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Things are getting psychotic. As you listen to EU leaders, all parroting identical ‘good news’ speaking points, they nonetheless radiate basal disquietude – presumably a reflection of the psychic stress from, on the one hand, repeating ‘Ukraine is winning: Russia’s defeat is coming’, when, on the other, they know the exact opposite to be true: That ‘no way’ can Europe defeat a large Russian army on the landmass of Eurasia.
Even the colossus of Washington confines the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose – wars lost to weak opponents that no one could gainsay whether the outcome was no loss, but somehow ‘victory’.
Yet, war with Russia (whether financial or military) is substantially different from fighting small poorly equipped and dispersed insurgent movements, or collapsing the economies of fragile states, such as Lebanon.
Initial U.S. braggadocio has imploded. Russia neither collapsed internally to Washington’s financial assault, nor fell into chaotic regime change as predicted by western officials. Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.
The question worrying the West is what the Russians now will do next: Continue to attrit the Ukrainian army, whilst simultaneously de-stocking NATO’s weapons inventory? Or roll out the gathering Russian offensive forces across Ukraine?
The point, simply put, is that the very ambiguity between the threat of the offensive and implementation is part of the Russian strategy to keep the West off-balance and second-guessing. These are the psychological warfare tactics for which General Gerasimov is renown. Will it come; from whence, and where will it go? We do not know.
Russia’s timing will not be shaped by the western political calendar; but when, and if, an offensive becomes propitiate to Russian interests. Furthermore, Moscow has its eye on two fronts: the financial war (which may argue for a slower military roll out to allow levels of economic pain to accrete) and the military situation (which may, or may not, favour the slow incremental, extirpation of the Ukrainian capacity to fight at all). Former Senior Adviser to the U.S. Defence Secretary, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, sees a big force roll out – and soonish. He may be right.
This latter consideration must be set against the bigger picture: Russia primarily is engaged in the roll-back of U.S. hegemony, and pushing NATO out from the Asian ‘Heartland’. Russians have known for some time that the ‘Global Order system’ is not sustainable (post-WWII structures are already clearly visible in the rear-view mirror). And both Russia and China appreciatethat there is no graceful – or short cut – way to undo such a large system.
The latter know that the West cannot be trusted and is destined to fall. For some years, Russia and China have been restructuring their economies and building their militaries – preparing for the inevitable collapse of the U.S. empire (whilst keeping fingers crossed that the ‘fall’ will not entail Apocalypse).
In practice, both Russia and China have been at pains to moderate that collapse, as far as possible. No one benefits from an uncontrolled implosion of the U.S. However, the U.S. is taking steps too far with its Ukraine project, and Russia is going to use this conflict to facilitate the end of the U.S. empire – there is really no other option.
As Kelley Beaucar Vlahos in the American Conservativeunderlines, U.S. factions have been preparing Russia’s ‘burial’ for many years. Indeed, one of most damaging facts to emerge from Matt Taibbi’s ‘Twitter Files’ exposé has been: “how aggressive congressional lawmakers and federal agency officials were – in pushing a cynical narrative that brought the social media giant to heel whilst setting up the Russian bogeyman that haunts U.S. foreign policy and posturing in the Ukraine war today”.
That concocted story of Russia trying to destroy U.S. democracy brought public buy-in for a new war with Russia.
This existential fight can’t stop now: It might be argued that the Europeans and Americans are in a bubble of everything is optics and ‘all’ is PR immediacy and theatre – and we all need to play this game. They may well also be projecting the same zeitgeist onto the Russians and the Chinese, believing that they must think similarly: No values, no belief in anything, except whatever plays best on MSM.
Looked at from this perspective, it truly is a cultural clash – one reflecting the western incapacity for empathy. The West genuinely may think that Putin’s attention is focussed above all on ratings – just as it is for Macron, Scholz and Biden – and that when hostilities end, it will be business as usual. They may genuinely not understand that this is not how the rest of the world thinks.
Within this mindset exists, ‘‘War is business’ … Tanks a lot, Now Give Us F-16s!’ No sooner had the U.S., Germany and other NATO powers announced the major release of main battlefield tanks for Ukraine, than Kiev immediately started demanding the supply of F-16 warplanes. Indeed, Ukrainian defence official Yuriy Sak brazenly commented about the relative ease of the “next big hurdle” of acquiring F-16s fighter jets:
“They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS [missiles], then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.”
This is a prime example of ‘war as business’ syndrome – and politics is about amassing money. That means F-16s are up next, and that means Poland – F-16s would not be based at an airbase in Ukraine. And extending the battlespace to Poland, inevitably would lead to more ‘war as business’: Tanks, APCs and F-16s. The Military Complex will be rubbing its hands in glee.
Predictably, the war-zealots’ frustration with the collective West’s failure to stem the tide of Ukrainian defeat is growing, and has been further compounded by the Rand Corporation(Pentagon-funded) report last week which amounted to a forensic rebuttal of the justifying rationale for the war in Ukraine. Emphasising that, though Ukrainians are doing the fighting, their flattened cities and decimated economy does not comport with Ukrainian interests.
The Report warns that the U.S. should avoid ‘a protracted conflict’, declaring Ukrainian victory as ‘improbable’ and ‘unlikely’ – and significantly warns of the conflict bleeding into Poland. The contingency that the U.S. risks inadvertently sliding towards nuclear war over several ‘issues’ is also highlighted.
On this last point, the Rand Report is prescient: The head of the Russian delegation to the OSCE this week has publicly warned that should western armour-piercing depleted uranium, or beryllium projectiles be deployed in Ukraine – as were used by the U.S. in Iraq and Yugoslavia with devastating consequences – Russia would view a such deployment as constituting the use of dirty nuclear bombs against Russia, with ensuing consequences.
If there were any doubts about Russian ‘Red Lines’, and where they lie, there can be none now. Just to be clear, ‘consequences’ equals a possible Russian nuclear response. The West has been warned.
If frustration at the failing Ukrainian military project be ‘the cause’, desperation is the sequel.
“Like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”, Victoria Nuland opined last week. This statement shows impotence, more than anythingelse (translated, Nuland is saying, OK folks, we are not impotent as – wink, wink – we still managed to destroy the gas pipeline for the EU).
The whole PR campaign for more tanks looks more like an attempt to give extra morale to Ukrainians and their supporters in Europe (given that the tanks will not change the course of war) – a ‘going through the motions’, effectively nothing more significant. Ditto for the political proposals put forward by Secretary of State, Blinken, and Victoria Nuland last week. They look to have been drafted knowing they would be rejected in Moscow – and they were.
Yet to give the Blinken-Nuland combination their due, if neo-cons are hopeless at the execution of their war projects – which almost invariably end disastrously – they are brilliant at manipulating States into becoming their accomplices – contrary to their own national interests.
Where the neocons have been given free-range is on destroying Europe, politically, economically and militarily. The U.S. itself (and the wider world) must be absolutely astonished at the degree of European subservience, and the absolute control of EU leadership that these neo-cons have exercised.
NATO’s members were never strongly united behind Washington’s crusade to fatally weaken Russia. The EU (especially French and German) populace has no stomach for body bags. But the neo-cons correctly espied the European Achilles Heel: It was Poland, Lithuania, the other Baltic Republics and the Czech Republic. The U.S. neo-cons allied themselves with this radical Russophobic faction who want Russia dismembered and pacified, and to seize the levers of EU foreign policy away from France and Germany. The latter sat silent and impotent at Bucharest in 2008, when the NATO ‘door’ was thrown open to Georgia and Ukraine. Why did they not then express their reservations which they say they had at the time?
Weak leadership has lifted the lid on the European Pandora’s box, for all the old ghost European animosities, jealousies and naked ambitions to waft out as dark vapours. Is there anyone who can close its lid now?
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Pope Francis‘ unprecedented message during his African tour early February relates sustainable peace and unity, economic development and citizenry welfare. The messages also touch on social questions especially how to forge an illuminating future devoid of ethnic rivalries, corruption and distrust that have fueled so many bloody conflicts in Africa. The 86-year-old pope brilliant words were received with resonating applause, especially crowds consisting the youth, down-trodden and marginalized citizens during his tour to Africa.
Pope Francis was urged conflict-ridden African countries to work towards peace and reconciliation. For decades, many African countries still bear the scars of civil war. The political differences and horrific atrocities have affected much-needed Africa’s unity. It has further contributed to weak institutions, slowed down development, and the under-development consequently provides grounds for new conflicts. Across Africa, most of the civil wars leave thousands of people dead, million displaced, and deeply impoverished.
The Pope underlined the fact that lands in the great African continent have suffered greatly from lengthy conflicts, and these conflicts were driven by greed for resources at the expense of innocent victims, and denounced “economic colonialism” in the continent. Pope Francis demanded that foreign powers stop plundering Africa’s natural resources, and the multinational extraction industries. He recalled how many people arrive in north Africa hoping to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, only to find themselves “taken to camps, and suffering there. Let us pray for all those people.”
Across Africa, during political campaigns, almost all the potential candidates eyeing for the presidential position make skyline promises and pledges to uproot corruption. Military also use corruption as one of the reasons for overthrowing constitutionally elected governments. The practical reality is that corruption has become part and particle of African political culture, and politicians are always getting involved in flagrant violations of constitutions.
Transparency International, a Berlin-based global NGO that focuses on reducing graft, these past years, has attempted researching and documenting reports on corruption. It says corruption, in practice, is worldwide. It ran a survey in sub-Saharan Africa in 2022 to attempt to measure the level of corruption.
The latest survey report says only a few countries, though, stood out as remarkably clean across Africa. Its report for 2022, indicated that there is a seated corruption in the majority of African countries, except few countries such as Botswana, Seychelles and Cape Verde. The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) reveals that 124 countries have stagnant corruption levels, while the number of countries in decline is increasing. This has the most serious consequences, as global peace is deteriorating and corruption is both a key cause and result of this.
It also show that corruption and conflict feed each other and threaten durable peace. On one hand, conflict creates a breeding ground for corruption. Political instability, increased pressure on resources and weakened oversight bodies create opportunities for crimes, such as bribery and embezzlement. Unsurprisingly, most countries at the bottom of the CPI are currently experiencing armed conflict or have recently done so.
On the other hand, even in peaceful societies, corruption and impunity can spill over into violence by fuelling social grievances. And siphoning off resources needed by security agencies leaves countries unable to protect the public and uphold the rule of law. Consequently, countries with higher levels of corruption are more likely to also exhibit higher levels of organized crime and increased security threats.
Corruption is also a threat to global security, and countries with high CPI scores play a role in this. For decades, they have welcomed dirty money from abroad, allowing kleptocrats to increase their wealth, power and geopolitical ambitions. The catastrophic consequences of the advanced economies’ complicity in transnational corruption became painfully clear following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In this complex environment, fighting corruption, promoting transparency and strengthening institutions are critical to avoid further conflict and sustain peace.
“Leaders can fight corruption and promote peace all at once. Governments must open up space to include the public in decision-making – from activists and business owners to marginalized communities and young people. In democratic societies, the people can raise their voices to help root out corruption and demand a safer world for us all,” explained Daniel Eriksson, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Transparency International.
Under the presidency of Jacob Zuma, who ruled South Africa from 2009 to 2018, corruption was at its highest. Zuma participated in anti-apartheid struggle until South Africa finally attained its independence in 27 April 1994. He held various positions in ruling African National Congress (ANC) until he was elected president of South Africa. Before that, he was the deputy to President Thabo Mbeki, but was dismissed of corruption over arm deals. There were multiple graft scandals, that he was forced to step down in February 2018, and currently spends time in prison, and faces corruption allegations in court.
In January 2018, as elected president of the African National Congress, Cyril Ramaphosa has raised hopes that he will stamp out corruption.
“Corruption must be fought with the same intensity and purpose that we fight poverty, unemployment and inequality. We must also act fearlessly against alleged corruption and abuse of office within our ranks,” Ramaphosa declared in his maiden speech after his election. “We must investigate without fear or favor the so-called ‘accounting irregularities’ that caused turmoil in the markets and wiped billions off the investments of ordinary South Africans,” he added.
Last May 2021, the South African commission investigating corruption and graft, Ramaphosa acknowledged that the ruling ANC party did little to prevent corruption, including by his predecessor Jacob Zuma.
“State capture and corruption have taken a great toll on our society and indeed on our economy as well,” Ramaphosa said. “They have eroded the values of our constitution and undermined the rule of law. If allowed to continue they would threaten the achievement of growth, development and transformation of our country.”
South Africa is not an isolated case. It’s neighboring southern States including Mozambique and Angola have similar horrible cases. After 38 years of rule, in 2017 President dos Santos stepped down from MPLA leadership. in efforts to fight corruption, Angolan leader João Lourenço removed many of the country’s top politicians including Isabel dos Santos who were seriously corrupt under Jose Eduardo Dos Santos.
From the Maghreb coastline to Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are all engulfed with corruption. Sudan, located in northeast Africa, has economic crisis, social problems despite its huge natural resources. Apparently, Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country for 30 years, did little for native country, his motherland, monopolized political power and ran deeply corrupt government. The New York Times wrote that Sudan’s economy was largely shattered due to political tyranny, deep-seated corruption and poor policies.
Peter Fabricius, Research Consultant from the South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS), cited corruption, poor policies and strategies quite recently in his article headlined – African Coups Are Making A Come Back – as some of the factors affecting sustainable development in Africa.
Nigeria has also experienced the worst and the highest levels of corruption. In an interview, Ambassador Uche Ajulu-Okeke with thirty-year achievements in the Nigerian Foreign Service spoke about the present-day Federal Republic of Nigeria, located in West Africa. Several years after its independence, the leaders have not succeeded in rebuilding the state institutions enough to reflect all-inclusive ethnic diversity, let alone in adopting Western-style democracy that takes cognizance of different public opinions on development issues in the country. The struggle for and misuse of power have brought the country into a stalemate, disrupting any efforts to overcome the deepening economic and multiple social crisis.
She further pointed to nepotism at all levels and institutions of government. Morbid corruption. Endemic kleptocracy. Ethnic cleansing and persecution of Christians and ethnic capture of the military and security apparatus of the state. Massive corruption and widespread kleptocracy with indigenous ethnicities in power making strenuous effort to capture state resources to the exclusion of other ethnic groups.
Still in West Africa on the Atlantic coast, Guinea said it would prosecute former president Alpha Conde, who was toppled in a military coup last September, for mismanagement, misuse of power and corruption, for murder and other crimes committed during his time in office. Conde will be among 27 former senior officials to face prosecution.
Mineral-rich but deeply poor and saddled with a reputation for corruption, Guinea has enjoyed few periods of stability since gaining independence from France in 1958. Many Guineans initially welcomed the coup but there is growing discontent in the nation of 13 million people.
Reports documented extravagant lifestyles of a small elite class in Africa. Such lifestyles are not separately linked to corruption and misuse of siphoned funds. The case of the following: British Broadcasting Corporation reported last September 2021, quoted an official statement that “wherever possible, kleptocrats will not be allowed to retain the benefits of corruption” and that was the case relating to the Justice Department of the United States decision to seize $26.6m (£20m) from Equatorial Guinea’s Vice-President Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue.
He is popularly known for his unquestionable lavish lifestyle, he has been the subject of a number of international criminal charges and sanctions for alleged embezzlement and corruption. He has a fleet of branded cars and a number of houses, and two houses alone in South Africa.
Teodorin Nguema has often drawn criticisms in the international media for lavish spending, while majority of the estimated 1.5 million population wallows in abject poverty. Subsistence farming predominates, with shabby infrastructure in the country. Equatorial Guinea consists of two parts, an insular and a mainland region. Meanwhile, Equatorial Guinea is the third-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Mozambique, Armando Ndambi Guebuza, the oldest son of of the former President Armando Guebuza has been targeted and accused of allegedly receiving the biggest share of the money embezzled from the loans mobilized with State guarantees, having pocketed US$33 million (equivalent €28 million). With the money, Armando Ndambi Guebuza bought top-of-the-range cars, some of which he gave to friends, and in addition purchased real estate inside and outside the country and paid for super high-class leisure trips. Armando Ndambi Guebuza used his influence with his father to make business schemes possible and to take advantage of his wealth for himself and his associates.
Still in southern Africa, and back to Angola which has its own corruption tales. As known, it is a country on the west coast of southern Africa. It is the second largest Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) country in both total land space and by population (behind Brazil), and is the seventh largest country, endowed with natural resources, in Africa.
Understandably, this is just one isolated case here. Isabel dos Santos amassed an empire worth more than $2 billion as the daughter of the former president. Dos Santos has come under scrutiny after a number of media outlets, including the New York Times, the BBC and The Guardian published articles based on the “Luanda Leaks” – a cache of some 700,000 documents related to her allegedly corrupt business dealings that were released to the International Consortium of Investigation Journalists (ICIJ).
Dos Santos was appointed to head Angola’s state oil company Sonangol in 2016 when her father was still the president of the country. (He finally retired in 2017 after ruling Angola for 38 years.) Growing revenue from resources including oil has created opportunities for corruption, an estimated $32 billion disappeared from government under Dos Santos administration, according a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço asserted in his many speeches, promised to scale up the fight against systemic corruption, at least, a new narrative for Angolans and the entire Africa. Arguably, he has the mandate to discharge that responsibility for the benefits of his people. Whether João Lourenço will deliver his dedication in tackling corruption head-on and reducing economic graft in his country, time will definite tell. The society is watching.
