red states’ predominantly.

In terms of uninsured, the ACA was able to add fewer than 17m to the health coverage rolls, out of the 50 million previously uninsured. It cost the government $900B a year to add these. Not a very cost efficient solution, but one which the health insurance companies liked. As one nurse I spoke to described it, the ACA was not a health insurance reform program; it was a health insurance industry subsidy program.

The ACA was financed by an amalgam of measures that raised the money for the $900b. Among these included a tax on medical devices, a tax on private high cost and often union-negotiated health insurance plans with their employers, a 3.8% surtax on investors income, a mandate that non-insurance companies had to buy into the program if they didn’t have equivalent coverage already, a mandate that individuals had to buy into the government managed plans if they didn’t have employer coverage, and dozens of other money raising measures. Immediately, business interests opposed the taxation and mandates and organized against the ACA, not just lobbying but directly as well, including in the streets demonstrations, protests, etc. The growing right wing media, led by Fox News and right wing social media, launched a constant attack against the ACA. This was encouraged by the fact that Obama and the Democrats allowed four years of ‘commentary’ before the ACA actually took effect. Passed in 2010, the law would not become effective until 2014. In the meantime, a window was allowed for opposition to grow. Lobbyists also picked away and reduced the law as well. Over time, even after 2014, court challenges chipped away at the funding and financing of the ACA. Mandates disappeared, taxes were reduced or eliminated, and only half or so of the states actually joined up.

By the time Trump entered office, Obamacare was a shell of its even limited intent. Without a public option, private insurers could, and did, ‘game the system’. Health care coverage was reduced and, most importantly, the costs of monthly premia, co-pays, and deductibles were allowed to rise significantly. What exists today is high unaffordable private industry offerings, with extremely high deductibles. It amounts for most to only extreme disaster insurance. Those covered amount to no more than 10-15 million at best who were previously uninsured. There therefore remain at least 30 million still uninsured in the US, while the health insurance companies continue to reap at least a half trillion dollars in new revenues a year from the program.

The big failure of the ACA, as this writer forewarned back in 2010-11, was it would fail to control health care rising costs and declining coverage. And that is true as well to this day. The other problem was the willingness of Obama and corporate Democrats to scuttle the public option, and prevent any discussion of Medicare for All being far more cost efficient and beneficial to households.

Now in the wake of the near collapse and deep failure of Obamacare—which repeated the failure of all prior health care privatization solutions—overlaid on the US health care affordability and coverage (and quality of health care for most) crises is the Covid-19 health crisis. Now tens of millions more are losing their health coverage, as poor as it has proven. Mass industry layoffs will result in mass decline in health care services. And re-employment will not occur rapidly, as Trump and other media declare a V-Shape quick recovery. Job losses will continue for years. Only some will come back in 2020-21. Most won’t. Health coverage crisis will continue.

The left wing of the Democrat party has been proposing Medicare for All as the only cost effective and moral alternative solution. But corporate wing Democrats refuse to consider it. And Trumpublicans consider Medicare for All anathema and will vigorously oppose it, labeling all you advocate it as ‘socialists’. And soon the massive budget deficits now being run up to bail out businesses and investors ($3.7T this year and another $2.2T in i2021) will no doubt result after the November 2020 elections in a major drive b y business interests to cut Medicare and Medicaid in order to reduce the deficits caused by business bail outs and America’s current 2nd Great Recession underway at present.

In short, it is clear that US elites since Clinton have only envisioned private, market based solutions to the US growing and continuing health care affordability crisis. All such have failed to date, as will those that may come. Whomever wins in November—Trump or Biden—there will be no Medicare for All solution considered. (Biden, like Trump, has publicly rejected it). That means that tens of millions more American workers and families will be uninsured and do without fundamental health services as the pandemic continues in inevitable second and third waves in the coming months. Those disproportionately affected by loss of medical services, insured and not, are the working poor, single female heads of households, and black and Latino households. The ranks of the uninsured will almost certainly surge once again, and quickly, above 50m and most likely much higher. That means nothing has changed or improved for the last 25 years since Clinton’s abysmal failure at health care reform, through Obama’s failed ACA, through Trump’s virtual disregard for doing anything except to continue to ensure insurance companies are taken care of first and foremost.

