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Kosovo Liberation Army Leader Hashim Thaçi on Trial for War Crimes

By Peter Schwarz and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 19, 2023

From the very outset those crimes against the people of Serbia and Kosovo were committed on behalf of the Atlantic Alliance. The KLA had extensive links to organized crime involved in drug trafficking. In the wake of the 1999 war, 24 years ago, a Mafia State was installed in Kosovo.

Scandinavia’s “Media Investigation” on Russia’s Alleged “Sabotage Plans”: Intended to Distract from Sy Hersh’s Nord Stream Report?

By Andrew Korybko, April 19, 2023

Scandinavia’s fake news about Russia was released at this particular point in time and specifically included the claim that Moscow is considering acts of sabotage in NATO-controlled waters so as to distract from Hersh’s report and revive the false story that the Kremlin blew up Nord Stream.

American De-industrialization: Paul Craig Roberts

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, April 19, 2023

Last week, I explained how economists and policymakers destroyed our economy for the sake of short-term corporate profits from jobs offshoring and financial deregulation. See this.

NATO’s Growing Military Presence in Latin America and the Caribbean

By Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, April 19, 2023

At present, it has become customary to speak of NATO’s expansion “towards Eastern Europe”, which, while effective, is a reductionist concept. The truth is that since the end of the bipolar world, the United States, believing itself to be the master of the world, has used NATO to expand throughout the planet.

Speak Your Truth: Don’t Let the Government Criminalize Free Speech

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, April 19, 2023

Under the pretext of clamping down on online stalking, Colorado wants the power to be able to treat expressive activities on social media as threats without having to prove that the messages are both reasonably understood as threatening an illegal act and intended by the speaker as a threat.

Leaked Pentagon Document Reveals US Spying on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

By Dave DeCamp, April 19, 2023

Classified documents allegedly leaked by Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira have revealed that the US is closely spying on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and is not happy with his engagement with Moscow.

Big Oil Willow Project in Alaska. ConocoPhillips Fossil Fuel Extraction. Devastating Impacts on Wildlife and the Environment

By Center For Biological Diversity, April 19, 2023

A federal judge today ruled in favor of oil giant ConocoPhillips by denying a motion for preliminary injunction brought by environmental groups as part of a lawsuit challenging the Willow project in Alaska’s Western Arctic.

Undercover in Broad Daylight: Israeli Military Raids in West Bank Cities

By Ola Marshoud, April 19, 2023

Since 2021, the Israeli army has intensified its raids into West Bank towns, where detention and assassination operations are usually conducted by undercover special forces. Israeli soldiers would appear in Palestinian neighbourhood dressed like locals – including disguised as Muslim clerics, workers, journalists, or medics – to conduct highly secretive military operations.

Bombshell Filing: 9/11 Hijackers Were CIA Recruits

By Kit Klarenberg, April 19, 2023

A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI.

Blair Misled Parliament Over 1998 Iraq Bombing, Files Show

By Mark Curtis, April 19, 2023

Declassified documents from 1998, when the UK and US bombed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, show Tony Blair was consistently informed military action was unlawful without UN authorisation. But he told parliament Britain had “the proper legal authority”.

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***

The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq. Here’s an example. This package of lies is called “Liberals Have a Blind Spot on Defense” but mentions nothing related to defense. It simply pretends that militarism is defensive by applying that word and by lying that “we face simultaneous and growing military threats from Russia and China.” Seriously? Where?

The U.S. military budget is more than those of most nations of the world combined. Only 29 nations, out of some 200 on Earth, spend even 1 percent what the U.S. does. Of those 29, a full 26 are U.S. weapons customers. Many of those receive free U.S. weapons and/or training and/or have U.S. bases in their countries. Only one non-ally, non-weapons customer (albeit a collaborator in bioweapons research labs) spends over 10% what the U.S. does, namely China, which was at 37% of U.S. spending in 2021 and likely about the same now despite the highly horrifying increases widely reported in the U.S. media and on the floor of Congress. (That’s not considering weapons for Ukraine and various other U.S. expenses.) While the U.S. has planted military bases around Russia and China, neither has a military base anywhere near the United States, and neither has threatened the United States.

Now, if you don’t want to fill the globe with U.S. weaponry and provoke Russia and China on their borders, the New York Times has some additional lies for you: “Defense spending is about as pure an application of a domestic industrial policy — with thousands of good-paying, high-skilled manufacturing jobs — as any other high-tech sector.”

No, it is not.  Just about any other way of spending public dollars, or even not taxing them in the first place, produces more and better jobs.

Here’s a doozie:

“Liberals also used to be hostile to the military on the assumption that it skewed right wing, but that’s a harder argument to make when the right is complaining about a ‘woke military.’”

What in the world would it mean to oppose organized mass murder because it skews right wing? What the hell else could it skew? I oppose militarism because it kills, destroys, damages the Earth, drives homelessness and illness and poverty, prevents global cooperation, tears down the rule of law, prevents self-governance, produces the dumbest pages of the New York Times, fuels bigotry, and militarizes police, and because there are better ways to resolve disputes and to resist the militarism of others. I’m not going to start cheering for mass killings because some general doesn’t hate enough groups.

Then there’s this lie:

“The Biden administration touts the size of its $842 billion budget request, and in nominal terms it’s the largest ever. But that fails to account for inflation.”

If you look at U.S. military spending according to SIPRI in constant 2021 dollars from 1949 to now (all the years they provide, with their calculation adjusting for inflation), Obama’s 2011 record will probably fall this year. If you look at actual numbers, not adjusting for inflation, Biden has set a new record each year. If you add in the free weapons for Ukraine, then, even adjusting for inflation, the record fell this past year and will probably be broken again in the coming year.

You’ll hear all sorts of different numbers, depending on what’s included. Most used is probably $886 billion for what Biden has proposed, which includes the military, the nuclear weapons, and some of “Homeland Security.” In the absence of massive public pressure on a topic the public hardly knows exists, we can count on an increase by Congress, plus major new piles of free weapons to Ukraine. For the first time, U.S. military spending (not counting various secret spending, veterans spending, etc.) will likely top $950 billion as predicted here.

War profiteer-funded stink tankers like to view military spending as a philanthropic project to be measured as a percentage of an “economy” or GDP, as if the more money a country has, the more it should spend on organized killing. There are two more sensible ways to look at it. Both can be seen at Mapping Militarism.

One is as simple amounts per nation. In these terms, the U.S. is at a historic high and soaring far, far over the rest of the world.

The other way to look at it is per capita. As with a comparison of absolute spending, one has to travel far down the list to find any of the designated enemies of the U.S. government. But here Russia jumps to the top of that list, spending a full 20% of what the U.S. does per person, while only spending less than 9% in total dollars. In contrast, China slides down the list, spending less than 9% per person what the United States does, while spending 37% in absolute dollars. Iran, meanwhile, spends 5% per capita what the U.S. does, compared to just over 1% in total spending.

Our New York Times friend writes that the U.S. needs to spend more to dominate four oceans, while China need worry only about one.  But here the U.S. desire to treat economic competition as a form of war blinds the commentator to the fact that a lack of war facilitates economic success. As Jimmy Carter told Donald Trump,

“Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war. . . . China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”

But you could drop the idiotic economic competition and still understand the benefits of investing in something other than death since tiny fractions of military spending could transform the United States and the rest of the world. Surely there would remain plenty of other things to lie about.

*

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This article was originally published on World BEYOND War.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and U.S. Peace Prize recipient. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswansonand FaceBook, and sign up for: Activist alerts. Articles. David Swanson news. World Beyond War news. Charlottesville news.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from World BEYOND War

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*** 

Last week, I explained how economists and policymakers destroyed our economy for the sake of short-term corporate profits from jobs offshoring and financial deregulation. See this.

That same week Business Week published an article, “Factory Jobs Are Gone. Get Over It,” by Charles Kenny. Kenny expresses the view of establishment economists, such as Brookings Institute economist Justin Wolfers who wants to know “What’s with the political fetish for manufacturing? Are factories really so awesome?”

“Not really,” Kenny says. Citing Eric Fisher of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, Kenny reports that wages rise most rapidly in those states that most quickly abandon manufacturing. Kenny cites Gary Hufbauer, once an academic colleague of mine now at the Peterson Institute, who claims that the 2009 tariffs applied to Chinese tire imports cost US consumers $1 billion in higher prices and 3,731 lost retail jobs. Note the precision of the jobs loss, right down to the last 31.

In support of the argument that Americans are better off without manufacturing jobs, Kenny cites MIT and Harvard academic economists to the effect that there is no evidence that manufacturing tends to cluster, thus disputing the view that there are economies from manufacturers tending to congregate in the same areas where they benefit from an experienced work force and established supply chains.

Perhaps the MIT and Harvard economists did their study after US manufacturing centers became shells of their former selves and Detroit lost 25% of its population, Gary Indiana lost 22% of its population, Flint Michigan lost 18% of its population, Cleveland lost 17% of its population, and St Louis lost 20% of its population. If the economists’ studies were done after manufacturing had departed, they would not find manufacturing concentrated in locations where it formerly flourished. MIT and Harvard economists might find this an idea too large to comprehend.

Kenny’s answer to the displaced manufacturing workers is–you guessed it–jobs training. He cites MIT economist David Autor who thinks the problem is the federal government only spends $1 on retraining for every $400 that it spends on supporting displaced workers.

These arguments are so absurd as to be mindless. Let’s examine them. What jobs are the displaced manufacturing workers to be trained for? Why, service jobs, of course. Kenny actually thinks that “service industries–hotels, hospitals, media, and accounting–have taken up the slack.” (I don’t know where he gets media and accounting from; scant sign of such jobs are found in the payroll jobs reports.) Moreover, service jobs have certainly not taken up the slack as the rising rate of long-term unemployment and declining labor force participation rate prove.

Nontradable service sector jobs such as hotel maids, hospital orderlies, retail clerks, waitresses and bartenders are low productivity, low value-added jobs that cannot pay incomes comparable to manufacturing jobs. The long term decline in real median family income relates to the movement offshore of manufacturing jobs and tradable professional service jobs, such as software engineering, IT, research and design.

Moreover, domestic service jobs do not produce exportable goods and services. A country without manufactures has little with which to earn foreign exchange in order to pay for its imports of its shoes, clothing, manufactured goods, high-technology products, Apple computers, and increasingly food. Therefore, that country’s trade deficit widens as each year it owes more and more to foreigners.

A country whose best known products are fraudulent and toxic financial instruments and GMO foods that no one wants cannot pay for its imports except by signing over its existing assets. The foreigners buy up US assets with their trade surpluses. Consequently, income from rents, interest, dividends, capital gains, and profits leave US pockets for foreign pockets. It is a safe bet that Hufbauer did not include any of these costs, or maybe even the loss of US tire workers’ wages and tire manufacturers’ profits, when he concluded that trying to save US tire manufacturing jobs cost more than it was worth.

Eric Fisher’s argument that the highest wage growth is found in areas where higher productivity manufacturing jobs are most rapidly replaced with lower productivity domestic service jobs is beyond absurd. (Possibly Fisher did not say this; I’m taking Kenny’s word for it.) It has always been a foundation of labor economics that workers are paid the value of their contribution to output. Manufacturing employees working with technology embodied in plant and equipment produce more value per man hour than maids changing sheets and bartenders mixing drinks.

In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution Of The West (2013), I point out the obvious mistakes in “studies” by Matthew Slaughter, a former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and Harvard professor Michael Porter. These academic economists conclude on the basis of extraordinary errors and ignorance of empirical facts, that jobs offshoring is good for Americans. They were able to reach this conclusion despite the absence of any visibility of this good, and they hold to this absurd conclusion despite the inability of a “recovery” (or lack of one) that is 4.5 years old to get off the ground and get employment back up to where it was six years ago. They hold to their “education is the answer” solution despite the growing percentage of university graduates who cannot find employment.

Michael Hudson is certainly correct to call economists purveyors of “junk economics.” Indeed, I wonder if economists even have junk value. But they are well paid by Wall Street and the offshoring corporations.

What the Brookings Institute’s Justin Wolfers needs to ask himself is: what is the redefinition of economic development? For my lifetime the definition of a developed economy is an industrialized economy. It has always been “the industrialized countries” that occupy the status of “developed economies,” contrasted with “undeveloped countries,” “developing countries,” and “emerging economies.” How is an economy developed if it is shedding its industry and manufacturing? This is the reverse of the development process. Without realizing it, Kenny describes the unravelling of the US economy when he describes the decline of US manufacturing from 28 percent of US GDP in 1953 to 12% in 2012. The US now has the work force of a third world country, with the vast bulk of the population employed in lowly paid domestic services. The US work force no longer looks like the work force of a developed country. It looks like third world India’s work force of three decades ago.

Kenny and junk economists speak of the decline of US manufacturing jobs as if they are not being offshored to countries where labor is cheap but replaced by automation. No doubt there has been automation, and more ways of replacing humans with machines will be found. But if manufacturing jobs are things of the past, why is China’s sudden and rapid rise to economic power accompanied by 100 million manufacturing jobs? Apple computers are not made in China by robots. If robots are making Apple computers, it would be just as cheap to make the computers in the US. The Chinese manufacturing workforce is almost the size of the entire US work force.

US companies employ Americans to market the products that are produced abroad for sale in the US. This is why US corporations employ Americans mainly in service jobs. Foreigners make the goods, and Americans sell them.

Economic development has always been about acquiring the capital, technology, business knowledge, and trained workforce to make valuable things that can be sold at home and abroad. US capital and technology are being located abroad, and the trained domestic workforce is disappearing from disuse and abandonment. The US is falling out of the ranks of the industrialized countries and is on the path to becoming an undeveloped economy.

*

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image: Bethlehem Steel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was one of the world’s leading steel manufacturers for most of the 20th century. But in 1982, it discontinued most of its operations, declared bankruptcy in 2001, and was dissolved in 2003. (Licensed under CC BY 2.5)

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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***

A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI.

Obtained by SpyTalk, the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants. It summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews he conducted with anonymous high-ranking CIA and FBI officials. Many agents who spoke to Canestraro headed up Operation Encore, the Bureau’s aborted, long-running probe into Saudi government connections to the 9/11 attack.

Despite conducting multiple lengthy interviews with a range of witnesses, producing hundreds of pages of evidence, formally investigating several Saudi officials, and launching a grand jury to probe a Riyadh-run US-based support network for the hijackers, Encore was abruptly terminated in 2016. This was purportedly due to a byzantine intra-FBI bust-up over investigative methods.

When originally released in 2021 on the Office’s public court docket, every part of the document was redacted except an “unclassified” marking. Given its explosive contents, it is not difficult to see why: as Canestraro’s investigation concluded, at least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited either knowingly or unknowingly into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation which may have gone awry. 

‘A 50/50 chance’ of Saudi involvement

In 1996, Alec Station was created under the watch of the CIA. The initiative was supposed to comprise a joint investigative effort with the FBI. However, FBI operatives assigned to the unit soon found they were prohibited from passing any information to the Bureau’s head office without the CIA’s authorization, and faced harsh penalties for doing so. Efforts to share information with the FBI’s equivalent unit – the I-49 squad based in New York – were repeatedly blocked.  

In late 1999, with “the system blinking red” about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the US, the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an “operational cadre” within an Al Qaeda cell that included the Saudi nationals Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The pair would purportedly go on to hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar had attended an Al Qaeda summit that took place between January 5th and 8th 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was secretly photographed and videotaped by local authorities at Alec Station’s request although, apparently, no audio was captured. En route, Mihdhar transited through Dubai, where CIA operatives broke into his hotel room and photocopied his passport. It showed that he possessed a multi-entry visa to the US.

A contemporaneous internal CIA cable stated this information was immediately passed to the FBI “for further investigation.” In reality, Alec Station not only failed to inform the Bureau of Mihdhar’s US visa, but also expressly forbade two FBI agents assigned to the unit from doing so.

“[I said] ‘we’ve got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad…we’ve got to tell the FBI.’ And then [the CIA] said to me, ‘no, it’s not the FBI’s case, not the FBI’s jurisdiction’,” Mark Rossini, one of the FBI agents in question, has alleged. “If we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau, I would’ve been violating the law. I…would’ve been removed from the building that day. I would’ve had my clearances suspended, and I would be gone.”

On January 15th, Hazmi and Mihdhar entered the US through Los Angeles International Airport, just weeks after the foiled Millennium plot. Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi government “ghost employee” immediately met them at an airport restaurant. After a brief conversation, Bayoumi helped them find an apartment near his own in San Diego, co-signed their lease, set them up bank accounts, and gifted $1,500 towards their rent. The three would have multiple contacts moving forward.

In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi alleged his run-in with the two would-be hijackers was mere happenstance. His extraordinary practical and financial support was, he claimed, simply charitable, motivated by sympathy for the pair, who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with Western culture. 

The Bureau disagreed, concluding Bayoumi was a Saudi spy, who handled a number of Al Qaeda operatives in the US. They also considered there to be a “50/50 chance” he – and by extension Riyadh – had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

That remarkable finding wasn’t known publicly until two decades later, when a tranche of Operation Encore documents were declassified upon the Biden administration’s orders, and it was completely ignored by the mainstream media. Don Canestraro’s declaration now reveals FBI investigators went even further in their assessments.

A Bureau special agent, dubbed “CS-3” in the document, stated Bayoumi’s contact with the hijackers and support thereafter “was done at the behest of the CIA through the Saudi intelligence service.” Alec Station’s explicit purpose was to “recruit Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar via a liaison relationship”, with the assistance of Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate.

A most ‘unusual’ CIA unit

Alec Station’s formal remit was to track bin Laden, “collect intelligence on him, run operations against him, disrupt his finances, and warn policymakers about his activities and intentions.” These activities would naturally entail enlisting informants within Al Qaeda. 

Nonetheless, as several high level sources told Canestraro, it was extremely “unusual” for such an entity to be involved in gathering intelligence and recruiting assets. The US-based unit was run by CIA analysts, who do not typically manage human assets. Legally, that work is the exclusive preserve of case officers “trained in covert operations” and based overseas.

“CS-10”, a CIA case officer within Alec Station, concurred with the proposition that Hazmi and Mihdhar enjoyed a relationship with the CIA through Bayoumi, and was baffled that the unit was tasked with attempting to penetrate Al Qaeda in the first place. They felt it “would be nearly impossible…to develop informants inside” the group, given the “virtual” station was based in a Langley basement, “several thousand miles from the countries where Al Qaeda was suspected of operating.”

“CS-10” further testified that they “observed other unusual activities” at Alec Station. Analysts within the unit “would direct operations to case officers in the field by sending the officers cables instructing them to do a specific tasking,” which was “a violation of CIA procedures.” Analysts “normally lacked the authority to direct a case officer to do anything.”

“CS-11”, a CIA operations specialist posted to Alec Station “sometime prior to the 9/11 attacks” said they likewise “observed activity that appeared to be outside normal CIA procedures.” Analysts within the unit “mostly stuck to themselves and did not interact frequently” with others. When communicating with one another through internal cables, they also used operational pseudonyms, which “CS-11” described as peculiar, as they were not working undercover, “and their employment with the CIA was not classified information.”

The unit’s unusual operational culture may explain some of the stranger decisions made during this period vis a vis Al Qaeda informants. In early 1998, while on a CIA mission to penetrate London’s Islamist scene, a  joint FBI-CIA informant named Aukai Collins received a stunning offer: bin Laden himself wanted him to go to Afghanistan so they could meet. 

Collins relayed the request to his superiors. While the FBI was in favor of infiltrating Al Qaeda’s base, his CIA handler nixed the idea, saying, “there was no way the US would approve an American operative going undercover into Bin Laden’s camps.”

Similarly, in June 2001, CIA and FBI analysts from Alec Station met with senior Bureau officials, including representatives of its own Al Qaeda unit. The CIA shared three photos of individuals who attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting 18 months earlier, including Hazmi and Mihdhar. However, as an FBI counter-terror officer codenamed “CS-15” recalled, the dates of the photos and key details about the figures they depicted were not revealed. Instead, the analysts simply asked if the FBI “knew the identities of the individuals in the photos.” 

Another FBI official present, “CS-12”, offers an even more damning account. The Alec Station analysts not failed to offer biographical information, but falsely implied one of the individuals might be Fahd Al-Quso, a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole. What’s more, they outright refused to answer any questions related to the photographs. Nonetheless, it was confirmed that no system was in place to alert the FBI if any of the three entered the US – a “standard investigative technique” for terror suspects.

Given Hazmi and Mihdhar appeared to be simultaneously working for Alec Station in some capacity, the June 2001 meeting may well have been a dangle. No intelligence value could be extracted from inquiring whether the Bureau knew who their assets were, apart from ascertaining if the FBI’s counter-terror team was aware of their identities, physical appearances, and presence in the US.

Quite some coverup

Another of Canestraro’s sources, a former FBI agent who went by “CS-23,” testified that after 9/11, FBI headquarters and its San Diego field office quickly learned of “Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and subsequently the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit” Hazmi and Mihdhar.

However, “senior FBI officials suppressed investigations” into these matters. “CS-23” alleged, furthermore, that Bureau agents testifying before the Joint Inquiry into 9/11 “were instructed not to reveal the full extent of Saudi involvement with Al-Qaeda.”

The US intelligence community would have had every reason to shield Riyadh from scrutiny and consequences for its role in the 9/11 attacks, as it was then one of its closest allies. But the FBI’s eager complicity in Alec Station’s coverup may have been motivated by self-interest, as one of its own was intimately involved in the unit’s effort to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar, and conceal their presence in the US from relevant authorities.

“CS-12”, who attended the June 2001 meeting with Alec Station, told Canestraro that they “continued to press FBI Headquarters for further information regarding the subjects in the photographs” over that summer. On August 23rd, they stumbled upon an “electronic communication” from FBI headquarters, which identified Hazmi and Mihdhar, and noted they were in the US. 

“CS-12” then contacted the FBI analyst within Alec Station who authored the communication. The conversation quickly became “heated”, with the analyst ordering them to delete the memo “immediately” as they were not authorized to view it. While unnamed in the declaration, the FBI analyst in question was Dina Corsi.

The next day, on a conference call between “CS-12”, Corsi, and the FBI’s bin Laden unit chief, “officials at FBI headquarters” explicitly told “CS-12” to “stand down” and “cease looking” for Mihdhar, as the Bureau intended to open an “intelligence gathering investigation” on him. The next day, “CS-12” emailed Corsi, stating bluntly “someone is going to die” unless Mihdhar was pursued criminally.

It was surely no coincidence that two days later, on August 26th, Alec Station finally informed the FBI that Hazmi and Mihdhar were in the US. By then, the pair had entered the final phase of preparations for the impending attacks. If a criminal probe had been opened, they could have been stopped in their tracks. Instead, as foreshadowed by the officials in contact with “CS-12,” an intelligence investigation was launched which hindered any search efforts.

In the days immediately after the 9/11 attacks, “CS-12” and other New York-based FBI agents participated in another conference call with Bureau headquarters. During the conversation, they learned Hazmi and Mihdhar were named on Flight 77’s manifest. One analyst on the line ran the pair’s names through “commercial databases,” quickly finding them and their home address listed in San Diego’s local phone directory. It turned out they had been living with an FBI informant.

“CS-12” soon contacted Corsi “regarding information on the hijackers.” She responded by providing a photograph from the same surveillance operation that produced the three pictures presented at the June 2001 meeting between Alec Station and FBI agents; they depicted Walid bin Attash, a lead suspect in Al Qaeda’s 1998 East Africa US Embassy bombings and its attack on the USS Cole. 

Corsi was unable to explain why the photo was not shown to FBI agents earlier. If it had been, “CS-12” claims they would have “immediately linked” Hazmi and Mihdhar to bin Attash, which “would have shifted from an intelligence based investigation into a criminal investigation.” The FBI’s New York field office could have then devoted its “full resources” to finding the hijackers before the fateful day of September 11, 2001.

Alec Station operatives fail upwards

Alec Station’s tireless efforts to protect its Al Qaeda assets raises the obvious question of whether Hazmi and Mihdhar, and possibly other hijackers, were in effect working for the CIA on the day of 9/11.

The real motives behind the CIA’s stonewalling may never be known. But it appears abundantly clear that Alec Station did not want the FBI to know about or interfere in its secret intelligence operation. If the unit’s recruitment of Hazmi and Mihdhar was purely dedicated to information gathering, rather than operational direction, it is incomprehensible that the FBI had not been apprised of it, and was instead actively misdirected.

Several FBI sources consulted by Canestraro speculated that the CIA’s desperation to penetrate Al Qaeda prompted it to grant Alec Station the power to recruit assets, and pressured it to do so. But if this were truly the case, then why did Langley refuse the opportunity to send Aukai Collins – a proven deep cover asset who had infiltrated several Islamist gangs – to penetrate bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan?