Angola, Mozambique and South Africa are members of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). Notwithstanding so many problems that hinder Africa’s development, the postcolonial period has seen quite an array of oppressive systems. The so-called democratic but dictatorial regimes, many previous military dictatorships have primarily failed to develop the economic, leaving dilapidated structures. Siphoning state coffers through dubious and opaque means is still the order of the day.
While African politicians continue blaming foreign actors and external factors for their economic woes. The statist economic systems of the past fifty years miserably failed to create free and prosperous African societies, even while they have been incredibly beneficial to Africa’s ruling elites and people who are politically connected.
William Gumede, an Honorary Associate Professor, Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand; and author of the recently released bestselling ‘Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times’ wrote a briefing paper for the Foreign Policy Centre in which he criticized Western countries for protecting their allies by turning a blind-eye to official corruption by ruling parties and leaders in the name of the so-called ‘war on terror’ or craftily overlooked corruption in order to secure mineral or oil rights as well as lucrative contracts.
“Civil society in Western countries and new emerging powers entering Africa should also hold their governments and businesses to account to ensure they are not overseeing corrupt and opaque operations. Corrupt governments, businesses and individuals – from Western as well as new emerging powers must be named and shamed in order to feel the reputable effects of corrupt activities,” he suggested in the policy paper.
Corruption in business is often not seen in a serious light by business leaders either globally or locally. The global financial crisis was essentially caused by corrupt and greedy bankers, traders and those working in the corporate sector. Yet, many of these business leaders and companies now flourish in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, as if they are blameless. Companies should be compelled to adhere to a set of integrity standards (in which they would foreswear corrupt activities) when trading in government contracts.
African public officials often dismiss international organizations’ corruption reports on Africa, saying these reports are infused by Western bias. African critics claim that such analysis overlooks corruption in Western countries and only focuses on developing countries. This is of course true, but only to some extent. The hypocrisy issue is a valid but separate debate and should not downplay the real seriousness of corruption at home.
Alternatively, Western countries look the other way when corrupt African governments are their allies, this has in fact encouraged corruption. Western business organizations also exacerbate corruption by colluding in corrupt practices. China, as a new emerging power on the block, has continued these age old practices in return for investment opportunities.
The organs of the state, that is the executive, the legislature and judiciary and the fourth estate (media must necessarily do more effective investigative journalism to uncover wrongdoing) must engage in “checks and balances” – this to a considerable extent, will scale back corruption in society. The political leader and the executive must periodically account for certain decisions in parliament.
In the long-term, the best antidote to corruption is to foster values (fairness, transparency, public accountability) across the continent which reward honesty and discourage dishonesty. Besides setting up anti-corruption committees and commissions, civil society organizations at the grassroots should step up public campaigns across Africa against corruption. The masses must know the extent of corruption, the impact it has on public service delivery, and how to monitor as well as report it, and the importance of holding their elected leaders and public servants more vigorously to account.
In final conclusion, it is worthy, at least, to keep in mind the suggestion made by the Republic of Ghana’s Vice President, Mahamudu Bawumia, who in May 2022 stated: “Building strong institutions means putting in place the right systems and practices that ensure transparency and brings about efficiency. As the saying goes, the biggest disease is corruption and the vaccine is transparency. The fact is that corrupt people hate transparency and public accountability.”
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
“The novelty of replacing one’s ‘home key’ with a microchip implant is gaining worldwide interest, but there’s another more compelling story under the surface. Why is this technology — an integrated circuit the size of a grain of rice — reviled by some and celebrated by self-proclaimed human cyborgs?
“Arguably, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet offers the most elegant explanation: ‘Nothing is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.’ However, it would be prudent to tell Prince Hamlet that not all microchip implants are designed alike, and understanding the technological design enables one to better evaluate the competing viewpoints. Today, more than 50,000 people have elected to have a subdermal chip surgically inserted between the thumb and index finger, serve as their new swipe key, or credit card. In Germany, for example, more than 2,000 Germans have opted to receive these implants; one man even used it to store a link to his last will and testament. As chip storage capacity increases, perhaps users could even link to the complete works of Shakespeare.”
The article goes on to provide an update of many advances and concerns in the practice of inserting microchips into humans, and this blog is referenced several times.
Indeed, I have written about microchip implants from a cybersecurity and privacy perspective three times before, and it is clear to me that inquiring minds still want to know: What is the future of microchip implants?
Why do I say that with confidence? Because blogs on this topic of microchip implants still receive very high page views and lots of interest from global readers. For your reference, here are those three blogs:
“Patrick Paumen causes a stir whenever he pays for something in a shop or restaurant.
“This is because the 37-year-old doesn’t need to use a bank card or his mobile phone to pay. Instead, he simply places his left hand near the contactless card reader, and the payment goes through.
“‘The reactions I get from cashiers are priceless!’ says Mr. Paumen, a security guard from the Netherlands.
“He is able to pay using his hand because back in 2019 he had a contactless payment microchip injected under his skin.”
But last December, another article asked if microchip implants in the human brain are still too dangerous. The article does a great job in covering the many benefits and drawbacks of the microchip implants, from curing diseases to complications in getting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.
Meanwhile, many state governments are passing laws to prevent forced microchip implants on employees and others. For example, Wyoming just passed such a bill.
AccordingThe Hill, “to date, at least 10 state legislatures in the United States have passed statutes to ban employers from requiring employees to receive human microchip implants.”
Final thoughts
Back in 2018, I listed a number of key questions that I think need to be answered as this human chip implant practice moves forward. I still think these are the right questions (and some are starting to get answered):
What are the benefits of implanting the chip(s)?
Is implanting chips physically and emotionally safe?
Who owns the data on the chip?
Who has access to the data — and when?
Do the chips communicate, somehow, with outside networks?
How are chips updated when flaws are found?
Can the chips be hacked? Assuming yes, what security is in place to stop unauthorized access to data and manipulation of data?
Do religious beliefs forbid the practice?
Is implanting the microchip truly voluntary? Will it still be voluntary tomorrow or in 10 or 20 years?
Is the practice medically necessary?
Are incentives offered to those who participate?
Are penalties coming for those who don’t participate?
Will being chipped start as an exception and become the rule?
Will ethical and moral processes and procedures be breached by hackers? (No way to stop the bad actors once you begin.)
What laws are put in place on this implanted chip topic?
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Daniel J. Lohrmann is an internationally recognized cybersecurity leader, technologist, keynote speaker and author.
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Washington’s political establishment says China was spying on US sovereign territory with what China has called their ‘weather balloon. China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesperson issued a statement:
The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure
However, the Western mainstream-media has been non-stop with the hysteria on China’s “spy balloon” invading US sovereign territory, but when it comes to the US government and its Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) who has consistently invaded the airspace of many sovereign countries, it is barely mentioned and forgotten. The bottom line is that the China balloon story is all about war propaganda. The US and its allies are setting the stage for another war, this time against China.
The Associated Press (AP)
‘China balloon: Many questions about suspected spy in the sky’ reported on what the Pentagon has claimed regarding China’s spy balloon, “The Pentagon says the balloon, which is carrying sensors and surveillance equipment, is maneuverable and has shown it can change course. It has loitered over sensitive areas of Montana where nuclear warheads are siloed, leading the military to take actions to prevent it from collecting intelligence.” Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary said, “the balloon was not a military or physical threat” and that “once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”
But CNN switched back to its propaganda mode when they reported on what Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer had said, “Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then, the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries.”
So, the US has used these types of balloons in the past, “But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion. Or at least until now.”
They mention the advancement of “miniaturization of electronics” which complements the idea of “floating intelligence platforms.” Layton said that “Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch.” An article published by The Washington Post ‘How do stratospheric Balloons Work? Here’s a Visual Guide’ said that “Experts in national security and aerospace said the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitudes balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting, telecommunications and scientific research.”
The Democrats and Republicans are united against a common adversary and that is China. They say how dare the Chinese Communist Party release a surveillance balloon on our sovereign territory and defy international law. Well, it is true that a foreign object that invades a sovereign country’s airspace does violate international law, but for decades, the US has invaded the sovereign airspace of many countries around the world including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, and others.
So let’s go back to November 11th, 1984, the United Press International (UPI) headlined with ‘Nicaragua said U.S. spy planes Sunday broke the sound…’ reported that “Nicaragua said U.S. spy planes Sunday broke the sound barrier twice over the country, causing minor damages and fueling the leftist Sandinista government’s fears of an American invasion.”
The SR-71 or its more accurate name, “The SR-71 “Blackbird” is used for “strategic reconnaissance” or in other words, to spy on its adversaries. The SR-71 Blackbird is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a heavyweight in the MIC was identified by the Sandinistas during the time of the Iran-Contra affair“Within two hours of each other, what the Nicaraguans identified as a U.S. SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ jets flew over Managua and other cities, breaking the sound barrier with a loud boom.”
Another incident happened on December 5th, 2011, this time in Iran. Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was noticed in the city of Kashmar, located in northeastern Iran and was seized by a cyberwarfare unit from Iranian forces. The Cyberwarfare unit gained control of the UAV spy drone and landed the plane although the western media reported that the spy plane was shot down. The Obama regime initially denied Iran’s claims but later admitted that the aircraft that was supposedly shot down, was a US drone. Iran did file a complaint to the United Nations over the US violating its airspace shortly after. The RQ-170 Sentinel Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is described in Airforce-technology.com as
“a high altitude and long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed and manufactured by Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the United States Air Force (USAF)”
and that “The UAV can capture real-time imagery of the battlefield and transfer the data to the ground control station (GCS) through a line of sight (LOS) communication data link.”
It was also used against various countries, “The low-observable design enables the aircraft to fly on the borders of Iran, China, India and Pakistan for capturing real-time information regarding missile tests, telemetry and multispectral intelligence.”
On July 21st, 2019, Venezuela’s airspace was also violated by the US military as Reuter’s headlined with ‘U.S. says Venezuelan plane aggressively shadowed a U.S. military aircraft’ not mentioning that it was a spy plane, “The U.S. military on Sunday accused a Venezuelan fighter aircraft of “aggressively” shadowing a U.S. Navy EP-3 Aries II plane over international airspace, in yet another sign of the increasing hostility between the two nations.” Keep in mind that that Obama had imposed sanctions against Venezuela, “The encounter between the U.S. and Venezuelan planes occurred on Friday, the same day that the Trump administration announced it was sanctioning four top officials in Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency.” The US military had issued a statement about the incident and said that “it had determined the “Russian-made fighter aggressively shadowed the EP-3 at an unsafe distance in international airspace for a prolonged period of time, endangering the safety of the crew and jeopardizing the EP-3 mission.”
So, what was that mission? To spy on Venezuela’s oil fields? This was during the time when the Trump regime’s hostilities towards the Maduro government was at an all-time high, “U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly used sanctions in an effort to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose 2018 re-election has been deemed illegitimate by the United States and most Western nations.” The EP-3 stems from the P-3 Orion. The P-3 Orion is an anti-submarine and surveillance aircraft also developed by Lockheed Martin in the 1960’s for the US Navy. The EP-3 known as ARIES (Airborne Reconnaissance Integrated Electronic System) has specific capabilities that can intercept various signals. It is an aircraft that is operated by naval personnel with specific skills that includes cryptographers, technicians and even linguists to translate intercepted messages in foreign languages.
Online news website ‘The Drive’ is one of the internet’s main sources for news, features and guides about modern automotive culture and other technologies has a section called ‘The War Zone’ published an article titled ‘The U.S. Army’s Newest Spy Plane in Action in Africa and Latin America’ admits that “After almost getting canned in 2012, the enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System is now snooping abroad.” “Rules for thee, and not for me” is the US model, so “snooping abroad” is I guess justified. According to The Drive:
The first version of the U.S. Army’s newest spy plane is in action in Africa and Latin America. At the same time, the service is finishing tests of three additional sub-variants in Arizona. On March 12, 2017, Scout Warrior first reported these overseas deployments. The War Zone subsequently learned only some of the four signals intelligence-focused versions of the Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (EMARSS-S) were snooping abroad.
In an Email, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Sean Smith confirmed this particular model was supporting U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) operations. “There are no other EMARSS variants fielded or deployed at this time,” he added. Despite its name, the EMARSS-S has a suite of signal-snooping gear to track and listen in on enemy communications, as well as the ability to record full-motion video during the day or at night. Each aircraft also has work stations connected to the controversial Distributed Common Ground System – Army (DCGS-A) intelligence data network, which is supposed to help collect, compile, and distribute information rapidly across units
Not only do they openly admit that the US has spy planes in Africa and Latin America, to them it makes perfect sense!
Sending the aircraft to work with AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM makes perfect sense for early deployments. The regions these commands work are relatively low threat environments for American aircraft, but offer no shortage of work tracking drug smugglers, terrorists, and insurgents in remote areas
Let me get this straight, they are using spy planes “to track drug smugglers, terrorists, and insurgents”? Call me cynical but “tracking drug smugglers, terrorists and insurgents” is only a half-truth. Maybe in a small number of cases they have tracked real drug smugglers and others, but the US government has been involved in drug smuggling operations in the past, just ask the CIA. As for tracking terrorists, the US government and the intelligence community has supported terrorists in the Middle East and Latin America for decades and as for tracking insurgencies of let’s say, in Iraq, it is usually against US and NATO occupiers, so who are they fooling?
In Central and South America and Africa, Army spy planes such as the RC-12X Guardrail Common Sensor (GRCS) and EO-5C Airborne Reconnaissance Low – Multisensor (ARL-M) already fly routine missions, in cooperation with other aircraft and personnel from the U.S. Air Force, American law enforcement agencies, local security forces, and private contractors. After 9/11, the Pentagon found renewed interest in monitoring terrorist groups and potential hotspots in Africa with a similar mix of assets
To the US establishment, any form of spying on its territory is considered a declaration of war, but any violation of airspace of their perceived enemies anywhere in the Global South is justified because the US government can do whatever they want and bypass international law. The Chinese spy balloon story is to create fear that an enemy is collecting data on its nuclear missile sites and on the American people. Now they are accusing China of spying on Latin America with another balloon which asks the obvious question, why? China has a good relationship with most of Latin America. The US establishment, the MIC and the mainstream media are all pushing for a new war with a nuclear power that has a formidable military that would fight any foreign invasion on its territory. China is not interested in becoming a global empire, it is the US who wants to remain a global empire. It’s all war propaganda, nothing more, and nothing less.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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President Emmanuel Macron of France has introduced a bill within the National Assembly which would make significant changes to the pension system established as a result of working class struggles over the decades.
Macron and his neoliberal political party presented itself during the 2022 elections as a viable alternative to the ultra-right wing National Front headed by Marine Le Pen.
Despite the fact that many workers viewed Macron as a lesser threat to the gains made by the French unions, one of the first pieces of legislation introduced in the second administration of the incumbent has been the attack on pensions. The plan is to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 while imposing higher contributions from the workers themselves by mandating that people be employed for 43 years to collect full pension benefits.
A broad coalition of French workers and youth have answered Macron’s policies with a series of general strikes and mass mobilizations. On February 11, another day of demonstrations will be held aimed at filling the streets of Paris and other major cities throughout the country.
Transportation systems are being halted, employees in the oil and energy industries have impeded fuel deliveries and access to electric power, schools are being closed as teachers and students join other workers to oppose the Macron agenda. These periodic general strikes are highlighting the potential political power of organized labor and their allies among the youth and other sectors of the population.
On January 19, the 31st and February 7, 2.8 million workers and hundreds of thousands of youth responding to the call of the National Student Union, participated in walkouts and marches. These manifestations have been largely peaceful although there were some clashes with police and property damage in Paris and other municipalities.
In light of the one-day general strikes during January and early February, the unions are contemplating even more militant initiatives against the pension reforms. These work stoppages are taking place amid higher rates of inflations not experienced in the western capitalist states since the 1970s and 1980s.
Unions representing the railway workers said they would continue their strike into Wednesday (Feb. 8) in order to emphasize the seriousness of the crisis. Oil workers also pledged to extend their stay away by another day.
Neoliberalism and the Plight of the Working Class
Despite the outpouring of unions and students over the recent period and the 2022 oil worker’s strike, the Macron forces appeared to be firmly committed to their neoliberal agenda which places greater burdens on the very class which are most impacted by inflation. French-based multinational energy firms remain largely unscathed by the government’s policy imperatives as Macron seeks to replace the decline in natural gas resources from Russia by negotiating new deals with Algeria and other states.
Although Macron was re-elected in June for another term of office, his political party failed to win a majority within the National Assembly. The French Senate is already dominated by the Republican conservatives and therefore the Renaissance Party of Macron, formerly known as the La Republique En Marche, will have to draw support for its pension reforms from the right-wing opposition.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon the unions and students to advance a broader economic program which provides specific alternatives to the ruling class parties which dominate French politics during this period. A coalition of Left forces in the National Assembly are attempting to sharpen the debate surrounding the pension reforms. The outcomes of this political debate will undoubtedly be influenced by the independent actions of the working class.
It will take militant and revolutionary initiatives of the workers and youth to defeat the neoliberal policies of Macron. Absent persistent agitation and organizing, the ruling class will prevail, setting the stage for even more draconian attacks on the wages and social benefits of the masses of people.