Private market solutions to the healthcare crisis, past present and future, have not only failed. They are in effect a central cause of the crisis. The US spent more than $3.5 trillion a year on health care services even prior to the current pandemic. It’s now spending well over $4 trillion ! More than a $1 trillion a year was being paid to paper pushers and middlemen call the health insurance industry. Today at least $1.5T will be paid to the paper pushers who provide not one iota of health care services. The health insurance industry is giant rentier profits industry sucking money out of the economy on a massive scale. The big pharmaceuticals are a close second. They continue to do so because they continue to buy elected politicians and lobby them and the rest in between elections, in the era in America where Citizens United and other court decisions mean corporations are first class citizens and the rest of households are second class (and minority households third class). And nothing will change except for the worse after the November 2020 elections, regardless which candidate of either wing of the Corporate Party of America prevails in the election.

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The debate in the German Bundestag on the extension of the mandate of German Kosovo Force (KFOR) soldiers turned into a criticism of long-time Chancellor Angela Merkel and raised speculation that Berlin might adopt a different position on Kosovo. The opposition reminded Merkel that Germany participated in the war in Kosovo, and that KFOR, a multinational NATO “peacekeeping force” was on the same side as the terrorist “Kosovo Liberation Army.” Is Germany preparing for a big turn on the issue of Kosovo?

The topic was raised by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP Anton Frizen and was surprisingly joined by Alexander Neu of the leftists Die Linke. They highlighted that the idea of ​​solving the Kosovo problem through the exchange of territories was supported by the U.S.

It is significant when the most right political party in the Bundestag is finding common ground with the most left political party, as they can coordinate pressures that could change Berlin’s course on Kosovo. Any change in major foreign policy in Germany ultimately influences the EU’s position. The main challenge is that the ruling coalition of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) is dominant in the German parliament and they rule Germany in an alliance with the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The AfD is the third strongest party in the Bundestag, and Dei Linke is in fifth place.

Merkel, who has a firm position on Kosovo will soon leave office and it is not yet known who will succeed her, and whether they want to change course on this issue. However, the last debate in Germany is an indicator that there has been a reconsideration, which is even being reflected on the global level, of policy on Kosovo. It is obvious that the failure of the project for an independent Kosovo from Serbia, considered the cultural, historical and religious heartland of the Serbs, shows that political public opinion is not only changing in the U.S., but also in Europe. It also shows how problematic this kind of Kosovo is for those who created it. We now have new actors and forces on the German political scene and in the Bundestag, who are critical of Germany’s previous behavior on the issue of Kosovo and demand reconsideration.

Since Kosovo made its illegal declaration of independence in 2008, it has become a ‘smugglers paradise’ for heroin and a hub for human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms trafficking, all under the watchful eye of KFOR. As of today, 15 countries have withdrawn their recognition of Kosovo as an independent country, meaning only 50% of countries in the world recognize the illegal entity.

This event in Germany is extremely important because it is a leading country that stands on a firm position that nothing will change on the Kosovo issue and pushes for Serbia to recognize the independence of Kosovo with the promise of EU membership. This debate in Germany now will certainly have an impact on Berlin’s policy, but not immediately – at least not while this ruling coalition, led by Merkel, is in power. Germany will take over the presidency of the Council of the European Union in July for a 6-month period and we can see how Merkel might navigate Kosovo considering the political climate is changing.

What is worth noting however is that Germany’s leftist parties, that are usually anti-American, are now closer to Washington’s proposals for Kosovo rather than Berlin’s.  But criticism of the government from both the left and the right will raise eyebrows when the Bundestag debates whether the extension of German soldiers in KFOR is necessary.

Ruling in Berlin are the parties that were in power during the 1990’s and were direct participants in everything that happened in Kosovo and supported the destruction of Yugoslavia. Therefore, it is logical that they have not given up their position. But pressure from the fringes of German politics, but who still wield massive influence, will certainly force a debate in Berlin about changing policy on Kosovo, especially as the breakaway province continues to lose legitimacy globally.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Over 86,500 people have reportedly died in the United States from the Coronavirus, and the fear generated by those deaths is driving the public policy debate. But that number is a dramatic overcount. Our metrics include deaths that have nothing to do with the virus. The problem is even worse as the Centers for Disease Control over counts even some of these cases and the government has created financial incentives for this misreporting. Relying on these flawed numbers is destroying businesses and jobs and costing lives.