One alternative explanation is that Alec Station, a powerful rogue CIA team answerable and accountable to no one, sought to infiltrate the terror group for its own sinister purposes, without the authorization and oversight usually required by Langley in such circumstances. Given that Collins was a joint asset shared with the FBI, he could not be trusted to participate in such a sensitive black operation.  

No member of Alec Station has been punished in any way for the supposed “intelligence failures” that allowed 9/11 to go ahead. In fact, they have been rewarded. Richard Blee, the unit’s chief at the time of the attacks, and his successor Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, both joined the CIA’s operations division, and became highly influential figures in the so-called war on terror. Corsi, for her part, was promoted at the FBI, eventually rising to the rank of Deputy Assistant Director for Intelligence.  

In a perverse twist, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program found that Bikowsky had been a key player in the agency’s black site machinations, and one of their chief public apologists. It is increasingly clear that the program was specifically concerned with eliciting false testimony from suspects in order to justify and expand the US war on terror. 

The public’s understanding of the 9/11 attacks is heavily informed by testimonies delivered by CIA torture victims under the most extreme duress imaginable. And Bikowsky, a veteran of the Alec Station that ran cover for at least two would-be 9/11 hijackers, had been in charge of interrogating the alleged perpetrators of the attacks.

The veteran FBI deep cover agent Aukai Collins concluded his memoir with a chilling reflection which was only reinforced by Don Canestraro’s bombshell declaration:

“I was very mistrustful about the fact that bin Laden’s name was mentioned literally hours after the attack… I became very skeptical about anything anybody said about what happened, or who did it. I thought back to when I was still working for them and we had the opportunity to enter Bin Laden’s camp. Something just hadn’t smelled right…To this day I’m unsure who was behind September 11, nor can I even guess… Someday the truth will reveal itself, and I have a feeling that people won’t like what they hear.”

*

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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

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Letter from Sir Franklin Berman to Foreign Office Permanent Undersecretary, 12 February 1998, in National Archives, PREM 49/294/1

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*** 

As I write, the world is on the edge of nuclear and humanitarian crises after a year of the Ukraine “proxy” war with Russia. No single event can be seen as the sole cause, but the most dramatic lurch in the story was the “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine in November 2013 to February 2014, notably the horrific massacre of protesters and police in Maidan (Independence) Square on February 20, 2014.

Without dismissing the large sectors of Ukrainian society with legitimate grievances against corruption and stagnation, this was a bloody coup d’état, engineered largely by the U.S. over years with parts played by NATO puppets and local proxies. Viktor Yanukovych was elected in internationally recognized fair elections, and new elections were planned to occur within a year. But powerful interests and a large section of the public believed it could not wait as he could not be trusted. And he was chased out of the country like a hunted animal.

And, like all “color revolutions,” despite the underlying legitimate grievances, it was no true upheaval or revolution at all, it was simply local elites of the same class switching their allegiances to another external power. As Ukrainian political researcher Volodymyr Ishchenko describes, four groups gained power after the violent 2014 coup: “the oligarchic opposition, the NGOs, the far right and Washington-Brussels.”^[1]

Many protesters congregated in Maidan Square from late November to February, sparked by the governments reticence to agree to the EU association agreement and its clauses on economic reform. Initially peaceful, the protests experienced periodic escalations in violence, often precipitated when things were settling down.

But it was the sniper attack of February 20, 2014, that was the crucial event that pushed things over the edge and led to the violent overthrow of the government, the consolidation of elements of fascist power in the government, and snowballed into the annexation of Crimea, a civil (and proxy) war in Donbas and the 2022 Russian “invasion” or “Special Operation Z,” depending on which side of the prism one is. The official and Western-implied view is that it was Yanukovych, or perhaps Russian-backed snipers, behind the massacre, yet those events received barely any coverage and no conclusive investigation or trial has occurred.

Who were the snipers? Who trained them? Who paid them? Who planned it? Who ordered it? Who benefited? Who covered it up and why?

Maidan shooters in the upper floors of the Maidan-occupied Music Conservatory Building on the morning of February 20, 2014. [Credit: Eygeniy Maloletka]

The Liberal-Fascist Alliance: Imperial Terrorism

Before we look at the influence of U.S. soft power on events, it is essential to consider the history of U.S. support of fascist and nationalist groups during the Cold War, including the recruitment of hundreds of Nazis in the Reinhardt Gehlen organization to develop the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)^[2] and the use of diaspora Croatian and Ukrainian nationalists-fascists as spies and covert actors.^[3]

This dual track of elite power—using both soft social democratic or liberal and hard fascist hands—is neither new nor a U.S. invention. For example, the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 by fascist Freikorps were pursuant to orders of Gustav Noske of the Social Democratic Party.^[4]

Mark Twain was so taken aback at the “banditry” of Teddy Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Cabot Lodge’s vile lurch into global imperialism that he suggested the flag should be changed into black and white stripes with skull and crossbones replacing the stars.^[5] One hundred and twenty years later, and perhaps as many million people killed in aggressions of regime change and counterinsurgency since, the comparison to piracy seems a quaint anachronism.

Uncle Sam says to the Filipinos: You choose—school teacher or soldier? We will dominate you either way. A centerfold in Puck by Udo Keppler, published November 1901. [Source: loc.gov]

When your modus operandi is anti-communism, fascists are your best friends. In fact, the rabid anti-communism was and is itself a front for corporate imperialism, and its true aim was and is to crush any resistance, whether it is indigenous sovereignty or an uncooperative local elite.

In the recent post-war U.S. context, in parallel to the “left-hand” overt and covert support of center-left political actors—a sort of “democracy washing”—there were simultaneous “right-hand” covert recruitments of fascist militias across the world. In Europe (and Turkey), for example, there were (are?) the Operation Gladio-type military-intelligence “stay-behind operations” that also apparently practiced a “strategy of tension” terrorism under U.S.-NATO control.^[6]

Similar imperial terror strategies of sabotage, death squads, torture and propaganda were also used in Asia (e.g., the CIA’s Edward Lansdale/General Thé’s terrorist bombing campaign in Saigon 1952–53,^[7] Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and similar operations earlier in the Philippines and Indonesia), Latin America (e.g., funding, training and intelligence support for police, military and paramilitaries in Operation Condor counterinsurgency in the Southern Cone and death squads in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador) and the Middle East, such as Shah-era SAVAK torture and assassination and the use of so-called Mujahadeen, Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and ISIS-ISIL mercenary-terrorist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.^[8]

The CIA-led bombing campaign in Saigon 1952–53, carried out by Cao Dai Buddhist-Catholic-nationalist General Trinh Minh Thé’s Li An Minh army and managed by Edward Lansdale, the “Quiet American.” [Source: laboratoireurbanismeinsurrectionel.blogspot.com]

Lest we forget, the Homeland is no exception to imperial aggression, and counterinsurgency (including provocateurism and terror) was and is rife; the FBI’s COINTELPRO was the enemy of any group even hinting at challenging the power structure and would not hesitate to intimidate, incarcerate or assassinate (most often in overzealous police raids as in Fred Hampton’s case), especially when their targets got geopolitically wise; its PATCON agents (including a German BND agent)^[9] riddled and provoked the right-wing militia movement in the 1990s; the CIA’s Operation CHAOS along with Army intelligence monitored hundreds of thousands of anti-war activists and infiltrated, rattled and incited thousands of organizations; and the FBI’s GOON squads terrorized and neutralized the American Indian Movement.^[10] Once one understands that the priority is counterinsurgency—elite power protecting itself—and not public or national safety, the violence and illegality of these operations are indefensible. And this is perhaps only the tip of a vast and disturbing iceberg, not to mention the links almost always found, when one takes the time to dig, between intelligence agents and terrorist acts on even cursory research of an event.

Back to foreign policy: in the end, to win a client-state against the interests of the majority of its citizens, a final push of terror, shock and violence is often needed for both regime change and—once a state is a client—to protect the regime with counterinsurgency operations. Once the masses are terrorized and traumatized or disenfranchised, it is much easier to maintain the status quo, and the elites might consider the country “stabilized.”

But the goons and dragoons that do the dirty work of empire are largely only pawns, radicalized with weaponized nationalism to face killing and death without squinting in the service of empire. Meanwhile, safely a few steps detached and hidden behind the façade of liberalism or feigned benevolence and endless trails of front organizations, the power players keep their hands clean and faces out of sight. These psychotic puppeteers use their psychotic puppets as agents of chaos, division and terror against the masses and their enemies.

In Ukraine, you do not have to look far to see an 80-year history of U.S. meddling with fascist groups for their own ends. The oldest is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which was formed in the 1920s, made up the 14^th Waffen SS Division during World War II, and its Bandera OUN-B branch. After OUN head Stepan Bandera was killed in 1959, Yaroslav Stetsko became its leader and, like many fascist-nationalist leaders across Eastern Europe, was chosen by U.S. intelligence—initially military intelligence, later the CIA—as their man to fight communism by any means necessary and, ultimately, like all of these brainwashed psychos, as a tool of U.S. imperialism.^[11]

More recent groups are the Ukrainian National Assembly—Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO), founded in the 1990; its 2013 offshoot, Right (Pravy) Sector, founded by Dmytro Yarosh; and Svoboda, formed from the OUN.

All of these ultra-nationalist groups and more were supported by U.S. politicians and agencies before the coup, were present at Maidan, and formed the leadership and majority of the “Maidan self-defense.” Svoboda—supported by the U.S.—had already gained 10% of the vote by 2012, no doubt thanks to a savvy political grooming of their leader and violent anti-Semite Oleh Tyahnybok.^[12] After the coup, Svoboda and Right Sector leadership gained prominent positions in Poroshenko’s post-coup government. Svoboda’s new politicians, for example, included Oleksandr Sych as Vice Premier for Economic Affairs, co-founder Andriy Parubiy as Secretary of the Security and National Defense Committee, as well as ministers for education, agriculture, and the environment.^[13]

Source: Photo courtesy of the author

One can also see “Gladio-B” parallels in the use of jihadists, mujahadeen and “moderate rebels” in the 1980s to the present, and some consider the training, funding and arming of neo-fascists more recently as a “Gladio-C.” (As a report by the Counter Extremism Projectstated in an April 2020 report on Ukraine: “In 2019, right-wing extremism effectively replaced jihadi terrorism as the number one threat to internal/homeland security of the countries of the broader West.”)^[14]

In many of these projects there have been accusations of assassination and terrorism, including “false-flag” operations that blame an atrocity or outrage on the target in order to increase state authority, destabilize and weaken enemies, precipitate invasion or intervention, drive the permanent war economy and marginalize left-wing (or more correctly, “non-aligned”) politics.

As Italian fascist and convicted bomber Vincenzo Vinciguerra said in 1992 of CIA-NATO Operation Gladio’s strategy of tension that killed hundreds in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s: “You were supposed to attack civilians, women children…innocent people outside of the political arena for one simple reason: To force the Italian public to turn to the state…turn to the regime and ask for greater security.”^[15] It is the elite’s covert use of military, intelligence, police and paramilitary fascist might to maintain control in so-called liberal democracies.

As well as state terrorism, these sleeper cell “stay-behind networks” also perform sabotage operations, and there is no doubt that equivalent forces are still active and under CIA-DIA-NATO direction in most enemy states, including Russia and Belarus.^[16] And it seems such cells were activated there before the Russian attack of February 24, 2022.

Mainstream media, particularly recently, claim Ukraine as a legitimate democracy, with the defense that the parliamentary vote is less right wing than other European nations. However, the continued co-opting of fascists into state power by other means, and reverence for fascist heroes such as Stepan Bandera, speaks of deeper roots. For example, in the early 1990s, officials from the Ukraine Defense Ministry attended an SS Galician Division reunion in Kyiv, whilst a similar reunion occurred in Lviv, endorsed by the city council and celebrated with the renaming of a street after Stepan Bandera, one that ironically had been called Peace Street.^[17]

Bandera Street in Lviv [Source: wikipedia.org]

More recently, as part of a tsunami-level neo-liberal PR campaign, the fascist brown is liberally whitewashed by both internal players seeking political power and the external U.S. and EU power-brokers not wanting their pawns weakened. It is important to look for blips in this whitewashing to see behind the propaganda to the true power of fascists in Ukraine. When you rule by fear, you do not need to be large in number, only in the right positions to create, validate and use that fear.

The fact that Zelensky is Jewish is often mentioned by the naïve or deceptive as an obvious sign that “Ukraine can’t be that fascist.” But this ignores the strange bedfellows of money and power politics, particularly in a region that has been pumped full of aid, gas money, corrupted investment and propaganda for decades, and has long been a battleground between the U.S. and Russia as well as between a large minority of Ukrainians and Russia.

Behind Zelensky and many of the notorious nationalist-fascist militias in the Donbas war, such as the Azov Battalion, is Ihor Kolomoisky, the PrivatBank and Burisma-linked billionaire.

Not only is he accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of millions in fraud and embezzlement, but Federal Court records show a far greater level of embezzlement that triggered a recession in Ukraine: “Between 2006 and 2015, more than $4.45 billion was transferred without any apparent effort by the banks or the government to stem the movement of dollars as the oligarch and his partners acquired an enormous [U.S.] real estate portfolio.”^[18] Yet, for the most part, the government, Deutsche Bank and mainstream media continue to look the other way. “He might be a totally corrupt oligarch with no morals, but he’s our guy!”

Apart from the shared source of income, Ukrainian politicians have had very real threats of assassination from the neo-fascists, and I believe they continue to take them seriously.

Like other post-Soviet countries, Ukrainian civic activists, largely working for or influenced by U.S. and EU-funded NGOs, can hold what can seem a paradoxical combination of nationalist, neo-liberal and pro-EU views.^[19] For example, during the 2013-14 protests, the EuroMaidan press—a George Soros-funded media central to the movement—published a piece defending even clearly hard-line fascists such as Dmytro Yarosh and their violence as a necessary force for change. Paradoxical views, like cognitive dissonance, are a sign that you are being manipulated.

A sort of “my bully is the good bully” moral ambiguity, and a recipe for escalation and disaster. This willingness to co-opt extremism (or be co-opted by extremists) even extends to ISIS-trained Jihadi fighters of the Sheikh Mansur Brigade, who came fresh from Syria and were managed by the Right Sector in the war in Donbas.

Even more broadly, liberals seem not to grasp nor have memory of basic geopolitics, the “offensive realist” or realpolitik view as openly decreed by many prophets of U.S. imperial policy like Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Kennan, Robert Gates, Alexander Haig and the neocons of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—let alone the covert action, soft power and slick PR that hides realpolitik behind a façade of a surreal Disney-on-the-Deathstar show.

They are trapped by their own privilege, a framing by corporate media, and in the naïve belief that their leaders practice what they preach as their billion-dollar PR campaigns turn darkness into light. I call it the “propagandascope.”

In this insane view, complete acquiescence to U.S./NATO/West/North—whatever you want to call the neo-liberal empire—is called “neutrality”; there are no other ways of living; history is over and resistance is futile. And because of its righteousness, its professed liberal values—its true sole value being elite profit motive—it is an inevitable and manifest destiny, as the unprecedented powerbrokers of the first American century, like the Dulles brothers and Henry Luce—all sons of Presbyterian ministers—believed. America, god and the free market.

Soft-Power Imperialism

“In a counterinsurgency situation the primary sources of insurgent strength are not a strong military organization and its technological industrial support, but the sources of discontent of the people within the nation, and thus, the people themselves.” — Special Operations Research Office, 1962 ^[20]

The greatest trick of empire is to hide in plain sight; the main aims of empire are to protect itself, neutralize its threats and to grow. Its main weapon for all of this is psychology—the appeal of virtue on one side, the threat of fear and anger on the other—and the most powerful form of this is the political use of atrocity to control the population.

After the exposures of clandestine imperialism of the CIA, et al., in the 1970s’ congressional investigations, and related whistleblowing from greats like Philip Agee (who incidentally offers an excellent, concise description of soft power in this 2005 interview), John Stockwell and Ralph McGehee, the CIA’s political action methods of imperialism evolved to overt soft power methods of NGOs, as neo-liberalism and spin took hold after the 1970s scandals and Vietnam failure.

The New Cold War started as the last one was ending, with a U.S. drive for global unipolar “benevolent” hegemony, later termed “full-spectrum dominance.” USAID began Ukraine projects in 1991 and recently described its interventions there as a 30-year partnership that “helped establish a vibrant and independent media, an active civil society, and a broader entrepreneurial class.”

This groundwork and astroturfing ensures that development is toward the American beacon and sphere of influence in terms of politics, economics, military, national security, civil society, labor, academia, culture and media; most importantly, it is intended that markets and resources (such as gas) are opened for U.S. and European multinational corporate exploitation.

As more and more soft-power influence has developed through countless and ever-multiplying USAID, State Department, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as well as European and the “philanthropic” projects of George Soros [whose International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been in Ukraine since 1989] and Pierre Omidyar, events in Ukraine escalated under Obama and through State Department -eocons such as Victoria Nuland and their Military-Industrial connections.

Nuland is the ex-CEO of war hawk Democratic think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and wife of PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan. Might as well call them all Republocrats or Demublicans, especially when it comes to imperial foreign policy.

Soft power includes political, diplomatic, cultural and media influence to co-opt civic and political leaders and capture the hearts and minds of the people. The darker side of this is sanctions, weaponizing aid (including IMF aid) as leverage as well as covert actions such as sabotage, provocateurism, assassinations and other “destabilizations” to create a society rotten-ripe for regime change. We will discuss the soft power apparatus developed in Ukraine in more detail in part II

Regime Change

John Pilger interviews Duane Ramsdell “Dewey” Clarridge, ex-head of CIA Latin America Division, on U.S. policy of regime change. [Source: vimeo.com]

Regime change requires an infiltration of society by the flow of (largely U.S. taxpayer) money to build infrastructure and cultural and political influence in a target state over years. In current USAID Orwellian parlance, these soft-power projects are called “stabilization and transition,” i.e., destabilization and regime change.

The local effect of each dollar and each project amplifies and is amplified by the level of public discontent, the weakness of local government and the level of opposition control of local and international media. Although color revolutions are largely an information war of hearts and minds, where the government is legitimate and has significant local support, brutal tactics of insurgency are ultimately needed for regime change.

The main strategies of regime change are:

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First published on October 31, 2022, following the US-NATO sabotage of  Nord Stream on September 26-27, 2022

***

As the crisis worsens, the “Goldman Sachs government”, the powerful US investment bank, is strengthening in Europe: that is, the appointment of politicians belonging to the financial elite to high government positions. After Mario Draghi as head of the Italian government, another “Goldman Sachs man”, Rishi Sunak, is put in charge of the British government: an expert in hedge funds, he married the daughter of an Indian billionaire who put him in charge of one of his financial companies. He has a similar career to French President Emmanuel Macron, who trained in the US investment  Rothschild bank.

These and other politicians, who at the same time hold key positions in the European Union, drag Europe into the abyss of crisis by playing Washington’s game. Eurozone inflation marks another record hitting 10% in September. At the origin, there is a huge increase in  gas prices, caused by the sanctions on Russia. Low-priced Russian gas is increasingly being replaced in the EU by expensive US liquefied natural gas (LNG) based on the reference price of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange controlled by a large US financial company.

At the same time, Italy is prevented from importing cheap oil and gas from Libya, as the Italian government “recognizes” and finances the Tripoli puppet government  and declares the real Libyan government in Benghazi, “illegal”. In the interview conducted by Michelangelo Severgnini, an important political exponent of Benghazi – Abdul Hadi Al-Huweej, former Foreign Minister of the Al-Thani Government, and secretary of the Libyan Future Party – declares that the Benghazi government can supply Italy with oil and gas at prices much lower than market prices and can offer Italian companies great job opportunities in Libya.

Hence the need for Italy on the one hand to abolish sanctions on Russia and reopen Russian gas imports, and on the other to make an economic agreement with Benghazi. To do this, Italy needs to come out of  military, economic, political, media, and ideological war – that is overwhelming our lives: a vital objective of the  ITALY OUT OF WAR Campaign which, launched a few days ago, is gathering growing support.

 The Campaign website is https://www.fuorilitaliadallaguerra.it/.

*

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This article was originally published on byoblu.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from International Man

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*** 

If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17, they were bound to be disappointed. The anti-China hawks, talons polished, got their fill. The US State Department would not be disturbed. The Pentagon could rest easy. The toadyish musings of the Canberra establishment would continue to circulate in reliable staleness.

In reading (and hearing) Wong’s speech, one must always assume the opposite, or something close to it. Whatever is said about strategic balance, don’t believe a word of it; such views are always uttered in the shadow of US power. From that vantage point, Occam’s Razor becomes a delicious blessing: nothing said by any Australian official in foreign policy should ever be taken as independently relevant. Best gaze across the Pacific for confirmation.

In Wong’s address, the ill-dressed cliché waltzes with the scantily clad platitude. “When Australians look out to the world, we see ourselves reflected in it – just as the world can see itself reflected in us.” (World, whatever you are, do tell.)

The basis for this strained nonsense is, at least, promising. Variety can, paradoxically, generate common ground. “This is a powerful natural asset for building alignment, for articulating our determination to see the interests of all the world’s peoples upheld, alongside our own.” Mightily aspirational, is Wong here, though such language seems pinched from the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War, one that Australia, US policing deputy of the Asia-Pacific, was never a part off. No informed listener would assume otherwise.

Like a lecture losing steam early, she finally gets to the point of her address: “how we avert war and maintain peace – and more than that, how we shape a region that reflects our national interests and our shared regional interests.” It does not take long to realise what this entails: talk about “rules, standards and norms – where a larger country does not determine the fate of the smaller country, where each country can pursue its own aspirations, its own prosperity.”

That the United States has determined the fate of Australia since the Second World War, manipulating, interfering and guiding its politics and its policies, makes this statement risible, but no less significant. We are on bullying terrain, and Wong is trying to pick the most preferable bully.

She can’t quite put it in those terms, so speaks about “the regional balance of power” instead, with Australia performing the role of handmaiden. She dons the sage’s hat, consumes the shaman’s herbal potion, insisting that commentators and strategists have gotten it wrong to talk about “great powers competing for primacy. They love a binary. And the appeal of a binary is obvious.  Simple, clear choices. Black and white.”

It takes one, obviously, to know another, and Senator Wong, along with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have shown little resistance to the very binary concept they supposedly repudiate. Far from opposing it, we might even go so far as to see their seduction by US power as a move towards the unitary: there is only one choice for the Canberra cocktail set.

Much of the speech seems trapped in this register. It rejects the “prism of great power.” It abhors the nature of great powers scrapping and squawking over territories. And yet, Wong is keen to point the finger to one great power’s behaviour: unstainable lending, political interference, disinformation, reshaping international rules and standards.

Finally, the dastardly feline is out of the bag – and it is not the United States. “China continues to modernise its military at a pace and scale not seen in the world for nearly a century with little transparency or assurance about its strategic intent.”

Oh, Penny, if only you could understand the actual premise of AUKUS and the US modernising strategy, given that Washington’s defence budget exceeds those of the next nine powers combined. Yes, you do say that a conflict over Taiwan “would be catastrophic for all”, but there is nothing to say what will restrain you, or your colleagues, from committing Australia to such a conflict. Given that the Albanese government has turned up its nose at war powers reform that would have given Parliament a greater say in committing national suicide, confidence can hardly be brimming.

The assessment of Australia’s own role in international relations is not just off the mark but off the reservation. “We deploy our own statecraft toward shaping a region that is open, stable and prosperous. A predictable region, operated by agreed rules, standards and laws. Where no country dominates, and no country is dominated. A region where sovereignty is respected, and all countries benefit from a strategic equilibrium.”

To this, one is reminded of the remarks of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who describes Wong’s alms-for-the-poor routine as, “Running around the Pacific Islands with a lei around your neck handing out money”. This could hardly count as foreign policy. “It’s a consular task. Foreign policy is what you do with the great powers: what you do with China, what you do with the United States.”

Much of the speech inhabits the realm of the speculative. Wong is delusionary in assuming that regional states will accept Australia’s observance of the Treaty of Rarotonga, whatever the stance taken by the AUKUS pact members. Otherwise known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, Wong has revealed Australia’s ambivalence in observing its provisions. For one, she is on record as accepting the position that the US need not confirm whether nuclear-capable assets visiting Australia have nuclear weapons. She merely says that Washington “confirmed that the nuclear-powered submarines visiting Australia on rotation will be conventionally-armed.”