According to the Associated Press:
“French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne defended the government plan Tuesday (Feb. 7) but suggested there was room for adjustments. ‘I’m convinced there are points of agreement to be found. I’m convinced that we can improve this text together. It will be through debate, confronting ideas and, of course, respect,’ she said, noting graffiti that appeared on the meeting place of the National Assembly, including a door marked with 60. If nothing is done, Borne said, taxes and social charges will increase, along with unemployment and lower purchasing power. That would cost retirees with modest pensions and ‘all those who worked all their lives, and certainly not the big bosses,’ she said.” See this.
The Russian special military operation in Ukraine has prompted sanctions by the European Union (EU) member-states and the United States against Moscow. These sanctions and the imperialist-engineered failure to negotiate an accord between Kiev and Moscow, have worsened the economic situation in Western Europe and other geopolitical regions of the world.
Simultaneously in Britain, unions representing railway, healthcare, educational and other workers have engaged in one-day strike actions as well. The Conservative Party government of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has imposed an austerity budget on the workers employed in the public sectors of the country.
There is much at stake in the recent manifestations of the class struggles which are unfolding in France and Britain. Workers and oppressed peoples in North America should follow these developments in Europe in order to gain lessons for the ongoing assaults on their wages and living standards in the world’s leading capitalist and imperialist state.
Consequently, the social plight of the working class in France and other European states are igniting industrial actions as witnessed in Britain since the beginning of 2023. The working class is becoming poorer while the energy firms and financial institutions are reaping huge profits.
A report on the actions of the trade union federations says that:
“Speaking at the protest, head of the CGT, one of France’s main unions, Philippe Martinez called for ‘tougher, more, and more massive’ strikes, while Laurent Berger, general secretary of the CFDT, said: ‘We will try to be even stronger this Saturday [when more protests are planned)’. Mr Martinez said: ‘The government cannot remain deaf to the immense majority of workers [who oppose reforms]. It continues to be stubborn despite protests, so yes, we must go up a gear with more marked, longer, tougher, more numerous, more massive and extended strikes.’”
Numerous union leaders and opponents of the pension reforms see no other alternative to withholding their labor in protests against the policy changes. Through their actions the workers and youth are attempting to influence the National Assembly debate to reject the pension reforms.
The same above-mentioned article conveys the sentiment of the workers: “Virginie Gonzales, general secretary of the UGICT-CGT told BFMTV: ‘I fear that without blocking the economy, we will not be heard; or at least, not listened to.’ Ecologist MP Sandrine Rousseau added: ‘I’m very angry that the government is asking people who are already doing a lot of work to take longer to get to retirement. Their bodies are in pain, they are exposed to psycho-social risks, burnouts, and a loss of meaning. ‘Retirement is the reward for this work. I would say that a ‘right to laziness’ from the age of 60 is legitimate, and even before, perhaps.’ She added that the reforms would also ‘worsen’ women’s position at work.”
The Capitalist Economic Crisis and the Role of the Working Class
A recent study by the French governmental statistical agency is predicting that the second largest EU economy will experience marginal growth during 2023. The forecast for far less than one percent growth is taking into account the industrial actions of the workers and youth.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned of the potential of a global recession by the concluding months of this year. Although the rise in inflation has somewhat eased, there are indicators which can impact employment and wages which are not keeping up with the rate of price hikes.
Food and energy prices in Europe are absorbing larger amounts of the salaries of workers. These realities are bound to prompt demonstrations and industrial actions in defense of the gains made during the labor struggles of the second half of the 20th century.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who claimed he acted as an intermediary between Russia and Ukraine at the start of the special operation, said in a video that Russian President Vladimir Putin assured him that he would not kill his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. This revelation comes as Benjamin Netanyahu is back in power and is driving Israel even closer to Ukraine and further away from Russia.
“He gave me two great concessions,” Bennett said on February 4 of his March 5, 2022 meeting with Putin. It is recalled that Bennet flew to Moscow in an effort to mediate only weeks after the special military operation began in February 2022. “I knew Zelensky was under threat, in a bunker… I said to [Putin], ‘Do you intend to kill Zelensky?’ He said, ‘I won’t kill Zelensky’.”
The former Israeli Prime Minister said he immediately contacted the Ukrainian president after this revelation and told him, “I’ve just come out of a meeting — [Putin] is not going to kill you.
“[Zelensky] asked me, ‘Are you sure?’ I said 100 percent. [Putin’s] not going to kill you.”
Bennett recalled:
“Two hours later, Zelensky went to his office, and did a video selfie in the office, [in which the Ukrainian president said,] ‘I’m not afraid.’”
According to Bennett, Putin agreed not to demand the disarming of Ukraine. In fact, that same weekend, Zelensky dropped Ukraine’s demand to become a NATO member. However, as recalled, Zelensky once again demanded for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into NATO after Russia announced the inclusion of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson oblasts into the Russian Federation in September 2022.
Bennett also said that “everything I did [in the mediation effort] was coordinated with the US.”
This is an unsurprising detail since Kiev refuses to negotiate with Moscow because of Zelensky’s desire to carry out orders from Washington and London. The Anglo alliance effectively controls Kiev, proving that Zelensky is not a political actor but a puppet. Despite this, the West still continues to allude that Russia is refusing to negotiate.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the argument that Russia refuses to negotiate on the Ukraine issue is a lie, which Moscow will continue to refute.
“Our diplomacy has a job to do, on a daily basis, to explain what’s going on, to expose the lies, especially the current lies about our denial to negotiate,” he said.
Although Bennet attempted to portray himself as a mediator that is balancing between Kiev and Moscow, his actions have led to direct military support for Ukraine, and this policy will certainly not relax under Netanyahu.
Axios revealed on February 1 that the new Israeli government is conducting a policy review on its position on the Ukraine War. The report said, citing three unnamed Israeli officials, that Netanyahu ordered the policy review after returning to office in late December and discussed the matter with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken when they met in Jerusalem on January 30.
Netanyahu reportedly stressed to Blinken that Israel will not reduce humanitarian aid and support for Ukraine, with a senior Israeli official claiming that the Biden administration knows that Jerusalem will not shift Israel’s position closer to Moscow.
Blinken none-the-less urged Israel to provide more support for Kiev, saying that “Russia’s ongoing atrocities only underscore the importance of providing support for all of Ukraine’s needs – humanitarian, economic, and security.”
When meeting with Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, Blinken said: “We appreciate Israel’s humanitarian assistance,” adding that “we look forward to discussing what more can we do.”
Confirming the Axios report, Netanyahu hinted at a policy shift in an interview with CNN on January 31, saying he was “looking into” providing Kiev with “other kinds of aid” besides humanitarian.
Russia warned Israel against arming Ukraine following the CNN interview.
“We say that all countries that supply weapons [to Ukraine] should understand that we will consider these [weapons] to be legitimate targets for Russia’s armed forces,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned.
“Any attempts — implemented or even unrealized but announced for the supply of additional, new or some other weapons — will lead to an escalation of this crisis. And everyone should be aware of this,” she added.
Although Israeli officials and media have attempted to downplay their country’s support for Ukraine, stressing that it does not extend beyond humanitarian support, The New York Times reported last month that the US military was shipping hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to Ukraine from a massive stockpile in Israel.
Senior European officials told Haaretz last month that “Israel agreed to underwrite the purchase of millions of dollars of ‘strategic materials’ for Ukraine” because of American pressure. The materials were transferred via a NATO country and Jerusalem allowed the transfer of Israeli-made weapons, including electro-optical and fire-control systems, by NATO countries to Ukraine.
In addition, it was revealed by Haaretz that Israel has stepped up its intelligence assistance to Ukraine in recent weeks by providing intel on Iranian drones.
In this way, Israel is playing a major role in attempting to limit the success of the Russian military operation in Ukraine despite continuous claims that it is balancing its interests and relations between the two warring parties. Israel, for its part, now faces the risk of Russia no longer tolerating its uncontested airstrikes in Syria and could deepen its military and intelligence ties with Iran.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
In “Reaffirming a Positive Correlation Between Number of Vaccine Doses and Infant Mortality Rates: A Response to Critics,” published Feb. 2 in Cureus, authors Gary S. Goldman, Ph.D., an independent computer scientist, and Neil Z. Miller, a medical researcher, examined this potential correlation.
Their findings indicate a “positive correlation between the number of vaccine doses and IMRs is detectable in the most highly developed nations” — which, on average, administer the most vaccine doses to infants.
The authors replicated the results of a 2011 statistical analysis they conducted, and refuted the results of a recent paper that questioned those findings.
Miller spoke to The Defender about the study and its implications for infant and childhood vaccination schedules.
The more doses, the higher the infant mortality rate
In 2011, Miller and Goldman published a peer-reviewed study in Human and Experimental Toxicology, which first identified a positive statistical correlation between IMRs and number of vaccine doses.
The researchers wrote:
“The infant mortality rate (IMR) is one of the most important indicators of the socio-economic well-being and public health conditions of a country. The U.S. childhood immunization schedule specifies 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year — the most in the world — yet 33 nations have lower IMRs.
“Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation coefficient of r = 0.70 (p < 0.0001) was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants.”
In the above figures, “r” refers to the correlation coefficient, a number that ranges from -1 to 1. Any figure above zero is understood as a positive correlation, with figures between 0.6 and 0.79 considered a “strong” positive correlation, and 0.8 and above a “very strong” positive correlation.
The “p-value” indicates the extent to which the predictor’s value, in a linear regression analysis, is related to changes in the response variable.
A p-value of 0.05 or below is considered statistically significant, and indicative that the predictor and the response variable are related to each other and move in the same direction.
In the same 2011 study, which used 2009 data, the researchers found the highest positive correlation in countries that administered the most vaccine doses to infants (between 21 and 26 months old).
“Linear regression analysis of unweighted mean IMRs showed a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality rates, with r = 0.992 (p = 0.0009),” the researchers wrote.
Miller told The Defender:
“In 2011, we published a study that found a counterintuitive, positive correlation, r = 0.70 (p < .0001), demonstrating that among the most highly developed nations (n = 30), those that require more vaccines for their infants tend to have higher infant mortality rates (IMRs).”
However, “critics of the paper recently claimed that this finding is due to ‘inappropriate data exclusion,’ i.e., the failure to analyze the ‘full dataset’ of all 185 nations.”
According to Miller:
“A team of researchers recently read our study and found it ‘troublesome’ that it’s in the top 5% of all research outputs. They wrote a rebuttal to our paper to ‘correct past misinformation’ and to reduce the impact of vaccine hesitancy.
Miller said he and Goldman “wrote our current paper to examine the various claims made by these critics, to assess the validity of their scientific methods and to perform new investigations to assess the reliability of our original findings.”
The original paper studied the U.S. and 29 other countries with better IMRs “to explore a potential association between the number of vaccine doses … and their IMRs,” finding a strong positive correlation.
The 10 researchers — Elizabeth G. Bailey, Ph.D., a biology assistant professor at Brigham Young University, and several students associated with her Bioinformatics Capstone course who wrote the rebuttal to Goldman and Miller’s 2011 analysis — combined “185 developed and Third World nations that have varying rates of vaccination and socioeconomic disparities” in their analysis.
“One stated rationale behind Bailey’s reanalysis (and additional new investigations) is to reduce the impact of vaccine hesitancy, which ‘has intensified due to the rapid development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine,’” Goldman and Miller said. “They also appear to be targeting our study for a potential retraction.”
Miller explained the methodology Bailey’s team used:
“The critics select[ed] 185 nations and use linear regression to report a correlation between the number of vaccine doses and IMRs.
“They also perform[ed] multiple linear regression analyses of the Human Development Index(HDI) vs. IMR with additional predictors and investigate IMR vs. percentage vaccination rates for eight different vaccines.”
According to Miller, “Despite the presence of inherent confounding variables in their paper, a small, statistically significant positive correlation (r = 0.16, p < .03) is reported that corroborates the positive trend in our study (r = 0.70, p < .0001).”
In other words, there is still a positive correlation between the IMR and the number of vaccine doses, albeit weaker, among the 185 countries Miller’s critics studied.
However, this positive correlation is “attenuated in the background noise of nations with heterogeneous socioeconomic variables that contribute to high rates of infant mortality, such as malnutrition, poverty, and substandard health care” — meaning that there are confounding factors in poorer nations that significantly contribute to their higher IMRs.
Miller explained the difference in methodologies:
“We both used linear regression to analyze a potential correlation between the number of vaccine doses and IMRs. However, we analyzed the 30 most highly developed nations with high vaccination rates (consistently above 90%) and uniformity of socioeconomic factors.
“In contrast, our critics analyzed 185 nations with variable vaccination rates (ranging from less than 40% to greater than 90%) and heterogeneous socioeconomic factors.
“By mixing highly developed and Third World nations in their analysis, our critics inadvertently introduced numerous confounders. For example, malnutrition, poverty, and substandard healthcare all contribute to infant mortality, confounding the data and rendering the results unreliable.”
Miller and Goldman also conducted three other types of statistical analysis: odds radio, sensitivity and replication analyses. These tests confirmed their findings, as they wrote in their new paper:
“Our odds ratio analysis conducted on the original dataset controlled for several variables. None of these variables lowered the correlation below 0.62, thus robustly confirming our findings.
“Our sensitivity analysis reported statistically significant positive correlations between the number of vaccine doses and IMR when we expanded our original analysis from the top 30 to the 46 nations with the best IMRs.
“Additionally, a replication of our original study using updated 2019 data corroborated the trend we found in our first paper (r = 0.45, p = .002).”
Put differently, the new study, which used 2019 data, found a somewhat weaker positive correlation of .045, but nevertheless confirmed a connection between the number of infant vaccine doses and IMRs.
Miller explained that, unlike the critics’ dataset of 185 countries, no adjustments for vaccination rates were necessary for his dataset, as “Vaccination rates in the countries that we analyzed generally ranged from 90-99%.”
He added that the odds ratio analysis considered 11 variables, including child poverty, and, “None of these variables lowered the correlation below 0.62.”
Similarly, said Miller, “In our sensitivity analysis, where we successively analyzed nations with worse IMRs than the United States, an additional 16 nations could have been included in the linear regression of IMRs versus the number of vaccine doses, and the findings would still have yielded a statistically significant positive correlation coefficient.”
Miller told The Defender the positive correlation he and Goldman identified grew stronger when the data were limited to highly developed countries, which tend to require a larger number of doses:
“When we replicated our 2009 study using 2019 data, we once again found a statistically significant positive correlation between the number of vaccine doses and IMRs. Although the correlation was less robust (r = 0.45, p = .002) than our original finding, it corroborated the direction of the trend initially reported.
“When our 2019 linear regression analysis was limited to the top 20 nations, the correlation coefficient increased (r = 0.73, p < .0003), revealing a strong direct relationship between number of vaccine doses and IMRs.”
Miller noted that his critics’ paper based its conclusions on results it found for “high” and “very high developed nations” as categorized by HDI.
Their paper stated, “A re-analysis of only highly or very highly developed countries similarly shows that human development index (HDI) explains the variability in IMR, and more recommended vaccine doses does not predict more infant death.”
However, Goldman and Miller, in their new paper, challenged the use of HDI as a predictor of overall health in a country, noting that HDI looks only at “educational levels, income per capita, and life expectancy” and that multiple scholars have identified “severe misclassification in the categorization of low, medium, high, or very high human development countries.”
“As we discuss in our paper, up to 34% of HDI-classified nations are misclassified due to three sources of error, so it is unreliable,” Miller told The Defender. “Although our critics reported a strong correlation between HDI and IMR, this reveals no specific health measures that might be positively or negatively influencing IMR.”
Miller also noted, “An alternative index, the Human Life Indicator (HLI) was created to address HDI shortcomings. While Denmark was recently ranked fifth in the world by HDI, it fell to 27th place with HLI; the U.S. was recently ranked tenth by HDI while HLI ranked it 32nd.”
In summarizing the shortcomings of his critics’ study, Miller said:
“It was inappropriate for our critics to combine data from nations with highly variable vaccination rates and heterogeneous socioeconomic factors.
“In Third World nations, several factors contribute to a high infant mortality rate, thus when all 185 nations are analyzed (rather than limiting the analysis to the most highly developed homogenous nations), a positive correlation between number of vaccine doses and IMRs is attenuated or lost in the background noise of these other factors.”
Infant deaths spike in days following vaccination, data show
Miller previously studied the association between pediatric vaccines and sudden infant death, in a 2021 paper titled “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature.”
Commenting on the findings of that research, Miller said:
“Of the 2,605 infant deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) from 1990 through 2019, 58% clustered within three days post-vaccination, and 78% occurred within seven days post-vaccination, confirming that infant deaths tend to occur in temporal proximity to vaccine administration.
“The excess of deaths during these early post-vaccination periods was statistically significant (p < 0.00001).”
Combined with the findings of his most recent paper, Miller argued that “Vaccines are not always safe and effective. Vaccine-related morbidity and mortality are more extensive than publicly acknowledged.”
He added:
“In all nations, a causal relationship between vaccines and sudden infant deaths is rarely acknowledged. Yet, physiological studies have shown that infant vaccines can produce fever and inhibit the activity of 5-HT [serotonin] neurons in the medulla, causing prolonged apneas and interfering with auto-resuscitation.”