“The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.”

Medical examiners in Michigan use the same definition. In Macomb and Oakland Counties, where most of the deaths occurred, medical examiners classify any deaths as Coronavirus deaths when the postmortem test is positive. Even people who died in suicides and automobile accidents meet that definition.

Still, these broad definitions are not due to a few rogue public health officials. The rules direct them to do this. Unlike other countries,

“if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” as Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, recently noted.

Classifications go beyond even these broad categories. New York is classifying cases as Coronavirus deaths even when postmortem tests have been negative. Despite negative tests, classifications are based on symptoms, even though the symptoms are often very similar to those of the seasonal flu. The Centers for Disease Control guidance explicitly acknowledges the uncertainty that doctors can face. When Coronavirus cases are “suspected,” they advise doctors that “it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate.”

That isn’t just a theoretical issue. On April 21st, when New York City’s death toll rose above 10,000, the New York Times reported that the city included “3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive” – a more than 50 percent increase in the number of cases.

But the problem is worse than this broad definition implies. Birx and others believe that the CDC is over counting cases. The Washington Post reports they are concerned that the CDC’s “antiquated” accounting system is double counting cases and inflating mortality and case counts “by as much as 25 percent.”

There are additional reasons for concern. Some doctors feel pressure from hospitals to list deaths as due to the Coronavirus, even when they don’t believe that is the case, “to make it look a little bit worse than it is.” There are financial incentives that might make a difference for hospitals and doctors. The CARES Act adds a 20 percent premium for COVID-19 Medicare patients.

Incentives matter. When the government increased the disability compensation for air traffic controllers, a lot more controllers suddenly started claiming to be disabled. When unemployment insurance payments increase, more people become unemployed and stay unemployed for longer periods. When the government offers flood insurance that charges everyone the same insurance premium regardless of the risk level in their area, more people build homes in frequently flooded areas.

The Washington Post and others claim that we are undercounting the true number of deaths. They reach that conclusion by showing the total number of deaths from all causes is greater than we would normally expect from March through early May, and that this excess is actually due to deaths not being accurately labeled as due to the Coronavirus. But these are simply not normal times. Lots of people with heart and other problems aren’t going to the hospital for fear of the virus. Surgeries for many serious conditions are being put off. The stress of the situation is increasing suicides and other illnesses.

Deaths that have absolutely nothing to do with the Coronavirus count as virus deaths. Add to that claims that the CDC is double counting some of these improperly identified cases and the perverse financial incentives created by the government, and you have a real mess when crucial decisions are being made based in large part on this data.

Erroneous data unduly scare people about the risks of the disease. It keeps the country locked down longer than necessary, which destroys peoples’ lives and livelihoods in many other ways. Exaggerated fears of the virus endanger lives by keeping people from obtaining treatment for other medical problems.  It also makes it impossible to accurately compare policies across countries.

It is hard to believe that we are basing such crucial decisions on such flawed data.

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 John R. Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Dr.Timothy Craig Allen is a Governor of the College of American Pathologists and Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is also on the Board of Directors and the Academic advisory board for the Crime Prevention Research Center. 

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Brexit is nothing if not exclusive and elitist. The government and Conservative party are united in contempt for the sovereignty of parliament, and the sovereignty of the people. The Remain campaign may have been one of the most vibrant and hopeful and articulate movements of recent political history but it has few friends in the establishment. And should Labour succeed in vetoing and tabling amendments to an erroneous and misguided agenda devised by the acolytes of May, the only thing we can look forward to with any certainty is that the country will be more bitterly and deeply polarised than before.

At risk of stating the obvious it is nevertheless worth reiterating that, whilst the public voted to give parliament a mandate to untether itself from the eu, nobody made an informed choice about on what terms and conditions this exit is to occur. One suspects that if all the truth were told beforehand, that the conservatives are pursuing a hard brexit that could penalise workers and small businesses, the margin of victory may have been smaller, nay, in favour of remain. Moreover, minds change. Opinion polls have repeatedly yielded results that prove people have changed their minds. People are beginning to realise a vote for brexit was not a vote against the establishment, it was only a vote of confidence in its lies.

