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As the war in Ukraine stalls, or moves towards the possibility of a Chinese-brokered peace agreement that would conclusively prove the waning influence of US hegemony, the empire and its provinces seek to renew tensions with an old enemy.

The allegation that China attempted to interfere in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections is just the latest example of Sinophobic hysteria conjured up by the agencies whose actions remind us that the term ‘military intelligence’ is an oxymoron.

It was just a few weeks ago that the useful idiots of the American military industrial complex were demanding Canada boost defence spending in response to the apparent threat of Chinese spy balloons (Conservative MP Michael Chong thinks the balloon barrage warrants participation in an American-led ballistic missile defense program of dubious utility). The American military had not even proven the first balloon was in fact being used for espionage purposes when it dispatched fighter jets to shoot down several more objects (each with missiles costing $400,000 a piece), all of which are now believed to be weather balloons launched by hobbyists. Information about the first balloon, which was apparently retrieved by the US Navy, remains confidential. American and Canadian efforts to recover the other objects were suspended.

Meanwhile, we are told the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a leak from a Chinese laboratory. This conclusion was made with ‘low confidence’ and comes from new information which remains hidden from the public. The theory that was once popularized by Trump supporters and other conspiracy theorists is now being reported as plausible if not likely by those who had once rejected it. The idea that the virus leaked from a Chinese government lab is no more credible today than it was when far-right politicians and pundits were weaponizing uncertainty for personal gain at the start of the pandemic. But it certainly sounds sinister. Evoking the spectre of a ‘Chinese government lab’ conjures images, either of secret military bioweapons, or lax safety standards and subpar security. The truth of the matter is neither of these things: the Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of the safest laboratories in China, well-known among the global community of epidemiologists and virologists for its work studying coronaviruses, not to mention its collaborations with similar labs in Canada, the United States, and France. There is in fact no new evidence pointing towards the lab leak hypothesis. The likeliest answer is still that the virus made its way to humans through an intermediate host.

Continuing this trend of creeping Sinophobia, we are now expected to believe that China attempted to interfere in the last two federal elections, a claim whose evidence has been withheld from the public but apparently shared widely with the intelligence services of several other nations. The theory—and it is only a theory until much better evidence is made available to the public—suggests that China interfered in our election only enough to ensure Justin Trudeau would be re-elected prime minister, but without a majority government. Thus, the theory suggests, a nominally pro-Beijing leader (and, by extension, party) has been installed with the assistance of the People’s Republic, though without the power of the full confidence of the house or a full term in office.

Here’s where the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) bizarre conspiracy theory begins to fall apart: either we’re expected to believe Trudeau and his Liberal government is a benefit to China or it isn’t. The idea that China favoured the Liberals, but only enough to bring about an unstable minority government that would “keep Mr. Trudeau’s power in check” seems to be both inconsistent, if not inherently contradictory. It is a case of trying to make the actual (and unanticipated) outcomes of the federal elections fit a pre-conceived notion of Chinese interference.

In other words, it looks like CSIS is trying to make facts fit its predetermined conclusion, rather than drawing conclusions from the verifiable fact that two unpopular Conservative Party leaders failed to galvanize sufficient public support to win two separate federal elections, and that Trudeau’s uninspired record as prime minister was equally incapable of delivering him majority governments. It is remarkable to note that Canada has started its ‘election interference’ frenzy just as the Americans are beginning to come around to the reality that ‘Russiagate’ was always mostly nonsense. The Democrats lost the 2016 US election because they ran an unpopular candidate who campaigned poorly. Donald Trump didn’t need any assistance from Russia.

Reporting by the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase indicates CSIS believes there was a broad Chinese government-led operation designed to ensure a Trudeau minority government, and to further ensure certain Conservative candidates were defeated. This isn’t a new story, either. In November of 2022 Global News reporter Sam Cooper published an article in which unnamed CSIS agents alleged that as many as 11 federal candidates may have received funding or additional support from the Chinese government prior to the 2019 federal election and that federal candidates may be affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. They also claimed that the Chinese government had placed agents in the offices of MPs in order to influence policy, “co-opt and corrupt former Canadian officials to gain leverage in Ottawa” and “punish Canadian politicians whom the People’s Republic of China views as threats to its interests.” According to the report, CSIS made Trudeau aware of this as early as January of 2022, but the prime minister took no action. In the same report, Global indicates that while CSIS knows who these people are, the briefings delivered to the prime minister did not include their names. Global’s sources also weren’t able to confirm who had received these briefings, or the specific timing of when that information was shared.

Global’s sources indicate that, whatever intelligence CSIS has, it had not at that point drawn any conclusions about whether the alleged conspiracy had any impact on the 2019 federal election.

A look at the results of that vote seems to confirm this. If there was in fact a concerted effort by the Chinese government to influence the election in favour of the Liberals, it was a spectacular failure. Of the 20 seats lost by the Liberals, most were lost to Conservative candidates in parts of the country where the Chinese-Canadian population is not especially high, such as rural ridings in the Maritimes and southern Québec, or urban ridings in the major cities of the Prairies. According to the Globe and Mail report, CSIS agents allege that the operation focused on 11 mostly Liberal candidates in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The difference between the 2015 results and the 2019 results in the GTA were negligible for either party. But assuming this subterfuge actually helped turn the majority of the seats in favour of the Liberals, this wouldn’t have changed the ultimate result of the election.

The allegation is that, while China preferred Trudeau to lead, they didn’t want him to have the power of a majority government. According to CSIS, an unnamed Chinese consular official and an unspecified Chinese diplomatic mission in Canada said that Beijing “likes it when the parties in Parliament are fighting with each other, whereas if there is a majority, the party in power can easily implement policies that do not favour the PRC.”

This also appears to be a contradictory position. Trudeau is alleged to be both a friend to Beijing as well as someone who can’t be trusted with a majority government, as this could result in anti-Beijing policies. As to the bickering between parties, one might argue that this would be the status quo for any Canadian parliament (parties of differing political orientations in a first-past-the-post electoral system tend to aggressively compete with one another rather than form coalitions). But even here, if the aim of the subterfuge was to keep Trudeau in check and Canadian political parties bickering with one another, despite the incredible sophistication of this operation, how is it that the Chinese didn’t realize the possibility of some kind of Liberal-NDP agreement, such as that which keeps the Liberals in a de facto majority position to this day?

Moreover, how could anyone reasonably consider Justin Trudeau to be any friendlier to Beijing than whoever happens to be at the helm of the Conservative Party?

Remember, Canada’s relationship with China has depreciated during Trudeau’s time in office, not least because of the Meng Wenzhou affair, in which his government amply demonstrated it was all too willing to arrest a Chinese national at the behest of the Trump administration. Under Trudeau, Canada’s foreign policy has been materially the same as US policy towards China, and is generally no less Sinophobic.

The idea that China may be meddling in our democratic processes is not new. Back in the mid-1990s, RCMP and CSIS agents produced a joint report called Project Sidewinder that made many of the same allegations currently being peddled by anonymous CSIS agents. The report’s conclusions were dismissed by CSIS managers in 1997 as a “rumour-laced conspiracy theory with little factual evidence.” The idea that we’re threatened by a rising Asian power, and being undermined by Asian people, isn’t new either—these have been hallmarks of official and casual Canadian anti-Asian racism dating back to the 19th century. Most Canadians don’t realize, as an example, that people of Japanese descent were prohibited from voting, and required to carry identification cars, both before the Second World War, as well as after.

In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Umberto Eco outlined the 14 typical elements of fascist societies, one of which seems amply demonstrated by our present ‘China syndrome.’ Eco wrote that fascist societies portray their enemies as being simultaneously both strong and weak, and this is how China is depicted in the examples offered above. China is held up as having a sophisticated global surveillance network, but one that weakly relies on ‘spy balloons.’ It has a secret, state-of-the-art bioweapons program, but it is run by incompetents who accidentally released one of their less lethal pathogens sparking a global pandemic. Chinese agents have infiltrated our electoral processes and the inner sanctum of a major political party, yet they can’t influence favourable foreign policy or anticipate likely election outcomes. Eco further stipulates that an obsession with foreign plots to undermine the nation’s institutions (as well as a healthy dose of generalized xenophobia) is a hallmark of a society degrading into fascism.

Justin Trudeau has now announced two probes into allegations of Chinese election interference, proving that all that separates a likely lie from a plausible truth is how often the lie is repeated. The federal government will now waste precious resources investigating a mirage, a projection of our insecurities in a rapidly changing world, while bellicose forces within our society and politics use this as an opportunity to further their agendas.

Now is a good time to remember that CSIS (of forgotten briefcases in stadium parking lots fame) didn’t think the far-right occupation of Ottawa was a national security threat.

And that Eco’s warnings weren’t about a possible future, but of how things have been for a very long time.

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Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian from Montréal. In addition to writing regularly for Canadian Dimension, he contributes to the Toronto Star, Jacobin, Cult MTL, The Maple, DeSmog, and the Montréal Review of Books, among others. He holds an MA in Public History from Duquesne University and has worked on the restoration of playwright August Wilson’s childhood home. He is also a frequent contributor to the Canadian Encyclopedia, and once debated several Canadian prime ministers at once on matters of foreign policy.

Featured image: The flag of the People’s Republic of China files at the Embassy of China in Ottawa. Photo from Flickr.

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***

The Trilateral Commission’s 50th anniversary marks the culmination of its self-proclaimed “New International Economic Order”.  On March 12, the Trilateral Commission held its plenary meeting in New Delhi, India to discuss issues relating to globalization. Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Technetronic Era” has apparently officially arrived.

Amid the new world alliances that are forming as India and China seek to normalize relations and as China just brokered a relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the globalist narrative has opened a new, and possibly final, chapter. According to Nikkei Asia, one unnamed Trilateral Commission member addressed the plenary meeting and stated,

“Three decades of globalization — defined as integrated, free-market based and deflationary — has been replaced by what will be a multidecade period of globalization defined as fragmented, not-free-market-based but industrial-policy based and structurally inflationary. This year, 2023, is Year One of this new global order.”

This reflects Brzezinski’s early strategy to transform the world as he wrote in Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era:

“The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”

Welcome to the “new global order”.

The Trilateral Commission Gives The Signal To the WEF

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), stated in 2020, “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world”.  This followed my analysis that the so-called pandemic was Technocracy’s coup d’état that had been building up for over 45 years at the hands of the Trilateral Commission. In fact, I have argued consistently that the Commission’s original “New International Economic Order” was nothing more than Technocracy warmed over from the 1930s. It was Brzezinski’s Technetronic Era. It was the United Nations’ Sustainable Development. It was Biden’s Green New Deal – all one and the same and all strategized by members of the Trilateral Commission starting in 1973.

The WEF is thoroughly intertwined with the United Nations and vigorously promotes its Sustainable Development Goals. The WEF website states,

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented its fair share of challenges but has also offered opportunities. The World Economic Forum has assembled physical events for over 50 years, but we now have a unique opportunity to take the experience online.

As part of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit 2020, the World Economic Forum is experimenting with a 3D environment that allows spacial exploration of the Sustainable Development Goals, SDG-specific content discovery, and experiencing the ambience of a physical event from your computer. Watch the video below for a sneak peek of our exploration.

When Schwab says that the WEF is “reimagining the future”, he is flatly misleading. The future was already reimagined by early members of the Trilateral Commission such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Rockefeller, Richard Gardner and, Henry Kissinger (all founding members).

On June 3, 2020, Schwab wrote on the WEF blog,

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.

Now the Trilateral Commission, acting as quarterback, has relayed the call to the WEF that “This year, 2023, is Year One of this new global order.” In other words, pull out all the stops. The Great Reset has arrived. Execute the battle plan to terminate capitalism and free market economics.

What does this mean for 2023?

As I have written, we are already experiencing a “polycrisis of doom” where multiple crisis are descending upon us at the same time. There is a man-made energy crisis that is warring against coal, oil and natural gas. There is a man-made food crisis that is warring against all traditional food systems. There is a man-made financial crisis that threatens total collapse of the existing financial system. There is a man-made military conflict between Russia and Ukraine that threatens WWIII.

Any one of these pending crisis could be seen as a “scorched-earth” policy where total destruction is possible down the the ground level. If all four are unleashed at the same time, it would be the equivalent of atomic warfare resulting in a literal “dark winter”.  Such a collapsed world would then be ripe for total capture and rebuilding into Technocracy’s dystopia.

Don’t shrug your shoulders

It is unfortunate that hardly anyone has given any credence to the Trilateral Commission over the years. I will say pointedly that the first person to bust them was the late scholar and professor Antony C. Sutton, with whom I co-authored Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II between 1978-1981. Few paid attention back then, just as few pay attention today. We were mercilessly censored back then, just as I am censored today. Nevertheless, our work has stood the test of time and now the endgame is at hand.

If you feel like you are in the dark on this, now is the time to start reading and studying  Sutton’s and my combined works.

Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II are available here and here.

Each of my three books on Technocracy (available here and here) chronicle the Trilateral Commission’s role in creating this new order.

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Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.

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***

The International Criminal Court at the Hague has issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin of Russia. NPR reports that “The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes involving accusations that Russia has forcibly taken Ukrainian children.”

At the very same time that these charges are being launched against Putin, these stories about forcible taking of children in the US appeared in my newsfeed.

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Tributes have been paid to a young Irish cricket player who died days after being diagnosed with testicular cancer. (click here)

21-year-old Daniel Donnan was rushed to the Ulster Hospital where he was treated for a bleed to the brain, but medical tests revealed tumors which had already spread to his brain and lungs.

Testicular cancer in young athletes

What is going on?

When a “fact check” vigorously denies something, it is very often true. Sure enough, a fact check denying the link between COVID-19 vaccines and testicular cancer exists (click here).

The fact check says “there is no evidence” but admits: “Grain of Truth: Four football players from the German first league have got testicular cancer since the spring of 2022.”

Except it’s not just 4 German football players (one article claims it’s actually 14). It’s also rugby players, skiers, cricket players, etc.

It’s athletes as well as non-athletes:

Some cases are extremely rapidly progressive, like this one: “late stage less than 2 months from 2nd jab…spread everywhere”.

Or in the case of 21 year old Irish cricket player Daniel Donnan, only a few days from diagnosis to death.

Or the case of VAERS 1232833 – a 32 year old military man who developed testicular pain 4 days after 2nd Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA dose and 20 days later was diagnosed with testicular cancer with metastatic spread to retroperitoneal lymph nodes.

What is the link between COVID-19 vaccines & testicular cancer?

As an Oncologist, I ask how and why. Yes, the COVID-19 vaccine spike protein localizes to the testes, according to the Japanese Pfizer Organ bio-distribution study done with rats. But at 48hr, the ovaries get 40x more LNP-mRNA than testes.

Perhaps the more important point is that the mRNA continues to accumulate in the testes with time. How long and to what degree? We don’t know because Pfizer didn’t look beyond 48hr.

More physical activity means more blood flow, with more mRNA delivered to the heart as well as the testes. So if the myocarditis and sudden cardiac death don’t get you…

Truthfully, we have no idea what the COVID-19 vaccine mRNA does after it deposits in the testes, because Pfizer and Moderna did not conduct any carcinogenicity studies to verify safety.

Pfizer/BioNTech have a testicular cancer treatment ready

Coincidentally, Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine partner BioNTech received European approval for new testicular cancer treatment on June 23, 2022, just as testicular cancer cases exploded across the German Bundesliga (click here).

Interestingly, their novel treatment targets heavily pretreated patients with relapsed or refractory advanced testicular cancer. In other words, particularly aggressive (turbo?) testicular tumors that don’t respond to conventional treatment.

Again, it’s almost as if they knew.

My Take…

Wherever COVID-19 vaccine spike protein accumulates, we see a “spike” in cancers: bone marrow (leukemias), lymph nodes (lymphomas), liver, kidney, pancreas, ovaries, testes, breasts, colon, brain, spinal cord, thyroid gland and more.

There is undoubtedly a direct local effect by the vaccine spike protein on the tissues it accumulates in, this is not just a systemic effect of the mRNA circulating and affecting the overall immune system.

Oncologists cannot continue to turn a blind eye to these rapidly progressive cancers, or “turbo cancers” as they’ve come to be known. Sooner or later, doctors will have to face the reality that they may have recommended something unsafe to their patients that was catastrophically damaging to their bodies.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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When Australia – vassal be thy name – assumed responsibilities for not only throwing money at both US and British shipbuilders, lending up territory and naval facilities for war like a gambling drunk, and essentially asking its officials to commit seppuku for the Imperium, another task was given.  While the ditzy and dunderheaded wonders in Canberra would be acquiring submarines with nuclear propulsion technology, there would be that rather problematic issue of what to do with the waste.  “Yes,” said the obliging Australians, “we will deal with it.”

The Australian Defence Department has published a fact sheet on the matter, which, as all such fact sheets go, fudges the facts and sports a degree of misplaced optimism.  It promises a “sophisticated security and safety architecture” around the nuclear-powered submarine program, “building on our 70-year unblemished track record of operating nuclear facilities and conducting nuclear science activities.”

This record, which is rather more blemished than officials would care to admit, does not extend to the specific issues arising from maintaining a nuclear-powered submarine fleet and the high-level waste that would require shielding and cooling.  In the context of such a vessel, this would entail pulling out and disposing of the reactor once the submarine is decommissioned.

Australia’s experience, to date, only extends to the storage of low-level waste and intermediate-level waste arising from nuclear medicine and laboratory research, with the low-level variant being stored at over a hundred sites in the country.  That situation has been regarded as unsustainable and politically contentious.

The department admits that the storage and disposal of such waste and spent fuel will require necessary facilities and trained personnel, appropriate transport, interim and permanent storage facilities and “social license earned and sustained with local and regional communities.” But it also notes that the UK and the US “will assist Australia in developing this capability, leveraging Australia’s decades of safely and securely managing radioactive waste domestically”.

That’s mighty good of them to do so, given that both countries have failed to move beyond the problem of temporary storage.  In the UK, the issue of disposing waste from decommissioned nuclear submarines remains stuck in community consultation.  In the US, no option has emerged after the Obama administration killed off a repository program to store waste underneath Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.  The reasons for doing so, sulked Republicans at the time, were political rather than technical.

Where, then, will the facilities to store and dispose of such waste be located?  “Defence – working with relevant agencies including the Australian Radioactive Waste Agency – will undertake a review in 2023 to identify locations in the current or future Defence estate that could be suitable to store and dispose of intermediate-level waste and high-level waste, including spent fuel.”

The various state premiers are already suggesting that finding a site will be problematic.  Both Victoria and Western Australia are pointing fingers at South Australia as the logical option, while Queensland has declared that “under no circumstances” would it permit nuclear waste to be stored.  “I think the waste can go where all the jobs are going,” remarked Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.  “I don’t think that’s unreasonable, is it?”

Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, in furious agreement, suggested that a site “somewhere remote, somewhere with very good long-term geological structure that doesn’t change or move and somewhere that is defence lands” narrowed down the options.  “[T]hat’s why Woomera springs to mind.

South Australia’s Premier, Peter Malinauskas, insists that the waste should go “where it is in the nation’s interest to put it” and not be a matter of “some domestic political tit-for-tat, or some state-based parochial thing.”

When it comes to storing nuclear waste, parochialism is all but guaranteed.  The Australian government is already facing a legal challenge from traditional owners regarding a 2021 decision to locate a nuclear waste site at Kimba in South Australia.  The effort to find a site for the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility intended for low and intermediate radioactive waste produced by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation at Lucas Heights, New South Wales, took three decades.

According to members of the First Nations group opposing the decision, the proposed facility risks interfering with a sacred site for women.  Dawn Taylor, a Barngarla woman and Kimba resident, told the ABC that, “The Seven Sisters is through that area.”  She feared that the waste facility would end up “destroying” the stories associated with the dreaming.

The federal resources minister, Madeleine King, has stated with little conviction that a cultural heritage management plan “informed by the research of the Barngarla people” is in place.  “There are strict protocols around the work that is going on right now to make sure there is no disturbance of cultural heritage.”

Local farmers, including the consistently vocal Peter Woolford, are also opposed to the project.  “We just can’t understand why you would expose this great agricultural industry we have here in grain production to any potential risk at all by having a nuclear waste dump here.”

The Australian security establishment may well be glorifying in the moment of AUKUS, itself an insensibly parochial gesture of provocation and regional destabilisation, but agitated residents and irate state politicians are promising a good deal of sensible mischief.

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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 The Millennium Report

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First published on July 11, 2022

***

“The guilt for the mass murder is solely that of the political leaders….. I accuse the leaders of abusing my obedience. At that time obedience was demanded, just as in the future it will also be demanded of the subordinate. Obedience is commended as a virtue.”  —Adolph Eichmann, Nazi, at his trial

 

Early in the declared Covid19 Pandemic, America’s medical community —  and this included America’s pharmacies  —  coalesced around a system of outlawing medicines known to be effective, safe and inexpensive, notably ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine  In time, it became obvious that withholding early treatment was crucial for the pharmaceutical industry’s project to vaccinate the world against a claimed Covid19 virus.

Had the effectiveness of inexpensive and available medicines been widely seen, the pretext for ‘Emergency Use Authorization’ of a warpspeed-produced experimental product would have vaporized. With a trillion dollar global vaccination project at stake, that couldn’t be allowed, so the lies of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine being toxic were authoritatively enforced.  

The policy descended (and continues to descend) from administrative networks within the Department of Health and Human Services, (notably CDC and NIAID) to the states. These networks are part of, and fed by, an international complex involving the World Health Organization, itself under the control of international pharmaceutical interests focused primarily on vaccines, as well as on gene manipulations sold under the deceptive banner of “vaccine”.

This multi-pronged, vaccine-focused universe now includes research universities and medical schools, medical societies and fraudulent medical journals showcasing ghost-written “scientific” articles. A key player is the discipline of Public Health, a politicized field posing as objective science, enforcer of official narrative and hurler of the “misinformation” epithet at dissenters. And of course there is the compliant media. And money, endless rivers of it. 

At hospital level, commands from this complex flow through desk-bound administrators, with doctors and nurses induced to follow those commands for fear of losing needed hospital access. Failure to mind can even result in suspension of license to practice medicine. This control system extends to state medical boards under the umbrella of the Federation of State Medical Boards, the guidelines of which require practitioners to use treatments “… supported by the best available scientific evidence or prevailing scientific consensus”. But officially accepted “best available scientific evidence” is now so tightly controlled that one is literally forced toward the “prevailing scientific consensus”. 

The “consensus” referred to is a rigidly enforced story, and divergence from it is immediately attacked from all corners of officialdom as “misinformation”. A key branch of the army protecting the official, lie-riddled storyline has been the burgeoning fact-check industry, succinctly nailed by Dr. Bryan Ardis  “Fact checking is to divert you from the truth and take you back to the narrative you’re being sold worldwide.”

You doctors who have been obedient to an industry-inspired, governmentally-driven protocol have abdicated the doctor-patient relationship. And what is true for doctors in this respect applies to nurses as well. By withholding available treatments and sending sick people home; by injecting a trusting public with an experimental gene-altering technology that has potentially devastating long-range, even trans-generational impacts; by not seeing immediately the criminal idiocy of injecting children, for whom the claimed virus is known to be benign, you have made your patients de facto lab animals. 

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once wrote “The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.” The Covid19 Pandemic, set up as justification for a global project to inject humanity with a gene-altering death-dealing technology, is certainly monstrous enough to handicap anyone, at least for a time. It is murderous on a scale so immense as to be unbelievable on first exposure. And that alone may have posed too great a barrier for most of the multitude to even want to take a closer look. 

But you medical professionals cannot claim ignorance at this late date, when mere minutes of online search can reveal that outstanding medical figures all over the world have been struggling against censorship and mainstream media vomitings to expose the lie-riddled Covid19/“vaccine” project ( 1, 2, 3…) For their troubles, of course, they continue to be attacked by the media network long known to be rotten to the core. Has your choosing to be obedient within this long nightmare been simply to hold on to a job? Or have you just been too lazy to search out censored information? Or too uncaring? Or are you just stupid? Only you would know for sure. 

Josef Mengele, like yourselves, was a medical doctor. At Auschwitz concentration camp, his grisly medical experiments won him a place in history as Todesengel, “The Angel of Death”. He is supposed to have said “The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.” Does that seem familiar, and do your patients still trust you? In any case, you medics who have been so obedient to the vaccine industry’s merciless global project might want to get to know Dr. Mengele. There are even books on the man. After all, he was a soul mate of yours, as you have, eyes wide open, made yourselves, whether by omission or commission, his medical heirs. 

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Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Сви чланци Глобалног истраживања могу се читати на 51 језику тако што ћете активирати дугме Преведи веб локацију испод имена аутора.

Да бисте добили дневни билтен Глобал Ресеарцх-а (изабрани чланци), кликните овде.

Пратите нас на Инстаграму и Твиттеру и претплатите се на наш Телеграм канал. Слободно поново постављајте и делите чланке Глобалног истраживања.

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Београдски форум за свет равноправних подржава званични принципијелни став највиших државних институција да Србија не уводи било какве санкције Русији. Српски народ је 90-тих година прошлог века искусио најтеже неправедне санкције у новијој историји цивилизације чије нехумане последице и данас осећа. Зато, свакоме треба да буде јасно зашто Србија не жели да ишта слично искуси било који народ или земља.

Србија не може против воље свог народа да уводи санкције Русији само зато што је то у интересу водећих земаља Запада – чланица ЕУ и НАТО. Тако нешто не би ни најмање допринело окончању сукоба у Украјини али би свакако било велико понижење за Србију као стару европску државу која је своју принципијелност, моралну чврстину и приврженост миру, исказивала увек када је то било  најтеже за  човечанство, укључујући њен немерљив допринос победи над наци-фашизмом у Другом светском рату.

Санкције Запада против Русије нису засноване на међународном праву, нити их је усвојио Савет безбедности УН који је једино овлашћени орган за предузимање мера принуде. Зато су те санкције једностране и незаконите.

Србија је опредељена за мир дијалогом, правом, истим стандардима и отклањањем узрока сукоба. Санкције нису средство мира већ политике силе, конфорнтације и економско-социјалног изнуривања.

Санкције против Русије и поред огромних притисака њихових носилаца, није прихватило три четвртине чланица светске заједнице, међу којима су и све земље растуће економске и политичке моћи као што су Кина, Индија, Бразил, ЈАР, Египат, Сауди Арабија и многе друге, које су изабрале пут новог, мултиполараног свтског поретка заснованог на демократским принципима суверене равноправности, немешања и мирољубиве коегзистенције.

Србија као суверена, независна, војно неутрална и мирољубива нема традицију нити интереса да послушнички следи било чије дупле стандарде, захтеве, средства и методе који воде конфронтацији, глобалној економско-финансијско-социјалној кризи и продубљивању дестбилизације. Методе новог хладног рата, неоколонијализма и хегемонизма нису прихватљиве народу Србије као ни другим мирољубивим народима света.

Београдски форум сматра да све захтеве, притиске и претње Србији због неувођења санкција Русији треба окарактерисати као апсолутно неприхватљиво мешање у питања суверенитета и независности земље и одлучно одбити. Форум сматра да су циљеви нисилаца политике притисака и уцена: скретсање Србије са пута досадашње политике независности и слободног избора  спољно-политичких партнера; гурање Србије у сукоб са Русијом као сталном чланицом СБ УН,  традиционалним пријатељем, савезником у најтежим временима и стратешким партнером; сврставање Србије уз носиоце геострастратегије ширења НАТО на Исток, хегемонзма, и неокоолонијализма; понижавање Србије у очима партнера земаља Глобалног Југа, односно, несврстаних, посебно, оних земаља које нису признале једнострано, илегално отцепљење Приштине а које чине светску већину; сламање одбране суверенитета и територијалног интегритета у складу са Уставом, Повељом УН и резолуцијом СБ УН 1244 и предаја судбине земље у руке оних који су  одговорни сепаратизам, тероризам и злочиначку оружану агресију НАТО-а 1999., чију 24. годишњицу обележавамо управо ових дана.

Београдски Форум подсећа да су носиоци садашње политике притисака и уцена  ретко када у новијој историји показивали разумевање или поштовање животних интереса Србије и српског народа. Раздробљеност и обесправљеност српског народа и територија; стотине хиљада расељених којима су и данас ускраћена права на слободан и безбедан повратак;  десетине, ако не стотине милијарди долара или евра вредне отете имовине, економских и природних богатстава – тек су део сведочанстава о њиховим намерама, плановима  и мерило поузданости њихових обећања. У садашњим условима глобалних сучељавања њихова грамзива неоколонијална геополитика је толико огољена  – да је потпуно јасно да не постоје ни елементарни услови за принципијелно, праведно и одрживо решење питања статуса Покрајине Косово и Метохија.

Дијалог под окриљем ЕУ и обећање чланства у ЕУ су претворени у механизам за изнуђивање признања једностраног насилног отцепљења. «Нормализација односа Косова и Србије» је провидна скривалица Запада за «међусобно признање». Ултиматум „по моделу две Немачке“, у плашту „Предлога ЕУ, уз подршку САД“ представља покушај историјске преваре. Мирно и праведно и одрживо решење које уважава и мири интересе свих релевантних чинилаца није на видику.

Свако ко захтева  да се Србија удаљи од  било којег провереног пријатеља или савезника, да прихвати одговорност за сва зла на подручју бивше СФРЈ, да амнестира одговорне за агресију и сецесију, да одустане од захтева за слободан и безбедан повратак око 250.000 протераних Срба и других неалбанаца у њихове домове и на њихова имања, да одустане од поштовања резолуције СБ УН 1244 као једине основе и оквира за постизање праведног и одрживог решења Косову и Метохији – очекује, у ствари, да Србија днашњим и будућим генерацијама веже руке – што се не може прихватити. Београдски форум је најдубље уверен да су Устав Србије, међународно право и посебно резолуција СБ УН 1244, једина прихватљива и принципијелна основа и оквир за праведно и одрживо решење у интересу мира, стабилности и развоја.

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Живадин Йованович является президентом Белградского форума “За мир равных”. Он является постоянным автором Global Research.

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***

Liebe Mitbürger! Wir sehen, hören und lesen viel über die Probleme in der Welt, über die Folgen von so genannten Naturkatastrophen (Türkei und Syrien), über den Ukraine-Krieg, die vielen anderen Kriege und über pharmazeutische Verbrechen. Alle Ereignisse berühren unseren Lebensnerv. Was wir bei dieser Flut von negativen Nachrichten gerne übersehen, das sind Anzeichen, die darauf hindeuten, dass sich die Welt trotz anhaltender, noch ungelöster Probleme anscheinend langsam aber sicher zum Besseren verändert. Dadurch kommt Zuversicht auf, die den Glauben an eine lebenswertere Zukunft weckt. Sicher wird es einige Geduld erfordern, bis sich die positiven Veränderungen auch im persönlichen Leben jedes einzelnen Bürgers niederschlagen. Wenn wir jedoch an das Gute im Menschen glauben, werden wir uns nicht verlaufen im Labyrinth von Zukunftsängsten.

So bekam ich vor kurzem das Monatsheft des deutschen Kopp-Verlags ins Haus geschickt mit einer ganzseitigen Werbung für das neue Buch von Robert W. Malone: „Lügen, die mir meine Regierung erzählte und der Weg in eine bessere Zukunft. Mit einem Vorwort von Robert F. Kennedy jr.“ (1)

Weil so eine Werbung bis vor kurzem unvorstellbar war, fand sich ein Anlass, ohne Euphorie über weitere positive Ereignisse zu berichten.

Wahrheit die Ehre erweisen

„Was auch immer sie heute über ihn sagen, Malone wird als Held in die Geschichte eingehen.“ Dieses Zitat des US-amerikanischen Fernsehmoderators Tucker Carlson befindet sich zusammen mit einer Abbildung des neues Buches bereits auf der Titelseite der Broschüre.

Im Vorspann auf Seite 1 heißt es sodann:

„Als Medizinstudent und Doktorand erfand Robert Malone in den späten 1980er-Jahren als Erster die mRNA-Impfstofftechnologie. Damals konnte er sich nicht ansatzweise vorstellen, dass er einmal eine führende Rolle in einer Bewegung spielen würde, welche die Gefahren  von mRNA-Impfstoffen aufdeckt. Milliarden von Menschen wurden sie verabreicht – ohne über die Risiken zu informieren.“ (2)

Die Fortsetzung lautet:

„Dr. Robert Malone wurde von Big Tech zensiert und von den Medien diffamiert, weil er sich gegen die „Mainstream“-Berichterstattung aussprach. (…). Dr. Malone ist die maßgebliche Stimme der Andersdenkenden. Er zeigt die dunkle Seite der Corona-Agenda, er deckt die Rolle der Mainstream-Medien, Zensur, Propaganda und die schöne neue Welt des Transhumanismus auf, die vom Weltwirtschaftsforum und seinen Gefolgsleuten gefördert wird. Wie ist es möglich, dass sich die von den Regierungen verbreiteten Lügen hartnäckig halten und unsere Institutionen es versäumen, sie zu korrigieren? Welche Auswirkungen hatte die Corona-Politik auf Menschenleben, Existenzen und Demokratien?

Dr. Malone geht diesen Fragen auf den Grund und beweist, wie Daten, Nachrichten und Emotionen während der Pandemie bewusst verzerrt und manipuliert worden sind. Die Regierungen haben die Angst der Menschen absichtlich als Waffe eingesetzt, um deren Verhalten zu steuern. Die Medien verleumdeten jeden, der sich gegen die offizielle Darstellung wehrte und zu Wort meldete. Dr. Malone untersucht die perversen Verbindungen zwischen Pharmaindustrie, Regierungen und Medien und sagt uns, was wir dagegen tun können.“ (3)

Menschen erkennen zunehmend, dass sie genötigt sind, einander die Hände zu reichen, um zu überleben

Trotz vieler Rückfälle tastet sich die Menschheit mit instinktiver Sicherhheit immer weiter voran. Einmal heißt es „Du sollst nicht töten!“, ein andermal „Liebe deinen Nächsten!“ Gerade in Zeiten des Ukraine-Krieges und der vielen anderen Kriege und Ungerechtigkeiten sind das wichtige Einsichten.

So fordern nicht nur demonstrierende Bürger, sondern auch realistische Politker weltweit eine diplomatische Lösung des gegenwärtigen Ukraine-Krieges und eine Ablösung der unipolaren Welt des Hegemons, in der nur einer entscheiden kann, hin zu einer multipolaren Welt, in der viele gemeinsam entscheiden können (4).

Die unterschiedlichen Formen des Gemeinschaftsethos der Menschen streben unaufhaltsam vorwärts und haben das Ziel, eine einträchtige Menschheit zu schaffen. Die instinktive Sicherheit, mit der dies geschieht, scheint auf den Arterhaltungstrieb zurückzuführen zu sein.

Eine Veränderung der Welt zum Besseren zeigt sich auch in der Befreiung vieler afrikanischer Staaten aus den Fesseln eines Jahrhunderte währenden mörderischen Kolonialismus‘. So verkündet Frankreichs Präsident schon einmal die Beendigung der kolonialen „France-Afrique Era“ (5). Weitere europäische und US-amerikanische Kolonial-Epochen werden demnächst ebenfalls ein Ende finden.

Hierzu zählt auch, dass sich die kanadische Regierung unter ihrem derzeitigen Ministerpräsidenten bei den Ureinwohnern für den an ihnen begangenen Genozid entschuldigte (6). Eine Entschuldigung ist zwar nur der Beginn einer gerechten Wiedergutmachung dieses Menschheits-Verbrechen – aber ein erster Schritt. Die Indianer als Ureinwohner Amerikas werden diese Geste der kanadischen Regierung genau registriert haben und auf ein ähnliches Signal aus Washington warten (7).

Abschließend stellt sich die Frage, wie sich diese positive Veränderung der Welt zum Besseren auf das persönliche Leben der einzelnen Bürgerinnen und Bürger auswirken wird und warum dadurch der Glaube an eine lebenswertere Zukunft – vor allem für unsere Kinder und Kindeskinder – geweckt wird?

Was eben noch heute auf den Menschen lastet, ist der Mangel an sozialer Durchbildung. Noch leiden viele an der Fiktion der Macht und der Selbstherrlichkeit des Individuums. Deshalb wird auch das Gesetz verkannt, unter dem die Menschheit steht: dass die Menschen zusammenhalten müssen und genötigt sind, einander die Hände zu reichen. Der Kampf um die Erhaltung des Lebens wie auch die Probleme der Sicherung sowie des Fortschritts und der Anpassung können doch durch die Eintracht aller und die gegenseitige Hilfe am besten gelöst werden.

Das kulturelle Erbe ist leider immer bedroht und muß jeden Tag neu errungen werden. Die Kulturentwicklung besteht im Wesentlichen darin, dass sich die Stimme des Menschheitsgewissens mehr und mehr Gehör verschafft und daß der Geist der Verantwortlichkeit an die Stelle der Gewalttätigkeit und der Kriege tritt. Dafür gibt es untrügerische Anzeichen in der Welt.

*

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Dieser Artikel wurde ursprünglich auf NRhZ-ONLINE veröffentlicht.

Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Schul-Rektor, Erziehungswissenschaftler (Dr. paed.) und Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych.). Nach seinen Universitätsstudien wurde er wissenschaftlicher Lehrer (Professor) in der Erwachsenenbildung: unter anderem Leiter eines freien Schul-Modell-Versuchs und Fortbildner bayerischer Beratungslehrkräfte und Schulpsychologen. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. Bei einer Öffentlichen Anhörung zur Jugendkriminalität im Europa-Parlament war er Berichterstatter für Deutschland. In seinen Büchern und Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung sowie eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Für seine Verdienste um Serbien bekam er 2021 von den Universitäten Belgrad und Novi Sad den Republik-Preis „Kapitän Misa Anastasijevic“ verliehen.

Er schreibt regelmäßig für Global Research.

Noten

(1) www.kopp-verlag.de, Kopp Aktuell. Bücher, die ihnen die Augen öffnen. Titelseite. März 2023

(2) A. a. O., S. 1

(3) A. a. O.

(4) https://de.rt.com/kurzclips/video/164562-frankfurt-am-main-demonstranten-fordern-diplomatische-loesung/

(5) https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/humanitaere-lustbruecke-der-eu-macron-verspricht-mehr-hilfe-fuer-kongo-18724733.html

(6) https://www.oe24.at/welt/trudeau-entschuldigt-sich-bei-ureinwohnern/310394473

(7) https://www.nzz.ch/international/veruebten-die-usa-einen-genozid-an-den-indianern-ld.1631753?reduced=true

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 19, 2023

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“There is great chaos under heaven; [hence] the situation is excellent.” —Mao Zadong

With staunch US support, Pakistan’s unelected “imported government” is trying to arrest former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the most popular politician in the country, to prevent him from running in elections. But protesters are protecting him.

If 2022 was the year of popular uprisings in Pakistan, raising hope for protesters fed up with a thoroughly corrupt and repressive civil-military regime, 2023 seems to be the year when the government is trying every dirty trick in the book to kill that hope.

After a US-backed regime change operation removed elected Prime Minister Imran Khan from power in April 2022, Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon in the nation’s history: For the first time, a civilian politician who was ousted from power didn’t simply end up in the dustbin of history, alongside interchangeable corrupt politicians who for decades played musical chairs, competing to plunder the country.

On the contrary, what occurred were massive outpourings of support for Khan and widespread opposition to the ancien régime put in power by Washington’s mercenaries in the military high command.

The enormous popular rejection of the current “imported government”, as Khan calls it, has made Pakistan’s elites increasingly desperate. They want him eliminated.

Assassination was their first method of choice – but they fumbled. At a rally in November, a gunman shot Khan in the leg, injuring but failing to kill him.

In the meantime, Plan B is being implemented: Arrest Khan on bogus charges and disqualify him from politics forever.

The former prime minister has been relentlessly holding peaceful demonstrations, demanding elections. The government knows that Khan would easily win, so it wants to prevent him from running.

A Gallup poll in March found that Khan is by far the most popular politician in Pakistan, with a 61% approval rating, compared to 37% disapproval.

The current, unelected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has the complete opposite: a 32% approval rating, compared to 65% disapproval.

The figures are clear: Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis support Khan and oppose the unelected government.

Pakistan’s “imported government” orders the arrest of Imran Khan

Faced with its deep unpopularity, on March 8, Pakistan’s regime initiated Plan B.

Khan was leading a peaceful protest – one of the countless rallies he has organized since the April 2022 regime-change operation.

This time, massive state security forces went on a rampage and tried to arrest Khan. But they could not do it. Standing between them and Khan were tens of thousands of his supporters.

The only way to get to Khan would have been a bloodbath. This was avoided – although one Khan supporter was killed.

Then again, on March 13, Khan called for a rally in the city considered to be the heart of Pakistan: Lahore.

Despite the entire state security machinery targeting him and his supporters, the rally in Lahore was one of the biggest the city has seen.

Khan and the protesters marched confidently and peacefully in every corner of the city, where they seemed unstoppable, greeted with joy by ordinary Pakistanis of all walks of life.

The former prime minister was undeterred, committed to holding demonstrations in the provinces of the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), in the lead-up to what he hopes will be national elections.

On March 14, the regime escalated its crackdown. Police surrounded Khan’s house in Lahore and tried to arrest him.

In response, thousands of supporters gathered at Khan’s home, protecting him.

The police responded with extreme violence, wounding dozens of protesters.

From his house, Khan symbolically delivered a speech via video stream, sitting with the tear gas canisters that had been fired outside.

The regime tries to ban Khan from public life

Khan’s determination to relentlessly participate in mass mobilizations has led the regime to try to ban him from public life.

Even Western organizations that are often biased, such as Amnesty International, have condemned the unelected Pakistani government’s authoritarian tactics, which have included prohibiting all speeches and rallies by Khan, as well arresting people who criticize the military on Twitter.

There are two main factors preventing an all-out assault to arrest Khan: the wrath of the population that would ensue, and fear that significant ranks within the armed forces would revolt and turn their guns on their superiors, à la Vietnam.

Indeed, it has been because of Khan’s popularity not just among ordinary Pakistani civilians but within the military ranks as well that the former prime minister has survived so far.

Khan’s popularity among some parts of the army is easy to explain. Rank-and-file soldiers and the majority of the junior and mid-rank officer corps are not keen on Washington dictating a War on Terror 2.0. They have always appreciated Khan’s principled opposition, since day one, to any military solution to the militancy in Afghanistan and the northwest of Pakistan.

Throughout 2022, Khan’s political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI, the “Movement for Justice”), exponentially rose in popularity, in contrast to the all-too-visible political shenanigans of the coalition of feudal family dynasties and other corrupt forces in power.

If it is true that Khan mismanaged both political and economic governance while in power, then the current lot has engendered a virtual implosion and collapse in the country.

Khan challenges Pakistan’s pro-Western elites

It is difficult to overstate how incensed ordinary Pakistanis are with the political mafias, significant sections of the military top brass, and the chief mafia don: Washington.

One of the most disturbing aspects of what has been happening is the virtual connivance of liberal-left forces and the Pakistani deep state in attempting to eliminate Khan from the Pakistani political scene.

The visceral hatred of Khan by Pakistan’s comprador elites cannot be explained by simply having differences with Khan on various policies – something that Khan’s own critical supporters have as well.

No, for this elite class of the liberal, pro-Western Pakistani intelligentsia, Khan has committed the ultimate crime: socio-cultural class betrayal.

Khan lived abroad for so long during his impressive cricket career. He studied at Oxford, and speaks perfect English. Thus, Pakistan’s ‘Westoxicated’ elites thought that Khan would behave just like them.

Instead, Khan has rejected the condescending attitude that the country’s Western-educated elites show toward ordinary Pakistanis.

Khan has mobilized tens of millions because of his sincerity to reimagine a new Pakistan, prioritizing social justice and an independent foreign policy.

The fact that one small, sectarian leftist party or the other is not being given the credit of leading the revolt against the unpopular regime has made them neurotically envious of Khan.

It is clear for all to see: Khan and the critical supporters both in and outside of his political party have become the most dangerous threat to Pakistan’s status quo.

That is why we have seen very unusual and fast-paced meetings between US officials and Pakistan’s generals and regime officials: Washington’s “friends again”.

Elimination of Khan is absolutely necessary for the troika of these power centers: local comprador political elites, the military high command, and Washington.

Why? Because they know that Khan and his party will sweep any elections that are held.

US encourages Pakistan to “continue working with the IMF”

In the meantime, Pakistan is enduring a deep economic crisis. The country has nearly exhausted its foreign exchange reserves.

The regime is in talks with the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) to save itself from bankruptcy. All of the corresponding policies of austerity and taxing the poor – “structural adjustment” – are to be expected.

CIA officer turned US State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a press briefing on March 8 that Washington wants Pakistan to “continue working with the IMF” to impose “reforms that will improve Pakistan’s business environment”, in order to “make Pakistani businesses more attractive and competitive”.

In other words, the US State Department wants Pakistan to double down on neoliberal economic policies, such as lowering wages and cutting social spending.

If hated before, the current “imported government” is now despised more than ever.

Imran Khan’s independent foreign policy angers the mafia don in Washington

Khan’s foreign policy was anathema to Washington.

He refused to recognize apartheid Israel as a legitimate state.

He improved ties with Russia for straightforward reasons of economic necessity (as well as promoting the geostrategic stability in the broader Central Asian region).

Khan mended ties and cooperated with Iran, even praising its revolutionary “dignity.”

He strengthened ties with China.

At the same time, Khan repeatedly said he desired friendly relations with Washington, proposing that they work together in peacebuilding in Afghanistan and the wider region.

But these other foreign policy aims were utterly unacceptable to the mafia don, which seems to be set on a war path with Beijing (and others).

Pakistan has been a close ally of China since the 1960s. But Islamabad’s intense obsession with pleasing Washington is a flagrant slap in the face of Beijing.

The meetings that top Pakistani military officials, including the powerful Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, have held with officials in Washington and London are not being missed upon by Beijing or Moscow.

Though Pakistan is suffering through some of the worst economic woes in its history – thanks to the robber barons in power – the US still knows that the South Asian nation has one of the most formidable militaries in the world, and is a nuclear-powered country of 230 million.

Washington also knows that it can easily woo the military top brass by reminding them of how only the US and its weapons and fighter jets can allow Pakistan to stay apace with arch-rival India, trying to match its military supremacy in the region.

This is why the US is so keen on Pakistan participating in Joe Biden’s second “Summit for Democracy” in March 2023. (Despite the fact that Pakistan’s current government was not elected, and repeatedly resisted calls for holding a vote.)

As prime minister, Khan respectfully declined the invitation to the first summit in 2021, because he knew exactly what the intention was: A declining empire seeking to muster as many nations as it can to be a part of its “coalition of the willing” against official enemies like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

According to leaks by Pakistan’s own ambassador to the US (who has a soft spot for Khan), Washington wants to reestablish its old military base in Pakistan, which was closed down in 2011.

The US is also reportedly dictating to Pakistan which militant groups to go after and which ones should be left alone – such as the anti-China East Turkestan independence movement or the ISIS elements giving trouble to Beijing and the Taliban government in Kabul.

Most importantly, Washington wants to compel Islamabad to do everything possible to significantly reduce or halt any progress on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Moreover, Washington and the Persian Gulf monarchies are having a splendid time in convincing the new favorable military-civilian regime in Islamabad to undertake a political 180 that Khan would never agree to: gradually normalizing relations with Tel Aviv.

Nevertheless, what all of these power centers conspiring against Khan overlook is that they are dealing with a different Pakistani population now. The people’s political consciousness has exponentially risen with the ouster of Khan from power.

Hence, whether Khan is assassinated or somehow arrested or disqualified from politics, the powers-that-be might get a rude awakening, and be surprised that they are dealing with a new Pakistan, with or without Khan – one that will have zero tolerance for their venality, corruption, and subordination to Washington.

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Prof. Junaid S Ahmad teaches Religion and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan.

Featured image is from The Cradle

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***

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the US-led NATO invasion of Iraq, we repost this article published in July 2003 by Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitaker. 

The Bush administration initiated the war under the pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which both the US and UK governments knew to be false even prior to the invasion. 

After 20 years, Iraq is in shambles. The continued presence of US military in the country has only caused further suffering and hardship to the Iraqis.

The invasion should teach us lessons about America’s “war on terror” and “humanitarian efforts”.

The article below will remind us of 20 lies that were used to justify the illegal war.