Miller also highlighted the sequence in which vaccines are administered as a potential factor contributing to IMRs. He told The Defender:
“Global health officials do not test the sequence of recommended vaccines nor their non-specific effects to confirm they provide the intended effects on child survival. More studies on this topic are necessary to determine the full impact of vaccinations on all-cause mortality.
“In Third World nations, numerous studies indicate that DTP and inactivated polio (IPV) vaccines have an inverse safety profile, especially when administered out of sequence. Multiple vaccines administered concurrently have also been shown to increase mortality.”
Miller said that based on his latest study, “We do not know whether it is the vaccinated or unvaccinated infants who are dying at higher rates.” However, he noted most nations in his sample “had 90-99% national vaccination coverage rates.”
“In our paper, we provide plausible biological evidence that the observed correlation between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants might be causal,” Miller said.
As a result, argued Miller, “more investigations regarding health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations … would be beneficial,” adding that “Health authorities in all nations have an obligation to determine whether their vaccination schedules are achieving desired goals.”
“Much more research needs to be done in this field, but more studies will only achieve limited positive change until more individuals and families begin to make the connection between vaccines and adverse events,” Miller said.
“Also, legislators and health authorities must permit people to accept or reject vaccines without intimidation or negative consequences.”
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
I would prefer not to relay the following very strange story given to me by a fellow sociologist, but he had done me a number of favors, and since he asked me to do him a favor in return, I feel obligated. I don’t know what to make of the whole thing. Following this brief introduction, you will find the manuscript he handed me. I realize you are getting this third hand, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t know his friend. When he asked me to print it for him, I told him I would prefer not to, but then guilt got the best of me, so here it is.
This is one of those stories hard to believe. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke, some sort of parable, and my friend who was telling it to me had had too much to drink or was just pulling my leg. I’m not sure. Like so much in today’s world, the difference between fiction and fact has become very blurry.
Let me call him Sean, since these days holding a strong dissenting opinion can cost you your job. He is a professor who, like the character David in John Fowles’ story, “The Ebony Tower,” teaches art history. And like Fowles’ character he is a very frustrated academic. In Sean’s case, he has had to contend with the transformation of his college from a place of learning to a place where “Woke” ideology stifles dissent. Perhaps more importantly, he has suffered from extreme writer’s block. He had just been telling me how, after years of writing copiously in his private journals, he had grown nauseated by it because it seemed so self-involved, concerning self and family stuff he was sick of. He wanted to write articles and books, yet when he tried, he couldn’t. All his energy had been going into his futile daily journals, where he felt trapped by family matters. Until one recent day at the bar where we regularly meet, he heard this strange story. It jolted him.
Here is what he told me over beer at the tavern. I am paraphrasing, but because his tale was so startling, I know I have the essentials right. He said:
“It was late in the afternoon last Wednesday when I came in here for a beer. I was feeling very tired that day, though depressed would be more accurate. The teaching routine seemed absurd to me. I wasn’t writing. I felt at a dead end. I guess I was. Anyway, you know that guy Tom whom we’ve talked to here before? Well, he was here and we got talking. The place was empty. It turns out his last name is Finn – Tom Finn. His father was Russell Finn, the famous painter, you know, the one the mainstream media gush over. A realistic sentimentalist is the way I’ve heard him described, although I would say he was a sick fabulist trying to repaint history for Hallmark Cards. Anyway, so this Tom Finn had had a few beers, and as he got talking, the both of us had a few more. It became obvious that he was obsessed with his father. He didn’t say that exactly, but I could guess it from the snide remarks about him he’d laugh out of the side of his mouth. I asked him about a big traveling exhibit of his father’s paintings which I had recently read about in the newspapers; had he seen it? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t go to that kind of crap. That’s his bag of marbles.’ Things like that.
“It turns out the son is also a painter, but he said nothing about his own work, just that he painted. He talked all about his father’s work, how his father stole ideas, wasn’t very good, etc. I told him I agreed that his father’s work was overhyped and mediocre, but that my experience studying art taught me that was true for every era. I was trying to be nice, something I tend to overdo. I got the impression he turned to painting by default, it being some kind of knee-jerk reaction to his father, some kind of Oedipal contest.
“It turns out his real obsession is toys, no shit, and he got very animated as he talked about them. He wanted me to come over to his house to see his vast toy collection. The invitation was so weird, and with the beer’s effects, I couldn’t refuse. It was nearly dinner time, so I called Sara and told her I’d be late. I was actually interested in what made him tick. I mean, why would a grown man – I’d say he is in his mid-forties – collect fucking toys? And weirder still, he said his specialty was tiny plastic figures of all sorts. Of these he had more than 25,000 – for some reason he emphasized that number – that he’d periodically put on display at local libraries.
“So I followed him over to his house which is on that street adjoining the university where a number of art history professors live. Oak Terrace, I think it is. I couldn’t help laughing when I saw all those abstract sculptures decorating their lawns. It was getting dark and they were spotlighted. What a juxtaposition – so perfect – so-called realism and cerebral abstraction side-by-side. And both utter bullshit. I was reminded of a description of Russell Finn’s paintings that I once read: Cute wallpaper for readers of Reader’s Digest.
“Actually, Finn’s house is quite cute itself. When we were going in, I had to restrain myself from saying to him, ‘Life’s cute, isn’t it?’ I don’t think he would have appreciated that, although it’s very possible that he wouldn’t have known what the hell I was getting at. He’s a toy collector after all and what’s cuter than that.
“I’ll tell you this. I wasn’t prepared for what he showed me. He took me down to his finished basement, which he called ‘the laboratory.’ When he switched on the lights the room was empty except for the walls. They were covered with shelves about six inches apart that ran from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. It gave the large room this incredibly bizarre look as though it were a prison cell. There were even spotlights that illuminated the shelves, upon which, right along the outer edges looking out, he had lined up his collection of little figures. As we stood in the middle of the room, it was as though thousands of little people were staring at us, the giants. I felt as though I was hallucinating. Finn just chuckled when I said, ‘Pretty fucking amazing!” Then he said, ‘I like the perspective, don’t you?’ I knew he didn’t expect an answer and I could only chuckle in response, even as I felt a chill on the back of my neck. It was so eerie that I had to contain a shudder. For a brief moment I had the feeling that the door we had entered was going to shut and be bolted and that something terrifying was about to unfold.
“But at that moment he gestured to me to follow him to another door, over which a sign read, ‘The Family Fun Room.’ ‘This is my favorite,’ he said with a smile.
“In the middle of this pink painted room there was a cage that extended from floor to ceiling, and in the cage, sitting on stools, were two life-sized and very realistic figures of a man and a woman. They were both dressed in those black and white stripped prison uniforms you’ve seen in old movies. The woman was facing away from the man. I couldn’t tell who the woman was, but I immediately recognized the man. It was Finn’s father, down to the most realistic detail. He was holding a small toy figurine and was looking into its face. The door to the cell was padlocked shut. ‘That’s to make sure they can’t escape,’ Finn said with a straight face. ‘Now that I got them where I want them, I can’t take any chances. They’re dangerous and can cause me a lot of grief.’
“He then closed the door and we went upstairs. Neither of us said a word. He offered me a beer, but I declined. I felt spooked, some dreadful feeling in my gut. I told him I had to be leaving, which I did. On the way out I noticed a framed photograph in the foyer. It was a picture of Finn at about the age of nine or ten with his parents and sister. They are sitting together on a couch, the two kids caught between the parents. No one is smiling. Behind them on the wall is the father’s famous painting of a family of four sitting on a couch. In that one, everyone is smiling and the father in the painting is Finn’s father. As you probably know, that was one of his father’s favorite techniques – to put himself in his paintings. Such a cute double-message: I did it, of course, but how could I have done it when I’m in it. You’re left wondering: who really did it? Who executed the painting of these happy people. But since it’s all supposed to be so amusing, you’re left to chuckle, to think, how cute, how tricky. You’re supposed to smile. But no one was smiling in the picture on the wall. It seemed like a house of smoke and mirrors and I was damn glad to leave.
“As I drove home, I sure as hell wasn’t smiling. There was something terribly disturbing about it all. I felt nauseated, disgusted, really disturbed. Maybe it seems obvious, but I felt there was a connection between this weird experience and myself. A double connection, actually. I won’t go into all the details now, and you know about my writer’s block, but this bizarre experience has left me with a new sense of freedom, some kind of opening to a new way to write that at the time I couldn’t put my finger on. I’ve come to think of it as writing beyond a cage of categories.
“I thought about all the stuff we talk about, the political propaganda about everything, the loss of a sense of reality, the illusions and delusions with the digital technology, the warmongering by the U.S against Russian, the covid bullshit, all of it, all the stuff we share over beers. Especially the disconnect between the private and the public and the two-faced nature of a way of living that is so fucking phony. I realized why I had been hiding in my notebooks, how they had become my cage.
“To top it all off, when I got home and told Sara about my experiences with Tom Finn, the cage and all, she didn’t believe me. She accused me of having drunk too much, which I had to admit I did. She said I was scaring her with such a ridiculous tale and that I was sounding like a deluded conspiracy nut.
“Anyway, I’ve told no one else about Finn. I’m afraid they wouldn’t believe me either. You’re a sociologist and know all about Max Weber’s prediction of a coming disenchanted world with its iron cage. Shit, I feel like I had a small glimpse of it. Do you think anyone would believe me if I told this story?
“Do you?”
*
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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***
Construction will reportedly soon begin on a mine that’s expected to become the United States’ largest source of lithium. This mine is viewed as critical to Joe Biden’s $2 trillion clean energy plan by powering the nation’s increased production of electric vehicles.
On Monday, a US district judge denied the majority of legal challenges raised by environmentalists, ranchers, and indigenous tribes, upholding that the federal government’s decision to approve the Thacker Pass mine in 2020 was largely not made in error. However, chief judge Miranda Du did agree with one of the protesters’ claims, ordering the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to complete a fresh review to determine if Lithium Americas Corp has the right to deposit waste rock on 1,300 acres of public land that the mining project wants to use as a waste site.
Because this waste site may not contain valuable minerals, there’s a possibility that this land may not be validly claimed as a waste site under current US mining laws, Du wrote in the order. A mining law from 1872 requires that mining projects must validate all claims to public lands before gaining federal approval, and that means Lithium Americas must now provide evidence that valuable minerals have been found on the proposed Thacker Pass waste site to resume the project.
Although this review may set back the project’s major construction timeline by as much as six months, that doesn’t seem to be a big concern for Lithium Americas. Reuters reported that the company met with BLM today to begin the review. The company’s chief executive, Jon Evans, told Reuters that because lithium has previously been found throughout the project area, Lithium Americas considers Du’s order to conduct a review an “easy fix.”
Calling it a win for the mining project, Evans confirmed that preparations for the mine site would promptly begin, projecting that heavy construction would be underway by this summer.
In the order, Du rejected claims that the project could disturb wildlife, degrade air quality and groundwater sources, or overlook the cultural significance of Thacker Pass to local tribes, determining that BLM adequately weighed environmental and cultural impacts before approving the project.
Ars could not immediately reach BLM for comment. Lithium Americas linked Ars to a statement the company posted today, saying that it would be working closely with BLM to review the waste site and saw no reason to further delay construction.
“The favorable ruling by the Federal Court confirms the permitting process for Thacker Pass was conducted thoroughly and responsibly, and results in there being no impediment to commencing construction,” Lithium Americas wrote in the statement.
*
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Ashley Belanger is the senior tech policy reporter at Ars Technica, writing news and feature stories on tech policy and innovation. She is based in Chicago.
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***
The catastrophic 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which has left thousands of people dead in Turkey and northwest Syria, has also destroyed several of the region’s historical monuments that had survived for centuries.
The earthquake, which has claimed the lives of at least 4,000 people in both countries, devastated sites in the Turkish regions of Gaziantep and Malatya and the Syrian province of Aleppo.
After Monday’s initial earthquake, the 2,000 year-old Gaziantep castle was heavily damaged, with many of its walls and watch towers reduced to rubble.
Known locally as Gaziantep Kalesi, the historic stone castle was first constructed as an observation point by the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BC.
The castle was expanded into a major fortification and then used in the second and third century AD by the Roman Empire.
Photos shared online showed the castle with its iron railings collapsed, meanwhile the walls and minaret of the 17th century Sirvani Mosque, which sits beside the castle, were levelled.
Yeni Mosque
Several of the walls of the 17th century Yeni Camii (New Mosque), located in Turkey’s southeastern city of Malatya, collapsed after the initial quake on Monday.
The mosque, which was made of stone and built in traditional Ottoman style, was restored last year and open for regular worship.
As the earthquake struck at 04:17 local time, it is unclear if anyone was in the building at the time of the quake.
The mosque was damaged in previous earthquakes and was flattened in March 1894 before being reconstructed. It was then damaged again in the 1964 Manyas earthquake.
Latin Catholic Church
The Latin Catholic Church, located in the Iskenderun district of Hatay province, was heavily damaged according to photos shared on social media.
Only the arches and walls of the church were left standing, while buildings nearby were reduced to rubble.
Only the arches and walls of The Latin Catholic Church in Iskenderun district of Hatay province, Turkey, were left standing (Screengrab/Twitter)
The church was particularly important for the local Catholic community, who marked Holy Week at the place of worship every Easter.
According to official records, it was built between 1858-71, and reconstructed in 1901 after sustaining fire damage.
Aleppo’s ancient citadel
Syria’s ancient Aleppo citadel, considered to be one of the oldest and largest castles in the region, was heavily damaged in Monday’s initial quake.
The entrance to the fort was heavily damaged while high walls which make up the medieval castle were reduced to rubble.
Parts of the dome of the Ayyubid mosque inside the citadel also fell off.
Thought to have been built around the 3rd millennium BC, the citadel was repaired and conserved in the early 2000s, and was a key tourist landmark.
The citadel is part of the Ancient City of Aleppo, which has been listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
The Margat castle, also known as the al Marqab castle in Arabic, located in Baniyas, northwest Syria, was also impacted by the quake.
The castle was a Crusader fortress, and tremors have caused its circular towers to crumble.
*
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Featured image: Many of the walls of the 17th century Yeni Camii Mosque in Malatya, Turkey, collapsed after the initial quake on Monday (Daily Sabah/DHA Photo)
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***
Pascal Najadi, a retired banker from Switzerland is at the center of a potentially huge sea change in the legal fight against the Globalist COVID financial fraud/bioterrorism campaign. Pascal has filed criminal charges of Abuse of Office under Article 310 of the Swiss Criminal Code against Swiss President Alain Berset, who is also that country’s former Minister of Health.
To everyone’s surprise, the Attorney General of Switzerland has decided to launch an investigation into the President – the first, of a sitting head of state – over their “vaccine” policies.
Pascal joins Todd Callender and Sean on the SGT Report, to describe the simple inconsistencies in the official narrative that he noted, that proved to him that the whole COVID/Vaxx campaign was a fraud – such as that time that Pfizer’s President of International Markets,Janine Small admitted before an EU special COVID-19 committee hearingthat the jab was not tested during clinical trials for its ability to prevent transmission before it entered the international market – leading Croatian MEP, Mislav Kolakusic to declare that the European Union’s purchase of 4.5 billion doses of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines amounted to the “biggest corruption scandal in the history of mankind.”
Then, Pascal describes the simple steps he took – which any citizen can do – to hold the genocidal criminals accountable. And the first step was just walking into the police station to lodge his complaint. For all of us, the revelation is that we can do the same.
Todd thanks Pascal for being “An example to all” and he says that we need a million people all over the world doing this, because it is a global genocide.
Suggest start at 3’0″ to avoid the advertisement
Todd adds,
“There are so many firsts, here. It’s really bigger than what it appears to be, by virtue of all the controls, like as I mentioned to you before, the OECD and their quote, unquote “confident authorities” have been controlling all law enforcement around the world.
“The fact that Pascal and his complaint got to the Attorney General, who is pursuing this is a huge indicator that this genocide is falling apart and those that are perpetrating it are missing. There’s no way this could have happened otherwise. I’m so chuffed, because the ramifications of this are just astounding. It took one man.”
Pascal was born in Switzerland and his Swiss mother, Heidi Anderhub-Minger is the grandniece of Rudolf Minger, who was the President of Switzerland before World War II.
Pascal’s father, Hussain Najadiwas the renowned Persian-Bahraini international banker and business developer who became a founding member of the European Management Forum, before he broke off with Klaus Schwab in 1987 and the Davos meeting was renamed the World Economic Forum.
Pascal says his father broke off with Klaus Schwab because he saw an abrupt personality change and he no longer wanted to be associated with him but he says that the early European Management Forum was a small gathering of no more than 100 people that was held at a 4-star hotel that he describes as “clever” and “benign”. It was basically a schmoozefest for leaders from “emerging markets” mainly in Asia, where Hussain had founded banks to develop Middle Eastern capital. In 2013, Hussain was fatally shot in Kuala Lumpur, alongside his wife, who was seriously injured. Pascal believes his father was assassinated for reporting corruption within Malaysia.
In the meantime, the World Economic Forum was taken over by the same group that is pushing Agenda 2030 at the UN, which Pascal calls “The end of humanity.” He recommends that we all go to the UN’s website and read the Agenda 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which he describes as a shocking document.