This hardly squares with the assessments of her own minions in the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs, who have confirmed that Australia will accept the deployment of nuclear weapons on its soil as long as they are not stationed.

The last word should be left to that great critic of the Albanese tilt towards Washington’s military-industrial pathology. “Wong,” observed Keating, “went on to eschew ‘black and white’ binary choices but then proceeded to make a choice herself – extolling the virtues of the United States, of it remaining ‘the central power’ – of ‘balancing the region’, while disparaging China as ‘intent on being China’, going on to say ‘countries don’t want to live in closed, hierarchical region, where rules are dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests’. Nothing too subtle about that.”  The Washington establishment will be delighted.

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

Featured image is from @SenatorWong/Twitter

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Below is the carefully documented article by Peter Schwarz entitled:

Kosovo Liberation Army Leader Hashim Thaçi on Trial for War Crimes

In that same article, I was personally accused of having “discredited the KLA”:

“Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, has set out the most meticulous frame-up in a piece entitled “Freedom Fighters Financed by Organised Crime”, which has been doing the internet circuit. Full of half-truths, assumptions and innuendoes about the KLA’s alleged use of drug money, Chossudovsky’s article seeks to discredit the KLA as a genuine liberation movement representing the aspirations of the oppressed Albanian majority. …

Listen to the 1999 report of Democracy Now  regarding the KLA as an “Army of the People”. 

Media censorship was applied. The fact that the KLA leader was on the Interpol list was casually dismissed or ignored. My article Kosovo “Freedom Fighters” Financed by Organized Crime,  April 1999, was turned down by Le Monde diplomatique, with which I had been actively collaborating since the early 1990s.

With regard to the Indictment of Hashim Thaci.: He was “a paid killer” acting on behalf of his sponsors. The KLA led by Hashim Thaci was relentlessly supported by NATO and the US military. 

Michel Chossudovsky, March 26, 2023, April 19, 2023

*** 

From March 24 to June 9, 1999, NATO bombed Serbia for 77 days. It was the first major war on European soil since the Second World War—even this fact is suppressed and denied today in view of the war in Ukraine.

War propaganda was in full swing at the time: NATO was laying waste to Serbian cities in order to defend “human rights” and to stop the “ethnic cleansing” Serbia was accused of carrying out in Kosovo. Greens, liberals and pseudo-left groups, who only a few weeks before had been invoking pacifism, eagerly took up this propaganda and switched to the war camp with flying colours. In Germany, the Greens and Social Democrats organised the first military combat mission involving German armed forces since Hitler’s defeat in 1945.

Image is licensed under Creative Commons

Now, the man whom Joe Biden embraced in 2009 and called the “George Washington of Kosovo” is facing a special court as a war criminal. On Monday, the trial of Hashim Thaçi, the co-founder and spokesman of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and later Kosovo’s foreign minister, head of government and president, began in The Hague.

The 70-page indictment accuses Thaçi and three other high-ranking KLA members—Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi—of being responsible for more than a hundred murders and numerous other war crimes in 1998 and 1999. All four are accused of having personally participated in threatening or abusing prisoners. The prosecution has handed over 56,000 documents to Thaçi’s defence lawyers that prove these accusations.

The indictment describes in detail the brutality with which the KLA acted against Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians. Kosovo Albanians who opposed their policies and supported Thaçi’s rival Ibrahim Rugova, who advocated a peaceful solution to the conflict with Serbia, were mercilessly persecuted. The KLA ran numerous detention centres where several hundred inmates were held and, according to witnesses, abused with torture, mock executions and death threats.

Victims were beaten with guns, baseball bats, metal tools and wooden sticks and tortured using electric shocks or feigned drowning. Other prisoners and family members had to watch the torture or were forced to abuse one another. Others were shot by the dozens.

The killings continued even after NATO forced Kosovo to secede from Serbia and stationed its 50,000-strong Kosovo Force (KFOR) there. The KLA took revenge on Serbs, Roma and Rugova supporters, dozens of whom were murdered. Thaçi, whose wartime name was “The Snake,” was considered their strong man.

The Thaçi trial is an object lesson in imperialist war propaganda, which stops at no lie to camouflage its predatory and criminal aims. This applies not only to the war in Yugoslavia at the time but also to today’s war in Ukraine.

Here, too, criminals are celebrated as freedom fighters—who, like the members of the Azov Battalion, wear Nazi insignia and for eight years persecuted all those in eastern Ukraine who spoke Russian or had sympathies for Russia. Here, too, politicians—who hang on the apron strings of oligarchs and Western puppet masters, or like Ukraine’s President Zelensky unscrupulously send tens of thousands of young soldiers to their deaths for NATO’s goals—are glorified as democrats and freedom fighters.

The positive and negative signs are simply reversed. For example, for nine years, not a day has gone by without the media proclaiming that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was a violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which was unacceptable under international law and historically unprecedented. But the immediate objective of the 1999 NATO war was to force Kosovo’s secession, which was indisputably part of Serbian territory under international law. After the war it was placed under international administration, and in 2008, against Serbia’s declared will, it proclaimed its state independence, which was immediately recognised by the US and most European states.

With the secession of Kosovo, a destitute province with 1.8 million inhabitants, the imperialist powers completed the division of Yugoslavia into seven powerless petty states completely dependent upon them. Above all, Serbia, traditionally politically and culturally linked to Russia, was thus to be isolated and weakened.

Hashim Thaçi played a key role in this criminal enterprise. In 1999, Madeleine Albright and Joschka Fischer, the foreign ministers of the US and Germany, invited the KLA spokesman to the Rambouillet Conference, where he provided NATO with the alibi for bombing Yugoslavia.

Monument to Serbs killed by “KLA” in Mitrovica (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

It was already known at the time that Thaçi’s KLA was carrying out terrorist attacks against Serbian targets and political opponents and financed itself through criminal enterprises, such as trafficking in drugs, women and human organs. The CIA had even classified the KLA as a terrorist organisation before NATO enlisted its services and reclassified it as a “liberation movement.”

After NATO forced the secession of Kosovo, it relied on Thaçi and the KLA to maintain “peace and order” there. After independence, Thaçi became foreign minister, prime minister and finally president of the new country, establishing a corrupt and criminal oligarchic regime.

While many Serb politicians were arrested and hauled before The Hague War Crimes Tribunal, Thaçi and the KLA leaders were under American and European protection. In Kosovo itself, they spread a climate of fear.

“Almost no one dared to testify against KLA veterans,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine described the situation in Kosovo after the Yugoslav war. “And those who did take the risk fared badly: Inexplicable car accidents with fatal outcomes, ‘suicides’ and sniper attacks could be the result.”

The Chief Prosecutor of The Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, also reported intimidation and terror in her memoirs published in 2009: “Witnesses were so fearful and intimidated that they were afraid to even talk about the presence of the KLA in some areas, let alone actual crimes.”

Those who spoke anyway put their lives in danger and had to be taken to other countries with their families, Del Ponte reports. Even members of the KFOR force and some Hague Tribunal judges were afraid of attacks.

The situation only changed when Swiss lawyer Dick Marty presented a comprehensive report on KLA crimes in 2011. Marty did this on behalf of the Council of Europe, to which 47 states belong and which is independent of the European Union.

The EU then appointed its own special investigator. It chose US lawyer John Clint Williamson, who was considered “credible” because he had co-authored the indictment against Serb leader Slobodan Milošević. After more than two years, Williamson concluded that Marty’s accusations were solidly substantiated.

Now the EU felt compelled to set up a special court in The Hague, formally part of Kosovo’s judicial system but staffed by foreign judges and prosecutors and financed by European funds.

The special court investigated for over five years without any charges being brought. Presumably the whole thing would have fizzled out had it not been for conflicts between the US and the EU.

Richard Grenell, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 as special envoy for negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, worked closely with President Thaçi, while the EU leaned on his rival, head of government Albin Kurti. When Thaçi was about to leave for a summit meeting with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić at the White House in Washington in June 2020, the Special Court published the indictment. Thaçi had to cancel the trip and resign.

The fact that the trial finally opened two and a half years after the indictment was published does not at all mean that Thaçi will eventually be convicted. According to the presiding judge, the trial is expected to last several years. The accused are being defended by top US law firms. And several prominent individuals, including the NATO Supreme Commander in the Yugoslav war Wesley Clark and the former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, are expected to testify in support of Thaçi.

But even Thaçi’s lawyers do not deny that the crimes described in the indictment took place. They are pursuing a familiar defence strategy from the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals: The KLA units had indeed committed crimes, but Thaçi, founding member, commander and official spokesman of the KLA, had known nothing about them!

In any case, the trial of Thaçi has already shattered the lies with which the Yugoslav war was justified. The WSWS had already categorically rejected this “clumsy and cynical propaganda campaign,” pointed out the real reasons for the war and campaigned for the building of an antiwar movement of the international working class based on a socialist programme.

An article posted in the WSWS on May 24, 1999 titled “Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World Power, Oil and Gold” [1], stated: “Once the fraudulent claims of the NATO spokesmen and the falsifications of the media are stripped away from this war, what remains? A naked aggression by imperialist countries against a small federation, in which the official reasons given for the onslaught serve as a smokescreen.”

The article linked the Yugoslav war to US plans to dominate the Eurasian landmass and warned: “The potential for a conflict with Russia, it should now be clear, has actually increased over the past ten years.” This warning has since been dramatically borne out.

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Note

[1] David North, A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016, Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2016, p. 123

More Unanswered Red Flags Regarding Jack Texeira and the Pentagon Leaks

By Larry Johnson, April 18, 2023

Several former military and intelligence professionals have contacted me and voiced similar doubts about the pat story being circulated regarding National Guard Airman Jack Texeira and the allegations that he removed TOP SECRET documents from a SCIF, photographed them and then posted them to a gamer chat. They all agree, something is not right. The media account does not make sense.

US War in Iraq Based on Fake Intelligence. Exposed by Dr. David Kelly. Was He Assassinated?

By Michael Welch and Dr. David Halpin, April 18, 2023

Dr David Kelly was a weapons inspector working under the auspices of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), and an expert in the field of biological weapons. He expressed doubts about the weapons of mass destruction claims found in the U.K. intelligence dossier “Iraq Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation”, published on January 30, 2003 and used as the basis of Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

Madame Von der Leyen – McKinsey and Pfizer

By Peter Koenig, April 18, 2023

At first sight you may wonder what do Ursula Von der Leyen and McKinsey and Pfizer have in common? The answer is: Corruption. Utmost corruption. Madame Von der Leyen, unelected President of the European Commission (EC) has several corruption scandals on her neck. 

ICC Arrest Warrant for Vladimir Putin for “Kidnapping Ukrainian Children” Borders on Ridicule

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 18, 2023

Thousands of children were killed by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion (which is supported by US-NATO). Fleeing the war zone to save your children is tagged by the I.C.C. as “deportation”. Starting in 2014, thousands of Donbass families including children were provided safe haven in Russia, as part of a humanitarian initiative under the auspices of  Moscow’s Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Media Covers Up Tracking of Unvaccinated People

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 18, 2023

In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The End of American “Exceptionalism”?

By Philip Giraldi, April 18, 2023

Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work.

Russia’s Electronic Warfare Capabilities

By Drago Bosnic, April 18, 2023

Electronic warfare (EW) is one of the most important aspects of modern military capabilities and is often the litmus test of how advanced the state and its armed forces are. It’s part of the “invisible” and yet extremely intense battle that we usually cannot see directly.

BRICS Bank De-dollarizing, Promises 30% of Loans in Local Currencies, New Chief Dilma Rousseff Says

By Ben Norton, April 18, 2023

The new president of the BRICS Bank has revealed that the Global South-led bloc is advancing toward de-dollarization, gradually moving away from use of the US dollar. The New Development Bank plans to give nearly one-third (30%) of its loans in the local currencies of the financial institution’s members.

Will the End of the Petrodollar End the US Empire?

By Rep. Ron Paul, April 18, 2023

Future historians may say that the most significant event of 2023 had nothing to do with Donald Trump, other 2024 presidential candidates, or even the war in Ukraine. Instead, the event with the most long-term significance may be one that received little attention in the mainstream media — Saudi Arabia’s movement toward accepting currencies other than the US dollar for oil payments.

Spurring an Endless Arms Race

By Michael T. Klare, April 18, 2023

On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it.

This article by Professor James Petras first published by GR in August 2016 brings to the forefront the ongoing conflict between the US and China. 

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China and the United States are moving in polar opposite directions: Beijing is rapidly becoming the center of overseas investments in high tech industries, including robotics, nuclear energy and advanced machinery with collaboration from centers of technological excellence, like Germany.

In contrast, Washington is pursuing a predatory military pivot to the least productive regions with collaboration from its most barbaric allies, like Saudi Arabia.

China is advancing to global economic superiority by borrowing and innovating the most advance methods of production, while the US degrades and debases its past immense productive achievements to promote wars of destruction.

China’s growing prominence is the result of a cumulative process that advanced in a systematic way, combining step-by-step growth of productivity and innovation with sudden jumps up the ladder of cutting edge technology.

China’s Stages of Growth and Success

China has moved from a country, highly dependent on foreign investment in consumer industries for exports, to an economy, based on joint public-private investments in higher value exports.

China’s early growth was based on cheap labor, low taxes and few regulations on multi-national capital.  Foreign capital and local billionaires stimulated growth, based on high rates of profit.  As the economy grew, China’s economy shifted toward increasing its indigenous technological expertise and demanding greater ‘local content’ for manufactured goods.

By the beginning of the new millennium China was developing high-end industries, based on local patents and engineering skills, channeling a high percentage of investments into civilian infrastructure, transportation and education.

Massive apprenticeship programs created a skilled labor force that raised productive capacity.  Massive enrollment in science, math, computer science and engineering universities provided a large influx of high-end innovators, many of whom had gained expertise in the advanced technology of overseas competitors.

China’s strategy has been based on the practice of borrowing, learning, upgrading and competing with the most advanced economics of Europe and the US.

By the end of the last decade of the 20^th century, China was in a position to move overseas. The accumulation process provided China with the financial resources to capture dynamic overseas enterprises.

China was no longer confined to investing in overseas minerals and agriculture in Third World countries.  China is looking to conquer high-end technological sectors in advanced economics.

By the second decade of the 21^st century Chinese investors moved into Germany, Europe’s most advanced industrial giant.  During the first 6 months of 2016 Chinese investors acquired 37 German companies, compared with 39 in all of 2015.  China’s total investments in Germany for 2016 may double to over $22 billion dollars.

In 2016, China successfully bought out KOKA, Germany’s most innovative engineering company.  China’s strategy is to gain superiority in the digital future of industry.

China is rapidly moving to automate its industries, with plans to double the robot density of the US by the year 2020.

Chinese and Austrian scientists successfully launched the first quantum-enabled satellite communication system which is reportedly ‘hack proof’, ensuring China’s communications security.

While China’s global investments proceed to dominate world markets, the US, England and Australia have been trying to impose investment barriers. By relying on phony ‘security threats’, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May blocked a multi-billion dollar Chinese investment-heavy nuclear plant (Hinckley Point C). The pretext was the spurious claim that China would use its stake to “engage in energy blackmail, threatening to turn off the power in the event of international crises”.

The US Committee on Foreign Investment has blocked several multi-billion dollar Chinese investments in high tech industries.

In August 2016 Australia blocked an $8 billion-dollar purchase of a controlling stake in its biggest electricity distribution network on specious claims of ‘national security’.

The Anglo-American and German empires are on the defensive.  They increasingly cannot compete economically with China, even in defending their own innovative industries.

In large part this is the result of their failed policies.  Western economic elite have increasingly relied on short-term speculation in finance, real estate and insurance, while neglecting their industrial base.

Led by the US, their reliance on military conquests (militaristic empire-building) absorb public resources, while China has directed its domestic resources toward innovative and advanced technology.

To counter China’s economic advance, the Obama regime has implemented a policy of building economic walls at home, trade restrictions abroad and military confrontation in the South China Sea – China’s strategic trade routes.

US officials have ratcheted up their restrictions on Chinese investments in high tech US enterprises including a $3.8 billion investment in Western Digital and Philips attempt to sell its lighting business.  The US blocked ‘Chen China’s planned $44 billion takeover of Swiss chemical group ‘Syngenta’.

US officials are doing everything possible to stop innovative billion dollar deals that include China as a strategic partner.

Accompanying its domestic wall, the US has been mobilizing an overseas blockade of China via its Trans-Pacific-Partnership, which proposes to exclude Beijing from participating in the ‘free trade zone’ with a dozen North America, Latin American and Asian members.  Nevertheless, not a single member-nation of the TPP has cut back its trade with China.  On the contrary, they are increasing ties with China – an eloquent comment on Obama’s skill at ‘pivoting’.

While the ‘domestic economic wall’ has had some negative impacts on particular Chinese investors, Washington has failed to dent China’s exports to US markets.  Washington’s failure to block China’s trade has been even more damaging to Washington’s effort to encircle China in Asia and Latin America, Oceana and Asia.

Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Taiwan, Cambodia and South Korea depend on Chinese markets far more than on the US to survive and grow.

While Germany, faced with China’s dynamic growth, has chosen to ‘partner’ and share, up-scale productive investments, Washington has opted to form military alliances to confront China.

The US bellicose military alliance with Japan has not intimidated China.  Rather it has downgraded their domestic economies and economic influence in Asia.

Moreover, Washington’s “military pivot” has deepened and expanded China’s strategic links to Russia’s energy sources and military technology.

While the US spends hundreds of billions in military alliances with the backward Baltic client-regimes and the parasitical Middle Eastern states, (Saudi Arabia, Israel), China accumulates strategic expertise from its economic ties with Germany, resources from Russia and market shares among Washington’s ‘partners’ in Asia and Latin America.

There is no question that China, following the technological and productive path of Germany, will win out over the US’s economic isolationist and global militarist strategy.

If the US has failed to learn from the successful economic strategy of China, the same failure can explain the demise of the progressive regimes in Latin America.

China’s Success and the Latin American Retreat

After more than a decade of growth and stability, Latin America’s progressive regimes have retreated and declined.  Why has China continued on the path of stability and growth while their Latin American partners retreated and suffered defeats?

Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Ecuador, for over a decade, served as Latin America’s center-left success story.  Their economies grew, social spending increased, poverty and unemployment were reduced and worker incomes expanded.

Subsequently their economies went into crisis, social discontent grew and the center-left regimes fell.

In contrast to China, the Latin American center-left regimes did not diversify their economies:  they remained heavily dependent on the commodity boom for growth and stability.

The Latin American elites borrowed and depended on foreign investment, and financial capital, while China engaged in public investments in industry, infrastructure, technology and education.

Latin American progressives joined with foreign capitalist and local speculators in non-productive real estate speculation and consumption, while China invested in innovative industries at home and abroad.  While China consolidated political rulership, the Latin American progressives “allied” with strategic domestic and overseas multi-national adversaries to ‘share power’, which were, in fact, eagerly prepared to oust their “left” allies.

When the Latin commodity based economy collapsed, so did the political links with their elite partners.  In contrast, China’s industries benefited from the lower global commodity prices, while Latin America’s left suffered.  Faced with widespread corruption, China launched a major campaign purging over 200,000 officials.  In Latin America, the Left ignored corrupt officials, allowing the opposition to exploit the scandals to oust center-left officials.

While Latin America imported machinery and parts from the West; China bought the entire Western companies producing the machines and their technology – and then implemented Chinese technological improvements.

China successfully outgrew the crisis, defeated its adversaries and proceeded to expand local consumption and stabilized rulership.

Latin America’s center-left suffered political defeats in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, lost elections in Venezuela and Bolivia and retreated in Uruguay.

Conclusion

China’s political economic model has outperformed the imperialist West and leftist Latin America.   While the US has spent billions in the Middle East for wars on behalf of Israel, China has invested similar amounts in Germany for advanced technology, robotics and digital innovations.

While President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “pivot to Asia” has been largely a wasteful military strategy to encircle and intimidate China, Beijing’s “pivot to markets” has successfully enhanced its economic competitiveness.  As a result, over the past decade, China’s growth rate is three times that of the US; and in the next decade China will double the US in ‘robotizing’ its productive economy.

The US ‘pivot to Asia’, with its heavy dependence on military threats and intimidation has cost billions of dollars in lost markets and investments.  China’s ‘pivot to advanced technology’ demonstrates that the future lies in Asia not the West. China’s experience offers lessons for future Latin American leftist governments.

First and foremost, China emphasizes the necessity of balanced economic growth, over and above short-term benefits resulting from commodity booms and consumerist strategies.

Secondly, China demonstrates the importance of professional and worker technical education for technological innovation, over and above  business school and non-productive ‘speculative’ education so heavily emphasized in the US.

Thirdly, China balances its social spending with investment in core productive activity; competitiveness and social services are combined.

China’s enhanced growth and social stability, its commitment to learning and surpassing advanced economies has important limitations, especially in the areas of social equality and popular power.  Here China can learn from the experience of Latin America’s Left.  The social gains under Venezuela’s President Chavez are worthy of study and emulation; the popular movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina, which ousted neo-liberals from power, could enhance efforts in China to overcome the business- state nexus of pillage and capital flight.

China, despite its socio-political and economic limitations, has successfully resisted US military pressures and even ‘turned the tables’ by advancing on the West.

In the final analysis, China’s model of growth and stability certainly offers an approach that is far superior to the recent debacle of the Latin American Left and the political chaos resulting from Washington’s quest for global military supremacy.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu below the author’s name or on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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a

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The following is a list of select excerpts from the March 31, 2023 episode of the Global Research News Hour. The show featured a conversation with Dr. David Halpin, who along with a committee of medical doctors contested the claim that Dr. David Kelly took his own life.

Dr David Kelly was a weapons inspector working under the auspices of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), and an expert in the field of biological weapons. He expressed doubts about the weapons of mass destruction claims found in the U.K. intelligence dossier “Iraq Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation”, published on January 30, 2003 and used as the basis of Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

This suggests a concerted attempt to conceal murder, a crime pointing to high people in power in Great Britain.

Find the full interview here: Iraq Twenty Years after “Shock and Awe”: The Mysterious Death of David Kelly

Select quotes from the interview with Dr. David Halpin:

“It is interesting to note that (Justice Roper’s) judgement took 19 pages and he had it prepared already before Hearing which lasted about 4-5 hours with quite a large lunch break / lunch adjournment. So, quite extra-ordinarily he prepared his judgment from the papers and not from the Hearing. That’s the first thing to observe. I was asked if I wanted to appeal – expensive exercise – and I wasn’t even sure whether that was possible over the Christmas period. We let it lie. But I haven’t given up! I have continued thinking about Dr. Kelly, because I think that lies should be challenged, and the whole damned thing is a lie!”

. . .

“He had written 82 emails, and one of them was to his daughter Rachel who he was very fond of – he had three daughters – and he talked about going down the next day in his village of Southmore to show Rachel where a mayor had had a new foe. And this was a message of joy, really. And he was addressing his daughter who lived just a few miles away in Oxfordshire. HE also said in the email that he’d been booked on a flight back to Iraq nine days later and he was looking forward to that. So this was NOT the picture of a man who had been so distressed by the Hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Tuesday, two days before that he had felt that life wasn’t worth living. There was no indication that he was suicidal.”

. . .

“Dr. Hunt produced a report on the 19^th of July – a post-mortem report – he analyzed his findings. He reported them no doubt into a recorder at the end of the autopsy. It took him about four hours finishing after midnight. We have never seen that report! Mr. Gardiner – Nicholas Gardiner the Oxford Coroner said at the time that Dr. Hunt would have to revise his post-mortem report in a later statement then in is recorded. We’ve never seen that. I’ve asked for it. But it is unlawful. Any pathologist must always record and present the sequence of his thoughts and recording and what is recorded in regard to his thought and findings. That has not happened. And that is one of the major deficiencies in the so-called Hutton Inquiry.”

. . .

“(Lord Hutton) was charged into the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly. The circumstances surrounding. It turned out in fact that the Hutton Inquiry focused a great deal on the BBC and Gilligan and in fact rounded on the BBC and exonerated one of the worst governments we’ve had in this country, in fact in our history. And intent on a genocidal war based on lies. That’s the fact of it. So Lord Falconer chose Lord Hutton, no doubt with some egging on by Blair, who by that time had arrived in Tokyo having received the congressional Gold Medal with vast adulation in Washington.”

. . .