The principle of sovereignty, in the context of parliamentary democracy, is that the government must be accountable to the representatives elected to serve the interests of the electorate. Which is precisely what is being jeopardised by the hackneyed manner in which brexit is being negotiated. As an intern for Unlock Democracy I came to understand that good policy is made when all relevant, affected parties are consulted on the content of the legislation. Bad policy is bludgeoned through before due scrutiny can be applied. Hard brexit is bad policy, and bad policy that hasn’t won a mandate in Parliament, and amongst the people.

The supreme court ruling that the government must have the approval of parliament to trigger article fifty has created an apoplectic, irrational rage from the right wing populist media, when in fact this ruling is what is needed to ensure we have a brexit that ensures people’s rights. Be not deceived in to thinking this is a transfer of power from the top down, the Conservatives will no doubt have a bonfire of legislation designed to protect workers, democracy and the environment, transferring more wealth and power upwards.

My tutor on constitutional politics replied to my observation that we aren’t a popular democracy by pointing out that people who think we are are definitely deluded. As much could be said of the press, who stoke the delusion that we are regaining popular sovereignty with Brexit. Parties may be keen to court public opinion and focus groups when they’re trying to look engaged to win a vote, but hard brexit is an exclusive, elitist brexit, which serves the establishment, and not the people.

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Have you experienced a sense of unease when witnessing a group of individuals wearing masks and/or keeping strictly two meters apart? If so, that’s good news, because it means you’re still sufficiently human to be able to respond to life’s deeper survival instincts. 

For those who don’t have an uneasy sense that something is wrong in this situation, I feel a genuine sense of concern and the strong hope that this will change – very soon. Here’s the reason why: you are being indoctrinated to allow a carefully constructed lie to direct your thinking, your behaviour and your individual powers of judgement.

For the purpose of this article, I am not going to repeat all the facts which make it quite plain to me  that the so called ‘pandemic’ given the name Coronavirus Covid-19, is most certainly not something to fear as a significant threat to health. And that the mask is a worse than useless piece of so called ‘protection’ which only serves to accentuate the fact that what it is supposed to protect against – doesn’t even exist in the form in which it is being described.

However, there is something about what this mask represents that should give rise to genuine alarm. That something, is the huge effort being made to turn what is essentially a corona virtual reality construction into a real life event. An event whose momentum is created by pressing down on the irrational fear button and keeping it down until the repetition of the preplanned indoctrination exercise has gone on long enough for the majority to believe that any other version of events must be ‘a conspiracy theory’.

This is basically where we are, ladies and gentlemen. Yet, in spite of the best efforts of our oppressors, the truth is coming out and awareness will follow-on not so far behind.  However, until such awareness forms the bedrock for a critical mass of humanity, we will go on witnessing the manifestation of the lie in all public places and in homes where individuals stick doggedly to the scripted formula they have been fed.

Here is where the uneasy feeling rises into something considerably more than just ‘uneasy’. Because what is on exhibit is an open admission of slavery to the unquestioned commands of ‘the leader of the day’; and what better symbol of such (typically unconscious) subservience than the wearing of the mask of the beast?

What better conformism to ‘the system’ is there than maintaining belief in the validity of ‘social distancing’ at two military paces from our collective brothers and sisters? What starker statement can one make concerning one’s loss of ability to recognise one is being deceived – than not to question being segmented into anti-humanitarian social isolation through a modern day act of apartheid?

If there is a pervasive sickness connected with the ‘grand covid pandemic’ it is this: the willingness of tens of millions of individuals to adopt that which is so far removed from the truth that not even those who are in charge of purveying it can make it sound like sense.

The British Prime Minister, recently attempting to explain the inexplicable rules he expects the population of Britain to conform to, sounded and looked like a man suffering from ‘cognitive dissonance’.

Think carefully about what this mask actually is. If it doesn’t have anything to do with health, what does it have something to do with?  If keeping two metres apart from fellow human beings also has nothing to do with health – and my research suggests that is indeed the case –  then what does ‘keeping distance’ actually stand for?

We know the answer, but perhaps as yet, not deeply enough to bring about the change that should result from such knowledge. So I am going to say it again, in the hopes that those who have not recognised the reality of the trick being perpetrated on us – hold onto this truth – and do not waver or fall due to the insidious levels of brainwashing being directed at dominating our psyches.