-Global Research, March 19, 2023

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1 Iraq was responsible for the 11 September attacks

A supposed meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, leader of the 11 September hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence official was the main basis for this claim, but Czech intelligence later conceded that the Iraqi’s contact could not have been Atta. This did not stop the constant stream of assertions that Iraq was involved in 9/11, which was so successful that at one stage opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Americans believed the hand of Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks. Almost as many believed Iraqi hijackers were aboard the crashed airliners; in fact there were none.

2 Iraq and al-Qa’ida were working together

Persistent claims by US and British leaders that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in league with each other were contradicted by a leaked British Defence Intelligence Staff report, which said there were no current links between them. Mr Bin Laden’s “aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq”, it added.

Another strand to the claims was that al-Qa’ida members were being sheltered in Iraq, and had set up a poisons training camp. When US troops reached the camp, they found no chemical or biological traces.

3 Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a “reconstituted” nuclear weapons programme

The head of the CIA has now admitted that documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to import uranium from Niger in west Africa were forged, and that the claim should never have been in President Bush’s State of the Union address. Britain sticks by the claim, insisting it has “separate intelligence”. The Foreign Office conceded last week that this information is now “under review”.

4 Iraq was trying to import aluminium tubes to develop nuclear weapons

The US persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges.

5 Iraq still had vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons from the first Gulf War

Iraq possessed enough dangerous substances to kill the whole world, it was alleged more than once. It had pilotless aircraft which could be smuggled into the US and used to spray chemical and biological toxins. Experts pointed out that apart from mustard gas, Iraq never had the technology to produce materials with a shelf-life of 12 years, the time between the two wars. All such agents would have deteriorated to the point of uselessness years ago.

6 Iraq retained up to 20 missiles which could carry chemical or biological warheads, with a range which would threaten British forces in Cyprus

Apart from the fact that there has been no sign of these missiles since the invasion, Britain downplayed the risk of there being any such weapons in Iraq once the fighting began. It was also revealed that chemical protection equipment was removed from British bases in Cyprus last year, indicating that the Government did not take its own claims seriously.

7 Saddam Hussein had the wherewithal to develop smallpox

This allegation was made by the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in his address to the UN Security Council in February. The following month the UN said there was nothing to support it.

8 US and British claims were supported by the inspectors

According to Jack Straw, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix “pointed out” that Iraq had 10,000 litres of anthrax. Tony Blair said Iraq’s chemical, biological and “indeed the nuclear weapons programme” had been well documented by the UN. Mr Blix’s reply? “This is not the same as saying there are weapons of mass destruction,” he said last September. “If I had solid evidence that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction or were constructing such weapons, I would take it to the Security Council.” In May this year he added: “I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were not.”

9 Previous weapons inspections had failed

Tony Blair told this newspaper in March that the UN had “tried unsuccessfully for 12 years to get Saddam to disarm peacefully”. But in 1999 a Security Council panel concluded: “Although important elements still have to be resolved, the bulk of Iraq’s proscribed weapons programmes has been eliminated.” Mr Blair also claimed UN inspectors “found no trace at all of Saddam’s offensive biological weapons programme” until his son-in-law defected. In fact the UN got the regime to admit to its biological weapons programme more than a month before the defection.

10 Iraq was obstructing the inspectors

Britain’s February “dodgy dossier” claimed inspectors’ escorts were “trained to start long arguments” with other Iraqi officials while evidence was being hidden, and inspectors’ journeys were monitored and notified ahead to remove surprise. Dr Blix said in February that the UN had conducted more than 400 inspections, all without notice, covering more than 300 sites. “We note that access to sites has so far been without problems,” he said. : “In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew that the inspectors were coming.”

11 Iraq could deploy its weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes

This now-notorious claim was based on a single source, said to be a serving Iraqi military officer. This individual has not been produced since the war, but in any case Tony Blair contradicted the claim in April. He said Iraq had begun to conceal its weapons in May 2002, which meant that they could not have been used within 45 minutes.

12 The “dodgy dossier”

Mr Blair told the Commons in February, when the dossier was issued: “We issued further intelligence over the weekend about the infrastructure of concealment. It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports.” It soon emerged that most of it was cribbed without attribution from three articles on the internet. Last month Alastair Campbell took responsibility for the plagiarism committed by his staff, but stood by the dossier’s accuracy, even though it confused two Iraqi intelligence organisations, and said one moved to new headquarters in 1990, two years before it was created.

13 War would be easy

Public fears of war in the US and Britain were assuaged by assurances that oppressed Iraqis would welcome the invading forces; that “demolishing Saddam Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk”, in the words of Kenneth Adelman, a senior Pentagon official in two previous Republican administrations. Resistance was patchy, but stiffer than expected, mainly from irregular forces fighting in civilian clothes. “This wasn’t the enemy we war-gamed against,” one general complained.

14 Umm Qasr

The fall of Iraq’s southernmost city and only port was announced several times before Anglo-American forces gained full control – by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, and by Admiral Michael Boyce, chief of Britain’s defence staff. “Umm Qasr has been overwhelmed by the US Marines and is now in coalition hands,” the Admiral announced, somewhat prematurely.

15 Basra rebellion

Claims that the Shia Muslim population of Basra, Iraq’s second city, had risen against their oppressors were repeated for days, long after it became clear to those there that this was little more than wishful thinking. The defeat of a supposed breakout by Iraqi armour was also announced by military spokesman in no position to know the truth.

16 The “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch

Private Jessica Lynch’s “rescue” from a hospital in Nasiriya by American special forces was presented as the major “feel-good” story of the war. She was said to have fired back at Iraqi troops until her ammunition ran out, and was taken to hospital suffering bullet and stab wounds. It has since emerged that all her injuries were sustained in a vehicle crash, which left her incapable of firing any shot. Local medical staff had tried to return her to the Americans after Iraqi forces pulled out of the hospital, but the doctors had to turn back when US troops opened fire on them. The special forces encountered no resistance, but made sure the whole episode was filmed.

17 Troops would face chemical and biological weapons

As US forces approached Baghdad, there was a rash of reports that they would cross a “red line”, within which Republican Guard units were authorised to use chemical weapons. But Lieutenant General James Conway, the leading US marine general in Iraq, conceded afterwards that intelligence reports that chemical weapons had been deployed around Baghdad before the war were wrong.

“It was a surprise to me … that we have not uncovered weapons … in some of the forward dispersal sites,” he said. “We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they’re simply not there. We were simply wrong. Whether or not we’re wrong at the national level, I think still very much remains to be seen.”

18 Interrogation of scientists would yield the location of WMD

“I have got absolutely no doubt that those weapons are there … once we have the co-operation of the scientists and the experts, I have got no doubt that we will find them,” Tony Blair said in April. Numerous similar assurances were issued by other leading figures, who said interrogations would provide the WMD discoveries that searches had failed to supply. But almost all Iraq’s leading scientists are in custody, and claims that lingering fears of Saddam Hussein are stilling their tongues are beginning to wear thin.

19 Iraq’s oil money would go to Iraqis

Tony Blair complained in Parliament that “people falsely claim that we want to seize” Iraq’s oil revenues, adding that they should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people administered through the UN. Britain should seek a Security Council resolution that would affirm “the use of all oil revenues for the benefit of the Iraqi people”.

Instead Britain co-sponsored a Security Council resolution that gave the US and UK control over Iraq’s oil revenues. There is no UN-administered trust fund.

Far from “all oil revenues” being used for the Iraqi people, the resolution continues to make deductions from Iraq’s oil earnings to pay in compensation for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

20 WMD were found

After repeated false sightings, both Tony Blair and George Bush proclaimed on 30 May that two trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological laboratories. “We have already found two trailers, both of which we believe were used for the production of biological weapons,” said Mr Blair. Mr Bush went further: “Those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons – they’re wrong. We found them.” It is now almost certain that the vehicles were for the production of hydrogen for weather balloons, just as the Iraqis claimed – and that they were exported by Britain.

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The financial turmoil may be starting to wage war on the planet – all well-planned, of course – simultaneously, worldwide, like covid-clockwork. Financial chaos and banking disasters happen often over weekends when people are distracted. It is possible – not certain, just possible, and not surprising — if as of next week, there would be severe restrictions on withdrawing cash from bank accounts.

This may also be the opportunity to pave the way for the Powers that Be – not benevolent powers, as it were – to preparing the way for introducing Central Bank Digital Money (CBDC), at least starting in the Global North.

As people may begin smelling a rotting fish – or dozens of them – they may cause a run on the banks which would be Step One to a full financial collapse. Just a thought.

Closer to home, Credit Suisse (CS) is in deep trouble. As these lines are written, BlackRock is talking about takeover offers and so is Switzerland’s largest bank, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS).

Philipp Hildebrand, former President of the Swiss National Bank, Vice Chairman of BlackRock, is a member of the BlackRock’s Global Executive Committee. He also oversees the BlackRock Investment Institute.

Hildebrand would be in a prime position to assess CS’s viability and / or liability for a quick takeover. It would be a prestige-loss for Switzerland, seeing one of her flagship financial institutions in foreign hands. Albeit, a bank that has often taken unwarranted risks and was frequently involved in international financial scandals. But it could and can be rescued.

This would be the opportunity for the Swiss government to do something useful and people-oriented with CS.

After having pumped 50 billion Swiss francs (about 54 billion US-dollars) into CS yesterday, Friday 17 March, to salvage the bank, possibly to no avail, it would be a great occasion for the Swiss Government to take over CS even with the intent of “temporarily” nationalizing it for a later private sell off.

Even better would be taking over CS and converting it into a public bank. Switzerland used to have several public banks only half a century back – and they did a lot of good to the Swiss economy. Today, the only quasi-public bank left is Post-Finance, an institution originally attached to the Swiss postal services.

Post-Finance is a noble institution working for the people. Even though it acts like a bank, the Swiss banking oversight commission, FINMA, Switzerland’s independent financial-markets regulator, overseeing banks, insurance companies and other security dealers for some non-transparent reasons does not allow Post-Finance to call itself a bank.

A real public bank, with the financial and banking background of CS, could do wonders for the Swiss economy and for the Swiss public, especially with the projected – maybe – difficult economic times ahead.

In the US, the only public bank is the Bank of North Dakota (BND). It created miracles during the 2008 / 2010 financial crisis. In 2008, the beginning of the last financial break-down, North Dakota’s economy grew by 7.3% (Forbes), more than double the growth of most US States. One of the secrets was its public bank, BND.

As the world may be slithering into a difficult financial period, public banking could be a good way to confront disaster, alleviate the worst to the extent possible.

This applies to the world, and especially the Global North, or West, where a financial meltdown may begin – God forbid – as well as for Switzerland, fully integrated and at the center of the global banking system.

Credit Suisse – from private to public – a thought well worth pondering.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image: Credit Suisse, Paradeplatz in Zürich (Switzerland) (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky

Our thoughts today are with the people of Iraq, whose country was invaded twenty years on March 20, 2003. The destruction and loss of life is beyond description. More than a million deaths have been recorded. 

It is important to analyze the political justification of the invasion of Iraq which was presented to public opinion. The evidence is overwhelming. The justification to wage war on Iraq was based on fake intelligence. War crimes committed at the highest levels of government. 

Smoking Guns

The War narrative which unfolded with Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council was that Saddam possessed “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

The intelligence Dossier presented by Colin Powell to the UNSC emanating from Tony Blair’s cabinet was  fake, confirmed by Dr. Glen Rangwala 

See our earlier article:

Colin Powell and the “The Sloppy Dossier”: Plagiarism and “Fake Intelligence” Used to Justify the 2003 War on Iraq: Copied and Pasted from the Internet into an “Official” British Intel Report

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Glen Rangwala, March 18, 2023

 

The Assassination of Dr. David Kelly

Another important event, which occurred in the wake of the invasion was the assassination of Weapons Inspector Dr. David Kelly. 

Dr. David Kelly was Britain’s foremost expert on biological weapons, with direct access to WMD intelligence on Iraq. In the months leading up to his death, he had become increasingly skeptical regarding Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Dr. David Kelly was found dead on July 18th, 2003. The official position was that he had committed suicide as contained in the Lord Hutton report. 

Lord Hutton was confronted by Drs. Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox and  David Halpin, who courageously challenged the official narrative” presented by Lord Hutton on behalf of Tony Blair’s government.

See below the text of the medical doctors entitled “Response to Lord Hutton”. 

The Chronology 

According to  Yassmeen Radif, Matt Roberts and Harry Zacharias in a comprehensive report:

“The basis for this war had been laid out in two distinct dossiers [September 24, 2002 and the February 3, 2003 Dossier]”

The latter was published 2 days prior to Colin Powell’s presentation to the UNSC.

“When he began to raise concerns about the integrity of these documents, he would find himself caught in a political storm. Four months later, Kelly was dead.”

March 2002: Prime Minister Tony Blair commissions an Intelligence Dossier about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in four countries.

“…His evidence to the committee was that he had not said the things Gilligan had reported his source as saying, and members of the committee came to the conclusion that he had not been the source. Some of the questioning was very precise. The Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay, in particular, used a forceful tone in his cross-examination. … Kelly was deeply upset by his treatment before the Committee (Military History)

17th of July:

Kelly was working as usual at home in Oxfordshire. Media coverage of his public appearance two days before had led many of his friends to send him supportive emails, to which he was responding. …

At about 15:00, Kelly told his wife that he was going for a walk as he did every day. … His wife reported him missing shortly after midnight that night, and he was found early the next morning [18th of July 2023].” (Military History)

The evidence suggests that his alleged “Suicide” was staged.

See statements and analysis of Drs. Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox and David Halpin

The Hutton Report

More than two years later, on November 3, 2006, The Times published a letter by Lord Hutton, in which he attempted to defend his report on Dr. David Kelly’s death.  In the letter, Lord Hutton dwells on the issue of the allegedly “sexed up” intelligence, ignoring the arguably much larger issue of his failure to establish exactly how Dr. David Kelly died.

The inquiry purported to obviate the need for an inquest. Suicide was seemingly assumed from the outset by Lord Hutton, and the Hutton Inquiry descended into establishing who, between the BBC and the Government, was to blame for the suicide of Dr Kelly.  But, crucially, suicide was never proved, either by the Coroner or Lord Hutton, as required by law. 

Whether or not the intelligence was sexed up (itself a serious enough matter) was, as it turned  out, viewed as a side issue.  It was completely missed by the mainstream media that Lord Hutton, who seemingly assumed suicide from the outset, thereby undermining due process, laid himself open to charges of cover-up, by himself “sexing up” his own findings on the cause of Dr David Kelly’s death. 

But, a cover-up of what?  What was so important to hide that such an elaborate cover-up, if that is what it was, was deemed necessary, given the huge inherent risks? 

A response to Lord Hutton’s letter to The Times was hurriedly drafted and submitted to The Times by three distinguished doctors.  However, The Times refused to publish the letter, and declined to give a reason.

We bring to the attention of our readers the text of the letter which the Times refused to publish.

It is important to note that two of the authors of this letter, Drs. C. Stephen Frost and David Halpin (together with Dr Searle Sennett) succeeded in breaking the mainstream media silence on the possibility that Dr David Kelly did not commit suicide, by having a letter published in The Guardian on 27 January 2004 (see link in Annex), the eve of publication of the Hutton Report. 

The letter directly led to the splash headline “Was Dr Kelly Murdered?” in The Evening Standard later the same day, though the doctors had not suggested that. 

Later that evening, despite unprecedentd security to prevent such a leak, the Hutton Report was duly leaked to the Sun.  

Thus, instead of The Evening Standard headline becoming the main story in the mainstream media the next day (the very day on which the Hutton Report was published), the leak to The Sun became the main story. 

Lord Hutton and Tony Blair were said to be incensed by the leak, and an inquiry was immediately ordered to identify the source of the leak. 

Some months later, that inquiry’s report was quietly published and was hardly noticed; it said that it had not been possible to establish the source of the leak.  

Not surprisingly, many suspect that the source of the leak was none other than 10 Downing Street itself.  

The original three doctors were subsequently joined by other doctors, and lawyers, and, as a result, five more letters appeared in The Guardian in 2004, and one in The New Statesman (2 May 2005), just prior to the 2005 General Election.  

Below is the Response to Lord Hutton, by Drs. Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox and David Halpin

The original November 3 letter by Lord Hutton to the Times is reprinted in Annex, together with links (in chronological order) to the texts of the letters of Dr. Frost et al. published in The Guardian and The New Statesman. 

We remain indebted to Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox and David Halpin for having revealed the truth regarding Dr. David Kelly. 

Dr. David Kelly’s Legacy will Live.

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 28 November 2008, March 19, 2023

 

Response to Lord Hutton 

by

Drs. Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox and David Halpin

 

Dear Sir

Lord Hutton presided over an inquiry which sought to apportion blame between the BBC and the Government for the “suicide” of Dr David Kelly when no “verdict” of suicide had been (and still has not been) reached.  His report was widely labelled a “whitewash”, because he was perceived to apportion that blame unfairly (given the evidence he had heard), all but exonerating the Government, and placing the blame almost entirely on the BBC.  Now, in his letter published in the Times (3 November 2006), he seemingly seeks to defend his report by setting out his case re the minutiae of the “45 minute claim”.

Lord Hutton misses the essential point. What is more, it appears that he was used by the Government to subvert due process in establishing precisely how Dr Kelly died.

We and several other medical colleagues (and lawyers) attempted in a series of six letters published in The Guardian and one in the New Statesman to inform the public, and the mainstream press, that all doctors learn at medical school that, in order to return a “verdict” of “suicide”, a coroner must prove suicide beyond reasonable doubt (a very high level of proof), including  “intent” to commit suicide, also beyond reasonable doubt. If the Coroner cannot achieve the necessary level of proof, he is required by law to return an “open verdict”, assuming that “foul play” has at the outset been excluded in the proper manner.  Unfortunately, there is some doubt as to whether “foul play” was properly excluded in the case of Dr Kelly.

However, disregarding any such failure in such a high-profile death, it is important to understand that the public was invited to believe that Dr Kelly’s death would be better investigated at the Hutton Inquiry than at a coroner’s inquest, when the exact opposite was the case.

Lord Hutton possessed none of the powers normally available to the Coroner.  He could not (and did not) hear evidence under oath, he could not subpoena witnesses, he could not aggressively cross-examine witnesses, and he could not call a jury.  Not enough with that, his inquiry was an “ad hoc” inquiry, not a public inquiry (as the public and the press were led to believe) subject to the provisions of the Public Inquiries Act !921 (itself quietly repealed last year and replaced by the Inquiries Act 2005).  Lord Hutton was invited (and consented) by Lord Falconer (the Lord Chancellor and the Minister for Constitutional Affairs) to conduct an inquiry on the very day that Dr Kelly’s body was allegedly found.

Later, Lord Falconer, used his powers as Lord Chancellor to invoke Section 17a of the 1988 Coroners’ Act and order the Oxfordshire Coroner, Mr Nicholas Gardiner, to “adjourn indefinitely” his inquest.

But, Section 17a had become law on 1 January 2000, largely, it is believed, at the instigation of Lord Falconer.  Its purpose was allegedly to obviate duplication of inquiry following multiple death scenarios (eg train disasters), when the cause of death could to some extent be assumed.  But, Dr Kelly’s death was a solitary death.

In addition, Lord Hutton’s remit and powers (since it was an “ad hoc” inquiry) were determined by Lord Falconer.  Lord Hutton’s remit was extremely narrow (and Lord Hutton seemingly sought to narrow it further), and his powers were very limited, so limited in fact that Lord Hutton could not prove anything, let alone “suicide”.

After all, Lord Hutton was directed by Lord Falconer to do no more than “inquire into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly”, and it appears that establishing the cause of Dr Kelly’s death was not viewed as a priority.  But, the cause of the death should have been THE priority in an inquiry which eventually purported to obviate the need for a full inquest.

Despite all this, the Coroner, Mr Nicholas Gardiner, on 16 March 2004, thought fit to conclude that there was no “exceptional reason” for him to re-open the Inquest, and even deferred to Lord Falconer by saying that he (Lord Falconer) was happy with the findings of Lord Hutton, and then went on to say  “and so am I”.

Given the obvious “insuffiency of inquiry” re the cause of Kelly’s death over which Lord Hutton presided, he (the Coroner) should not have been sharing in Lord Falconer’s happiness.  In addition,  the Coroner was surely extremely unwise to talk to the Mail on Sunday some weeks before his final hearing in March 2004, saying that he wished to achieve “closure” at his coming hearing, and hinting at that stage that he could see no “exceptional reason” to re-open the Inquest.

Apparently, it is unprecedented for judges to discuss publicly their findings, as Lord Hutton has done, not once, but twice.  But, then, it is unprecedented for the Government to lead the public to believe that a “verdict” of suicide has been reached, and the Inquest “closed”, when no such verdict could be reached, and for that reason the Inquest could not be closed.

Dr David Kelly is the first British citizen to be denied an inquest in such circumstances.  Given the clear “insufficiency of inquiry”, regarding the cause of death over which Lord Hutton presided, the Coroner should have re-opened the Inquest.

There are unconfirmed reports that he (the Coroner) now regrets that he did not do so.  It is our view that if the Coroner is not able at this late stage to reverse his decision, a fresh inquest should be ordered.

 

Yours faithfully

C Stephen Frost,
BSc MB ChB Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (Stockholm, Sweden)

[email protected]

 
Christopher Burns-Cox,
MD FRCP
 
David Halpin,
FRCS

---

ANNEX:

Text of Lord Hutton’s Letter to The Times

Sexed-up means just what it says and no more

From Lord Hutton

The Times, London, 3 November 2006

Sir,

Your summary (report, Nov 1) of my report into the death of Dr David Kelly was too brief to give an entirely accurate description of my finding in respect of the alleged “sexing up” of the September 2002 dossier.

On May 29, 2003, Mr Andrew Gilligan, the BBC defence correspondent, reported (inter alia) on the Today programme the allegation that “the Government probably knew that that 45 figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in…Downing Street, our source says, a week before publication ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting and more facts to be discovered”.

He went on to say: “Our source says that the dossier, as it was finally published, made the intelligence services unhappy because, to quote the source, he said there was basically unhappiness because it didn’t reflect the considered view they were putting forward”.

In the evidence to my inquiry the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and four other members of the Joint Intelligence Committee stated that the dossier was issued with the full approval of that committee. There was no evidence that the very senior figures in British Intelligence who gave evidence to the inquiry had taken part in a conspiracy with the government to mislead the country by inserting intelligence in the dossier which was known or believed to be wrong. Therefore, I found that the allegation reported by the BBC that “the Government probably knew that the 45 figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in” was unfounded.

In paragraph 220 of the report I stated: “The term ‘sexed-up’ is a slang expression, the meaning of which lacks clarity in the context of a discussion of the dossier. It is capable of two different meanings. It could mean that the dossier was embellished with items of intelligence known or believed to be or unreliable to make the case against Saddam Hussein stronger, or it could mean that while the intelligence contained in the dossier was believed to be reliable, the dossier was drafted in such a way as to make the case against Saddam Hussein as strong as the intelligence contained in it permitted. If the term is used in this latter sense then, because of the drafting suggestions made by 10 Downing Street for the purpose of making a strong case against Saddam Hussein, it could be said that the Government ‘sexed-up’ the dossier. However, having regard to the other allegations contained in Mr Gilligan’s broadcasts of May 29 I consider that those who heard the broadcasts would have understood the allegation of ‘sexing-up’ to be used in the first sense which I have described, namely that the Government ordered that the dossier be embellished with false or unreliable items of intelligence…Therefore, in the context of Mr Gilligan’s broadcasts, I consider that the allegation that the Government ordered the dossier to be ‘sexed-up’ was unfounded.”

Brian Hutton

House of Lords

---

Links to Letters by Drs. C Stephen Frost, Christopher Burns-Cox,  David Halpin and Searle Sennett, et al.
in The Guardian and The New Statesman:

Our doubts about Dr Kelly’s suicide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1131833,00.html

Medical evidence does not support suicide by Kelly
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1146232,00.html

Questions still unanswered over Dr Kelly’s death
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,,1151352,00.html

Reopen the inquest into Kelly’s death
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,,1169514,00.html

New doubts over Kelly
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hutton/story/0,,1314212,00.html

Questions over Kelly
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,,1378539,00.html

Due process and the Kelly inquest
http://www.newstatesman.com/200505020027

 

 

This important article was first published by Global Research in February 2019.

Disclosure about 5G — and its considerable risk for humanity — is occurring within the United Nations. This is thanks to longtime UN staff member and whistle-blower Claire Edwards, who recently contacted me with this powerful story which touches all of humanity and our shared future. Watch the interview above, or on YouTube here or on Facebook here. – Josh del Sol Beaulieu

***

The first eight months of WWII with no fighting was called The Phoney War. Using millimetre waves as a fifth-generation or 5G wireless communications technology is a phoney war of another kind.

This phoney war is also silent, but this time shots are being fired – in the form of laser-like beams of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) from banks of thousands of tiny antennas^[1] – and almost no one in the firing line knows that they are being silently, seriously and irreparably injured.

In the first instance, 5G is likely to make people electro-hypersensitive (EHS).^[2] Perhaps it was sitting in front of two big computer screens for many of the 18 years I worked at the UN that made me EHS. When the UN Office at Vienna installed powerful WiFi and cellphone access points – designed to serve large, public areas – in narrow, metal-walled corridors throughout the Vienna International Centre in December 2015, I was ill continuously for seven months.

I did my best for two and a half years to alert the UN staff union, administration and medical service to the danger to the health of UN staff of EMR from these access points, but was ignored. That’s why, in May 2018, I took the issue to the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres[transcript]. He is a physicist and electrical engineer and lectured on telecommunications signals early in his career, yet asserted that he knew nothing about this. He undertook to ask the World Health Organization to look into it, but seven months later those public access points remain in place. I received no replies to my many follow-up emails.

As a result, I welcomed the opportunity to join the effort to publish an International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space because it was clear to me that, despite there having been 43 earlier scientific appeals, very few people understood the dangers of EMR. My experience as an editor could help ensure that a new 5G appeal, including the issue of beaming 5G from space, was clear, comprehensive, explanatory, and accessible to the non-scientist. The International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space is fully referenced, citing over a hundred scientific papers among the tens of thousands on the biological effects of EMR published over the last 80 years.^[3]

Having spent years editing UN documents dealing with space, I know that outer space is hotly contested geopolitically and any untoward event involving a military satellite risks triggering a catastrophic response.^[4] Space law is so inadequate – just one example is the complexity of space liability law^[5],[6] – that we could really call the Earth orbits a new Wild West. China caused international consternation in 2007 when it demonstrated an anti-satellite weapon by destroying its own satellite. Space debris is the main concern among space-faring nations, with a so-called Kessler syndrome positing a cascade of space debris that could make the Earth orbits unusable for a thousand years.^[7] Does launching 20,000+ commercial 5G satellites in such circumstances sound rational to you?

I live in Vienna, Austria, where the 5G rollout is suddenly upon us. Within the last five weeks, pre-5G has been officially announced at Vienna airport and 5G at the Rathausplatz, the main square in Vienna, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors to its Christmas market each December and skating rink each January, which are special treats for children. Along with birds and insects, children are the most vulnerable to 5G depredation because of their little bodies.^[8]

Friends and acquaintances and their children in Vienna are already reporting the classic symptoms of EMR poisoning:^[9] nosebleeds, headaches, eye pains, chest pains, nausea, fatigue, vomiting, tinnitus, dizziness, flu-like symptoms, and cardiac pain. They also report a tight band around the head; pressure on the top of the head; short, stabbing pains around the body; and buzzing internal organs. Other biological effects such as tumours and dementia usually take longer to manifest, but in the case of 5G, which has never been tested for health or safety, who knows?^[10]

Seemingly overnight a forest of 5G infrastructure has sprouted in Austria. In the space of three weeks one friend has gone from robust health to fleeing this country, where she has lived for 30 years. Each person experiences EMR differently. For her, it was extreme torture so she and I spent her last two nights in Austria sleeping in the woods. Interestingly, as she drove across southern Germany, she suffered torture even worse than in Austria, while in northern Germany she had no symptoms at all and felt completely normal, which suggests that there has been as yet no 5G rollout there.

There are no legal limits on exposure to EMR. Conveniently for the telecommunications industry, there are only non-legally enforceable guidelines such as those produced by the grandly named International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection, which turns out to be like the Wizard of Oz, just a tiny little NGO in Germany that appoints its own members, none of whom is a medical doctor or environmental expert.^[11]

Like the Wizard of Oz, ICNIRP seems to have magical powers. Its prestidigitation makes non-thermal (non-heating) effects of EMR exposure disappear into thin air, for taking into account the tens of thousands of research studies demonstrating the biological effects of EMR would invalidate its so-called safety guidelines.^[12] It has bewitched the International Telecommunication Union, part of the UN family, into recognizing these guidelines.^[13] And one little email sent to ICNIRP in October 2018 to submit Professor Martin Pall’s comments on ICNIRP’s new draft guidelines conjured up an immediate explosion of interest in the sender’s online presence – which had hitherto attracted none – from companies and individuals worldwide, one country’s immigration authorities, the office of the Austrian Chancellor (head of government), a firm of lawyers in Vienna and even Interpol!^[14],[15]

I hope that people read and share our Stop 5G Space Appeal to wake up themselves and others quickly and use it to take action themselves to stop 5G. Even eight short months of this 5G Phoney War could spell catastrophe for all life on Earth. Elon Musk is set to launch the first 4,425 5G satellites in June 2019 and “blanket” the Earth with 5G, in breach of countless international treaties. This could initiate the last great extinction, courtesy of the multi-trillion-US-dollar 5G, the biggest biological experiment and most heinous manifestation of hubris and greed in human history.10

People’s first reaction to the idea that 5G may be an existential threat to all life on Earth is usually disbelief and/or cognitive dissonance. Once they examine the facts, however, their second reaction is often terror. We need to transcend this in order to see 5G as an opportunity to empower ourselves, take responsibility and take action. We may have already lost 80 per cent of our insects to EMR in the last 20 years.^[16] Our trees risk being cut down by the millions in order to ensure continuous 5G signalling for self-driving cars, buses and trains.^[17] Are we going to stand by and see ourselves and our children irradiated, our food systems decimated, our natural surroundings destroyed?

Our newspapers are now casually popularizing the meme that human extinction would be a good thing,^[18],[19] but when the question becomes not rhetorical but real, when it’s your life, your child, your community, your environment that is under immediate threat, can you really subscribe to such a suggestion? If you don’t, please sign the Stop 5G Appeal and get active in contacting everyone you can think of who has the power to stop 5G, especially Elon Musk^[20] and the CEOs of all the other companies planning to launch 5G satellites, starting in just 20 weeks from now. Life on Earth needs your help now.

The transcript of my exchange with the UN Secretary-General of 14 May 2018 follows.

Staff member:Mr. Secretary-General

UN staff have repeatedly been told that they are the most important resource of this Organization.

Since December 2015, the staff here at the Vienna International Centre have been exposed to off-the-scale electromagnetic radiation from WiFi and mobile phone boosters installed on very low ceilings throughout the buildings. Current public exposure levels are at least one quintillion times (that’s 18 zeros) above natural background radiation according to Professor Olle Johansson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

The highly dangerous biological effects of EMFs have been documented by thousands of studies since 1932 indicating that we may be facing a global health catastrophe orders of magnitude worse than those caused by tobacco and asbestos.

Mr. Secretary-General, on the basis of the Precautionary Principle, I urge you to have these EMF-emitting devices removed immediately and to call a halt to any rollout of 5G at UN duty stations, because it is designed to deliver concentrated and focused electromagnetic radiation in excess of 100 times current levels in the same way as do directed energy weapons.

In line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, to “Protect, Respect and Remedy”, 5G technologies MUST be subjected to an independent health and safety assessment before they are launched anywhere in the world.

There is currently an international appeal (https://www.emfscientist.org/index. php/emf-scientist-appeal) signed by 237 EMF scientists from 41 nations urging the UN and particularly the WHO to exert strong leadership in fostering the development of more protective EMF guidelines, encouraging precautionary measures, and educating the public about health risks, particularly risk to children and fetal development.

Mr. Secretary-General, we have a unique opportunity here at the UN Office at Vienna. Since our medical records are digitized, you have the possibility of releasing data on a closed population exposed to off-the-scale levels of electromagnetic radiation to establish if there have already been abnormal health consequences for the UN staff here in the last 28 months.

I urge you to do so and stop any 5G rollout in these buildings immediately.

Thank you.

UN Secretary-General:Sorry, because you are talking to someone who is a little bit ignorant on these things. You’re talking about the WiFi systems?

Staff member:On the ceilings of these buildings, WiFi boosters and cell phone boosters were installed without consultation, without information to staff in December 2015. Now, if you understand electromagnetic radiation, the signal is – if you cannot get a signal from your mobile phone, the signal goes to maximum strength and that then bounces off metal walls affecting the body multiple times at maximum exposure levels. So the situation here is extremely dangerous. I have heard anecdotally of many people who have had health problems. I don’t know if they are related but the Precautionary Principle would dictate that we use our medical records to look into this and that we remove these dangerous devices immediately. Thank you.

UN Secretary-General:Well, I’m worried because I put those devices in my house. [Laughter & applause]

Staff member:Not a good idea!

UN Secretary-General: This I will have to – I confess my ignorance on this but I’m going to raise this with WHO [World Health Organization] – which I think is the organization that might be able to deal with it properly for them to put someone – their staff or organizations to work on that because I must confess I was not aware of that danger – [humorously] to the extent that I put those things in the rooms of my house – in the ceiling.

Staff member:I would suggest that everybody start looking into this issue and particularly into 5G, which 237 scientists from 41 countries consider a threat that is far worse than the tobacco and asbestos threats of the past.

UN Secretary-General:Well, maybe I have learned something completely new. I hope it will be very useful to me but I confess it is the first time I hear about it.

*

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This article was originally published on Take Back Your Power.

Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Delos, Peter. “The Way to a New Phased Array Radar Architecture.” TechTime: Electronics & Technology News. January 15, 2018. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://techtime.news/2018/01/ 15/analog-devices-phased-array-radar/. “Although there is a lot of discussion of massive MIMO and automotive radar, it should not be forgotten that most of the recent radar development and beamforming R&D has been in the defense industry, and it is now being adapted for commercial applications. While phased array and beamforming moved from R&D efforts to reality in the 2000s, a new wave of defense focused arrays are now expected, enabled by industrial technology offering solutions that were previously cost prohibitive.”

[2] “Electrosensitive Testimonials.” We Are The Evidence. 2018. Accessed January 1, 2019. http://wearetheevidence.org/adults-who-developed-electro-sensitivity/. “WATE intends to expose the suppressed epidemic of sickness, suffering and human rights crisis created by wireless technology radiation; elevate the voice of those injured; defend and secure their rights and compel society and governments to take corrective actions and inform the public of the harm.”

[3] Glaser, Lt. Z. “Cumulated Index to the Bibliography of Reported Biological Phenomena (‘effects’) and Clinical Manifestations Attributed to Microwave and Radio-frequency Radiation: Report, Supplements (no. 1-9).” BEMS Newsletter B-1 through B-464 (1984). Accessed January 1, 2019. http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Zory-Glasers-index.pdf. Lt. Zorach Glaser, PhD, catalogued 5,083 studies, books and conference reports for the US Navy through 1981.

[4] “Space Sustainability: A Practical Guide.” Secure World Foundation, 2014, 21. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://swfound.org/media/206289/swf_space_sustainability-a_practical_guide_2018__1.pdf.

“However, as more countries integrate space into their national military capabilities and rely on space-based information for national security, there is an increased chance that any interference (either actual or perceived) with satellites could spark or escalate tensions and conflict in space or on Earth. This is made all the more difficult by the challenge of determining the exact cause of a satellite malfunction: whether it was due to a space weather event, impact by space debris, unintentional interference, or deliberate act of aggression.”

[5] “Space Law: Liability for Space Debris.” Panish, Shea & Boyle LLP. 2018. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://www.aviationdisasterlaw.com/liability-for-space-debris/. “Filing a lawsuit against SpaceX for space debris is a little different than one against the commercial industry or state-sponsored launch. Since SpaceX is a private company, injured parties can file claims directly against the establishment in accord with the state’s personal injury laws. For the claim to be successful, the plaintiff will have to prove that SpaceX was negligent in some way that caused the space debris collision. Space law is notoriously complex, making it very difficult for injured parties to recover for [sic] their damages in California.”

[6] Von Der Dunk, Frans G. “Liability versus Responsibility in Space Law: Misconception or Misconstruction?” University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law: Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program Faculty Publications 21 (1992). Accessed January 1, 2019. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/spacelaw/21/?utm_source=digitalcommons.unl.edu/spacelaw/21&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages.

[7] Kessler, D. J., P. M. Landry, B. G. Cour-Palais, and R. E. Taylor. “Aerospace: Collision Avoidance in Space: Proliferating Payloads and Space Debris Prompt Action to Prevent Accidents.” IEEE Spectrum 17, no. 6 (1980): 37-41.

[8] Morgan, L. Lloyd, Santosh Kesari, and Devra Lee Davis. “Why Children Absorb More Microwave Radiation than Adults: The Consequences.” Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure 2, no. 4 (December 2014): 197-204. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/pii/S2213879X14000583. Highlights: (1) Children absorb more microwave radiation (MWR) than adults. (2) MWR is a Class 2B (possible) carcinogen. (3) The fetus is in greater danger than children from exposure to MWR. (4) The legal exposure limits have remained unchanged for decades. (5) Cellphone manuals warnings and the 20 cm rule for tablets/laptops violate the “normal operating position” regulation.

[9] Electro Hypersensitivity: Talking to Your Doctor. PDF. Canadian Initiative to Stop Wireless, Electric, and Electromagnetic Pollution. http://weepinitiative.org/talkingtoyourdoctor.pdf.

[10] FCC Chairman on 5G: “We won’t study it, regulate it, have standards for it.” Youtube. June 20, 2016. Accessed January 1, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwgwe01SIMc. Notes in video: Ultra-high frequency radiation (24 to 100 GHz or more); aimed and amplified signals; massive deployment of towers; worth billions; no standards, no testing; sharing with satellite and military operations; all areas (including rural areas) to be saturated with radiation; all local deployments to be fast-tracked; everything to be microchipped.

[11] Dariusz Leszczynski, PhD. “Is ICNIRP Reliable Enough to Dictate Meaning of Science to the Governmental Risk Regulators?” Between a Rock and a Hard Place (blog), April 8, 2018. Accessed January 2, 2019. https://betweenrockandhardplace.wordpress.com/type/gallery/. “The major problems of ICNIRP are: (1) it is a “private club” where members elect new members without need to justify selection; (2) lack of accountability before anyone; (3) lack of transparency of their activities; (4) complete lack of supervision of its activities; (5) skewed science evaluation because of the close similarity of the opinions of all members of the Main Commission and all of the other scientists selected as advisors to the Main Commission.”

[12] Matthes, Rüdiger. “EMF Safety Guidelines: The ICNIRP View.” International Telecommunications Union Workshop on Human Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields, May 9, 2013. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/climatechange/emf-1305/Documents/Presentations/s2part1p1-Rued igerMatthes.pdf.

[13] ITU Telecommunication Development Sector Study Group 2: Session on Modern Policies, Guidelines, Regulations and Assessments of Human Exposure to RF-EMF. Session 1: Recent Activities on Human Exposure to RF-EMF in ITU and ICNIRP, Geneva, Switzerland. October 10, 2018. Accessed January 2, 2019. www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Study-Groups/2018-2021/Pages/ meetings/session-Q7-2-oct18.aspx. “Session 1 will discuss some of the recent activities held in ITU and describe the latest updates to the ICNIRP (International Commission on Non‐Ionizing Radiation Protection) guidelines.”

[14] Martin L. Pall, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences, Washington State University. Response to 2018 ICNIRP Draft Guidelines and Appendices on Limiting Exposure to Time-Varying Electric, Magnetic and Electromagnetic Fields (100 KHz to 300 GHz). October 8, 2018. Accessed January 2, 2019. www.5gexposed.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FINAL-Martin-L-Pall-Response-to-2018-Draft-Guidelines-8.10.18.pdf.

[15] Cooperation Agreement Between The International Criminal Police Organization Interpol and The International Telecommunication Union. Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-18) Dubai 29 October–16 November 2018. Accessed January 2, 2019. https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/md/18/pp/c/S18-PP-C-0047!!MSW-E.docx. “2. In implementing the Agreement, each Party shall act within their respective areas of competence. More specifically, the implementation of the Agreement by ITU shall not exceed beyond its mandate pertaining to building confidence and security in the use of ICTs, in accordance to Plenipotentiary Conference Resolution 130 (Rev. Busan, 2014) and to its role on child online protection in accordance to Plenipotentiary Conference Resolution 179 (Rev. Busan, 2014), whereas the implementation of the Agreement by INTERPOL shall not exceed its mandate as defined by article 2 of its Constitution which include activities pertaining to cybercrime and online child exploitation”. (emphasis added)

[16] Hallmann C.A., M. Sorg and E. Jongejans. “More than 75 per cent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas.” PLOS One 12, no. 10 (2017): e0185809. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809&type=printable. Accessed January 1, 2019.

[17] Laville, Sandra. “Millions of Trees at Risk in Secretive Network Rail Felling Programme.” The Guardian, April 29, 2018. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/ apr/29/millions-of-trees-at-risk-in-secretive-network-rail-felling-programme.

[18] May, Todd. “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” The New York Times, December 17, 2018. Accessed January 1, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/human-extinction-climate-change.html.

[19] Davis, Nicola. “Falling total fertility rate should be welcomed, population expert says: figures showing declining birth rates are ‘cause for celebration’, not alarm.” The Guardian, December 26, 2018. Accessed January 3, 2019. www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/26/falling-total-fertility-rate-should-be-welcomed-population-expert-says.

[20] “Planet Earth: Worldwide 5G Radiation from Orbit?” Letter from Claus Scheingraber, Roland Wolff and others to Elon Musk. June 18, 2018. Brunnthal, Germany. “… We are sure that your satellite project is already at an advanced stage. But even if much money has been invested, one should consider that it is only a matter of time until the fact of damaging health potential of mobile communications – and especially of 5G-mobile communication – can no longer we overlooked. Therefore we emphatically recommend not to implement the satellite project.” (Letter in German) (Letter in English)

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

First published on September 17, 2021

Personal carbon allowances are being advanced in alignment with the goals of Agenda 2030, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)and the manmade climate change hoax. I have written about this hoax before in articles such as Good Hearts, Fooled Minds: Top 4 Fallacies of the Hijacked Environmental Movement where I have pointed out that humanity is indeed polluting the planet, but that such pollution has absolutely nothing to do with carbon dioxide or CO2, which is a gas of life. Since Operation Coronavirus is a natural outgrowth of the New World Order (NWO) agenda in general, it is to be expected that its pattern of deception would mimic other scams and hoaxes promoted by the cabal. There are many examples of this, but are 2 quick ones: check out the similarities between COVID and 9/11 (the 20th anniversary of which just recently passed), and between COVID and the manmade climate change scam. This article will explore the latter, especially the specific area of personal carbon allowances.

The Technocratic Idea of Carbon Credits

The idea of personal carbon allowances and carbon credits has been around a long time, and has its roots in technocracy, which can be defined as “a government or social system controlled by technicians, especially scientists and technical experts.”

The technocrats want to set up a system where the energy unit of society is under their control, and thus all people, naturally dependent upon energy, would also come under their control. In a way, we have such a system now, where money is energy and that form of energy is under the control of private central banks. But carbon credits take the idea way, way further. Imagine a world where everything people did – eat, drink, travel, use appliances, use electricity in any way, even breathe – was all tied to their personal carbon allowances. And imagine if all carbon credits were controlled and distributed by technocrats. Any dissident could then easily be cut out of the system at the flick of a switch, with devastating real life consequences.

Study Concludes Personal Carbon Allowances Could be Trialled in Climate-Conscious Nations

A study in Nature entitled Personal carbon allowances revisited, published August 16th 2021, analyzes how person carbon allowances could be used to achieve climate goals. To those familiar with the NWO agenda, ‘climate goals’ is an Orwellian term which basically translates to the creation of an artificial limit to human energy consumption (to fulfill the technocratic objective) and the creation of propaganda to make people think they are somehow saving the planet or helping the environment by going along with it. Here are a few quotes from the study:

“Here we discuss how personal carbon allowances (PCAs) could play a role in achieving ambitious climate mitigation targets. We argue that recent advances in AI for sustainable development, together with the need for a low-carbon recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, open a new window of opportunity for PCAs. Furthermore, we present design principles based on the Sustainable Development Goals for the future adoption of PCAs. We conclude that PCAs could be trialled in selected climate-conscious technologically advanced countries, mindful of potential issues around integration into the current policy mix, privacy concerns and distributional impacts.”

This is designed to dictate every little detail of your life:

“the allowance could cover around 40% of energy-related carbon emissions in high-income countries, encompassing individuals’ carbon emissions relating to travel, space heating, water heating and electricity. Allowances were envisioned to be deducted from the personal budget with every payment for transport fuel, home-heating fuels and electricity bills. People in shortage would be able to purchase additional units in the personal carbon market from those with excess to sell. New, more ambitious PCA proposals include economy-wide emissions, encompassing food, services and consumption-related carbon emissions, for example.”

This next quote lets the cat out of the bag. The whole point is that personal carbon allowances are about behavioral modification or behavioral change. This entire scheme is a psychological operationdesigned to change your actions. They want you to perform carbon budgeting which would mean, essentially, becoming OCD about your every act! There is yet another parallel with COVID, which has been encouraging people to be OCD about touching any surface or having human interaction:

“Building on this literature, PCAs are envisaged to deliver carbon-emissions-related behavioural change via three interlinked mechanisms: economic, cognitive and social. Similar to a carbon tax, a policy with which it is often compared, the economic mechanism of PCAs is envisaged to influence decision-making by assigning a visible carbon price to the purchase and use of fossil-fuel-based energy in the first instance, and possibly also to consumption-related emissions in more advanced PCA designs. However, in addition to the economic mechanism, PCAs aim to influence energy and consumption behaviour by increasing carbon visibility, by evoking users’ cognitive awareness of carbon in their daily routines and by encouraging carbon budgeting. Moreover, the shared goal of emissions reduction and the equal-per-capita allocation of PCAs is envisaged to create a social norm of low-carbon behaviour.”

It Worked for COVID, So Why Can’t It Work for Climate Change?

Here is same theme yet again, which goes something like this: it worked for COVID, so why can’t it work for climate change? If the NWO controllers can trick people and propagate mass fear over a bogus virus that has never been proven to exist, why not try the same thing over an imaginary impending carbon apocalypse?

“In particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on individuals for the sake of public health, and forms of individual accountability and responsibility that were unthinkable only one year before, have been adopted by millions of people. People may be more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations related to PCAs to achieve a safer climate and the many other benefits (for example, reduced air pollution and improved public health) associated with addressing the climate crisis. Other lessons that could be drawn relate to the public acceptance in some countries of additional surveillance and control in exchange for greater safety. For instance, in many countries, mobile apps designed for COVID-19 infection tracking and tracing played an important part in limiting the spread of the pandemic. The deployment and testing of such apps provide technology advances and insights for the design of future apps for tracking personal emissions.”

Introducing AI into the Decision-Making Process

Remember the creepy Google video The Selfish Ledger (my analysis here) which outlined a dystopian future where decision-making was surrendered to AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the ultimate act of social engineering? That’s also promoted right here:

“Finally, advances in digitalization and AI for sustainable development promise to shrink implementation costs and logistical challenges for PCAs … An ever-increasing number of decision-making tasks are being delegated to software systems, allowing the presentation of targeted personalized information to future users on their emissions patterns. The latest science on AI for learning, including the use of virtual agents, could help refine the type of information that users are shown to manage and reduce their carbon emissions. To the user, all of the above could be packaged in an easy-to-use smartphone app that presents tailored information and advice on personal carbon emissions and facilitates carbon savings.”