“Kelly was phoned by Peter Beaumont of the Observer newspaper, and Peter Beaumont asked him what his view of this was…In essence, he said, “the machines are what the Iraqis say they are. They are machines for producing hydrogen for the balloons laying about artillery guns.”…He discounted that there was any malign purpose in these two machines, which in fact ironically had been sold to the Iraqis for a high price by British Aerospace. So you can imagine – I can easily imagine – that the sofa Cabinet, Blair, Mandelson, Powell, Campbell, and all the other psychopaths sitting there sipping their wine, would have in fact had brown trousers when they had that teletape or email of what Kelly had said. Kelly was going off message, and in fact he’d been off message for some time. I think when he went to Kuwait in May, I am fairly certain he was being scrutinized very carefully, and being kept, shall we say, on a leash. And I think when the time came when probably America said, “it’s time for Kelly to be silenced.”

. . .

“That old dream, what I call a nightmare, of a larger Israel, from the brook of the Nile to the Euphrates was still in the mind. And it was there in fact it was put in a clear picture by Oded Yinon in 1982. And what was in that? The destruction first of Iraq…Syria next I think it was, then of Libya, and of all other Arab entities or nations. No mention was made of any loss of blood. But it was quite clearly in the dream – in the nightmare – that this should happen. And it’s been happening. The game has in fact been was one of the more recent targets. But we have to see it wasn’t a war for oil that was a factor. It was a war for Eretz, Israel.”

. . .

“If you look at the images, the burning of his trunk tails off from the flanks, as it would do if he was irradiated. And I am certain, absolutely certain, that Ali … he was made armless and scarred terribly in his trunk by an enhanced radiation weapon as designed by Cohen at Livermore Laboratories, a man who regarded the weapon as humane! Now the enhanced radiation weapon or the neutron bomb is, I think, owned by the Chinese, by the Russians, probably by the Israelis, and certainly by the Americans, and was owned I think by the British and is said to be disowned. It is a remarkable weapon. It produces a vast flux of neutrons which destroyed tissues, but do not destroy material. So concrete and metal survive, but tissues are frazzled terribly.”

. . .

“We’re talking about a force of about 30,000 men, so called elite troops. And the question remains whether a neutron weapon was not exploded beneath ground and caused the death – the mass death – of the Republican Guard. This is an hypothesis, but this blogger raised the issue, where did the Republican Guard go to, what happened to them when they were fighting the invaders themselves beneath the surface of the Baghdad Airport in the most elaborate catacomb probably constructed by an American or a British contractor.”

. . .

“It was quite likely that Kelly might have known that a neutron weapon had been used. Now, if he knew that, and if was learned about a war which was constructed on the lie that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction, and it was discovered that the coalition of the willing led by U.S. and its poodle the UK, and on behalf, I believe, in large part Israel, if it was widely known that weapons of mass destruction had been used by the coalition of the willing, you can imagine that the world would have been turned on the Bushes and the Blairs and their collaborators with fierce vehemence. I’m sure of that. So I think this was a second reason why Kelly might have had to be eliminated.”

. . .

“But what was happening day by day following the March 22, 2003, was of utmost importance to the public psyche. People they respond to immediacy. They get into a flurry when things are happening. The media then drop it and soon people forget about it. But I’m quite certain that if it came out that they’d used a WMD in Iraq that would have blown up Blair’s government. I think they would have been made to resign within days, I think, even with the damnable Tories opposing them.”

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In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program

Within days, fact checkers tried to debunk the idea that individual people are being tracked, or that these data could be misused by government or third parties

COVID “vaccination” status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022, yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws

Your medical data are not nearly as private as you think. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is rife with exemptions when it comes to your privacy. Federal agencies such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, are exempt from the privacy clauses and can access identifiable data — especially if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious

Government agencies and a number of third parties or “covered entities” can also use a number of loopholes to re-identify previously de-identified patient data

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In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.¹

Within days, fact checkers were burning the midnight oil trying to debunk the idea that individual people are being tracked, or that these data could be misused by government or third parties.

Strangely enough, the most egregious “misinformation” example USA Today’s fact checker could find was a social media post that “generated nearly 200 likes in less than a month.”² Two hundred likes? To most influencers, that’s nothing, especially not over the course of 30 days.

Why is USA Today stressing over a post with 200 likes? Seems a bit panicky if you ask me. Reuters also came out with a fact check and, like USA Today, Reuters claimed there was a lack of “context:”³

“New diagnostic codes that describe a patient as under-immunized against COVID-19 were introduced to help doctors identify patients potentially at risk for more-severe COVID and to help health officials track vaccine effectiveness and mortality statistics, among other public health questions, not for U.S. government tracking of unvaccinated individuals, as some are claiming online.

The codes in an individual’s medical record, like all personal health information, are protected by U.S. privacy law and could only be analyzed at the group or population level uncoupled from individual identities …”

Your Medical Records Are Far From Private

As is so often the case, the fact checkers are the ones taking the issue out of context or, rather, not presenting the full picture. The fact is, your medical data are not nearly as private as you think. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is rife with exemptions when it comes to your privacy.

Federal agencies such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have every right to access identifiable information, as they are exempt from the privacy clauses, and they’re particularly justified to access your private vaccination data if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious. As noted in the HHS’s and CDC’s HIPAA guidance:⁴

“Balancing the protection of individual health information with the need to protect public health, the Privacy Rule expressly permits disclosures without individual authorization to public health authorities authorized by law to collect or receive the information for the purpose of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability, including but not limited to public health surveillance, investigation, and intervention …

[T]he Privacy Rule expressly permits PHI [protected health information] to be shared for specified public health purposes. For example, covered entities may disclose PHI, without individual authorization, to a public health authority legally authorized to collect or receive the information for the purpose of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability …

Further, the Privacy Rule permits covered entities to make disclosures that are required by other laws, including laws that require disclosures for public health purposes.”

Loopholes Also Allow Re-Identification of Personal Data

Government agencies and a number of third parties or “covered entities” can also use a number of loopholes to re-identify previously de-identified patient data. As explained in a CDC Public Health Law document detailing the lawful sharing of private medical data:⁵

“While HIPAA limits the use and disclosure of health information, it also permits certain secondary use exceptions for public health purposes. HIPAA provides certain circumstances under which patient data can be disclosed to health departments without patient authorization.

Under HIPAA, providers may disclose identifiable patient data (protected health information or PHI) if required by law, allowing states to pass legal exceptions to HIPAA restrictions.

Providers may also disclose PHI to health departments without patient authorization for public health activities, such as communicable disease reporting, or to a public health authority to prevent or control disease, injury, or disability under the public health exemption. A covered entity may access, use, and disclose PHI for clinical research without an individual’s authorization if:

Providers may disclose EHI without patient authorization when the data have been ‘de-identified’ … but still permits re-identification by providers or regional health information organizations through randomized patient source codes should a public health alert or case report become necessary.

Finally, providers may disclose a ‘limited data set,’ including dates and zip codes, without authorization and still re-identify patients if they maintain patient codes derived from certain identifiers.”

So, can your vaccination status be accessed by federal health agencies? Yes. Can that information be identifiable? Absolutely yes. Does that mean that you, as an individual, could be surveilled and/or get caught in a forced vaccination dragnet or end up experiencing negative repercussions in other areas of your life due to your vaccination status? Probably.

U.S. “privacy” laws certainly make allowances for such scenarios, and considering the behavior of government over the past three years, it would be naïve to believe they would never use your vaccination data against you.

Reuters Muddies the Water

Reuters also muddies the water in other ways. For example, the fact check stresses that medical providers have used the general code Z28.3 (which represents “underimmunized”) since 2015, and that “these codes are not used with purposes beyond monitoring and reporting diseases and mortality statistics or for insurance billing.”

While it’s true that the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code Z28.3 has been around for years, the new subcodes that track COVID jab status were added in mid-September 2021 during a ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting, and during that meeting, they specified that “there is interest in being able to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized.”

Below is a screenshot of page 194 of the agenda⁶ distributed during that meeting. There’s no ambiguity here. The new ICD-10 codes were added for the specific purpose of “tracking people” who are unjabbed or only partially jabbed against COVID-19.

They didn’t say they wanted to track “general population data.” They specifically said “people” are to be tracked. They also clearly state that this tracking is “of value for public health” — and again, the key words “public health” open the door to federal health agencies accessing identifiable data.

Moreover, additional subcodes specify the “why” a person chose not to get the COVID shot or stopped getting boosters. Those codes are listed in the screenshot below, under Z28.3 Underimmunization Status.⁷

The use of “delinquent immunization status” under code Z28.39 also tells us something about where this is all headed. “Delinquent” means being “neglectful of a duty” or being “guilty of an offense.” Is refusing boosters a criminal offense? Perhaps not today, but some day, it might be, and these codes lay the foundation for that kind of medical persecution.

All Missed Vaccinations Will Be Tracked

Another tipoff that these codes will become part and parcel of the biosecurity control grid, even if they’re not used in this way now, is the fact that code Z28.39 — “Other underimmunization status”⁸— is to be used “when a patient is not current on other, non-COVID vaccines.”⁹

In other words, they have already begun tracking ALL of your vaccinations, not just the COVID shot, and they can use the Z28.3 sub-codes to identify why you refused a given vaccine.

They’ve also added a billable ICD-10 code for “immunization safety counseling,” which explains the codes detailing “why” you refused a vaccine. So, if you didn’t get a vaccine due to “personal decision” (code Z28.2), or due to “personal beliefs or group pressure” (code Z28.1), then your doctor can bill your insurance for regurgitating vaccine propaganda and trying to change your mind.

Codes Could Be Put to Good Use

Giving credit where credit is due, Reuters Fact Check did point out a potentially beneficial purpose for the new ICD-10 codes:¹⁰

“[Eric Burnett, who specializes in hospital and internal medicine at Columbia University] said the ICD-10 codes could also help track data on vaccine efficacy, including comparisons between vaccination statuses of hospital or ICU patients with COVID, or patient mortality data based on vaccination status.”

That would be great, but the risk of these data being misused by the government is, I believe, greater than the possibility of them being used to protect the public from dangerous mRNA shots, seeing how overwhelming amounts of data showing harms are already being willfully ignored.

CDC Refuses to Answer Questions About the New Codes

Another red flag is the fact that the CDC has refused to answer questions about how it intends to use the new ICD-10 codes. In mid-February 2023, nine House Republicans sent a letter to the CDC demanding answers to these five questions:¹¹

1. Why did the CDC and National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) decide to start gathering data on why Americans chose not to take the COVID-19 vaccine?
2. How do the CDC and NCHS intend to use these new COVID-19 vaccination ICD codes?
3. What steps are the CDC and NCHS taking to ensure that Americans’ private health information contained in the ICD system is protected?
4. Will the CDC and NCHS confirm that they have not, will not, and cannot create a database of Americans based on their COVID-19 vaccination status?
5. Can the CDC and NCHS confirm that private companies do not have access to lists of Americans’ COVID-19 vaccination status through the ICD system, or any other database overseen by the CDC and NCHS

As reported by The Daily Signal February 28, 2023, the CDC for some reason does not want to answer these questions:¹²

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The Daily Signal that it ‘will not be tracking’ the reasons Americans give for refusing to take a COVID-19 vaccine … Meanwhile, congressional Republicans told The Daily Signal that the CDC failed to respond to their questions by a deadline last week.

‘Two weeks ago, we sent a letter to the CDC demanding answers about its new COVID-19 vaccine database,’ Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal in a statement …

‘The CDC is stonewalling us and refusing to respond. Why won’t the CDC explain why it’s gathering data about Americans’ personal choices? House Republicans are not afraid to use the budgetary process to keep the CDC accountable to the American people,’ Brecheen warned.

House Republicans raised the alarm about the CDC’s involvement with the World Health Organization’s recently codified International Classification of Disease, or ICD, codes related to COVID-19 vaccination status, which went into effect last April. The codes enable the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect data on the reasons Americans refuse to take one of the vaccines …

‘The ICD codes were implemented in April 2022, however the CDC/NCHS does not have any data on the codes and will not be tracking this information,’ Nick Spinelli, a CDC spokesman, said in an emailed statement. ‘The codes are developed and managed by the World Health Organization to enable healthcare providers to track within their practices …'”

End Goal Is Global Database for the Vaccine Passport System

The mention of the WHO brings me to my next point, which is that all of this information will likely, eventually, be transferred into a global vaccination database. Hence the reason why the WHO develops and manages the ICD-10 codes. It’s to allow for the “harmonization” of health care across the world.

Incidentally, the fact that the WHO develops and manages these codes also means that the WHO has approved these new codes that track vaccination status, and we already know that the WHO is working on a global vaccine passport.

To work properly, a global vaccine passport system needs a global vaccination database, and there’s no telling what privacy measures, if any, such a database might end up with. What we do know is that white papers¹³ and proposed legislation¹⁴ published during the COVID era that discuss health tracking and/or vaccine passports have stressed that privacy concerns must be relaxed or dropped altogether to ensure global biosecurity.

We also saw how COVID “vaccination” status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022. In many places, you had to disclose your status and show proof that you’d been jabbed. Yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws. What a joke.

As noted by Dr. Robert Malone in a January 25, 2023, Substack article, this vaccine passport system is being put into place right under our noses, and it would be incredibly naïve to think that these new ICD-10 codes are not part of that scheme:¹⁵

“The administrative state is busy building a vaccine passport system that will be active before most Americans are aware of what is being done to them. No one is going to knock on your door asking for your vaccine status because they already know …

They don’t need approval from Congress or the courts because we have given them the information through our health care providers. The CDC is the governmental organization tasked with tracking vaccine status on individuals.

They already have the records, as well as updated booster information. They just need to tweak a definition here and there, or get President Biden to keep the COVID-19 public health emergency in place indefinitely and the vaccine passports will be a fait accompli.”

A Data Collection Dragnet

As of January 1, 2014, the U.S. government required public and private health care providers to adopt and use electronic medical records (EMR) if they wanted to quality for full Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement.

The government also financially incentivized physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic HEALTH records or EHR.¹⁶ The difference between EMR and EHR is that EHR provides a far more comprehensive patient history than EMR, as it contains a patient’s medical history from more than one medical practice.

In essence, EHR is what you get when doctors share your medical data to create one comprehensive file that covers all your interactions with the medical system. While that sounds good in theory, Big Pharma immediately seized the opportunity to misuse it by placing drug ads within the EHR system.

This in turn has driven up medical costs and resulted in poor prescribing decisions that put patients at risk.¹⁷ Patients are also directly targeted with drug marketing through patient portals.

Physicians and hospitals who adopted EHR got paid extra. Between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) paid out EHR incentive payments to hospitals totaling $14.6 billion.¹⁸ Meanwhile, those who chose not to capture, share and report clinical data on patients were financially penalized through reduced Medicare reimbursements.^19,20

Needless to say, these “sticks” and “carrots” led to the rapid adoption of both EMR and EHR, both of which government requires if it wants the power to control the population through medicine, and we now know that’s exactly what government intends to do.

Transhumanism Is Being Implemented Through Food and Medicine

At the end of September 2022, President Biden laid out a “bold goal” to “end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030” through a federally-backed “Food Is Medicine” campaign.²¹

Integrating food and nutrition with health care so that food and health policies are under one umbrella will facilitate the creation of new policies, funding and control over both areas. Eventually, food purchases and health records will be linked to your vaccine passport/digital identity, which also holds your educational records, travel records, work records and bank accounts.

That this “Food Is Medicine” campaign has nothing to do with promoting real nutrition or whole food is obvious, as that same month Biden also signed the “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”²²

This specifies that biotechnology and genetic engineering be used to transform the food and medical industries in order to promote a transhumanist agenda. It’s all about creating fake, synthetic and genetically manipulated foods and tinkering with the human genome.

On a larger scale, this plan is also promoted by the World Health Organization, which is trying to seize power over health care globally through International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments and the Pandemic Treaty. For more information on that, see “Pandemic Treaty Will Usher In Unelected One World Government.”

The WHO is also seeking to put food, medicine and climate under one umbrella. This would allow it to control the global population in any number of ways, as a climate issue could be positioned as a public health issue, or a food issue, and vice versa. In other words, people could be forced to eat bugs instead of beef because it “benefits the climate.” Private vehicle use could be restricted because it helps lower vehicular pollution that endangers public health, and so on.

So, to bring us full circle back to where we started, while media are now trying to lull you to sleep with “promises” that there’s nothing nefarious about tracking the unvaccinated or “undervaccinated,” think long and hard before you close your eyes to the possibility that this is all part of biosecurity-based totalitarian control grid.

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Notes

¹ PJ Media April 8, 2023

² USA Today March 10, 2023

^3, 10 Reuters February 21, 2023

⁴ CDC HIPAA Privacy Rule and Public Health

⁵ CDC Public Health Law

⁶ CDC ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee Meeting September 14-15, 2021

⁷ Naked Emperor Substack January 27, 2023

⁸ ICD10data Underimmunization

⁹ AAFP New Diagnosis Codes

^11, 12 The Daily Signal February 28, 2023

¹³ The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)

¹⁴ Congress.gov HR 6666

¹⁵ RW Malone Substack January 25, 2023

^16, 20 USF Health February 16, 2017, Updated March 4, 2023

¹⁷ AMA June 16, 2021

¹⁸ OIG HHS EHR Incentive Payments to Hospitals

¹⁹ AMA EHR Incentive Programs

²¹ Health.gov Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health

²² Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy

Featured image is from Mercola

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Lavrov’s trip showcased the significant role that Russia attaches to Brazil when it comes to the Latin American dimension of Moscow’s grand strategy. Both parties’ rhetoric was positive, but it remains to be seen if anything of tangible substance ultimately comes from it, which will be greatly determined by whether or not Lula attends this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in less than two months’ time like he was just invited to do.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s latest visit to Brazil went exactly as expected with respect to these two BRICS countries promising to comprehensively expand cooperation, but there were also five very important details that evaded the notice of most observers. The first is that the official Brazilian press release informed everyone that bilateral trade reached the historic record of $9.8 billion last year, which occurred entirely under the tenure of Lula’s predecessor Bolsonaro.

This fact contradicts the Alt-Media Community’s narrative that this former leader was a US puppet since no such proxy would ever take trade with Russia to its highest-ever level, especially in the context of the ongoing NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine over the past year. The basis upon which both sides pledged to further enhance their ties was therefore partially built by Bolsonaro, who in turn continued the trajectory that Temer and Rousseff kept in place from Lula’s first two terms.

Second, Lavrov’s expression of gratitude “to our Brazilian friends for a correct understanding of the genesis of this situation and their striving to contribute to a search for ways of settling it” that was reported in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official transcript of his joint statement has a deeper meaning.  It extends credence to a recently leaked report alleging that his country approves of the optics surrounding Lula’s peace rhetoric, but this crucially isn’t the same as endorsing the substance thereof.

About that, the third detail is the time that Russia’s top diplomat devoted to explaining Moscow’s stance towards the conflict and desire to see it end “as soon as possible”. This follows Lula’s condemnation of Russia in his joint statement with Biden, Brazil’s vote in support of an anti-Russian UNGA Resolution, and then Lula lying just the day prior to Lavrov’s trip about President Putin supposedly being disinterested in peace. Accordingly, his words can thus be seen as a polite response to those preceding developments.

Fourth, Lavrov’s reaffirmation of support for Brazil’s envisaged permanent UNSC seat proves the de-ideologization of Russia’s relations with Latin America, especially after Lula’s abovementioned political unfriendliness and his reported plans to launch a global influence network with the US Democrats. Even though China and the US are Brazil’s two most important partners in Lula’s grand strategy, Russia can still help it advance their shared goal of accelerating the global systemic transition to multipolarity.

And finally, Lavrov’s counterpart confirmed that he passed along President Putin’s invitation for Lula to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in mid-June, which TASS reported was first extended during his chief foreign policy advisor’s trip to Moscow last month. Lula earlier pledged that he won’t visit either Russia or Ukraine due to their conflict, and the ICC demands that Brazil arrest President Putin if he ever sets food there, so it’s unclear whether Lula will take him up on this offer.

This last-mentioned detail from Lavrov’s trip to Brazil is by far the most important since it’s a clever and polite way to assess the sincerity of Lula’s stated intentions to continue building ties with Russia in spite of US pressure. He can of course just say that there are so-called “scheduling conflicts” or possibly claim to be sick right before he’s supposed to depart for St. Petersburg, but the point is that this will prove whether Lula is serious about making good on everything that Lavrov and his counterpart discussed.

All told, Lavrov’s trip showcased the significant role that Russia attaches to Brazil when it comes to the Latin American dimension of Moscow’s grand strategy. Both parties’ rhetoric was positive, but it remains to be seen if anything of tangible substance ultimately comes from it, which will be greatly determined by whether or not Lula attends this year’s SPIEF in less than two months’ time. In the meantime, the US is expected to maximally pressure him into not going, so it’s difficult to predict what he’ll do.

*

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work.

Instead, Biden and the gang of introverts and neocon war criminals that the has surrounded himself with have done everything that can to inflict fatal damage on the economy through rash initiatives both overseas and at home. A spending spree to buy support from the bizarre constituencies that make up the Democrat Party base while also fighting an undeclared war in Europe have meant that nearly two trillion dollars has been added to the national debt under Biden’s rule, a debt that was already unsustainable at nearly $30 trillion, larger than the United States’ gross national product. Plans to cancel student loan debts will add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the red ink.

And those actions undertaken overseas, to include continuing to expand the war in Ukraine against Russia, will do immeasurable more damage. Consider how the Democratic Party has long had it in for Russian Federal President Vladimir Putin, dating back to when Putin took power in 2000 and started kicking out the western scallywags who were looting his country.

Subsequently, false intelligence and other innuendoes were contrived by Hillary Clinton and her team in 2016 to implicate Donald Trump as a Russian stooge who was secretly working for Putin. When that didn’t work and Trump was elected, the Russians were accused by the media and Democrats of willy-nilly interfering in US elections more generally speaking, a much-exaggerated claim in contrast to the overwhelming silence surrounding the real electoral and policy interference, which has been coming from Israel and its fifth column inside the United States, who, not coincidentally, are the chief proponents of the war against Russia.

Placing a target on Vladimir Putin’s back appears to have an unfortunate consequence which Biden has yet to wake up to, namely the fact that the United States now has what might be described as a Ponzi scheme faux economy which is very vulnerable, particularly as much of the world has become disenchanted with the US style of global leadership. Note for example the recent state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to Beijing, where he embraced a “global strategic partnership with China” to bring about a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs” that is not sheltering behind “Cold War mentality.” Macron also criticized the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”

And threats made by the Bidens against both China and Russia have accomplished little beyond drawing the two major political and military powers closer together. Beijing and Moscow entered into a trade agreement in their own currencies in 2014 and have openly taken steps to challenge US dominance of international currency exchanges, creating instead a global multipolar trading environment. Europe aside, many nations are now eager to cut the tie that binds, which is the decades long American dominance of international financial mechanisms and also the general use of dollars to pay for oil and other energy supplies. The widespread use of petrodollars enables the buffoonish Janet Yellen at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks to print unlimited unbacked fiat currency, knowing that there will always be a market for it.

Which brings us back to the Ukraine war, pursued “until we win” by Biden and his somnolent Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One of the first moves when Russia intervened in Ukraine was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Countries like China and India with large economies then realized that the US Treasury Department and the dominance of the dollar as an exchange currency had now become a weapon of war and a serious threat to the economies of all other nations.

As a consequence, the US Dollar is right now being rejected by many nations as the world’s reserve currency. Some nations all over the world have agreed to use the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee for any-and-all international currency transactions. Saudi Arabia continues to use the petrodollar but does not demand it. Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to permit the Saudis to sell oil to China in Yuan. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is now allowing multiple currencies to be used to purchase its oil, a major attack on the primacy of the US dollar and it also has accepted Chinese mediation to mend fences with the US and Israel’s arch enemy Iran. And the Saudis have even more recently refused a Biden Administration request that it start pumping more oil to reduce energy costs, signaling that the shift is both political and economic in nature. Japan, a major economy, has also started purchasing oil and gas directly from Russia against the US imposed energy embargo while Brazil, another major economy, has agreed to use the Yuan in its increasing trade with China. As fewer nations utilize the US dollar, America’s ability to export and ignore its burgeoning domestic debt and inflation to other countries is being diminished.

This might have a decisive impact on the US currency as the drive to break with the petrodollar continues to grow and could produce something like a “perfect storm” impacting on the US economy. It threatens to drastically lower the standards of living of nearly all Americans within the next several years as the dollar loses value and purchasing power. As the US economy is heavily interconnected with many European economies, Europe is also likely to be a victim of the coming disaster.

The good news, of course, is that the United States will no longer be able to afford its endless wars and international interventions. Lacking its economic power, it will no longer be able to declare itself “exceptional” and the enforcer of a “rules based international order.” It would mean an ending of the funding of developments like the Ukraine proxy war and the troops will have to come home from places like Syria and Somalia. And it might even mark the ending of sending billions of dollars annually to a wealthy Israel.