The mask is a statement. A statement of conformity. Conformity with a plan to destroy humanity – and by extension – the living environment and the overall aspiration to spiritual evolution which is innate in all life forms. Symbolically and actually, the covering of the nose and mouth with a mask is an expression of ‘secrecy’, ‘subversion’, ‘disguise’ and ‘undercover operations’.

The mass wearing of such masks (with the exception of doctors/medical practitioners) becomes a conformist identity symbol “I see, he/she is also wearing a mask, so they are one of us, we who agree to follow the regulations, to obey the rules and to behave in a politically correct manner. In this way we will be seen to be upstanding members of the community – and normal individuals.”

To be ‘normal’ is a treasured status within 21^st century urban/suburban communities and beyond. There is a terrible fear of being seen to be ‘different’ and thereby ‘not normal’.

But to fear being different more than to fear being a slave, is a truly terrible sickness. Far worse than that being framed as Coronavirus. One for which the only cure may be a bang on the door by the stasi police who have come to remove such a ‘normal individual’  from his/her home – with worse to follow – if that person still fails to raise a finger of self defence for fear of ‘disobeying the law’.

We must break the chains of such paralysing conformity. A conformity historically epitomised by mass obeisance to the Nazi regime in World War Two Germany. Stand up – anyone who fails to recognise that such a time bears a sinister similarity to the in-your- face rampant top-down usurpation of power going-on today, under the excuse that it is ‘necessary’ to prevent the spread of some sort of fake pandemic.

At a time like this, we must make visible statements of our belief in fundamental life values. Where there are occasions being advertised in which peaceful collective assembly in stated places/locations is the objective – be at those events – and demonstrate ‘en masse’ that it is we the people who rightfully hold the destiny of this planet in our hands and NOT the control system which has usurped those powers. Then go home and continue to act on your freshly resurrected sense of self belief.

Anyone still passively allowing the state/corporate alliance to manufacture their lives for them at this point in time – is not worthy of the title ‘human’.

Dear friends, let us rebel from our own susceptibility to fall prey to indoctrination, of any kind. Let us refuse to allow ourselves to take the easy way out! Let us disabuse ourselves of obeisance to the absurd social distancing commandments emanating from The World Health Organisation and passed down to us by a cohort of puppet dictators styling themselves as bona fide representatives of the Ministry of Truth.

Anyone who has warmth in their heart knows instinctively that people need each other and need to be close to each other – especially in times of stress and hardship. They know that to impose ‘distancing’ has nothing to do with preserving the health of the nation – and everything to do with preserving the top down divide and conquer programme of the fascist dream. 

This is where civil disobedience becomes our primary and most effective tool of resistance. Let us not delay putting it into effect.

Over the next few weeks, months and years, we are going participate in one of the most moving uprisings this world has ever known. Literally millions of us are going to step out of our psychological imprisonment and declare ourselves sovereign independent human beings who do not consent to a life of squalid serfdom.

So uplifting will this great rising be that deluded enforcement bodies – attempting to exercise some form of illegal arrest or restraining coercion upon us – will shrink back into the night from whence they came – and quite simply fail to achieve their sickly mission.

This is the future I clearly see ahead – and because I see it I believe you do too – and if you do, I do and we all do,it will happen. All it takes is a sprinkling of courage and a pinch of passion – stirred well into the natural heart led instinct that favours life over death – and we’re away – unstoppable forces for the great emancipation of humanity!

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Julian Rose is a writer, organic farmer, international activist and holistic practitioner/teacher. Two of Julian’s books ‘Creative Solutions to a World in Crisis’ and ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ are particularly prescient reading for this time. See www.julianrose.info for more information. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

US President Donald J. Trump took time from his domestic fight of battling COVID-19 single-handedly and with one arm tied behind his back to set fire to Syrian wheat fields in Hasakah governate. He performed the ritual of the double-war crime — torching farmland and illegal bombing of a foreign nation — on the Christian sabbath.

Deuteronomy 20:19 prohibits the destruction of that which yields food, even during times of war.

War against Syria has not been declared; Trump has engaged in a secular war crime and has spat upon a biblical commandment.