Then, he says we need to look into the WHO’s International Health Regulations. “The draft is online, you can read it. Article 3 – just one of many – is shocking. Why? Human rights and dignity have been eliminated, canceled. This article, alone will unhinge, make obsolete every constitution of a normal, democratic country in this world. Correct?
“This agreement has to be stopped. Trump was good. He exited the WHO. If you can do that, that’s the smartest thing to do. Just exit…It is a Fascist declaration,” Pascal says of the IHR.
The topic turns to the 44-year-old Crown Princess of Thailand, who has been in a coma for the past six weeks after being injected three times with the bioweapon. Sean refers to a report from Clayton Morris at Redacted about the King of Thailand, Vajiralongkorn planning to nullify the Kingdom’s contract with Pfizer.
The clip features an interview between Pascal and Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, who has lived most of his adult life in Germany but he is Thai and his father was the court physician to the current King’s father. Because of this relationship, Dr Bhakdi was able to go straight into the royal court of Thailand and he was able to inform the King that the so-called vaccine is a genocidal bioweapon.
Todd tells Sean that the Thai Royal Family has Universal Jurisdiction to declare Crimes Against Humanity. “They have the ability to try Pfizer and their executives and everybody else that helped for Crimes Against Humanity. All they have to do is get one general in their military to open a war crimes tribunal and they can extraterritorially apply these laws against anybody that was involved in it. This is also a big deal!”
In a previous interview, Todd had said, “Now, you’re going to see the floodgates open, these are universal jurisdiction crimes, which means that, if Switzerland wanted to prosecute our president, they would not only have the ability to do that – and do that in absentia – they would have the ability to sentence and actually carry out that sentence in absentia, meaning extra-territorially.
“If they were able to find a treaty partner, they could go and grab whoever it is responsible, bring them back for the execution, if that was the sentence. This is a big deal. This is a huge deal: the first sovereign to do this.” Todd also predicted that officials all over the world are going to start trying to cut deals.
As for trying to do this in the US, Todd has been unable to find one billeted general officer (Brigadier General and above) willing to come forward, out of the 3,000 of those who have attained the rank required to open up an investigation inside the US military, which appears to be the primary culprit responsible for this unthinkable attack on humanity.
*
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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
Almost as soon as major Nato countries, led by the US, promised to supply Ukraine with battle tanks, the cry went up warning that tanks alone would be unlikely to turn the war’s tide against Russia.
The subtext – the one western leaders hope their publics will not notice – is that Ukraine is struggling to hold the line as Russia builds up its troop numbers and pounds Ukrainian defences.
A permanent partition of Ukraine into two opposed blocs – one more pro-Russian, the other more pro-Nato- is looking ever more likely.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has not been shy in telling the West what he expects next: fighter jets, especially US-made F16s.
Kyiv is keen to break what western media have termed a “taboo” by getting Nato aircraft directly involved in the Ukraine war. There is a good reason for that taboo: the use of such jets would let Ukraine expand the battlefield into Russian skies, and implicate Europe and the US in its offensive.
But why assume the West’s taboo on supplying combat jets is really any stronger than its former taboo on sending Nato battle tanks to Ukraine? As one European official observed in a Politico article: “Fighters are completely unconceivable today, but we might have this discussion in two, three weeks.”
And sure enough, within days, Zelensky’s office said there had been “positive signals” from Poland about supplying Ukraine with F16s. French President Emmanuel Macron also refused to rule out the possibility of contributing combat jets.
Upping the stakes
There is a logic to how Nato is operating. Step by step, it gets more deeply immersed in the war. It started with sanctions, followed by the supply of defensive arms. Nato then moved to issuing more offensive weapons, in aid so far totalling some $100bn from the US alone. Nato is now supplying the main weapons for a land war. Why should it not join the battle for air supremacy next?
Or as Nato’s head, Jens Stoltenberg, recently observed, echoing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Weapons are the way to peace.”
But the reverse is more likely to be true. With each additional step they take, the more the parties involved risk losing if they back down. The longer they refuse to sit and talk, the greater the pressure to keep fighting.
That no longer applies just to Russia and Ukraine. Now, Europe and Washington also have plenty of skin directly in the game.
Late last month, in what sounded like a Freudian slip, Germany’s foreign minister, Anna Baerbock, stated at a Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg: “We are fighting a war against Russia.” Days earlier, Ukraine’s defence minister made much the same point: “We [Ukraine] are carrying out Nato’s mission today, without the loss of their blood.”
According to many analysts, a few dozen Nato tanks are unlikely to be a game changer. And if as seems likely, Russia is able to disable them through drone strikes, the US and its junior partners will face a stark choice: accept humiliation at Moscow’s hands and abandon Ukraine to its fate, or up the ante and move the battle to the skies over Ukraine and Russia.
Where this risks leading was underscored by international scientists last month. They warned that the Doomsday Clock had moved to 90 seconds to midnight, the nearest point humankind has come to global catastrophe since the clock was established in 1947. The primary reason, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is the threat of the war in Ukraine leading to a nuclear exchange.
Unexpectedly, the only prominent dissent from western leaders has come from Donald Trump, the former US president. He wrote on social media: “FIRST COME THE TANKS, THEN COME THE NUKES. Get this crazy war ended, NOW.”
Rejecting ‘humiliation’
The cause for alarm, again unacknowledged by western leaders and western media, is that Russia has very strong reasons – from its perspective – to believe its current struggle is existential. It was never going to allow Ukraine to become a forward military base for Nato on its doorstep, with the fear that western nuclear missiles might be stationed there.
New tidbits of information that emerge of what has been going on behind the scenes tend to reinforce Russia’s narrative, not Nato’s. This week former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennettsaid mediation efforts between Moscow and Kyiv he had led at the start of the war, ones apparently making progress, were “blocked” by the US and its Nato allies.
The more weapons the US and Europe send to Ukraine, and the more they refuse to pursue talks, the more Moscow will be convinced it was right to fight and must keep fighting. Ignoring that fact, as the West did in the build-up to Russia’s invasion and continues to do now, does not make it any less true.
Even Boris Johnson, Britain’s former prime minister who has every reason to paint himself in a flattering light in relation to Ukraine, last week implicitly undermined the claim that Nato did nothing to provoke Russia. Recollecting a conversation with Vladimir Putin shortly before the invasion, he framed it in terms of the Russian president’s concerns about Nato expansion.
Johnson told a BBC documentary: “[Putin] said, ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join Nato anytime soon … What is anytime soon?’ And I said, ‘Well it’s not going to join Nato for the foreseeable future.’”
Coverage of the exchange has been dominated by Johnson’s suggestion that Putin threatened him with a missile strike – a claim Russia denies. Instead, a Downing Street readout from the time of that conversation only confirms that Johnson did “underscore” Ukraine’s right to membership.
But in any case, one has to wonder why Moscow would believe Johnson’s evasive, half-hearted assurances on Nato expansion – especially following more than a decade of broken promises by Nato, as well as covert operations on the ground that moved Kyiv away from neutrality towards becoming a member by stealth.
And that is not even to highlight credible reports that Johnson, presumably acting on behalf of Washington, scuppered efforts towards a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early stages of the war.
In a similar vein, Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said in the same BBC documentary that at the end of a meeting with Russia’s military head, Valery Gerasimov, the general told him: “Never again will we be humiliated.”
It is hard to see how what happened before the invasion or since – from Nato creeping ever nearer to Russia’s border, to its fighting an undeclared proxy war in Ukraine officially designed to “weaken” Russia – has not been intended precisely to humiliate Moscow.
Business booming
The West’s original justification for arming Ukraine was supposedly to support Kyiv’s struggle for sovereignty. But paradoxically, the more Nato, or more precisely the US, becomes the arbiter of what Ukraine needs, the less sovereignty Ukraine enjoys – including the right to decide when it most makes sense to sue for peace.
The New York Times reported matter-of-factly last November that western militaries, especially the US, increasingly view Ukraine as a testing ground for new military technologies.
According to the Times, Ukraine has been serving as a laboratory for “state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come”. These tests are viewed as vital to preparing for a future confrontation with China.
An increasingly pertinent question is: who in western capitals now has an interest in the war actually ending?
Ukraine’s subservience to the US – its loss of sovereignty – was underscored last month when Zelensky appealed to major US corporations to seize business opportunities in Ukraine, “from weapons and defence to construction, from communications to agriculture, from transport to IT, from banks to medicine”.
While declaring that “freedom must always win”, Zelensky noted that US financial giants BlackRock, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were already doing deals for Ukraine’s reconstruction. A cynic might wonder whether Ukraine’s destruction is becoming a feature, more than a bug, of this war.
But Ukraine is not the only major player losing control of events. The more Russia is forced to see its fight in Ukraine in existential terms, as Nato weapons and money pour in, the more European leaders should be concerned about existential dangers ahead – and not just because the threat of nuclear war looms ever larger on Europe’s doorstep.
The type of western, especially US, provocations that triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are simmering just below the surface in relation to China – a region Nato now perversely treats as within its “North Atlantic” mission. The Ukraine war looks like it may serve as a prelude to, or dry run for, a confrontation with China.
Worried that fallout from the Ukraine war will suck them in, European states are putting in larger orders than ever for weaponry – much of it from the US, where business is booming for arms manufacturers. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defence spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, told Yahoo News late last year.
Meanwhile, Europe’s biggest source of energy supplies, from Russia, has been cut off – quite literally in the case of mysterious explosions that blew up the Russian pipelines supplying gas to Germany. Now Europe has had to turn to the US – which declared itself officially “gratified” by the explosions – for far more expensive shipments of liquified natural gas.
And with European industries stripped of cheap energy supplies, they now have every incentive to relocate outside Europe, not least to the US. Warnings of Germany’s imminent deindustrialisation are to be found everywhere.
US primacy
The Biden administration cajoled Berlin into supplying tanks. But now, with German armour about to rumble towards Russia for the first time since Nazi forces slaughtered millions of Soviet soldiers eight decades ago, relations between the two are certain to fracture even more deeply.
The European peace dividend, touted so loudly through the 1990s, has evaporated. Everything US and European leaders have done over the past 15 years, and since Russia’s invasion, looks as though it was, and is, designed to scupper any hopes of a regional security framework capable of embracing Russia. The goal has been to keep Moscow excluded, inferior and embittered. For that reason, the current war looks more like the culmination of post-Cold War planning – again a feature, not a bug.
The return of a geopolitical siege mentality will serve the same purpose as demands for austerity and belt-tightening have done: it will justify the redistribution of wealth from western populations to their ruling elites.
Writing back in 2015, seven years before the invasion, it was already clear to British scholar Richard Sakwa that a US-dominated Nato was using Ukraine as a way to deepen, rather than resolve, tensions between Europe and Russia. “Instead of a vision embracing the whole continent, [the European Union] has become little more than the civilian wing of the Atlantic security alliance,” he wrote.
Or as one writer summed up one of Sakwa’s key conclusions: “The prospect of greater European independence worried key decision-makers in Washington, and Nato’s role has been, in part, to maintain US primacy over Europe’s foreign policy.”
That cynical approach was encapsulated in a pithy comment from Victoria Nuland – Washington’s perennial meddler in Ukrainian politics – during a secretly recorded conversation with the US ambassador to Kyiv. Shortly before US-backed protests would oust Ukraine’s Russia-sympathising president, she declared: “F*ck the EU!”
Washington’s fear was, and is, that a Europe not entirely dependent militarily and economically on the US – especially the industrial powerhouse of Germany – might stray from a commitment to a unipolar world in which the US reigns supreme.
With European autonomy now sufficiently weakened, Washington appears more confident that it can rally its Nato allies, once Russia is isolated, for another great-power engagement against China.
As the war grinds on, it is not just Ukraine, but Europe that will pay a heavy price for Washington’s hubris.
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Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
Featured image: President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Wednesday, December 21, 2022, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
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In what Austin journalist Christopher Hooks has called “one of the stupidest news cycles in living memory,” the entire American political/media class is having an existential meltdown over what the Pentagon claims is a Chinese spy balloon detected in US airspace on Thursday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinkencancelled his scheduled diplomatic visit to China after the detection of the balloon. The mass media have been covering the story with breathless excitement. China hawk pundits have been pounding the war drums all day on any platform they can get to and accusing the Biden administration of not responding aggressively enough to the incident.
“The important thing that the American people need to understand, and what we are going to try to expose in a bipartisan fashion on this committee, is that the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party is not just a distant threat in East Asia, or a threat to Taiwan,” House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallaghertold Fox News on Friday. “It is a threat right here at home. It is a threat to American sovereignty, and it is a threat to the Midwest — in places like those that I live in.”
“A big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones,” tweetedSenator Mitt Romney. “Let’s shut them all down.”
China’s foreign ministry says the balloon is indeed from China but is “civilian in nature, used for meteorological and other scientific research,” and was simply blown far off course. This could of course be untrue — all major governments spy on each other constantly and China is no exception — but the Pentagon’s own assessment is that the balloon “does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”
So everyone’s losing their minds over a balloon that in all probability would be mostly worthless for spying, even while everyone knows the US spies on China at every possible opportunity. US officials have complained to the press that American spies are having a much harder time conducting operations and recruiting assets in China than they used to because of measures the Chinese government has taken to thwart them, and in 2001 a US spy plane caused a major international incident when it collided with a Chinese military jet on China’s coastline, killing the pilot.
The US considers it its sovereign right to spy on any nation it chooses, and the average American tends more or less to see it the same way. This is highlighted in controversies around domestic versus foreign surveillance, for example; Americans were outraged over the Edward Snowden revelations not because spy agencies were conducting surveillance, but because they were conducting surveillance on American citizens. It’s just taken as a given that spying on foreigners is fine, so it’s a bit silly to react melodramatically when foreigners return the favor.
Foreign surveillance of sensitive U.S. sites is not a new phenomenon. “It’s been a fact of life since the dawn of the nuclear age, and with the advent of satellite surveillance systems, it long ago became an everyday occurrence,” as my colleague and former CIA analyst George Beebe puts it.
U.S. surveillance of foreign countries is likewise quite common. Indeed, great powers gathering intelligence on each other is one of the more banal and universal facts of international relations. Major countries even spy on their own allies, as when U.S. intelligence bugged the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Typically, even when such surveillance is directed against the United States by a rival power, it does not threaten the safety of Americans and it poses manageable risks to sites where secrecy is of the utmost importance. However — in the context of rapidly increasing U.S.–China tensions — foreseeable incidents like these can quickly balloon into dangerous confrontations.
“The US has secured access to four additional military bases in the Philippines – a key bit of real estate which would offer a front seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan,” writes the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes. “With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of US alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south. The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints – Taiwan and the South China Sea.”
“The US hasn’t said where the new bases are but three of them could be on Luzon, an island on the northern edge of the Philippines, the only large piece of land close to Taiwan – if you don’t count China,” writes Wingfield-Hayes.
The BBC provides a helpful illustration to show how the US is completing its military encirclement, courtesy of the Armed Forces of the Philippines:
The US empire has been surrounding China with military bases and war machinery for many years, in ways Washington would never tolerate China doing in the nations and waters surrounding the United States. There is no question that the US is the aggressor in this increasingly hostile standoff between major powers. Yet we’re all meant to be freaking out about a balloon.
Ask me to show you how the US has been aggressing against China I can show you all the well-documented ways in which the US is encircling China with weapons of war. Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the US and they’ll start babbling about TikTok and balloons.
These things are not equal. Maybe Americans should stop watching out for hostile foreign threats and start looking a little closer to home.
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A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.
The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession. Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises — namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet.
Every year, Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, uses the occasion of Davos to release its latest rundown on global inequality. This year’s report, “Survival of the Richest,” offered a striking vision of global poverty from the trenches of the pandemic years. Imagine this as a start: in the last two of those years, the world’s richest 1% captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth, or twice that of the bottom 99%. Put another way, this planet’s billionaires have collectively “earned” (and yes, that’s in quotation marks for obvious reasons) $2.7 billion every one of the last 730 days. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, at least 115 million people fell into “extreme poverty,” with billions more hanging on by a tenuous thread. By 2030, Oxfam reports, the world could be facing the “largest setback in addressing global poverty since World War II.”
The grim realities laid out in the report left me wondering: What kind of cooperation were they talking about at Davos? Did they mean a collaboration among all global communities? (Not likely!) Or did they mean the continued partnership of economic elites intent, above all else, on protecting their own wealth? And what of fragmentation? Amid increasing warfare and beneath the ongoing fracturing of democracies (including our own, thanks in part to a billionaire whose name I hardly need mention), nations, and long-held international arrangements, do they recognize the deepest fragmentation of all, that caused by so much needless suffering and inexcusable gluttony?
Poverty Amid Plenty
Here in the United States, it’s the same story: untold wealth and shocking want, even as House Republicans are threatening to slash programs like Medicare and Social Security just weeks into a new congressional session. Today, in one of the richest nations in the world, nearly half the population is either poor or a single $400 emergency away from poverty. The moral and cognitive dissonance of such a reality can be difficult to fathom, as can the numbers. At a time when the U.S. economy is valued at nearly $25 trillion and the wealth of the three richest Americans exceeds $300 billion, at least 140 million people strain to meet their basic needs and face the daily threat of economic ruin thanks to one pay cut, layoff, accident, extreme storm, or bad medical diagnosis.