Ending dollar supremacy would inevitably have an immediate impact on what passes for US foreign policy, making it more difficult for Washington to initiate and sustain Treasury Department sanctions on countries like Iran and North Korea. It could also create economic turmoil for many countries until the situation resolves itself by producing greater volatility in currency markets worldwide. The Federal Reserve Bank will no doubt respond to the unfolding crisis by acting as it always does by raising interest rates to astronomical levels, thereby hurting most the Americans who can least afford the shock therapy.

And it did not have to turn out this way. It could have been avoided. If the US, which had no horse in the race, had left Ukraine alone Vladimir Putin would not have become a symbol of defiance against the “Rules Based International Order” and he would not have worked with China to establish multipolarity in the way the financial world operates. Instead, we have a situation where Europe is being de-industrialized due to soaring energy prices and Washington’s destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines while the US is potentially confronting economic disaster as the dollar’s relevance to international trade sinks. The ultimate irony is that Russia, and also the US/Israeli arch enemy Iran, are by comparison doing quite well economically as they sell their oil and gas to anyone in any currency. One has to conclude that when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently made her secret trip to Kiev to promise the despicable Volodymyr Zelensky billions of taxpayer dollars the United States might just have been better served if she had stayed in Washington and made some minimal effort to address the mounting economic problems confronting us here at home.

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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 councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Several former military and intelligence professionals have contacted me and voiced similar doubts about the pat story being circulated regarding National Guard Airman Jack Texeira and the allegations that he removed TOP SECRET documents from a SCIF, photographed them and then posted them to a gamer chat. They all agree, something is not right. The media account does not make sense.

The biggest oddity are the two separate documents from the CIA’s Operations Center. Neither are complete and both deal only with the Ukrainian/Russian war. To reiterate a point from my previous article, that CIA Operations Center produces two daily reports — one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is not a “Community” product, i.e., it is not distributed to the other intelligence agencies. It is an internal CIA document (of course, it is available to the Director of National Intelligence).

Texeira’s alleged possession of two separate reports is doubly odd because he did not copy the full reports. The one dated 1 March 2023 only shows 3 of 8 pages. If he was taking the documents to impress the youngsters on the gamer chat, why did he not take the whole enchilada? And why did he only publish the portions of the intel report that dealt exclusively with Ukraine and Russia?

There has been some media reports that he also posted a State Department EXDIS cable. I have not seen it and cannot confirm that it exists. If it does, that would be another huge red flag. EXDIS is bureaucratic speak for EXCLUSIVE DISSEMINATION. It has a cousin, NODIS — i.e., NO DISTRIBUTION. The U.S. military does not have access to such cables.

There was a time when State EXDIS was available to U.S. military commands on a restricted basis. That was pre-Chelsea Manning. After Manning’s leaks in 2010, that access was cut off. I know this first hand because I was part of a team scripting military exercises for all U.S. regional commands (i.e., EUCOM, NORTHCOM, AFRICOM, PACOM, CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM) during the course of a year. I was the State Department Subject Matter Expert. That means I had the job of creating cable traffic from the Secretary of State or U.S. Embassies that the U.S. military might see during a terrorist crisis. Prior to the Manning/Wikileaks leak, I had full access to State Department messages, including EXDIS. After Manning, that access was terminated. Not just for me but for all the uniformed personnel I worked with. All held TS SCI clearances. There has been no change in that policy, which means there is no way that Jack Texeira would have had any access to copy and take a State Department EXDIS message.

Another curiosity with the story, apart from Jack’s youth and the claim that he held TS SCI clearances and had access to CIA internal reports, is the schedule of his Massachusetts Air National Guard unit. That outfit had not been called up and assigned a 24 x 7 mission. Instead, the Air National Guard unit meets one weekend a month. In other words, Jack had to work his magic over a two or three day period surrounded by peers and those in command of the unit. You do not just show up and pursue your own interests. There are drills and assigned work, which is supervised by Non-Commissioned Officers (i.e., Sergeants) and Officers.

The documents I have seen posted on Twitter and Telegram, were dated 28 February, 1 March and 2 March, i.e., Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. According to the MI-6 funded Bellingcat, those documents were published on 4 March, a Saturday. Let’s assume that Texeira’s National Guard unit assembled for drill on March 4. We’re asked to believe that Jack Texeira showed up for monthly Air National Guard duty on Saturday, quickly scoured the high side computer for sensitive documents, printed them off, smuggled them out of the SCIF, returned home sometime after 5 pm (normal end of duty day), photographed the documents and quickly uploaded them to the Discord server. If that is what happened, it smacks of urgency. Most young airmen, after a long day at work, want to go out and party rather than stay at home photographing documents.

I remain skeptical of the narrative and hope by raising these questions that some genuine journalists will explore the oddities and try to get to the ground truth.

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Why is the Pentagon budget so high?

On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration’s request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren’t even officially at war right now (if you don’t count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending?

The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions. “Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range Weapons” was a typical headline in the Washington Post about that 2024 budget request. Military leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and missiles they carry.

Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s. Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share of the proposed budget — $170 billion or 20% — is allocated for purchasing just such hardware.

But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it — $145 billion, or 17% — is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and 2050s. Believing that our “strategic competition” with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for what’s called “research, development, test, and evaluation” (RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific discoveries into weapons of war.

To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than any other country except what China spends on defense in toto and constitutes approximately half of China’s full military budget. So what’s that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of this country’s military budget, intended for?

Some of it, especially the “T&E” part, is designed for futuristic upgrades of existing weapons systems. For example, the B-52 bomber — at 70, the oldest model still flying — is being retrofitted to carry experimental AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRWs), or advanced hypersonic missiles. But much of that sum, especially the “R&D” part, is aimed at developing weapons that may not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever. Spending on such systems is still onlyin the millions or low billions, but it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets soar into the trillions.

Weaponizing Emerging Technologies

Driving the Pentagon’s increased focus on future weapons development is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon’s 2024 budget request put it:

“An increasing array of fast-evolving technologies and innovative applications of existing technology complicates the [Defense] Department’s ability to maintain an edge in combat credibility and deterrence. Newer capabilities such as counterspace weapons, hypersonic weapons, new and emerging payload and delivery systems… all create a heightened potential… for shifts in perceived deterrence of U.S. military power.”

To ensure that this country can overpower Chinese and/or Russian forces in any conceivable encounter, top officials insist, Washington must focus on investing in a major way in the advanced technologies likely to dominate future battlefields. Accordingly, $17.8 billion of that $145 billion RDT&E budget will be directly dedicated to military-related science and technology development. Those funds, the Pentagon explains, will be used to accelerate the weaponization of artificial intelligence and speed the growth of other emerging technologies, especially robotics, autonomous (or “unmanned”) weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is of particular interest to the Department of Defense, given its wide range of potential military uses, including target identification and assessment, enhanced weapons navigation and targeting systems, and computer-assisted battlefield decision-making. Although there’s no total figure for AI research and development offered in the unclassified version of the 2024 budget, certain individual programs are highlighted. One of these is the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control system (JADC2), an AI-enabled matrix of sensors, computers, and communications devices intended to collect and process data on enemy movements and convey that information at lightning speed to combat forces in every “domain” (air, sea, ground, and space). At $1.3 billion, JADC2 may not be “the biggest number in the budget,” said Under Secretary of Defense Michael J. McCord, but it constitutes “a very central organizing concept of how we’re trying to link information together.”

AI is also essential for the development of — and yes, nothing seems to lack an acronym in Pentagon documents — autonomous weapons systems, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Such devices — far more bluntly called “killer robots” by their critics — typically combine a mobile platform of some sort (plane, tank, or ship), an onboard “kill mechanism” (gun or missile), and an ability to identify and attack targets with minimal human oversight. Believing that the future battlefield will become ever more lethal, Pentagon officials aim to replace as many of its crewed platforms as possible — think ships, planes, and artillery — with advanced UAVs, UGVs, and USVs.

The 2024 budget request doesn’t include a total dollar figure for research on future unmanned weapons systems but count on one thing: it will come to many billions of dollars. The budget does indicate that $2.2 billion is being sought for the early procurement of MQ-4 and MQ-25 unmanned aerial vehicles, and such figures are guaranteed to swell as experimental robotic systems move into large-scale production. Another $200 million was requested to design a large USV, essentially a crewless frigate or destroyer. Once prototype vessels of this type have been built and tested, the Navy plans to order dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, instantly creating a $100 billion-plus market for a naval force lacking the usual human crew.

Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics, because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill (while skimming atop the atmosphere’s outer layer) that they should be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with Russia reportedly firing some of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.

As the Pentagon put it in its budget request:

“Hypersonic systems expand our ability to hold distant targets at risk, dramatically shorten the timeline to strike a target, and their maneuverability increases survivability and unpredictability. The Department will accelerate fielding of transformational capability enabled by air, land, and sea-based hypersonic strike weapon systems to overcome the challenges to our future battlefield domain dominance.”

Another 14% of the RDT&E request, or about $2.5 billion, is earmarked for research in even more experimental fields like quantum computing and advanced microelectronics. “The Department’s science and technology investments are underpinned by early-stage basic research,” the Pentagon explains. “Payoff for this research may not be evident for years, but it is critical to ensuring our enduring technological advantage in the decades ahead.” As in the case of AI, autonomous weapons, and hypersonics, these relatively small amounts (by Pentagon standards) will balloon in the years ahead as initial discoveries are applied to functioning weapons systems and procured in ever larger quantities.

Harnessing American Tech Talent for Long-Term War Planning

There’s one consequence of such an investment in RDT&E that’s almost too obvious to mention. If you think the Pentagon budget is sky high now, just wait! Future spending, as today’s laboratory concepts are converted into actual combat systems, is likely to stagger the imagination. And that’s just one of the significant consequences of such a path to permanent military superiority. To ensure that the United States continues to dominate research in the emerging technologies most applicable to future weaponry, the Pentagon will seek to harness an ever-increasing share of this country’s scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.

This, in turn, will mean capturing an ever-larger part of the government’s net R&D budget at the expense of other national priorities. In 2022, for example, federal funding for non-military R&D (including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) represented only about 33% of R&D spending. If the 2024 military budget goes through at the level requested (or higher), that figure for non-military spending will drop to 31%, a trend only likely to strengthen in the future as more and more resources are devoted to war preparation, leaving an ever-diminishing share of taxpayer funding for research on vital concerns like cancer prevention and treatment, pandemic response, and climate change adaptation.

No less worrisome, ever more scientists and engineers will undoubtedly be encouraged— not to say, prodded — to devote their careers to military research rather than work in more peaceable fields. While many scientists struggle for grants to support their work, the Department of Defense (DoD) offers bundles of money to those who choose to study military-related topics. Typically enough, the 2024 request includes $347 million for what the military is now calling the University Research Initiative, most of which will be used to finance the formation of “teams of researchers across disciplines and across geographic boundaries to focus on DoD-specific hard science problems.” Another $200 million is being allocated to the Joint University Microelectronics Program by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon’s R&D outfit, while $100 million is being provided to the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics by the Pentagon’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office. With so much money flowing into such programs and the share devoted to other fields of study shrinking, it’s hardly surprising that scientists and graduate students at major universities are being drawn into the Pentagon’s research networks.

In fact, it’s also seeking to expand its talent pool by providing additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In January, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that Howard University in Washington, D.C., had been chosen as the first such school to serve as a university-affiliated research center by the Department of Defense, in which capacity it will soon be involved in work on autonomous weapons systems. This will, of course, provide badly needed money to scientists and engineers at that school and other HBCUs that may have been starved of such funding in the past. But it also begs the question: Why shouldn’t Howard receive similar amounts to study problems of greater relevance to the Black community like sickle-cell anemia and endemic poverty?

Endless Arms Races vs. Genuine Security

In devoting all those billions of dollars to research on next-generation weaponry, the Pentagon’s rationale is straightforward: spend now to ensure U.S. military superiority in the 2040s, 2050s, and beyond. But however persuasive this conceit may seem — even with all those mammoth sums of money pouring in — things rarely work out so neatly. Any major investment of this sort by one country is bound to trigger countermoves from its rivals, ensuring that any early technological advantage will soon be overcome in some fashion, even as the planet is turned into ever more of an armed camp.

The Pentagon’s development of precision-guided munitions, for example, provided American forces with an enormous military advantage during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but also prompted China, Iran, Russia, and other countries to begin developing similar weaponry, quickly diminishing that advantage. Likewise, China and Russia were the first to deploy combat-ready hypersonic weapons, but in response, the U.S. will be fielding a far greater array of them in a few years’ time.

Chinese and Russian advances in deploying hypersonics also led the U.S. to invest in developing — yes, you guessed it! — anti-hypersonic hypersonics, launching yet one more arms race on planet Earth, while boosting the Pentagon budget by additional billions. Given all this, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million for the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first installment in costly development and procurement programs in the years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

If you want to bet on anything, then here’s a surefire way to go: the Pentagon’s drive to achieve dominance in the development and deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to another endless cycle of high-tech arms races that, in turn, will consume an ever-increasing share of this country’s wealth and scientific talent, while providing negligible improvements in national security. Rather than spending so much on future weaponry, we should all be thinking about enhanced arms control measures, global climate cooperation, and greater investment in non-military R&D.

If only…

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

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*** 

“Global Power Struggles Signal An End to An Era of Diplomacy.” So ran a page one headline to New York Times April 11 print edition for an article marking Joe Biden’s ceremonial visit to Ireland to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Accords.

The commemoration served as an “unspoken reminder that such diplomatic breakthroughs remain a thing of the past,” bemoaned reporter Peter Baker.

Certainly, he is correct if one confines one’s view to the record of the US and its vassal states on the Ukraine crisis. Sec. of State Blinken has made it abundantly clear that the US wants nothing to do with negotiations to end the US proxy war in Ukraine.

Likewise, the US and its allies cynically used negotiations over the Minsk Accords for eight years as a cover for war preparations. Then the US and UK torpedoed the very promising negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end the war in April of 2022.

But to declare diplomacy dead simply because US diplomacy is a corpse indicates a blinding tunnel vision. If we look at nations outside the West, the future of diplomacy looks brighter all the time. The Middle East provides a clear example, one among too many to be considered here.

China Brokers Saudi Arabia, Iran Deal

Early in March, Iran and Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations after a seven year lapse, a deal brokered by China and announced at a meeting of foreign policy officials of the two countries in Beijing in early April. This followed a visit by Xi Jinping to Riyadh in December and a visit of Iran’s President Raisi to Xi in Beijing in February. By early June the countries will reopen embassies and consulates and they look to cooperate on trade, technology, and combatting terrorism.

Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official summed things up as follows: “This is a victory for dialogue, a victory for peace, and is major positive news for the world which is currently so turbulent and restive, and it sends a clear signal.”

The antagonism between Riyadh and Tehran has shaped much of the conflict in the Middle East including the horrific war in Yemen, a humanitarian catastrophe that has consumed 230,000 lives in fighting and famine. There is now movement to get a “permanent ceasefire” and end the war, perhaps the first dividend of the “clear signal,” Wang Yi mentioned.

As The Intercept remarked, “To help end the Yemen war, all China had to do was be reasonable. With Joe Biden nowhere to be found, China’s diplomacy set the stage for Saudi concessions and cease-fire talks.” As this is written, there comes news of a swap of nearly 900 prisoners over three days between the warring Yemeni factions, unimaginable just weeks ago.

Moscow Mediates Syria-Saudi Reconciliation

Diplomacy seems to be spreading like a contagion in the region. In the wake of the Syrian-Saudi agreements mediated by Beijing, Moscow has moved to broker a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Syria which is leading to Syria’s rejoining the Arab League. The Saudis plan to invite Bashar al-Assad to an Arab League Summit on May 19. This is something that Washington has worked to prevent for over a decade by threat and sanctions.

It is clear that the Moscow-Beijing “no limits” partnership facilitated the reconciliation between Syria, a Russian ally, and Saudi Arabia, the newfound friend of Beijing. A hint of things to come perhaps.

Much of this diplomatic effort is simply to undo the damage inflicted on Syria after the Arab Spring unrest of 2011 which the US turned into a full-scale regime change op and civil war. As part of its anti-Syrian vendetta, the US has used any and all means to keep Syria down and isolated from its Arab neighbors for the last 12 years.

It has also left nearly 1000 US soldiers (the official count) fighting in Syria to this day in an undeclared war unknown to most of the American people. Those troops occupy a region that is the agricultural breadbasket and source of oil for Syria which is starved for food and energy after the great damage caused by years of war.

The claim has always been made that US troops are there to fight ISIS or its latest incarnation, but as Aaron Mate has demonstrated most persuasively, the real purpose remains regime change in Syria. (As the wise Jimmy Dore often asks, If Syria is fighting ISIS, why is the US fighting Syria?)

Diplomacy for Peace, an alien idea in Washington

All these diplomatic moves in such a short time are almost dizzying. They were opened up by China’s masterful initiative with Iran and Saudi Arabia. And they are designed to bring stability and peace to the region which the developing nations there desperately need if they are to move forward. And that development can help the economies of the world.

The US made its own unique contribution to the process by dispatching CIA Director William Burns in an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia with a complaint that the US was “blind-sided’ by the move to reconcile with the Saudis. Some see the Burns visit as a warning or perhaps even a threat. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud will want to beef up his security detail.

To return to the New York Times account of Biden’s failure at diplomacy, one success in the eyes of the Times was mentioned: “Mr. Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken have successfully unified NATO against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and won support from other countries as well.” This may be a premature announcement of success, if one examines the situation in the EU more closely. But whatever the case, this is a “diplomatic” initiative to further Biden’s cruel proxy war to bring down Russia, cynically using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Diplomacy for war.

Quite a contrast. Diplomacy for war versus diplomacy for peace.

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John V. Walsh, until recently a Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at a Medical School in Massachusetts, has written on issues of peace and health care for the San Francisco Chronicle, EastBayTimes/San Jose Mercury News, Asia Times, LA Progressive, Antiwar.com, Consortium News, CounterPunch, and others.

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A delegation from Saudi Arabia has arrived in Yemen’s capital Sana’a alongside Omani negotiators with the aim of reaching a resolution to the protracted war in Yemen. This marks a major turning point in a conflict that began more than eight years ago and has been characterized as a stalemate between Yemen’s Houthis and a coalition of anti-Houthi forces backed and led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

This arguably unexpected turn of events — surprising given Saudi Arabia’s years-long war against a group they characterize as ​“Iran-allied rebels” — is the result of talks that began in early 2022 between the Saudi Arabian government and Yemen’s government in Sana’a, led by Ansar Allah — also known as the Houthis. The Houthis have in effect been ruling much of northern Yemen for the past eight years. 

This is ​“the closest Yemen has been to real progress towards lasting peace,” Hans Grundberg, the United Nations envoy to Yemen, remarked to the Associated Press earlier this month. Grundberg urged both parties to ​“start an inclusive political process under UN auspices to sustainably end the conflict.” 

While the terms of any settlement have yet to be made public, this moment signals the seriousness of the talks and the likelihood of a lasting political agreement among warring parties following years of asymmetrical warfare in which hundreds of thousands of Yemenis were killed, millions more were starved, and Yemen was virtually left in ruins.

War and Famine

In the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring, peaceful country-wide protests began in Yemen that eventually ended with Yemen’s longtime dictator, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, transferring power to his then-Vice President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi in 2011. 

In the following years, Hadi clinged to power after failing to address the demands of all of the country’s various factions. Meanwhile, Ansar Allah rose to power following protests against the government’s curbing of fuel subsidies, and eventually seized the capital Sana’a in late 2014, and forced Hadi into house arrest.

Despite these tumultuous events, a UN-negotiated settlement was reached between Hadi, the Houthis and other factions, but this settlement was derailed. Soon after the new Saudi king appointed his son, Mohammed bin Salman, as deputy crown prince and defense minister in early 2015, Saudi Arabia amassed a coalition of several neighboring countries and, together with Western support – primarily from the Obama administration—launched airstrikes against the Houthis and imposed a naval blockade targeting food, medicine, fuel and other essential supplies in an effort to reinstate Hadi as the main head of the government. This was ratified in UN resolution 2216, which provided cover for these attacks and the imposition of the blockade under the guise of an ​“arms embargo.”

Meanwhile, Hadi fled to Riyadh and continued to enjoy Saudi support for years to come, while the UAE trained and funded the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist group whose stated goals are to secede from the Yemeni union.

Despite full military support from the United States and other allies, including weapon sales, intelligence, logistics, training, targeting support, and, until late 2018, mid-air refueling, the Saudi-led coalition failed to capture Yemen’s most populous region from the Houthis. The Houthis, on the other hand, joined forces with their longtime enemy, former president Saleh, and formed a government and armed resistance to the Saudi-led coalition.

Even after their fallout and subsequent killing of Saleh in December 2017 after he switched to the Saudi-coalition’s side, the Houthis continued to control much of the pre-1990 unity north Yemen, where 70% to 80% of the population resides. However, the Houthis’ attempts to capture Marib, a key oil- and gas-rich province, failed.

As the fighting continued and the blockade on Yemen was tightened, the Yemeni population faced a crumbling economy and destruction of its healthcare systems. This led to outbreaks such as cholera and diphtheria, reduced functional healthcare facilities to 50%, and left more than 80% of Yemenis in need of food, water and medicine. With more than 17 million people facing food insecurity in 2022, the UN warned that ​“catastrophic” and ​“famine-like” conditions were projected to increase five-fold for those most vulnerable.

Previous Talks

In early 2022, after a series of Saudi-led attacks that killed at least 80 civilians and shut down Yemen’s internet for four days, and Houthi attacks that reached an oil facility in Jeddah and a storage facility in Abu Dhabi, warring parties began ceasefire talks in Oman. 

Though far from being the first peace — a ceasefire agreement was reached in April 2022, and extended twice until October of that year — they brought a halt to U.S.-supported airstrikes for the first time since March 2015.

Despite the U.S. and Saudi’s insistence that this war was waged on behalf of Hadi — Yemen’s ​“legitimate” head of government — he was virtually powerless and remained in Riyadh since leaving Yemen in 2015. This facade came down when the Saudi and UAE governments set aside Hadi and replaced him with a council of eight men, all of whom were backed by Saudi Arabia or the UAE. While the Council was formed to unify anti-Houthi groups given that most had already waged battles against the Houthis, their conflicting interests soon led to in-fighting, especially in Shabwa where UAE-backed STC forces fought Saudi-backed Islah forces.

Peace Now?

In the year since the first ceasefire was achieved in 2022, fighting on the ground continued in key southern areas including Shabwa and al-Mahra. And when Houthi demands to pay government workers their long overdue salaries using oil and gas revenues were not met, they responded by attacking oil facilities to prevent the export of oil and gas. 

Now, this key condition seems to have been met in a draft deal last month, and reports of a roadmap toward peace include issuing payments to government employees using gas and oil revenues in exchange for the Houthis allowing exports to take place.

But to achieve a lasting peace deal, Yemen’s sovereignty must be restored and the blockade must be fully lifted. While talks with Saudi Arabia are a major first step toward alleviating Yemenis’ suffering, the UAE must also give up control over strategic areas such as Bab al-Mandab strait and the island of Socotra, which they occupied and recently militarized.

The coalition’s failure to consolidate power among warring groups in southern Yemen, which they have controlled since 2015 underscores the importance of ceasing all foreign intervention and financial backing of warring factions. This includes the U.S.’s role, which has been instrumental in furthering the war over the past eight years despite legislative efforts to end this unconstitutional involvement.

While the meetings in Sana’a between Saudi and Houthi officials hold promise for peace with the Saudi-led coalition, a meaningful end to the war can only take place when all Yemenis who fought on either side of the war — the Houthis, Saleh and Hadi’s General People’s Congress, the Islah party, the STC, and others — face one another in direct talks and draft a way forward without the financial and military backing of foreign governments. When overt and covert foreign interventions cease, Yemen will finally have a chance to chart its own course.

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Shireen Al-Adeimi is an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. Since 2015, she has played an active role in raising awareness about the Saudi-led war on her country of birth, Yemen, and works to encourage political action to end U.S. support. She is a non-resident fellow at Quincy Institute.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

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*** 

The new president of the BRICS Bank has revealed that the Global South-led bloc is advancing toward de-dollarization, gradually moving away from use of the US dollar.

The New Development Bank plans to give nearly one-third (30%) of its loans in the local currencies of the financial institution’s members.

Dilma Rousseff, the left-wing former president of Brazil, took over the leadership of the Shanghai, China-based New Development Bank (NDB) this March.

The new chief of the BRICS' New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the US dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members.