The Trump regime American illegals in the SAR dropped several incendiary bombs on the wheat farmlands “in the countryside of Shaddadi, south of Hasakah,” destroying more than 200 dunams (around 50 acres) of Syrian wheat crops, local sources told SANA reporter.

An illicit US Apache helicopter “flying close to the ground” dropped several thermal balloons onto the wheat fields. Despite its cute name, these are small bombs, equipped to function as large Molotov cocktails (those watching the success of Operation Mockingbird may notice that the joy of children playing with balloons has been put on the list of fun things to be expunged, because of environmental issues, yet those with their minds in chains do not notice demonic bombs used to destroy the sustenance of life — wheat fields — merrily get to use the word, “balloon.”

American Apache helicopter. Imagine a foreign military using their helicopters to destroy food. [Photo credit Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway.]

Trump illegals in their military aircraft have also engaged in psychological warfare operations against Syrian civilians and farmers in this region, sadistically and war criminally approaching people’s homes and farmlands, terrifying Syrian children, as part of a Satanic plot to ethnically cleanse this area of Syria, and replace indigenous Syrians with an assortment of Madman Erdogan mercenary terrorists, and Obama-created and Trump accelerated cannon fodder traitor separatists re-marketed as the SDF. The NATO klansmen running the United Nations — and their House Servants — are 100% on board with this ethnic cleansing, which is a war crime, using the coronavirus pandemic as “health terrorism” against the Syrian Arab Republic.

 

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Featured image is from Syria News

Corporate media are laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check.

The Washington Post (4/23/20) ran an article by Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, the second sentence of which said, “The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that, to a great degree, our very health is in Chinese hands; from medicines to masks, we are at Beijing’s mercy.” America, in this conception, is under Chinese domination, a tyranny that’s evidently imposed not only by the Chinese government, but by Chinese people generally.

Details like the US having more than 21 times as many nuclear warheads as China, or the fact that it’s the US dollar and not the Chinese yuan that underpins the global financial system, do not enter into consideration. Instead, because the US imports a great many goods made in China, Romney urged readers to understand China as Americans’ oppressors, who implicitly must be resisted.

Romney warned his audience that China has a “grand strategy for economic, military and geopolitical domination” and thus “The West” must “respon[d]” with “a unified strategy among free nations to counter China’s trade predation and its corruption of our mutual security.”

He said China is conducting an “alarming military build-up.” Sure, the available evidence indicates that the US spends almost three times what China does on its war apparatus, but “Americans should not take comfort in our disproportionately large military budget,” Romney cautioned, because, supposedly, “China’s annual procurement of military hardware is nearly identical to ours,” though few know about this “outside classified settings.”

Then he revealed China’s supposed threat to America’s “security”: “Because our military has missions around the world, this means that in the Pacific, where China concentrates its firepower, it will have military superiority.” In other words, China is a danger because it “concentrates its firepower” in the ocean nearest to it, while the US’s divine right to empirerequires that its military saturate the globe.

The senator argued that “action should be applied in national security sectors” such as phone technology and medicine, and that “the free nations must collectively agree that we will buy these products only from other free nations” as part of a plan to “protect…our security.”

The idea that China is a threat to Americans’ security is baseless: China hasn’t threatened to attack America, while the US has a massive military presence in the Asia/Pacific region. The Pentagon, with bipartisan support, wants to engorge that menace with a $20 billion budget increase, and with offensive weaponry such as land-based Tomahawk cruise missiles that had been banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty until the US abrogated the deal. China, meanwhile, has no military installations anywhere close to the United States.

Romney repeatedly called on “free nations,” a grouping in which he included the US, to take on China. In doing so, he cast the potential conflict as a civilizational battle between freedom and dictatorship—that the US has the highest prison population per capita on Earth does not trouble the senator’s framework.

Romney also referred to China or its economic practices as a “predator,” “predatory,” or “predation” eight times, making the US and its allies the supposed prey. “Today,” Romney wrote, “Beijing’s weapon of choice is economic: The tip of its spear is global industrial predation.” China is “a predator, unbound by the rules followed by its competitors,” so “when the immediate health crisis has passed, the United States should convene like-minded nations to develop a common strategy aimed at dissuading China from pursuing its predatory path.” Romney is propagating a timeworn worldview in which deceitful, barbaric Orientals take advantage of innocent, rule-abiding Americans whose businesses never break laws or do anything that could be viewed as predatory.