Personal Carbon Allowances: Final Thoughts

Some scams and hoaxes need an injection of new variants to keep the official fear narrative alive. We now have ISIS-K (sounds like a cereal) and the dreaded Delta variant and Mu variant. At some point, after all the new variants, vaccines, boosters and whatever else, the NWO controllers may find it is too difficult to keep up the pretense that there’s an imminent threat. They may then pivot to the decades-old concocted climate change threat and push for personal carbon allowances, riding on the back of COVID or other propaganda. The details of the scam du jour may change, but the patterns of manipulation remain the same. We must remember that the war on carbon is a war on life, since we are carbon-based creatures living in a world of carbon-based life. The dodgy or rather non-existent science behind the official COVID narrative is the same non-existent science behind the manmade climate change narrative. Don’t give up your freedom and rights or sell yourself short by confining your behavior to a carbon scheme that purports to save the environment when it does nothing of the sort.

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Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles, author of the book Cancer: The Lies, the Truth and the Solutions and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and Odysee/LBRY.

Sources

https://thefreedomarticles.com/hijacked-environmental-movement/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/9-11-covid-similarities-16-glaring-parallels/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/eerie-similarities-between-coronavirus-and-climate-change-hoaxes/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00756-w

https://thefreedomarticles.com/10-reasons-sars-cov-2-imaginary-digital-theoretical-virus/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/selfish-ledger-google-social-engineering/

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

MARZO 2003 – Vent’anni fa, il 20 marzo 2003, gli USA e la Coalizione sotto loro comando attaccavano e invadevano l’Iraq, accusato di possedere armi di distruzione di massa in base a “prove” poi risultate false. Lo stesso Segretario di Stato Colin Powell, che le aveva presentate al Consiglio di Sicurezza dell’ONU, sarà costretto anni dopo a definire il suo discorso del 2003 all’ONU una “macchia” sul suo curriculum. Il 20 marzo il presidente George Bush annunciava:

“Su mio ordine, le forze della coalizione hanno iniziato a colpire per minare la capacità di Saddam Hussein di condurre una guerra. Più di 35 Paesi stanno fornendo un supporto cruciale, fino al dispiegamento di unità da combattimento. Ogni nazione che fa parte di questa coalizione ha scelto di assumersi il dovere e condividere l’onore di servire la nostra difesa comune”.

Della coalizione sotto comando USA facevano parte 30.000 soldati italiani. Iniziava così la guerra che avrebbe ucciso oltre un milione di iracheni e sarebbe costata agli USA, insieme alla guerra iniziata in Afghanistan nel 2001, oltre 14.000 miliardi di dollari. Il fine strategico degli USA era quello di controllare non solo l’Iraq, ma l’intero Medio Oriente.

MARZO 2023 – “L’accordo tra Iran e Arabia Saudita mediato dalla Cina disegna un nuovo Medio Oriente”, scrive il Wall Street Journal, mentre il New York Times scrive:

“L’accordo tra i rivali regionali evidenzia la crescente importanza economica e politica della Cina in Medio Oriente e il declino dell’influenza americana”.

Incapaci di impedire il “declino” con strumenti politici ed economici, gli USA e i loro alleati ricorrono sempre più a quelli militari. In tale quadro rientra il “fondamentale accordo con Australia e Gran Bretagna”, annunciato dal presidente Biden. Esso prevede la costruzione di una nuova flotta di sottomarini da attacco nucleare realizzata da Stati Uniti, Gran Bretagna e Australia. In tal modo l’Australia diventerà di fatto la decima potenza nucleare con il compito di tenere sotto tiro la Cina. La nuova flotta da attacco nucleare opererà non solo nel Mar Cinese Meridionale e nel Pacifico, ma anche nell’Atlantico contro la Russia.

Manlio Dinucci

VIDEO :

 

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First published on May 12, 2021

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There are many conspiracy theories – some believe that reptilians are running the US government and others believe that Coca-Cola uses the blood of Christian babies to produce its soft drinks. There are people who have seen “chemtrails” and others who advocate wearing tinfoil hats when watching television to protect from destructive brainwashing waves. Often, the prophecies of Scripture are interpreted as a commentary on some technological discovery or event. But there are also rational facts that it doesn’t make sense to deny because they are documented. These include the existence of the Bilderberg club, the CIA’s MK-Ultra project, and George Soros’ funding of dubious political activities in a number of countries.

The case described below relates to an officially documented fact, although there is something rather biblical about it. Patent WO/2020/060606 was registered on 26 March 2020.

The patent application was filed by Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, headed by Bill Gates, back on 20 June 2019, and, on 22 April 2020, the patent was granted international status.

The title of the patent is

“Cryptocurrency system using body activity data”.

So, what is this invention that the people at Microsoft decided to patent? The abstract of the patent application online states:

“Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.”

In other words, a chip will be inserted into the body that monitors a person’s daily physical activity in return for cryptocurrency. If conditions are met, then the person receives certain bonuses that can be spent on something.

A detailed description of the “invention” provides 28 concepts for how the device could be used.

It also provides a list of countries for which the invention is intended. Essentially, this is all the members of the United Nations and a few regional organisations specified separately – the European Patent Office, the Eurasian Patent Organization, and two African intellectual property protection organisations.

Although inserting microchips into the body is nothing new – the Masonic Youth Child Identification Program has been in operation in the US for a while, and people calling themselves cyborgs exhibit various implants – Microsoft’s involvement is interesting. And why has the patent been given the code number 060606? Is it a coincidence or the deliberate choice of what is referred to in the Book of Revelation as the number of the beast?

Bill Gates’ name is constantly being mentioned these days in connection with his interests in pharmaceutical companies, vaccinations, and WHO funding. Although the globalist media try to highlight Bill Gates as a great philanthropist and protect him from attacks and criticism in every way possible, it is unlikely they’ll be able to conceal a whole web of connections.

Bill Gates’ company is involved in another project – the digital ID project ID2020 Alliance.

On the website’s homepage, it says that the project has been addressing the issue of digital rights since 2016.

In 2018, the Alliance worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Besides Microsoft, the Alliance includes the Rockefeller Foundation, the design studio IDEO.org (with offices in San Francisco and New York), the consulting firm Accenture, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – a company that actively promotes and distributes various vaccines around the world. The Secretariat for the Alliance is based in New York.

It is telling that Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance mostly covers countries in Africa and Asia. In Europe, the organisation is only active in Albania, Croatia, Moldova and Ukraine, and, in the Caucasus, in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance also has links with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF. These are all listed as founding partners!

Since February 2020, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has been focusing on the coronavirus pandemic. The organisation’s CEO is Dr Seth Berkley. Although the headquarters of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance are in Geneva, Berkley himself, an epidemiologist by training, is from New York. Since the late 1980s, he has spent eight years working at the Rockefeller Foundation and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also an advisory council member of the New York-based Acumen Fund.

So, yet another link has been found. Theological interpretations of the patent number are probably best left to experts on religion, but it is clear that there are strong links between organisations and companies like the Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft, the pharmaceutical lobby and the World Bank Group, not to mention secondary service providers.

They are trying to play the role of a supranational government by constantly focusing on the fact that, these days, national governments cannot cope with epidemics, illnesses, famines, etc. single-handed. But, as China has shown, they can.

The West cannot and does not want to acknowledge this, however, largely because it does not want to share power. So, the globalist media will continue their information campaigns, where the blame will be placed anywhere but on the West. It is telling that right now, as additional information on the coronavirus has started to emerge, false stories on China’s role in the epidemic have been stepped up and statistics manipulated.

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Leonid Savin is a geopolitical analyst,  founder and chief editor of Journal of Eurasian Affairs

Featured image is from OrientalReview.org

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Introductory Note

The Chinese document “US Hegemony and its Perils” just came out on 20 February 2023.

It is very important – and says:

“Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.

It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a “rules-based international order”.

The United States has been overriding truth with its power and trampling justice to serve self-interest. These unilateral, egoistic and regressive hegemonic practices have drawn growing, intense criticism and opposition from the international community.”

In five precise paragraphs, China analyses how the US exerts hegemony and abuse of global power in the fields of politics, military, economics, technology, and culture, media, social media as well as censorship.

The Chinese analysis is harsh but accurate – and China must be expected to act upon it.

Beware the timing. The Chinese paper comes exactly the day before Putin’s Federal Council speech and two days before Chinese top-diplomat Wang Yi’s visit to Moscow.

Introductory Note by Karsten Riise

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It should be noted that this text was released on February 20th, 2023, 4 days prior to the PRC’s statement entitled China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis

Below is the complete text of this important document entitled  US Hegemony and Its Perils released by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

 

Click here to read the full Document 

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Global Times

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***

Three years ago, on March 16, 2020, the NIH issued a press release titled NIH Clinical Trial of Investigational Vaccine for COVID-19 Begins. Though most Americans didn’t notice it at the time, it announced a project that was already the SOLE focus of the official pandemic response. In Chapter 4 of The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death, Dr. McCullough and I tell the story of this event and its link to the ruthless suppression of early treatment for COVID-19. If you find this chapter interesting, please consider ordering a copy of our book, which has earned over 1,000 5-Star ratings on Amazon.

***

On March 16—the same day that Elon Musk retweeted a reference to the Rigano-Todaro paper [on the efficacy of chloroquine in treating COVID-19]—the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that it was beginning a clinical trial of a new investigational vaccine at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) in Seattle.

The vaccine is called mRNA-1273 and was developed by NIAID scientists and their collaborators at the biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) supported the manufacturing of the vaccine candidate for the Phase 1 clinical trial.

“Finding a safe and effective vaccine to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2 is an urgent public health priority,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “This Phase 1 study, launched in record speed, is an important first step toward achieving that goal.” The investigational vaccine was developed using a genetic platform called mRNA (messenger RNA). The investigational vaccine directs the body’s cells to express a virus protein that it is hoped will elicit a robust immune response. The mRNA-1273 vaccine has shown promise in animal models, and this is the first trial to examine it in humans.

Scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and Moderna were able to quickly develop mRNA-1273 because of prior studies of related coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Coronaviruses are spherical and have spikes protruding from their surface, giving the particles a crown-like appearance. The spike binds to human cells, allowing the virus to gain entry. VRC and Moderna scientists already were working on an investigational MERS vaccine targeting the spike, which provided a head start for developing a vaccine candidate to protect against COVID-19. Once the genetic information of SARS-CoV-2 became available, the scientists quickly selected a sequence to express the stabilized spike protein of the virus in the existing mRNA platform.[i]

Record speed indeed. The causal agent of COVID-19 wasn’t known until Chinese researchers announced they’d identified it on January 7, 2020. A draft copy of the genome was made available to researchers on January 11, and the first reported U.S. case was on January 21 in Seattle.[ii] The WHO did not declare COVID-19 a pandemic until March 11—five days before NIAID and Moderna began their human clinical trial.[iii] Clearly this partnership had been developing their new mRNA vaccine technology against coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS for some time. According to Moderna’s website, the company had been working on mRNA technology for a decade, investing tens of millions in its development. Now it seemed they had an opportunity to deploy it on a global scale.[iv]

NIAID’s March 16, 2020 announcement not only reported a promising new vaccine technology to combat COVID-19, but also a declaration from Anthony Fauci—who assumed the countenance of the nation’s chief public health advisor—that the vaccine his institute had developed (and made a substantial investment in) was an urgent health priority. As long as no drugs were available to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 and prevent the COVID-19 illness it caused, the new vaccine was apparently mankind’s only hope, and therefore justified enormous resources for its development. Dr. Fauci did not mention in the announcement that the NIH (a government research funding institution) had not only invested in the vaccine for promoting public health, but also claimed to co-own the patent and therefore stood to share the royalties from its commercial exploitation.[v]

During the Event 201 Pandemic Simulation on October 19, 2019, several participants believed that a repurposed anti-viral medication was the best hope for immediately addressing the emergency because it would take at least a year to develop a vaccine. However, Dr. Timothy Evans drew his colleagues’ attention to the fact that CEPI—the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—was already working on a coronavirus vaccine. Now CEPI “supported the manufacturing of the vaccine candidate for the Phase 1 clinical trial.” This was the first step in executing the “Preliminary Business Plan” that CEPI published in November 2016.

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Notes

[i] NIAID. NIH Clinical Trial of Investigational Vaccine for COVID-19 Begins. March 16, 2020. https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/nih-clinical-trial-investigational-vaccine-covid-19-begins

[ii] CDC. First Travel-related Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Detected in United States. January 21, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p0121-novel-coronavirus-travel-case.html

[iii] CDC. CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline. https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html

[iv] Moderna. Our Story. https://www.modernatx.com/about-us/our-story?

[v] Tin, Alexander. Moderna offers NIH co-ownership of COVID vaccine patent amid dispute with government. CBS News, Nov. 15, 2021. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moderna-covid-vaccine-patent-dispute-national-institutes-health/

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

With foresight, this timely article was written by Peter Koenig almost six years ago in July 2017.

“Electronic Money” is currently on the One World Order agenda (OWO)

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Electronic money, a cashless society, is perhaps the ultimate and most direct means of the New World Order (NWO), also called One World Order (OWO), to control us all via its financial system. A system that the NWO would like to maintain as the world’s financial system, albeit, it has already been reduced to the western world’s financial system.

Why reduced to the Occident? – Because the Orient, China, Russia and the other countries belonging to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and to the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU) have already largely delinked themselves from the western dollar-based system of fraud. They are saved from slavehood.

This reminds of one of the oldest and world’s worst criminal agent against humanity – still alive and kicking – Henry Kissinger:

“Who controls food, controls the people; who controls energy controls entire continents; and who controls money controls the world.”

He is, of course, right on all fronts, and has given us this clue already more than 40 years ago. But nobody has really seriously taken it to heart and acted upon these edicts.

Many, including me, have written about freeing the world from the NWO money control.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/globalization-is-the-demise-of-humanity-towards-an-economy-of-peace-with-an-alternative-monetary-system/5545014.

Deglobalizing would be a first step towards freeing us all from the bloody claws of the Washington implemented, and Dark State directed NWO.

Critics often talk of an overhaul and reform of the system. This monetary system cannot be reformed. It is privately owned and rotten to the core. None of the private owners, the Rothschild, Rockefeller clans et al, would allow interfering with their wealth, usurped of the back of the world’s workers and populace at large. Former attempts (e.g. under JFK)  to bring the FED (Federal Reserve) under national reign, have resulted in failure.

Compare the dollar-based monetary system to the European Union – which cannot be reformed either. Any ‘reform’ is just fiddling at the margins – as is inherent in the term ‘reform’. And that’s not good enough. As we know by now, the EU was not the construct of Europeans, per se, but an idea behind the ‘deep state’, already at the onset of Phase II of the Great Hundred Year War (WWII – September 1939 to September 1945). Phase I (WWI – 1914 – 1918), as well as Phase II were induced to weaken Europe, to make her ready for full domination.

Imagine a ‘Picador’ of a Spanish bullfight, whose job it is to weaken the bull to the point where the torero and matador have a relatively easy task subduing and killing the bull. Well, Europe is the bull. They don’t want to kill Europe altogether, good old Lady Europe, because they need her as a stepping stone for subjugating the rest of the world, for vital trade that helps justifying and generating the unlimited dollar machine – and, as a cushion to the East, where massive military troops and weapons can be stationed in the name of NATO, to eventually launch, what they would like to think, is the final blow on the East, starting with Russia.

For all this the European (non)-Union was created, her Brussels hub, dominated by the non-elected European Commission (EC) which also dictates most of the rules imposed on her 28-member states – and which are all not-so-coincidentally run by neoliberal, some close to neofascist governments. Of course, by adhering to the Brussels dictate, they have become devoid of national sovereignty. That is a must. A sovereign country would not submit to the horrors of police state and militarization that are in the coming. The euro with the Wall Street (Goldman Sachs – GS) run European Central Bank (ECB) is just a logical add-on to the fake EU. By now, many serious scholars have concluded that neither the EU nor the euro are sustainable, but are doomed to collapse sooner or later.

The EU and the euro are a complex construct, largely manipulated and carried forward by the Dark State’s main secret services, CIA, NSA, Mossad, MI6 with close collaboration of Europe’s national secret services. Hence, the creation of a complete political and monetary vassal, the European Union and her currency, equally fraudulent as its master currency, the US-dollar.

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It is not by chance that today’s western US-dollar based monetary system, with its center, the Federal Reserve (FED), has been created just at the onset of Phase I of the Hundred Year war, i.e. WWI. In 1910, Rhode Island Senator, Nelson Aldrich, with his heart close to the world of bankers, organized a ”hunting trip” for five top Wall Street (WS) bankers to travel in disguise by train to Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, where they concocted in a few days the concept of the modern FED – which was to become the ‘mother’ of the new dollar-based world monetary system, now reduced to the western monetary system. The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in December 1913 by President Woodrow Wilson.

On his death bed, in 1924 Wilson apparently declared,

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

The FED, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS – also called the central bank of all central banks, manipulating gold prices and currency exchanges), as well as the related dollar-machine are totally privately owned. On top of the owner pyramid are the Rothschild and Rockefeller clans, et al. Henceforth, all international monetary transactions had to transit through a WS bank, be it in New York or London. This is the only reason why the US government, i.e. Washington and its dark handlers, are able to hand out economic and financial ‘sanctions’ as they please, to control those, who do not want to bend to their dictate.

‘Sanctions’ in terms of blocking trade with a Washington-destined country and punishing everyone who does not observe the sanctions, plus, confiscating a country’s foreign assets – are totally illegal before any international court. But there is no international court that is not bought by this sham monetary system. By the same token, this same deceitful banking-monetary scheme induced the last artificial economic ‘crisis’ 2007 / 2008 – and counting, allowing WS to launch a worldwide globalization of banking which de facto, puts worldwide private banking under the oppressive wings of the FED and WS. This, all the more as the World Trade Organization (WTO) a few years earlier made banking deregulation mandatory for any new WTO wannabe member.

How to get out of this slavery before we are totally locked into a system from where to escape may be nearly impossible? The solution sounds simple enough in theory, but of course is much more complex, as it confronts politics, which is controlled by the ‘dark deep state’ of the NWO, or the One World Order which more appropriately describes what we are faced with.

Nations and societies that want to get out of the killer-claws of those who control the NWO, have to start thinking out of the matrix – ‘deglobalizing and de-dollarizing’.

The first step is thinking in a new paradigm. Greece would have had an excellent opportunity to show the world how to become free of those abusive financial vultures, and regain her sovereignty. Hélas, Geece didn’t. She may have not been ‘allowed’ to do so. A huge dark killer sledgehammer was and still is hanging over the country.

“Local production, for local markets, with local money, and local public banking for the promotion of the local economy” is the name of the ‘simple game’.

Beyond this approach, trading between regional friends, culturally similar countries, ‘think-alike’ peoples’ nations, respecting each other’s comparative advantages, would be a normal next step. Trading would become again what the original meaning of the word says: An exchange of goods among equals, where, contrary to the current system, each trading partner is a winner. A good example, still in its infant steps, but progressing, is ALBA (Spanish acronym for Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America; “alba” also means appropriately “dawn” in Spanish). This alliance was launched by Venezuela and Cuba and today comprises some 11 Latin American countries, including Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and a number of small Caribbean nations.

The concept of ALBA could be replicated in many parts of the world. ALBA in many ways is a modern barter system which uses a virtual currency, the Sucre. The currency’s value is the weighted average of each member country’s economic output – plus the US-dollar. – Why the US dollar? I was told by one of the member country’s Minister of Finance that keeping the dollar in, would help avoid a massive boycott of the nascent system by Washington. We can only hope he is right. ALBA needs to gain more strength and new members.

Only half a century ago, this type of trading “within neighbors” was common, and it was OK. It was certainly more equal than today’s WTO-led and globalized trading system, where the ‘small’ – i.e. developing countries, always lose out, for the benefit of the domineering west. The US-creation of the expression “win-win situation” is certainly correct for any trade between a western industrialized country and a developing country following the rules of WTO. The “win-winner“ is always the west. And yet, most developing countries are eager to join the ‘club’, lest, they fear, they may become isolated trade-wise. Well, I am not sure. There are alternatives à la ALBA. Unfortunately, many of their ‘leaders’(sic), are buyable.

Stepping forward into the old system, may be unthinkable for today’s generation, as they have not known – and have been brainwashed to think that “Globalization is the best”.

With GREXT, local money and a new public banking system – detached from Wall Street and European BCE-linked banks, Greece would be already on a fast-track to recovery, regaining their strength as a sovereign proud economy, whose philosophers have, after all, offered the world the concept of ‘democracy’ some 2,500 years ago.

Local public banking is key. Just look at the Bank of North Dakota, a state owned public banking institutions which had kept North Dakota out of the 2007 / 2008 crisis. Except for Ellen Brown, President of the American Public Banking Institute, hardly anybody talks about this success story.

Why? – Because it runs counter to what the FED-WS dominated private banking system is doing. This private banking system is NOT working for the people, or for a country’s economy. It is working for private banking profit – and for the wealth of a few – and for eventually dominating the world’s financial system, so as to enslave the population, by totally controlling their financial resources, their livelihood. Case in point is that Germany’s private banks have made a profit of 1.34 billion euros on the Greek misery, just recently admitted by the German Minister of Finance.

That’s the deadlock we have to break. – How? With an ever more propaganda and lie-infested media that ever more controls the populace? – Imagine, the blood-dripping fangs that keep us hostage are not going to loosen their grip, come hell or high water. We, the People, have to break loose, peacefully, non-violently, by thoughtful actions. The deglobalization concept is akin to the concept of “Resistance Economy”.

We have to promote the concept of Resistance Economy by all means we have available; talking and writing about it to as wide an audience as possible; by having alternative media, like RT, Sputnik, TeleSur and others, promoting the idea; and by strongly and firmly always-always thinking that a drastic change is possible, that darkness doesn’t rule the world – that light can and will shine, if we, The People want it – we eventually may make a difference. What We, the People, are still missing is organization and solidarity. Against the dark state’s constant effort to divide to rule, an initiative in solidarity may move mountains, by steering the vessel from the shade into the sun. All is possible. Never give up.

And Light is Peace.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.  

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization

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First published on February 24, 2023

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According to Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum, ongoing global warming threatens to destroy humanity. Methane, coming from the belches and farts of cows, is a greenhouse gas (GHG). So, cows are a problem!

Fortunately, Bill Gates has a solution for us, explained in this video. We need to stop growing cattle and switch to lab-grown synthetic beef.

The World Economic Forum expects we will eat “synthetic meat” in 16 years. (the article below was written 4 years ago)

Bill Gates made sizable investments in “synthetic meat” manufacturers, expecting to turn a nice profit.

The CNBC article explains that “lab-grown meat,” that is, cell cultures grown in giant stainless vats, is not the same as “fake meat” made of soy or pea protein:

Vegetarians have long touted the ethical and environmental problems with meat production and consumption. Start-ups such as MosaMeat, JUST and Memphis Meats are tissue-engineering meat in a lab to allow people to enjoy being a carnivore without any of the environmental or ethical hang-ups.

Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from “fake meat,” like the soy protein “chicken” you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal.

Okay, but what kinds of cells is that lab meat grown from?

Lab-Grown “Meat” is Made of “Immortalized” Cancer Cells

This excellent Bloomberg article (paywall-free link) clarifies that all lab meat is grown as immortalized tumor cells. As the article explains, these same cells are used to produce traditional vaccines.

Thank the biotech revolution. Under the right conditions, animal cells can be grown in a petri dish, or even at scale in factories full of stainless-steel drums. For decades, companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnsonhave cultured large volumes of cells to produce vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other biotherapeutics. Now the idea is that we might as well eat these cells, too.

What are these cells?

The big honking asterisk is that normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.

The article puts a “human face” on some of these cell lines, for example, the “HeLa line” made from the cervical cancer of Henrietta Lacks:

That’s where immortalized cells come in. They’ve been used in medical research since the early 1950s, when the first and most famous immortal cell line—derived from the cervical cancer cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks—was successfully grown in a lab.

The distinction between pre-cancerous and cancerous cells is relatively minor: cancerous cells, by definition, can float away from the tumor site, travel through the blood or lymph, and start a new tumor (metastases) in another location in the body.

The distinction is important for the clinical outcome of a patient with a newly discovered tumor but involves only a minor bio-cellular distinction.

Don’t worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweekthat because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all. … And cow tumors sometimes wind up in store-bought ground chuck, too. [not true – tumors are NEVER allowed by USDA inspectors – see below – I.C] Of course, the facts might not matter much if ranchers or other players in the traditional meat industry felt threatened enough to declare a public-relations war. It’s all too easy to imagine misleading Fox News chyrons about chicken tumors and cancer burgers.

Not so misleading! The main problem of growing an endless “lab meat” supply is that normal tissue cells cannot endlessly replicate (see above). There is a limit on how many times they will divide.

Vaccine manufacturers already use such immortalized tumor cells to make some Covid vaccines and other vaccines:

Today, AstraZeneca Plc and J&J’s Covid-19 vaccines are grown using immortalized human kidney and retinal cells, respectively.

Thus, “lab meat” and “cell line” suppliers grow meat from tumor cells that are “immortalized”; in other words, their cells can endlessly replicate. This is why cancers never stop growing, after all!

Eat Just Inc. declined to comment for this story. Believer Meats Chief Scientific Officer Yaakov Nahmias says that his company uses immortalized cells in its cultured chicken and that his team has somehow, by means he says even they don’t understand, created immortalized cells that don’t share any genetic signatures with cancer cells.

Are you skeptical of the above? I am. Even Bloomberg author Joe Fassler, to his credit, doubted the above explanation and asked independent biologists who also did not believe Yaakov Nahmias’s BS:

(Two cell biologists I shared his comments with expressed skepticism.)

We can see that so far, all lab meat is made using endlessly-dividing tumor cells.

Our bodies’ immune systems are designed to kill off and fight such abnormal and cancerous cells. Thus, cancers only take hold when immune systems weaken or the cancer cells learn to avoid immune reactions.

Cells become immortal in human bodies all the time, by mutating to bypass senescence—and mutating some more to evade the immune system, which generally tries to kill off such mutants.

The lab meat companies plan to sell those kinds of solid tumor cells to us to eat.

Bon appetit!

USDA Inspectors Screen Out Cancers and Tumors in Animal Carcasses

Despite Bloomberg’s restrained and soothing language, cancers and tumors can never pass USDA meat inspections.

Clarifications

The above story applies to “lab-grown meat”: products made from immortalized animal tumor cells growing in vats.

The “plant substitute” meat replacements, such as Beyond Meat, are based on pea or soy protein. As such, they are NOT related to these lab-grown cancer cell projects. Those plant products are not “meat” in any sense.

In addition, fake news websites are screaming that lab-grown meat (made of tumor cells) will give us cancer. There is no evidence that lab-grown meat will facilitate cancers. There is also no evidence that lab-grown meat will NOT cause cancers. It is simply an unknown. The USDA has a reason to reject tumor-containing carcasses, however. It is best not to make unwarranted claims, and my substack is not about making up sensationalized stuff.

Now They Want to Sell Us Solid Tumor “Steaks” 

• The Bloomberg article explains that all “lab meat” is made of tumor cells.
• At the same time, USDA regulations forbid tumors in meat supply for humans.

I am sure that one way or another, Bill Gates and the WEF will lobby for a change in rules so that they can sell us solid tumors as “lab-grown meat.”

At this point, I am torn: would I rather eat “ze bugz”, or “lab-grown tumor meat.” Or go vegetarian? A tough decision!

What would YOU choose?

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Our thoughts today are with the people of Iraq, whose country was invaded twenty years on March 20, 2003. The destruction and loss of life are beyond description.

The architects of this illegal invasion are “war criminals”. Amply documented the war on Iraq was justified using fake intelligence. Prime Minister Tony Blair played a key role in claiming that Iraq had Weapon’s of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The article first published in February 2007 focusses on the assassination of Whistleblower Dr. David Kelly, who had worked in Iraq as weapon’s inspector under the auspices of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). “It was Dr Kelly who exposed claims by President George Bush, Tony Blair and Colin Powell that mobile biological warfare units had been found in Iraq as false.” (Independent, 25 July 2003)

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February 5 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council referred to the U.K. intelligence dossier entitled “Iraq Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation”, published on January 30, 2003. This document pointed without evidence to Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

This report had been read by Dr. David Kelly who expressed his doubts prior to its release.

Following its release on February 5,  2003, it was reviewed by Cambridge lecturer Dr. Glen Rangwala who confirmed that it was not a bona fide intelligence document prepared by British Intelligence. It was copied and pasted from the internet by members of Tony Blair’s staff.

Dr. Rangwala’s report was aired on Channel IV, it was then submitted to the House of Commons which released it on June 30, 2003, more than 3 months after the invasion. It was not an object of parliamentary debate.

Michel Chossudovsky, March 18, 2023

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The British media has become embroiled in yet another set of distortions regarding the death of British government weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly in July 2003. Kelly died in mysterious circumstances in the woods near his home in Oxfordshire.

Kelly was Britain’s foremost expert on biological weapons, with direct access to WMD intelligence on Iraq. In the months leading up to his death, he had become increasingly skeptical regarding Iraq’s alleged WMDs.

According to the Hutton inquiry report:

“Dr Kelly took his own life… [T]he principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body”. (emphasis added)

Suicide was seemingly assumed from the outset by Lord Hutton, and the Hutton Inquiry descended into establishing who, between the BBC and the Government, was to blame for the suicide (rather than the murder) of Dr Kelly.

The inquiry led by Lord Hutton pointed to “suicide” as the cause of death, in contradiction with the results of the autopsy. “Suicide was never proved, either by the Coroner or Lord Hutton, as required by law”. (See Dr. Stephen Frost, et al, Global Research, 28 November 2006)

The inquiry purported to obviate the need for an inquest as well as exonerate the Government of Tony Blair and the Secret Service “of all significant charges”. It was an obvious camouflage. (See the analysis of Rowena Thursby, Global Research, Oct 2006,  see also dr-david-kelly.blogspot.com)

On November 3, 2006, The London Times published a letter by Lord Hutton, in which he attempted to defend his report on Dr. David Kelly’s death. In the letter, Lord Hutton dwells on the issue of the allegedly “sexed up” intelligence, ignoring the arguably much larger issue of his failure to establish exactly how Dr. David Kelly died.

A response to Lord Hutton’s letter to The Times was submitted by three distinguished doctors ( Drs. C. Stephen Frost, David Halpin and Searle Sennett)  The Times, refused to publish the response, which  was subsequently published as an article by Global Research. Drs. Frost et al contributed to breaking the mainstream media silence on the possibility that Dr David Kelly did not commit suicide. 

What was dismissed by the mainstream British media was that Lord Hutton, who seemingly assumed suicide from the outset, had undermined due process, and therefore laid himself open to charges of cover-up, by himself “sexing up” his own findings on the cause of Dr David Kelly’s death. But, a cover-up of what? (See Drs. C. Stephen Frost, et al, op cit).

New British Media consensus

In its “Conspiracy Files” documentary (25 February 2007), the BBC questioned the official version that Kelly had committed suicide, as outlined in the Hutton inquiry report. In this BBC programme, the findings of the Hutton inquiry are refuted through carefully documented research and analysis. It was not suicide, it was murder.

The media consensus regarding the cause of Dr. Kelly’s death seems to have been reversed. Or has it?  While the BBC and the British media have acknowledged  that Dr. Kelly might have have been murdered, they have failed to address two crucial questions:

1. If it wasn’t suicide, who ordered the assassination of David Kelly?

2. Who ordered the cover-up of a criminal act?

Contradicting their own assessment of the evidence, the BBC is suggesting that the government of Tony Blair could not possibly have been involved.

John Morrison, former deputy chief of British defence intelligence, who was interviewed by the BBC’s “Conspiracy Files” programme, states emphatically  that there was “no British secret service plot to kill Dr Kelly.”

Morrison rejected suggestions that Dr Kelly could have been the victim of British agents licensed to kill: “It is indeed complete fantasy that there are agents that are licensed to kill”.  According to Morrisson:

“There are intelligence agencies around the world who do engage in assassinations, there’s no doubt about that. Some of them not very nice people at all….. But we [ in Britain] have never had a policy of assassination to my knowledge in the history of the UK intelligence agencies, and certainly not in the last few decades”. (Source BBC website)

If the U.K government was not involved because The British Secret Service “does not have a policy of assassination”, who then could possibly be behind the murder of David Kelly?

Criminal Investigation

If it was murder rather than suicide, one would expect a full fledged police investigation leading up to trial court proceedings.

One would also expect –as in a bona fide criminal investigation–  that one or more “suspects” would be identified, and that “methods”, “motives” and “intent” would be examined.  Moreover, one would also expect that the issue of alleged government involvement be either confirmed or dismissed in a court of law.

Will a criminal investigation –which could potentially bring down the government– be allowed to proceed?

Or will there be another cover-up, “to cover-up the cover-up”?

BBC Fake News: Saddam did It

Meanwhile, in the interest of “balanced reporting”, the BBC documentary also included an authoritative statement by Richard Spertzel, a former US weapons inspector who worked with Dr Kelly in Iraq. Spertzel believes that “the Iraqis assassinated him” implying that Kelly might have been murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein and that the defunct Baathist regime’s intelligence apparatus was behind the assassination.

“It has always been obvious that his death was highly convenient for the UK intelligence services but one of Kelly’s former colleagues, Richard Spertzel, an American biological weapons inspector, says that the Iraqi intelligence service may have been pursuing a vendetta against him. Spertzel says both he and Kelly were known to be on an Iraqi hit list.”(emphasis added. Irish independent, 26 Feb 2007)

Contradictory statement: “Convenient for UK intelligence” but it was, according to Spertzel, more likely that the Iraqi Intelligence service was behind the murder.

Qui Buono? Who benefits? Did the murder of Dr. Kelly serve the interests of Iraq. Was it “convenient” for the defunct Baathist regime?

And why the Hutton report cover-up?

If the murder had been ordered by Iraq, why did they need to cover it up? If indeed Iraqi agents had been behind it, this would have been front page news: the reports of the Iraqi sponsored vendetta and murder of a prominent British scientist would have been plastered on Britain’s tabloids. Just imagine the headlines.

Where is the motive? What interest would the post-Saddam Iraqi resistance have in murdering the man who was revealing the lies behind the Iraqi WMD allegations, which served as the main justification for waging war on Iraq. Remember: Dr David Kelly  was the source for a BBC report claiming the government of Tony Blair had “sexed up” its dossier on Saddam’s alleged WMD arsenal. And ultimately, the “sexed up” WMD report was the casus belli, the pretext for waging war on Iraq, which was invoked by the US and its indefectible British ally.

Complicity of the State? “Set the hares running”

Liberal MP Norman Baker, who was interviewed in the BBC programme, outlines the results of his investigation. He states that it was not suicide, but murder.

“I’ve concluded in my mind, beyond reasonable doubt as it were, that it’s impossible for the suicide explanation to hold water. The medical evidence doesn’t support it in any way, the psychological evidence barely supports it either and as it wasn’t obviously natural causes or an accident, then you’re driven to the conclusion that it must have been some sort of murder.” (GMTV “The Sunday Programme”, 25 February 2007)

“Describing his approach as non-sensational and factual, he said he has tested various theories ‘to destruction’. One witness who contacted him recently claimed to “know” that Dr Kelly was murdered. Asked about “complicity of the State”, Mr Baker chose his words carefully, claiming this would ‘set the hares running’. He is pursuing a number of leads”

Norman Baker’s inquiry has reached the conclusion that Kelly was assassinated but he asserts categorically that the British government could not possibly have been involved:

“I don’t believe the Prime Minister, the politicians and the Government were responsible for what happened to David Kelly. I believe they treated him shamefully and I believe they treated him callously in that they deliberately leaked his name to the press and they were quite happy to offer him up as fodder in some sort of Soviet-style Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in order to discredit Andrew Gilligan and the BBC”.

 

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First published by Global Research on April 27, 2022

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The US has a long History of Confrontation with Russia

This goes way back to the time of Lenin’s revolution in 1917 to replace the Tsar with a communist government. Along with more than a dozen other countries, in 1918 the US sent 13,000 troops to fight Lenin’s Bolshevik forces. Although this was gross interference in another country’s affairs, more than 250,000 foreign troops took part in the war against the Russian forces. The Russian forces fought with patriotic zeal, and the foreign troops made little progress and were forced to withdraw in 1920.

 

US Troops in Vladivostok in 1918

The US finally established diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933 and an icy relationship has continued to the present. When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June of 1941, the US position was revealed by then U.S. Senator Harry Truman when he said:

“If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”

Primarily through the battles fought by Soviet forces, Nazi Germany was defeated, but instead of gratitude for this historical feat, the US government was persuaded by its embedded faction of Russia-hating officials to embark on a totally different course of action.

This began with the totally unnecessary and criminal decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed and injured at least 200,000 Japanese. Japan had been fully prepared to surrender and because of this, almost all high ranking military officals, including Eisenhower and McArthur, opposed the use of atomic bombs. However, Truman’s inner circle of advisors convinced him to do this. In actuality, this was not to end the war on Japan but to show the USSR that this could happen to them if they wouldn’t follow USA’s dictats.

On September 25, 1975 several previously secret documents from the US War Department, dated September 15, 1945, were declassified.

 

These documents revealed, in stark tones, that the USA had planned a coordinated unprovoked nuclear attack with 204 atomic bombs to destroy 66 major urban areas in the Soviet Union.

This nuclear assault would have been a diabolical and criminal undertaking on human life. Genocide is an understatement. The main document referred to “the number of atomic bombings which should be available to insure our national security”. These documents are discussed further here.

With respect to “insure our national security,” a sane question would be why the US would be so afraid of a USSR devastated by its war with Nazi Germany that the US would still require a further massive nuclear devastation of Russia in order for the US “to be safe.” The real reason is undoubtedly the American desire to destroy the USSR’s socialist-communist system, which was also the same reason for Hitler’s attack on the USSR.

A further report on this issue states that: According to US generals’ estimates, the attack could have resulted in the death of about 285 to 425 million people. Some of the USSR’s European allies were meant to be completely “wiped out.”

How should history judge the USA’s morality in this regard . . . although not carrying out this onslaught, but just seriously even considering such a course of action?

The Soviets became aware of the USA’s plans and developed their own atomic bomb in 1949.  This occurred before the US had their 204 bombs for their attack. And once the USSR had their own bombs, the US realized that if they launched their attack, American cities would be hit as well. The overall result was the ensuing Cold War and a nuclear arms race.

Ukraine History and World War II

With regard to Ukraine, unlike Russia with its more that a 1,000 year history, Ukraine, as a territorial unit, started about 1650 and has a complex historical background. To understand the current conflict, it is important to recall that Russians and Ukrainians once lived in relative harmony, when they were both part of the USSR. This was violently interrupted in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR, by first taking over the territory of Ukraine.

It is important to point out that the vast majority of Ukrainians fought the Nazi invasion, just as the Russians did, and suffered a loss of more than 6 million people, military and civilians. However, it is a historical fact that a portion of the people in western Ukraine supported the Nazis and even formed several divisons of troops to fight the Soviet army. This was done under bizarre delusion that somehow after the war the Nazis would allow them to have an independent state, independent of Russia. Their most prominent leader was Stepan Bandera, a collaborator with Hitler who led the liquidation of thousands of Poles, Jews and other minorities. Ironically, Bandera is now considered a major hero by Zelensky’s government.

In the meantime, on the basis of Nazi racial policy all Slavic people, Jews, Roma and black people were considerd Untermenschen or “subhuman” and “inferior people” who, if at all possible, were to be exterminated in one way or another. Despite this open philosophy of the invading Nazi hordes, a portion of the Ukrainian people in the Galicia region of western Ukraine somehow felt that if they collaborated with the Nazis that after the defeat of the USSR they would somehow acquire an independent Ukrainian state. Total delusion, but a historical fact.

According to John-Paul Himka, a retired professor from the University of Alberta, a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust lived in Ukraine, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists collaborated with the Nazis in carrying out their horrendous deeds.

As for the invading German Nazi forces, if there were Ukrainians who were prepared to collaborate with them, in a cynical manner, the Nazis accepted them. And in this manner, these Ukrainian Nazi allies proceeded to kill thousands of Polish people in the Lvov area and they participated in killing more then 30,000 Jews whose bodies were then thrown in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev.

At the end of World War II thousands of these Ukrainian Nazi collaborators managed to retreat to Germany and then somehow managed to get accepted as “refugees” in Canada and the USA. In Ukraine they were dealt with as Nazi collaborators and it’s not certain what happened to them. It’s now 77 years since the war ended, and you’d think the Nazi era is past history, but it seems that some  descendants of these collaborators are are still on the scene as “neo-Nazis.” And unfortunately these neo-Nazis continue to promote hatred and white supremacy and attack racial and ethnic minorities, and in some cases are prepared to live in a fascist state.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

In the course of the turmoil in the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine officially declared itself an independent country on 24 August 1991. At the end of the year, on December 25, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his post as president of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the USA dominated the world, and it wasn’t until Vladimir Putin took over as President in 2000 that Russia once again began to have some world influence.

The 2014 EuroMaidan Coup and Its Aftermath

As for Ukraine, after its independence it struggled along, but it wasn’t until 2014 that a cataclysmic event occurred which totally changed the course of history in that country. The USA succeeded in staging a coup d’état which replaced a democratically elected president and installed a regime in which neo-Nazis proceeded to have a major role.

Following this, I had three major articles published on this debacle. One of them was immediately translated into French, German and Spanish. In that article I review the whole course of events that then occurred in Ukraine.

Immediately after the coup, Victoria Nuland gleefully bragged how the US spent five billion dollars to enable the coup to take place. She even had a hand in picking out who should be in the cabinet and who should be the new president…. and if the European union didn’t like it, “Fuck the EU”…. all this is on record.

After the coup, two basically fascist and neo-Nazi parties, Svoboda and Right Sector, held prominent positions in the new government–they formed a third of the cabinet. This is despite the fact that Svoboda had only 8 percent of the seats in the Rada and that the Right Sector didn’t have any elected members.  Later the followers of these parties formed the Azov military force, which openly display Hitler’s military regalia.

While the new Ukrainian regime has been busy empowering fascists, they stripped communist parties of their right to participate in elections in 2015 and issued controversial ‘decommunisation’ laws.

These laws ban the display of Soviet symbols and change the status of the May 9 holiday which marked the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2. The laws will remove all mentions of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ (a Soviet term for World War 2).  Tens of thousands of streets have since been renamed, along with nearly one thousand cities and villages. Over two thousand statues and monuments have also been removed in this anti-communist cultural project. Despite widespread criticism, the current government has refused to revoke the laws.

In actual fact, the United States has continued to work with Ukrainian fascists in their endless destabilization campaigns against Russia. According to CIA specialist Douglas Valentine, “the CIA has been developing fascist assets in the Ukraine for 70 years.” Nazism and fascism are very real factors in Ukraine, and they have been extensively documented.

Given what has happened, it is hardly surprising that Ukraine was the only country, along with the United States, which voted against the UN General Assembly’s draft resolution “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

The day after the coup government was formed its very first action was to pass a bill to ban the use of Russian in any official capacity and to ban all Russian media in Ukraine. This was done even though one-fifth of Ukraine’s population are ethnic Russians and that about 40% of the population speak Russian.  In fact, the eastern part of Ukraine and Crimea are almost totally ethnic Russians, with a Russian history that goes back more than a thousand years. And suddenly their language was banned!

To put this issue in perspective for Canadians, just imagine if a newly installed government in Ottawa would suddenly ban the use of French as an official language in Canada. How long would it take for Quebec to call for a referendum and then proceed to secede from Canada? In actuality, this is exactly what happened in Crimea, where the bulk of the people speak Russian. They conducted a referendum on March 16, 2014 and with a turnout of 83 percent, there was a 97 percent vote to secede from Ukraine. Since ethnic Russians formed only 58 percent of the population, it means that the bulk of Ukrainians and Tatars in Crimea also voted to secede from Ukraine. Crimea then appealed to Russia to be accepted into the Russian Federation, and Russia proceeded to do this.

Despite the referendum in Crimea to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, Russia is constantly accused of annexing Crimea, i.e., conducting a forcible acquisition of part of Ukraine’s territory, which is a blatant lie. To add to this lie, no one in the West ever refers to Crimea’s referendum, which was monitored by a team of Western observers. In the meantime, with no referendum, Kosovo was detached from Serbia…. with the full approval of the USA. In fact, the US engineered this.

As for Russia’s decision to intervene militarily in Ukraine, the government and the people still vividly remember that the USSR lost 27 million people fighting the Nazis in the 1940s. It was President Kennedy in his memorable speech on June 10, 1963 at American University who stated:

And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland–a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

To make his point vividly clear to the US public, he compared the devastation in the USSR to the USA: a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

So now with neo-Nazis basically in control of Ukraine, as well as having it in their constitution to join NATO and with its president talking of acquiring nuclear weapons, it should be no mystery how Russia feels about this. With nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it would take less than 10 minutes to destroy Moscow …. with no possibility of blocking such an attack. Russia and its people are not prepared to undergo another World War II. That is the long and the short of it.

How did it come to this? After the 2014 coup and the law to ban the Russian language in all legal affairs, the new Kiev regime sent a group of their administrators to take over the government offices in the Russian speaking Lugansk and Donetsk regions.

These administrators were promptly sent back to Kiev and these areas continued with their own people in office. The Kiev regime’s response? ….. a military attack was launched on the Donbass area. A vicious war took place for almost a year. These two areas had their own armed forces and there were no Russian troops involved, as acknowledged by Ukraine’s military commander. After a significant defeat of Ukraine’s army in a major battle in 2015, open warfare ceased.

It was at this point that Ukraine agreed to negotiations arranged by Germany, France and Russia in Belarus at the city of Minsk. They signed a 14-point Minsk Accord, later approved by the UN, for the purpose of resolving the Lugansk and Donetsk issue. Ukraine was to negotiate an agreement with these two areas which would give them a degree of autonomy, similar to that of Canadian provinces or US states.

Although Ukraine signed this document, and although Lugansk and Donetsk were fully prepared to negotiate an agreement, Ukraine refused to negotiate with them….in violation of the UN approved agreement they had signed. Instead, the Ukraine military, headed by the neo-Nazi Azov forces (complete with Hitler regalia) proceeded for the next 7 years to regularly shell the civilian areas of Luhansk and Donetsk causing substantial infrastructure damage . . . hospitals, schools, residential areas . . . and killing more than 14,000 people.

Fast forward to the present . . . People are rightly concerned about civilians being killed in Ukraine, but where were they these past 8 years when Ukrainian forces killed more than 14,000 people in eastern Ukraine? And during America’s wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia, Libya, Syria and many other places where millions of people were killed, did any of these currently outraged people ever compare any of the American presidents to Hitler? So what is going on at the present time??

It amazes me that Russia did not intervene sooner to prevent this awful senseless carnage in the Donbass. It seems Russia was hoping that eventually Ukraine would come to its senses and institute the Minsk agreement, which would keep these areas in Ukraine, but with a degree of autonomy. It also appears that this wasn’t done because the USA never approved of the Minsk proposal. Also this agreement was totally opposed by the Azov-Nazis, and they threatened to kill anyone who would attempt to enact it. As such it appears that President Zelensky was so intimidated that it seems he didn’t dare do this.

As an indication of Azov’s strengths and influence in Ukraine, Azov members proved it about a month ago. Right after the first negotiation meeting that Ukraine had with Russia in Belarus, Azov members killed the Ukrainian negotiator who seriously considered a Russian proposal. When the neo-Nazis found out about this, they abducted him from his Kiev home, tortured him and then shot him and left his body on the street in front of Ukraine’s legislative Rada building.  A clear warning to Zelensky.

For the record, it should be noted that Zelensky won the presidential election in April of 2019 against the incumbent Poroshenko with 73% of the vote. His election platform was based on establishing good relations with Russia and promising to enact the Minsk agreement with Donetsk and Lugansk. Obviously, this is what the bulk of the Ukrainian population wanted. However, Zelensky totally backed off from these electoral promises, seemingly because of threats to his life by the Azov-Nazis. So this shows the power of these reactionary forces.

It should be noted that Wikipedia has stated that Azov’s founding member Andriy Biletsky, leader of the far right Social-National Assembly (SNA), had stated in 2010 that:

“the historic mission of our nation” was to lead the “white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival […] a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen“, Numerous fighters bear SS tattoos, including swastikas.^[104] In 2014, the German ZDF television network showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and “the SS runes of Hitler’s infamous black-uniformed elite corps”.

Despite this, American and Canadian military instructors have conducted lengthy training sessions of Azov military personnel. When confronted with this, they have tried weasel themselves out of this, but the facts remain.