More here: https://t.co/CyJKBODc2D pic.twitter.com/PUGokEHYxw

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 15, 2023

The NDB was created in 2014, by the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as a Global South-oriented alternative to the US-dominated World Bank, which is infamous for imposing neoliberal economic reforms on impoverished countries, which hinder their development.

In an interview with China’s major media outlet CGTN on April 14, Rousseff explained, “It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar”.

“The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies. China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real”, she said.

“At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries”, Rousseff added.

“That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments”, the new NDB president stressed.

H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff, the NDB newly elected President, has started her first day in office in the NDB Headquarters in Shanghai, China. pic.twitter.com/JOLblXhhzQ

— New Development Bank (@NDB_int) March 28, 2023

Members of the NDB not only include the founders of the BRICS but also Bangladesh, the UAE, and Egypt. Uruguay is likewise in the process of joining, and many other countries have expressed interest.

Argentina, Iran, and Algeria have formally applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc, and according to the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, other nations that are interested “include Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, and a number of African nations”.

Flags of the members of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB) 

South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, revealed in January that BRICS plans to “develop a fairer system of monetary exchange” in order to weaken the “dominance of the dollar”.

“The systems currently in place tend to privilege very wealthy countries and tend to be really a challenge for countries, such as ourselves, which have to make payments in dollars, which costs much more in terms of our various currencies”, she said.

“So I do think a fairer system has to be developed, and it’s something we’re discussing with the BRICS ministers in the economic sector discussions”, Pandor added.

BRICS is making “a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed.

Saudi Arabia, which applied to join BRICS, is considering selling oil in other currencies.

China says it will by Gulf energy in yuanhttps://t.co/fDWhqExVAw

— Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) March 13, 2023

This April, Brazil’s current president, Lula da Silva, a fellow member of Dilma’s leftist Workers’ Party, took a historic trip to China, where he called to challenge US dollar dominance.

While in Shanghai, Lula was the first head of state to visit the NDB headquarters, where he attended the swearing in ceremony for Dilma.

Lula said the NDB’s goal is “creating a world with less poverty, less inequality, and more sustainability”.

He added that the bank should play a “leading role in achieving a better world, without poverty or hunger”.

This was the first time that a Head of State visited the Bank's Headquarters in Shanghai and addressed the NDB staff in person. President Lula had the opportunity to witness the NDB's commitment to promoting sustainable development and delivering on its mandate.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/MlC9tfySPY

— New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023

Dilma also commented, “As a former president of Brazil, I know the importance of the work of multilateral banks to support developing countries, particularly NDB, in addressing their economic, social, and environmental needs”.

“Becoming the president of the NDB is undoubtedly a great opportunity to do more for the BRICS, the emerging markets, and developing countries”, she said.

In her speech, H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff emphasized the Bank's commitment to supporting Brazil's sustainable development goals and highlighted the importance of the presidential visit for strengthening the cooperation between the NDB and Brazil.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/0aut3dLM1H

— New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023

In her interview with CGTN, Rousseff explained her goals with the BRICS Bank:

It is very important to me that New Development Bank, the bank of the BRICS, acts as the tool to support the development priorities of the BRICS and other developing countries.

We need to invest in projects that contribute to three fundamental areas:

First, we need to support the countries with regards to climate change and sustainable development goals.

Second, we should promote social inclusion at every opportunity we have.

And I believe we should finance their most critical and strategic infrastructure projects.

That said, we want to promote quality development.

Developing countries still don’t have the necessary infrastructure. They don’t have enough ports, airports, and highways to meet their needs. And many times, the ones they have are not adequate.

They still have to build alternatives and more modern models of transportation, for instance.

I see China, a country that has developed capability for alternative transportation at the scale and quality it needs.

NDB has to support the other countries to also build their quality infrastructure as well, like high-speed trains.

It is very important to invest in technology and innovation, invest in universities for example.

Our countries will not overcome extreme poverty if we don’t invest in education, science, and technology.

When asked what challenges the BRICS and NDB face, Rousseff replied:

The world now is under the threat of high inflation and restrictive monetary policy, particularly in developed countries.

Such monetary policy means a higher interest rate, and therefore a higher probability of reduction in growth and a higher probability of recession.

This presents an important question for the BRICS. We need a mechanism, a so-called anti-crisis mechanism, which must be counter-cyclical and support stabilization.

It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar.

The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies.

China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real.

At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries.

That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments.

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*** 

Future historians may say that the most significant event of 2023 had nothing to do with Donald Trump, other 2024 presidential candidates, or even the war in Ukraine. Instead, the event with the most long-term significance may be one that received little attention in the mainstream media — Saudi Arabia’s movement toward accepting currencies other than the US dollar for oil payments.

After President Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold, his administration negotiated a deal with the Saudi government. The US would support the Saudi regime, including by providing weapons. In exchange, the Saudis would conduct all oil transactions in dollars. The Saudis also agreed to use surplus dollars they accumulated to purchase US Treasury bonds. The resulting “petrodollar” is a major reason why the dollar has maintained its world reserve currency status.

Also this year, China and Brazil made an agreement to conduct future trade between the countries using the countries’ own currencies rather than dollars. Brazilian President Lula da Silva has called on more nations to abandon the dollar.

This de-dollarization movement is driven in part by resentment of America’s foreign policy, including, in particular, the US government’s increasing use of economic sanctions. Dethroning the dollar from its world reserve currency status makes it easier for countries to ignore these sanctions.

De-dollarization will negatively impact the US government’s ability to manage its over 30 trillion dollars debt. With a few exceptions, there is still no real support in Congress for spending cuts. Republican leadership members may say they will not support a debt ceiling increase unless it is tied to spending cuts. However, after the Biden administration accused the Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared a reduction in spending on Social Security and Medicare — big drivers of the federal deficit — “off the table.” Similarly, despite the growing skepticism of foreign interventionism among Republicans, the military-industrial complex maintains a viselike grip on congressional leadership and the White House. Therefore, do not expect any reduction in military spending. Instead, the Pentagon’s budget will likely increase.

The Federal Reserve will face continuing pressure to monetize ever-increasing federal debt and keep interest rates (and thus the federal government’s borrowing costs) low. The resulting inflation will lead to more support for ending the dollar’s world reserve currency status. As more countries abandon the dollar, the Fed will become less able to monetize the federal government’s debt without creating hyperinflation. This will result in a dollar crisis and an economic meltdown worse than the Great Depression.

This crisis will lead to the end of the welfare-warfare-fiat currency system. While history suggests this will lead to the rise of even more authoritarian political movements, the growing popularity of libertarian ideas suggests the collapse will also fuel the further growth of the liberty movement. This could mean that the crisis leads to a restoration of limited government and an advancement of liberty. The key to taking full advantage of the opportunity presented by the crisis is to keep spreading our ideas. Fortunately, we do not need a majority; we just need a tireless, irate minority committed to the cause to regain our liberty.

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Ramsey Clark passed away in April 2021 

His legacy will live forever.

He has been a source of inspiration to anti-war activists for more than half a century.

Our thoughts are with Ramsey Clark, whom I first met in New York in 1999 at the height of the US-NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

Ramsey was fully aware of the dangers of all out war in Ukraine. Below is Ramsey Clark’s November 2014 open letter to President Obama et al, condemning US-NATO troop deployments on Russia’s borders.

With foresight, Ramsey Clark had predicted what is now happening.

“This massive U.S. intervention in the Ukraine and ever-increasing campaign to surround and isolate Russia must end, I therefore demand:

1. That the U.S. government and all its public, secret, official and unofficial agencies immediately cease all forms of intervention in Ukraine, including ceasing all material and political aid to fascist and right-wing organizations within the country;

2. That all sanctions and threats of sanctions against the Russian Federation be dropped — sanctions are an act of war;

3. That U.S. military forces immediately be withdrawn from the Eastern European region and that NATO’s expansion and provocative actions against Russia be ended.”

“Peaceful Coexistence” between Russia and America is the Answer

Michel Chossudovsky,

Global Research, April 11, 2021,  April 18, 2023

***

TO:

President Obama, Senator McCain, Secretary Kerry, Secretary-General Ban, Members of Congress, and Members of the Media:

The overwhelming majority of the population of the U.S. is against being dragged into another disastrous war. Nothing is more dangerous than the aggressive U.S./NATO troop movements right on the borders of Russia.

Sending U.S. destroyers into the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea; scheduling threatening U.S./NATO war games and troop movements in East Europe; and imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation is a threat to peace on a world scale. We have seen the cost of past and continuing U.S. wars, which enrich the military corporations while impoverishing the targeted countries as well as poor and working people here in the U.S.

The years of U.S. funding of fascist forces in Ukraine and the recognition of a government in Kiev that overthrew the elected government, seized power and appointed extreme right-wing groups to head the police, army and national guard in order to pull Ukraine into NATO membership makes the U.S. complicit in the complete denial of the rights of the Ukrainian people. It is also a provocation against the entire region.

People in East and South Ukraine, outraged by this coup government, have attempted to resist the illegal junta, have declared an independent People’s Republic of Donetsk, and have called for referendums. In response, the right-wing coup government has allowed its military forces and other fascists to terrorize the Ukrainian people. In the most recent incident, some 40 people were massacred in the city of Odessa on May 2 by fascist militants, loyal to the Kiev government, who set the Trades Union Building on fire. In addition, 23 people were killed at Slavyansk and in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region in attacks by Ukrainian military forces from May 2-3.

Despite mass desertions by Ukrainian police and military personnel, so-called “anti-terrorist” campaigns against activists in southeastern Ukraine were launched immediately after visits to Kiev by U.S. officials. Washington has spent $5 billion to effect “regime change” in Ukraine, helping to bring into power a junta dominated by fascist, racist, anti-Semitic organizations like Svoboda, Fatherland and Right Sector. Meanwhile, the U.S. has pledged up to $10 billion in loans to the illegal coup regime, and Washington has been instrumental in securing a $17 billion aid and austerity package from the International Monetary Fund.

This massive U.S. intervention in the Ukraine and ever-increasing campaign to surround and isolate Russia must end. I therefore demand:

1. That the U.S. government and all its public, secret, official and unofficial agencies immediately cease all forms of intervention in Ukraine, including ceasing all material and political aid to fascist and right-wing organizations within the country;

2. That all sanctions and threats of sanctions against the Russian Federation be dropped — sanctions are an act of war;

3. That U.S. military forces immediately be withdrawn from the Eastern European region and that NATO’s expansion and provocative actions against Russia be ended.

Tragically, neither the US nor the EU honored the February 21 compromise accord between the Maidan coalition and the Yanukovich govenment that was brokered by Foreign Ministers of France, Germany and Poland. It is upon the US government to save the honor of Western democracies as promoters of peace, legality and moderation. Return to the February 21 Accords before the hell of war breaks loose!

Sincerely,

Ramsey Clark

Former US Attorney General
Founder of International Action Center
New York

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***

First published in January 2018

Ukraine. Across its eastern border is Russia and to its west-Europe. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its rich lands and access to the Black Sea.

The 2014 Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it?

“Ukraine on Fire” by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych. Covered by Western media as a people’s revolution, it was in fact a coup d’état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department.

Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America’s geopolitical agenda abroad.

Watch the full documentary below.

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*** 

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*** 

Food processing plants blowing up, vaccine mandates crippling the US military, and people pushing and hustling for the next pandemic… what is really going on?

In the video below, Atty. Thomas Renz appears on Bannon’s War Room to talk about the bigger agenda behind all this.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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*** 

The word is getting out that almost nothing is true about what governments and legacy media have been telling us concerning the COVID-19 disaster. Moreover, all the imposed remedies, but especially the global lockdowns and the gene-modifying injection procedures, are resulting in absolutely catastrophic effects whose full scale is basically still unfathomable in these increasingly apocalyptic times.

So far the world’s eight billion habitants have received about 14 billion shots collectively. Many will recognize that this worldwide jab fest is not good news at all. It is very bad news with enormous consequences for all of humanity and our posterity as well.

The governments of almost every one of the world’s 192 countries came up with similar sets of bad policies that have been doing the lion’s share of the damage constituting the manufactured COVID crisis. The simultaneous similarity of these consistently destructive policies indicate that some supranational initiative above the level of nation states has been mobilized to orchestrate our ongoing descent into tyranny. This descent kicked into high gear in the winter of 2020, but especially after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic without sufficient credible evidence.

Hence the imperative of thinking globally while acting locally is absolutely apt right now when it comes to developing the collective muscle we need to stop the horrific continuing predations.

Here and there citizens are organizing to initiate our own public inquiries into the genesis of the disaster we are living through. In Canada there is a “citizen-led inquiry” presently underway. The mission of the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) is to investigate “Canada’s COVID-19 responses.” To advance this mission, a cross-country tour of citizen-appointed NCI Commissioners is underway.

It is my intention to participate in this process, including by giving expert testimony if and when I am called upon to do so. My intention is to send out regular dispatches on GlobalResearch.ca. I am checking my tires and updating my laptop to prepare myself to join the tour as it approaches Saskatchewan and then my home province of Alberta.

The principle that this inquiry is citizen-led, not government-led, is crucial to understanding the larger significance of what is taking place here in Canada. Government-led investigations are rarely credible when it comes to investigating suspected crimes committed by governments. Such investigations usually turn out to be whitewashes of the powerful and well connected. Very often the investigations turn into witch hunts directed at smearing the most effective critics of government policies and actions.

This pattern is almost perfectly illustrated by Trudeau’s outrageous effort to criminalize the Canadian Freedom Convoy movement and thereby distinguishing himself as a vigilant champion of law and order. In mid-February of 2022 Trudeau invoked Canada’s version of martial law. Trudeau’s purpose was to vanquish the Freedom Convoy by tactics like unleashing police violence on peaceful demonstrators on Parliament Hill and by seizing the bank accounts of some Truckers and their supporters.

Justin appointed a very politicized Liberal Party judge and Trudeau family friend, Paul Rouleau, to lead in early 2023 a Commission charged to investigate whether the Canadian government had acted properly or not by imposing the highest level of emergency measures provisions on top of layer upon layer of prior COVID emergency measures. Variations of this same process have happened all over the world as the executive branches of government have seized vast new powers by suspending civil liberties in the name of fighting the celebrity virus.

Not surprisingly the Liberal Party judge gave his friend Justin and his cronies a clean bill of health. Trudeau’s friend found the Trudeau government, Not Guilty. Nothing to see here folks, just keep moving along.

So in Canada the precedent is being set that we cannot count on governments to investigate their own crimes in instigating and worsening the manufactured COVID crisis and the subsequent manufactured crises flowing from the Mother of All Medical False Flags. We need local initiatives, national initiatives, regional initiatives and ultimately worldwide initiatives to get to the bottom of what has happened and to initiate the kind of juridical procedures necessary to stop this spree of serial Crimes Against Humanity.

Only trials, criminal verdicts when justified, and appropriate punishments will serve the cause of the kind of justice we desperately need right now as the rule of law continues to vanish day-by-day.

In late 2022 Preston Manning, founder of Canada’s Reform Party and the son of former Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, initiated the NCI in a press conference in Parliament’s press gallery in Ottawa. He explains very clearly the importance in these circumstances of not waiting for governments to investigate themselves.

Click here to view the video

The following link contains some examples of the testimony gathered so far by the NCI: click here.

I recommend particularly the testimony of Vincent Gircys, a retired senior police official in Ontario who has been working diligently with colleagues to clarify what the rule of law demands of police officers in these times. Constable Gircys had his bank account seized by the Trudeau government zealots in one of the most characteristic demonstrations of the fascistic tactics being developed to stifle legitimate dissent.

The testimony of Embalmer Laura Jeffey is gripping. Ms. Jeffrey is an exemplary model of a resolute whistle blower coming forward when all the public officials around and above her, refuse to honour their professional responsibilities and do the right thing.

Journalist Rodney Palmer has presented a well documented assessment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s appalling refusal to investigate the COVID-19 scandal. He names names and chronicles explicitly the depth to which the CBC has fallen by renouncing its role as a public broadcaster. Palmer provides the evidentiary goods to prove that the CBC has become a purveyor of gross propaganda to serve the agenda of its thoroughly corrupt paymasters. Clearly we need a new public broadcaster to replace the now-thoroughly discredited CBC.

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Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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*** 

Sudan’s capital Khartoum has turned into a war zone with a split in the military forces.  The Sudanese army is battling the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which is a paramilitary force, and the 10 million residents are taking cover to avoid the artillery exchanges, and air force operations against the RSF. Hospitals are reporting 80 injured, and three civilian deaths.

Al Sharek TV, based in the UAE, reporting from Sudan, claimed that an Eqyptian soldier was killed in Murwey military airbase in Khartoum today, with raging battles continuing from yesterday. 

A large contingent from the army swooped into the RSF camps and took control on Saturday after the RSF had attacked army bases previously, according to Brigadier-General Nabil Abdallah, who characterized the army as performing their duty to safeguard the country.

The RSF claimed to have taken control of the capital airport, two other regional airports, and the presidential palace, while Sudan’s General Intelligence Service refuted the RSF claims as untrue.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the ruling Sovereign Council, was reportedly safe.  Sudan has struggled to return to civilian rule following a military takeover when the army and the RSF ousted the former president in 2019.  A transition period, with elections to follow was planned, but never initiated.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, the commander of the RSF, called Burhan a ‘criminal’ and accused the army of carrying out a coup. Hemedti has been deputy leader of the ruling Sovereign Council headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan since 2019, and his RSF are 100,000 strong.

The tension between the army and the RSF began on Thursday when the army accused the RSF of movements which were independent of the army and were illegal. Under the still unsigned transition agreement, the RSF is to be integrated into the ranks of the army. The process of the merger and under which authority it should be conducted has opened the door to conflict.

The RSF grew out of the government of the autocratic President Omar al-Bashir, who was removed from office in 2019. During Bashir’s time in power, Hemedti carried out a brutal crackdown in Sudan’s Darfur region during the decades of conflict there. The struggle for power and control between the army and the RSF today dates back to the previous administration.

The RSF have been accused of war crimes in the Dafur conflict, and in June 2019 they raided a Khartoum pro-democracy camp and nearly 130 people died.

Foreign intervention

Like so many countries in the Middle East, Sudan has been split by sections of the society who follow the Muslim Brotherhood, and their political ideology of Radical Islam, and those who are against extremism.  Qatar, Turkey and the US have been allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, and especially the US has used them as foot soldiers in Syria.  However, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Russia have rejected the Muslim Brotherhood.

US and Israel

Yesterday, the U.S. Ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey, said the escalation of tensions to direct fighting was “extremely dangerous” and called urgently on the senior leadership to stop the clashes. Godfrey said he and embassy staff were sheltering in place. 

In January 2021, Sudan agreed to normalize relations with Israel in order to have Sudan removed for the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. On February 2, 2023 Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen met with Burhan in Khartoum, and the two countries were planning to sign a peace treaty in Washington, DC. before the end of 2023, but first depending on the Sudan democratic elections result.

Burhan accepted the US demands that Sudan stop its support of the Palestinian cause of freedom, and to cut off its relations with Iran.

However, Sudan was not the beneficiary of improvements in its infrastructure, and Sudan remains a broken, failed state with a population on the brink of starvation.

The current confrontation between the army and the RSF could acerbate the economic breakdown, and tribal violence across the vast country.

The Syrian opposition

Syrian opposition leader Fahad Almasri, founder of the National Salvation Front in Syria (NSF), has publically called for normalization between Syria and Israel.  Almasri says Syrians have wasted their time on the Palestinian cause, and should look after their own interests instead.

During the armed conflict in Syria, injured Jibhat al-Nusra terrorists were taken to Israeli hospitals for treatment.  Jibhat al-Nusra is designated as a terrorist group by the US and the UN.  

Members of the extinct Free Syrian Army sang songs and carried banners in Homs praising Israel and asking for their help in their participation in the attack on Syria.

The conflict in Syria began in 2011 and was a US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change.  The US policy goal to change the government in Syria was formulated in Tel Aviv with the policy paper “A Clean Break” written in 1996.

The situation today in Sudan should be a wake-up call to the Syrian opposition calling for normalization with Israel.  Looking at the case of Sudan, we can see that following the US and Israel down the path of normalization has not benefitted Sudan, or its people.

The US and Israel make promises, but fail to follow through with actions.

*

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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*** 

Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with.  In one sense, the French President was consistent, riding the hobbyhorse of Europe’s strategic autonomy, one hived off from the US imperium and free of Chinese influence.

Europe’s third-way autonomy would be a mighty thing for the Elysée Palace, especially given French pretensions in steering it.  After all, Frau “Mutti” Merkel is no longer de facto European chief, presiding over the bloc with matronly care.  Her successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is finding himself caught in undergrowth, a difficult thing at times for the continent’s largest economy, and the globe’s fourth.

What, then, of the fuss?  In the first place, Macron had company on his Beijing visit: on his first day of the trip, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had decided to come along. This was never going to go well, given their respective views over the Middle Kingdom.  Von der Leyen, for one, uses a larded management approach to Beijing, ringing the relationship with restrictions and signals of constipation.  On Taiwan’s status, she sticks to the warring line embraced by policy makers stretching from Canberra to Washington.  Macron, at least in one sense, understands the power of China to be not only inextinguishable but a logical weight against the US.

The fuss then began in earnest with Macron’s remarks, made on his plane, the Cotam Unité, after the three-day visit.  To reporters from Politico and Les Echos, he began conventionally, reiterating the view that Europe should be a third power, a counterweight to Washington and Beijing.  But it was his remarks on Taiwan that caused some bristling across a number of quarters.  “Do we [Europeans],” he posed to Les Echos, “have an interest in speeding up on the subject of Taiwan?  No. The worst of things would be to think that we Europeans must be followers on this subject and adapt ourselves to an American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction.”

The mania over Taiwan’s fate constituted a potential “trap for Europe”, landing it in crises “that are not ours”.  The heating up of the US-Sino conflict would frustrate European ambitions, be it in terms of time or finance, to develop “our own strategic autonomy and we will become vassals, whereas we could become the third pole [in the world order] if we have a few years to develop this”.

Those familiar with the Macron recipe have seen it before.  An interview of frankness acts as kindling.  The fire rages.  Then come the explainers, clarifications, points of qualification.  The fire abates.  In 2019, he warned of NATO’s “brain death”. (Since then, that brain-dead patient has become ever more emboldened and enlarged, engaged in a proxy war with Russia.)  He has also been unabashed about offering a fig leaf or two to Moscow, despite its Ukrainian adventurism.

Representatives of the US empire-set, nervously clinging to orb, sceptre, and some misguided sense of civilisation, sneered and scoffed.  Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), rolling around in the rhetoric of anti-Sino thrill, called the Chinese Communist Party “the most significant challenge to Western society, our economic security, and our way of life”.  The remarks from Macron had been “embarrassing”, “disgraceful”, and “very geopolitically naïve.”

Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offered his few cents worth.  “If Macron is speaking for all of Europe, and their position now is they’re not going to pick sides between the US and China over Taiwan, maybe then we should not be taking sides either.”  His point: the US was essentially funding a European war, and to what end?

The Washington Post viewed the visit as one that “angered politicians and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic, highlighting gaps between the US and French approaches to China, showcasing division within the European Union – and probably delighting Beijing.”

The Wall Street Journal was even more bullish in its criticism, suggesting that Macron had refused to get with the anti-China deterrence program. (Good of the paper to openly admit that such a policy is actively being pursued in Washington.)  “If President Biden is awake, he ought to call Mr Macron and ask if he’s trying to re-elect Donald Trump.”  At the WSJ, warmongering is ascendant.

For some commentators, notably in Macron’s camp, the anti-China pugilists had misunderstood the whole message.  This was the reading from French lawmaker Benjamin Haddad: “Macron is much closer to the European centre of gravity on China than the numerous scandalized comments on his comments would suggest.”

Chances are that Macron knew exactly what he was saying, cognisant of the preening egos he would affront.  The same cannot be said about the number of US lawmakers who, ignorant of their own republic and its warring ambitions, are keen to interpret the views and ambitions of another as disturbingly independent of their own.

Were these figures to go back to school, directed by the spirit of Lafayette, and the French purse that was broken in supporting the American War of Independence, such lawmakers might show a greater appreciation about the view from Paris.  But those days are long gone, and Washington, in its increasingly trembling way, is keen to stay the pretensions of any power that will challenge it, and make others toe the line.

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

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*** 

When reflecting on the significance of the defeat of the coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, it is easy to forget the regional context at that fateful moment and focus only on the terrible events in the national context. But it is also important to remember always that the ruling elites in the United States and their local allies in the region were at that time and are still constantly striving to sabotage and if possible reverse the emancipation processes of the peoples of the region that had gained strength since 2006. In 2018, corrupt right-wing governments allied with the United States dominated most of Latin America and collaborated closely, especially to help the government of President Donald Trump intensify its criminal hybrid war against Venezuela and the blockade against Cuba.