The Washington Post’s George Will (4/29/20) likewise said that it’s necessary to “stand up to China,” advocating that the US adopt “a policy of national strength” toward the country. This is the language of war, suggesting that China presents a danger to the US that has to be met with American might.

Will encouraged presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to “practice what he preaches about bipartisanship by associating himself” with far-right Republican Sen. Tom Cotton’s “measured but insistent support for an investigation into the possible role of a Wuhan, China, research laboratory in the coronavirus outbreak.” By endorsing the racist, warmongering senator’s proposed inquiry, Will is mainstreaming an extremely dubious conspiracy theory (Grayzone, 4/20/20) alleging that Covid-19 is a Chinese biological weapon unleashed, perhaps unintentionally, from a research lab in Wuhan.

Will also seemed to endorse Cotton’s

question[ing] of the visas for people from China to pursue postgraduate studies here in advanced science and technology fields: If Chinese students want to study “Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”

At the very least, Will amplified and declined to question the notion that Chinese students doing graduate scientific research in America should be viewed with suspicion, implicitly because they might be engaged in piracy or espionage on behalf of the Chinese government, though no evidence is offered for this accusation. It’s a perspective that imagines that the wealthiest, most populous country on Earth might somehow be kept away from advanced technology—though in the long run, the US has more to gain from Chinese research than the other way around (CounterSpin, 5/24/19).

Canada’s Financial Post (5/4/20) went a step further, saying that “China Must Be Brought to Heel,” animalizing language that hearkens back to when Western powers actually did dominate China, and treated the nation to such delights as the Opium Wars (London Review of Books, 11/3/11).

A Fox News article (5/4/20) went full fire and brimstone, calling for the US “to avenge [the] deaths of hundreds of thousands” that have been caused by Covid-19. Another Fox article (5/4/20) said it’s necessary to “hold China accountable” for the harm the coronavirus has caused, applauding Missouri’s lawsuit against the country without noting one minor detail: US courts have no jurisdiction to sue China (Reuters, 4/21/20). Another notable barrier to US media revenge fantasies is that the US and China have the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship, something that the US is hardly in a position to break away from, with China’s economy mostly up and running and the US’s largely offline.

Similarly, the Boston Herald’s Joe Battenfeld (4/14/20) contended that “Trump[’s] Move to Hold China [and the] World Health Organization Accountable [Was] Long Overdue,” a reference to Trump suspending funding to the UN’s main infectious disease-fighting body. WHO gets 15% of its budget from the US; Battenfeld himself acknowledges that withdrawing this “could [incapacitate] the agency’s healthcare initiatives”; in other words, undermining global health during a worldwide pandemic is a good way to teach China a lesson.

The author also endorsed the US “impos[ing] sanctions on China for its role in the spread of the coronavirus,” the type of economic warfare the US is waging against several countries, causing untold death and misery (Jacobin, 3/26/20). Given the fact that China’s largely Covid-free economy is likely to be in far stronger shape than the US’s for the foreseeable future, however, it’s doubtful that Washington will be in any position to impose sanctions on Beijing.

Further problems abound with the idea that the Chinese bad guys have to be punished for Covid-19 by the American good guys. As historian Vijay Prashad (People’s Dispatch, 4/23/20) demonstrated, the narrative of a Chinese-WHO coronavirus cover-up is itself profoundly flawed. And it’s hard to see how China is to blame for the US’s dismal response to the pandemic, which has been characterized by moves like the rejection of a coronavirus test approved by the WHO in January in favor of a test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that wasn’t dispatched until February, and some of which didn’t work properly once they were (Washington Post, 4/18/20).

Corporate media distortions and bombast are priming the American public to see China as a treacherous villain that has to be forcefully confronted, perhaps with violence. Presenting China—and Chinese people—as a threat to the United States and its people is that much more reckless at a moment when there is an “alarming surge in anti-Asian racism related to Covid-19” (NBC, 4/16/20). But such considerations don’t trouble those who are in the business of ginning up the hatred necessary for a new cold war.

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Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

Featured image is from FAIR/WaPo