What brought Russia to finally intervene militarily in Ukraine is information leaked to them by someone in the Ukraine military, and later confirmed by official documents, that in mid-March of this year, about 100,000 Ukraine troops were scheduled to attack Donetsk and Lugansk in a Blitzkrieg manner. The plan was to overrun these two areas in a matter of days, which would have involved killing thousands of these Russian-speaking people.  The Russian government and President Putin decided that the only way to prevent this from happening is for Russia to take military action.

Russia first recognized Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as separate states and then two days later, on February 24, Russia launched its “special military operation” to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.” That day Russia notified the UN Secretary-General that the military action was “taken in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter in the exercise of the right of self-defence,” actually citing the provision of “anticipatory self-defence” or the right of “interceptive self-defence” in light of Ukraine’s planned attack on Lugansk and Donetsk.

In effect, Russia was acting to stop “neo-Nazis and militias” from killing civilians and to prevent a “genocide” of Russians in Eastern Ukraine.

In their military operation, Russian troops were instructed to do the least possible damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure and civilian population. As such there has been no bombing of any Ukrainian cities, totally unlike the US “Shock and Awe” campaigns such as in Iraq where within a few days they killed tens of thousands of people….and eventually killed more than 1,000,000 Iraqis. Russian attacks were directed at military facilities, fuel and munition depots, and military communications.  Also, within a few days, they somehow wiped out practically all of Ukraine’s military aircraft and aircraft bases. They surrounded Kiev, not to attack it, but to maintain Ukrainian troops there. In phase 2, their main objective will be to deal with large number of Ukrainian troops in the Donbass area.

The Azov neo-Nazis had their main base in Mariupol and the Russian forces have now finally captured this centre. Unlike other areas, much of this city has been destroyed through artillery fire, but it seems the Azovs may fight to the last neo-Nazi, often using civilians as human shields.

As for the overall war, now approaching two months, the UN has estimated that there have been “4,450 civilian casualties in the country: 1,892 killed and 2,558 injured.”

When it comes to military casualties, this is totally different. On April 16, Russia updated the number of Ukrainian military fatalities to 23,367, which includes the Ukrainian army, Azov forces and foreign mercenaries. As for Russian losses, they reported that 1,351 soldiers were killed and 3,825 wounded.  In the meantime, with no evidence to support his claim, Zelensky is boasting that 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, compared to only 2,500 Ukrainian troops.

Russia has also reported that more than 400,000 Ukrainian civilians had been evacuated to Russia from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

As for the West’s current “Great Hero” Zelensky, he has recently outlawed all left-wing or progressive political parties and openly approves of violent reprisals against the members of these parties. Journalist Max Blumenthal has documented the current political situation in Ukraine.

A few excerpts from Blumenthal’s account are apropos:

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that “there would be consequences for collaborators” indicates that these atrocities have been sanctioned by the highest levels of government.

Western media has looked the other way, however, as Zelensky and top officials in his administration have sanctioned a campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination of local Ukrainian lawmakers accused of collaborating with Russia. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia.

Zelensky has further exploited the atmosphere of war to outlaw an array of opposition parties and order the arrest of his leading rivals. His authoritarian decrees have triggered the disappearance, torture and even murder of an array of human rights activists, communist and leftist organizers, journalists and government officials accused of “pro-Russian” sympathies.

At this stage, Russia has withdrawn most of its forces from Kiev and other places and has concentrated them in the Donetsk and Lugansk areas to confront the bulk of the Ukrainian forces. This will be phase 2 in their campaign, and the single most important battle is to take place shortly.

In my concluding comments, I would like to refer to a speech made by Vladimir Putin a while ago in which he went back in history to the time when the USSR was enticed to reunite East and West Germany and to loosen its control over the east European countries that were attached to the USSR following World War II.

During crucial negotiations in 1990 President Gorbachev was assured repeatedly by the US and other NATO leaders that if he agreed to all these reforms, NATO would not move from its boundaries “by one inch,” With such an assurance, Gorbachev allowed the reunification of Germany, and the USSR then relinquished all controls and alliances with the multitude of countries along its western border.  Instead of honouring its promise to not advance “by one inch” towards Russia, NATO, led by the USA, absorbed all these countries and then tried to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into its fold. So the West’s promises at that time were nothing more than lies.

Then on February 28, in discussing the sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its intervention in Ukraine, Putin referred to the West as the Empire of Lies. And for good historical reasons, this is how Russia may now view the West. Interestingly, since Putin made this comment, this is how the USA is being referred by a number of commentators.

Since this war started in Ukraine, there has been an amazing amount of censorship in our “freedom loving” West, with not only all Russian media being censored but also anyone in the West who is critical of the USA’s or the West’s portrayal of events in Ukraine. We are indeed living in interesting times.

Much more remains to be said, but this is where I will leave it for now.

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John Ryan, Ph.D., Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg.

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The peace movement did a great many things right in the first decade of this millennium, some of which we’ve forgotten. It also fell short in many ways. I want to highlight the lessons I think we’ve most failed to learn and suggest how we might benefit from them today.

1. We formed uncomfortably large coalitions. We brought together war abolitionists with people who simply adored every war in human history but one. We probably didn’t hold a single event at which there wasn’t somebody pushing a theory about 9-11 that required some level of lunacy just to understand. We didn’t put most of our effort into distinguishing ourselves from other peace advocates or seeking to get people canceled; we put most of our effort into trying to end a war.

 

2. It all began to fall apart in 2007, after Democrats had been elected to end the war and escalated it instead. People had a choice in that moment to stand on principle and demand peace, or to kneel before a political party and peace be damned. Millions made the wrong choice, and have never understood it. Political parties, especially when combined with legalized bribery and a subservient communications system, are deadly to movements. The war was ended by a movement compelling George W. Bush to sign an agreement to end it, not by electing Obama, who only ended it when that agreement made him do so. The point is not the idiotic strawman that one should ignore elections or pretend that political parties don’t exist. The point is to put elections second. You don’t even have to put them millionth, only second. But put policy first. Be for peace first, and make public servants serve you, not the other way around.

 

3. A “war based on lies” is simply a longwinded way of saying “a war.” There is no such thing as a war not based on lies. What distinguished Iraq 2003 was the ineptness of the lying. “We are going to find vast stockpiles of weapons” is a really, really stupid lie to tell about a place where you are very shortly going to fail to find any such thing. And, yes, they knew that was the case. In contrast, “Russia is going to invade Ukraine tomorrow” is a really smart lie to tell if Russia is about to invade Ukraine sometime in the next week, because nobody is going to care that you got the day wrong, and statistically practically nobody is going to have the resources to understand that what you’ve really said is “Now that we’ve broken promises, torn up treaties, militarized the region, threatened Russia, lied about Russia, facilitated a coup, opposed a peaceful resolution, supported attacks on Donbas, and escalated those attacks in recent days, while mocking utterly reasonable peace proposals from Russia, we can count on Russia invading, just as we’ve strategized to make happen including in published RAND reports, and when that happens, we are going to load the whole zone up with more weapons than we ever pretended Saddam Hussein had, and we’re going to block any peace negotiations in order to keep the war going as hundreds of thousands die, which we don’t think you’ll object to even if it risks nuclear apocalypse, because we’ve pre-conditioned you with five years of ludicrous lies about Putin owning Trump.”

 

4. We never said one word about the evil of the Iraqi side of the war on Iraq. Even though you may know, or suspect — pre-Erica Chenoweth — that nonviolence is more effective than violence, you aren’t permitted to utter one word against Iraqi violence or you’re accused of blaming the victims or asking them to lie down and be killed or some other stupidity. To simply state that Iraqis might be better off using exclusively organized nonviolent activism, even while you are working day and night to get the U.S. government to end the war, is to become an arrogant imperialist telling one’s victims what to do and somehow magically forbidding them to “fight back.” And so there is silence. One side of the war is evil and the other good. You can’t cheer for that other side without becoming an ostracized traitor. But you must believe, exactly as the Pentagon believes but with the sides switched, that one side is pure and holy and the other evil incarnate. This hardly constitutes ideal preparation of the mind for a war in Ukraine where, not only is the other side (the Russian side) clearly engaged in reprehensible horrors, but those horrors are the primary topic of corporate media. Opposing both sides of the war in Ukraine and demanding peace is denounced by each side as somehow constituting support for the other side, because the concept of more than one party being flawed has been erased from the collective brain through thousands of fairy tales and other content of cable news. The peace movement did nothing to counter this during the war on Iraq.

 

5. We never made people understand that the lies were not only typical of all wars, but also, as with all wars, irrelevant and off-topic. Every lie about Iraq could have been perfectly true and there would have been no case for attacking Iraq. The U.S. openly acknowledged having every weapon it pretended Iraq had, without creating any case for attacking the United States. Having weapons is not an excuse for war. It makes no difference whether it’s true or false. The same can be said of economic policies of China or anyone else. This week I watched a video of a former prime minister of Australia ridiculing a bunch of journalists for not being able to distinguish China’s trade policies from an imaginary and ludicrous fantasy of a Chinese threat to invade Australia. But is there a member of the U.S. Congress who can make that distinction? Or a follower of either U.S. political party who will be able to much longer? The war in Ukraine has been named by the U.S. government/media the “Unprovoked War” — quite obviously precisely because it was so clearly provoked. But this is the wrong question. You don’t get to wage a war if it was provoked. And you don’t get to wage a war if the other side was unprovoked. I mean, not legally, not morally, not as part of a strategy for preserving life on Earth. The question is not whether Russia was provoked, and not merely because the obvious answer is yes, but also because the question is whether peace can be negotiated and established justly and sustainably, and whether the U.S. government has been impeding that development while pretending that only Ukrainians want the war to continue, not Lockheed-Martin stock holders.

 

6. We didn’t follow through. There were no consequences. The architects of the murder of a million people went golfing and got rehabilitated by the very same media criminals who had pushed their lies. “Looking forward” replaced the rule of law or a “rules based order.” Open profiteering, murder, and torture became policy choices, not crimes. Impeachment was stripped from the Constitution for any bipartisan offenses. There was no truth and reconciliation process. Now the U.S. works to prevent the reporting of even Russian crimes to the International Criminal Court, because preventing any sort of rules is the top priority of the Rules Based Order, and it hardly makes news. Presidents have been given all war powers, and darn near everybody has failed to grasp that the monstrous powers given to that office are drastically more important than which flavor of monster occupies the office. A bipartisan consensus opposes ever using the War Powers Resolution. While Johnson and Nixon had to clear out of town and opposition to war lasted long enough to label it a sickness, the Vietnam Syndrome, in this case the Iraq Syndrome lasted long enough to keep Kerry and Clinton out of the White House, but not Biden. And nobody has drawn the lesson that these syndromes are fits of wellness, not illness — certainly not the corporate media which has investigated itself and — after a quick apology or two — found everything in order.

 

7. We still talk about the media as having been an accomplice to the Bush-Cheney gang. We look back condescendingly at the age in which journalists claimed that one could not report that a president had lied. We now have media outlets in which you cannot report that anyone at all has lied if they are a member of one criminal cartel or the other, the elephants or the donkeys. It’s time we recognize how much the media outlets wanted the war on Iraq for their own profit and ideological reasons, and that the media has played the leading role in building up hostility with Russia and China, Iran and North Korea. If anyone is playing supporting actor in this drama, it is government officials. At some point we’ll have to learn to appreciate whistleblowers and independent reporters and to recognize that corporate media as a mass is the problem, not just one part of the corporate meda.

 

8. We never did even really try to teach the public that the wars are one-sided slaughters. U.S. polling for years found majorities believing the sick and ridiculous ideas that U.S. casualties were somewhere near equivalent to Iraqi casualties and that the U.S. had suffered more than Iraq, as well as that Iraqis were grateful, or that Iraqis were inexcusably ungrateful. The fact that well over 90% of the deaths were Iraqis never got through, nor the fact that they were disproportionately the very old and young, nor even the fact that wars are fought in people’s towns and not on 19th century battlefields. Even if people come to believe that such things happen, if they are told tens of thousands of times that they only happen if Russia does them, nothing useful will have been learned. The U.S. peace movement made the conscious choice over and over and over again for years and years to focus on the damage the war was doing to U.S. troops, and the financial cost to taxpayers, and not to make ending a one-sided slaughter a moral question, as if people don’t empty their pockets for faraway victims when they learn that they exist. This was the boomerang result of the spitting lies and other wild tales and exaggerations of mistakes of blaming the rank-and-file troops who destroyed Vietnam. A smart peace movement, its elders believed, would stress sympathizing with troops to the point of not telling anyone what the basic nature of the war was. Here’s hoping that if a peace movement grows again it deems itself capable of walking while chewing gum.

 

9. The United Nations got it right. It said no to the war. It did so because people around the world got it right and applied pressure to governments. Whistleblowers exposed U.S. spying and threats and bribes. Representatives represented. They voted no. Global democracy, for all its flaws, succeeded. The rogue U.S. outlaw failed. Not only did U.S. media/society fail to begin listening to the millions of us who didn’t lie or get everything wrong — allowing the warmongering clowns to go on failing upward, but it never became acceptable to learn the basic lesson. We need the world in charge. We do not need the world’s leading holdout on basic treaties and structures of law in charge of law enforcement. Much of the world has learned this lesson. The U.S. public needs to. Foregoing one war for democracy and democratizing the United Nations instead would work wonders.

 

10. There are always options available. Bush could have given Saddam Hussein $1 billion to clear out, a reprehensible idea but far superior to giving Halliburton hundreds of billions in a campaign to ruin the lives of tens of millions of people, permanently poison vast swaths of territory, predictably generate terrorism and instability, and fuel war after war after war. Ukraine could have complied with Minsk 2, a better and more democratic and stable deal than it is likely to ever see again. The options always get worse, but always remain far better than continuing war. At this point, after openly admitting that Minsk was a pretense, the West would need actions rather than words merely to be believed, but good actions are readily available. Pull a missile base out of Poland or Romania, join a treaty or three, constrain or abolish NATO, or support international law for all. The options are not hard to think of; you’re just not supposed to think them.

 

11. The underlying, WWII-based mythology that teaches people that a war can be good is rotten to the core. With Afghanistan and Iraq it took a year-and-a-half each to get good U.S. majorities in polls saying the wars never should have been started. The war in Ukraine appears to be on the same trajectory. Of course, those who believed the wars shouldn’t have been started did not, for the most part, believe they should be ended. The wars had to be continued for the sake of the troops, even if the actual troops were telling pollsters they wanted the wars ended. This troopism was very effective propaganda, and the peace movement did not effectively counter it. To this very day, the blowback is minimized as so many believe it would be inappropriate to mention that U.S. mass shooters are disproportionately veterans. Slandering all veterans in the hollow minds of those who cannot grasp that 99.9% of people are not mass shooters at all is deemed a greater danger than creating more veterans. The hope is that U.S. opposition to the war in Ukraine may grow in the absence of the troopist propaganda, as U.S. troops are not involved in large numbers and not supposed to be involved at all. But the U.S. media is pushing heroic stories of Ukrainian troops, and if no U.S. troops are involved, and if the nuclear apocalypse will stay within a magic European bubble, then why end the war at all? Money? Will that be enough, when everyone knows that money is simply invented if a bank or a corporation needs it, whereas reducing money spent on weapons will not increase money spent on any enterprise that isn’t set up to recycle chunks of it into election campaigns?

 

12. The wars ended, mostly. But the money didn’t. The lesson was neither taught nor learned that the more you spend on preparing for wars, the more war you’re likely to get. The war on Iraq, which generated hatred and violence around the globe, is now credited with keeping the United States safe. The same tired old bullshit about fighting them over there or over here is regularly heard on the floor of Congress in 2023. U.S. generals involved in the war on Iraq are presented in the U.S. media in 2023 as experts on victories, because they had something to do with a “surge,” even though no surge ever produced any victory. Russia and China and Iran are held up as threatening evils. The need for empire is openly admitted in keeping troops in Syria. The centrality of oil is discussed without shame, even if pipelines are blown up with a wink. And so, the money keeps flowing, at a greater pace now than during the war on Iraq, at a greater pace now than at any time since WWII. And the Halliburtonization continues, the privatization, the profiteering, and the pseudo-rebuilding services. The absence of consequences has consequences. Not a single serious pro-peace Congress Member remains. As long as we continue to oppose only particular wars for particular reasons, we’ll lack the necessary movement to put a plug in the sewer drain that sucks down over half of our income taxes.

 

13. Thinking longer term while trying to prevent or end a particular war would impact our strategies in many ways, not by cartoonishly reversing them, but by significantly adjusting them, and not just in terms of how we talk about troops. A little long-term strategic thought is enough, for example, to create serious concerns about pushing patriotism and religion as part of advocating for peace. You don’t see environmental advocates pushing love for ExxonMobil. But you do see them shying away from taking on the U.S. military and war celebrations. They learn that from the peace movement. If the peace movement won’t demand the global cooperation in place of war that’s needed to avoid nuclear disaster, how can the environmental movement be expected to demand the peaceful cooperation necessary to slow and mitigate the collapse of our climate and ecosystems?

 

14. We were too late and too small. The biggest global march in history was not big enough. It came with record speed but was not early enough. And not repeated enough. In particular it was not big enough where it mattered: in the United States. It’s wonderful to have had such massive turnout in Rome and London, but the lesson mislearned in the United States was that public demonstrations do not work. This was the wrong lesson. We overwhelmed and won over the United Nations. We constrained the size of the war and prevented a number of additional wars. We generated movements that led into the Arab Spring and Occupy. We blocked the massive bombing of Syria and created a deal with Iran, as the “Iraq Syndrome” lingered. What if we had begun years earlier? It’s not as if the war wasn’t advertised ahead. George W. Bush campaigned on it. What if we had mobilized en masse for peace in Ukraine 8 years ago? What if we were to protest the predictable steps toward war with China now, while they are being taken, rather than after the war starts and it becomes our national duty to pretend they never occurred? There is such a thing as being too late. You can blame me for this message of gloom and doom or thank me for this motivation to get into the streets in solidarity with your brothers and sisters across the globe who want life to continue.

 

15. The biggest lie is the lie of powerlessness. The reason the government spies on and disrupts and constrains activism is not that its pretense of paying no attention to activism is real, just the opposite. Governments pay very close attention. They know damn well that they cannot continue if we withhold our consent. The constant media push to sit still or cry or shop or wait for an election is there for a reason. The reason is that people have far more power than the individually powerful would like them to know. Reject the biggest lie and the others will fall like the imperialists’ mythical dominoes.

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This article was originally published on WorldBeyondWar.Org.

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.

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Outstanding analysis first published in 2004 by author and antiwar activist Richard Sanders. Of relevance to recent developments in Ukraine.

 

 

 

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John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937), the world’s first billionaire, was America’s most generous philanthropist

Although Rockefeller’s wealth was based largely on a near global control of oil refining, he also had large interests in other monoplies. As Anthony Sutton notes, Rockefeller

“controlled the copper trust, the smelters trust and the gigantic tobacco trust, in addition to having influence in some Morgan properties such as the U.S. Steel Corporation as well as in hundreds of smaller industrial trusts, public service operations, railroads and banking institutions. National City Bank was the largest of the banks influenced by Standard Oil-Rockefeller, but financial control extended to the U.S. Trust Co. and Hanover National Bank [and] major life insurance companies – Equitable Life and Mutual of New York” (Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1981).

His incredible rags-to-riches success story owes much to what he learned from his father’s attitudes towards business and respect for the public good. Descended from hardworking German immigrants, his father William Avery Rockefeller was a travelling, snake oil salesman. “Big Bill” excelled as a quack doctor, or pitch man, conning the sick and desperate into buying expensive remedies that were either useless or downright dangerous.

“He would be gone for months and come back with a great roll of money…. He would go to small towns and put up handbills advertising himself as ‘The Celebrated Dr. Levingston.’ He advertised to cure anything, but made a specialty of cancer and kidney troubles” (MacDonald, “Double Life,” New York World, February 2, 1908).

But these were not “Doc’s” only crimes. He was indicted for rape, but was not arrested or tried. He fled the area with family and escaped neighbours who accused him of horse thieving, burglary, arson and counterfeiting. He had two wives, simultaneously, and was a bigamist for 34 years. He met his second wife in Norwich, Ontario, where he sold lumber in 1853, calling himself William Levingston.

William’s example provided ample life lessons to his sons about the business values of duplicity, deceit, and a blatant disregard for public health.

John dropped out of high school in 1855 to take a business course. He worked as a bookkeeper and then teamed up with a friend to start a grain commission business.

In 1863, the Civil War propelled him into the oil business. That year, he – like J.P. Morgan and other rising stars – paid $300 to avoid conscription. It was a small price for them, but unattainable for the thousands who would die.

At first, he sold whiskey at inflated rates to Federal soldiers. Then, he invested his profits in oil refineries. The South had been supplying turpentine to the North for camphene-fueled lights. When the war cut off the North’s access to this fuel, kerosene from Pennsylvania oil quickly took over as the lamp fuel of choice and stimulated his oil business.

In 1865, Rockefeller bought out his partners in the kerosene business for $72,500.

In 1870, he and a few others, organized The Standard Oil Company, with capital of $1 million. He built his company by buying out competitors, price cutting and controlling secondary businesses related to pipelines, trains, oil terminals and barrel making.

By 1880, his monopoly controlled the refining of 95% of America’s oil. In 1885, 70% of Standard Oil’s sales were overseas, largely to northern Europe and Russia. All of its properties were merged into the Standard Oil Trust with an initial capitalization of $70 million, and by 1900 Rockefeller controlled about two-thirds of the entire world’s oil supply. He was also a director of the U.S. Steel Corp when it formed in 1901.

In the 1880s, an oil boom was brewing in Tsarist Russia, around the Caspian Sea town of Baku.

Robert Nobel, the son of Alfred Nobel (originator of Sweden’s peace prize and the inventor of dynamite), was soon competing with the Parisian Rothschilds for control of Central Asia oil treasure.

Their exports threatened Rockefeller’s near global oil monopoly, especially when Marcus Samuel, future founder of Shell Oil, developed tankers to carry the Rothchild’s oil to Europe and Asia.

In 1903, Rockefeller made a deal with the Tsarist government to lease and then buy the Baku oil fields. Besides selling vast quantities of American oil to pre-Soviet Russia, Rockefeller also had millions invested there. Thereafter, seeing an inevitable revolution looming on the horizon, Rockefeller also invested in anti-Tzarist forces to protect this branch of his empire. The Soviets did expropriate the Caspian oil fields from the Nobels and Rothschilds. Rockefeller’s National City Bank also lost assets, thanks to the revolution. Its lawyer, Joseph Proskauer, fought a legal battle to get Rockefeller’s money back. In 1926, Walter Teagle, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, successfully negotiated oil concessions in the Soviet Union.

By that time though, Standard Oil’s near global monopoly had been broken up. In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court decided it was violating anti-trust laws and dissolved it into about three dozen companies. Many of these are now household names like Chevron (Standard Oil California), Amoco (Standard Oil Indiana), Mobil (Standard Oil New Jersey) and Exxon, previously called Esso (Standard Oil New Jersey).

When the U.S. was debating whether to join WWI, a group of so-called “War Hawks,” calling themselves the National Security League, knew that this war would be a major boon to profits.

This League of bankers and industrialists, including Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Coleman du Pont and H.H. Rodgers of Standard Oil, promoted increases in arms production and universal military training.

By 1917, they had helped build war hysteria to a fever pitch. But not all Americans were on their side. The Woman’s Peace Party, many suffragists and others, strongly opposed America’s entry into WWI. However, the League was successful and the War Hawks’ profits skyrocketed.

Soon after WWI and the Russian revolution, many among America’s wealthy elite felt threatened by rising radicalism, particularly among unions. In April 1919, letter bombs, destined for John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and others, were supposedly discovered in the U.S. postal system.

The media quickly stirred up a massive Red Scare by blaming unions, communists, anarchists and foreign agitators. John Spivak says: “Trade unions were openly disbelieving and denounced with anger the so-called discoveries as a deliberate frame-up to provide excuses for more raids against organized labour” (A Man in His Time, 1967). This incident and others were used as pretexts for the Palmer Raids, during which the government rounded up more than ten thousand activists across the country.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, while the persecution of leftists continued, corporate leaders on the extreme right, continued their criminal rampages in pursuit of profit. Although Rockefeller’s many links to Nazism are too numerous to list here, a few examples are worth noting. In the 1920s, Exxon entered into partnerships with Germany’s top chemical cartel members, BASF and I.G. Farben.

The Bank for International Settlements, which helped fund the Nazis before and during WWII, was created in 1930 by the world’s central banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of NY. Its creation was inspired by the Nazi government and its bankers. Its first president was Gates McGarrah, a Rockefeller banker formerly of Chase National Bank and the “Fed.”

In 1932, Chevron struck oil in Bahrain and was soon operating in Saudi Arabia.

In 1933, when Hitler seized power, Standard Oil New Jersey supplied Germany with the patents it required for tetraethyl lead aviation fuel. In 1936, the company Schroder, Rockefeller Investment Bankers, included board directors linked to the Gestapo and several European, Nazi-linked banks. It’s lawyers were John Foster Dulles and Allan Dulles, leading Wall Street fascists who drummed up American investments in Germany and elsewhere.

The Dulles law firm represented I.G. Farben and Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was Hitler’s biggest German financier. The Dulles brothers later became Secretary of State and CIA Director, respectively.

In 1937, John D. Rockefeller died, but his legacy of using oil money to grease the wheels of fascism continued.

That year, as the Spanish Civil War raged, Texas Co. (later called Texaco) fueled Franco’s fascists. (In 1936, Texas Co. and Standard Oil California formed California Texas Oil (later Caltex) to combine Texas Co’s marketing network in the Middle East with Standard’s operations there.) Texas Co. also continued shipping oil to Germany during WWII.

In 1938, Brown Brothers, Harriman, the Wall Street investment firm (with senior partners Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker) was involved in funding the supply of leaded gas for the Nazi Luftwaffe.

Chevron and Texas Co. created Aramco in 1939, to pump Saudi oil for the Nazi war machine. In 1940, Texaco provided an office, in their Chrysler Building, for a Nazi intelligence officer, Dr. Gerhardt Westrick. Executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were “Prominent figures of Himmler’s Circle of Friends of the Gestapo – its chief financiers – and close friends and colleagues of the Baron von Schroder” a leading Gesatpo officer and financier (Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy). Just before WWII, the Rockefeller’s Chase Bank collaborated with the Nazi’s Schroder Bank to raise $25 million for Germany’s war economy. They also supplied the German government with names and background information on 10,000 fascist sympathizers in America. Throughout WWII, Rockefeller’s Chase Bank stayed open in Nazi-occupied Paris, providing services for Germany’s embassy and its businesses.

In 1943, Roosevelt’s government took control of Rockefeller’s Aramco. It also seized assets of the Union Banking Corp., which Harriman, Bush and Walker had built up by collaborating with Nazi companies that used slave labour. This money was later returned and it launched the Bushes in oil and politics.

In 1953, after an elected upstart named Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil business, a UK/U.S.-backed coup returned the Shah to power. CIA Director Allan Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were instrumental in this coup. Previously, Iran’s oil had been controlled by the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (i.e., British Petroleum, BP) but after the U.S. role in this coup, U.S. companies got a 40% share and the top beneficiary was Standard Oil of New Jersey.

The next year, the Dulles boys were at it again orchestrating a coup in Guatemala. This one ushered in decades of fascist military governments that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. But, it brought great profits for Rockefeller’s United Fruit Co., in which the Dulles were invested. Allen had also been on its Board of Trustees.

John D. Rockefeller would be happy to see the re-merging of his great monopoly. In 1988, Standard Oil merged with British Petroleum. Since then, other mergers have reunited many of his original oil companies. Exxon and Mobil reunited in 1999, to become the world’s top oil business. They made profits of $17.7 billion the next year. BP, merging with Amoco and Standard Oil Ohio, was number two that year and made profits of $12 billion.

J.D. Rockefeller’s philanthropy has been much lauded. Even as a student, he reportedly gave donations to his Baptist church and to foreign Sunday schools. By 1900, he offered to buy a whole church for Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon, a former, southern politician who was then flogging his white supremacist gospel in New York. But from the pulpit, Dixon’s fiery tirades against “creeping negroidism” didn’t reach enough people, so he took up writing respectable, romantic novels about the KKK. He churned out two dozen books. The Clansman, his race-baiting best seller, extolled the Klan’s role in redeeming the South. In 1915, it was made into a movie, called The Birth of a Nation. Endorsed by President Wilson, the film helped revive this dreaded terrorist organization.

Rockefeller’s great generosity was aimed largely at medical education, perhaps because of his father’s career and its peculiar contributions to medicine.

J.D.Rockefeller, being a high school dropout, was not well-suited to his new role as godfather of the country’s centres for higher learning. His philanthropy was permeated with extremely racist views. In 1901, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was created. In 1902, the General Education Board (GEB) began four decades of tremendously controversial influence over American schools and universities.

That same year, J.D. Rockefeller and Averell Harriman, a business partner of Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker in Brown Brothers Harriman, gave $11 million to create the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Built on Manhattan property owned by the Dulles brothers, it spawned America’s ground-breaking “eugenics” research and the world’s first “racial hygiene” laws.

By 1907, Rockefeller funding was heavily influencing America’s medical institutions. The Rockefeller Institute created the first genetics lab in 1909. The following year, the Eugenics Research Association and the Eugenics Records Office were founded near Cold Spring Harbor, New York, on land donated by the widow of Averell Harriman. In 1911, John Foster Dulles summed up eugenics, saying that by eliminating “the weakest members of the population” a purer race could be created.

In 1928, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Eugenics, Anthropology and Human Heredity was created.

Run by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s foremost “racial hygienist,” the institute’s main financing came from Rockefeller.

Ironically, by 1936 an early psychiatrist at that institute, the half Jewish Dr. Franz Kallmann, had fled Nazism to America. According to Anton Chaitkin, Kallman’s experiments on 1,000 schizophrenics, published by the Freemasons, was used in 1939 to justify the Nazi’s mass murder of

“mental patients and various ‘defective’ people.”

Meanwhile, other Nazi doctors conducted incredibly cruel and vicious experiments on live, captive human subjects. Their body parts “were delivered to [Josef] Mengele, [Otmar] Verschuer and the other Rockefeller-linked contingent at the Wilhelm Institute.”

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Sources

Edward Jay Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America, 1977
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/epstein/aof2.html

John D. Rockefeller Page
http://voteview.uh.edu/entrejdr.htm

Albert I. Berger, “William Avery Rockefeller of ND: The Father of the Man Who Founded Standard Oil and his Remarkable Double Life,”
http://www.nd-humanities.org/html/rockefeller.html

Destination New Jersey: Sharing With Standard
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Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1981
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Stephen Kinzer, “A Perilous New Contest for the Next Oil Prize,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 1997
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Elijah Zarwan, “Pipeline Politics,” World Press Review, Nov.-Dec. 2001
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Richard N. Draheim, Jr., “Oil and ‘Socialism,'” The Dallas Libertarian, Feb 19, 1998.
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Texaco History
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Yagmur Kochumov, “Issues of International Law and Politics in the Caspian in the Context of the Turkrnenistan-Azerbaijan Discussion and Fuel Transport,” Caspian Crossroads, Winter 1999.
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Caspian Projects II
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Marcelo Bucheli, The History of the United Fruit Company
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Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, 1992.
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Dixon, Thomas Jr.: 1864-1946, Writer
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Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross, 1987

World War I War Hawks and the Passing of the Nineteenth Amendment
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Dr. Len Horowitz, “The American Red Double-cross”
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/apocalypse/red_double_cross.html

All images in this article are from COAT

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak

December day,

The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive

Us all away

They set my roof on fire, with their cursed

English spleen

And that’s another reason why I left old

Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. From Hunger on Trial Teaching Activity.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19^th century Ireland to 21^st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

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Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project. He the author and co-editor of numerous publications including Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years and A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis.

Featured image: The Irish Famine, 1850 by George Frederic Watt. (Source: Zinn Education Project) All other images in this article are from Zinn Education Project.

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***

 

The protest movement directed against Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition does not take a stance on the rights of Palestinians.

There were no Palestinian flags in the protest movement against Netanyahu. 

Palestinians are the victims of  both the Netanyahu government as well Israel’s Judicial system which Netanyahu wants to dispel, transforming Israel into what the protest movement describes as a “theocratic dictatorship”.

“In a letter addressed to German and UK envoys, some 1,000 prominent Israeli figures say that Israel is in the midst of the most severe crisis in its history, and that Netanyahu is trying to turn the country into a ‘theocratic dictatorship’

Israel is already a “theocratic dictatorship”. 

The current Netanyahu ultra-nationalist coalition government remains committed to the “Greater Israel” project and the “Promised Land”, namely the biblical homeland of the Jews. 

Benjamin Netanyahu has been pressing ahead to formalize “Israel’s colonial project”, namely the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands. 

The Netanyahu coalition is committed to total appropriation as well as outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland: 

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlements in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”  (Netanyahu January 2022)

Under Netanyahu, Israel is currently proceeding with the plan to annex large chunks of Palestinian territory “while keeping the Palestinian inhabitants in conditions of severe deprivation and isolation.”

Israel is a de facto member of NATO following the signing in November 2004  of bilateral protocol agreement.  The “Greater Israel” project including the appropriation of Palestinian lands has been endorsed by US-NATO.

Creating conditions of extreme poverty and economic collapse constitute the unspoken means for triggering the expulsion and exodus of Palestinians from their homeland.  It is part of the process of annexation:

“If the manoeuvre is successful, Israel will end up with all of the territories it conquered during the 1967 war, including all of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and most of the Palestinian Territories, including the best sources of water and agricultural land.

The West Bank will find itself in the same situation as the Gaza strip, cut off from the outside world and surrounded by hostile Israeli military forces and Israeli settlements.” (South Front) 

“Palestine Is Gone! Gone! راحت فلسطين . The Palestinian plight is savagely painful and the pain is compounded by the bafflingly off-hand dismissal and erasure by Western powers of that pain, Rima Najjar, Global Research, June, 7, 2020 

We call upon the leaders of Israel’s protest movement to take a firm stance on the Rights of Palestinians. 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 17, 2023

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Below are excerpts from the Ynetnews report.

Our thanks to Ynetnews.

***

Hundreds of Israeli writers, artists, and intellectuals on Tuesday called on Germany and Britain to cancel upcoming visits by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying his plan to overhaul Israel’s judicial system has put the country on a destructive course.

Netanyahu’s coalition, a collection of ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, has barreled ahead with legislation that aims to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court and give them control over the appointment of the nation’s judges.

They say the plan is a long-overdue measure to curb what they see as an outsize influence by unelected judges. But critics say the plan will destroy Israel’s fragile system of checks and balances by concentrating power in the hands of Netanyahu and his parliamentary majority. They also say it is an attempt by Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, to escape justice.

Tens of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets over the past two months to protest the sweeping overhaul. Protests last week were so large that Netanyahu was forced to take a helicopter to the airport in order to catch a flight for an official visit to Italy.

Israeli demonstrations in recent months have escalated as reform legislation proceeds (Photo: Tal Shahar)

High-tech leaders, Nobel-winning economists, and prominent security officials have spoken out against it, military reservists have threatened to stop reporting for duty and even some of Israel’s closest allies, including the U.S., have urged Netanyahu to slow down. Repeated efforts by Israel’s figurehead president, Isaac Herzog, to broker a compromise have not yielded fruit.

To Read Complete Article on Ynetnews Click Here

 

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Featured image: Netanyahu celebrates the bill passing the first of three votes (Photo: The Knesset Channel)

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***

So-called World public opinion probably sees my country, Poland, as one of the most involved warmongers, always on the front line of an aggressive imperialist policy steered from Washington and London. 

It seems to be confirmed also by the present leaks about at least indirect Polish involvement in the terrorist attack on Nord Stream on 6th September 2022. 

As we already know, one of known versions widely discussed in the Western media points to an ‘independent group of friends of Ukraine’ as the perpetrators who, carrying out the act of sabotage, were supposed to travel on a yacht rented from a Ukrainian company registered in Poland. 

The story about freelancers and volunteers does not sound particularly credible, neither explaining how they so freely transported tons of explosives needed to initiate the explosion, nor the sources of the rest of the highly specialised equipment necessary for the entire operation.  However, this is also a preliminary admission of guilt on the part of the pro-Kiev forces, a confirmation that Russia did not blow up the Nord Stream, but on the contrary, that it was an action clearly in the interest of the current Ukrainian government and the policy implemented through them.

Poland’s energy defeats

One way or another, we are dealing with an attempt to involve Poland, as well as Germany (the mysterious sabotage yacht was supposed to operate from the port of Rostock), i.e. the two countries that were actually most affected by the undersea explosion in the Baltic Sea.  And yet Poles are also, and perhaps above all, victims of this extremely dangerous correlation.

Being a peripheral country dependent on the West on all levels, we bear the severe costs of the current global crisis of capitalism, presented as voluntary and inevitable consequences of the energy transformation and alleged climate crisis.  Therefore we have been forced to renounce our natural and hitherto basic energy resource, that means hard coal.

In turn, while participating in the anti-Russian coalition, we cut ourselves off from supplies of Russian natural gas, i.e. the basic transitional resource, thanks to which Europe was to survive the initial stage of transformation, planned for no less than couple decades.  Unfortunately, first we have been subjected to the extremely restricted policy of the European Commission, known as the Fit for 55 strategy.  Complementary we observed speculations on the natural gas options market, which led to a sharp increase in market prices already in autumn 2021.  Finally Ukrainian conflict, combined with the energy blockade and economic war against Russia disturbed the very base of the Polish economy, strongly subsidiary to the Germany interests, including assumed success of the Energiewende, German way of the energy transformation with human face. This face, however, was slapped by the Anglo-Saxons.

Time is running out for Europe

Today we can be absolutely sure, that assumptions of the infamous 10-Point Plan to Reduce the European Union’s Reliance on Russian Natural Gas have been clearly propaganda humbug.  From all of them the only one actually achieved was introducing harsh austerity policy forced by tough pricing policies, loosening of social covers and forcing ordinary citizens to use less energy.  Others, like maximum usage of reserve capacity and rising storage levels, and further transformation towards renewables turned out to be economically unprofitable and technically impossible, at least in a short term. And even if, analytics as e.g. the think-tank Aurora Energy Research, associated with the University of Oxford, warned that all these visions more or less stick together only if the Ukrainian conflict and its consequences last no longer than 2 years.  That means if Russian natural gas continues to flow through Ukraine and the NS2 delay will be no longer than until 2025.  After that time, Europe would have to return to mutually beneficial economic cooperation with Russia.  This is what the Anglo-Saxons had to prevent to.

We know that Americans did it…

From the Polish perspective the American terrorist attack against Nord Stream was undoubtedly the most tragic moment of the current conflict, and it is no coincidence that even mainstream Polish politicians, such as former Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, were among the first to reveal information about American responsibility for this act of energy sabotage in the Baltic Sea.

After all, one of the important goals of American aggressive politics was to increase the energy and thus economic dependence of Central Europe, including Poland, on American and Qatari LNG supplies, as well as gaining a market for American nuclear technologies.  And we must remember that talking about the peaceful use of nuclear energy is a euphemism, because there is no doubt that we are dealing with a desire to quickly resume the nuclear arms race, thanks to the production of a significant amount of fissile material, also in the nuclear plants planned to be built in Poland.

This means that according to the Anglo-Saxons, Central Europe will lose its status of a nuclear-free zone together with relocation of the American and British nuclear weapons directly to the Russian border, what is only a matter of time, rather not long.  And that is not all.  Every day we can predict and even feel other long-term effects of US terrorism against Nord Stream, including wider energy exclusion; draconian increase in the cost of living in Poland and the already felt recession; deepened dependence on foreign energy supplies, and thus lower economic competitiveness of Polish companies.  Above all, the threat of war is growing and the attack in the Baltic only fosters war psychosis, espionage hunting, new Red/Russian Scare and censorship, but not aimed at the real American perpetrators, but against all revealing the truth.

US aggression against Europe

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons are doing everything to make the peace as difficult as possible also for the Russians too.  This is the same kind of blackmail that was used before 24 February 2022, during almost official Ukrainian (Western) preparations for the invasion against Donbass and Crimea, with a provocative message towards Russia AND WHAT WILL YOU DO?!  However, when it turned out, that Russians were able to DID at least something, sorry for the Ukrainians, the Anglo-Saxons has continued to play this game successfully, not only by supporting the Kiev resistance, but most significantly by blowing up the Nord Stream BECAUSE WHAT WILL YOU DO?!  That flicking Russian open eyes has the same purpose as the tanks sent to Kiev: to keep the war going and provoke Russian reactions.  Although we could reverse that reasoning and ask: how we, the Europeans should react?

For Poles, as for all Europeans, the undersea explosion carried out by American, Norwegian and British terrorists is therefore the first shot of America’s full-blown war against Europe.  We have been attacked, so we must wage our own defence against terror and tyranny to protect our families, homes and workplaces.  Since our real enemies did not hesitate to expose millions of people to death from hypothermia – they will stop at nothing.

This is not the end

What could be the target of the next attacks? For example, TurkStream, and especially the project of its expansion and extension into the entire system supplying southern Europe with Russian gas sent via the Turkish hub.  The existing Anapa-Kıyıköy pipeline is already under sanctions, but since those on the example of Nord Stream turned out to be ineffective, there can be no more ‘independent yachts’ with random commandos with tons of explosives.  We are clearly entering a period in which the transformation of capitalism, its transition into a phase of low-consumption and zero-growth hibernation will also be carried out with the use of military means and acts of terror.

While we know that the American hegemony, carrying out the tasks of the globalist finances, considers China as its main competitor, associated with the declining stage of industrial-consumer capitalism (the post-Fordist model), then it seems to be logical that the Suez Canal or the new Nicaraguan canal planned by Beijing (which would allow bypass US blockades in Panama) could become equally natural targets of attacks.

Let us recall what happened two years ago, in March 2021, after a seemingly minor failure of the Ever Green container ship sailing from the Malaysian port of Tanjung Pelepas to Rotterdam.  At that time, the interruption in communication via Suez lasted only six days, and so it effectively disrupted the supply chain to Europe.  Let’s imagine what if there was an explosion on the scale of Nord Stream and the fastest sea route between Asia and Europe was permanently shut down, just as the wars in Ukraine and Syria effectively block land connections.

Just as in particular Central Europe is deprived of energy, it is perfectly possible to imagine Western consumers being cut off from semiconductors, and thus, most of the hardware and software, electronic devices, cars, as well as other consumer goods, as garments and textiles, the oversupply of which we have become accustomed for successive decades of welfare capitalism.  Decades that are coming to an end with three main turning points of the long Twentieth Century: the energy transformation, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.  The Anglo-Saxon attack against Nord Stream is only an episode for this breakthrough, but perhaps one with the dimension of Sarajevo and Pearl Harbor.

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Konrad Rękas is a renowned geopolitical analyst and a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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***

Last week, the Biden administration asked Congress to permit its agents to continue to spy on Americans without search warrants. The actual request was to re-authorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. FISA requires warrants from the FISA Court for all domestic spying. Section 702 is a 2008 amendment to FISA. It expressly authorizes warrantless spying of foreign persons.

The Supreme Court has characterized spying as surveillance and surveillance as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires search warrants issued by judges and based upon probable cause of crime demonstrated to the judges under oath and specifically describing the place to be searched or thing to be seized for the surveillance to be lawful.

Since FISA Court warrants — issued by a secret court in Washington, D.C. — are not based on probable cause of crime, and since Section 702 does away altogether with the warrant requirement when foreign persons are even peripherally involved, both FISA and its Section 702 are unconstitutional.

Here is the backstory.

After the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and the full extent of his use of the FBI and the CIA for domestic warrantless surveillance became known, Congress enacted FISA. It proclaims itself to have established the only lawful method for surveillance outside of the Fourth Amendment. This proclamation is a profound constitutional error — an oxymoron — as all surveillance in defiance of the Fourth Amendment is unconstitutional.

That amendment was written in the aftermath of British agents executing general warrants on the colonists. General warrants were not based on probable cause of crime, but rather governmental need. And they did not specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.

Rather, general warrants — issued by a secret court in London — authorized the bearer in America to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found. The agents ostensibly were looking for proof of tax payments. They were really engaged in spying. They were looking for subversive, revolutionary materials.

After the Revolutionary War was won and the Constitution was ratified, the Bill of Rights was ratified. The Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects all “people” from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government — both law enforcement and spies. The courts have interpreted “unreasonable” to mean “without a search warrant.”

The amendment’s drafters’ intentional employment of the word “people” makes it obvious that the amendment protects every person from every search and every seizure by anyone from the government without a warrant. It is not limited to Americans or adults or good people or people the government likes; rather, it protects all people.

In a linguistic effort to accommodate the warrant requirement and its probable cause pre-condition, the congressional drafters of FISA required that the FISA Court may issue warrants for surveillance based on probable cause, not of crime, but of being a foreign government agent. The FISA Court then, on its own, morphed foreign agency into foreign personhood, and then morphed that into communicating with a foreign person.

So, if you text or email or call your cousin in Geneva or an art dealer in Florence, you become a target for a FISA surveillance warrant — merely by communicating with a foreign person.

Even this loosening of Fourth Amendment protection by the Orwellian re-definition of probable cause was not enough to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the government to spy. Thus, President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency — the federal government’s 60,000-person strong cadre of domestic spies — to engage in warrantless spying, in defiance of FISA, and on a scale vastly greater than that which Nixon had ordered of the FBI and CIA in the 1970s.

When Congress learned of the warrantless spying, rather than defunding it, it enacted Section 702 as an exception to FISA, and thereby made warrantless spying on foreign persons in America legal. In a direct affront to the Fourth Amendment, Section 702 permits the NSA and its cousins in the 16 other federal spying agencies to spy without warrants on all communications involving foreign persons.

What happens when a foreign person communicates with an American? Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with foreign persons, permits the NSA to maintain a database of all such American persons, permits the FBI to search those databases without a search warrant, and if the NSA learns of evidence of criminal behavior without a warrant, requires it to share that evidence with the FBI.

It gets worse.

Since Department of Justice lawyers have persuaded the FISA Court to issue warrants to spy on Americans who communicate with foreigners out to the sixth degree of communication, the NSA has contended that Section 702 also permits it to spy out to the sixth degree.

How many persons can be spied upon if the NSA’s interpretation of 702 is lawful? Call your cousin in Geneva and NSA can spy on everyone with whom you speak and everyone to whom they speak, and so on, out to the sixth level of communication.

The FBI reported that in 2021, it searched 3.4 million names in the NSA database of Americans who communicated with foreigners. If you take those 3.4 million out to the sixth degree of their American communications, the number grows exponentially. You will have reached 330 million Americans before completion of the process.

Stated differently, the Biden administration, the DOJ, the NSA and the FBI all claim the lawful authority to spy on all persons in America — American and foreign — without a search warrant, without probable cause, without articulable suspicion; and these deep state denizens want that lawful authority congressionally extended beyond its expiration date at the end of this year.

Any member of Congress who votes to do so is unfit for office. Such a vote would be an assault on the Constitution.

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a

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“One year ago the world finally recognized true horror Putin and the Russian Federation planned for #Ukraine and the Ukrainian people – a complete genocide of the people and culture. However, he miscalculated. Ukraine fought back. Ukraine will triumph.” [1]

 – Heather McPherson, Member of Parliament and NDP Foreign Affairs critic

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As it stands right now, not a single member of the House of Commons, in government or in opposition, objects to major support by Canada to the Ukrainian government in its war with Russia. Not one![2]

The elected party in opposition historically most likely to oppose the war drive especially as it diverts resources from health care, education, climate policy, housing and other social policies is the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP). Yet today, as indicated by their Foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson, the reigning party, the Liberals, are not hawkish enough![3]

Enter Ethnorama News Winnipeg, a community newspaper in the city of Winnipeg at the centre of Canada. It claims to highlight the views of the new voices from various ethnic groups that is not heard or reflected in the mainline press. In August and September of last year, it ran a two part article entitled Long History of US-Russia Confrontation. Analysis of Ukraine-Russia Relations. It was a reprint of the story written for Global Research about two months after the invasion took place.