Only Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela kept alive in that period the vision of a sovereign regional integration promoting the interests of their countries’ majorities. The right-wing Sebastian Piñera had won the presidency in Chile. In Argentina, Mauricio Macri and his cronies were deepening the country’s economic crisis, seeking a corrupt arrangement with the International Monetary Fund to favor the financial interests of the national oligarchy. Despite their extremely low levels of popular support, Michel Temer in Brazil and Lenin Moreno in Ecuador oversaw the implementation of neoliberal policies against their peoples while their allies in the judiciary abused the criminal justice system to attack their progressive political rivals.

In Colombia, Ivan Duque acted to systematically prevent the implementation of the Peace Agreements while dozens of community leaders and former FARC combatants who had welcomed the peace were killed every month. In Peru, due to their own bitter internal political disputes, the national oligarchy exploited the judicial and legislative system to keep the country in a permanent crisis of governance. In Paraguay, the corrupt government of Horacio Cartes was coming to the end of its term. In Uruguay, the Frente Amplio government of Tabaré Vasquez was also coming to the end of its period severely damaged by lack of popular support and the forced resignation of its Vice President Raul Sendic.

All this throws into relief the events of 2018 in Nicaragua and reveals their dual aspect. In one sense, it was another attack by the empire seeking to maintain the Monroe Doctrine and its usual regional dominance and control. At the domestic level, it was one more episode in the endless class war waged by the national oligarchy insisting on wanting to maintain their privileged dominant status in relation to the dispossessed majority. In a broader sense, the 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua represents another moment of the Western elites’ ruthless assault on the idea of the nation state, which is the main defense of the world’s peoples against the depredations of giant multinational corporations, which are the essence of globalization.

Image: Augusto César Sandino (Licensed under the Public Domain)

So the failed coup attempt of 2018 in Nicaragua can be seen from different perspectives. In part, it was a popular battle against a political, social, economic and cultural retreat into the past. At the local level, a reactionary minority made an alliance with foreign powers because they lacked the political strength and popular support to win elections. Externally, the United States insisted on its imperative of regional control to intervene and force a change of government favoring its interests. What happened in 2018 repeated historical patterns in Nicaragua that have persisted from the time of William Walker, from the Knox Memo and the Chamorro-Bryan Treaty to the Espino Negro Pact, the assassination of General Sandino and the Contra war against the Sandinista Popular Revolution of the 1980s.

If 2018 was a battle against returning to the sinister past of submission to empire and to the political and economic repression of US puppet governments, it was also a battle to defend the prosperity and advances in force at that time, the result of good government by Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and their sandinista ministerial team. More profoundly, it was an absolutely fundamental defense of a future of true political and economic democracy, of security, prosperity and tranquility for the population, of development and peace. Above all, it was a defense of the future national sovereignty which has been not only the basis of all the recent economic, social, cultural and spiritual victories of Nicaragua’s people, but which is also an essential element of the new multipolar or pluricentric world now under construction.

In 2018, the Nicaraguan people faced choosing between passively submitting to the lies, violence, anarchy and arrogance of the coup plotters or acting decisively to defend the sovereignty that the coup leaders and their foreign owners wanted to take away from them. On the one hand, we could see the reactionary bishops, the failed traitorous politicians, the greedy opportunistic business leaders, the corrupt management class of the bought NGO sector and the criminal thugs abusing the population in the roadblocks. On the other hand, Nicaragua’s People could see their own reflection as protagonists of the revolutionary model of the government’s National Plan for Human Development and Poverty Reduction, a plan for peace, development and justice based on the historical program of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Over the weeks and months from April to July 2018, mixed in with the coup attempt’s horrific abuses, odious crimes and widespread terrorism, popular feeling steadily grew rejecting the coup leaders self-evident cynicism, hypocrisy and lack of seriousness during the sessions of the national dialogue. In the end the clear choice lay between between defending the achievements of the People and their revolutionary process or submitting to a new repressive government of odious, mediocre leaders directed by their Yankee patrons. Over the last few days Comandante Daniel has summarized what happened in 2018 as follows:

“There was an attempted coup d’état here, and as usual, the historical imperialists, the Europeans, the European empires, vassals of the North American Empire, immediately joined in. But, thanks to the People’s decision, the coup was aborted and we have managed to resume the conditions that we had up until 2018, of stability, Peace, security, economic growth, progress in the fight against poverty and this has strengthened the People’s Consciousness and also strengthens the defense capacity of the Nicaraguan people.”

It is no accident that Comandante Daniel made that comment during a meeting with a delegation from the Cooperation Agency of the People’s Republic of China. The defeat of the coup attempt in Nicaragua was a key event in a regional and global context characterized by the desperate efforts of the United States and its allies to destroy any initiative that structurally favors the region’s dispossessed majorities. The US suffered another defeat with the landslide electoral victory of the Bolivian people in 2020, reversing the coup d’etat in that country following the elections in 2019.

Similarly, the Venezuelan people have repeatedly defeated the tremendous, constant US economic aggression and sabotage, just as the Cuban people have done for over 60 years. All these victories are increasingly shaping a Latin America and Caribbean based on respect and equality between sovereign nations instead of privileging the interests of the region’s national oligarchies allied to North American and European elites. That is why the victory of the Nicaraguan people over the failed coup attempt in 2018 was such a great triumph for the region’s sovereign future, so essential to consolidate Nicaragua’s development in a new world of international relations genuinely based on international relations of justice and Peace.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Protest in Managua, Nicaragua in 2018 (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The 21-year Old Leaker — Something Is Not Right

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The media obsession in vilifying Jack Texeira for “leaking” TOP SECRET and SECRET documents and judging him guilty without any benefit of doubt, is just another symptom of the authoritarian fever that grips many inhabitants of the United States. Forget the first amendment.

“New York City Spring 2020: Investigating the COVID Epicenter”

By Michael Bryant, April 17, 2023

A recent retrospective piece by the NY Times titled, “Covid Was Bad in New York City. See How Bad on a 200-Year Timeline”, took a look back to Spring 2020 in New York City and the “wave of illness” that hit the city causing a “seismic” death event not seen in nearly 200 years.

World Economic Forum: The Global Shadow Elite

By Ernst Wolff, April 17, 2023

The world, especially with the support of the WEF, has reached a point where it is no longer just about political, economic or social change, but about the transformation of people themselves, about their fusion with the digital sphere, also called “biodigital convergence” or “transhumanism”.

Beef Producers Panic Over mRNA Vaccine News

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 17, 2023

Last week, I reported that pork producers have been using customizable mRNA-based “vaccines” on their herds since 2018 — without telling the public. This issue really only rose to the surface after attorney Tom Renz started promoting new legislation in Missouri (House Bill 1169, which he helped write) that would require labeling of mRNA products.

Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines

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The mRNA and adenoviral DNA COVID-19 vaccine debacle in humans has set populations on edge, distrustful of poorly conceived genetic technology. Meanwhile the field has advanced considerably in veterinary medicine.

COVID and Free Speech in the High Court

By Thomas Hayes, April 17, 2023

On 5 April 2023 the [U.K.] High Court handed down judgment in Adil v General Medical Council [2023] EWHC 797 (Admin). The case examined the extent to which a professional regulator can interfere with the right to freedom of expression of an individual subject to its regulation, as well as the circumstances in which the Court should accept challenges to decisions made by regulators in the performance of their duties.

Russia’s Investigations About US Biolabs in Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, April 17, 2023

Finally, the Russian investigation about American biological activities on Ukrainian soil was completed. A special parliamentary committee had been formed to carefully analyze evidence of crimes such as the production of biological weapons in military biolabs found and neutralized by Russian armed forces. 

Capitol January 6, 2021: At Least 50 Undercover Officers and Informants Monitored Proud Boys and Crowds, New Court Filing Says

By Joseph M. Hanneman, April 17, 2023

Up to a dozen previously undisclosed undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers were embedded in the crowds on Jan. 6—including one who admitted joining in protester chants to “stop the steal”—according to an April 10 court filing in the Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trial.

How NATO States Sponsored ICC Prosecutor’s Putin Arrest Warrant

By Max Blumenthal, April 17, 2023

ICC prosecutor general Karim Khan raised millions from NATO states by crafting an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin while freezing investigations into well-documented US and Israeli war crimes. Along the way, he won powerful friends in Washington, London, Kiev — and Hollywood.

History: The Origins of the Polish-Ukrainian Conflict: West Ukraine and Greater Poland

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, April 17, 2023

At the very beginning, it must be noticed that before the outbreak of WWI in the summer of 1914 it was not both either Poland or Ukraine as the state on the political map of Europe. Poland was considered a historical region while Ukraine was a geographical one.

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“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.” –T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (Part I, The Burial of the Dead)

A recent retrospective piece by the NY Times titled, “Covid Was Bad in New York City. See How Bad on a 200-Year Timeline”, took a look back to Spring 2020 in New York City and the “wave of illness” that hit the city causing a “seismic” death event not seen in nearly 200 years.

Noting that the the spike in the city’s death rate was “like something from a different era” and that life expectancy dropped city-wide an astonishing 4.6 years from 2019 to 2020, the article unquestioningly and exclusively attributes this shocking mortality event to the impacts of Covid.

Nowhere in the piece, as is the case with the official narrative, can one find a more extensive examination of events as they unfolded in NYC in Spring 2020 though there are hints even within the article that oddities which defy the accepted narrative abound. 

Towards the end of the article it is noted, “In Brownsville, Brooklyn — an impoverished and predominantly Black neighborhood with a high concentration of public housing developments — the premature death rate was nine times as high as in Greenwich Village and SoHo, predominantly white and wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods.”

While it could be justifiably argued that the poor are beset by an array of pre-existing health problems, thus impacted disproportionately by disease due to these lower health indices, would this not make the case that the inferior health of these communities is the issue, not some deadly disease?

This also brings up a range of questions as to how such a fast moving, super contagious and deadly virus selectively opted to hit poor, minority communities while percipiently avoiding upscale principally white neighborhoods.

Further in the article it is acknowledged that, “Many people went without seeing doctors or receiving medical care when Covid-19 arrived. Deaths from heart disease, for instance, were nearly 20 percent higher in 2020 than the year before.” 

Even as this anomaly is recognized,  logical follow-up questions posited are omitted, questions which could present a more complete picture of this cataclysmic event. 

How many of these individuals who died due to avoidance of medical treatments would still be alive had they not been dissuaded from seeking medical care by the constant fear-based narrative?

How many of these deaths from heart disease were falsely attributed to Covid? 

While certain incongruities can be discerned in this one article, this hardly scratches the surface. 

The spectrum of unanswered questions is substantial. 

A necessary full scale investigation into the events of Spring 2020 would undoubtedly unleash a multitude of inconvenient questions:

What was the location of the reported waves of death in NYC?

Were NYC emergency rooms truly overwhelmed? 

What does the data say about NYC ICU rates?

Was Elmhurst hospital, tabbed as “coronavirus ground zero”, truly overflowing in Spring 2020? 

What does the data say about Elmhurst hospital Spring 2020 emergency visits compared to previous years?

What was the 2020 emergency like for NY- Presbyterian Columbia hospital inpatient volume?

What does the data indicate for Maimonides Medical Center, understood to be the NYC hospital with the highest number of Covid deaths between March and May 2020?

What medical procedures and protocols were being used inside hospitals to treat Covid patients? To what effect?

What drugs were used in NYC hospitals?

What impact did newly introduced Covid-19 Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders have on patient outcomes?

How did financial incentives dictate hospital policies?

Who were the people that died during this time? 

The colossal dimensions of the media reports coming out of New York City in Spring 2020 cannot be overstated as the alleged onslaught of Covid-related illnesses and ‘wave of deaths’ in NYC hospitals became the circuit breaker for the entire mass hysteria that subsequently beset the United States and the primary ‘code red’ rationale for national lockdowns and suspension of civil liberties across the country.

The mainstream news outlets reportage and blind acceptance of overwhelmed hospitals, dead bodies piled into trucks, lines of people anxiously waiting outside hospitals and various sci-fi scenarios struck terror into the hearts of those who witnessed these images as they sat glued to their television.

Three years on, an unquestioning media gives the impression that mass deaths caused by a novel pathogen is an unassailable truth. 

However, the Spring 2020 apocalyptic scenario of a deadly pathogen besieging New York City increasingly looks to be a disputable chronicle of events rather than an ironclad narrative. 

Who can forget Andrew Cuomo crying about an urgent need to get more ventilators?

Who can forget the scarcely used 70,000-ton ‘message of hope’ Navy hospital ship sent to NYC? 

As further evidence and hospital data comes to light a picture emerges which stands in stark contrast with the story portrayed by the mainstream media.

The world deserves a full scale investigation into what happened throughout New York City in Spring 2020 and specifically what happened within the NYC hospitals.

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This article is inspired by and links to Dr. Jessica Hockett’s independent research on New York City’s 2020 mortality event. Hockett holds a PhD in educational psychology from University of Virginia and shares the results of her personal inquiries on Twitter @ewoodhouse7 and Substack https://woodhouse.substack.com.

Featured image: Marchers on International Working Women’s Day in New York City on March 8 demand an end to sanctions and comprehensive support for workers during the COVID-19 epidemic. (Source: Sara Flounders)

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Below are excerpts from Ernst Wolff’s book.

***

Foreword

We live in turbulent and unsettling times. The world around us is changing at an unprecedented speed. Financialization and the digitalization of the world economy have fundamentally changed the global balance of power on our planet within the past 50 years.

After Wall Street’s big banks dominated global #nance for almost a century, the big asset managers took their place at the start of the millennium. The ten leading companies in this industry, which has only emerged in the last 50 years, managed well over 40 trillion US dollars in mid-2022, roughly as much as the combined gross domestic product of the USA, China and Japan, the world’s three largest economies.

In addition, there is a historically unique concentration process: the largest asset managers BlackRock and Vanguard finance each other as major shareholders and are also among the major shareholders of six of the next largest eight asset managers. In addition, BlackRock has Aladdin[1], a unique global financial data analytics system used by numerous large corporations and major central banks. Their leaders, such as the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB), have made BlackRock an influential advisor in return for access to its software.

 The second process that has led us to the current situation alongside financialization is the digitization of the global economy. Although it is less than 50 years since the first IT giants Microsoft and Apple were founded, this industry has now conquered the entire planet. With the platform economy[2], it has spawned an entirely new branch of business that has spread like wildfire across the globe and usurped unprecedented market power.

What’s more, digitization has given IT giants a competitive advantage that has never existed before: By capturing the data and financial flows of other companies, they have insights into their innermost workings that no company before them has had. This information has not only given them an invaluable knowledge advantage over the rest of the economy, but has also historically changed the balance of power in the world. Whereas “money makes the world go round” used to apply, this change means that “money and data make the world go round” nowadays.

With BlackRock and Vanguard also still among the major shareholders of Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft, and themselves digitally merged with some of them (Aladdin was uploaded to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud in 2021), the digital-financial complex has created a corporate cartel that surpasses anything the world has ever seen in cartels and monopolies.

The impact of this development became apparent in the wake of the Corona Crisis starting in 2020. Nearly 200 governments, regardless of all other differences and controversies, enacted almost identical measures that brought historic gains to the digital-financial complex. Whether lockdowns, quarantines, homeschooling, home offices, the introduction of QR codes, or the rollback of cash — the beneficiaries of all restrictions were always the digital corporations and the asset managers behind them.

Not only did the power of the world-dominating cartel become clear during the Corona crisis, but also the way in which it  exercises this power. It has outsourced a large part of its power so that it can remain largely unrecognized in the background and pull the strings undisturbed. This has created a network of organizations with which it can exert pressure through a wide variety of channels, disseminate targeted information or even misinformation, and manipulate and direct the economy and society in its interests.

But who are these organizations that serve as tools for the cartel? Besides the transnational conglomerates, which are dominated by the digital-financial complex, it is first and foremost the central banks, who have been dependent on Aladdin’s data and thus on BlackRock since the world financial crisis. The top asset managers are now so powerful that they can move any market on earth in any direction they wish and therefore have the central banks completely in their hands. Should they make any decisions that the asset managers do not like, a short, deliberately induced crash of the financial markets would be enough to bring them back on track.

Governments can also be made compliant in this way. Greece provided a vivid example of this in 2015. When the austerity-critical Syriza party threatened to win the elections, the ECB unceremoniously cut the country o! from all financial flows — with the effect that, after the election, Syriza politicians did exactly the opposite of what they had promised the Greek people in the election campaign.

In addition to central banks and governments, the digital-financial complex has also subjugated academia, especially the world’s leading universities. A good example of this is provided by the US Johns Hopkins University, which produced the statistics during  the Corona crisis on the basis of which lockdowns and restrictions were decided. The most important institute of its medical faculty is the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, founded in 1916 with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation. Since 2001, it has been named after the IT billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who donated more than $3.5 billion to the school by 2022. 

Even international organizations such as the United Nations and several of its sub-organizations such as the children’s relief organization UNICEF or the World Health Organization WHO are by no means independent. They are largely dependent on private donors such as the international pharmaceutical industry, for example, which in turn is backed by the digital corporations and asset managers. Even global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cannot get around their power. This was also evident in the Corona crisis, when the granting of loans to various governments was linked to compliance with health rules that benefited the platform economy.

It is no different with the media. If you look at the shareholder structure of the major media groups, the same names always appear there, too. Even where they don’t appear, the digital-financial complex has its fingers in the pie. For example, the powerful Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by far the financially strongest in the world with assets of around 50 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, awards millions year after year worldwide for “good journalism”. In December 2018, for example, the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL received a donation of more than $2.5 million.[3]

The development of Gates’ foundation also reflects a trend that has played an increasingly important role in the global power structure over the past 20 years — the concealment of influence by the ultra-wealthy elite through the increasing use of foundations.

The general public still sees foundations as organizations through which particularly successful people want to give something of their wealth back to society out of gratitude. However, this view has little to do with their actual function. After all, modern foundation law came into being primarily to make it easier for wealthy people to avoid paying taxes.

In recent decades, this goal has been joined by another: direct influence on politics, the economy and society, bypassing parliamentary or other social structures, almost always dressed up as the benefaction of one or more philanthropists. The Open Society Foundations conglomerate of U.S. billionaire and major investor George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have been particularly prominent in this regard.

The WEF plays a special role here, because its example is an excellent illustration of how parliamentarism has been increasingly eroded and condemned to ineffectiveness in recent decades. Moreover, this story shows that the course of the world is increasingly determined by forces that are not elected by anyone and are often hardly known to the public. This example also illustrates in a frightening way the immense dangers of abusing power in times of rapid technological upheaval.

The world, especially with the support of the WEF, has reached a point where it is no longer just about political, economic or social change, but about the transformation of people themselves, about their fusion with the digital sphere, also called “biodigital convergence” or “transhumanism”.

This development is by no means in its infancy any more, but is already far advanced and is being pushed ahead at high speed behind the public’s back. Should it reach its goal, it would be no more and no less than the end of evolution and the dawn of an epoch in which the process of creation would be interfered with and the self-determination of man would be replaced by external control in the interest of a tiny elite.

This book is intended to help prevent such a development.

Chapter I: A Small Town on the Shores of Lake Geneva

If you drive north from Geneva along the shores of Lake Geneva, after a few kilometers you reach Cologny, one of the most beautiful communities in western Switzerland, home to about 5,000 people. The townscape is characterized above all by the historic facades of stylish country houses that the Geneva upper classes have built there since the end of the 17th century.

If you turn onto the Route de la Capite, which runs parallel to the waterfront promenade, after a few hundred meters you will see the stately Villa Diodati on your left, which is considered a kind of place of pilgrimage among fans of the horror genre. In its rooms, the then 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote the manuscript for her literary worldwide success Frankenstein in the cold summer of 1816.[4]

If you drive a little further straight ahead, you will come to a building opposite a golf course that doesn’t #t into the picture at all: a spacious cubist fat-roofed building with huge window fronts and terraced floors, whose contemporary architecture seems like a provocation compared to the old architectural style of the place.

The break in style has a symbolic character, because since 1998 it has been home to the headquarters of an organization that has undergone a historically unique development over the past 50 years and set new standards worldwide. The World Economic Forum (WEF), founded in 1971 by the German professor Klaus Schwab as the “European Management Forum”, has succeeded within a few decades in becoming one of the most important political and economic hubs of world affairs and thus one of the most significant power centers of our time.

Whether multinational corporations, governments, trade unions or NGOs — there is hardly an organization of significance in the leading industrialized nations and also in many emerging and developing countries whose leading personnel are not linked to the WEF in some way. Top politicians and corporate leaders from all continents have passed through the WEF’s two cadre workshops, the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow” and the “Young Global Leaders”, some 1,000 major corporations with billions in sales are among its international partners, and more than 10,000 ambitious young people under 30 are currently being networked and prepared for careers in the WEF’s spirit as part of the “Global Shapers”.

The annual highlight of the WEF’s activities is the yearly meeting held in Davos in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Usually about 2,500 business leaders travel to meet presidents, heads of government and representatives of the ultra-rich elite to discuss current issues and to agree and coordinate future strategies.

To this day the foundation is led by its founder Klaus Schwab, who still holds the reins firmly in his hands and who must also be considered one of the most important personalities in contemporary history, at least since the 1980s. But how did an unknown German professor manage to catapult himself to such unimaginable heights leading a Swiss foundation and becoming one of the key figures in world affairs? Does Klaus Schwab possess extraordinary abilities that others do not have? Or were there special historical circumstances that favored his rise? And if so — which ones?

These are precisely the questions that this book seeks to explore. On the one hand, it will shed light on Schwab’s background and personal activities, and on the other hand, it will try to uncover the social, economic and financial driving forces that made the historically unique rise of the WEF possible.

Chapter II: Klaus Schwab’s Background

Klaus Schwab was born in Ravensburg on March 30, 1938, the son of the German Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and his second wife, the Swiss Erika Schwab,[5] née Epprecht. Eugen Schwab, a trained mechanical engineer, had been appointed commercial director of the Ravensburg branch of the Swiss engineering and turbine company Escher Wyss, which he had previously managed in Zurich.

Escher Wyss, one of Switzerland’s largest exporters of industrial products after the First World War, ran into difficulties in the wake of the world economic crisis in the 1930s and struggled to survive. During this struggle, the Ravensburg plant headed by Eugen Schwab developed into an important pillar of the company as a whole, albeit under questionable auspices. As a military contractor, the company bene#ted from Hitler’s war preparations and, as the largest employer in Ravensburg, was awarded the title of “National Socialist Model Company” by the NSDAP. 

During the war, Escher Wyss helped the German Wehrmacht to produce war weapons and armaments, including manufacturing parts for German fighter planes and employing prisoners of war.[6]

Because of their German-Swiss origins, the Schwab family enjoyed the privilege of traveling back and forth between the two countries at any time during the war. After the end of the war, Eugen and Erika Schwab moved back to Switzerland with Klaus and his younger brother Urs Reiner. The family returned to Ravensburg a few years later, where Eugen Schwab was appointed president of the Ravensburg Chamber of Commerce.

Klaus Schwab attended The Spohn High School in Ravensburg from 1949. After graduating from high school, he studied mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich from 1958 to 1962 at the request of his father. In 1962, he graduated with an engineering degree. He then studied business administration at the University of Fribourg in western Switzerland, working part-time from 1963 to 1966 as assistant to the general director of the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) in Frankfurt. In 1965, he received his doctorate from the ETH Zurich with a dissertation on “Der längerfristige Exportkredit als betriebswirtschaftliches Problem des Maschinenbaus” (Long-term export credit as a business problem in mechanical engineering) and in 1967 from the University of Fribourg with a dissertation on “Ö!entliche Investitionen und wirtschaftliches Wachstum” (Public Investment and Economic Growth).

In 1966 and 1967, Schwab completed an academic year at Harvard Business School, from which he graduated with a Master of Public Administration (MPA). Here he met a number of personalities who were to have a major influence on the rest of his life. According to Schwab’s own statements, his professor Henry Kissinger, one of the key figures in world politics in the 1970s as U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, is one of the personalities who most influenced his thinking over the course of his life.

Hardly less important may have been two other Harvard professors: Kenneth Galbraith, world-famous economist, textbook author and advisor to several U.S. presidents; and Herman Kahn, cyberneticist, futurologist and, as a nuclear strategist, one of the  architects of the concept of “nuclear deterrence” developed during the Cold War. All three were to play a decisive role in the establishment of Schwab’s foundation in 1971.