Over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks out of the paychecks of their workers, so much so that the average CEO now makes 670 times more than his or her employees. It tells you how far we’ve come that, in 1965, that number was “just” 20 times more. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year) has remained remarkably low, hurting not only those who earn it, but millions of other workers whose employers use it as the floor for their own pay scales. Bear in mind that if the minimum wage had kept up with the economy’s overall productivity over the last half-century, it would now be $22 an hour, or close to $50,000 a year.
All of this has occurred in an era of policymaking intensely antagonistic to the poor and all too favorable to the rich. In the early 1970s, wages began to level off as the economy was riven by rising unemployment, low growth, and inflation, otherwise known as “stagflation.” This was also a period of labor militancy. As economic geographer David Harvey has pointed out, for the U.S. economic elite, these conditions posed a two-fold threat — politically, to their ability to hold sway within the highest reaches of the government and, economically, to their ability to maintain and build their wealth.
America’s CEOs found relief in the theories of an insurgent wave of neoclassical economists pioneering a model of capitalism that came to be known as “neoliberalism.” What emerged was a political project aimed at restoring the full-throated power of the wealthy, whose playbook included: decreased public spending, greater privatization, increased deregulation of banking and financial markets, slashed taxes, and pulverizing attacks on organized labor.
Since then, our economy has indeed been reshaped. At the bottom, growing parts of the workforce are now non-unionized, low-wage, often part-time, and regularly without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. This labor crisis has been accompanied by an unprecedented $15 trillion-plus in personal (including mounting medical and student) debt. As a result (as I wrote in 2021 with Astra Taylor), “millions of Americans aren’t just poor; they have less than nothing. The American dream is no longer owning a house with a white picket fence; it is getting out of debt. In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people now aspire to have zero dollars.”
The view looks very different from the top. The first two years of the pandemic marked the most unequal recession in modern American history, with the wealth of the country’s 651 billionaires actually increasing by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of that year, he was joined by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. At Amazon, where the median pay in 2020 was about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made that year to his own endangered workers and would still have had well over $100 billion left.
As an anti-poverty organizer, I’m regularly asked if we can afford to end poverty, even as politicians and economists cite the specter of scarcity to justify inaction or even outright anti-poor policies. Look at the debate over the debt ceiling taking place in Congress right now and you’ll see Republicans putting social programs on the chopping block in an attempt to both delegitimize and defund the government. If, however, you were to focus on the abundance unequally circulating around us, it’s clear that scarcity is a lie, a political invention, used to cover up vast reservoirs of capital that could be marshaled to meet the needs of everyone in this country and the world.
Don’t be fooled. We’re not living in a time of insufficiency, but in a golden age of plenty amid grotesque poverty, of abundance amid unbearable forms of abandonment.
To Tackle Poverty, Tackle Wealth
Despite the capacity to wipe out poverty altogether, antipoverty advocacy generally operates within two interdependent philosophical frameworks: mitigation and charity. The first assumes that poverty is indeed a permanent feature of our economy best alleviated by job-training programs, fatherhood initiatives, and work requirements, but never to be abolished outright. The second approaches poverty as a sad social condition that exists on the margins of society and treats poor people as, at best, pitiable and, at worst, pathological. Together, those two frameworks funnel billions of dollars in charitable and philanthropic giving to explicitly apolitical measures directed downstream from the source of poverty.
While such giving does indeed help many impoverished people meet immediate needs, it does very little to confront poverty in its fullness or why it exists in the first place — and in most cases, the help is inadequate given the need. No wonder the wealthy tend to be the biggest proponents of mitigating poverty through charity, because to fundamentally address the problem would also mean addressing the unequal distribution of political power in our world.
Oxfam’s new report is a good place to explore this, since it not only critiques inequality, but offers possible solutions to the nightmares such a situation creates, above all increasing tax rates on the wealthy, which right now are mind-numbingly low. Consider this statistic: “Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of about 3% between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%.”
To counter this, Oxfam proposes that worldwide taxes on the income of the richest 1% be raised to at least 60% (with even higher rates for multimillionaires and billionaires). They also suggest that taxes on the wealthy be levied in such a way that their number would be dramatically reduced and their wealth redistributed to meet the needs of the poor.
Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s executive director, explained it this way:
“Taxing the super-rich is the strategic precondition to reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy. We need to do this for innovation. For stronger public services. For happier and healthier societies. And to tackle the climate crisis, by investing in the solutions that counter the insane emissions of the very richest.”
A New and Unsettling Force
People often ask me for a plan to end poverty. Usually that means they want to know what policy positions and prescriptions to advocate for, a line of inquiry on which I have plenty of thoughts. As a start, I refer them to the fulsome agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign (that I co-chair), including our demands for fair tax policy. But long ago, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested an approach to lifting the load of poverty that goes far beyond any single program or policy.
Some months before the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, having been endlessly asked for an itemized list of demands, King answered this way:
“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program. What is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen… The call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”
The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign emerged on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest legislative victories. At the time, King pointed out that, beneath the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, areas in which they had made significant gains, millions of Black people remained locked in poverty in the South, as well as across the country, as did so many others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. King himself was surprised to learn that poor white people actually outnumbered poor Black people nationally. Taking that into consideration, he counseled that the movement had to make an evolutionary leap from “civil rights to human rights” and from “reform to revolution.”
This may not be the King whom the nation chooses to remember every mid-January in glitzy speeches by politicians who vehemently oppose the very positions for which he gave his life. In fact, this year, on that very commemorative day, I couldn’t help but think of the words of poet Carl Hines:
“Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him, build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
But the truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.” Years of experience, and the guidance of others, had convinced him that the next chapter of the struggle required a mass movement of a breadth and depth not yet awakened. As he came to see it, strategically speaking, the unity of the poor would be the Achilles heel of a society desperately in need of restructuring. If poor people could unite to form a new political alliance across the lines that historically divided them, they would be uniquely positioned to lead a broad and powerful human-rights movement that confronted militarism, racism, and economic exploitation together.
The same is no less true today. To end poverty, our smartest and most innovative ideas have to be brought to the table. The right analysis alone, however, won’t end poverty. That will only happen through a movement or movements transforming the hurt and pain of millions into, as King once put it, a “new and unsettling force” carrying this nation to higher and more stable ground.
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***
Tank warfare has evolved. The large force-on-force armored battles that were the hallmark of much of WWII, the Arab-Israeli conflicts, which served as the foundation of operational doctrine for both NATO and the Soviet Union (and which was implemented in full by the United States during Operation Desert Storm in 1991), has run its course.
Like most military technological innovations, the ability to make a modern main battle tank survivable has been outstripped by the fielding of defensive systems designed to overcome such defenses. If a modern military force attempted to launch a large-scale tank-dominated attack against a well-equipped peer-level opponent armed with modern anti-tank missiles, the result would be a decisive defeat for the attacking party marked by the smoking hulks of burned-out tanks.
Don’t get me wrong: tanks still have a vital role to play on the modern battlefield. Their status as a mobile bunker is invaluable in the kind of meat-grinder conflicts of attrition that have come to define the current stage of large-scale ground combat. Speed and armor still contribute to survivability, and the main gun of a tank remains one of the deadliest weapons on the modern battlefield.
But the modern tank performs best as part of a combined arms team, supported by infantry (mounted and unmounted) and copious amounts of supporting arms (artillery and close air support.) As part of such a team, especially one that is well-trained in the art of close combat, the tank remains an essential weapon of war. However, if operated in isolation, a tank is simply an expensive mobile coffin.
Much has been made about the recent decision made by NATO and allied nations to provide Western main battle tanks to Ukraine. The politics of this decision is its own separate topic. This article will address the operational practicalities of this decision, namely has the military capability of Ukraine been enhanced through the provision of these new weapons systems.
To answer this question, one needs to examine three basic issues: training, logistical sustainability, and operational employment.
Training
It takes 22 weeks to train a basic American M1 Abrams crewmember. That training just gives the soldier the very basic skill set to be functional. Actual operational expertise is only achieved through months, if not years, of additional training in not just the system itself, but employing it as part of a similarly trained combine arms team. Simply put, even a Ukrainian tank crew experienced in the operation of Soviet-era T-72 or T-64 tanks will not be able to immediately transition to a Western-style main battle tank.
First and foremost, the crew size of a Soviet-era tank is three, reflecting the reality that the Soviet tanks make use of an automatic loading mechanism. Western tanks have four crew members because the loading of the main tank gun is done manually. Adapting to these dynamics takes time, and requires extensive training.
Training is expensive. NATO is currently providing Ukraine with three types of Western main battle tank: the British Challenger 2, the German Leopard 2, and the American M1A2. There is no unified training course—each tank requires its own unique training prospectus that is not directly transferable to another system.
The decentralized training processes created by such a diverse approach promotes inefficiencies and generates discrepancies in outcome—one crew will not be like another, which in combat, where units are supposed to be interchangeable to promote predictable outcomes if all other circumstances remain the same, is usually fatal.
Moreover, these problems will only be enhanced by the emphasis that will be placed on rapid outcomes. The reality is whatever training programs that are developed and delivered by the nations providing the tanks will be insufficient to the task, resulting in poorly trained crews taking extremely complicated weapons systems into the most dangerous environment in the world for a tank—the teeth of a Russian Army designed and equipped to kill these very same tanks.
Logistical Sustainability
Tanks are among the most technically challenging weapons systems on a modern battlefield. They are constantly breaking down, especially if not properly maintained. For the M1 Abrams, for every hour a tank is in the field, there are three hours of maintenance time required. This problem only becomes magnified in combat.
Normally an armor unit is equipped with highly specialized organic maintenance crews that can repair most of the minor issues that can sideline a tank. Given the training requirements to produce this level of high-quality mechanic, it is unlikely Ukraine will be provided with this kind of maintenance support.
This means that the tanks that are being provided to Ukraine will need to be returned to NATO nations for any significant repairs of equipment that is damaged through simple usage or actual combat. In short, it is highly likely that a Western main battle tank in Ukrainian hands will break down at some point during its operational use by Ukraine, meaning that the total number of tanks available to Ukraine will be far less than the number of tanks provided.
Operational Employment
Ukraine’s commander in chief of the Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told The Economist last month that he needed 300 tanks, 500 infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 artillery pieces, if he were going to have any chance of defeating [Russia].
Following the January 20 meeting of the Ramstein Contact Group, and subsequent follow-on discussions about the provision of tanks, NATO and its allied partners have agreed to provide less than 50% of the number of tanks requested, less than 50% of the number of infantry fighting vehicles requested, and less than 20% of the artillery requested.
Moreover, the timetable for delivery of this equipment is staggered incoherently over a period that stretches out for many months, and in some cases extends into the next year. Not only does this complicate training and logistical sustainability issues that are already unfavorably inclined for Ukraine, but it makes any meaningful effort to integrate this material into a cohesive operational employment plan all but impossible. In short, Ukraine will be compelled to commit the equipment provided—especially the tanks—into combat in piecemeal fashion.
The truth about tanks is that NATO and its allied nations are making Ukraine weaker, not stronger, by providing them with military systems that are overly complicated to operate, extraordinarily difficult to maintain, and impossible to survive unless employed in a cogent manner while supported by extensive combined arms partners.
The decision to provide Ukraine with Western main battle tanks is, literally, a suicide pact, something those who claim they are looking out for the best interests of Ukraine should consider before it is too late.
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During a time when species are going extinct faster than any period in human history, the survival of species and persistence of healthy ecosystems requires science-based decisions. A new analysis by NatureServe addresses five essential questions about biodiversity–the variety of life on Earth–that need to be answered if we are going to effectively conserve nature: 1) How many species and ecosystems are at risk? 2) Are species and ecosystems adequately protected? 3) What are the major threats to biodiversity? 4) Where is imperiled biodiversity concentrated? 5) Where do we go from here?
In the first report of its kind, Biodiversity in Focus: United States Edition reveals an alarming conclusion: 34% of plants and 40% of animals are at risk of extinction, and 41% of ecosystems are at risk of range-wide collapse. Because many protected areas prioritize geological features or landscapes of cultural significance instead of targeting threatened biodiversity, most at-risk species and ecosystems are insufficiently protected to prevent further decline.
Biodiversity in Focus leverages nearly 50 years of intensive data collection by NatureServe and the NatureServe Network, a collaborative of more than 60 programs that work together to develop, curate, analyze, and share information that can offer novel, actionable insights into biodiversity conservation. A major takeaway of the report is that to truly protect imperiled biodiversity, a range of on-the-ground data and analyses, including calculations of spatial overlap between individual species and specific threats, should be used to guide conservation decisions.
“For fifty years, the NatureServe Network has been collecting the information necessary to understand biodiversity imperilment in the United States. This new analysis of that data, a first in 20 years, makes crystal clear the urgency of that work,” stated Regan Smyth, Vice President for Data and Methods at NatureServe. She continued, “Two-fifths of our ecosystems are in trouble. Freshwater invertebrates and many pollinators, the foundation of a healthy, functional planet, are in precipitous decline. Understanding and addressing these risks is critical if we are to forestall devastating consequences for the biodiversity that humanity needs to survive.”
Because the data are collected in a standardized way and by local partners such as state authorities, the authors of the report were able to examine detailed patterns relevant to where at-risk biodiversity is found and why it is threatened across the United States. They found that habitat degradation, invasive species, dams, and climate change are among the primary threats to biodiversity in the United States. At-risk species are concentrated where threats are greatest, but species face different types and levels of threats in different regions of the country. For example, among pollinators, bees are particularly threatened, with 37% of assessed species classified as at risk. Bees in the West are more threatened than bees in the East.
By combining our data on the location of imperiled species with a map of protected areas, NatureServe has identified currently unprotected areas where conservation actions will most benefit biodiversity. These areas, marked in red on the map, indicate where on-the-ground conservation actions can most effectively prevent the extinction of the nation’s most imperiled species.
The authors also examined risks to ecosystems, documenting the impacts of centuries of land conversion and identifying ecosystem types at greatest risk. America’s once vast grasslands and diverse, life-sustaining wetlands are highlighted as being in particular need of conservation attention.
Biodiversity in Focus shines a light on species and ecosystems in peril, allowing us to make plans to protect these precious resources. The analyses presented in the report inform how to effectively and efficiently use our financial resources to make the best conservation decisions. The 30×30 global initiative calls for the conservation of 30% of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Meeting this goal requires investments in land acquisition and management to maximize value for biodiversity conservation. Those investments need to be targeted where they can have the greatest impact, and this report helps spotlight the species, ecosystems, and locations where resources are most needed. Strategies that protect the full diversity of natural ecosystems can be complemented by strategies that address the needs of individual species at risk of extinction.
“We are currently experiencing and causing the Sixth Extinction—the mass extinction of species across the planet. NatureServe’s data highlight where the threats are right here at home,” stated Dr. Sean T. O’Brien, President and CEO of NatureServe. He continued, “The plants, animals, and ecosystems found in our state, tribal, and federal lands are key components of our cultural and natural heritage. We should be proud of the biodiversity in our backyard and should prioritize protecting what is here, now.”
To access the full Biodiversity in Focus, U.S. Edition report visit: www.natureserve.org/bif
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US Central Command announced last week that it was involved in 43 operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in the month of January. Task & Purpose reported the monthly average for US operations against ISIS in 2022 was 26 per month, signaling that the US military is stepping up its assaults against the terror group.
While ISIS no longer controls any territory, there are remnants of the group in remote regions of Syria and Iraq. CENTCOM said each raid in January was conducted with partner forces, the government in Iraq, and the Kurdish-led SDF in Syria.
“We rely heavily on the Syrian Democratic Forces for the fight against ISIS,” CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael Kurilla said. “Meanwhile, our Iraqi Security Forces have been aggressively taking the fight to ISIS in Iraq.”
The command said that in the operations in both countries, 11 suspected ISIS operatives were killed, and 227 were detained. CENTCOM did not offer any information about possible civilian casualties.
While on paper, the US presence in Syria is about fighting ISIS, the occupation is part of the US economic campaign against Damascus. By backing the SDF and keeping about 1,000 troops in eastern Syria, the US is able to control about one-third of the country, an area where most of Syria’s oil resources are located. The US maintains crippling economic sanctions on Syria specifically to prevent the country’s reconstruction.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
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The U.S. got more than it bargained for after instigating the Ukrainian conflict. The Biden foreign policy team grows more desperate and their plans become more dangerous as they reckon with the unintended consequences of their actions.
“Senator Cruz, like you I am and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” — Victoria Nuland
Victoria Nuland is Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. The mouthful of a title doesn’t begin to describe what she actually does on behalf of the U.S. Perhaps Under Secretary for Destabilizing the World would be more accurate. Nuland is one of those persons who is always in the revolving door of foreign policy, destined to return when an election puts her clique back in office. She may be best known for passing out cookies to the mobs in Kiev’s Maidan Square when they overthrew the elected Ukrainian president in 2014. It was clear that the Obama administration had a hand in the coup, but Nuland disabused anyone of doubt when she gabbed on an unsecured phone and discussed who the next president of Ukraine ought to be. In declaring Ukraine’s new reality as a de facto U.S. colony she famously or rather infamously said, “Fu*k the EU!”