Somehow, the story got the attention of the NDP, both provincially and federally in Ottawa. NDP officials or some other authority spoke to two NDP MPs in the city, Leah Gazan and Daniel Blaikie, people who generally support progressive community projects such as this one. After their meeting, they were either coerced, cajoled or outright ordered to remove advertisements from the newspaper, denying them hundreds of dollars for production purposes. The reason was based on them publishing the above article, which they refer to as “disinformation.”

What’s more, the author of the article is a former Geography Professor and Senior Scholar at the University of Winnipeg by the name of John Ryan. He and his work were smeared without actually going over his material point by point. (You think this was war by NATO? You are nuts!)

Since this view tries to expand the picture of the war and get some context which is missing in mainstream media discourse, attacks of this nature are a warning not only to Ethnorama but to any journalistic organ daring to ask daring questions and scrutinize details of a war, expensive in financing and Ukrainian lives!

It seems as if any deviation from the position that “Ukraine is good, Russia is evil” is harmful propaganda!

Can Ethnorama manage to survive and hold up their journalistic principles and be able to survive financially as two members of Parliament, and perhaps other influential people, withdraw sponsorship? Answering these questions goes to the heart of this chapter of the Global Research News Hour.

In the first half hour we speak to the author of the article, Dr John Ryan, about the factual content on which it was based and the problems from his point of view with the NDP for appearing to convince the two individuals to wash their hands of the magazine based on one article.

Then we speak with Ethnorama editorial collective members Marianne Cerilli and Glenn Michalchuk about their defence of the article and their critical view of US-NATO’s role in the war, and also of the fund-raising event scheduled for the 31st of March at the Ukrainian Labour Temple. (Tickets are $20 each and can be purchased by emailing [email protected])

John Ryan, Ph.D. is a Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg. His two Ukraine war related articles for Ethnorama can be found here and here. Professor Ryan has also written about his journey to Afghanistan in 1978. His write-up in 2006 got.the respectful attention of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh!

Marianne Cerilli is a parent, educator, former member of the Legislative Assembly and community development aficionado. She sits on Ethnorama’s editorial board.

Glenn Michalchuk is chair of Peace Alliance Winnipeg and the president of the Winnipeg branch of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

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Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

1. https://twitter.com/HMcPhersonMP/status/1629141816372076545?lang=en
2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/house-vote-ukraine-genocide-1.6433212
3. https://twitter.com/HMcPhersonMP/status/1629141816372076545?lang=en

 

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***

State Department spokesman Ned Price answered a question on North Korea diplomacy today, and his answer unwittingly demonstrated the folly of the U.S. approach:

On your first question, it unfortunately is a purely hypothetical question. It’s an academic question, because we have been clear and consistent in conveying publicly and through all channels available to us that we are prepared and willing to engage in constructive diplomacy with the DPRK towards what is the goal we share with our allies and partners of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula [bold mine-DL]. And I say it’s hypothetical and academic because at every turn the DPRK has failed to engage meaningfully on these offers. But were that to be the case, were the DPRK to take us up on this, we would look to see if we could devise practical steps that could help to advance what is that longer-term objective of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The goal of the complete denuclearization of the peninsula is at odds with engaging in constructive diplomacy with North Korea. As long as this remains the goal of U.S. policy, there is not going to be constructive diplomacy. When “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” means nothing more than North Korea’s unilateral disarmament, North Korea isn’t going to “engage meaningfully” with a demand for its own capitulation. Of course North Korea has “failed to engage,” because they have no incentive to entertain the terms that the U.S. has set.

Their government isn’t going to engage in a process where the end result is the dismantling of an arsenal that they have spent almost two decades building up. The U.S. and its allies can acknowledge this reality and adjust their goals accordingly, or they can sit back and watch as North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and missile program continue to advance and expand. If the U.S. and its allies want a different outcome, they will have to change what they have been doing and modify their demands.

Biden administration officials love to say that “the ball is in their court” when talking about their inability to make any diplomatic progress with other governments. The Biden administration took this line with North Korea early on, and it is not a coincidence that ever since then North Korea has continued building up its forces and testing its missiles in record numbers. Saying that “the ball is in their court” lets the administration pretend that the deteriorating situation is entirely the fault of the other party. It is how they excuse their own lamentable neglect of the issue. This passivity and unwillingness to take the initiative are debilitating for U.S. diplomacy, and it is no wonder that the U.S. has so few major diplomatic achievements in recent years.

The U.S. is the more powerful and secure state, and it has the luxury of taking the first step to revive negotiations if it wishes to negotiate. Because it is much more secure, the U.S. has greater flexibility and freedom of action than North Korea, and that means that the U.S. is in a position to break the current impasse. It cannot do that if it remains wedded to maximalism and coercive tactics.

Van Jackson explained in his new book, Pacific Power Paradox, what is needed to manage the problem with North Korea and its nuclear weapons:

Similarly, the North Korea problem will never be resolved through pressure attached to demands for unilateral disarmament [bold mine-DL]; the only solution lies in living with the Kim regime’s need to gird itself against ingrained perceptions of external threat while making a serious bid to change the relationship of rivalry that fuels that perception.[1]

This solution will be difficult to realize, but at least it has some chance of working and reducing instability in the relationship with North Korea. The current approach is guaranteed to produce more failures and it will almost certainly lead to more North Korean missile and nuclear tests. If the U.S. wants North Korea to engage meaningfully, it has to be willing to offer their government a reasonable compromise instead of issuing an ultimatum and threatening more economic warfare.

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Note

[1] Jackson, Pacific Power Paradox: p. 204.

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***

Alberta woman’s COVID-19 vax injury vindicated by federal compensation

Carrie Sakamoto was a healthy woman two years ago. First, she received an AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccination, and followed up with Pfizer’s version in July of 2021. She was never well again. (click here)

“I got sick that evening, but it was just like regular flu symptoms…then by day ten, I was in the hospital.” Bell’s Palsy was setting in, causing Sakamoto’s brain to swell, causing “really bad” vomiting. Her 5-ft 4-ins. frame shrunk to 100 lbs.

“I wasn’t able to eat because I had all these flu symptoms. By the time I got to hospital, I was in pretty bad shape. I had to learn how to walk with a walker because my balance was gone. I had to learn to chew and swallow, which I couldn’t do. I had a feeding tube too, because I kept aspirating on the food I was trying to chew.”

Sakamoto was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy that causes her facial paralysis and dizziness. She now has a hearing aid in her right ear due to 35% hearing loss that ensued. She also suffers with trigeminal neuralgia”

On March 1, 2023, she received compensation of “less than $100,000” from Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program.

How common are COVID-19 vaccine audiovestibular injuries?

As of March 16, 2023, WHO’s VigiAccess database recorded 140,995 Adverse Events involving “Ear and labyrinth disorders” following COVID-19 vaccination: (click here)

Most notable are:

• Tinnitus: 57,630
• Vertigo: 49,824
• Ear Pain: 17,731
• Deafness: 5,858
• Sudden hearing loss: 3,237

Tinnitus

Tinnitus is an otologic symptom characterized by a conscious perception of sound without an external auditory stimulus.

One study that reviewed the VAERS database found: “COVID-19 vaccines were associated with statistically significant increases in the incidence of vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss and Bell’s palsy of 1877, 50, 12 and 14 cases per 100,000.” (click here)

The cause remains unknown. Another study speculates: “Conceivable that mRNA entered the cochlea via hematogenic spread, thrombosis of a cochlear vein occurred, there was isolated neuronitis of the cochlear nerve, there was focal encephalitis, or thrombosis of cerebral veins had occurred. It is also conceivable that immunologic reactions against the virus secondarily affected cochlear structures or the cochlear nerve (click here).

Although many patients suffer terribly with post COVID-19 mRNA vaccine tinnitus, most published studies downplay it, and doctors offer nothing to treat it.

Tinnitus Treatment

There is a very recent paper from China that offers acupuncture as one option to seek some relief for post COVID-19 vaccine tinnitus (click here).

As for Quercetin and NAC, both have spike protein binding and inhibiting abilities.

“Molecular docking studies have highlighted that quercetin, a natural polyphenol belonging to the flavonol class, inhibits 3CLpro, PLpro and spike (S) proteins.” (click here)

Proteomics data showed that N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), an antioxidant and mucolytic agent been widely in use in clinical medicine, forms covalent conjugates with solvent accessible cysteine residues of spike protein that were disulfide bonded in the native state. In silico analysis indicated that this covalent conjugation perturbed the stereo specific orientations of the interacting key residues of spike protein that resulted in threefold weakening in the binding affinity of spike protein with ACE2 receptor (click here)

Vertigo

Vertigo is the sensation that you, or the environment around you, is moving or spinning.

One study found that the mean time to onset of vertigo/dizziness following vaccination is 10 days (click here)

A Japanese study examined 378 patients who presented at the vertigo clinic, and found that “vestibular neuritis should be recognized as one of the side effects of BNT162b2 (Pfizer) COVID-19 vaccination” (click here)

Hearing Loss

WHO admits: Pfizer vaccine potentially linked to hearing loss (click here)

“What has been heartbreaking about this, as a seasoned physician, are the emails I get from people that, this has affected their life so badly, they have told me they are going to take their own life”

“The WHO reported 367 cases of tinnitus and 164 cases of hearing loss among the 11 billion vaccines administered — with onset ranging from a few minutes to 19 days, but most commonly within a day of the jab.”

“The most reported COVID-19 vaccines in these cases were Pfizer/BioNTech” the WHO bulletin stated, making up approximately 80 per cent of the cases. Researchers noted hearing loss is not included as an adverse reaction on the product labelling for COVID-19 vaccines”

Many of these cases are treated with 2 weeks of oral steroids, sometimes with addition of ASA, and severe cases with local steroid injections (click here)

My Take

There are 10,000s of cases of post COVID-19 vaccine tinnitus, vertigo and hearing loss reported to VAERS, Eudravigilance, Vigiaccess, UK Yellow Card, etc.

The causes are the usual: autoimmune reactions, blood clots (vascular), blood vessel inflammation (vasculitis).

After reading dozens of studies, I was disturbed by what lengths the medical literature has gone to, to minimize these debilitating audio-vestibular side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, which were most prevalent with Pfizer mRNA.

The JAMA hearing loss study by Formeister excluded 75% of the 2170 VAERS reports and concluded that there was no link between COVID-19 vaccines and hearing loss. (click here)

A follow-up JAMA study by Ulrich admitted that Israeli data had shown a higher risk of hearing loss after vaccination compared to expected rates but that this had “minimal impact with regard to public health” (click here)

JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) has been one of the most corrupt journals throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

It appears that some relief from these injuries is possible with Quercetin, NAC or other compounds that bind the spike protein and inhibit its action.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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On Monday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published its latest report of global arms sales, which shows that European states’ imports of major arms over the five years between 2018 and 2022 increased by 47 percent compared with that of the 2013-2017 period, while the global arms transfers decreased by 5.1 percent.

During the stated period, arms imports in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, and the Middle East fell by 40 percent, 21 percent, 7.5 percent and 8.8 percent respectively.

In the meantime, European North Atlantic Treaty Organization states increased their arms imports by 65 percent mainly due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The report also said that the U.S. dominance of the global arms trade increased, as its share of global arms exports surged from 33 percent to 40 percent while Russia’s share fell from 22 percent to 16 percent.

Who were the top 10 exporters of major arms in 2018–22?

1) USA🇺🇸
2) Russia🇷🇺
3) France🇫🇷
4) China🇨🇳
5) Germany🇩🇪
6) Italy🇮🇹
7) UK🇬🇧
8) Spain🇪🇸
9) South Korea🇰🇷
10) Israel🇮🇱

New SIPRI data out now ➡️ https://t.co/qnHO6QwBNV pic.twitter.com/Dz8gERaZS7

— SIPRI (@SIPRIorg) March 13, 2023

In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea, Japan and Australia’s arms imports soared 61 percent, 171 percent and 23 percent respectively, with the U.S. as the main supplier to the three countries. In the Middle East, the largest arms supplier is also the U.S., providing 54 percent of the region’s arms imports.

As a result of military aid from the U.S. and many European states following the crisis in February 2022, Ukraine became the 3rd biggest importer of major arms during 2022.

“Even as arms transfers have declined globally, those to Europe have risen sharply due to the tensions between Russia and most other European states,” said Pieter D. Wezeman, senior researcher with the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme.

Russia-Ukraine conflict: business for the arms industry #Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/SsDGcoqXl0

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) March 13, 2022

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Featured image: Soldier fires a missile. | Photo: Twitter/ @Kyivtodaycom

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***

The Cuban socialist healthcare system is internationally recognized as one of the best in the world.¹ It is innovative, preventative, people-oriented, comprehensive, community-centered, internationalist, and, of course, de-commodified—treating healthcare as a human right, not a profitable commodity. However, in spite of its extraordinary successes, the United States’ sixty-year long blockade has tremendously detrimental effects on Cuban life in general, and their healthcare system in particular. As Amnesty International reported, the US blockade “limits Cuba’s capacity to import medicines, medical equipment, and the latest technologies, some of which are essential for treating life-threatening diseases.”²

The intentions behind the US blockade on Cuba have always been clear. As Lester Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in 1960:

Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy [blockade] is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government . . . the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.³

The blockade is thus aimed at making the material conditions of Cubans as difficult as possible, creating fertile soil for discontent in the Cuban revolutionary process to arise. However, the United States doesn’t leave the arrival of discontent to chance. As Tracy Eaton from the Cuba Money Project has shown, the United States, through regime change fronts like the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the U.S. State Department, has spent more than one billion dollars funding Cuban opposition groups and media within and outside of the country.⁴ This combination of blockade and opposition funding is a central component of the hybrid warfare against Cuba (as well as other victims of US imperialism).

Notwithstanding the formidable aggression bearing down on Cuba, the island has been able to achieve remarkable success in the fields of medicine, education, sustainable development, sports, etc. In this article, I will briefly highlight how the Cuban healthcare system functions, some of its successes, and how the blockade has affected Cuban medicine and stifled medical development both within Cuba and in the United States.

Cuba’s Socialist Healthcare System

Speaking to Cuban militias a few months after the revolution, Che, himself a physician by training, would say that

Medicine will have to convert itself into a science that serves to prevent disease and orients the public toward carrying out its medical duties. Medicine should only intervene in cases of extreme urgency, to perform surgery or something else which lies outside the skills of the people of the new society we are creating.⁵

“Such a profound social change demands,” he would argue, “equally profound changes in the mental structure of the people.”⁶ Socialist society could not limit itself to creating changes in institutions and the material foundations of society, it is equally vital, as he famously says in Socialism and Man in Cuba, “to build the new man and woman.”⁷ In the field of medicine, this required the formation of a new type of doctor, “a revolutionary doctor, that is to say a [person] who utilizes the technical knowledge of [their] profession in the service of the revolution and the people.”⁸

In the same year, Fidel Castro would remark that “the future of Cuba will be a future of [people] of science.”⁹ This visionary statement was uttered on the heels of a massive exodus of professionals, where half of the doctors, as well as many of the teachers, had left the country. For instance, “only 12 of the 250 Cuban teachers at the University of Havana’s Medical School remained.”¹⁰ For all the factors pointing otherwise, Fidel’s 1960 proclamation would become true, as today Cuba is the country with the most doctors per capita. This was not a coincidental development. Since 1959, the revolution reorganized the 1909-founded Ministry of Health and Welfare into the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), which created “a single, national, state-run health system that sets short, medium, and long-term policies.”¹¹ With its goal of training generations of humanistic medical professionals dedicated to the revolutionary process, Cuba eliminated university tuition, made textbooks free, developed various scholarship plans, and constructed networks of universities which created dozens of schools capable of educating professionals in every province of the country.¹² Universal education and universal healthcare went hand in hand – the development of one was the condition for the development of the other.

Cuba’s emphasis on universal education and healthcare within the socialist model allowed the country which lost half of its medical (and other) professionals to develop a surplus which participates in various internationalist missions, almost half of which are done for free (for the poorest countries of the global south), and the other half at a sliding scale.¹³ Thanks to these internationalist missions (which have been ongoing since the first years of the revolution), millions of human beings from the poorest corners of the planet can say that “they owe their health, if not their lives, to Cuban professionals and the government which trained and sent them.”¹⁴

By the middle of the 1970s, after several generations of doctors had been developed within the revolution, Cuba would institutionalize the polyclinic model, a staple of their innovative, community based, socialist healthcare. As Helen Yaffe writes,

A new model of community-based polyclinics was established in 1974 to deliver comprehensive care to residents in their neighbourhoods. Polyclinics gave Cuban communities local access to primary care specialists such as obstetricians, gynaecologists, paediatricians, internists and dental services. Training and policy emphasised the impact of biological, social, cultural, economic and environmental factors on patients.¹⁵

Far from the reductive and deterministic frameworks often found in Western capitalist medicine, Cuban healthcare emphasizes the dialectical relationship of the individual and their community and of the biological and the social. Such an integrative and relational framework allows for a more comprehensive approach to treatment. With the polyclinics and the 1984 “family doctor” programs, the integration of doctors within the individual’s “everyday environment” allowed, as Che hoped, for the preventative and communal dimension of healthcare to thrive.¹⁶

The most interesting dimension of Cuban healthcare, in my view, is its emphasis on prevention. The emphasis on prevention stands as a pinnacle of medical practice, one which would seem like lunacy in the US. When profits are in command, why would anyone do something which might prevent more profits from being realized in the future? When people are what matters, like in Cuba, the goal of medical practice is almost self-destructive, in the sense that the aim is to destroy the conditions, i.e., the sicknesses, which make medical treatment necessary in the first place. The opposite is true when health care is subjected to the same logic as everything else under capitalism. Instead of its natural tendency for self-abolition, the tendency here is towards proliferation, i.e., towards developing more conditions for which treatment is required. The more treatment needed, the more profit there is to be made.

This puts the for-profit health care system found in the United States—the only developed country in the world without socialized medicine—in an irreconcilable antagonism with what the essence of medical care entails. It also creates fertile ground, as we saw with regards to the COVID vaccines, for a large portion of the population to develop medical and scientific skepticism. After all, if it is the same pharmaceutical industrial complex that, in collaboration with the US government, proliferated the criminal but profitable opioid crisis which kills seventy thousand Americans yearly, it does not seem irrational for a portion of the population to lack trust in the same pharmaceutical industry’s handling of the pandemic.¹⁷ This absence of trust in medical institutions does not exist in Cuba, where people know that medicine′s first and only goal is to serve the people. As Hippocrates (from whom we get the Hippocratic oath that is ingrained in every medical trainee in the United States) argued, “a physician’s aim in dealing with any illness . . . should be to halt the conditions that promote its flourishing.” It shouldn’t be that, as for-profit health care promotes, those conditions are sustained or metamorphized into others so that profitable treatment may continue.¹⁸

Cuba’s innovative, preventative, community-centered, and holistic approach to healthcare is the reason why, in spite of the tremendous material difficulties the blockade creates, Cuba is considered to have one of – if not the – most efficient healthcare system in the world. After sixty years of socialism, Cubans are amongst the healthiest and longest-living people in the world, living on average three years longer than Americans.¹⁹ Besides the sixteen year increase in life expectancy the revolution has achieved since 1959, it has also had the largest reduction in infant mortality, from 6 to 0.41 percent, the lowest in the whole Western hemisphere.²⁰ “Infectious and contagious diseases like polio, malaria, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough and dengue,” which are frequently found in the poorest parts of the world, “have been eradicated.”²¹

Cuban medical sciences, thanks to the importance and investment the state affords it, has made prodigious inroads in cancer, diabetes, HIV, and other areas of medical study.²² With regards to lung cancer, perhaps the “best-known innovation is the CimaVax vaccine, created by researchers at the Havana’s Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM), which acts on the growth factor of cancer cells to prevent the disease from spreading.”²³ The most common cancer death is lung cancer, which killed around 1.8 million people worldwide in 2020.²⁴ With the US blockade in place, thousands of Americans are deprived of the prolongation and enhancement of their lives which the CimaVax vaccine would provide.²⁵ While clinical trials and collaboration had begun during the Cuban thaw, when Obama partially lifted the blockade, the full reinstatement of the blockade with Trump, and its continuation and proliferation with Biden, has once again removed the hope the Cuban vaccine could bring to the hundreds of thousands of Americans with lung cancer.²⁶

Along with CimaVAx, Racotumomab and VSSP are “promising cancer drugs invented by CIM.”²⁷As Cuba Debate reported,

Racotumomab targets a molecule that scientists believe is found in all cancer cells, meaning the drug could one day be effective against leukemia and the tumors that accompany lung, breast, colon and prostate cancers. VSSP, originally designed as a compound to activate the immune response to vaccines, also appears to stimulate the immune response against cancer.²⁸

Recent research into VSSP has shown that it “significantly reduce[s] myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) among people with advanced kidney cancer,” paving “the way for a new treatment” for the disease.²⁹

In addition to its successes in cancer research, “in 2015, the World Health Organization recognized Cuba as the first country to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mother to child.”³⁰This is a feat that Dr. Margaret Chan, at the time the Director-General of the WHO, said was “an important step towards having a generation free of AIDS.”³¹

Cuban medical sciences have also succeeded in developing what has been called the diabetes miracle treatment, Heberprot-P. As Cuba Debate reports,

When uncontrolled diabetes damages the nerves and blood vessels in a person’s foot, it can cause one of the disease’s most debilitating complications: diabetic foot ulcers, capable of penetrating the bone. These ulcers can even become gangrenous and, in the worst case, cause the amputation of a finger, foot or even a leg. Since 2006, Cuba has had a medicine for ulcers called Heberprot-P, which avoids the need to amputate. Its inventors, scientists from the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana, describe this treatment as “an epidermal growth factor” that is injected next to the affected area and can accelerate the skin’s healing process, closing the wound in about three months.³²

Heberprot-P has shown nearly an 80 percent  success rate in preventing amputation, an incredible fact considering that up to 60 percent of amputations lead to death within five years, and up to 80 percent within ten years.³³ In the United States, diabetes is the seventh most common cause of death, affecting more than one in ten adults, and prediabetes affecting one in three. Each year 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed with diabetes, and more than one hundred thousand die from the disease.³⁴ Nonetheless, Heberprot-P, a treatment which, according to Manuel Raíces, the Communications Executive at the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), could reduce the risk of US amputations in half, saving tens of thousands of lives a year, is prevented from being used in the US because of the blockade.³⁵

Hardships of the Blockade

Image: Cuban doctors and nurses getting ready to travel abroad, Havana, Cuba, April 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @AlmaCubanita

For thirty consecutive years the United Nations General Assembly has voted in favor of lifting the US blockade on Cuba.³⁶ In the recent vote in November 2022, 185 countries voted in favor of lifting the blockade, and only two countries, the United States and Israel, voted in favor of sustaining the blockade.³⁷ It is estimated that the last sixty years of the US blockade has cost Cuba 1.3 trillion dollars.³⁸ It is impossible to overestimate how difficult this has made the construction of socialism in Cuba, and the development of their healthcare system and medical sciences in particular.

As Cuba’s Ministry for Public Health reports,

[Cuba] is denied the right to acquire technologies, raw materials, reagents, diagnostic means, medicines, devices, equipment and spare parts necessary for the best functioning of its National Health System, which must be obtained in geographically distant markets or through a third country, with an increase in costs.

Technologies from the United States or with more than 10 percent of components from that country cannot be acquired by the Island, which has a negative impact on healthcare.

In some cases, it is necessary to send patients abroad at a much higher cost than doing the procedure in national territory, if the technology were available.³⁹

There are a plethora of examples to point to where the blockade prohibits Cuba from accessing medicine, technologies, equipment, etc. that it would need to save or improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Cubans. American companies and manufactures with more than 10 percent of American capital backing it frequently ignore, and sometimes explicitly reject, Cuba’s requests for purchasing their products. For instance, as Cuba reported to the United Nations:

From January to July 2021, the Medical Products Import and Export Company (MEDICUBA S.A.) contacted 65 US companies to inquire about the possibilities of importing medicines, equipment, devices and other supplies necessary for the care of the Cuban people through the national health system. Of these, 56 did not respond to the requests of the Cuban entity, and three responded negatively (OWENS & MINOR, INC., MERCURY MEDICAL and ELI LILLY).

The OHMEDA, GENERAL ELECTRIC and HEWLETT PACKARD Companies were asked for multipurpose mechanical ventilators for newborns and infants, as well as multipurpose cardiomonitors (which include blood pressure monitoring, among other parameters). Its acquisition has yet to be made possible.

In the same way, the ONE-LAMBDA Company was asked for kits for HLA typing, essential to determine the compatibility of a kidney transplant candidate with possible donors; they could not be acquired either.⁴⁰

“Some 158,800 Cuban patients,” the report argues, “are harmed by the impossibility of accessing technology for the implantation of percutaneous aortic valves (TAVI)” which would, through a “small surgical procedure,” greatly improve people’s quality of lives and prevent more complex surgeries and longer hospitalizations.⁴¹ American companies such as EDWARD LIFESCIENCE (Edwards-SAPIEN valve) and MEDTRONIC (CoreValve valve) have control over the TAVI valves and, because of the blockade, prohibit Cuba from access.

Likewise, “if Cuba could access the drug Nusinersen, produced only by the US multinational company BIOGEN,” more than half of its children who struggle with infantile spinal atrophy could survive much longer and attain a better quality of life.⁴²

The IQ 577 Laser System model, produced by the US company IRIDEX CORPORATION, could treat “retinal disorders and glaucoma” for dozens of Cuban babies born with retinopathy from prematurity who are at risk of going blind; because of the blockade, those Cuban babies will not be able to receive that treatment.⁴³

In many instances, additional licenses are required to sell to Cuba, even when the companies are not American and have less than 10 percent of American capital. As the Cuban Ministry for Public Health reports, shortages were caused in blood bags because the usual supplier, UNFAMED, “reported that the company Terumo BCT of Japan had its bank account blocked, since they must have an Additional License that allows them to sell to Cuba products that are not produced in the United States.”⁴⁴

The “US’s exploitation of the pandemic to increase pressure for regime change” also affords a variety of examples for how the blockade affects Cuban healthcare.⁴⁵ For instance, at the height of the pandemic, while WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked for countries to put their sanctions “in quarantine” because “thousands of lives are at stake,” the US company Vyaire Medical bought ventilator manufacturers IMTMedical and Acutronic, immediately banning all sale of ventilators to Cuba.⁴⁶ Around the same time, Jack Ma’s foundation tried to send Cuba one hundred thousand facemasks, ten Covid diagnostic kits, ventilators, and gloves, all of which was stopped by Avianca, a Colombian Airline whose “major shareholder is a U.S.-based company subject to the trade embargo on Cuba.”⁴⁷ Similarly, the donations from Swiss solidarity organizations MediCuba-Suiza and Asociación Suiza-Cuba to help Cuba fight COVID where refused to be transferred by the Swiss banks UBS, Cler, and Cantonal Bank of Basilea.⁴⁸

While Cuba was helping the world fight COVID-19 through the Henry Reeve Brigade (for which it was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize), the United States was busy preventing the world from helping Cuba, banking on the pandemic-blockade dual force to fulfill the conditions Lestor Mallory proposed for regime change.⁴⁹ Despite the difficulties, Cuba was able to develop five viable vaccines, vaccinating over 90 percent of its population, and delivering hundreds of millions of doses to the global south free of charge.⁵⁰ However, because of the US blockade, the early days of the pandemic saw Cuba lacking access to the syringes needed to effectively vaccinate its population with the vaccines it developed.⁵¹

The internationally denounced blockade on Cuba by the United States is a gross violation of human rights, one which affects both Cubans and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have better quality of lives, and even their lives saved, had the United States not prevented their people from having access to novel treatments in cancer, diabetes, and advances in other fields of research developed by Cuban scientists. The spirit of science and scientific inquiry is nourished with openness and collaboration. The US blockade prevents this from occurring, stifling scientific progress.

However, if there is something the last sixty years have demonstrated, it is that the Cuban people are committed to their revolutionary process and unwilling to compromise their socialism and sovereignty. Lestor Mallory’s hope for the blockade would not bear fruit.  Even in the periods where the US warfare on Cuba has produced the most formidable of challenges in attaining the necessary materials to ensure the subsistence of the Cuban people, the mass of Cubans have brazenly defended the revolutionary process, with the slogan of their Bronze Titan Antonio Maceo engraved on their chest: “Whoever tries to take over Cuba will only collect the dust of their blood-soaked soil, if they do not perish in the fight.”⁵² With the initial goal of the blockade unable to concretize, the only reason for its proliferation is to perpetuate senseless suffering, both of Cuban and American people. As those who recognize the emancipatory potential of science and believe that science should serve the people, we have a duty to stand in solidarity with the Cuban people and mobilize to #EndtheBlockade on Cuba.

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Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an MA in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early nineteenth century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor of the Marxist educational project Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies.

Notes

1. Salim Lamrani, “Cuba’s Health Care System: A Model for the World,” HuffPost, August 8, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cubas-health-care-system_b_5649968.
2. Amnesty International, The US Embargo Against Cuba: Its Impact on Economic and Social Rights (Amnesty International, London: 2009), https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/amr250072009en.pdf.
3. “499. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Mallory) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom),” US Department of State, April 6, 1960, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d499.
4. Iroel Sánchez, “Con Tracey Eaton: Rastreando los millones para cambiar a Cuba,” Cuba Debate, June 26, 2015, http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2015/06/26/con-tracey-eaton-rastreando-los-millones-para-cambiar-a-cuba/.
5. Ernesto Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution (New York: Ocean Press, 2003), 114.
6. Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 115.
7. Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 217.
8. Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 113, https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm;
9. Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Great Britain: Yale University Press, 2020), 124.
10. Yaffe, We Are Cuba, 125.
11. Juan Vela-Valdéz et al., “Formación del capital humano para la salud en Cuba,” Pan American Journal of Public Health 42, no. 33 (2018), https://doi.org/10.26633/RPSP.2018.33.
12. Valdéz, “Formación del capital humano para la salud en Cuba,” 2.
13. Manish Rai, “Cuba Has 9 Doctors Per 1000 Citizens, Highest in Its History,” teleSUR, July 23, 2019, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/cuba-cuban-doctors-highest-number-in-history-20190723-0009.html; Yaffe, We Are Cuba, 68–69.
14. Yaffe, We Are Cuba, 173.
15. Yaffe, We Are Cuba, 127.
16. Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 50.
17. Scott E. Hadland et al., “Association of Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing of Opioid Products With Mortality From Opioid-Related Overdoses,” JAMA Network Open 2, no. 1 (2019): e186007, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.6007; Jonathan H. Marks, “Lessons from Corporate Influence in the Opioid Epidemic: Toward a Norm of Separation,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiries 17, no. 2 (2020): 173–189, https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs11673-020-09982-x.
18. Philip Wheelwright, The Presocratics (Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press 1975), 266.
19. “Esperanza de vida en Cuba asciende a 78,45 años,” Cuba Debate, May 26, 2015, http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2015/05/26/esperanza-de-vida-en-cuba-asciende-a-7845-anos/; Rob Minto, “Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans,” Newsweek, September 02, 2022.
20. Fidel Castro, “Cuba’s achievments and America’s Wars,” May 01, 2003, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/2003/05/01.htm;  “Cuba: Infant mortality rate from 2010 to 2020,” Statistica.
21. Castro, “Cuba’s Achievments and America’s Wars.”
22. “Con homenaje a Fidel, clausurado Universidad-2016 (+ Fotos y Video),” Cuba Debate, February 19, 2016, http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2016/02/19/con-homenaje-a-fidel-clausurado-universidad-2016/.
23. “Tres grandes logros de la medicina cubana,” Cuba Debate, April 09, 2016, http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2016/04/09/tres-grandes-logros-de-la-medicina-cubana/.
24. “Cancer,” World Health Organization, February 03, 2022, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer.
25. “Governor Cuomo Announces First-Ever Biotech Venture Between U.S. and Cuba to Research and Develop New Cancer Treatments,” Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, September 26, 2018, https://www.roswellpark.org/newsroom/201809-governor-cuomo-announces-first-ever-biotech-venture-between-us-cuba-research.
26. “Governor Cuomo Announces First-Ever Biotech Venture Between U.S. and Cuba.”; Dylan Manshack, “Americans could beat lung cancer if U.S. lifted blockade of Cuba,” Peoples World, December 16, 2022, https://peoplesworld.org/article/americans-could-beat-lung-cancer-if-u-s-lifted-blockade-of-cuba/.
27. “Tres grandes logros de la medicina cubana,” Cuba Debate.
28. “Tres grandes logros de la medicina cubana,” Cuba Debate; Mariano R. Gabri et al., “Racotumomab for Treating Lung Cancer and Pediatric Refractory Malignancies,” Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy 16, no. 4 (2016): 573–78, https://doi.org/10.1517/14712598.2016.1157579.
29. Pavel López Lazo, “Roswell Cancer Center praises Cuba´s VSSP cancer drug effectiveness,” Prensa Latina, October 06, 2022, https://www.plenglish.com/news/2022/10/06/roswell-cancer-center-praises-cubas-vssp-cancer-drug-effectiveness/.
30. Victor Román, “Los aportes científicos más importantes que Cuba le ha dado a la medicina,” N+1, April 21, 2018, https://nmas1.org/news/2018/04/22/medicina-cuba-ciencia#:~:text=Los%20aportes%20cient%C3%ADficos%20m%C3%A1s%20importantes%20que%20Cuba%20le,…%203%20Bajas%20tasas%20de%20mortalidad%20infantil%20.
31. Victor Román, “Los aportes científicos más importantes que Cuba le ha dado a la medicina.”
32. “Tres grandes logros de la medicina cubana,” Cuba Debate; Jorge Berlanga-Acosta et al., “Heberprot-P: A Novel Product for Treating Advanced Diabetic Foot Ulcer,” Medicc Review 15, no. 1 (February 10, 2013), https://doi.org/10.37757/MR2013V15.N1.4.
33. “Treatment For Diabetic Foot Ulcer Utilizing Heberprot-P,” Cuba Heal, December 11, 2018, https://www.cubaheal.com/2018/12/11/treatment-for-diabetic-foot-ulcer-heberprot-p/; Bernard Pac Soo et al., “Survival at 10 years following lower extremity amputations in patients with diabetic foot disease,” Endocrine, 69, no. 1 (July 2020): 100–106, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12020-020-02292-7.
34. “Type 2 Diabetes Statistics anAge of Onset for Type 2 Diabetes: Know Your Riskd Facts,” Healthline; Chad Terhune and Robin Respaut, “Exclusive: U.S. Diabetes Deaths Top 100,000 for Second Straight Year,” Reuters, January 21, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-us-diabetes-deaths-top-100000-second-straight-year-federal-panel-urges-2022-01-31/.
35. “Cuba Has a Diabetes Treatment That Could Save Tens of Thousands of Lives, But the US Is Blocking It,” Breakthrough News, December 13, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWTzgqRRMAU.
36. Manish Rai, “185 Countries Pass Resolution Against US Blockade of Cuba,” teleSUR, November 3, 2022, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/185-Countries-Pass-Resolution-Against-US-Blockade-of-Cuba-20221103-0009.html.
37. Owen Schalk, “Global Community Condemns US Blockade of Cuba for 30th Time,” Canadian Dimension, November 4, 2022, https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/global-community-condemns-us-blockade-of-cuba-for-30th-time.
38. Vijay Prashad, “Washington Beats the Drum of Regime Change, but Cuba Responds to Its Own Revolutionary Rhythm: The Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2021),” Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis, July 23, 2021, https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/washington-beats-the-drum-of-regime-change-but-cuba-responds-to-its-own-revolutionary-rhythm-the-twenty-ninth-newsletter-2021-by-vijay-prashad; Carlos L. Garrido, “Anti-Government Protests in Cuba Provoked by U.S. Embargo Has Right-Wingers Salivating at the Prospect of Regime Change,” CovertAction Magazine, August 12, 2021, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/08/12/anti-government-protests-in-cuba-provoked-by-u-s-embargo-has-right-wingers-salivating-at-the-prospect-of-regime-change/.
39. “Bloqueo estadounidense provoca cuantiosas pérdidas al sector de la salud,” Ministerio de Salud Pública de la República de Cuba, July 01, 2021, https://salud.msp.gob.cu/bloqueo-estadounidense-provoca-cuantiosas-perdidas-al-sector-de-la-salud/.
40. “Salud pública cubana: impacto negativo del bloqueo para su Desarrollo,” Representaciones Diplomáticas de Cuba en el Exterior, February 10, 2022, https://misiones.cubaminrex.cu/es/articulo/salud-publica-cubana-impacto-negativo-del-bloqueo-para-su-desarrollo-0.
41. “Salud pública cubana,” Representaciones Diplomáticas de Cuba en el Exterior.
42. “Salud pública cubana,” Representaciones Diplomáticas de Cuba en el Exterior.
43. “Salud pública cubana,” Representaciones Diplomáticas de Cuba en el Exterior.
44. “Bloqueo estadounidense provoca cuantiosas pérdidas al sector de la salud,” Ministerio de Salud Pública de la República de Cuba.
45. Garrido, “Anti-Government Protests in Cuba Provoked by U.S. Embargo.”
46. “US blocks sale of ventilators to Cuba after acquiring medical companies,” Morning Star, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/us-blocks-sale-ventilators-cuba-after-acquiring-medical-companies.
47. Michael Weissenstein, Cuba: US embargo blocks coronavirus aid shipment from Asia,” AP News, April 3, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-global-trade-cuba-united-states-jack-ma-2858fbaa2dd5460fa2988b888fc53748.
48. “Bloqueo estadounidense provoca cuantiosas pérdidas al sector de la salud,” Ministerio de Salud Pública de la República de Cuba.
49. Socorro Gomes and Thanassis Pafilis, “Nobel Peace Prize nomination for the ‘Henry Reeve’ International Contingent of Doctors,” World Peace Council,  September 22, 2020, https://www.wpc-in.org/statements/nobel-peace-prize-nomination-henry-reeve-international-contingent-doctors.
50. “Cuba’s COVID-19 vaccine success could serve as global model: report,” Harvard School of Public Health, November 03, 2022, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/cubas-covid-19-vaccine-success-could-serve-as-global-model-report/; Sam Meredith, “Why Cuba’s extraordinary Covid vaccine success could provide the best hope for low-income countries,” CNBC January 13, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/13/why-cubas-extraordinary-covid-vaccine-success-could-provide-the-best-hope-for-the-global-south.html; “Despite U.S. Embargo, Cuba Aims to Share Homegrown Vaccine with Global South,” Democracy Now, January 27, 2022, https://www.democracynow.org/2022/1/27/cuba_beat_covid_despite_us_embargo.
51. Chris Agee, “Under Pandemic, United Nations Votes to Condemn Cruel and Illegal U.S. Blockade of Cuba—But There Is A Twist,” CovertAction Magazine, June 24, 2021, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/06/24/under-pandemic-united-nations-votes-to-condemn-cruel-and-illegal-u-s-blockade-of-cuba-but-there-is-a-twist/.
52. Carlos L. Garrido and Edwards Liger Smith, “Pioneers for Communism: Strive to Be Like Che,” The International Magazine Issue 25, 18.

Featured image: Rural health care in Cuba (Photo by Carol Foil, 2009).

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The US CDC indicates that 92% of adults have taken one or more COVID-19 vaccine injections. Among those, 92% have been with an mRNA product (Pfizer or Moderna). All recipients have been blinded to the complete ingredient list no one knows exactly what has been injected into the human body.

There are some fundamental points known about mRNA. Natural RNA is made of two purines adenine and guanine and two pyrimidines cytosine and uracil. The replacement of uracil with its ribose ring (uridine) with N-1-methyl-pseudouridine, a synthetic product makes the genetic code for the Wuhan Spike protein better stabilized on lipid nanoparticles, long-lasting, and very efficient in terms of evading cellular destruction and able to undergo repeat reading by ribosomes for continued protein synthesis. Morais et al indicate that both Pfizer and Moderna chose development strategies replacing all uridine units with pseudouridine, making the entire strand completely “unnatural” to the human body. Thus vaccine consultants, companies, and patients unfortunately gambled on how long mRNA would be active within the human body. We now understand the quantity and duration of the disease-promoting and potentially lethal Spike protein cannot be known because the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of mRNA were not characterized.

Morais P, Adachi H, Yu YT. The Critical Contribution of Pseudouridine to mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2021 Nov 4;9:789427. doi: 10.3389/fcell.2021.789427. PMID: 34805188; PMCID: PMC8600071.

Fertig et al found lipid nanoparticles with mRNA were measurable in plasma for—15 days. Recently, Castruita et al demonstrated mRNA in blood out to 28 days. Roltgen et al have found mRNA in lymph nodes 60 days after injection. None of these studies demonstrated complete clearance of mRNA from a group of patients. This is worrisome since injections are recommended in some populations just a few months apart implying there will be stacking of long-lasting mRNA in the body without adequate opportunity for clearance and elimination.

We will look back for many years and ask: how could so many people readily accept injections of heavily modified synthetic genetic code giving the body instructions to manufacture a disease promoting and lethal protein engineered in a biosecurity lab in Wuhan, China? Repeated administrations of mRNA studded with apparently indestructible pseudouridine may have changed the course of lives forever. Done out of fear, and later with pressure, coercion, and threat of reprisal, perceptive recipients must swell with regret everyday with more understanding of what has transpired.

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Sources

Morais P, Adachi H, Yu YT. The Critical Contribution of Pseudouridine to mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2021 Nov 4;9:789427. doi: 10.3389/fcell.2021.789427. PMID: 34805188; PMCID: PMC8600071.

Castruita JAS, Schneider UV, Mollerup S, Leineweber TD, Weis N, Bukh J, Pedersen MS, Westh H. SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences circulate in blood up to 28 days after COVID-19 vaccination. APMIS. 2023 Mar;131(3):128-132. doi: 10.1111/apm.13294. Epub 2023 Jan 29. PMID: 36647776.

Fertig TE, Chitoiu L, Marta DS, Ionescu VS, Cismasiu VB, Radu E, Angheluta G, Dobre M, Serbanescu A, Hinescu ME, Gherghiceanu M. Vaccine mRNA Can Be Detected in Blood at 15 Days Post-Vaccination. Biomedicines. 2022 Jun 28;10(7):1538. doi: 10.3390/biomedicines10071538. PMID: 35884842; PMCID: PMC9313234.

Röltgen K, Nielsen SCA, Silva O, Younes SF, Zaslavsky M, Costales C, Yang F, Wirz OF, Solis D, Hoh RA, Wang A, Arunachalam PS, Colburg D, Zhao S, Haraguchi E, Lee AS, Shah MM, Manohar M, Chang I, Gao F, Mallajosyula V, Li C, Liu J, Shoura MJ, Sindher SB, Parsons E, Dashdorj NJ, Dashdorj ND, Monroe R, Serrano GE, Beach TG, Chinthrajah RS, Charville GW, Wilbur JL, Wohlstadter JN, Davis MM, Pulendran B, Troxell ML, Sigal GB, Natkunam Y, Pinsky BA, Nadeau KC, Boyd SD. Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition, and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination. Cell. 2022 Mar 17;185(6):1025-1040.e14. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.01.018. Epub 2022 Jan 25. PMID: 35148837; PMCID: PMC8786601.

Featured image is from Dr. Rath Health Foundation

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This is one of the more important pieces I have published. I have been given the honor of hosting a letter written by Jews around the world who unequivocally condemn the weaponization of “anti-semite” to character-assassinate people guilty of nothing but questioning approved narratives; exercising free speech; exposing corruption, lies, and harmful policies; and practicing independent, critical thinking.

The reckless abuse of such a pointed term is being done in the name of Jews, and the signatories of this letter are saying, “NOT IN OUR NAME.” They are holding the media, politicians, and ideologically motivated organizations accountable for the destruction of lives resulting from the wielding of this accusation—the gentle Clemens G. Arvay being but the latest tragic example.

We rely on you to share Clemens’s story and the Open Letter in Commemoration of Clemens Arvay that follows. Thank you for your role in helping to prevent more casualties of calumny.

“They’re killing me.”[1]

Those were the words scribbled on a note found on an Austrian cliff known as Türkenfallen on February 18, 2023.

At the foot of the cliff lay the body of Clemens Arvay, a forty-two-year-old Austrian biologist, health ecology author, musician, and father of a special-needs son.

It wasn’t the first time Clemens had written those words. According to his friend Raphael Bonelli, “They’re killing me” was a frequent refrain in his WhatsApp messages.

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This paper examines the total costs of the war in Iraq and Syria, which are expected to exceed half a million human lives and $2.89 trillion. This budgetary figure includes costs to date, estimated at about $1.79 trillion, and the costs of veterans’ care through 2050. Since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, between 550,000-580,000 people have been killed in Iraq and Syria — the current locations of the United States’ Operation Inherent Resolve — and several times as many may have died due to indirect causes such as preventable diseases. More than 7 million people from Iraq and Syria are currently refugees, and nearly 8 million people are internally displaced in the two countries.

Source: Brown University

This report also estimates that 98 to 122 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (MMTCO2e) were emitted from U.S. military operations between 2003 and 2021 in the war zone, calculated as 12 to 15 percent of the DOD’s total operational greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. war in Iraq began on March 19-20, 2003. Most allied and U.S. forces left Iraq in 2011, but the U.S. returned to significant military operations in Iraq and Syria in late 2014 in fighting that was undertaken to remove Islamic State from territory it had seized in those two countries. The war continues, with a nearly $400 million budget request from the Biden Administration this month to counter ISIS.

Click here to read the full paper.

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Is 5G actually a greater threat than the bioweapon itself?

Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is here to report his latest findings on the dangers of 5G technology. 

5G microwave radiation is a far greater threat than the so-called “vaccine” because it effects everyone.

Dr. Barrie Trower is described as a “real life James Bond” and is an expert on the dangers of 5G.

Microwave radiation has been a weapon since the 1930s. We’ve gotten used to using microwave ovens but the radiation is a weapon and can be used to cause almost any symptoms of any disease. It can also be used for geoengineering.

The elites and globalists are using 5G technology to create a “kill switch” that can genocide entire populations. Dead crops and livestock could be a result of 5G radiation.

In 2022, Federal Judge Frederic Block stopped Verizon from putting up cellular antennas in small Connecticut and Vermont towns clarifying that local governments can stop their construction. State and local governments need to ban 5G towers.

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***

Dear fellow citizens! We see, hear and read a lot about the problems in the world, about the consequences of so-called natural disasters (Turkey and Syria), about the Ukraine war, the many other wars and about pharmaceutical crimes. All events touch our lifeblood. What we tend to overlook in this flood of negative news are signs that the world seems to be changing slowly but surely for the better, despite ongoing problems that remain unsolved. This gives rise to confidence, which inspires faith in a future that is more worth living. Certainly, it will take some patience until the positive changes are also reflected in the personal lives of each individual citizen. But if we believe in the good in people, we will not get lost in the labyrinth of fears for the future.

For example, I recently received the monthly magazine of the German publishing house Kopp-Verlag in the mail with a full-page advertisement for the new book by Robert W. Malone: “Lies My Government Told Me and the Road to a Better Future. With a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” (1)

Because such an advertisement was unimaginable until recently, an occasion was found to report other positive events without euphoria.

Paying tribute to truth

“Whatever they say about him today, Malone will go down in history as a hero.” This quote from the US television presenter Tucker Carlson is already on the cover of the brochure, together with an image of the new book.

The introduction on page 1 then reads:

“As a medical student and doctoral candidate, Robert Malone was the first to invent mRNA vaccine technology in the late 1980s. At the time, he could not begin to imagine that he would one day play a leading role in a movement to expose the dangers of mRNA vaccines. Billions of people were given them – without being informed about the risks.” (2)

The sequel reads:

“Dr Robert Malone was censored by Big Tech and defamed by the media for speaking out against “mainstream” reporting. (…). Dr Malone is the authoritative voice of dissent. He exposes the dark side of the Corona agenda, he exposes the role of the mainstream media, censorship, propaganda and the brave new world of transhumanism promoted by the World Economic Forum and its acolytes. How is it possible that the lies spread by governments persist and our institutions fail to cotigrate them? What has been the impact of Corona politics on lives, livelihoods and democracies?