In 1967, Schwab returned to Zurich and worked until 1970 as assistant to the chairman of the board of directors of Escher Wyss, the company his father had previously headed. Escher Wyss had again run into difficulties in the years before and, after unsuccessful cooperations with Brown Boveri and Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, was taken over by Winterthur-based Sulzer AG in 1966.

In the following three years, Schwab helped in a leading position to organize the complete merger with Sulzer. Here, some of his strengths became apparent, namely the early recognition of technological and market trends and their implementation in business practice. When he took up his post in 1967, he already predicted the importance of the use of computers in modern mechanical engineering. In the three years that followed, he put this insight to good use and ensured that the mechanical engineering company, renamed Sulzer Ltd, was developed into a modern technology group.

In 1969, he accepted a part-time professorship at the Centre d’Études Industrielles (CEI), an international management institute affiliated with the University of Geneva, which later became IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Chapter III: Three Decisions with Big Consequences

In 1970, Schwab made three decisions that would change his life from the ground up: He quit his job, completed a book, and prepared for a first major international conference. 

After quitting his permanent job, he set up a three-person office in Geneva. The first employee he hired was Hilde Stoll, whom he married the following year and who remains by his side to this day. In the same year, he completed a book entitled Moderne Unternehmensführung im Maschinenbau (Modern Management in Mechanical Engineering), which he had written at the request of his former employer, the German Engineering Federation (VDMA), and which was published in Frankfurt in 1971.

This book contains an important key to understanding Schwab’s great success. In it, he outlined the foundations of his political and economic philosophy and was one of the first to use the term stakeholder capitalism. Schwab thus deliberately set himself apart from the neoliberal concept of shareholder capitalism. For its most popular proponent at the time, Milton Friedman, the main goal of corporate managers should be to maximize earnings in order to increase returns for shareholders (Friedman Doctrine).

Schwab countered this provocatively cynical definition with his vision of a capitalism that should also be concerned with the interests and welfare of employees, customers, suppliers, the government, society as a whole and, beyond that, with protecting the environment. In doing so, however, it merely adopted the common critique of capitalism voiced mostly by the political left, without questioning the laws of the market, challenging the political order, or providing concrete instructions for action to achieve its goals. Basically, the ideology of stakeholder capitalism was and is nothing more than a wholehearted commitment to the market economy and to the existing political and social structures, combined with a (mostly ineffective) appeal to the conscience of entrepreneurs and politicians.

For the latter, however, Schwab’s ideology has a certain appeal: On the one hand, those who subscribe to it indicate that they are familiar with criticism and strive to act in a more socially acceptable way than the neoliberal competition. On the other hand, whenever they deviate from its principles, they can point to external constraints of an economic or political nature, and thus redeem themselves morally. In other words, the concept of stakeholder capitalism is a fig leaf behind which one can hide without having to fundamentally change one’s strategy.

Schwab’s main activity as an independent contractor in 1970 was to prepare and organize a conference to introduce top European managers to American management methods, and to do so on a large scale. His goal was to bring together several hundred CEOs with the leading faculty of European and U.S. business schools the following year.

Since Schwab was only 32 years old at the time, had just five years of professional experience, and could not boast an extraordinary success story, one wonders: Were these the fever dreams of a young man suffering from overconfidence?, or were there possibly influential forces supporting him in the background?

At least one such force is even confirmed by Klaus Schwab himself. According to his statements, there was a German industrialist  who lent him 50,000 francs for his project.[7] The fact that he made this loan to Schwab conditional on either repaying the money or joining his company suggests that the two were close. It is quite possible that the sponsor was Gottlieb Stoll, the founder of the Swabian company Festo and father of Schwab’s later wife Hilde.

But even 50,000 francs would certainly not have been enough to put Schwab’s plans into practice. So who were the other supporters? A look at the personnel and circumstances of the first conferences should provide the answer to this question.

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Table of Contents

Foreword 

Chapter I: A Small Town on the Shores of Lake Geneva 

Chapter II: Klaus Schwab’s Background 

Chapter III: Three Decisions with Big Consequences 

Chapter IV: Davos, 1971: The First Meeting 

Chapter V: 1972: The Second Meeting — under the Sign of Europe 

Chapter VI: 1973: Undeterred Ahead 

Chapter VII: The Economic and Political Background of the Early Years

Chapter VIII: 1974 — 1976: The Forum Gains Influence and Power 

Chapter IX: 1977 — 1980: The Breakthrough 

Chapter X: In the Background: Digitalization and Financialization Take their Course

Chapter XI: The First Half of the 1980s: Brick upon Brick 

Chapter XII: 1985 — 1988: Rise to the Political Olympus 

Chapter XIII: 1989 — 1990: The Final Disintegration of the Eastern Bloc

Chapter XIV: The 1990s — Digitalization and Financialization Pick up Speed 

Chapter XV: 1991 — 1992: The WEF Becomes a Cadre School for the Elite 

Chapter XVI: 1993 — 1995: Elected by No One, but more Influential Than Ever 

Chapter XVII: 1996 — 1998: The WEF Gradually Takes Over Global Leadership

Chapter XVIII: 1999 — 2000: Protests, Turn of the Millennium and a Foundation with Consequences 

Chapter XIX: 2001 — 2003: Terror and War as Economic Drivers

Chapter XX: 2004 — 2006: The Calm before the Storm

Chapter XXI: 2007 — 2008: The World Financial Crisis Changes Everything 

Chapter XXII: 2009 — 2011: Austerity at any Price 

Chapter XXIII: 2012 — 2014: Focus on Health, Climate and Ukraine 

Chapter XXIV: 2015 — 2017: Fourth Industrial Revolution and Transhumanism 

Chapter XXV: 2018 — 2019: The Financial System is Finished, What Now? 

Chapter XXVI: 2020: COVID-19 and the Great Reset 

Chapter XXVII: 2021 — 2022: “Creative Destruction” — up to War 

Chapter XXVIII: The WEF’s Vision of the Future: Authoritarian Regimes and Digital Central Bank Currencies … 131

Chapter XXIX: From EMF to WEF: From Lobbyism to Transhumanism 

Chapter XXX: 2023: Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence 

Bonus Chapter A: Strategic Partners

Bonus Chapter B: Young Global Leaders 

World Economic Forum: The Global Shadow Elite

by Ernst Wolff

Publisher: ‎ Clearsight Media (April 14, 2023)

Language: ‎ English

Paperback: ‎ 258 pages

ISBN-10: ‎ 1739777913

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1739777913

Click here to order.

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Ernst Wolff was born in China in 1950 and spent his childhood in Korea. After studying in Germany and the USA, he worked as an interpreter, language teacher and screenwriter. Since the 1990s, he has been working as a journalist on the relationship between politics and “nance. He has published numerous articles on this subject and written several non-fiction books (World Power IMF, Financial Tsunami and Wolf of Wall Street). With the highly acclaimed book World Power IMF he became an acknowledged bestselling author. With World Economic Forum he continues this success. His investigative research and detailed knowledge of the global monetary system make him one of the top authors in the fields of economics, “nance and political economy. Ernst Wolff runs his own info channels on YouTube, Telegram and Odysee and regularly reaches an audience of millions.

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*** 

A man has died following a shooting at a farm in Kenya that supplies flowers to British supermarkets.

A second man is understood to have been seriously injured.

The shooting happened at 2.30am today near Mount Kenya at Ibis Farm in Timau, which is operated by Flamingo Group.

It is the world’s largest rose grower and top supplier of premium flowers to UK supermarkets. 

Customers include Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, M&S, Waitrose and the Co-op.

A Flamingo spokesperson told Declassified: “A gang of around 20 people broke into Flamingo’s farm site in Kenya. Flamingo’s guards, who are all unarmed, were on duty at the time and alerted the police.

“Following the arrival of the police there were gunshots and the gang dispersed. Some time later, it became clear that a person beyond the boundary of the site had tragically passed away.

“We extend our sincere condolences to the family of the deceased. Our current priority is ensuring the safety of all personnel.”

Flamingo guards patrol with dogs but claim not to carry weapons and could have been overpowered by the intruders, who sometimes steal drip lines or plastic.

The deceased, who did not work for Flamingo, has been named as Kalulu Mutwiri, a married father of two young children.

Kalulu Mutwiri’s body was found 200m away from the farm at 9am. (Photo: Supplied)

Local people are furious that Mutwiri was shot dead, apparently at close range, rather than arrested.

Kelvin Kubai, a lawyer who lives in the area, accused those involved of “taking the law into their own hands”.

He told Declassified Mutwiri’s body bore signs of torture and had been dragged by a rope to a nearby river valley.

Kubai believes those responsible hoped heavy rainfall would wash away the body and cover up the death.

Instead police were called back after the body was discovered by community members 200m from the site at 9am, triggering a protest at the farm this morning by around a thousand local villagers.

The protesters demanded an explanation from farm management and some destroyed property inside the site, including setting fire to a tractor.

The situation remains volatile with the farm in shut down and all employees being evacuated.

Kenya’s police were asked to comment. At least one person has been arrested.

Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands (left) on a tour of Flamingo farms in Kenya as a trade minister in 2018. (Photo: UK Foreign Office)

Lorry crash

The dramatic scenes follow another incident there in December, when dozens of workers were injured after a lorry fell over.

Workers are bussed around the farm in the back of lorries that have no seats.

Between 68 and 136 workers were involved in the accident. Many suffered crush injuries and required hospital treatment.

One man, 28-year-old Samuel Sikuku, received a head injury and died from a blood clot between his skull and brain six weeks later, according to a post-mortem report filed with Kenya’s police.

It stated that Sikuku was “an employee at Flamingo” who was “injured in a motor vehicle accident”.

A pathologist found the cause of death were “complications of chronic subdural haematoma following head injury due to blunt force trauma” and high blood pressure.

The NHS website says “Head injuries that cause subdural haematomas are often severe, such as those from a car crash”.

A lorry carrying Flamingo workers fell over at a farm in Timau, Kenya, on 8 December 2022. (Photos: Supplied)

Pay gap

Flamingo, headquartered in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, posted annual post-tax profits of £50m and paid one of its directors annual remuneration worth £1m, according to the company’s most recent accounts.

Its workers in Kenya are expected to pick 1,500 roses a day. At peak times, like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, the daily target rises to 4,500 stems. 

Workers at Timau can be paid as little as £2 a day (365 Kenyan shillings). They receive a death in service payment of just £179 (27,000 shillings). 

Many of the workers injured in the accident were employed under one month contracts which were not renewed after the accident.

Kubai commented: “They take the thorns as Flamingo takes the roses.” 

In response to the lorry accident, a company spokesperson said: “Flamingo Horticulture takes the safety and wellbeing of all its employees extremely seriously. We strongly refute a number of the issues raised and would highlight our contribution to our employees and communities over 40 years of working in Kenya. 

“These include making material contributions, totalling more than £5,000,000 in Kenya, in areas such as education and healthcare. We also run a school feeding programme for local schools in the surrounding community in Nanyuki. We operate to high ethical standards and are subject to regular 3rd party audits from independent bodies.”

‘Ethical business’

Sikuku, who died in the latest incident, had worked at the Flamingo farm in Timau, near Mount Kenya, since 2014. 

When Declassified visited the area last year, we saw horticulture workers living in squalid conditions a 40 minute drive from the luxurious Lewa Wildlife Conservancy where Prince William spent his gap year.

Flamingo has previously faced criticism over its flower farms at Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, where nomadic Maasai herders were concerned over high water usage.

Flamingo’s farm at Timau was previously run by Scottish firm Finlays, which acquired much of their land in Kenya during colonial rule when indigenous communities were violently evicted by British settlers.

In February an undercover investigation by the BBC accused Finlays managers of sexually abusing women who work at its Kenyan tea plantations.

Flower pickers at Timau live in shanty towns. (Photo: Phil Miller / Declassified UK)

Large swathes of Kenya’s most fertile farmland are foreign owned, with some still controlled by the descendents of European settlers. 

After independence from Britain in 1963, some land was allocated to local communities. However, the area around Timau was pocketed by a corrupt Kenyan land minister, Jackson Angaine, who sold part of it to Finlays subsidiary Home Grown Kenya.

Last year Kenya’s National Land Commission ruled that some of the land grabbed by Angaine should be returned.

Conservative party chairman Greg Hands toured Flamingo farms in Kenya in 2018 when he was a trade minister, with the British high commission calling the company an “ethical business”.

This week Kenyan MP Francis Kuria Kimani said he suspected some multinational companies were using “large parcels of land across the country…without having to compensate the people of Kenya” and accused foreigners of receiving “preferential treatment”.

*

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Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo

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*** 

The mRNA and adenoviral DNA COVID-19 vaccine debacle in humans has set populations on edge, distrustful of poorly conceived genetic technology. Meanwhile the field has advanced considerably in veterinary medicine. While these shots may protect animals from pathogens over the short term, what are the implications for our food supply? Any of the genetic material transmissible to humans through consumption? Raw or cooked? These and other questions are coming up as more information is being brought forward.

Aida and colleagues have graphically summarized the genetic technologies in use as of 2021 in veterinary medicine. In the consumer meat category at present, only swine are of concern given the use of plasmid DNA, replication incompetent viral vector, and RNA replicon products. Do these technologies cause noninfectious diseases in the animals?

Can any of the genetic material survive denaturing during curing and cooking? How about pork intestines harvested for the production of heparin widely used in human medicine? It is conceivable that genetic incorporation of foreign RNA or DNA into humans and production of antigens for example, porcine endemic diarrhea or influenza A, could have untoward effects including autoimmunity similar to that with the COVID-19 vaccines?

Aida V, Pliasas VC, Neasham PJ, North JF, McWhorter KL, Glover SR, Kyriakis CS. Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines. Front Vet Sci. 2021 Apr 15;8:654289. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.654289. PMID: 33937377; PMCID: PMC8083957.

Now is a good time for veterinary and human medicine including the FDA and USDA, to come together and review the published studies of these new products on genetic transmissibility to humans and its potential implications. The Aida paper does not even mention the possibility of collateral impact to humans. One can see that developers, sponsors, and authors are blinded with infatuation for molecular biology and have lost sight of biological product safety in the food supply.

If you find “Courageous Discourse” enjoyable and useful to your endeavors, please subscribe as a paying or founder member to support our efforts in helping you engage in these discussions with family, friends, and your extended circles.

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Source

Aida V, Pliasas VC, Neasham PJ, North JF, McWhorter KL, Glover SR, Kyriakis CS. Novel Vaccine Technologies in Veterinary Medicine: A Herald to Human Medicine Vaccines. Front Vet Sci. 2021 Apr 15;8:654289. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.654289. PMID: 33937377; PMCID: PMC8083957.

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*** 

On 5 April 2023 the [U.K.] High Court handed down judgment in Adil v General Medical Council [2023] EWHC 797 (Admin). The case examined the extent to which a professional regulator can interfere with the right to freedom of expression of an individual subject to its regulation, as well as the circumstances in which the Court should accept challenges to decisions made by regulators in the performance of their duties. It is the first case decided by the [UK] High Court concerning anti-vaccination statements made by a doctor in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the actions of the General Medical Council (“GMC”) in response. 

Factual Background

Mr Adil is a consultant colorectal surgeon. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, he posted multiple videos on social media in which he, amongst other things, made statements to the effect that:

1. COVID-19 did not exist;
2. the pandemic was a conspiracy brought about by the United Kingdom, Israel and America; 
3. the pandemic was a scam which was being manipulated for the benefit of Bill Gates and pharmaceutical companies;
4. Bill Gates infected the entire world with COVID-19 in order to sell vaccines; and 
5. COVID-19 vaccines would be given to everyone, by force if necessary, and could potentially contain microchips that affect the human body.

In these videos Mr Adil made it known that he was a doctor working in the UK.

The GMC brought regulatory proceedings against Mr Adil on the basis that these statements:

1. undermined public health;
2. were contrary to widely accepted medical opinion; and/or 
3. undermined public confidence in the medical profession.

His case was heard by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal (“the Tribunal”) in June 2022. It found that the statements were made as alleged, that in doing so Mr Adil was guilty of misconduct which in turn gave rise to an impairment of his ability to practise medicine, and that a six-month immediate suspension of his registration was appropriate. 

Grounds of Appeal

Mr Adil appealed to the High Court. He advanced five grounds of appeal, which focussed primarily on whether the Tribunal’s decision was consistent with his right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The grounds can be summarised as follows:

Ground 1 was that the conclusions on misconduct and impairment were contrary to Article 10(1), ECHR because they represented an interference with his Article 10 rights that was not “prescribed by law”;

Ground 2 was that the conclusions on misconduct and impairment were a disproportionate interference with his Article 10 rights;

Grounds 3 and 4 were in effect further extensions of ground 2. Ground 3 was that the Tribunal was wrong to conclude that expressing views “outside widely accepted medical opinion” amounted to misconduct or provided a justification for interference with Mr Adil’s right to freedom of expression. Ground 4 was that there was no evidence to support the conclusion that his comments had damaged the reputation of the medical profession. This too, it was submitted, went to whether the conclusions of misconduct, impairment, and the penalty imposed were proportionate interferences with his ECHR rights.

Ground 5 was that the sanction of six months suspension from the medical register was wrong.

Applicable Law

Article 10(1) of the ECHR states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers

The right is qualified by Article 10(2), which makes express provision for interference with freedom of expression for the purpose of the protection of health:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health…

Judgment

The Court dismissed all 5 grounds of appeal and upheld both the Tribunal’s determinations and its sanction.

In respect of the first ground, the Court held that the provisions of “Good Medical Practice” (the GMC’s principal guidance document for doctors) were sufficient to satisfy the requirement that any interference with Mr Adil’s Article 10 rights be “prescribed by law”. Although the requirement for doctors to maintain public trust in the profession is framed by “Good Medical Practice” in quite general terms, it was nevertheless sufficient to reflect the body of obligations which attached to the profession and was capable of being readily understood by doctors so as to enable them to regulate their conduct. The Court held that it should have been reasonably foreseeable to Mr Adil that his actions would conflict with the professional standards set by the GMC.

In respect of the second, third and fourth grounds, the Court held that whilst the GMC’s sanction undeniably engaged Article 10, it was a proportionate interference with his freedom of expression. Mr Adil had identified himself as a doctor and then made comments which the Judge considered to be “outlandish”. In the circumstances, it was clearly open to the Tribunal to conclude that his comments undermined the protection of public health and would impair public trust in the profession. Having done so, it was a proportionate interference with Mr Adil’s Article 10 rights for the Tribunal to conclude that: (a) his broadcast amounted to misconduct; (b) that by reason of that misconduct his fitness to practise was impaired; and (c) that his registration should be suspended for six months.

As to the fifth ground of appeal, the question for the Court was whether the Tribunal’s sanction was “wrong”. In light of its conclusions in respect of grounds 1 to 4, the decision to impose an immediate suspension was clearly one which was open to the Tribunal. Accordingly, the final ground of appeal also failed. 

Comment

The Court recognised that in matters of professional regulation, the regulator has a particular expertise which the Court lacks as to how the reputation of the profession and the public interest is best protected. It follows that the Court should be slow to interfere with a regulator’s decision. In this case, given the nature of Mr Adil’s comments, the determinations and conclusions of the Tribunal were held to be clearly reasonable.

Nevertheless, the Court properly remarked upon the necessity of freedom of expression for medical professionals, and that this should not be constrained by any need for a doctor’s comments to fall within mainstream medical opinion. The Court recognised the interest in preserving the right of doctors to challenge medical orthodoxy, and the undesirable consequences if doing so placed a doctor at risk of professional sanction. 

Interestingly, the Court held that the enabling law for the purpose of satisfying the requirement that any interference with freedom of expression be “prescribed by law” was not statute passed by Parliament (in the form of the Medical Act 1983), but “Good Medical Practice”. It follows that where a regulator issues guidance or advice to a professional as to expected professional standards, the regulator should be cognizant that the Court may treat such guidance as “law” by which those professional standards are to be judged. Should this guidance later be shown to be insufficiently precise, a regulator’s actions may be held to be unlawful where they engage qualified rights conferred by the ECHR. Documents such as “Good Medical Practice” cannot therefore be treated merely as helpful guidance provided by a regulator to assist professionals in shaping their conduct, but have the potential to be treated by the Court as codes of conduct against which a professional’s standards should be judged. 

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Martin Forde KC acted for the General Medical Council, assisted by Thomas Hayes, the author of this piece.

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Up to a dozen previously undisclosed undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers were embedded in the crowds on Jan. 6—including one who admitted joining in protester chants to “stop the steal”—according to an April 10 court filing in the Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trial.

A motion for mistrial filed by defense attorney Roger Roots said the additional undercover officers bring the number of police, agents, and informants embedded in Jan. 6 crowds to at least 50.

He had filed an April 5 motion in the case that estimated the number to be 40.

Roots, who represents Proud Boys defendant Dominic Pezzola, asked U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly to declare a mistrial based on “numerous, repeated and yet-unfolding” instances where exculpatory evidence was withheld by federal prosecutors.

At an April 7 meeting with prosecutors, “the defense learned that there were at least 10 to 12 additional, previously unknown plainclothes MPD officers among the Proud Boys on Jan. 6,” Roots wrote.

“This brings the total number of informants among defendants on or around Jan. 6 to 50 or more,” he said. “And there are reasons to suspect the true number is higher.”

In his April 5 court filing, Roots said there were 19 confidential informants from an agency called HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) in the crowds on Jan. 6. That was in addition to eight FBI informants within the group.

Five members of the Proud Boys—Pezzola, Zachary Rehl, Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, and Ethan Nordean—have been on trial since December.

They are charged with seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct official proceedings, obstruction of official proceedings, conspiracy to prevent certain federal officers from performing their duties, and other Jan. 6 counts.

Prosecutors contend they conspired to attack the Capitol and disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress.

Tarrio, Rehl, Nordean, and Biggs face nine criminal counts related to the Capitol breach, and Pezzola is charged with 10.

Officer Joins in Protest Chants

Roots said the newly disclosed 10–12 MPD undercover officers were from the Narcotics and Special Investigation Division. They were in addition to previously reported undercover officers from the MPD Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU).

Prosecutors presented three of the undercover MPD officers for defense attorneys to interview, Roots said.

On April 7, investigator Nicholas Tomasula told defense attorneys his role on Jan. 6 was to record the crowds with his bodycam. He did not know if the other narcotics division undercover officers were also capturing video, the motion stated.

Roots said the defense has not been provided with Tomasula’s video.

“And he admitted he himself had been heard on video chanting, “Whose house? Our house!” and “Stop the steal!” Roots said.

“We still do not know the extent to which the crowd’s First Amendment demonstrations were transformed into violence by undercover law enforcement officers,” Roots said.

“The Tomasula bodycam videos may be the tip of a much larger iceberg.”

Tomasula told defense attorneys he had destroyed his iPhone, and all of his text messages—including some related to the Proud Boys—had been auto-deleted, the motion said.

“Tomasula indicated he would have immediately written reports of any violence, violent talk, or violent or insurrectionist plans among the Proud Boys or patriots but reported none,” he said.

“Such information would have been nice to have weeks ago when defendants were cross-examining government witnesses and developing their defense,” Roots said.

Prosecutors previously disclosed that a dozen ESU undercover officers were in the crowds taking videos and photographs, the motion said.

Those officers recorded protesters on the scaffolding on the west front of the Capitol, live-streamed video to MPD’s Joint Operations Command Center (JOCC), documented MPD’s attempts to hold police lines while being assaulted by the crowd, and filmed a Jan. 5 crowd that had taken an “aggressive stance” with MPD officers, according to a supplement filed with Roots’ motion.

DOJ Is Unaware

In its reply to Roots’ April 5 court filing, the U.S. Department of Justice said it is unaware of any Homeland Security Investigations unit that worked at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Defendant Pezzola does not identify the agency that runs the ‘Homeland Security Investigations’ unit, nor does he contend that this unit is closely aligned with the prosecution team,” read the response, signed by Jocelyn Ballantine, chief of the Complex Conspiracy Unit in the DOJ Capitol Siege Section.

“And, indeed, the government is aware of no involvement in Dominic Pezzola’s case by any unit so identified,” the response read.

A leaked video posted on Rumble on March 24 shows three undercover MPD officers engaging in provocateur behavior on Jan. 6, helping protesters climb over barriers, shouting pro-Trump slogans, and directing the crowd to proceed up the northwest stairs to the Capitol.

The actions of those officers were disclosed in court filings in another case by Jan. 6 defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas.

Pope has asked U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to lift the court seal on a video shot by one of the officers so the public can view it.

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Featured image: Outside during the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021 attack on the building (Licensed under Creative Commons)

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