Of course she is back with the Biden administration and is the leader of the proxy war against Russia that is taking place in Ukraine. Her most recent infamous remark about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which would have carried natural gas to Germany, should be seen as an admission of guilt. The September 26, 2022 explosion remains mysterious but only because US vassals like Sweden have not made their investigation findings public. Nuland also said of Nord Stream in January 2022, “We will work with Germany to ensure it does not move forward.” The U.S. is the prime suspect yet again.
Nuland’s bravado is yet another sign of the mess that the Biden administration made for itself in instigating the conflict with Russia. Nothing has gone according to its plans. Biden said that sanctions would, “Turn the ruble to rubble.” Russia has survived relatively unscathed and the only people suffering from U.S. interference are the EU nations who are supposed to be allies but who are in fact underlings who will never step out of line, even in favor of their own interests.
After nearly a year of conflict, European nations have literally given their all militarily, with very little left in the way of materiel to provide to Ukraine. They have given up cheap Russian natural gas and now purchase US liquified natural gas, which costs more and creates more environmental damage. Now even the Rand Corporation, which is funded by the military industrial complex and fossil fuel companies, and pushed for war with Russia in 2019, is waving red flags about the overreach. In an article entitled Avoiding a Long War, Rand concludes, “In short, the consequences of a long war – ranging from persistent elevated escalation risks to economic damage – far outweigh the possible benefits.” Rand is no peacemaker, believing that challenging China should be the focus and not the Ukraine stalemate. Warnings from a friendly party show that the best laid plans for hegemonic regime change have gone wrong once again.
The U.S. has pumped more than $113 billion into Ukraine, that is to say into the hands of the defense contractors who run Washington. Russian forces continue to advance, and the Ukrainian people who everyone claims to want to help are suffering, as middle aged men are dragooned from their homes, trained for a few weeks, and then sent to the front lines where they face death from well armed Russian forces.
Now tanks are on everyone’s lips, from Leopards in Germany to Abrams in the U.S. Tanks require manpower, highly trained manpower who need months to learn how to use this complicated equipment. Ukraine has neither enough men nor time necessary to make tanks useful to them in battle. Of course, Russia also has tanks and soldiers who already know how to use them. The latest alleged game changer won’t amount to much in the way of assistance for the beatified Ukrainians.
Victoria Nuland and her boss Antony Blinken and his boss Joe Biden are caught in a bind of their own making. They really believed they could wreck Russia’s economy, or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or break that country up into smaller parts ripe for the picking. But fantasy foreign policy is just that. The only thing that makes sense is to talk to the target nation directly. Yet if the past is any indication of future behavior they will probably do something reckless instead.
The Nord Stream explosion points to the danger that the U.S. poses to the whole world. The sabotage was an act of desperation as they sought to make sure that their lap dogs didn’t get any big ideas about acting independently, and so they escalated. In the process they create more dangers to Europe and to the whole world as they amateurishly play a game of chicken with another nuclear power.
Ukraine is losing, dependent upon an unending supply of money from Washington, and suffering after many casualties. President Zelensky will do what Washington tells him and the Biden administration is the wildcard. If they would blow up Nord Stream they would do something else equally foolish and they have plenty of company.
Having had Ukraine blow up in their faces they have turned their attention to China. An Air Force general wrote a memo predicting war by 2025, and exhorted his subordinates to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most. Aim for the head.” Members of congress are still provoking China with visits to Taiwan. The goal is the same as the failed policy in Ukraine. Provoke some sort of incident and then sanction China, or come up with a rationale to sanction China without an incident. The Biden administration turns the old saying on its head. “If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.”
Of course the people lose. They have lost $113 billion while their needs go unmet. But a state that is devoted to creating a proxy war with a nuclear power has no interest in helping its people anyway. Humanity is a hindrance to their grand schemes. They see the welfare state as something to be subverted.
The NATO Secretary General said without any irony, “Weapons are in fact the way to peace.” Of course, only peace is the way to peace. Wars can end with negotiation, but peace is antithetical to their grand plans. Ukraine is not working out the way they hoped. But any change in course is not on their agenda.
They see forever wars as success, or baiting Russia and China as success, regardless of the outcome of their actions. They don’t see the world the way sane people do. They have made the Ukraine conflict an existential crisis, and then decide they have no choice but to engage in dangerous actions. The world is a zero-sum game to them. If Russia and China are independent actors, they believe they lose. The idea of peaceful coexistence is anathema to Nuland, Biden, and Blinken. Blown up pipelines are seen as proof of victory to people who thought they could make dangerous and irrational obsessions come true.
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Hysteria over balloons is a strange thing. Hot air balloons made their appearance during the Napoleonic era, where they served as delivery weapons for bombs and undertook surveillance tasks. High altitude balloons were also used by, of all powers, the United States during the 1950s, for reasons of gathering intelligence, though these were shot down by the irritated Soviets. Somehow, the US imperium and its noisy choristers have managed to get worked up over a solitary Chinese balloon that traversed the United States for over a week before it was shot down by the US Air Force.
On January 28, a device reported to be a “high-altitude surveillance balloon” entered US airspace in Alaska. It then had a brief spell in Canadian airspace before returning to the US via Idaho on January 31. On February 4, with the balloon moving off the coast of South Carolina, a decision was made by the US military to shoot it down using a F-22 Raptor from the 1st Fighter Wing based at Langley Air Force Base. The Pentagon has revealed that the collecting of debris is underway.
In response, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a stern note of disapproval, protesting “the US attack on a civilian unmanned airship by force.” This was “a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.” Beijing also issued a note of apology, regretting “the unintended entry of the ship into US airspace due to force majeure.”
A US State Department official, while noting the statement of regret, felt compelled to designate “the presence of this balloon in our airspace [as] a clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law”.
Rumours of a second Chinese balloon flying across Latin America were also confirmed by a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry on February 6, who described it as being “of a civilian nature and is used for flight tests.” The instrument had been impaired by weather in its direction, having “limited self-control capabilities”.
The Pentagon’s press secretary, Brigadier General Pat Ryder, also confirmed the existence of the second balloon, reaching the predictably opposite conclusion to his Chinese counterparts. “We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon.”
This overegged saga has seen much airtime and column space dedicated to those in the pay of the military-defence complex. Little thought was given about the purpose of such a seemingly crude way of collecting military intelligence. Timothy Heath of the Rand Corporation went so far as to extol the merits of such cheeky devices. For one thing, they were hard to detect, making them somehow reliable.
General Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and US Northern Command, made reference to a number of Chinese spy balloons that supposedly operated with impunity during the Trump administration. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats.” This had resulted in a “domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.” At this writing, the begging bowl for even larger defence budgets is being pushed around the corridors of power.
Lawyers of international law have also had their say, reaching for their manuals, and shaking their heads gravely. Donald Rothwell of the Australian National University thought that “the incursion of the Chinese balloon tested the boundaries of international law.”
Thankfully, one or two sober notes of reflection have prevailed, even from within the military-intelligence fraternity. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has issued a few self-evident truths. “Balloons are not an ideal platform for spying,” writes James Andrew Lewis. “They are big and hard to hide. They go where the winds take them”. Such instruments “would be a strange choice for a technologically advanced and sophisticated opponent.”
This absurd spectacle has become the stuff of political bricks and straw for a Biden administration keen to push its stuttering election cart. Embroiled in his own classified documents scandal, President Joe Biden was put off his stroke about focusing on any announcement about running for a second term. Burnishing the China Threat was just the ticket.
In his State of the Union Address, Biden paved the way for a number of rhetorical salvos against the Great Yellow Hordes he finds so threatening to the awesome majesty of US power. “Today, we’re in the strongest position in decades to compete with China or anyone else in the world.” In passing reference to the balloon, the president proved entertainingly, if absurdly belligerent: “as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.” Such a response, and such a threat.
The Chinese explanation has been scoffed at and derisively dismissed. Yet balloons are an almost quotidian feature of scientific and meteorological work, whatever the official explanation offered by Beijing might be. NASA’s own Scientific Balloon Program, for instance, has been most engaged of late. The organisation was keen to tout its fall 2022 campaign involving six scientific, engineering and student balloon flights in support of 17 missions.
The scale of any one mission can be sizeable. “Our balloon platforms,” came the description from NASA’s Scientific Balloon chief Debbie Fairbrother, “can lift several thousand pounds to the edge of space, allowing for multiple, various scientific instruments, technologies, and education payloads to fly together in one balloon flight.”
The disproportionate nature of Washington’s reaction to Beijing over such balloons also looks rather odd in the face of vast surveillance technologies it deploys against adversaries and friends. But politics is not merely the art of the possible but an opportunity for the absurd to find form and voice. On this score, the mouse has clearly terrified the elephant.
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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]
The tools they use to pursue this war against the citizens of the Earth are technology, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, threats against individuals who display leadership skills and massive bribes for the leaders who are allowed to be covered in the media to represent the conservative and the progressive causes.
On February 3, the Turkish interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, blasted the US Ambassador to Turkey, Jeffry L. Flake, saying, “Take your dirty hands off of Turkey.” The outrage was prompted after Washington and eight European countries issued travel warnings over possible terror attacks in Turkey.
“Never Again Is Now Global,” a five-part docuseries highlighting the parallels between Nazi Germany and global pandemic policies. Each one-hour episode focuses on recent testimonies by Holocaust survivors and their descendants who discuss comparisons between the early repressive stages under the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust and global COVID-19 policies.
How does one best explain the brutal crackdown on COVID-19 protesters worldwide for the sake of Public Health™ while, at the same time, Black Lives Matter was permitted to run hog-wild on America’s streets? How are elected Democrat leaders allowed to literally incite race riots while those same leaders pearl-clutch about January 6 in never-ending televised witch trials?
During a recent interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, former Chancellor and European political heavyweight Angela Merkel revealed that the Minsk accords, a comprehensive 2015 diplomatic treaty, agreed by the EU, United States, Russia, and Kyiv to end the civil war in eastern Ukraine, was essentially subverted by the Ukrainians in an attempt to buy time to expand its military capabilities.
For the last several days, the mainstream propaganda machine diverted its attention from the mandatory “evil Russia” narrative and focused on 24/7 coverage of a weather balloon. Although the media frenzy was part of the “evil China” narrative, this one is not as omnipresent as that about Russia, at least not yet.
The White House announced Friday that it would send long-range missiles capable of striking nearly 100 miles into Russian territory to Ukraine, in one of the most significant escalations of US involvement in the war with Russia to date.
In recent developments, German Prosecutor General Peter Frank confirmed “there is no evidence to blame Russia for the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines”. No evidence of foreign sabotage of an act which has created social havoc and hardship in the European Union, with rising energy prices? People are freezing, unable to pay their heating bills.
South Korea and Japan trying to attend to their own business by inviting unbidden guests to the region should be well aware that they are getting closer to the extreme security crisis, far from defusing security uneasiness. It was reported that the secretary general of NATO embarked upon his trip to South Korea and Japan.
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Note the following sentence in a New York Times news story yesterday by Michael Schwirtz and Anton Troianovski about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Mr. Putin’s attempt to put a veneer of nobility on an unprovoked invasion that has killed thousands of civilians and turned millions more into refugees was made in the Russian city once known as Stalingrad, on the 80th anniversary of a victory there against Nazi Germany that changed the course of World War II.” (Italics added.)
The operative word is “unprovoked.”
First of all, it’s a strange word for news reporters to be using because it’s more in the nature of a commentary or editorial. News reporters are supposed to report the news, and the editorial department of a newspaper is supposed to render opinions and commentary on the news. Schwirtz and Troianovski do both in their news article.
Second, and more important, for the life of me, I cannot understand how Schwirtz and Troianovski are unable to see that Russia’s invasion was provoked. It was provoked knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately.
Now, one could argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wasn’t justified. That’s a different word from “unprovoked.” An invasion can be “provoked” and “unjustified” at the same time. My hunch is that Schwirtz and Troianovski meant to use the word “unjustified” rather than the word “unprovoked.”
When the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact was terminated, and the Soviet Union was dismantled. As far was Russia was concerned, the Cold War was over.
Not so, however, for the United States and, specifically, for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. The Cold War had been very beneficial to the U.S. national-security establishment in terms of ever-increasing power within the federal governmental structure and ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largesse to finance America’s Cold War military machine, including its vast army of voracious “defense” contractors who had become dependent on feeding at the public trough.
Thus, while Russia was ready to move on, the U.S. national-security establishment was not. It was determined to not let go of its Cold War racket.
NATO had been brought into existence after World War II to ostensibly protect Western Europe from an invasion by the Soviet Union. But the notion of such an invasion was ludicrous from the start. Russia had been devastated by the war. As many as 27 million Soviet citizens were killed as a result of the war. That’s 27 million people! That’s a lot of people. Moreover, the entire industrial might of the country had been decimated.
The Soviets knew that if they started a war with their former World War II partners and allies, the United States would immediately come to their assistance. The United States had not suffered any damage to its industrial capacity and was still fully capable of fielding a massive army. Moreover, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear bombs and had displayed a willingness to use them against people living in populated cities. Thus, there was never any realistic possibility whatsoever that the Soviet Union was going to invade Western Europe. NATO served no purpose whatsoever.
Recall that one of the major reasons for all the death and destruction that Russia had experienced during the war was Germany’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, an invasion that almost resulted in the German conquest of Russia. German troops made it all the way to Stalingrad before they met with defeat, owing to the tenacity of the Russian people and the brutality of the Russian winter.
Make no mistake about it: Germany’s near-conquest of their country — and the massive death and destruction wreaked by Germany on their country — was seared into the collective conscience of the Russian people. No Russian generation will ever forget it. Thus, when Germany decides to send tanks to Ukraine in the hopes that Ukraine ultimately joins NATO, which would enable German tanks, troops, and missiles to be aligned on Russia’s border, one should be able to at least understand why the Russian people might feel a bit uneasy about that.
In fact, Schwirtz’s and Troianovski’s news article mocked Russian president Vladimir Putin for using the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory at Stalingrad to deliver a speech about the war in Ukraine. In their mockery, Schwirtz and Troianovski are clearly unable to draw the link between Germany’s near conquest of Russia and Germany’s current thirst to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, which would enable Germany to put its tanks, missiles, and troops along Russia’s border.
Once the Cold War was over, NATO had fulfilled its ostensible mission. There was no longer any threat of the Soviet Union invading Western Europe. Thus, this old Cold War dinosaur clearly should have gone extinct.
Instead, the Pentagon decided to keep NATO in existence and, even worse, began using NATO to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact, which was enabling the United States and Germany to move their troops, missiles, bases, and armaments eastward, i.e., ever closer to Russia’s border.
Throughout this process, Russia was, not surprisingly, vehemently objecting. Russia continuously asked: If the Cold War was really over, then what was the point of doing this? NATO’s answer was that there was nothing to be concerned about. The United States and Germany were both peace-loving nations that would never aggress against Russia.
That, of course, is a ridiculous notion. For its part, Germany had already aggressed against the Soviet Union in World War II, which had resulted in 27 million Russian deaths, the total destruction of the country, and the near-conquest of Russia. For its part, the United States was, in the words of Martin Luther King, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
How could anyone not understand why Russia would be concerned about NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s border, especially when there was no good reason to do so?
As Russia continuously objected to NATO’s expansion, Russia made it clear that there was one “red line” that would finally provoke a Russian reaction — the threat to absorb Ukraine into NATO. That would enable Germany and the United States to place their tanks, nuclear missiles, bases, armaments, and troops on Russia’s border. Given Germany’s prior invasion of the Soviet Union and the U.S. propensity for violence, that was unacceptable to Russia.
The United States and Germany, operating through NATO, knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately crossed that “red line,” knowing full well that it was a “red line” for Russia. By threatening to absorb Ukraine into NATO, they knew that Russia would respond because Russian had said that it would respond.
Thus, when President Biden claimed that his “intelligence” had learned that Russia would invade Ukraine, he was being disingenuous. He knew Russia would invade because Russia had been saying it would invade if the United States, Germany, and other NATO powers crossed its “red line” by threatening to absorb Ukraine into NATO.
Thus, there is no doubt that the Pentagon, operating through NATO, did provoke Russia into invading Ukraine. Again, one can argue that the Pentagon’s action did not justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but one cannot rationally say that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked,” as Schwirtz and Troianovski did yesterday in their news story in the New York Times.
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Open Letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia Regarding a Fine British Columbia Physician: Dr. Charles Douglas Hoffe
Dr. Charles Hoffe has been a physician in the Lytton community of British Columbia for nearly 30 years, looking after a largely native community after having gained his medical schooling from the University of Witwatersrand, the second ranked clinical medical university in South Africa.
A citation has been issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia against Dr. Hoffe for (allegedly) publicly spreading misleading information by:
a) recommending Ivermectin for Covid-19
b) saying Covid vaccines can cause microscopic blood clots, and
c) saying that vaccinated persons can cause harm to unvaccinated persons.
I, Elizabeth Woodworth, a retired health sciences librarian who delivered medical literature to the BC Ministry of Health for 25 years, including the Provincial Health Officer and all the regional health officers and the public health nurses, mental health professionals, nutritionists, dental staff and others, wish to point out some of the peer-reviewed literature that has been tragically overlooked by many public health agencies during this pandemic. Dr. Hoffe, on the other hand, is aware of this literature.
Second, it is now well established in the medical literature that blood clots are caused in some mRNA-injected people for Covid-19.