Dr Malone explores these questions and proves how data, news and emotions were deliberately distorted and manipulated during the pandemic. Governments deliberately used people’s fear as a weapon to control their behaviour. The media vilified anyone who resisted the official position and spoke out. Dr Malone examines the perverse links between the pharmaceutical industry, governments and the media and tells us what we can do about it.” (3)

Humans increasingly realise that they are compelled to reach out to each other in order to survive

Despite many relapses, humanity continues to move forward with instinctive certainty. One day it is “Thou shalt not kill”, another day “Love thy neighbour!” Especially in times of the Ukraine war and the many other wars and injustices, these are important insights.

Thus, not only demonstrating citizens but also realistic politicians worldwide are calling for a diplomatic solution to the current Ukraine war and a replacement of the unipolar world of the hegemon, in which only one can decide, with a multipolar world in which many can decide together (4).

The various forms of the communal ethos of human beings are inexorably striving forward with the goal of creating a united humanity. The instinctive certainty with which this happens seems to be due to the instinct of species preservation.

A change in the world for the better is also evident in the liberation of many African states from the shackles of centuries of murderous colonialism. For example, France’s president has already proclaimed the end of the colonial “France-Afrique Era” (5). Other European and US colonial eras will also soon come to an end.

This includes the Canadian government, under its current prime minister, apologising to the indigenous people for the genocide committed against them (6). An apology is only the beginning of a just reparation for this crime against humanity – but it is a first step. Indians, as Native Americans, will have registered this gesture of the Canadian government closely and will be waiting for a similar signal from Washington (7).

In conclusion, the question arises as to how this positive change of the world for the better will affect the personal lives of individual citizens and why this will awaken the belief in a more liveable future – especially for our children and our children’s children?

What still weighs on people today is the lack of social education. Many still suffer from the fiction of power and the self-importance of the individual. That is why the law under which humanity stands is also misunderstood: that people must stick together and are compelled to reach out to one another. The struggle for the preservation of life as well as the problems of security, progress and adaptation can best be solved through the unity of all and mutual help.

Unfortunately, cultural heritage is always under threat and has to be won anew every day. Cultural development essentially consists in the voice of human conscience making itself heard more and more and in the spirit of responsibility taking the place of violence and wars. There are unmistakable signs of this in the world.

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This article was originally published on NRhZ-ONLINE.

Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a school rector, educationalist (Dr. paed.) and psychologist (Dipl.-Psych.). After his university studies, he became an academic teacher (professor) in adult education: among other things, he was head of an independent school model experiment and in-service trainer of Bavarian guidance counsellors and school psychologists. As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in private practice. He was rapporteur for Germany at a public hearing on juvenile delinquency in the European Parliament. In his books and articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education and an education for public spirit and peace. For his services to Serbia, he was awarded the Republic Prize “Captain Misa Anastasijevic” by the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad in 2021.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) www.kopp-verlag.de, Kopp Aktuell. Books that open their eyes. Cover. March 2023

(2) op. cit., p. 1

(3) op. cit.

(4) https://de.rt.com/kurzclips/video/164562-frankfurt-am-main-demonstranten-fordern-diplomatische-loesung/

(5) https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/humanitaere-lustbruecke-der-eu-macron-verspricht-mehr-hilfe-fuer-kongo-18724733.html

(6) https://www.oe24.at/welt/trudeau-entschuldigt-sich-bei-ureinwohnern/310394473

(7) https://www.nzz.ch/international/veruebten-die-usa-einen-genozid-an-den-indianern-ld.1631753?reduced=true

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***

The US is apparently blackmailing Switzerland to force the country to play a more active role in the Ukrainian conflict. The American embassy in Switzerland suggests that neutrality would no longer be a possible path for the European country, which sounds like a kind of threat if the Swiss government does not adopt an anti-Russian military policy.

In a recent interview, the American ambassador in Switzerland Scott Miller stated that Switzerland was going through a serious crisis, in which the country would need to decide on what “neutrality” means. Miller claims that the US supports Swiss neutrality but does not consider this principle to be “static”, believing in a Swiss obligation to help the West as much as possible to tighten sanctions against Moscow.

There is currently a huge debate among Swiss parliamentarians over whether to allow the shipment of Swiss-made weapons to the Kiev regime. NATO enthusiasts support the measure as a form of military aid to Ukraine against the Russians. On the other hand, more conservative politicians are against changes in legislation as they understand that this would affect the country’s historical neutrality. Under current law, there is a ban on all forms of re-export of Swiss-made weapons. This means that non-neutral countries are not able to buy Swiss weapons and ship them to Kiev. This law deeply irritates the member states of NATO, since, according to Scott Miller, it “benefits the aggressor, who violates all principles of international law.”

However, Ambassador Miller went beyond what was expected in his demands. In addition to banning the anti-re-export law, he openly demanded the freezing of all Russian assets in Swiss financial institutions. According to him, this is a way for Switzerland to endorse the sanctions and help Ukraine more actively.

“Switzerland is in the most serious crisis since the Second World War. It is confronted with what neutrality means (…) We understand and respect it. But it is not a static construct. Switzerland can’t call itself neutral and allow one or both sides to exploit its laws to their own advantage (…) I think we still have a lot of work to do (…) Sanctions are only as strong as the political will behind them. We need to find as many assets as possible, freeze them and, if necessary, confiscate them in order to make them available to Ukraine for reconstruction”, he said.

The spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova understood the words of the American diplomat as a real threat. According to her, there is a parallel between Miller’s suggestions and the recent crisis at Credit Suisse, an important local financial institution that went into deep debt and requested tens of billions in loans from the Central Bank to continue working. Zakharova also recalled the American banking crisis and suggested that Miller could be blackmailing the Swiss into serving US interests – possibly in exchange for some help to prevent local banks from going the same way as the American ones, or, in the worst case, this could even be a direct threat of sabotage.

“Considering that the second-largest Swiss bank plunged right after three American banks went bust, such a statement looks like direct blackmail”, she said, adding that the essence of Miller’s message is: “drop neutrality and start sending weapons to the Kiev regime, and you’ll keep living full-bellied and lavishly; refuse – and bad days are in order”.

Recently, blackmail and threats have become America’s main methods in foreign policy. Furthermore, the country has already demonstrated that it has no respect for its partners and allies, considering that illegal and even terrorist acts have been carried out to force them to meet US interests – such as what was seen in the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in Germany. So, it is possible that Miller’s message consists of a warning that either Switzerland changes its policy of neutrality, or it will be the target of American reprisals – certainly in the banking sector, which is the central part of the Swiss economy.

The Swiss government bears no responsibility for the Ukrainian conflict. As a historically neutral country, it is under no obligation to send weapons to Kiev and would be breaking with its own diplomatic tradition if it bans the anti-export law. Furthermore, as a country with a bank-centered economy, freezing all Russian assets does not sound strategic for Switzerland. Taking the measures demanded by the US would be disastrous for the country, both in terms of economy and defense.

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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

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***

On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron chose to approve his pension reform without waiting for the completion of the parliamentary procedure.

Using the special powers the Constitution grants to the French president, he will put into effect the pension reform even if it is not approved by the Lower House.

Macron decided to do this after a meeting with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and other members of his cabinet, who informed him that votes from the French right were not enough to pass the pension reform.

To justify the change in the French pension system, Macron has argued that the reform seeks to guarantee financial balance in the face of a potential deficit of US$16 billion in 2032.

This financial deficit, which might represent up to 8 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), would occur due to the aging of the resident population in France, where the number of retirees will exceed the number of workers contributing to security social.

🔴 A l'annonce du 49.3, la foule rassemblée aux abords de l'Assemblée nationale se met à chanter.

En réponse, la Police demande à la foule de se disperser.#ReformeDesRetraites pic.twitter.com/TMNeghE849

— La France insoumise (@FranceInsoumise) March 16, 2023

The tweet reads, “After the announcement of article 49.3, the crowd gathered around the National Assembly begins to chant. In response, the Police ask the crowd to disperse.”

Macron’s main measure to compensate the financial deficit until 2030 consists of increasing the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years.

On the other hand, until 2027, his administration will increase from 42 to 43 years the contribution time necessary to collect a full pension.

French people who started working before the age of 17 may retire early at age 60 if they have 43 years of social security contributions.

Women who have made contributions for 43 years may also retire before turning 64, if they have accumulated quarters for maternity leave.

#France | Trade unions will mobilize on Wednesday as part of a new day of protests against the reform of the pension system promoted by President Emmanuel Macron. pic.twitter.com/HVHD0Mc4e6

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) March 15, 2023

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***

The crashes of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and its related bank insolvencies are much more serious than the 2008-09 crash. The problem at that time was crooked banks making bad mortgage loans. Debtors were unable to pay and were defaulting, and it turned out that the real estate that they had pledged as collateral was fraudulently overvalued, “mark-to-fantasy” junk mortgages made by false valuations of in the property’s actual market price and the borrower’s income. Banks sold these loans to institutional buyers such as pension funds, German savings banks and other gullible buyers who had drunk the neoliberal Kool Aid believing with Alan Greenspan that banks would not cheat them.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) investments had no such default risk. The Treasury always can pay, simply by printing money, and the prime long-term mortgages whose packages SVP bought also were solvent. The problem is the financial system itself, or rather, the corner into which the post-Obama Fed has painted the banking system. It cannot escape from ts 13 years of Quantitative Easing without reversing the asset-price inflation and causing bonds, stocks and real estate to lower their market value.

In a nutshell, solving the illiquidity crisis of 2009 in a way that saved the banks from losing money (at the cost of burdening the economy with enormous debts), paved away for the deeply systemic illiquidity crisis that is just now becoming clear, although I cannot resist that I pointed out its basic dynamics already in 2007 and in my 2015 book Killing the Host.

Accounting fictions vs. market reality

No risks of loan default existed for the investments in government securities or packaged long-term mortgages that SVB and other banks have bought. The problem is that the market valuation of these mortgages has fallen as a result of interest rates being jacked up. The interest yield on bonds and mortgages bought a few years ago is much lower than is available on new mortgages and new Treasury notes and bonds. When interest rates rise, these “old securities” fall in price so as to bring their yield to new buyers in line with the Fed’s rising interest rates.

A market valuation problem is not a fraud problem this time around.

The public has just discovered that the statistical picture that banks report about their assets and liabilities does not reflect market reality. Bank accountants are allowed to price their assets at “book value” based on the price that was paid to acquire them – without regard for what these investments are worth today. During the 14-year boom in prices for bonds, stocks and real estate this undervalued the actual gain that banks had made as the Fed lowered interest rates to inflate asset prices. But this Quantitative Easing (QE) ended in 2022 when the Fed began to tighten interest rates in order to slow down wage gains.

When interest rates rise, bond prices fall (and stock prices tend to follow). But banks don’t have to mark down the market price of their assets to reflect this decline if they simply hold on to their bonds or packaged mortgages. They only have to reveal the loss in market value if depositors on balance withdraw their money and the bank actually has to sell these assets to raise the cash to pay their depositors.

That is what happened at Silicon Valley Bank. In fact, it has been a problem for the entire U.S. banking system. The following chart comes from Naked Capitalism, which has been following the banking crisis daily:

How SVP’s short-termism failed to see where the financial sector is heading

During the years of low interest rates, the U.S. banking system found that its monopoly power was so strong that it only had to pay depositors 0.1 or 0.2 percent on deposits. That was all that the Treasury was paying on short-term risk-free Treasury bills. So depositors had little alternative, but banks were charging much higher rates for their loans, mortgages and credit cards. And when the Covid crisis hit in 2020, corporations held back on new investments and flooded the banks with money that they were not spending.

The banks were able to make an arbitrage gain – obtaining higher rates from investments than they were paying for deposits – by buying longer-term securities. SVB bought long-term Treasury bonds. The margin wasn’t large – less than 2 percentage points. But it was the only safe “free money” around.

Last year Federal Reserve Chairman Powell announced that the central bank was going to raise interest rates in order to slow the wage growth that developed as the economy began to recover. That led most investors to realize that higher interest rates would lower the price of bonds – most steeply for the longest-term bonds. Most money managers avoided such price declines by moving their money into short-term Treasury bills or money-market funds, while real estate, bond and stock prices fell.

For some reason SVB did not make this obvious move. They kept their assets concentrated in long-term Treasury bonds and similar securities. As long as the bank did not have any net deposit withdrawals, it did not have to report this decline in the market value of its assets.

However, it was left holding the bag when Mr. Powell announced that not enough American workers were unemployed to hold down their wage gains, so he planned to raise interest rates even more than he had expected. He said that a serious recession was needed to keep wages low enough to keep U.S. corporate profits high, and hence their stock price.

This reversed the Obama bailout’s Quantitative Easing that steadily inflated asset prices for real estate, stocks and bonds. But the Fed has painted itself into a corner: If it restores the era of “normal” interest rates, that will reversed the 15-year run-up of asset-price gains for the FIRE sector.

This sudden shift on March 11-12 left SVB “sitting on an unrealized loss of close to $163bn – more than its equity base. Deposit outflows then started to crystallize this into a realized loss.”[1] SVB was not alone. Banks across the country were losing deposits.

This was not a “run on the banks” resulting from fears of insolvency. It was because banks were strong enough monopolies to avoid sharing their rising earnings with their depositors. They were making soaring profits on the rates they charge borrowers, and the rates yielded by their investments, but continued to pay depositors only about 0.2%.

The U.S. Treasury was paying much more, and on Thursday, March 11, the 2-year Treasury note was yielding almost 5 percent. The widening gap between what investors can earn by buying risk-free Treasury securities and the pittance that banks were paying their depositors led the more well-to-do depositors withdraw their money to earn a fairer market return elsewhere.

It would be wrong to think of this as a “bank run” much less as a panic. The depositors were not irrational or falling subject to “the madness of crowds” in withdrawing their money. The banks simply were too selfish. And as they withdrew their deposits, banks had to sell off their portfolio of securities – including the long-term securities held by SVB.

All this is part of the unwinding of the Obama bank bailouts and Quantitative Easing. The result of trying to return to more normal historic interest-rate levels is that on March 14, Moody’s rating agency cut the outlook for the U.S. banking system from stable to negative, citing the “rapidly changing operating environment.” What they are referring to is the plunge in the ability of bank reserves to cover what they owed to their depositors, who were withdrawing their money and forcing the banks to sell securities at a loss.

President Biden’s deceptive cover-up

President Biden is trying to confuse voters by assuring them that the “rescue” of uninsured wealthy SVB depositors is not a bailout. But of course it is a bailout. What he meant was that bank stockholders were not bailed out. But its large uninsured depositors were saved from losing a single penny, despite the fact that they did not qualify for safety, and in fact had jointly talked among themselves and decided to jump ship and cause the bank collapse.

What Biden really meant was that this is not a taxpayer bailout. It does not involve money creation or a budget deficit, any more than the Fed’s $9 trillion in Quantitative Easing for the banks since 2008 has been money creation or increased the budget deficit. It is a balance-sheet exercise – technically a kind of “swap” with offsets of good Federal Reserve credit for “bad” bank securities pledged as collateral – way above current market pricing, to be sure. That is precisely what “rescued” the banks after 2009. Federal credit was created without taxation.

The banking system’s inherent tunnel vision

One may echo Queen Elizabeth II and ask, “Did nobody see this coming?” Where was the Federal Home Loan Bank that was supposed to regulate SVB? Where were the Federal Reserve examiners?

To answer that, one should look at just who the bank regulators and examiners are. They are vetted by the banks themselves, chosen for their denial that there is any inherently structural problem in our financial system. They are “true believers” that financial markets are self-correcting by “automatic stabilizers” and “common sense.”

Deregulatory corruption played a role in carefully selecting such tunnel-visioned regulators and examiners. SVB was overseen by the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB). The FHLB is notorious for regulatory capture by the banks who choose to operate under its supervision. Yet SVB’s business is not home-mortgage lending. It is high-tech private equity entities being prepared for IPOs – to be issued at high prices, talked up, and then often left to fall in a pump and dump game. Bank officials or examiners who recognizes this problem are disqualified from employment by being “over-qualified.”

Another political consideration is that Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold and rich source of campaign financing. The Biden Administration was not going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of campaign contributions. Of course it was going to bail out the bank and its private-capital customers. The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.

The Fed gets frightened and rolls back interest rates

On March 14 stock and bond prices soared. Margin buyers made a killing as they saw that the Administration’s plan is the usual one: to kick the bank problem down the road, flood the economy with bailouts (for the bankers, not for student debtors) until election day in November 2024.

The great question is thus whether interest rates can ever get back to a historic “normal” without turning the entire banking system into something like SVB. If the Fed really raises interest rates back to normal levels to slow wage growth, there must be a financial crash. To avoid this, the Fed must create an exponentially rising flow of Quantitative Easing.

The underlying problem is that interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, but the economy follows an S-curve and then turns down. And when the economy turns down – or is deliberately slowed down when labor’s wage rates tend to catch up with the price inflation caused by monopoly prices and U.S. anti-Russian sanctions that raise energy and food prices, the magnitude of financial claims on the economy exceeds the ability to pay.

That is the real financial crisis that the economy faces. It goes beyond banking. The entire economy is saddled with debt deflation, even in the face of Federal Reserve-backed asset-price inflation. So the great question – literally the “bottom line” – is how can the Fed maneuver its way out of the low-interest Quantitative Easing corner in which it has painted the U.S. economy. The longer it continues to save FIRE sector investors from taking a loss, the more violent the ultimate resolution must be.

The severity has been a policy choice to keep “kicking the can down the road,” bailing out one financial squeeze after another at least until the next election year.

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Note

[1] Huw van Steenis, “History can instruct us on the fallout from SVB’s collapse,” Financial Times, March 13, 2023.

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March 17 is traditionally St Patrick’s Day, a day when ‘Irishness’ is celebrated all over the world. This date is traditionally held to be the date of the death of St Patrick  (c. 385 – c. 461), the patron saint of Ireland. It is marked by parades through the main cities and towns of Ireland, and in recent years it has become popular as a festival around the world with famous buildings being lit up green and major rivers being dyed green.

However, in recent decades the symbolism of St Patrick’s Day has changed dramatically and promotes negative stereotypes (e.g. leprechauns) of the Irish people to a world audience. This is not good for Ireland or the Irish people.

It must also be noted that St Patrick is seen as the patron saint of Ireland because he defeated pagan ideology in favour of Christianity. However, pagan ideology had a strong connection with nature and the cycles of nature that resulted in seasonal festivals such as Beltaine (1 May), Lughnasadh (1 August), Samhain (1 November) and Imbolc (1 February).

St Patrick

Not a lot is known about Saint Patrick except he is believed to have been a Romano-British Christian missionary who was kidnapped by Irish raiders and brought to Ireland as a slave. After six years as a shepherd he went home and became a priest. He then returned to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. He is famously believed to have driven the snakes out of Ireland despite the fact there is no record that Ireland ever had snakes.

It is more likely that the snakes refer to the pagans themselves:

“Scholars suggest the tale is allegorical. Serpents are symbols of evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition—the Bible, for example, portrays a snake as the hissing agent of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. The animals were also linked to heathen practices—so St. Patrick’s dramatic act of snake eradication can be seen as a metaphor for his Christianizing influence.”

It is believed that he died on 17 March and was buried at Downpatrick. It is also believed that the date is suspiciously close to Ostara, a pagan holiday:

“It wasn’t arbitrary that the day honoring Saint Patrick was placed on the 17th of March. The festival was designed to coincide, and, it was hoped, to replace the Pagan holiday known as Ostara; the second spring festival which occurs each year, which celebrates the rebirth of nature, the balance of the universe when the day and night are equal in length, and which takes place at the Spring Equinox (March 22nd this year). In other words, Saint Patrick’s Day is yet another Christian replacement for a much older, ancient Pagan holiday; although generally speaking Ostara was most prominently replaced by the Christian celebration of Easter (the eggs and the bunny come from Ostara traditions, and the name “Easter” comes from the Pagan goddess Eostre).”

St Patrick’s Day Parade

As a child I remember being brought to the parade and seeing a very dignified parade of marching pipe bands and symbols of the Irish state and nation such as the Irish army. By the 1980s it had been reduced to low levels of commercialisation (such as multiple floats advertising a major security firm). Later, the influence of Macnas took over and a kind of Celtic primitivism became very influential.

St Patrick’s Day, Downpatrick, March 2011 (Licensed under Wikimedia Commons)

The commercialism of the St Patrick’s Day Parade also resulted in Irish people dressing up as red-bearded and green-hatted leprechauns:

“Films, television cartoons and advertising have popularised a specific image of leprechauns which bears little resemblance to anything found in the cycles of Irish folklore. It has been argued that the popularised image of a leprechaun is little more than a series of stereotypes based on derogatory 19th-century caricatures.”

Along with this negative stereotype came a change in terminology as St Patrick’s day became known as Paddy’s Day, a derogatory term for Irish people (Paddy). The festival has become an excuse for all-day drinking and riotous behaviour, feeding into the negative stereotypes of ‘drunken paddys’.

St. Patrick Parade, Fifth Ave., New York 1909 (Licensed under the Public Domain)

In a way the St Patrick’s Day parade of recent years does symbolise the Ireland of today just as the content of past parades represented the prevalent ideologies of their day too. The colorful, brash, internationalism of the parade now is similar to other major festivals around the world (such as Brazilian Carnival) and, similarly, has more of a feeling of public catharsis than a celebration of national identity.

The kind of drinking and self-mocking celebrated now on St Patrick’s Day has more in common with the work of the Roman satirical poet, Juvenal (c. 100 CE), who wrote that “the People have abdicated our duties [and] now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”  Public palliatives for societal woes only temporarily cover up the real problems facing Irish people today as the housing, energy and financial crises deepen.

Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal. This is what is really needed now, the rebirth of the politics of social justice, and the renewal of our deep connection with nature and life – a movement away from the theology of death.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. Caoimhghin has just published his new book – Against Romanticism: From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment and the Culture of Slavery, which looks at philosophy, politics and the history of 10 different art forms arguing that Romanticism is dominating modern culture to the detriment of Enlightenment ideals. It is available on Amazon (amazon.co.uk) and the info page is here.

The Covid “Killer Vaccine”. People Are Dying All Over the World. It’s A Criminal Undertaking

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***

Economist Michael Hudson analyzes the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, and Signature Bank, explaining the similarities to the 2008 financial crash.

In this discussion with Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton, Hudson also addresses the US government bailout (which it isn’t calling a bailout), the role of the Federal Reserve and Treasury, the factor of cryptocurrency, and the danger of derivatives.

Transcript

BEN NORTON: Hi everyone, I’m Ben Norton. I have the pleasure of being joined by someone I think is one of the most important economists in the world, Michael Hudson.

And I should say that we should wish Professor Hudson a happy birthday. Today is March 14th. It’s his birthday, and he turns eighty-four today. How do you feel Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Just like I feel every other day. I usually feel energetic on my birthday because I’m always working on a new chapter and I tend to write a lot around this period each year.

BEN NORTON: And Michael is extremely prolific. He has so many books. And today we’re going to be talking about a lot of topics that he addressed in one of his classic books, which is Killing The Host. And talking about how the financial sector is parasitic for the real economy.

Today we’re going to be talking about the banking crisis that we see unfolding in the United States.

This March, three banks have collapsed in the span of one week.

It started at first with a California-based cryptocurrency-focused bank, Silvergate, which collapsed on March 8th, and then two days later Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went down as well. It went down in the largest-ever bank run.

And that was the second biggest ever to fail in US history. And it was also the largest bank to crash since 2008.

Silicon Valley Bank had $209 billion in assets, compared to the largest-ever bank failure which was Washington Mutual, which had $307 billion in assets, and that was in 2008.

Professor Hudson has been writing about this. He already has two articles that he published. The first is “Why the US banking system is breaking up.”

So Michael, let’s just start with your basic argument of why you think these banks have been crashing — first Silvergate, then Silicon Valley Bank, and why you think they’re crashing, and what the response of the Federal Reserve (Fed) has been.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well in order to understand why they’re crashing, you have to compare it to what happened in 2008 and 2009.

This crash is much more serious.

In 2008 and 2009, Washington Mutual collapsed because it was a crooked bank. It was writing fraudulent mortgages, junk loan mortgages. It should have been allowed to go under because of the fraud.

The basic subprime fraud and collapse was widespread fraud throughout the whole financial system. Citibank was one of the worst offenders. Countrywide, Bank of America.

These were individual banks that could have been allowed to go under and the mortgages could have done what President Obama had promised to do.

The mortgages could have been written down to the realistic market values that would have cost about as much to service as paying your monthly rent. And you just would have got the crooks out of the system.

My colleague Bill Black at the University of Missouri at Kansas City described all this in The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.

So the problem then under the Obama administration — he made an about-face and reversed everything that he had promised his voters.

He had promised to write down the loans, to keep the subprime mortgage people in their houses, but to write down the loans to the fair value and undo the fraud.

What happened instead was, as soon as he took office, he invited the bankers to the White House and said, “I’m the only guy standing between you and the mob with the pitchforks.”

[By] “the mob with the pitchforks,” he meant mainly Black and Hispanic buyers, mortgagees, who were the main victims of the subprime fraud.

He bailed out the banks and directed the Fed to undertake fifteen years of quantitative easing (QE). And what that was, was the Fed said, “Well the mortgages are worth less than —the value of the property doesn’t suffice to cover all of the bank deposits, because the banks have made bad mortgages.”

“How do we save the banks that have misrepresented the value of what they have?”

“We’re going to slash interest rates to zero. We’re going to spur the largest asset-price inflation in history.”

“We’re going to put nine trillion dollars supporting bank credit — flooding the market with credit — so that instead of real estate prices going back to an affordable level, we can make them even more unaffordable.”

“And that will make the banks much richer. It’ll make the 1% in the financial sector much richer. It’ll make the landlords much richer. We’re going to do that.”

So they spurred — by lowering the interest rates, they created the biggest bond-market boom in American history. From high interest rates in 2008 all the way down to almost zero.

So the result of course was an inflation in stock prices, an inflation of bond prices.

And the result was widening inequality for Americans, because most stocks and bonds are owned by the wealthiest 10%, not by the bottom 90%.

So if you were one of the 10% of the population that owned stocks and bonds, your wealth is going way up.

If you were a part of the 90%, your wages were not going up, and in fact your living standards were being squeezed — not only by the inflation, but by the fact that more and more of your income had to go to paying rent and interest to the FIRE sector — [Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate].

Well finally, a year ago, the Federal Reserve said, “Well there is a problem. Now that COVID is over, wages are beginning to rise.”

“We’ve got to have two million Americans thrown out of work in order to lower wages so that the companies can make larger profits, to pay higher stock prices.”

“Because if we don’t cause unemployment, if we don’t lower the wage levels for America, then profit levels will go down and stock prices will go back down, and our job at the Fed is to increase stock prices, increase bond prices, and increase real estate prices.”

So finally they began to raise [interest] rates to — as they put it — “curb inflation.”

When they say “inflation,” what they mean is “rising wages.”

And even though wages have gone up, they have not gone up as much as consumer prices have gone up.

And the consumer prices have gone up, not because of wage pressures, but for two reasons.

One — the sanctions against Russia have sharply increased the price of energy, because Russian oil can’t be sold to the West anymore, and Russian agriculture can’t be sold to the West anymore.

[Two] — the Democratic party has followed the Republican party in deregulating monopolies. Every monopolized sector of the economy has been raising its prices without its costs going up at all.

And they raise the prices because, they say, “Well, we’re raising them because we expect inflation to go up.”

Well that’s a euphemism for saying, “We’re raising them because we can, and we can make more money by raising them.”

So the prices have gone up, but the Fed is using this as an excuse to try to create unemployment.

Well, what has happened is that, by solving the problem of wages rising, they’ve also created a problem that spilled over into the financial sector. Because what they’ve done is reverse the whole asset-price inflation from 2009 to just last year, [2022].

That’s almost a 13-year, steady asset-price inflation.

By raising the interest rates, all of a sudden they’ve put downward pressure on the bonds. So the bonds that went way up in price when interest rates were falling, now go down in price, because if you have a higher-yielding bond available, the price of your low-yielding bond falls, so that it works out to yield exactly the same.

Also there’s been a withdrawal of money from the banks in the last year, for obvious reasons.

The banks are the most monopolized sector of the American economy. Despite the fact that interest rates were going up, despite the fact that banks were making much more money on their loans, they were paying depositors only 0.2 percent.

And, imagine — if you are a fairly well-to-do person, and you have a retirement income, or a pension plan, or if you’ve just saved a few hundred thousand dollars, you can take your money out of the bank, where you’re getting almost no interest at 0.2 percent, and you can buy a two-year treasury note that yields 4 percent or 4.5 percent.

So bank deposits were being drained by people saying, “I’m going to put my money in safe government securities.”

Many people also were selling stocks because they thought the stock market was as high as it could go, and they bought government bonds.

Well what happened then is that all of a sudden, the banks — especially Silicon Valley Bank — found themselves in a squeeze.

And here’s what happened.

Silicon Valley Bank and banks throughout the country were flooded by deposits ever since the 2020 COVID crisis.

And that’s because people were not borrowing to invest very much. Corporations were not borrowing.

What they were doing was building up their cash.

[SVB’s] deposits were growing very very rapidly, and it was only paying 0.2 percent on the deposits — how is it going to make a profit?

Well it tried to squeeze out every little bit of profit that it could by buying long-term government bonds.

The longer term the bond is, the higher the interest rate is.

And even the long-term government bonds were only yielding let’s say 1.5 percent, maybe 1.75 percent.

They took the deposits that they were paying 0.2 percent on and lent them out at 1.5, 1.75 percent.

And they were getting — it’s called arbitrage — the difference between what they had to pay for their deposits and what they were able to make by investing them.

Well here’s the problem. As the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, that meant the value of these long-term bonds — the market price — steadily fell.

Well most people who saw this coming — every CEO that I know sold out of stocks, sold out of long-term government bonds.

When the Federal Reserve head said that he was going to raise interest rates, that means you don’t want to hold a long-term bond.

You want to keep your money as close to cash as possible. You want to keep it in three-month Treasury bills. That’s very liquid. Because short term treasury bills, money market funds — you don’t lose any capital value in that at all.

But the Silicon Valley Bank thought — well they were still after every little bit of extra they can get, and they held onto their long-term bonds that were plunging in price.

Well, what you had was a miniature of what was happening for the entire American banking system.

I have a chart on that, on the market value of the securities that banks hold:

Now, when Banks report to the Federal Reserve, that’s exactly it. When they report — this shows the actual market value.

If banks valued their assets just what they were worth on the market, they would have plunged just like you see at the bottom there.

But banks don’t have to do that. Banks are allowed to represent their assets according to the book value that they paid for them.

So Silicon Valley Bank, and other banks throughout the system, have been carrying all their long-term mortgage loans, packaged mortgaged, government bonds, at the price they paid for them — not the declining market price.

They figured — “Well, we can ride this out and hold it to maturity in twenty-five years as long as nobody in the next twenty-five years actually withdraws their money from the bank.”

It’s only when bank customers and depositors pull their money out that they decide that, “Wait a minute. Now in order to raise the cash to pay the depositors for the money they’re taking out, we have to sell these bonds and mortgages that we’ve bought. And we have to sell them at a loss.”

And so the bank began to sell the bonds and the packaged mortgages at a huge loss. And they were losing capital.

Well as it happens, Silicon Valley Bank isn’t a normal bank. A normal bank you think of as having mom and pop depositors, individuals, wage earners.

But almost all the deposits — I think over eighty percent of the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank — were by companies. Mainly high-tech companies that were sponsored by private capital — special purpose private capital acquisitions.

And they began to talk amongst each other, and some of them decided, “Well it looks to me like the bank’s being squeezed. Let’s pull our deposits out of the small bank and put them in a big bank like Chase Manhattan or Citibank or any of the big banks that the government says are too big to fail.”

So you know that their money will be safe there. So there was a run on deposits.

So the the problem that Silicon Valley Bank and other banks have is not that they’d made bad loans. It’s not that they had committed any fraud. It’s not that the US government couldn’t pay the bills. It’s not that the mortgagers couldn’t pay the bills.

It was that the market price of these good loans to solvent entities had gone down and left the bank illiquid.

Well, that is what is squeezing the entire financial sector right now.

So just as the quantitative easing was flooding the economy with enough credit to inflate asset prices for real estate, stocks and bonds — the tightening of credit lowered the asset prices for bonds certainly, for real estate too.

For some reason the stock market has not followed through. And people say, “Well, there is an informal government Plunge Protection Team (PPT) that’s artificially keeping the stock market high, but how long can it really be kept high?”

Nobody really knows.

So the problem is that the 2009 crisis wasn’t a systemic crisis, but now, the rising interest rates have created a systemic crisis because the Federal Reserve, by saving the banks’ balance sheets by inflating the prices for capital assets, by saving the wealthiest 10% of the economy from losing any of their money — by solving that problem they’ve boxed themselves into a corner.

They cannot let interest rates rise without making the entire economy look like Silicon Valley Bank. Because that’s the problem. The assets the banks hold are stuck.

Now a number of people have said, “Well why didn’t the banks — if they couldn’t cover their deposits — why didn’t they do what banks did in 2009?”

And in 2009 the banks — Citibank, Chase Manhattan, all the big banks — went to the Federal Reserve and they did repo deals.

They would pledge their securities and the Fed would lend them money against their securities.

This wasn’t a creation of money.

None of this quantitative easing appeared as an increase in the money supply. It was all done by balance sheet manipulation. The banks were able to go to the Fed.

Or instead of selling the bonds, people said, “Why couldn’t Silicon Valley Bank simply borrow short-term money? You want to pay out the depositors? Okay, borrow the money, pay the four percent, but don’t sell — you know, it’s not going to last very long. Once the Fed sees how systemic the problem is, they’ll certainly turn out to be cowards and roll back the interest rates to what they were.”

But there’s a problem. If the the repo market — in other words, the “repo market” is the “repossession market” — it’s the market that banks go to if they want to borrow from larger banks. You want to borrow overnight credit. You want to borrow from the Federal Reserve.

But if you borrow in the repo market, the bankruptcy law was changed in order to protect these sort of non-bank lenders, and it was changed so that if a bank makes a currency swap — if it says, “I’m going to give you a billion dollars worth of packaged the government bonds and you’ll give me a loan” — if the bank then goes under and becomes insolvent, as Silicon Valley did, the bonds that it pledged for repo are not available to be grabbed by the bank itself to make the depositors whole.

The repo banks — the large banks — are made whole.

Because Congress said, “We have a choice. Either we can make the economy rich or we can make the banking sector rich. Who gives us our campaign contributors? The banks.”

“To hell with the economy. We’re going to make sure the banks don’t lose the money, and that the 1% that own the banks don’t lose money. We’d rather the voters lose the money because that’s how democracy works in America.”

So the result is that the — there was a lot of pressure against SVB trying to protect itself in the way that banks were able to do back in 2009. All they did was sell the existing securities they had in order to pay the depositors before they were closed down on Friday afternoon — before closing hours — and that led them to the problem today, before President Biden decided to bail them out and then blatantly lied to the public by claiming it’s not a bailout.

How can it not be a bailout? He bailed out every single uninsured depositor because they were his constituency. Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold, as most of California is.

There’s no way that Biden and the Democratic Party was going to let any wealthy person in Silicon Valley lose a penny of their deposits, because it knows that it’s going to get huge campaign contributions in gratitude for the 2024 election.

So the result is that of course they bailed out the banks and President Biden weaseled his way out of things by saying, “Well, we didn’t bail out the bank stockholders; we only bailed out the billions of dollars of depositors.”

BEN NORTON: It’s very revealing to see how the financial press treated Silicon Valley Bank.

In fact, just before — on the eve of it imploding — Forbes described SVB as one of “America’s Best Banks” in 2023. And that was for 5 years straight, praising this bank.

And I think it’s important to go look at SVB’s website and to see how it portrayed itself, what it was boasting of.

If you go to the Silicon Valley Bank website, they boast that 88% of “Forbes’ 2020 Next Billion-Dollar Startups” are SVB clients. “Around 50% of all US venture capital-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB.”

And in fact, just before it imploded, 56% of the loans that SVB had made were to venture capital firms and private equity firms.

And if you go down on their website, they boast “up to 4.5% annual percentage yield on deposits,” which is incredible. I mean most banks offer 0.2% yield.

SVB wrote on their website, “Help make your money last longer with our startup money market account. Like with the savings account you’ll earn up to 4.5% annual percentage yield on deposits.”

MICHAEL HUDSON: “Up to.” I could say, why don’t they say “Up to 50% a year.” — anything you want.

I think in this case they were factoring capital gains into it — that means asset-price gains — this wasn’t an income yield so much. It was an overall yield, making the depositors part of the mutual speculation.

But the depositors — we know that eighty percent were people like Peter Thiel. They were large private-capital firms.

And one of the problems is, if you have a lot of well-connected rich people who are the major depositors that they’re talking to in this case, they talk to each other.

And when they see that there’s no way that the bank can pay anywhere near 4.5% anymore, they jump ship.

And that’s exactly what happened. They talked to each other and there was a run on the bank.

Now, most people think of a run on the bank as being “the madness of crowds.”

This wasn’t the madness of crowds. The crowd was not mad. The bank may have been mad, but the crowd was perfectly rational.

They said, “Look, I think the free lunch is over. Let’s pull our money out. What we want now is not to hope and pray for a 4.5% return — let’s just move for safety.”

If you have a billion dollars, you’re more concerned with keeping that billion dollars safe than actually making an income on it. And I think that’s what happened.

And when you say “up to” — yeah, that’s funny language.

BEN NORTON: And Michael, I know you’re friends with Pam Martens and Russ Martens over at WallStreetOnParade.com that always do great reporting.

MICHAEL HUDSON: They’ve done a wonderful job of following all of this. They say, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t be bailed out, it’s the wealthy billionaire depositors of that bank.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, they described Silicon Valley Bank as a “Wall Street IPO pipeline in drag as a federally insured bank.”

And I just want to read what they wrote here which really summarizes it very well: “SVB was a financial institution deployed to facilitate the goals of powerful venture capital and private equity operators by financing tech and pharmaceutical startups until they could raise millions or billions of dollars in a Wall Street Initial Public Offering (IPO).”

You mentioned, Michael, that the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that the US government is not going to bail out the depositors — these private equity firms and such and startups at SVB — but in reality only $250,000 of their deposits were actually federally insured, but we were seeing that actually the US government is ensuring that all of their deposits, including above $250,000, is going to be paid to them.

So essentially, what the Federal Reserve — backed by the Treasury with the $25 billion war chest in supporting this operation — what they’re essentially saying is that deposit insurance on commercial banks in the United States, including ones with very high interest interest-bearing deposits — it’s basically infinity.

There is no limit on federally insured accounts. It’s no longer actually $250,000 — which only incentivizes other firms in the future to deposit their earnings into very risky banks that offer very high interest rates they can’t pay out, because they know that the US government will bail them out.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well Janet Yellen also said that Ukraine was going to win the war with Russia. Sort of the reincarnation of Pinocchio.

You’re never going to have a Federal Reserve head say that there’s going to be a problem.

Bankers are not allowed to tell the truth.

That’s why — one of the worst things that can happen to a banker is if they get COVID. Because when you get COVID sometimes, you’re not able to lie quickly, and it’s a surefire way of losing the job.

That’s part of it. But there’s another reason.

If you have a banker be aware of the systemic risk that I just explained — the risk that is for the whole economy if it ever tries to go back to normal, which it can’t again without causing a crisis — then you’re disqualified for the job. Or you’re called overqualified.

In order to be a bank examiner or a bank regulator, you have to believe that every problem can be kicked down the road. That there are automatic stabilizers and the market is going to solve everything thanks to the magic of the marketplace.

And if you don’t believe that, you’re a blackballed and are never going to be promoted.

So the last person you’re ever going to want to explain anything, whether it’s Alan Greenspan or his successors, is the head of the Federal Reserve.

BEN NORTON: Michael, I want to talk about the scheme that the Federal Reserve has created in order to bail out Silicon Valley Bank and its clients without calling it a bailout.

I’m going to look at a very good Twitter thread that was done by the post-Keynesian economist Daniela Gabor.

forget about SBV liabilities for a second, the real bailout story is the regime-change in the Fed's treatment of collateral:

par value goes against every risk management commandment of the past 30 years.
it turbocharges the monetary power of collateral pic.twitter.com/7T0M8QUrrn

— Daniela Gabor (@DanielaGabor) March 13, 2023

She’s tweeted that she has spent fifteen years researching central banks collateral, and she has never heard a single central banker contest the common wisdom that there should be “haircuts.”

Instead, what we see is the Fed is paying par value.

So the Fed has this program called the Bank Term Funding Program, and essentially it’s giving extremely favorable loans to Silicon Valley Bank and other banks, which are essentially government subsidies.

And instead of using as collateral the Treasury securities and other assets that are owned by Silicon Valley Bank — or at least that were — instead of using their market value, the Federal Reserve is using the value at par — the face value that was printed on the Treasury securities that are held by SVB and other banks that need to be bailed out.

So essentially what they’re saying is that, only average working people are subject to the discipline of the market.

But banks — they don’t actually have to go along with market value for their securities.

They can be bailed out by using as collateral the values of what they originally bought the security at before the Fed raised interest rates and the price of those bonds decreased.

So in short what it is, is socialism for the rich for big corporations and for the commercial banks, and capitalism for everyone else.

Daniela Gabor said she’s never seen this in fifteen years of research. Have you ever seen something like this?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well this is what I said at the very beginning of our discussion today.

I said, the banks are able to carry their assets at the price they purchased them. That was called the “book value” — not the “current market value.”

For years, in the 1960s and 1970s, if you had banks or a corporation carrying real estate at book value, people were looking over these balance sheets saying, “Aha, they’re going to value their real estate at what they bought it for in the 1950s and now it’s tripled in value. Let’s raid that corporation and take it over, break it up, and sell the real estate.”

That was how money was made in the 1960s and 1970s and even more in the 1980s.

But that’s when asset prices are going up.

But when you mark to “purchase price” — “book value” — instead of the “market value,” you’re going to have this disparity. That’s exactly the problem.

And you’re quite right about the double standard that the government has.

Look at the double standard with the student loan debtors. They are unable to pay their student loans without making a big sacrifice. But Biden has made sure that they’re not going to be bailed out because he’s the man who sponsored the bankruptcy bill saying that student loans are not subject to bankruptcy laws to be written down.

Every other kind of asset, if you go bankrupt, can be written down to the current market failure for what you owe. But not student loans.

They are kept sacrosanct.

There’s a diametric opposite economic philosophy when it comes to what wage earners and consumers owe, and what the financial and real estate sector owes.

The Biden Administration and the Republicans say that no billionaire should lose a single penny. No bank or real estate company should owe anything. We will guarantee that bailout — they are risk-free.

We’ve transferred all of the risk onto the voters who put us in power, because we say that, “Maybe you’ll be a billionaire someday. You don’t want to hurt them, do you?” or whatever their politicking is.

So this double standard is what is squeezing the economy now. By not permitting the financial sector from taking a penny loss, somebody has to lose. And the losers are the non-financial economy — the real economy of production and consumption.

BEN NORTON: Michael, another factor in this is crypto. While all of this is happening, it’s also in the wake of a disastrous collapse in big parts of the cryptocurrency industry.

You yourself have always been very skeptical and have criticized this crypto industry and you can talk about that — I mean I’ve done many interviews with you over the years. Going back on the record people can see that you were proven right about this.

Of course Silicon Valley Bank as its name suggests is definitely involved in the tech sector and Silicon Valley.

But before SVB collapsed we saw Silvergate collapse, and Silvergate was very heavily invested — or at least many of its depositors were companies invested in crypto.

And then on March 12th there was another bank that went down which — unlike SVB and Silvergate, which were in California — the third bank to go down was Signature Bank which is based in New York City. And thirty percent — almost one-third of Signature Bank’s deposits were cryptocurrency businesses.

So maybe you can talk about crypto’s role in all of this. And of course this comes at a time when Sam Bankman-Fried — the fraudster who ran the FDX exchange — he was exposed to the world for committing literal fraud, and losing billions of dollars really overnight.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the whole mythology and fantasy of crypto has been burst, especially with Bankman-Fried.

Crypto was supposed to be — they called it peer-to-peer lending. The peer-to-peer lending was, the person who bought the crypto took money out of the bank and paid for crypto with a bank transfer fee — was one peer.

Who’s the other peer? The other peer was Bankman-Fried, and he could do whatever he wanted with his money.

The crypto cover story was, “Well, we know that the economy’s messed up and we don’t like big government and we don’t like the bank, so here’s an alternative to the banks, putting your money in that bank and putting your money, depending on government fiat currencies.”

So people would put their money into crypto, thinking, this is something different from the banks. And yet it turns out — what did the crypto companies do?

If you get a billion dollars of inflow by people who want an alternative, what are you going to do with a billion dollars?

Well Bankman-Fried simply bought luxury real estate and gave money to the Democratic Part and a few Republicans for campaign contributions to buy influence.

But most of the crypto was put in Silvergate Bank or other banks, or government securities. I mean, where else are you going to put a billion dollars inflow?

You get a bank transfer from a bank. It goes into your bank account — you have to have a bank account somewhere to hold it. And what do you do?

The money that goes into crypto ends up in the very banks or the government securities that crypto’s supposed to be an escape from.

So all that crypto is, is a disguised bank or a mutual fund that has its money in banks and government securities.

Except it has secrecy, so that if you’re a criminal or a tax evader or a crook and you don’t want the government to know what you have, you’re willing to give a premium.

Just like the cocaine cartel who will pay ten percent or twenty percent for money laundering.

Crypto was a vast money laundering operation wrapped in an idealization — a fantasy — that it was an alternative to banks and government money, when of course the backing for the crypto was banks and government money.

Obviously when people begin to realize this, and saying, “Wait a minute, who is running the cryptocurrency that we’re holding? We don’t know what it is.” Because it’s crypto — that’s why it’s called crypto. And it can’t be regulated, because the government can’t know what’s in it or who’s paying what, because it’s crypto.

So there’s no way of regulating crypto, and needless to say, every mafiosi — every sort of financial crook — finds it’s like taking a candy from a baby. All you have to do is say that we have a an idealistic libertarian answer to socialism.

So crypto was the libertarian answer to socialism. And we’ve seen — I think socialism won that particular fight.

The banks of course — when people were selling the crypto, the cryptocurrency had to draw on its bank account. And when it drew on its bank account, the banks were left without money.

The banks that had to pay the crypto company to pay the crypto seller had to sell their bonds and packaged mortgages and take a capital loss on assets that they were carrying at original book value or purchase price, but that they were only getting the market price for.

So, the whole unraveling of all of this — reality raised its ugly head.

BEN NORTON: Professor Hudson you’ve written in an article about this, which is “Why the US banking system is breaking up.” And then you followed up and you said that “the US bank crisis is not over.” And you warned that it could spread.

And I just want to go over this briefly again just these numbers here.

The biggest bank to ever fail in US history was Washington Mutual and I was in 2008 during the financial crash and it had $307 billion in assets.

The second biggest bank ever to collapse in US history was Silicon Valley Bank with $209 billion in assets. So pretty close to Washington Mutual.

And Signature Bank was the third biggest bank to collapse, which had $118 billion in assets.

So clearly there are parallels to the 2008 crash.

But in your article you also pointed out that there are parallels to the Savings and Loan (S&L) Crisis of the 1980s. So what can we learn from the 1980s S&L crash and also the 2008 crash?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I want to first of all challenge what you said about Washington Mutual being the biggest bank to go under.

This is not at all the right way to look at it.

What is important to look at is, what banks were insolvent.

Sheila Bair wrote in her autobiography that there was one bank that was worse than all the others. It was totally insolvent — not only incompetently managed but crooked. That bank was Citibank.

But Citibank was looked over by Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — who had worked with Bob Rubin, who was the protector of Citibank — so the fact is that not only Citibank — Citigroup— but all the big banks — Sheila Bair, who was head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said, the banks are insolvent.

She was pressing. She said, “Look, Citibank should go under. Let’s clean it up. Let’s take it under and clean out the crooks.”

And Geithner said, “No, the crooks are us. That’s our game.”

So the key to look at isn’t what banks actually were permitted to go under — the really crooked banks like Washington Mutual — but what banks are insolvent. Citibank and Wells Fargo, she mentioned. These were the banks that had the junk mortgages. Bank of America. The banks were insolvent.

And when I say that the problem is just beginning, it’s just beginning because the problem that the financial sector and the banking sector has today is endemic to finance capitalism.

The charts that I’ve made in Killing The Host and also in The Destiny of Civilization — the financial sector grows by interest-bearing debt, and that’s an exponential system. Any interest rate has a doubling time. Any interest rate goes exponentially.

But the economy doesn’t keep track. It goes on an S-curve, and it goes slower and slower, and then it turns down. That’s the business cycle. And it’s depicted as a kind of sine curve, up and down.

The problem is that the economy can’t keep pace with the ability with the debts that it owes — the ability to pay the exponentially rising debt does not keep pace with this growth of debt.

That makes a collapse inevitable.

This disparity between the growth curves of debt and the growth curve of the economy has been known for 5,000 years. It was already documented in Babylonia in 1800 BC.

We have the textbooks — the mathematical textbooks — that scribes were trained in. Antiquity knew this. Aristotle talked about it.

Everybody knows about this, but it’s not taught as part of the financial curriculum.

The financial sector grows by different mathematical laws then the economy grows in. And that’s what makes it inevitable.

The Savings and Loan Crisis was somewhat different. It is worth mentioning, because much of it was the result of a fraud — again as Bill Black has explained.

But here is the problem in the Savings and Loans and savings banks. I discussed this in the article that you just cited.

The savings banks and S&Ls lent mortgage money, and they would — basically, when I was working in the 1960s, interest rates were going up from about 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent for mortgages.

And the banks would take deposits and they’d pay maybe a 2.5 percent interest and they’d make loans at maybe 3.5 percent for a thirty-year mortgage.

So of all of this sort of happened normally until the late 1970s. And in the late 1970s — because of the Vietnam War — the interest rates steadily rose because the US balance of payments was getting squeezed.

And finally you had inflation because of the war-induced shortages — “Pentagon capitalism” — and so Paul Volcker raised the interest rates to 20 percent.

Well imagine what happened? Even though they came down from 20 percent, after 1980, they were still very high.

Well here’s the situation — the SNL’s were in much the same situation that bank depositors were in the last few years.

You could get a very low rate of interest from the banks or a high rate of interest by putting your money in government securities or corporate bonds or even hunk bonds that were paying a lot of money.

So people took the money out of the banks and a bought higher yielding financial securities.

Well the banks were squeezed, because the banks could not pay. When interest rates went up to 6 percent, 7 percent for mortgages — banks couldn’t simply charge their mortgage customers more because the mortgage customer had a thirty-year loan at a fixed rate of interest.

So there was no way the banks could earn enough money to pay the high interest rates that were in the rest of the economy. And as a result they were pushed under, and the commercial banks had a field day.

Sheila bear told me that the banks raped the — she didn’t that used that word — the savings banks.

She said, “They said they were going to provide more money for savings bank depositors, and what they did was empty it all out and just pay themselves higher salaries.”

So there are I think no more savings banks, hardly — no more S&Ls. They were all cannibalized by the large Wall Street Banks emptied out as a result and that transformed the financial structure and the banking structure of the American economy.

Well that transformation, and that squeeze, of getting rid of a whole class of banks is now threatening the smaller banks in the United States, the smaller commercial banks.

Because they’re in the situation of being sort of left behind. In the sense that, if only the largest banks are too big to fail — in other words, they’re such big campaign contributors and they have so many of their ex officials running the Treasury or serving as Treasury officials or going into Congress or buying Congressman — that they’re safe.

And people who have their money in smaller banks — like a Silicon Valley Bank and the others you’ve mentioned — are nowhere near as safe as the Too Big to Fail banks.

And if a bank’s not too big to fail, then it’s small enough to fail, and you really don’t want to keep more than $250,000 there because that’s not insured, and you don’t know how long Biden can get away without bailing out the wealthy depositors and just sticking it to the rest of the economy.

At some point, he just can’t be a crook anymore.

BEN NORTON: Michael, you’ve emphasized that, after the 2008 crash, in addition to bailing out the big banks and all this and the idea of Too Big to Fail — one of the ways that the US had a so-called recovery — although you pointed out it wasn’t really a recovery — is through quantitative easing.

And you can see quantitative easing really is a kind of drug for the economy, where money was so cheap, interest rates were so low — I mean, now that interest rates are rising — the federal funds rate is going up — it makes it more expensive to get money and this bubble that was created by the Fed is is beginning to burst.

And you’ve argued that this is maybe going to push them back toward quantitative easing, although Jerome Powell has insisted that he’s potentially going to continue increasing the federal funds rate.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That was on Friday [March 10] he said that. Yesterday he withdrew. He said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We crashed the banks. Never mind. Never mind. Now that I realized that I’m not only hurting labor, but I’m hurting our constituency, the 1%, of course we’re going to roll it back. We’re not going to — don’t worry 1%, give your money to the party. We’re going to make everything okay for you.”

BEN NORTON: If you look at a graph of asset price inflation, we see that it seems like the economy in the US is at a point where it’s so financialized, and it relies so much on these bubbles, that it doesn’t seem like it can survive without low interest rates and without quantitative easing.

So you’ve argued that this crisis is here to stay. There needs to be fundamental systemic change.

It’s going to either be stagflation, with the continuation of these policies of QE and low interest rates, or it’s going to be economic crisis like we’re seeing now.

MICHAEL HUDSON: This is the corner into which the Fed has painted itself.

We’re in the culminating part of the “Obama depression.” This is what Obama set in motion by bailing out the banks and supporting the banks instead of the economy as a whole.

Obama and Geithner and Obama’s cabinet declared war on the economy by the 1%.

And the amazing thing is that the economy doesn’t see how dangerous what he did was, and how consciously he sold out the voters that have put trust in them — to do everything he could to hurt them, because the degree to which he could hurt the economy was the degree to which the 1% or the 10% was able to make a killing.

So this is not the class interest that Marx talked about. It’s not the class interest of employers versus wage earners.

It’s the finance class allied with the real estate and insurance class — the FIRE section — against the economy at large — the real economy of production and consumption.

That is what we’re seeing, and something has to give.

And in every case both the Republicans and the Democrats say, “If something has to give, we’re willing to shrink the economy in order to protect the the financial, insurance, and real estate sector from taking a loss, because that’s where the 10% have it’s assets.”

We’re not in industrial capitalism anymore —we’re in finance capitalism. And the way that finance capitalism works is very different from the dynamics of industrial capitalism as was forecast in the nineteenth century.

BEN NORTON: Michael, as we start to wrap up here I want to ask you about corruption. This is something that you mentioned in your articles analyzing the SVB crash and other banks crashing.

You talk about campaign financing, which you address, but also regulatory capture is I think an important point.

And you wrote that, “To understand this, we should look at who the bank regulators and examiners are. They are vetted by the banks themselves, chosen for their denial that there is any inherent structural problem in our financial system. They are True Believers that financial markets are self-correcting by automatic stabilizers.”

Talk about the concept of regulatory capture and how really it’s just corruption, but we don’t call it that. Because the US acts as if other countries are corrupt but the US isn’t corrupt.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the center of this corruption — again my colleague Bill Black has explained this — if you notice, who were the bank regulators over the Silicon Valley Bank and the others?

These banks that have gone under are all regulated by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. If there’s any bank board that is totally run by the banks that it regulates, it’s the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.

And they look at themselves as “protecting” the banks under their authority. Instead of regulating them, they say, “How can we help you make more money?”

Before that the most corrupt regulator was the [Office of the] Comptroller of the Currency group.

Now, banks have a choice. The banks are able to choose what regulator is going to regulate them.

If you’re a banker and you want to be a crook, you know just who to go to.

“I want to be regulated by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board because I know that they’ll always let me do anything I want.”

“They owe their job to the fact that I can get them fired at any time if they do something that will not let me do whatever I want.”

“If they try to say that what I’m doing is fraudulent, I’ll say, ‘This is socialism! You’re regulating the market! This is market regulation, come on! Theft is part of the market, don’t you get that?’ ”

And the regulator later said, “Oh yes, you’re right — the free market under the libertarian Federal Home Loan Bank Board — fraud is part of the free market. Theft is part of the free market. Anything else is socialism, so of course we’re not socialists..”

Of course you can do whatever you want and as long as you have bank regulators like that who believe that, as Alan Greenspan put it, “Why would a banker ever cheat somebody? If he cheated somebody he wouldn’t have them as customers anymore.”

Well, if you ever have been pickpocketed in Times Square anywhere else in New York, you notice that the pickpocket doesn’t say, “Gee, I better not steal the wallet of this guy because then he’ll never trust me again.”

You’re never going to meet the guy again — it’s a hit and run. And that’s how the financial sector has worked for the last century, and already for the early twentieth century.

There were critics of how banks were structured, and the British critics especially. During World War I the argument came out, “Maybe Germany is going to win the war because they have a much more industrially-organized banking system.” Banks had been industrialized.

But the British banks — and stockbrokers especially — are hit-and-run and just want a quick payout and leave the company emptied out.

Well the way to make money most quickly, if you’re a financier in America, is asset stripping — you borrow money, you buy out a corporation, you load it down with debt, and empty it out, and leave it as a bankrupt shell.

That’s finance capitalism. That is what you’re taught to do in business schools. That’s how the market economy works.

Raid a company, take it over, sell off the wealthy assets, pay yourself a management fee, pay yourself a huge dividend — this is why I think Bed Bath & Beyond is going under. It’s why a whole bunch of companies are going under.

You borrow money, you take over a company, you let the company borrow money, you pay it to yourself as the new owner as a special dividend, and then you leave the company owing a debt with no current income able to cover the debt, and it goes bankrupt. And you say, “Whelp, that’s the market.”

And of course it doesn’t have to be the market. It doesn’t have to be this way, but that’s the way in which the market is structured.

And you’d think that this is the kind of thing that academic economics courses would teach about. But instead of teaching people how to make an alternative to this, and how to avoid this kind of a ripoff economy and smash and grab economy, they show you how to do it.

So, given the way in which public consciousness is taught and the skill of financial lobbyists and telling people that they’re getting rich to borrow more money to buy a house whose price is going to go up and up if only they take on more and more debt.

If people imagine that the economy’s recovering by taking on debt to make housing more expensive and stocks and bonds and hence retirement income more expensive, then you’re living in an inside-out world that turns out to be a nightmare.

BEN NORTON: Well to conclude here, Michael my last question is: Where you think we should be keeping an eye on the US economy? What other financial institutions could be next?

You wrote in your analysis that the Biden administration is simply kicking the can down the road until the 2024 election. That these are fundamental systemic problems and there may very well be more banks that crash in the next weeks, months, years.

So, where should we be looking, and what’s the final word you want to leave us with?

MICHAEL HUDSON: The word is: “derivatives.”

There are $80 trillion of derivatives — that is, bets — casino bets — on whether interest rates will go up or down — whether bond prices will go up or down.

And there’s been a gigantic increase in the volume of bets that banks have made — maybe a hundred times as large as it was back in 2008-2009.

And one of the reasons it could grow so much is, with interest rates of almost zero, people could borrow from the bank and essentially go to the races and make bets on currencies, exchange rates, interest rates.

But now that interest rates are beginning to go up, it costs more to make the bets, and even if you bet right on a derivative — you can put down a penny and buy a $100 bond and bet that this bond is going to go up one penny.

And if it goes up one penny, you’ve doubled your money. But if it goes down one penny then you’ve lost it all.

This is what happens when you have a highly leveraged bet on derivatives or something else.

The derivatives are what everybody’s worried about, because there’s no real accounting for them. We just know that — I think JP Morgan Chase has maybe [$55 trillion] in derivatives.

Ellen Brown has just written a wonderful article on derivatives that’s all over the internet, and she’s a lawyer as well as a bank reformer.

The next big crash is going to be some bank that’s made a wrong bet in derivatives and the wrong bet has just wiped out all the bank capital. What is going to happen then? That’s the —as they say, the next shoe that is going to fall.

BEN NORTON: Well Michael, I want to thank you so much for joining us to explain these important topics.

Not only I’m just for joining us, but for joining us specifically on your birthday. Happy birthday, it’s a real pleasure. Thank you so much for spending your time with us.

I want to invite everyone to go check out Michael’s website at michael-hudson.com.

There you can find links to his articles, to his books, and I will link in the description below to the articles that he’s written specifically about the crash of Silicon Valley Bank and other financial institutions.

Finally what I’ll say is that I will also invite everyone to check out a show that Michael hosts every two weeks with friend of the show Radhika Desai — they have a show together called Geopolitical Economy Hour, and it’s hosted here at Geopolitical Economy Report.

In the description below I will include a link to include a playlist where people can find all of their episodes there explaining the intricacies of economics and geopolitics.

Michael, thank you so much, it’s a real pleasure.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I’m glad we discussed this in a timely fashion, because all of this is unfolding so rapidly that who knows what the story will be next week.

BEN NORTON: Absolutely. We always benefit from this very timely analysis from you. Thanks a lot.

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Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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History teaches that the greatest threat to peace today is the United States. No other nation creates dangers as great as those emanating from the U.S. commitment to the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance.

As anti-imperialist and Anti-war activists are preparing to mobilize in Washington D.C. on the 20th anniversary of the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its Western colonial allies, it is imperative that authentic anti-imperialist forces and those earnestly committed to an Anti-war principle recognize two things: the U.S. based transnational ruling class is fully invested in the doctrine of U.S. “Full Spectrum Dominance,” and as a consequence the U.S. state has become an existential threat to collective humanity on our planet.

The recognition of these two “facts” are the only basis of a politics that can unite Anti-war and anti-imperialists and mitigate the ideological and political confusion that permeates progressive politics in the U.S. that has resulted in progressives and even self-defined radicals supporting pro-imperial policies under the guise of humanitarianism and anti-authoritarianism. The Eurocentric and social-imperialist left has played a nefarious role also providing left ideological and moral cover for those same politics under the guise of opposing “authoritarianism,” usually in the global South, and in Russian or Chinese imperialism.

There is a discussion among left forces in the West that poses as a debate point the question of whether or not Western colonial/imperialist powers represent the main global contradiction or should an equal moral and political focus be on all “imperialisms,” meaning great powers such as Russia and China and nations seen as “sub-imperialist.”

This debate has an abstract character to it that reflects the kinds of speculations that petit-bourgeois forces engage in that are completely divorced from the terrible realities that one force – the Pan European Colonial/capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy – has unleashed on global humanity, beginning in 1492 when European barbarians started to spill out of Europe into what became the Americas.

The invasion and conquering of the peoples of the Americas and the international slave trade shifting to the Americas, which resulted in millions of Africans providing free labor on indigenous lands, literally created Europe, as Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Gerald Horne and other anti-colonial scholars have pointed out.

The material consolidation of European rule in the form of colonial and settler-colonial imperialism was consolidated in major parts of the world, though not all, by the latter part of the 19th century. The “internal” competition among those colonial powers and confrontations with the other existing empires created the competitive redivision of the world that after two horrendous wars in the first half of the 20th century that cost the lives of millions, produced a relative global equilibrium between the colonial/capitalist camp now under the hegemonic leadership of the United States settler state and the Soviet Union. The bipolar world constituted the main configuration of power relationships for most of the 20th century, even with the de-colonizing non-aligned movement of the global South and the entry of China with the Chinese revolution of 1949.

The Chinese project of national development and the successful right-wing counter-revolution in the Soviet Union shaped the politics of last decade of the 20th century and the context of this century, including the absence of a countervailing restraint on the U.S., and an arrogant triumphalism represented in the delusional positions of Francis Fukuyama and the “Project for a New American Century.” It is the unrestrained colonial hubris of the U.S. that drove its disastrous belief that it could conduct two simultaneous wars that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with an operational defeat in both theaters.

Yet, the expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe continued and its use as an expansionary force for Western imperialism was normalized. The U.S. military budget expanded to obscene levels that exceeded its military spending at the height of the Vietnam war. The U.S. basing system expanded and was strengthened with the creation of the U.S. African Command and the Obama Administration’s initiation of the “pivot to Asia” that generated significant support for the reorganized Indo-Pacific Command. Coups were executed and/or supported over the last two decades, and especially under the Obama Administration, in Honduras, Egypt, and Ukraine. Attempted and constitutional coups were carried out against Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Iran. Wars were initiated with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen with a greenlight given to slaughter Palestinians and for Rwanda and Uganda to wage war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and against political dissidents in Mozambique. More than forty nations are under crippling economic sanctions by the U.S. and the Western powers.

With over 800 to perhaps 1,000 military installations, depending on how one defines bases and installations, a military budget of over $800 billion that exceeds the next nine nations combined, and a national security strategy that openly declares that its strategic objective is “Full Spectrum Dominance,” we are supposed to be debating the primary contradiction and principal threat to humanity?

For the African working classes and other colonized and exploited peoples, the “debate” is one that only the comfortable petit-bourgeois, Eurocentric, national chauvinist, social imperialist left engages in. The rest of us do not have that luxury. That is not to say that there are not serious questions that have been produced by the specific geo/political and economic realities of this conjuncture. We say that despite the complexities of the moment, what is consistent is the hegemony of U.S. criminality on a global scale. Instigating a war in Europe, carrying out a terrorist attack on Nord Stream pipelines, antagonizing the Chinese on Taiwan and engaging in the reckless talk of winning a nuclear war reflect the dangerous psychopathology of decision makers in the U.S. that make them a threat to everyone.

As we come off a National Day of Action Against Police Terror in the settler-colonial state of the U.S., conscious Africans understand our relationship to the colonial state domestically and abroad. We understand that the war being waged against the Palestinians, the subversion against the revolutionary nations of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, Cop City in Atlanta and the militarization of the domestic army known as the police, the strengthening of AFRICOM, the proxy war in Ukraine, are all part of the commitment to Full Spectrum Dominance. We are clear.

This is what we are reminded of on this anniversary of the U.S. war against the people of Iraq. As we said in the Black Alliance for Peace when the second stage of the manufactured war in Ukraine that began in 2014 was launched last February, to understand Ukraine we should de-center Ukraine and focus on the geo-strategic interests of imperialism, U.S. and Western imperialism!

Can this approach be the basis of a possible strategic and tactical unity between the Anti-war peace movement and the anti-imperialist movement? Perhaps. We say the Black radical peace tradition offers a way.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.”

Today, that is still the call and must be the commitment. We want peace, but we understand there will be no peace without justice and justice means altering the international balance of forces away from the hegemony of the European colonial/imperialist states and their ruling classes.

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Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9879389-0-9

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

Price: $9.40

Click here to order.

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In conflicts, I know, neither side can be trusted. Both sides twist and distort, magnify and minimize in support of their cause. But the daily, almost hourly pictures from  Ukraine—of hardship, suffering, of death, destruction and flight, all too genuine, cause me the despair I have always felt on hearing—and worse seeing, if only on a screen—any pain inflicted on my fellow human beings, no matter what insignia they wear or flag they honor.

But I must also recoil at the hypocrisy and dishonesty which so often go unnoticed. The propaganda producers who feign despair but seek more conflict, more medals, more billions, always praise a noble cause: freedom, democracy, rule of order, and always warn of despicable enemies; Bolsheviks, anarchists, Stalinists, communist aggressors and, when these are eliminated, terrorism. When that, too, erodes, authoritarianism must serve, or “imperialism” turned upside down. A nasty “villain” is always effective, justly or not, an Iago: Lenin, Stalin, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin.

Image is from Popular Resistance

Is hypocrisy involved? Double standards? Chinese sources, like all others, must be met with caution. But can all the charges in their Foreign Affairs Department memorandum be completely denied?

“The history of the USA is characterized by violence and expansion… After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War…

In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded 700 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40 percent of the world’s total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined.

The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries…The United States has also adopted appalling methods in war… massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons as well as cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium bombs, causing enormous damage on civilian facilities, countless civilian casualties and lasting environmental pollution… Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the USA in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives with some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions.”

Did none of this deserve the opprobrium now directed at Putin? Were any flags of sympathy displayed when the people of Serbia, Iraq or Afghanistan were bombed? When drones exploded on hospitals and wedding processions—were there also calls for tribunals against Bush—or Obama?

My despair grew far more intense when I felt the menace of escalating demands, after Leopard tanks, for powerful artillery, fighter planes and boats, and not just to win back Crimea; when I read the editorials insisting on “fighting on to victory,” no matter what it costs, above all to the people of Ukraine.  Or when I read the following:

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”

Adm. Richard’s threat came after the U.S. released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which reaffirms the U.S. doctrine on first use of nuclear weapons. The review says that the purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is to “deter strategic attacks, assure allies and partners, and achieve U.S. objectives if deterrence fails.” What are then the U.S. objectives in Europe, Asia—or Africa and Latin America?

Only a few lonely voices questioned them and their likely cost, but were quickly muzzled. Peace rallies, rarely attracting more than 2-3000 faithful leftists even in Berlin, were mentioned, if at all, superciliously and dismissed as ragged little remnants of the huge rallies of the 1980’s. The media kept up its routine of repeated scenes of death, flight and destruction in Ukraine (not in Yemen), combined with rousing calls for more and deadlier instruments of war—until Ukraine was fully restored and Putin defeated, humbled, possibly deposed and preferably tried and sentenced.

How then, could I find any cause for joy, any reason to smile?

Almost surprisingly, two of the best-known women in Germany overcame past differences and joined hands. Alice Schwarzer, now 80, had once, with her magazine “Emma,” been the main founder and expounder of the women’s rights movement in West Germany, including abortion rights, but had later drifted politically rightwards. Sahra Wagenknecht, 52, with an East German background, was alongside party founder Gregor Gysi the most prominent, media-wise and popular spokesperson of the LINKE, the Left, a truly brilliant orator, but who has been disavowed by most of the present reformist leaders of her party, with some of them even demanding her ouster.

This unusual duo joined to publish a manifesto calling for a cease-fire in Ukraine and urging—not tanks and armaments for the Zelenskiy government in Kyiv but pressure on both sides for peace negotiations. It warned of the consequences of more weapons—and more active participation by Germany, basically in the wake of Washington.

But what could these two women achieve against such high tidal waves? Their position, in today’s Germany, was considered purest heresy, which must quickly be exorcized.

Suddenly, the witch-doctors found this far tougher than expected—after 69 prominent Germans signed the manifesto, people originally from all the parties, popular, respected people: a former female church leader, singers, actors, the son of one-time Chancellor Willy Brandt. And then the numbers of signers grew, and grew, and grew! 50,000, 100,000—by Saturday it had topped 650,000 and was aiming at a million!

The alarm bells rose to a deafening cacophony! The media, the politicians, sadly including many of the LINKE, they all joined in a wild attack against the manifesto and especially against Sahra.

Their attempts to disprove its arguments were less and less convincing. Could more weapons really bring Russia to its knees, forcing it to give up claims it deemed necessary to its independence—if not its survival, like keeping NATO missiles at least a minimal distance from Moscow’s doorsteps and preserving safe, unmonitored warm-water Black Sea routes to the world’s oceans? Or might bigger attacks by Ukraine-USA lead instead to desperation? All such questions are publicly taboo—like questions about who really blasted the German-Russian underwater gas pipelines, who was really throwing dangerous missiles at atomic energy plants controlled by Russian troops, or what the USA-Ukrainian biological laboratories were really researching. There were too many such questions to permit discussion; it was like opening Pandora’s box. The lid must be kept sealed!

Common lid sealers were the usual accusations of Putin-endearment, of blindness to death and destruction, denial of Kyiv’s right to territorial sovereignty and free choice of its alignments, awarding Putin territorial seizures without a fight. But none of this applied; the Manifesto made no demands on anyone—except to sit down and end the slaughter before it exploded further and irreparably.

When Sahra and Alice called for a big rally in Berlin on February 25th  the fears multiplied. A counter-demonstration was organized for the 24th, the anniversary of open warfare, mostly with Ukrainians (66,000 now live in Berlin) but aimed at convincing Germans who sympathize with Ukraine and its suffering to reject any blame on the preceding NATO provocation and blame Putin alone. One effort was to transport a wrecked Russian tank to a spot next to the Russian embassy, with its big gun aimed directly at its entrance.

But the main argument against Sahra and Alice stressed the support by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose anti-European Union, pro-Russian positioning led its leaders to add their names to the manifesto and announce their intention to join the peace rally. Sahra answered: “We can have nothing to do with fascists or racists, we must not permit them to raise their banners or posters. But we simply do not wish, nor or we able to exclude anyone from singly signing or attending whose heart is honestly devoted toward ending further bloodshed—or worse.”

Many in eastern Germany vote for the AfD because of anger and disappointment at hardships caused by unification and their treatment as second-class citizens. Too many are fooled into blaming “privileged foreigners.” Many are just against “those on top,” somewhat like many simpler Trump voters, they want (affordable) butter not guns, therefore distrust further involvement in the Ukraine war. Since some LINKE leaders gratefully joined in state governments they were seen, not always falsely, as “part of the Establishment,” so many LINKE voters switched to the AfD or didn’t vote at all. Such support is certainly embarrassing to Sahra and Alice, but they hope a Manifesto for Peace movement can become a healthy antidote to fascists and their deceitful initiatives.

Yet it was this issue which was played upon by both media and politicians—trying to depict the Manifesto movement as a unity: right-wing nationalists with leftist “Putin-lovers”. This method of attack has been utilized in the past to split and wreck attempts at building a broad peace movement. One might suspect that powerful groups grasp this function of the far right all too well and apply it whenever required.

Would such constant media hammering succeed? Would this peace rally end up as a pathetic flop, with a meager crowd like the Zelenskiy-friendly Ukrainian rally the evening before? Waiting for the subway, I feared to find, once again, that same small bunch of the faithful, many of them old friends.

And what did I find? On this icy-cold Saturday afternoon, with snowflakes beginning to flutter down, the subway was jammed! There was hardly room to even stand properly! And at the next station more tried to push into the car! Where were they all going?

There was no doubt about it! When I arrived at the station near the Brandenburg Gate, the site of the rally, thousands and thousands climbed out of the jammed cars, ascended and merged into the crowded streets, all headed in one direction! I too moved through the famous arch towards the big speakers’ stage—but never got to a place where I could see them. I had just barely enough room to squeeze in to a free spot. And only later did I learn from my sons that the crowd had been huge on all sides, jammed, chilly, but friendly, polite, in wonderfully high spirits at the giant turn-out, and determined in their applause, cheers, occasional boos (when war-hungry politicians were named), with occasional shouts like “No Weapons! Negotiations!”- “Make Peace not War”.

Image: Attack on Kremenchuk Mall (Source: Sky News)

Many, perhaps most of those present, on or below the speakers’ stage, deplored and condemned the Russian invasion. But many also insisted that Kyiv’s big planned attack on the Donbas, the numerous maneuvers all around Russian ports and borders, a secret CIA intensive training program in 2015 for elite Ukrainian special operations forces, had made it unavoidable, that these were part of a trap—which Russia either fell into or was forced to fall into, as in Afghanistan in 1979.

I, too, knew of an MSNBC report on March 4, saying:

Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable: The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine’s NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake…The abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent…Senator Joe Biden knew as far back as 1997 that NATO expansion, which he supported, could eventually lead to a hostile Russian reaction.

Views on the war were far distant from those in the media!

People discussed and debated, but all I spoke to agreed that further conflict would only continue the terrible afflictions for the Ukrainians, could achieve no victories but only create giant dangers—also atomic dangers threatening the entire world.

And the neo-fascists? In media reports afterwards they were very much present, with an interview with one of their leaders somewhere on the periphery. We heard later that a few known far-rightists had indeed shown up with a banner, but a “left-wing Linke” group, at the ready, had quickly covered it over with a bigger anti-war banner and pushed the rightists—non-violently—away from the rally. I saw a few Russian and pro-Russian flags, carried, I think, by Russian-speakers, perhaps adult children of the many Russians who have moved here in recent decades. One of my sons did see a small group with nationalist flags, which could not easily be banned in that giant but always peaceful crowd, but can hardly have reached anywhere near 1%. And as for me, in all the time I spent there, or getting there and back, I saw not one rightist sign, but rather many hundreds carrying peace dove depictions or self-made anti-war slogans, happily ignoring the organizers’ request to carry no signs at all.

As Sahra and Alice commented: the Manifesto, now being signed by additional tens of thousands, and especially the rally, have frightened all those who want to continue the war, who want no negotiations, who are determined, as some say openly, ”to ruin Russia” and unseat anyone like Putin who, love him or hate him, refuses, unlike Yeltsin, to take orders from abroad. Policy-makers in the American seats of power clearly want to prevent even the weak but potentially growing cooperation between Germany with its European allies and Russia or China, which had been supported by some sectors in Germany—but had now been suffocated, with the current near-total domination by those German Herren, now in modern dress, but who recall all too frighteningly the stiffly monocled, heel-clicking warriors of past generations.

Of course, détente between Western Europe, Russia and China could mean fewer billions for U.S. frackers and fuel providers, could cut profits for weapon-makers and other hungry expanders, from Amazon, Coca-Cola and Disney to Facebook, Unilever and the other queen bees in the honeyed hives of the pharmaceutical, movie, herbicide, food and other empires. Above all, the CEOs at Lockheed, Northrup, Raytheon, at Rheinmetall, Exxon Mobil and Chevron could then no longer rub their hands quite so gleefully or buy quite so many yachts, jets or mansions.

In her speech, Sahra reiterated: “We want no German tanks firing at those Russian women and men whose great-grandparents, in millions, were inhumanly slaughtered by the German Wehrmacht.” She condemned as cynical the signing of agreements to provide armaments for years in advance and said that true solidarity meant getting engaged for peace, not war.

Of course Vladimir Putin must also be willing to make compromises, she said, Ukraine must not be turned into a Russian protectorate. But as we have since learned, negotiations were not stymied by the Russian side. Several speakers recalled that Blinken, like his predecessors, had continued to push eastward, rejecting Russian appeals and offers and a final red-line warning in December 2021 to agree on security guarantees for all sides. New revelations by Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister of Israel, indicate that negotiations between Russia and Ukraine were moving ahead in March until Boris Johnson from London and his prompters in Washington made clear that an agreement was not desired. Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, though he succeeded in achieving grain shipments, prisoner exchanges and even a safe travel guarantee for Biden’s trip to Kyiv, felt the same outside pressure against further agreement.

Sahra and Alice got cheers when they stressed that agreements are not impossible, but must be fought for—and must be wanted! There is no need for tanks but rather for diplomacy, for a readiness to find compromises. A broad new peace movement is urgently necessary—and this rally must provide an impetus.

The media and the politicians, now more frightened than ever, were unsurprisingly quick, later, to dig up a solitary rightist they could use as Exhibit A, and then to lie about the figures. After the pro-Zelenskiy rally the night before, with about 7,000, they estimated 10,000; in our peace rally they could only count up to the same 10,000 figure, when everyone else saw 30,000, 50,000, perhaps even more. Since too many had taken part who would not swallow such a nonsense figure, TV reporters shame-facedly revised it to 13,000 or, vaguely, “thousands.” These were the least nasty, distorting even insulting examples of the immense efforts—even within a fracturing LINKE—to strangle this baby in its cradle before it emulates Hercules’ swift growth in muscle!

It was in fact the biggest peace rally in many, many years, good cause for them to fear—and for me and so many I have spoken to a source of great, unaccustomed joy! So close can despair and joy occupy one’s heart!

*

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Victor Grossman, born in NYC, fled McCarthy-era menaces as a young draftee, landed in East Germany where he observed the rise and fall of its German Democratic Republic (GDR). He has described his own life in his autobiography Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), and analyzed the GDR and questions of capitalism and socialism in Germany and the USA, with his provocative conclusions, along with humor, irony and occasional sarcasm in all directions, in A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee (New York: Monthly Review Press). His address is wechsler_grossman [at] yahoo.de (also for a free sub to the Berlin Bulletins sent out by MR Online).

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***

Increasingly, blackmail and direct threat become the main mechanisms in Western foreign policy towards Russia. Recently, Canada’s Foreign Minister said that her country hopes to overthrow the Russian government, suggesting that Canadian intelligence would be planning some kind of maneuver to destabilize Moscow through a regime change operation. The case is further evidence that on the part of NATO’s powers there is no sign of respect in bilateral relations with Moscow.

The threat was made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada Mélanie Joly. According to Joly, only “isolating” Russia would not be enough for the West to achieve its goals, which is why she expects something more disabling to be launched against Moscow. Joly believes Russia should be attacked economically, politically, and diplomatically, so that it becomes unable to continue its operation in Ukraine. In this sense, she also hopes that, as a consequence, the Putin government will be overthrown, and he and his allies will be considered guilty of war in the future.

“We’re able to see how much we’re isolating the Russian regime right now — because we need to do so economically, politically and diplomatically — and what are the impacts also on society and how much we’re seeing potential regime change in Russia (…) The goal is definitely… to weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine. We want also to make sure that Putin and his enablers are held to account (…) I always make a difference between the regime and the people of a given country, which is fundamental”, she said.

As expected, Canadian animosity was praised by Volodymyr Zelensky who came to media to express his support for Joly’s statement  and ensure that Kiev is working in the same direction, seeking to encourage international society to further sanction Russia, especially concerning aluminum and steel – sectors in which Canada recently imposed new sanctions. The goal is to increase coercive measures until Moscow eventually becomes unable to continue fighting.

“We are also working to add new sanctions against Russia (…) Recently, Canada took a significant step by expanding sanctions on imports of Russian aluminum and steel. I thank Canada for this decision – for this signal to the international community”, Zelensky said.

Obviously, the Russian reaction to the Canadian minister’s words were severe. On social networks, Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokespersons commented the following:

“Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly declared regime change in Russia foreign policy goal of Canada… officially (…) Sorry to see the ruling liberal clique having subdued Canada with decadent anti-family, pro-drug & support for Ukrainian Neo-Nazis agenda”, spokespersons published on the Ministry’s official Twitter account.

In the same vein, the Russian Ambassador in Canada responded to the Minister’s words by stating that he was “perplexed” with her speech, and asking for clarification on whether she guides the Canadian embassy in Moscow to work for a regime change in the country.

“Quite perplexed to hear from Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly that her goal is ‘regime change’ in Russia. Is this how she instructs the Canadian Embassy in Moscow? (…) And by the way, what reaction would we expect if, for example, someone in Moscow had said that Russia’s goal is ‘regime change’ in Ottawa?”, he said.

In another occasion, he also emphasized the popularity of Russia’s government, saying:

“What Joly or other decision-makers in Ottawa don’t want to recognize is that the current Russian policy is supported by the ultimate majority of the nation” – the goal apparently was to respond to Joly’s statement that she makes “a difference between the regime and the people of a given country”.

It is not surprising that the Canadian state acts this way. In practice, Canada works much more as a 51st American state than as an independent country. The case shows how relations between Russia and the West are deeply broken, close to a point of no return.

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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas o Twitter and Telegram.

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***

If the PT’s base was aware of the military-strategic dynamics that forced Russia to commence its special operation as a last resort for defending the integrity of its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO clandestinely crossed them there, then they’d be against Lula’s political support of Kiev. It would thus be self-evident to them that he’s placing Brazil on a US-aligned grand strategic trajectory in the New Cold War, which could lead to them publicly pressuring him en masse to change his policy.

Brazilian President Lula proved that his recalibrated worldview in recent years is a lot more closely aligned with the US’ than ever after downplaying the causes of the NATO-Russian proxy war. According to him, “In the 21st century, it shouldn’t be possible that we have war over small things”, which he uttered after declaring that he won’t visit either Russia or Ukraine due to the special operation. This position serves as further proof that he endorses the US’ narrative about the conflict.

Lula previously condemned Russia in a joint statement with Biden during his trip to DC in early February, after which Brazil voted in support of a fiercely anti-Russian UN Resolution demanding Moscow’s full and immediate withdrawal without any preconditions from all the territory that Kiev claims as its own, which includes Crimea. Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzia reacted to the passing of that motion by describing it as pushing a “militaristic Russophobic line”.

Removing any ambiguity about his government’s stance, Lula then called Zelensky shortly afterwards to reaffirm that “Brazil defends Ukraine’s territorial integrity”. Despite these objectively existing and easily verifiable pieces of evidence documenting his political support of Russia’s nemeses in Kiev, an intense information warfare campaign has been waged by forces allied with the ruling party to gaslight its base into falsely thinking that Lula isn’t aligned with the US on this issue or others like Nicaragua.

Elite members of the Workers’ Party (PT) fear that the rank and file might revolt upon becoming aware that their leader is moving Brazil closer to the US-led West’s GoldenBillion than the Sino-Russo Entente or even the Global South of which it’s apart amidst the impending trifurcation of International Relations. With a view towards preemptively averting the scenario of them publicly pressuring him en masse to change this grand strategic trajectory, they sought to manipulate their perceptions about Lula’s policies.

This explains the intense information warfare campaign that’s being waged against their minds at this pivotal point in the global systemic transition, which he himself is directly participating in upon downplaying the causes of the NATO-Russian proxy war in an attempt to justify his political support of Kiev. Lula wants his supporters to discount the evidence before their eyes and ears in favor of agreeing with the US’ narrative that Russia supposedly “invaded” Ukraine for purely “imperialistic” purposes.

If the PT’s base was aware of the military-strategic dynamics that forced Russia to commence its special operation as a last resort for defending the integrity of its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO clandestinely crossed them there, then they’d be against his political support of Kiev. It would thus be self-evident to them that Lula is placing Brazil on a US-aligned grand strategic trajectory in the New Cold War, which could lead to them publicly pressuring him en masse to change his policy.

The following analyses explain the larger context within which the special operation is being waged:

• 15 March 2022: “Why Did U.S. Prioritize Containing Russia Over China?”
• 26 March 2022: “Russia Is Waging an Existential Struggle in Defense of Its Independence & Sovereignty”
• 24 December 2022: “Putin Explained Why He Had No Choice But To Protect The Russian Population In Ukraine”
• 22 February 2023: “Putin Reminded Everyone That Russia Is Using Force To End The War That The West Started”
• 22 February 2023: “Russia Would Be Torn To Pieces Exactly As Medvedev Predicted If It Ended Its Special Operation”

A summary of the abovementioned insight will now follow for the reader’s convenience.

In brief, the US spent the preceding eight years between its successful Color Revolution in early 2014 and the start of the special operation in 2022 turning Ukraine into an anti-Russian bastion, the purpose of which was to degrade that targeted Great Power’s strategic capabilities to defend itself from the US. This was to be done through a combination of Hybrid War means related to Kiev’s support of information warfare- and terrorist-driven separatism as well as conventional ones connected to NATO.

The first half of this policy aimed to destabilize Russia from within through the cultivation of forces that could advance its “Balkanization” while the second intended to eventually employ biological weapons, clandestine NATO bases, and “missile defense” infrastructure to place it in a position of blackmail. The US envisaged forcing Russia into a never-ending series of unilateral concessions that would ultimately result in its geostrategic neutralization and thus facilitate the successful “containment” of China.

This plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony was to begin with Kiev’s NATO-supported reconquest of Donbass, which threatened to genocide that region’s indigenous Russian population and ethically cleanse the survivors. That sequence of events was foiled by the special operation that was launched after President Putin realized that the West had no interest in discussing his country’s security guarantee requests from December 2021 for politically resolving their security dilemma.

While the US prepared for the possibility of some kinetic response to its support of Kiev’s imminent reconquest of Donbass, American policymakers hadn’t calculated that President Putin would launch a preventive campaign across all of Ukraine to avert the impending scenario of Russia’s strategic neutralization simultaneously with the preemptive one to stop the Donbass genocide. Had it been otherwise, then they’d have retooled the West’s military-industrial complex well in advance.

This major miscalculation explains why the NATO chief admitted last month that his bloc is in a “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia, which wouldn’t be the case if it truly expected a protracted conflict of this scale, nor would Kiev’s forces be faring as badly as the Washington Post just revealed. President Putin regularly reminds everyone of the existential nature of this conflict, which places his decision to commence an interconnected preemptive-preventive campaign into context.

Returning to Lula’s latest remarks that inspired this analysis, there’s no doubt that he’s well aware of these military-strategic dynamics that forced President Putin’s hand, which thus means that he’s deliberately downplaying them in order to manipulate his base. He can’t claim ignorance after over a year of Russia explaining this at length, hence why it can now confidently be concluded that Lula politically aligned Brazil with the US in the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II.

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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.

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***

If 2022 was the year of popular uprisings in Pakistan, raising hope for protesters fed up with a thoroughly corrupt and repressive civil-military regime, 2023 seems to be the year when the government is trying every dirty trick in the book to kill that hope.

After a US-backed regime-change operation removed elected Prime Minister Imran Khan from power in April 2022, Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon in the nation’s history: For the first time, a civilian politician who was ousted from power didn’t simply end up in the dustbin of history, alongside interchangeable corrupt politicians who for decades played musical chairs, competing to plunder the country.

On the contrary, what occurred were massive outpourings of support for Khan and widespread opposition to the ancien régime put in power by Washington’s mercenaries in the military high command.

The enormous popular rejection of the current “imported government”, as Khan calls it, has made Pakistan’s elites increasingly desperate. They want him eliminated.

Assassination was their first method of choice – but they fumbled. At a rally in November, a gunman shot Khan in the leg, injuring but failing to kill him.

In the meantime, Plan B is being implemented: Arrest Khan on bogus charges and disqualify him from politics forever.

The former prime minister has been relentlessly holding peaceful demonstrations, demanding elections. The government knows that Khan would easily win, so it wants to prevent him from running.

A Gallup poll in March found that Khan is by far the most popular politician in Pakistan, with a 61% approval rating, compared to 37% disapproval.

The current, unelected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has the complete opposite: a 32% approval rating, compared to 65% disapproval.

The figures are clear: Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis support Khan and oppose the unelected government.

Nearly 61 per cent of Pakistanis have a "positive impression" of PTI chief Imran Khan, while just 36 per cent do so of PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif and foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardarihttps://t.co/6j41OU5WZu

— WION (@WIONews) March 8, 2023

Pakistan’s “imported government” orders the arrest of Imran Khan

Faced with its deep unpopularity, on March 8, Pakistan’s regime initiated Plan B.

Khan was leading a peaceful protest – one of the countless rallies he has organized since the April 2022 regime-change operation.

This time, massive state security forces went on a rampage and tried to arrest Khan. But they could not do it. Standing between them and Khan were tens of thousands of his supporters.

The only way to get to Khan would have been a bloodbath. This was avoided – although one Khan supporter was killed.

We are heartbroken & outraged that PTI political worker Ali Bilal (Zille Shah), a person with disability, was murdered by the state in Lahore yesterday. He was only exercising his right to peaceful assembly (which he often turned festive) & 🗣 protest! #StopThisFascism pic.twitter.com/3AutOvTW32

— Aurat March – عورت مارچ (@AuratMarchKHI) March 8, 2023

Then again, on March 13, Khan called for a rally in the city considered to be the heart of Pakistan: Lahore.

Despite the entire state security machinery targeting him and his supporters, the rally in Lahore was one of the biggest the city has seen.

Khan and the protesters marched confidently and peacefully in every corner of the city, where they seemed unstoppable, greeted with joy by ordinary Pakistanis of all walks of life.

Pakistan's former PM Imran Khan stages a rally with thousands of supporters in Lahore as courts in Islamabad issue two more arrest warrants against him pic.twitter.com/fTKg2OW4t2

— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) March 14, 2023

The former prime minister was undeterred, committed to holding demonstrations in the provinces of the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), in the lead-up to what he hopes will be national elections.

On March 14, the regime escalated its crackdown. Police surrounded Khan’s house in Lahore and tried to arrest him.

In response, thousands of supporters gathered at Khan’s home, protecting him.

Current situation of Zaman Park Lahore now at 10:15pm. Massive rallies across the country are gathering there for the protection of Imran Khan.#زمان_پارک_پہنچو pic.twitter.com/Lyx6X0JdZO

— PTI Islamabad (@PTIOfficialISB) March 15, 2023

The police responded with extreme violence, wounding dozens of protesters.

From his house, Khan symbolically delivered a speech via video stream, sitting with the tear gas cannisters that had been fired outside.

Tear gas shells fired at Imran Khan’s residence in Zaman Park Lahore. pic.twitter.com/BipjKywcVH

— Shiffa Z. Yousafzai (@Shiffa_ZY) March 15, 2023

The regime tries to ban Khan from public life

Khan’s determination to relentlessly participate in mass mobilizations has led the regime to try to ban him from public life.

Even Western organizations that are often biased, such as Amnesty International, have condemned the unelected Pakistani government’s authoritarian tactics, which have included prohibiting all speeches and rallies by Khan, as well arresting people who criticize the military on Twitter.

Authorities in Pakistan has placed a blanket ban on protests in Lahore. The authorities have used a draconian colonial-era law to crush dissent hours before several protests, including the #AuratMarch.#IWD2023 📢https://t.co/G4Z6Lz7Ujt

— Amnesty International (@amnesty) March 8, 2023

There are two main factors preventing an all-out assault to arrest Khan: the wrath of the population that would ensue, and fear that significant ranks within the armed forces would revolt and turn their guns on their superiors, à la Vietnam.

Indeed, it has been because of Khan’s popularity not just among ordinary Pakistani civilians but within the military ranks as well that the former prime minister has survived so far.

Khan’s popularity among some parts of the army is easy to explain. Rank-and-file soldiers and the majority of the junior and mid-rank officer corps are not keen on Washington dictating a War on Terror 2.0. They have always appreciated Khan’s principled opposition, since day one, to any military solution to the militancy in Afghanistan and the northwest of Pakistan.

Throughout 2022, Khan’s political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI, the “Movement for Justice”), exponentially rose in popularity, in contrast to the all-too-visible political shenanigans of the coalition of feudal family dynasties and other corrupt forces in power.

If it is true that Khan mismanaged both political and economic governance while in power, then the current lot has engendered a virtual implosion and collapse in the country.

Khan challenges Pakistan’s pro-Western elites

It is difficult to overstate how incensed ordinary Pakistanis are with the political mafias, significant sections of the military top brass, and the chief mafia don: Washington.

One of the most disturbing aspects of what has been happening is the virtual connivance of liberal-left forces and the Pakistani deep state in attempting to eliminate Khan from the Pakistani political scene.

The visceral hatred of Khan by Pakistan’s comprador elites cannot be explained by simply having differences with Khan on various policies – something that Khan’s own critical supporters have as well.

No, for this elite class of the liberal, pro-Western Pakistani intelligentsia, Khan has committed the ultimate crime: socio-cultural class betrayal.

Khan lived abroad for so long during his impressive cricket career. He studied at Oxford, and speaks perfect English. Thus Pakistan’s Westoxicated elites thought that Khan would behave just like them.

Instead, Khan has rejected the condescending attitude that the country’s Western-educated elites show toward ordinary Pakistanis.

Khan has mobilized tens of millions because of his sincerity to reimagine a new Pakistan, prioritizing social justice and an independent foreign policy.

The fact that one small, sectarian leftist party or the other is not being given the credit of leading the revolt against the unpopular regime has made them neurotically envious of Khan.

It is clear for all to see: Khan and the critical supporters both in and outside of his political party have become the most dangerous threat to Pakistan’s status quo.

That is why we have seen very unusual and fast-paced meetings between US officials and Pakistan’s generals and regime officials: Washington’s “friends again”.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of relations between the U.S. and 🇵🇰 Pakistan. It was my pleasure to host Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, to the Pentagon where we discussed our long-standing defense partnership and areas of mutual interest. pic.twitter.com/ptiZDiqc8I

— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) October 5, 2022

Elimination of Khan is absolutely necessary for the troika of these power centers: local comprador political elites, the military high command, and Washington.

Why? Because they know that Khan and his party will sweep any elections that are held.

US encourages Pakistan to “continue working with the IMF”

In the meantime, Pakistan is enduring a deep economic crisis. The country has nearly exhausted its foreign exchange reserves.

The regime is in talks with the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) to save itself from bankruptcy. All of the corresponding policies of austerity and taxing the poor – “structural adjustment” – are to be expected.

CIA officer turned US State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a press briefing on March 8 that Washington wants Pakistan to “continue working with the IMF” to impose “reforms that will improve Pakistan’s business environment”, in order to “make Pakistani businesses more attractive and competitive”.

In other words, the US State Department wants Pakistan to double down on neoliberal economic policies, such as lowering wages and cutting social spending.

If hated before, the current “imported government” is now despised more than ever.

Imran Khan’s independent foreign policy angers the mafia don in Washington

Khan’s foreign policy was anathema to Washington.

He refused to recognize apartheid Israel as a legitimate state.

He improved ties with Russia for straightforward reasons of economic necessity (as well as promoting the geostrategic stability in the broader Central Asian region).

Khan mended ties and cooperated with Iran, even praising its revolutionary “dignity”.

He strengthened ties with China.

At the same time, Khan repeatedly said he desired friendly relations with Washington, proposing that they work together in peacebuilding in Afghanistan and the wider region.

But these other foreign policy aims were utterly unacceptable to the mafia don, which seems to be set on a war path with Beijing (and others).

Pakistan has been a close ally of China since the 1960s. But Islamabad’s intense obsession with pleasing Washington is a flagrant slap in the face of Beijing.

The meetings that top Pakistani military officials, including the powerful Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, have held with officials in Washington and London are not being missed upon by Beijing or Moscow.

Though Pakistan is suffering through some of the worst economic woes in its history – thanks to the robber barons in power – the US still knows that the South Asian nation has one of the most formidable militaries in the world, and is a nuclear-powered country of 230 million.

Washington also knows that it can easily woo the military top brass by reminding them of how only the US and its weapons and fighter jets can allow Pakistan to stay apace with arch-rival India, trying to match its military supremacy in the region.

This is why the US is so keen on Pakistan participating in Joe Biden’s second “Summit for Democracy” in March 2023. (Despite the fact that Pakistan’s current government was not elected, and repeatedly resisted calls for holding a vote.)

As prime minister, Khan respectfully declined the invitation to the first summit in 2021, because he knew exactly what the intention was: A declining empire seeking to muster as many nations as it can to be a part of its “coalition of the willing” against official enemies like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

According to leaks by Pakistan’s own ambassador to the US (who has a soft spot for Khan), Washington wants to reestablish its old military base in Pakistan, which was closed down in 2011.

The US is also reportedly dictating to Pakistan which militant groups to go after and which ones should be left alone – such as the anti-China East Turkestan independence movement or the ISIS elements giving trouble to Beijing and the Taliban government in Kabul.

Most importantly, Washington wants to compel Islamabad to do everything possible to significantly reduce or halt any progress on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Moreover, Washington and the Persian Gulf monarchies are having a splendid time in convincing the new favorable military-civilian regime in Islamabad to undertake an political 180 that Khan would never agree to: gradually normalizing relations with Tel Aviv.

Nevertheless, what all of these power centers conspiring against Khan overlook is that they are dealing with a different Pakistani population now. The people’s political consciousness has exponentially risen with the ouster of Khan from power.

Hence, whether Khan is assassinated or somehow arrested or disqualified from politics, the powers-that-be might get a rude awakening, and be surprised that they are dealing with a new Pakistan, with or without Khan – one that will have zero tolerance for their venality, corruption, and subordination to Washington.

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This article was originally published on Geopolitical Economy Report.

Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion and World Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan gives a speech from his home on March 15, with tear gas cannisters that had been fired at protesters by the police trying to arrest him (Source: GER)

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China’s rise as a global power has had profound effects on world politics, economics, and security. Its growing influence and strategic interests have led to increasing involvement in the Middle East, a region that is of critical importance to the world’s energy supply and has long been plagued by conflicts and instability. One area where China can play a significant role is as an honest broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two of the region’s most powerful countries. China’s brokering a deal between longtime Gulf rivals is a broader sign of a changing global order. During talks in Beijing on Friday, Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations and reopen their embassies within two months. The agreement also stipulated affirming “the respect for the sovereignty of states and the non-interference in internal affairs of states”. Iran and Saudi Arabia have a long history of rivalry and tension. The two countries have competing interests and geopolitical ambitions, and their competition has led to numerous proxy conflicts in the region, particularly in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

The Chinese as an honest broker bring together Saudi Arabia and Iran. On the other hand, the United States’ aim has been to bring Saudis to join with Israel in a military block against Iran. We need to look at who is really trying to create a zone of peace for our time. Incredible that China was able to broker resumption of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Chinese style is to embrace diplomatic and political resolutions to conflict rather than the military one that Americans prefer.  The grand entry of China in both diplomatic and strategic terms displaces more than 70 years of American domination in the region. China’s win-win approach to all of its bilateral relationships is the central factor motivating the majority of the nations of Eurasia to welcome China’s BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) project. As opposed to the American engineered destabilization efforts and interventions in the Middle East, China on the other hand desires stability and peaceful cooperation amongst regional powers particularly between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Iran like many countries now has been continuously suffering under American sanctions which attempt to isolate Iran from the international community. Hence, it makes perfect sense why a country like Iran would look East in order to escape the pariah status that Washington wants to give it. KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) is acting pragmatically according to realpolitik in its recognition of the obvious changing global geopolitical dynamics. Tehran-Riyadh rivalry has been the cause of deep instability, conflicts and violence in the region and beyond for several decades now. Considering this, sensible minds in Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh foresee a future of common prosperity once these tensions are managed and reduced. Regional countries such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen that have been horribly affected by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry could now look forward to more peace, stability and prosperity. The geo-sectarianism that has violently consumed the region finally has the potential to be mitigated in favor of geopolitical cooperation. Also, China sees Eurasian Integration through BRI and the Middle Eastern region is the centre of it and which acts as a bridge between Asia and Europe. The US has always wanted complete domination and hegemony of Middle Eastern oil reserves and the military supremacy of the state of Israel.

China’s role as a mediator between Iran and Saudi Arabia can help ease tensions and promote stability in the region. China has traditionally maintained good relations with both countries, and its non-interference policy in the internal affairs of other countries has earned it the trust and respect of many countries in the Middle East. Moreover, China’s economic and strategic interests in the region give it a stake in promoting stability and preventing conflicts. China has also sought to increase economic ties with both countries, particularly through its Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to create a network of infrastructure projects across Eurasia. In some ways, Xi Jinping’s visit to Saudi Arabia was the culmination of a breakthrough of peace talks that China had been meditating on for some time. This deal was brokered under the guidance of the new superpower of the Middle East, China which is the potential game changer not only in Middle Eastern politics but also globally. The geopolitical ramifications of these new developments for countries like Pakistan can be the improved relations with Iran since historically Pakistan remained firmly within the Saudi camp.

The US is less interested in bringing about peace in the Middle East and more interested in stoking divisions and selling arms to one side and trying to contain the other. Hence, what’s happening actually is the shadow of the US and its footprints in the Middle East is reducing but the footprint of China is expanding. However, the main difference here is that when the US was dominant in the Middle East it was a confrontation between the two most important countries in the region, Saudi Arabia and Iran, while China is interested in bringing about peace in the Middle East. While no one expects all of the disagreements between the Saudis and the Iranian to disappear overnight, this still is a huge step in the pursuit of peaceful and mutually respectful negotiations over long-standing differences. However, the Palestinian question remains as a case study for the both countries to stand against inhumanities and violence committed by the colonial settler Israel.

The clear shift in Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy in terms of more cooperation and commitment with China, Russia and recent engagement with Iran it appears that the divide between the West and the Rest is going to become stronger and deeper. As Martin Jacques predicts in his book “When China Rules the World ” it could quite possibly and dramatically change the rules based international order. Iran and Saudi Arabia can build on this partnership and if they bring peace to Syria, Lebanon and Yemen as a result of this new dialogue then perhaps there is a new dawn in the Middle East but if they just mean they exchange ambassadors and nothing more beyond that then things will be business as usual.

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Aqib Sattar is a Lecturer of Politics and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, Pakistan.

Featured image: Rubble aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a Yemeni neighborhood in 2015. (Source: Almigdad Mojalli/Voice of America)

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In a report covering covid-19 period from March 2020 to March 2021 OXFAM’s research bring home some hard facts that are camouflaged by words & terms. IMF Fiscal consolidation is nothing but austerity upon low-income & middle class populations while IMF reforms means cutting social welfare & subsidies. OXFAM says that these measures which cover taxing, wage bill cuts or freezes, pension cuts, subsidy elimination, cuts to public spending have over period of time brought countries to great difficulty as they have to continue taking loans & paying back taken loans with interest while people suffer consequences of IMF recommendations. OXFAM claims IMF austerity increases income of the wealthiest 10% at the expense of the bottom 80% which include the middle class who face the most burdens.

IMF Consolidation = austerity

IMF reforms = elimination of subsidies/cuts/freezes etc.

How does the wealthiest 10% increase their income.

IMF while recommending to slash state subsidies to the people, also promote privatization & when state entities are privatized while state increases prices/taxes which have to be borne by the poor – the private owners naturally gain more income as they hold most avenues of revenue.

Within 9 months in 2020, 1000 billionaires wealth had increased by $3.9trillion but workers had lost $3.7trillion in labor income. This showed the gap between top 10% & bottom 80% widening.

When the covid-pandemic struck, Governments had no choice but to impose lockdown which impacted every sphere of society. OXFAM says that neglected health, education by the State as a result of IMF agreed initiatives, countries were ill-prepared to deal with the pandemic & their self-sustainence apparatus had been compromised.

According to OXFAM only 1 in 6 countries were spending enough on health, only 1/3 the global workforce had adequate social protection and 1 in 3 workers across 100 countries had no labor protection.

OXFAM accuses IMF of not promoting “people centred just & equal recovery to fight inequality not fuel it”. IMF should encourage governments to increase social spending not cut it. Then only quality of the people improve. OXFAM asks why IMF doesn’t focus on people-centred recovery through policy that redistributes free quality universal – healthcare, education & social protection.

OXFAM says that IMF is well aware of the burden of austerity unevenly distributed across society, globally.

OXFAM says that IMF is also aware that imposing austerity will only worsen the pre-pandemic situation of low income families. IMF loan interest may be cheaper, but look at the cost to the people burdened by IMF conditions.

Why does IMF always targets the poorer segments of society & never the corrupt rich, the corrupt corporates or the corrupt politicians.

Why doesn’t IMF impose wealth tax, capital gains tax, removal of tax exemptions that favor rich, demanding governments tackle illicit financial flows (tax evasion).

OXFAM research covered 1 March 2020 – 15 March 2021

• 85% IMF’s 107 loans with 85 governments involved austerity demands (as per loan documents of 73 of the 85 countries)
• IMF conditions targets low income/middle classes only
• IMF imposed VAT introduction/increases on 41 countries
• IMF imposed wage bills cuts/wage freezes on 31 countries
• IMF imposed subsidy cuts on 11 countries
• IMF imposed pension cuts on 6 countries
• IMF imposed reduction to public spending on 55 countries
• IMF imposed targeted social protection programs on 8 countries (this meant that only a segment was covered while others who were also vulnerable was omitted)
• 26 governments in Africa & Latin America /Caribbean planned to resume fiscal consolidation in 2020 & 2021as per IMF requirements.
• 107 IMF loans with 85 countries between 1 March 2020 & 15 March 2021 worth $107billion.

Austerity Measures in IMF Loans During and in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia

Asia and Pacific

Latin America & Caribbean

Europe

When IMF was aware of the impact of covid, why did IMF impose conditions to covid-19 loans while also demanding countries adopt austerity after pandemic?

Why does IMF demand countries that face high deficits & debt to adopt fiscal consolidation (austerity) knowing the dire outcome? IMF’s own research reveals this outcome.

OXFAM refers to 500 organizations issuing a letter to IMF regarding conditions imposed by IMF for pandemic-hit countries. OXFAM says IMF should be promoting redistribution policies to make society more equal & shield people from severe economic hardships, instead of fueling inequality with IMF conditions.

IMF’s argument is that fiscal adjustments(austerity) reduces budget deficits & sovereignt debt. But what has this cost the people who have to face the austerity measures? IMF influences govts through lending, technical assistance & surveillance to adopt austerity measures but the same IMF teams do not offer any solutions when inequality & poverty prevails which developing nations have to face but cannot because IMF will be blowing hot & cold.

IMF forces countries to

• Cut wages/freeze wages
• Impose consumption taxes (VAT) without taxing rich/corporates
• Increase prices of essential goods & services
• Cut public spending/ration social welfare
• Cut subsidies
• Slash pensions

Countries impacted with IMF austerity have seen  rise in unemployment, job cuts, youth depression, HIV infections soaring, high suicide rates & a very angry general public. Thus, these IMF austerity are all counter-productive because the middle class & poor have to survive with what they have but are unable to survive because what they have cannot meet the price hikes & tax increases. There is no growth in a country. A country will only witness inequality, anger & social calamity.

Eventually the State has nothing left to tax or gain revenue to even repay debts because IMF forces countries to sell their resources & assets and with people in dire straits without jobs, income & in poverty, how can a government provide relief when it has to pay IMF loans, while taking more loans to live but having no assets to generate income/revenue as these have all been privatized or sold off. When there is no internal growth wagon under the state, the state cannot function. What happens then?

IMF requires countries to scale down on social welfare to its citizens, sudden pandemic situation like covid-19 has shown the adverse effects of neglecting health making people vulnerable & the outcome is nothing countries can be proud of.

OXFAM accuses IMF of contributing to cutting down on a states health investment which affected covid pandemic & highlights the importance of govts supporting social structures. OXFAM criticizes IMF’s proposal of “targeted social assistance programs” as they only cover low-income and excludes middle-income earners who also require assistance as given by universal healthcare.

IMF will refuse to take accountability

Similarly, IMF has also required countries to scale down on improving public sector productivity and this has resulted in a lethargic yet ballooning politicized workforce. The scenario is used by IMF to demand wage cuts/job freezes none of which overall help improve/increase the productivity of a country & impedes the growth apparatus. With job cuts the result is unemployment, social ills, public outrage & social disorder – all of which further impedes growth & every time such happens, governments have no choice but to take more debt which IMF is happy to give by making more demands that ultimately hit the people. IMF loans are only creating, widening the inequality gap.This vicious cycle needs to stop.

OXFAM recommends

• IMF helps countries restructure debt & cancels all middle-low-income debt payments owed during pandemic & after pandemic
• IMF must work with donors to maximize aid flows & secure balance payments
• IMF should encourage & support countries to increase social spending as a permanent measure & create basis for securing quality, universal free public services.

IMF should support countries to create necessary fiscal space through $650b Special Drawing Rights allocation & transfer SDRs from reserve accounts & channeling SDRs from rich countries to middle & low income countries

In addition to the OXFAM critique of IMF, the Boston University Global Development Policy Centre looks at IMF from 2001-2018 & key findings are

• IMF has not departed from austerity inspite of 2008/2009 financial crisis
• To face less austerity measures, countries have to align to Western European trade/diplomatic goals.
• IMF austerity results in increasing income share of top 10% at the expense of bottom 80%
• Research reveal that IMF-austerity was not evenly distributed to borrowers or those facing similar economic issues. IMF’s decisions were based on foreign, economic & diplomatic relationships. In short, IMF had no equal stand applied for loans.
• IMF austerity specifically targets a nations poorest & the biggest losers are the middle class earners

It is unfortunate that “learned” think tanks & “economists” are busy promoting IMF loans & even IMF conditionalities & they are blind to the ground realities that prevail.

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Shenali D Waduge is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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***

Back in 2021, we had the revelation of emails from the German Interior Ministry which showed that it enlisted scientists to scare the population.

Last year it was revealed that the Covid statistics had been falsified by Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge by inflating the numbers.

And now we have the revelation of over 100,000 WhatsApp messages from former British Health Minister, Matt Hancock. The British “Daily Telegraph” has put them online as “The  Lockdown Files”. 

From all these revelations, it has been shown time and again that the coronavirus was no more deadly than other cold and flu viruses. As we know from flu and colds, these can be fatal to vulnerable, very old people. For anyone under 80, these viruses are almost never fatal. So it was with Covid-19. It was a common cold virus.

Minister Matt Hancock had a discussion with then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, via WhatsApp about this low mortality rate. He wrote that this was a problem because it meant that vaccination targets would not be met.

The Lockdown Files also show that in addition to the vaccines, other Covid measures were mainly intended to instil fear of the virus into the population.

The revelations in Germany, the Netherlands and now especially in the United Kingdom show that the same Covid policy was deliberately followed in all these countries – policy which had nothing to do with the nature of the coronavirus. The Lockdown Files show that no special measures were needed, given the low mortality of the virus. The British government switched from publishing mortality rates to publishing the number of infections. The entire EU then switched and reported on Covid in the same way.

Pushing through the vaccines and introducing the corresponding digital Covid pass was the real goal. For this, no means were shunned.

Unvaccinated people were not simply portrayed as irresponsible but as anti-social, dangerous enemies of the state. There were threats of incarceration and forced vaccination. Unvaccinated people were fired. People were locked in their homes via curfews. Hospitals and nursing homes prohibited partners and children from visiting their sick spouses or parents, even when they were dying.

From the beginning, there were medical experts who scientifically argued that the imposed measures were futile and warned against the vaccinations.

Doctors who protested were silenced on social media. Doctors who prescribed effective drugs were punished with heavy fines and the revocation of their license.

The Lockdown Files show that the unvaccinated and Covid-critical doctors were right – and that there was absolutely nothing right about government policy. 

What also emerges from the Lockdown Files is the involvement of Bill Gates.  Matt Hancock literally messages about Bill Gates, “He owes me one.” In other words, Bill Gates owes me one because Hancock had millions of his vaccines injected. 

This so-called philanthropist bought shares in Big Pharma for $50 million and after the Covid hype was over-sold those same shares for $500 million.

The contracts with huge sums of money signed by governments with the pharmaceutical multinationals are still not public. The correspondence between Pfizer and EU President Ursula von der Leyen is still secret. The messages between Dutch minister Hugo de Jonge and Prime Minister Mark Rutte about Covid have supposedly been erased.

It looks like the European Commission and the governments of EU member states were as aware of Covid’s low mortality as the British government. Their policies were almost identical, the flawed PCR test was accepted EU-wide, the Digital Covid pass became an international travel document, even the wording was almost identical. Several countries started using the same phrases at the same time: “from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, from house to house, from arm to arm.”

The measures lacked any reasonable ground yet they violated basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. Physical and mental integrity were violated without justification.

There must be government accountability for this in every state. As a Member of the European Parliament, I demand that the European Commission come to Parliament to account for this.

Therefore, I ask the President of the European Parliament urgently to put on the agenda for the next Strasbourg session a debate on the Lockdown Files with Ursula von der Leyen. 

We will see whether the European Parliament wants to take up its controlling task or whether it is complicit in the biggest scandal of the century.

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***

I once again find myself in a position where I must comment on the federal NDP’s stance regarding foreign affairs. Only this time, its position on some foreign affairs reverberates in a deplorable reactionary manner in the party’s actions within Canada.

Before I deal with the current situation, I would like to briefly alert the readers of Ethnorama to a time when I felt compelled to take the federal NDP to task over its foreign affairs policies in the past.

Shortly after Jagmeet Singh took over as leader of the NDP in the fall of 2017, I wrote an article entitled: “Open Letter to Jagmeet Singh: NDP’s reactionary foreign policy positions must be changed.” In this article I denounced the NDP’s policies that were totally aligned with US policies to undermine Venezuela, the NDP’s support for Ottawa’s adoption of the Magnitsky Act and sanctions on Russia, its support for the White Helmets in Syria, its partisan support for Israel, its support for the 2014 US-inspired reactionary coup d’état in Ukraine, and other matters. I sent the article to all federal NDP members – without a single response. Moreover, the NDP since then has not changed its position on any of these reactionary policies.

Earlier still, in 2015 I published an article entitled, “Lament for a Party that has lost its way.” As the 2015 election approached, consistent public opinion polls indicated that the NDP was headed to form the government. But then because of plainly stupid reactionary policies, the NDP was dealt a devastating blow, reducing it from the 103 seats it won 2011 to 44 and relegated it once more to third party status. I started my article saying:

“I write this with sadness and dismay. . . the NDP must do some serious soul-searching to find its true raison d’être. From my perspective, it is fundamentally wrong for the party to abandon its basic social democratic principles in a misguided attempt to veer to the centre-right and try to become “electable” as a supposedly non-threatening capitalist party, not much different from the Liberals or the Conservatives.”

I then pointed out that columnist Thomas Walkom commented after the election:

“What is the point of a social democratic party that is afraid of democratic socialism? What is the point of running as faux Liberals when the real Liberals are already there? . . . If a left- wing party’s only chance at power is to move rightward, why bother?”

But enough with the past; let’s take a look at the present. In mid-October Winnipeg MPs Leah Gazan and Daniel Blaikie contacted Ethnorama and stated that they had been instructed by the Ottawa NDP to cancel their advertisements in Ethnorama because of the article they had published by John Ryan on the Ukraine-Russia issue.

There is some confusion about why the federal NDP took such a course of action. Initially, it appears that Ethnorama was informed by Leah Gazan that the Ukrainian Canadian Congress had disapproved of my article and reported this to some federal NDP caucus members. As a result, these two Winnipeg NDP MPs were instructed to withdraw their advertisements in Ethnorama because Ethnorama had the audacity to publish my article.

Confusion then sets in because Leah Gazan now apparently says that the Ukrainian Canadian Congress wasn’t involved in this matter. If that’s the case, who was it that was instrumental in getting these two MPs to withdraw their advertisements from Ethnorama? Was it pro-NATO federal NDP members? If so, based in Ottawa, how did they discover my article in Ethnorama?

As the current Ethnorama editorial states:

“The concern of Ethnorama is not merely the loss of support in ads from these two MPs but rather the fact that the federal NDP would capitulate and succumb to such censorship and infringement on journalistic freedom, and commitment to finding the truth in this military conflict.”

I would like to note that my article had been originally published by Global Research on April 27, then reposted the same day by The Unz Review, and later reposted in two parts in August and September by Ethnorama. In the Unz Review there were 149 comments devoted to my article, with very few who added more to what I had to say.

As with all my publications, this article is fully and properly documented. Despite this, it appears that in my article I revealed information that challenged the views of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. It seems highly likely that this was made known to the federal NDP who then instructed the two Winnipeg MPs to withdraw their advertisements from Ethnorama. The federal NDP did not cite any specific objections to my article, except for where I had it published. For some bizarre reason they wanted to punish Ethnorama for simply re-publishing my article.

In present day Ukraine, all political parties, aside from the party now in power, have been banished and nowhere is there a publication that challenges the party in power. And nowhere is this reported in our media. I pointed this out in my article, and this is probably one of the reasons why this is verboten in the “freedom loving West.”

As for the federal NDP, to its further discredit, it appears highly likely that on the basis of pressure from a politically biased organization, they would “capitulate and succumb to such censorship and infringement on journalistic freedom,” as so eloquently stated in the Ethnorama editorial.

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This article was originally published on Ethnorama News Winnipeg, November 2022, Vol. 4 Issue No. 10.

John Ryan, Ph.D., Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg.

Featured image is from davidduke.com

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U.S. President Joe Biden, Western politicians and their media partners agree that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.” The president of the country notorious for its numerous unprovoked wars of aggression called Putin a “criminal” for doing so.

That the war could have any connection to NATO expansion, which led to the deployment of nuclear-capable missiles in Poland and Romania with a flight time of less than 10 minutes to Moscow, is not even remotely addressed.

Neither is the Obama/Biden administration’s push to annex Ukraine into NATO, with a 2,000-kilometer (1,243 miles) shared border with Russia and even more missile bases in the future. If Cuba deployed a single Russian missile, that would be grounds for Washington to go to war against the island; Russia, on the other hand, is expected to be surrounded by countless NATO missiles on its borders and in its vicinity without fighting back.

Russia allowed Germany to reunite peacefully after the West had promised diplomatically not to move NATO an inch to the east. Moreover, in 1999, Western countries had agreed to the principle in the Charter for European Security that “the obligation of each State not to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other States.”

Russian Limits Ridiculed

The oh-so-trustworthy values West, however, did not give a damn about keeping promises and agreements with Russia. Moscow swallowed the big toad when NATO ballooned into a serious threat on Russia’s borders, not only in Poland and Romania, but for years held unabated to its demand that Georgia and Ukraine not be allowed to become NATO members under any circumstances. Western politicians and media have never taken this Russian “red line” seriously and have even ridiculed it.

Russia is well aware that NATO is not just a self-defense organization, as it claims, but an aggressive war alliance, at least since NATO’s wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.

It is therefore probably no coincidence that mainstream media consumers never learned that the same Joe Biden, when he was the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assessed NATO expansion as a dangerous Western provocation of Russia and warned that it would provoke “a vigorous and hostile response from Russia.”

Instead of preventing this predictable response by providing a security guarantee to Russia, which would have been inexpensive and painless for all concerned, he actively helped provoke it! Well, to honest Joe Biden’s credit, he has outed himself as a corrupt politician who has to serve the donors: “I don’t think you should assume that I’m not corrupt. It takes a lot of money to get into office. And the people with that money always want something.”

Were you able to read anything about all this in your newspaper or learn about it from your TV channels? Exactly. So you can assume that a well-lubricated senator who wants to become president at least does not stand in the way of the expansionist urge of the all-powerful military-industrial complex and therefore adjusts his opinion: So it was Russia that provoked! Politicians and media loyal to Washington immediately added the reason for the NATO expansion: There is an imperialist tsar in the Kremlin who has turned into a dangerous new Hitler, and that is why a highly armed NATO is needed on as many of Russia’s borders as possible. Truly, the devil in the Kremlin provoked the NATO expansion!

It took 32 years from the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact to the almost complete NATOization of Europe—compare the state of affairs in 1990 with that of 2022, the year of the “unprovoked war of aggression.”

Europa 1990. [Source: cnbc.com]

The illustration above shows that in 1990—year 1 after the fall of the Berlin Wall—the Russian-dominated Soviet Union included Ukraine, the Baltic States and several other now independent countries. The Warsaw Pact, an alliance also dominated by Russia, included six states, all of which are also independent today.

And in the chart below, you can see that in 2022—32 years since Germany reunified—all the former Warsaw Pact countries have joined NATO in the meantime. Three countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—have also become NATO members.

Europa 2022. [Source: cnbc.com]

Who started the Ukraine war and when?

Until now, the official and constantly repeated mantra of Washington, its European vassals and media partners has been that Russia was responsible for the crime of a completely “unprovoked” war of aggression, which it started in February 2022. Now NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has corrected the date of the start of the war—confirming what consumers of alternative media have known for years:

“…the war didn’t start in February last year. It started in 2014.” -NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on February 14, 2023

The war began eight years earlier, in 2014, when the democratically elected Yanukovych government in Kyiv was forcibly deposed in a U.S.-backed coup and replaced by an anti-Russian government that subsequently cracked down on Russian minorities.

By the way, it is not entirely coincidental that eight years after the coup in Kyiv, the year of Russia’s “unprovoked” war of aggression, the smoking gun for U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the government in Kyiv was removed from YouTube.

NATO began training and arming Ukrainian forces after the coup. The new, Banderist and Russophobic regime in Kyiv took advantage of the military buildup starting in 2014 and began bombing Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbas that same year, causing death and devastation. You could not learn about all this from your newspapers or TV channels either.

Reporting on Ukrainian terrorism in the Donbas is censored

Alina Lipp moved to Donetsk in 2021, a year before Russia invaded Ukraine to live there for a while and find out for herself what was actually happening in the Donbas. At that time, the freelance journalist from Germany was still comparatively unknown.

Germany wanted to punish her for this with three years in prison, although Berlin paradoxically proclaims to defend democracy and thus freedom of speech in Ukraine (nota bene with heavy German weapons, including German tanks rolling against Russia again)! Here is the first part of her new documentary about her time in Donbas. Watch it and form your own opinion about it. In a forthcoming piece I will add more examples.

Valued minorities versus criminally neglected minorities

When it comes to the rights of a minority like LGBTQ, the megaphones of the “values West” loudly demand support. But when it comes to minorities in Ukraine, they are silent. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto lamented on his Facebook page that minority rights, including language rights, of the more than 150,000 ethnic Hungarian Ukrainians have been severely curtailed by the Kyiv regime.

For example, Hungarian-speaking children were denied the right to be taught in their language. Unlike the case of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province, where a wave of international protests erupted against what was alleged to be a similar cultural genocide (although Uyghur children are taught in both Uyghur and Mandarin), there has, of course, been no outcry here.

In addition, at least 19 million Russian-language books were taken out of circulation, denying the Russian-speaking minority access to literature in their native language. NBC correspondent Richard Engel witnessed the burning of Russian-language books at a checkpoint in Kyiv, including, for example, the war-important book Fire Resistance of Burning Structures.

The political party, which had come in first behind Zelensky in the presidential election, was banned by the latter along with other opposition parties representing mainly Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Critical media, especially those close to minorities, have also been banned or put on a state leash.

Several Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including a democratically elected former president, have had their Ukrainian citizenship revoked, and others have had their property confiscated. The list is not exhaustive, as the Kyiv regime is in the process of eliminating as much “Russian influence” as possible. It seems to want to fulfill the wish of its national hero, Nazi Bandera, who is buried in Germany, to create a “pure” Ukraine.

Was Russia provoked into invading Ukraine?

NATO’s claim that “Russia wants to conquer Europe” to justify its omnipresence in Europe is nonsensical. Russia precisely does not want to trigger Article 5 (mutual assistance clause in case of attack) of the NATO treaty: First, it invaded Ukraine before Ukraine could officially join NATO to militarily resolve the Donbas issue—where the majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians live, threatened by the Russophobic Kyiv regime.

The West and Kyiv had not been ready for a diplomatic solution before; while Russia was accused by Western politicians and media of not wanting to comply with the Minsk agreements to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, the fact is that, according to main protagonists Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky, these agreements were not meant to be complied with at all, but only had the purpose of buying time so that the Ukrainian Army could be rearmed by NATO and prepared for war with Russia. And secondly, precisely because of NATO Article 5, one can assume that Russia does not want to and will not intentionally invade a NATO country.

To answer the question of whether Russia felt provoked to invade, one must consider the situation before the actual invasion, which was as follows: By mid-February 2022, the civil war waged by Kyiv in an inhumane manner—with aircraft, artillery and tanks—against the Russian-speaking civilian population in eastern Ukraine had resulted in more than 13,000 deaths, about a million people forced to flee, and countless destroyed towns and villages.

No concession could be expected from a Ukraine equipped with state-of-the-art U.S. weapons in the Donbas autonomy efforts; instead, there was Zelensky’s threat toward Russia to acquire nuclear weapons. The West’s refusal to negotiate legitimate security guarantees for Russia and the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine also played a role in Russia’s calculations.

And despite the genocide caused by years of bombardment of Russian-speaking civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk by the Ukrainian Army, irregular volunteer units, and the “fascists who overran the country” (Jerusalem Post), the Western-dominated UN Security Council has not intervened—even though it was obligated to do so under the following paragraph 6 of the International Criminal Code a.k.a “Völkerstrafgesetzbuch”:

“Whoever, with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group as such, kills a member of the group, inflicts serious bodily or mental harm on a member of the group, particularly of the kind specified in section 226 of the Criminal Code, places the group in conditions of life likely to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part … shall be punished by life imprisonment.”

In his book “Ausnahme Zustand: Geopolitische Einsichten und Analysen unter Berücksichtigung des Ukraine-Konflikts” (State of Emergency: Geopolitical Insights and Analyses Taking the Ukraine Conflict into Account), German lawyer Wolfgang Bittner explains that Russia can invoke its Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) vis-à-vis the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine—a generally recognized requirement under international law to prevent serious human rights violations. R2P, however, is a problematic doctrine that was originally introduced into international law by the United States and NATO—primarily to justify the war of aggression against Yugoslavia.

Whether provoked or unprovoked—one war is not enough!

However, NATO expansion in Eastern and Northern Europe is not the end of the story. Now this war-time alliance is working hard to expand in Asia as well, because a rising China is perceived as a threat to U.S. world domination.

So China is not only being subjected to a fierce Washington-led economic and propaganda war to contain the new “yellow peril.” Western armies, which together already spend many times more on “defense” than China, are now to be upgraded even more massively. And if the money is not enough, one can always cut the budgets for education, research, health, social services, and infrastructure and incur more debt.

It is not surprising that the media do not call attention to the fact that China is clearly acting defensively in response to these aggressions, while the United States is acting aggressively. The following chart shows how tightly the United States has encircled China, not the other way around:

Source: caitlinjohnstone.com

If Beijing suddenly started acting as Western politicians and media accuse it of doing or wanting to do, China’s behavior would resemble that of the United States in some ways: Chinese warships would have to participate in the same aggressive “freedom of navigation” exercises that U.S. warships frequently carry out in waters close to China to Beijing’s dismay, for instance, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and off the coasts of California and Hawaii.

A network of military bases that the United States has built up around China and is still expanding would need to be replicated by China in Central and South America. The American empire, which has more than 800 military installations worldwide, indeed seems to be expanding militarily without end: In the Philippines, for example, four new American military bases are currently being built, targeting China, as shown in the chart below:

Source: bbc.com

How real is the “China threat” conjured up in the U.S. and echoed in Europe?

Allow me a brief digression here: The actual name of China is Zhongguo (中国), which means Middle Kingdom. It dates back to a time when its citizens prided themselves on being the most civilized nation in their own universe, where the territory they controlled was at the center of a world surrounded by less developed foreign cultures and alien civilizations.

The fact that China is now preparing to re-emerge as the leading economic power, and this after a century of humiliation by today’s G7 countries in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and decades of internal turmoil, is frightening in the West, especially since it comes from a foreign culture that is capable of generating fear. After all, what one does not know, does not understand and cannot assess is often perceived as threatening.

The goal of the Chinese Communist Party is not to turn the world into a “communist paradise,” not even its own country, but to promote the renewal of the country. Chinese politicians speak of the “Chinese dream,” by which they mean national renewal and renaissance (i.e., not communism). The party, which can be described as patriotic or perhaps nationalist rather than communist, and which merely derives its claim to sole representation and leadership for the country’s modernization from Marxism, also advocates the millennia-old concept of tianxia (“all under one heaven”). This is understood to mean an inclusive world with harmony for all. To put it casually, “We leave you in peace, and you leave us in peace.” That is why the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries is so important to them.

So the Chinese do not want to conquer the world. If they had wanted to, they could have done it with ease in the 13^th, 14^th or 15^th centuries. They had the chance when they were the undisputed and only economic superpower. At that time, when China was far superior to other countries.

Chinese Admiral Zheng He led the world’s largest and most sophisticated fleet (with 317 ships and 27,800 sailors) on several excursions from China to Kenya, Somalia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Instead of pursuing a gunboat policy, the Chinese wanted to trade. Unlike the Europeans, they did not take the opportunity to conquer and subjugate other countries because they simply had no interest in doing so.

It is no different today: Their goal is to regain their historic top position in the world in a peaceful, stable international order (in peaceful coexistence with other powers). Stability is the key to realizing their dream. This is where the U.S., a fundamentally unpeaceful empire, pulls the lever and creates the instability that the Chinese so fear, through decoupling, deglobalization, or tensions in Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula.

The Chinese are not trying to convert us to their model. Unlike the Americans, they lack a sense of mission and proselytizing spirit, and besides, the Chinese system would be unsuitable for export because it is so specific and inextricably interwoven with the country’s millennia-old tradition and culture.

It was the U.S. and the rest of the self-proclaimed “value-oriented West” that tried for a long time to get the Chinese to adopt their ruthless version of capitalism and move them away from their social model of state-controlled capitalism (pioneering planning goals and research investment, breaking up and banning cartels and monopolies and ensuring fair competition, requiring the rich to pay their fair share of taxes to reduce social inequalities, etc.).

But why would the Chinese have allowed themselves to be talked out of a model of success that enabled China to achieve in 30 years a level of development (including the liberation of 800 million of its citizens from poverty) that took the West 200 years? The West also ignores the fact that the thoroughly pragmatic Chinese government uses the market as a competitive tool to drive innovation and modernization, and ultimately to achieve the Chinese dream.

Unlike politicians, scientists and journalists of the “value West,” they are not ideologues, but pragmatists with a strong sense of reality. The joy of experimentation and the many breathtaking changes that are taking place every day throughout the country are proof of this.

Once again, the Chinese are not missionaries, they do not feel called to be world policemen, and they have no desire for expansion. In this respect, they are fundamentally different from the Americans. When American politicians, academics, media and their European parrots waffle about the imperialist danger and the threat from China, it is merely an expression of their ignorance and projection. It is no wonder that imperialism and colonialism are concepts coined and lived by the West, not by Chinese.

Taiwan—America’s new conflict case à la Ukraine?

After Ukraine, the next pawn is Taiwan; at least that seems to be the goal. Can China prevent a new century of humiliation—including a war that will be more brutal than the Opium Wars—by the West?

Taiwan is, in a sense, the “Ukrainian” pretext for a possible direct or proxy war with China. Taiwan’s ruling party, which in Zelensky fashion pandered to U.S. interests and sought to arm the island with American weapons against China, suffered a resounding defeat in the last election, which was reported rather casually, if at all, in the Western media.

The election winner, the opposition Kuomintang, advocates rapprochement with China, which must displease the war hawks in Washington.

The Taiwanese president then resigned from her post as leader of the ruling party [though she remained as Taiwanese President]. Just a few months earlier, she had received Nancy Pelosi and many other anti-China and warmongering politicians from Western countries with great pomp.

Recently, however, she meekly announced that war with China was “not an option”—a bitter disappointment not only for the Western war industry but also for its political and media groupies who are in favor and determined to “take a stand against China.”

Well, at least they are left with the hope that the CIA will discreetly solve this vexing political problem on the unreliable island for the belligerent West.

However, it should do it a bit more skillfully this time than it did in Hong Kong (see Nury Vittachi’s book “The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong”).

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Felix Abt is the author of “A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom” and of “A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs?” He can be reached via his Twitter account.

Featured image: A scene like something out of a third-rate mafia movie: producer, screenwriter and director (left) leaves this Orthodox church in Kyiv with his leading actor (right)—neither is Orthodox—taking leisurely steps, while sirens wail warning of an imminent Russian bombing. Although Moscow was briefed by Washington before this visit to avoid a dangerous incident, The Independent, representing the bellicose mainstream media, enthusiastically cheered: “Biden defies safety warnings and air raid sirens for moment of history in Kyiv.” [Source: img.buzzfeed.com]

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***

“I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”—Senator Frank Church on Meet The Press, 1975

If you give the government an inch, it will always take a mile.

This is how the slippery slope to all-out persecution starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all, a warning issued in response to the threat posed by Nazi Germany’s fascist regime, still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

This particular slippery slope has to do with the government’s use of geofence technology, which uses cell phone location data to identify people who are in a particular area at any given time.

First, police began using geofence warrants to carry out dragnet sweeps of individuals near a crime scene.

Then the FBI used geofence warrants to identify individuals who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It wasn’t long before government officials in California used cell phone and geofence data to track the number and movements of churchgoers on church grounds during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

If we’ve already reached the point where people praying and gathering on church grounds merits this level of government scrutiny and sanctions, we’re not too far from free-falling into a total surveillance state.

Dragnet geofence surveillance sweeps can and eventually will be used to target as a suspect every person in any given place at any given time and sweep them up into a never-ending virtual line-up in the hopes of matching a criminal to every crime.

There really can be no overstating the danger.

The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol protests provided a glimpse of exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents compiled a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Included in that data roundup were individuals who may have had nothing to do with the protests but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol protests to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators reportedly tracked—and questioned—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol.

One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

The massive amount of surveillance data available to the government is staggering.

As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This [surveillance] data…provide[s] an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Now, thanks to the digital trails and digital footprints we all leave behind, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

In an age of overcriminalization, when the average American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day, there is no one who would be spared.

The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.

As Warzel and Thompson warn:

“To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Case in point: consider what happened to Calvary Chapel during COVID-19.

Government officials in Santa Clara County, Calif., issued a shelter-in-place order in March 2020, dictating whom residents could see, where they could go, what they could do, and under what circumstances.

County officials imposed even harsher restrictions on churches, accompanied by the threat of crippling fines for those that did not comply with the lockdown orders.

Then Santa Clara officials reportedly used geofence surveillance technology to monitor the concentrations of congregants at Calvary Chapel during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, using their findings to justify levying nearly $3 million in public health fines against the church for violating the county’s strict pandemic restrictions.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that similar restrictions unconstitutionally singled out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment and “struck “at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty,” county officials have sought to collect millions of dollars in fines levied against churches, including Calvary Chapel, for violating the county’s mandates.

At a minimum, the use of geofence surveillance to monitor church attendees constitutes an egregious violation of the churchgoers’ Fourth Amendment rights and an attempt to undermine protected First Amendment activities relating to the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

Still, the government’s use of geofence surveillance goes way beyond its impact on church members and anyone in the vicinity of the Jan. 6 protests.

The ramifications for all of us are far-reaching.

Mass surveillance has been shown to chill lawful First Amendment activities, and historically has been used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, and harass marginalized communities.

A study conducted by Roger Clarke, the famed Australian specialist in data surveillance and privacy, indicates that the costs resulting from the erosion of personal privacy are so significant that they essentially threaten the very foundation of a democratic society.

Some of the most serious harms include:

• A prevailing climate of suspicion and adversarial relationships
• Inequitable application of the law
• Stultification of originality
• Weakening of society’s moral fiber and cohesion
• Repressive potential for a totalitarian government
• Blacklisting
• Ex-ante discrimination and guilt prediction
• Inversion of the onus of proof.

In other words, the chilling effects of pervasive surveillance give rise to a constant, justifiable fear in even the most compliant, law-abiding citizen.

Of course, that’s the point.

The government wants us muzzled, complacent and compliant.

So far, it’s working.

Americans are increasingly self-censoring and marching in lockstep with the government’s (and corporate America’s) dictates, whether out of fear or indoctrination, or a combination.

In the meantime, the use of geofence warrants continues to be debated in the legislatures and challenged in the courts. For instance, while a California court found that a broad geofence search warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, a federal district judge for the District of Columbia upheld the use of geofence warrants by police in connection with the events of Jan. 6.

No matter how the courts rule, however, one thing is clear: these dragnet geofence searches are well on their way to becoming the eyes and ears of a police state that views each and every one of us as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how technologies purportedly adopted to rout out dangerous criminals in our midst are used to conquer a free people.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image: Two geofences defined in a GPS application (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

Kristina Berster got out of the brown Mercury and began to say her goodbyes. It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but she thanked them anyway for bringing her this far. Mostly, she spoke to Ray, who looked pretty gloomy in the back seat.

“Are you sure about this?” he grumbled. He doubted that the idea would work. But indecision was a hopeful sign. After previous refusals, the Americans might wait for her on the other side of the border after all, and then drive her to Plattsburgh.

She would have to be shrewd. The driver didn’t know much about the real situation, only that she wanted to enter the US secretly — in other words, illegally — and needed a lift to Noyan, near the border, to check things out. Ray’s girlfriend Maria probably knew more, and she was nervous. She’d helped rent a room at the Noyan Inn. But now she wanted to move on to sightseeing. And she wasn’t at all eager to take unnecessary risks for a stranger.

Persuading Ray, appealing to his sense of chivalry, seemed like a viable strategy. It was certainly preferable to hitchhiking at night to someplace she had never seen.

Or maybe guilt would work. “The least you can do is wait on the US side,” she pleaded, and grabbed the roadmap she had been using to direct the driver, Michael, since they left Montreal. She pointed to a spot on the US side where, according to some friends back in France, there was a gas station called the Alburg Truck Stop. They could pick her up there after she made her way around the Customs station.

“It’s crazy, not a good plan,” said Ray. She had made up her mind, but he continued to discourage her. He wasn’t even sure why she was running. What had provoked such a desperate move? In the end, however, he knew it was her decision and the only humane thing was to try to make sure she made it safely.

She’d decided. No more refusals. And no more time to argue. Her Canadian visa ran out in August and there was no telling when she could get a ride this far again. Better to try now. It was as good as any other option. There was a good chance that Ray and the others would wait for her.

“Thank you for helping,” she said, giving Maria a kiss. Then the car headed back as she watched from the roadside, surrounded by trees and pastures. Her route was in the opposite direction. To her right, sometimes through the branches, she could see the setting sun. It was cloudy, interrupting an orange glimmer of the puddles in her path. She didn’t notice much, instead reviewing the choices she had made since flying from Lyon to Mirabel airport. As usual, she was preoccupied with her shortcomings and mistakes.

She knew one thing. If she couldn’t make it to Plattsburgh today her chances wouldn’t improve by returning to the Inn. The room had been a security measure at best, in case someone questioned her presence near the border. “Just a student,” she could say, “visiting wonderful Canada and staying in the countryside.” They might just believe her. But the prospect of another night at the Inn, alone, without a ride or her luggage, wasn’t appealing.

Leaving her bags back in Montreal was probably one of those mistakes. It would take weeks to get them back. They might even be lost or seized if Ray didn’t return to pick them up. On the other hand, they had been useful as collateral to get this far. When Ray balked at providing a ride to Noyan, she said, “Here, I’ll leave my clothing in Montreal to prove I’m not planning to cross today.” The small lie had worked.

She was 90 percent certain that Ray would convince the others to make the pick up in Alburg. Still, he was skeptical about the whole idea, and Maria’s presence limited her ability to persuade him. It had been different back in France, where they first met. Last year he seemed suave, independent, and eager to help. But she wasn’t ready to leave Europe. Since then Ray had turned cautious, although she still sensed his underlying generosity.

Many things had changed — friendships, the political scene, the intelligence dragnet descending over the continent. It was harder to find a helping hand, especially from someone like Ray, a boutique owner in Greenwich Village who avoided intrigue and had something to lose.

She was walking along an unmarked road. It felt like this was taking longer than necessary. On their map of Canada and Vermont, the Chileans had noted that the walk from Noyan to Alburg was no more than a few miles. But she’d been walking for an hour without a sign of the border. Maybe she was headed in the wrong direction. The last thing she needed was to get lost in the dark.

On the farmland beside the road she noticed someone, probably the owner or a worker. She waved and walked across the grass, greeting the Canadian in French. She was visiting the area, she said, and had become lost. She asked for directions back to the Inn and the location of a river to the west.

The farmer’s advice took her to the corner she had been looking for since about eight o’clock. The map called it Line Road. She assumed the name came from its location parallel to the border. But she wasn’t sure which side she was on. There was no sign of a Customs station in either direction. She decided to stay on the road. It couldn’t be far from the truckstop and the likelihood of being noticed in the dark was slim.

But she was afraid now. There was a chance of being stopped for “routine” questioning. In Europe it happened too often. Questions that led to detention while the authorities checked out her story and her passport. And detention would mean fingerprints, detection, identification, and questions she couldn’t afford to answer. If they used a computer they might discover who she really was.

For the moment she was Shahrzad S. Nobari, a 19-year-old citizen of Iran with German ancestry. A student with a five-week visa to visit Canada. To friends like Ray and others she knew abroad, she was Rita. That was usually enough, Rita Mueller. At the youth hostel in Montreal she had signed in as Nobari and told people to call her Rita. It was painful to remember when she had been herself, a 27 years old West German. A fugitive, moving from place to place, country to country, for more than five years.

While she walked west along Line Road, Customs Agent John Ryan was heading east in his patrol car with the headlights off. He had covered this zone for about four years, normally on the lookout for drug smugglers. He had been parked at the corner of Line Road and South Shore Drive, sitting out his shift, when he decided that something was up.

What he had noticed through the rear view mirror was a brown car, with three passengers, moving slowly along the road, then turning back in the opposite direction. It was just enough to arouse his suspicions.

Kristina noticed the car heading in her direction. The fact that its headlights were off nudged her fear up another notch. When the car reached her it stopped, and the man in the driver’s seat called her over to talk. Refusing would be suspicious, but speaking to a stranger could be risky.

While she weighed the alternatives Ryan stepped out of the car. Then she caught a glimpse of his badge, pinned to the shirt of his blue uniform. He asked where she’d been and where she was heading.

“I am out for a walk,” she said.

“Anything to declare?”

“No.” Then he asked to see her purse.

She handed it over and the agent examined its contents on the hood of his car. Aside from the beam of his flashlight, the road was dark. He found some notes, a wallet, a candybar, and a passport. Paging through it, he noticed the Canadian visa and Iranian citizenship. But there was no US visa.

“Would you step inside the car?” He said. It wasn’t a request.

To be continued…

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In the video below, Hirofumi Yanagase, member of the House of Councillors of Japan, talks about the surge in Japan’s excess deaths that are linked to COVID vaccines. 

Michel Chossudovsky’s book entitled

The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity, was published in  Japanese in April 2022. The English version released in August 2022 is available in E-Book format. Free of Charge. Click Here

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仕組まれたコロナ危機:「世界の初期化」を目論む者たち

Tankobon Softcover – April 25, 2022