Third, regarding the question of the vaccinated causing harm, since the mRNA injections do not stop transmission of Covid-19, the vaccinated frequently infect the unvaccinated.
Dr. Hoffe has received thirty-two 5-star ratings from his patients online at
Finally, regarding the big money behind some of the Covid-19 strategies, epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch, emeritus Prof. of Medicine and Public Health at Yale University, long-time on the editorial board of the Amer. J. Epid., and who has no financial connections to Big Pharma, has written extensively in WSJ, Newsweek, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, and many others about the corruption of the CDC and FDA, who along with the now-corrupted WHO, have led the Covid-19 response.
Elizabeth Woodworth Head Librarian B.C. Ministry of Health (1978-2002) Victoria, BC
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According to Donbass authorities, Russian forces were attacked with chemical compounds by Ukrainian enemies. The denunciation comes as further evidence of the terrorist, illegal and anti-humanitarian practices of the neo-Nazi regime. In addition, Western involvement needs to be investigated, considering that it is possible that the weapons used in the attacks were supplied by Kiev’s NATO allies.
The report was made on February 6 by Denis Pushilin, the acting governor of the Donetsk People’s Republic, during an interview to a Russian TV channel. He said his office has been receiving constant reports of chemical attacks “for at least two weeks”. The weapons are said to be being used by neo-Nazi troops specifically in the Donetsk region and would be making the affected Russian soldiers severely sick.
“According to the statements of our forces, and commanders who came forward with such information, there are facts of the use of chemical compounds causing sickness among our servicemen not only in the Artyomovsk [Bakhmut] direction but also in the Ugledar direction (…) They are dropping [chemical weapons] from drones on the locations of our forces (…) We currently seek to equip our units [with chemical protection suits]. Then again, we have some of the things that we need but it’s not always comfortable to constantly wear chemical protection suits while in position. Certainly, it makes it harder for our forces to perform their missions so we are looking for additional ways to protect our troops (…) They [the affected soldiers] trigger coughing, followed by watery eyes and general discomfort”, the DPR head said.
Other Russian officials declined to comment on the case, just saying that investigations are still ongoing. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for the Kremlin, however, made it clear that reports on possible incidents would be passed on to the appropriate authorities at the Ministry of Defense. In this sense, it is likely that investigations will be concluded soon, and official statement will be made in the coming weeks.
In fact, rumors of chemical warfare have been rising since at least mid-January. Many soldiers and civilians in Donbass reported evidence that toxic compounds are being used in the region through specific air-dropped munitions. Although there is still no precise information and investigations continue to take place, it is a fact that in this period in which the rumors have been spreading, many Russian soldiers have shown health symptoms that indicate contamination by toxic compounds, which makes the suspicion very plausible.
In addition, a video is circulating on the internet showing Ukrainian soldiers assembling drones to carry some unknown ammunitions. The shells are shown in the video being removed from a refrigerator. Some experts have assumed that these could be chemical weapons. Although there is still no concrete information about the case, the video has increased suspicion about the use of this type of weapon, in addition to showing a scene consistent with reports by residents of Donbass about air-dropped ammunition, considering the drones.
It is important to remember that chemical warfare is prohibited under international law, in the terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) – a treaty established in 1997 and to which both Moscow and Kiev are signatories. The document forbids the use of all types of weapons equipped with toxic chemical compounds, including non-lethal ones. However, constant violations of international norms have already become commonplace among Ukrainian forces, which is why the use of these weapons would not be surprising.
In parallel, it is important to investigate the possible Western participation in this Ukrainian crime. The US is the only country in the world to publicly maintain stockpiles of chemical weapons. On the same day as the Pushilin’s interview, there was a joint statement by the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, and Syria, Dr. Faisal Al-Miqdad, where they condemned Western unsubstantiated accusations that Syria used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in 2018. They recalled the fact that only the US currently has these weapons, which is why the possible incident in Douma appears to be a foreign provocation.
In the same sense, if chemical weapons are being used by Kiev, it is necessary to investigate whether they are provided by international allies of the neo-Nazi regime. Even if the chemical compounds are not imported from NATO countries, the entire military technological chain involved in the alleged attacks needs to be investigated. Considering that the compounds are allegedly being dropped from the air, then it is necessary to find out whether the drones used in these illegal maneuvers are supplied by NATO.
In fact, it is unacceptable that in the face of so much evidence of crimes and violations of international law, the West continues its irresponsible policy of supporting Kiev. With the use of chemical weapons, the Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime reaches new levels of anti-humanitarian practices. Measures are urgently needed to stop Kiev from continuing to promote such practices – and halt the Western sending of arms.
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One might actually be willing to consider that there might be some value in the “rules based international order” being promoted by the Joe Biden Administration if such a thing actually existed and was applied equally to all transgressors. Of course, in reality, the “rules” being referred to are neither agreed upon nor driven by any broad international consensus and are merely a trick that is exploited to further the interests of the United States and its closest allies. In fact, the “rules”, such as they are, are most frequently ignored to give a pass to the bad behavior being exhibited by the US and its friends.
If the “rules” were actually intended to place limits on violent interactions among nations, consider for a moment the actual record of the United States in that regard. Recent opinion polls demonstrate that the US by a large margin is considered by other nations to be the most dangerous country in the world. That judgement is based not only on historic memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the Vietnam War and the overthrowing of alleged “leftist” regimes in places like Iran, Chile and Guatemala. Armed interventions on a greater or lesser scale have been a regular features of US initiatives throughout the Caribbean and Latin America ever since the Spanish-American War.
More recently there has been the global war on terror, unleashed on the entire world based on US condemnation of countries that were not perceived to be toeing Washington’s red line on what constitutes terrorism. This has led to pointless and ultimately failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia in which, by some estimates millions of civilians have died directly or indirectly, and the US itself has sustained the war-making through the printing of trillions of dollars in essentially fiat currency and running up enormous debts, a chicken that will come home to roost before too long. In Afghanistan, and also in Yemen and Iraq, the US has engaged in targeted assassinations as well as profile killings of civilians using drones.
The most troublesome aspect of all the violence that the US has initiated is that there are no actual rules in sight, apart from the Blinken-Biden-Austin clowns in Washington citing unsubstantiated threats coming from countries incapable of actually doing any harm like Iran or countries like Russia and China that had previously no intention of confronting the American military colossus.
So Washington is the beating heart of policies that have created turmoil worldwide while also moving the Doomsday clock closer to the finality that might well come with a nuclear war. And all the posturing is literally for nothing, for a bad cause supporting a corrupt, autocratic regime in a country that is no democracy with no visible off ramp. The hypocrisy of those in the White House and in Congress, as well as in the media, who are so reckless with the lives and fortunes of their fellow citizens literally defies belief.
If Washington is the first of the three cities that I am considering, Moscow must certainly be number two as it is on the receiving end of the US hypocrisy, being accused of having deviated from the “rules based” international order by invading Ukraine one year ago. Russia, however, sees things differently. The Kremlin has argued that it has repeatedly sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on two fundamental issues that it plausibly claims threaten its own national security and identity. First is the failure of Ukraine to comply with the Minsk Accords of 2014-5 which conceded a large measure of autonomy to the Donbas region, an area indisputably inhabited by ethnic Russians, as is Crimea.
Recently former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has let slip that there was never any intention to comply with the Minsk Agreement, implying that it was all a charade to enable strengthening Ukraine to join NATO and, if necessary, fight Russia. In fact, the Accords were ignored right from the beginning, with Ukrainian militias and other armed elements using artillery to shell the Donbas, killing an estimated 15,000 mostly ethnic Russian residents, a number which appears to be confirmed by independent sources.
The second vital national security issue for Moscow was over plans to offer NATO membership to Ukraine, which would place a possibly superior hostile military alliance at its doorstep. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly observed that the issues were both negotiable and that Zelensky only had to agree to maintain his country as “neutral,” i.e. not linked to any military alliance, and to honor some reasonable autonomy for Donbas. Reportedly it was the United States and Britain that pushed Ukraine into rejecting any and all of the Russian demands in a bid to initiate a war of attrition using Ukrainian lives to destabilize Putin’s government and reduce its ability to oppose US and Western dominance.
And there is of course the back story, that the United States had long been meddling in Eastern Europe in spite of a pledge not to take advantage of the break-up of the Soviet Union to expand NATO eastwards. The US had brought about “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014 to remove a government friendly to Moscow. But in this case, the increasing involvement of the US and NATO in the fighting has been an extremely dangerous development because it has escalated the conflict and turned it into what might become a devastating nuclear exchange. One would like to see an immediate truce initiated to stop the fighting followed by serious negotiations to come to a settlement of the territorial dispute. But, of course, the United States, which has provided Zelensky with more than $100 billion in aid, has made it clear that it is not interested in a negotiated settlement unless Putin is willing as a confidence building first step to withdraw from all occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. In other words, he must surrender.
So whether Moscow has broken with the “rules based international order” depends very much on how one defines threats. Certainly, at a minimum, Washington has behaved far worse than Russia over the past twenty years, which rather confirms that the “rules” are essentially a convenient fiction. And finally, my third city to consider is Jerusalem, the claimed capital of the state of Israel. As the Jewish state is arguably either Washington’s closest ally or, as many believe, the tail that actually wags the White House dog, it is instructive to look at its behavior to examine whether the US applies a uniform standard to friend and foe alike when it doles out punishment to accused rule breakers.
If the United States is considered by the world community to be the most dangerous “superpower” country, Israel has to be considered the leading pariah among smaller, more regionally focused nations. And its control over the White House, the Congress and the national media in the US is such that it is never held to account for anything. Most recently, there was an attack by Israeli soldiers on a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin on the West Bank in which ten Arabs were killed. In retaliation, a Palestinian gunman subsequently shot dead seven Israelis in Jerusalem before being killed himself. Speaking from the Oval Office, President Biden only saw fit to mention the Palestinian counter-attack, saying merely that “This was an attack against the civilized world.” The initial Israeli attack which killed ten was not even cited, suggesting that Israeli atrocities killing Palestinians do not bother the civilized world that the Bidens live in.
In another White House demonstration of where its priorities lie, last year’s shooting dead by an Israeli soldier of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh led eventually to a milk-toast call for an inquiry by the White House, even though Biden and company openly bought into the Israeli government lie that it was an accident, likely triggered by a lot of Palestinian terrorist shooting in the area, which was not true. And don’t expect any real pushback against Israel’s policy of shoot-first from Congress, which only last week removed Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee because she was “antisemitic” due to her criticism of Israel’s behavior.
The Israeli Defense ministry indicated that it would not cooperate with any inquiry into its behavior and the Abu Akleh story has since disappeared. Israel has also killed other American citizens without any consequences, including Rachel Corrie and 34 sailors on board the USS Liberty naval vessel in 1967. Never before has a government killed Americans only to be rewarded with a $3.8 billion gift from the US taxpayers every year. The Jewish state’s government has also recently indicated that its free-fire policy against Palestinian civilians and their foreign supporters will not be modified. Israeli soldiers and policemen who kill Palestinians, who are routinely described as “terrorists,” are almost never investigated or prosecuted and have been, in some cases, praised in the media and promoted.
And Israeli control over major parts of the US federal government appears to be tightening. In a press conference last week, the United States State Department refused to confirm that Israel is in illegal occupation of large parts of Palestine, nor will it acknowledge that Israel has a nuclear arsenal.
Israel’s track record vis-à-vis its neighbors is somewhat similar to the American pattern of rules enforcement, though it rarely even bothers to excuse its behavior. It even started a major war, having attacked all its neighbors, after complaining falsely that they were “threatening,” in 1967, after which it illegally seized and occupied their territory. It is currently bombing Syria on a regular basis and has also attacked Iran, Lebanon and the Palestinians in Gaza. It has assassinated Iranian scientists and technicians.
Israel has invaded and occupied southern Lebanon and facilitated a massacre of Palestinians settled in camps there. Neither Syria nor Iran has ever attacked Israel or even threatened to do so, but Israel persists in claiming that it is threatened and is trying to convince Biden to join it in attacking the Iranians. The new, extreme racist right-wing government of Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu is in particular stepping up the pressure on Palestinians through actions that are illegal under international law without a squeak coming out of the White House. Home demolitions, property seizures, checkpoints and other round the clock harassment of Palestinians also are increasing in frequency as the Israelis expand their occupation of the West Bank. And Israel even sponsors actual terrorists in the form of the weaponized settlers who beat and destroy Palestinians at will with no consequences even when they kill an unarmed Arab or a child.
And some Israelis are also thinking of something grander, in the form of genocide, when it comes to their Palestinian neighbors. A prominent right wing Israeli member of parliament has perhaps suggested what he and many of his colleagues would like to see done to the remaining Palestinians. Zvika Fogel, a member of the governing coalition has called for a “final war” against the Palestinians to “subdue them once and for all”, following international condemnation of security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s incursion into Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, an additional illegal move intended to assert total control over access to Muslim holy sites. Fogel responded to the criticism, saying in an interview that Israel’s policy of going to war with Palestinians “every two or three years” was no longer good enough and that there should be one last war to “subdue them once and for all. It would be worth it because this will be the final war…”
So, it is a tale of three cities. Moscow is engaged in a war that at least has a rationale, even as one should and must oppose armed interventions between two neighboring countries. The Russian operation has been opposed by the United States, which has heedlessly escalated the war and produced a situation that can be devastating for all life on the planet. Washington is also the grand hypocrite in the game in that it has behaved far worse than Moscow over the past twenty years. And then there is Jerusalem, or if one prefers, Tel Aviv. A monstrous Israel is preeminent in how it wins the prize for being the absolute worst in its inhumanity and war crimes, without a rebuke from Washington or Joe Biden ever about “rules based international order” violations.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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There is a strong possibility of Moldova becoming a conflict hotspot so that the West can maintain maximum pressure on Russia’s periphery and bog the country down in more war. This comes as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the media that the West now has its “eyes” on Moldova and that Moldovan President Maia Sandu is ready to act on any instructions that she receives.
The possibility of Moldova becoming a major European flashpoint has always existed because the Transnistrian conflict has been frozen since July 1992.
If Moldova, in the eyes of officials, becomes even more pro-Western and integrated into Romania, the more likely is that Transnistrians will resolve their right for sovereignty by force. This would turn Moldova into the “next Ukraine”, which will surely see indirect international intervention, and perhaps a direct Russian intervention. Moscow has the ability to support Transnistria, including with financial, diplomatic and military methods to resolve the conflict, and will not hesitate to do so if new provocations emanate from Moldova.
Transnistria, where 60% of the inhabitants are Russian and Ukrainian, had sought to secede from Moldova even before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, fearing that Moldova would join Romania in the face of post-communist nationalism. In 1992, after the Moldovan government failed to resolve the issue by force, Transnistria became an unrecognised territory outside of Chisinau’s control.
Peace in the Transnistrian conflict zone is maintained by a joint peacekeeping force, consisting of 402 Russian servicemen, 492 Transnistrian servicemen and 355 Moldovan servicemen, as well as ten military observers from Ukraine. Peacekeeping forces serve at 15 fixed checkpoints and other checkpoints located in key areas of the security zone.
It is recalled that in late December, Moldova’s Ministry of Defence had to deny claims about a Russian missile being launched in the direction of their country. Several Moldovan media outlets reported that Ukrainian Telegram channels made claims about an alleged Russian missile heading towards Moldova.
“Amid information appearing in the media about a missile that is believed to have flown towards Moldova due to shelling in Ukraine this morning , we announce that the air surveillance systems of the National Army did not record illegal flights in the airspace of the republic,” noted the press service of Moldova’s defence ministry.
This scenario was concocted as part of Kiev’s efforts to draw more countries into the conflict. Moldova is particularly vulnerable considering it is a poor country contending with an internal ideological struggle between Western liberalism and Moldovan sovereignty. Ever since Sandu came to power, Moldova has been integrating deeper into NATO, the European Union and Romania.
“First of all, because they were able to put a president at the head of the country through quite specific methods, far from being freely democratic, who, quite simply, is willing to enter NATO, has Romanian citizenship, is ready to unite with Romania and, in general, is ready for almost anything,” Lavrov explained on February 2.
“I won’t go into details, but this is one of the next countries that the West wants to turn anti-Russia,” Lavrov added.
For his part, Moldovan Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu denied Lavrov’s charges, claiming that
“We categorically reject such insinuations. Such a tone is entirely out of place in a proper relationship between two states. And at the same time, it is absolutely clear what the population of the Republic of Moldova wants. The citizens of the Republic of Moldova want a democratic, prosperous, European country, where corruption is eliminated and which joins the European Union.”
In the same statement, Popescu denied his country’s obvious and open anti-Russia actions, but also claimed that the ruling government is fighting corruption. However, despite Sandu coming to power in 2020, Statista’s “Corruption perception index score of Moldova from 2012 to 2022” found that the “composite indicator that includes data on the perception of corruption in areas such as bribery of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, embezzlement of state funds, and effectiveness of governments’ anti-corruption efforts” actually worsened in 2021 and 2022.
Therefore, despite the claims by Popescu that Sandu and her government are dealing with corruption, Moldovan perceptions is that corruption has actually deepened under the current pro-Western government.
In fact, even more damning for Popescu’s claims is that on February 3, WatchDog MD announced that a recent survey in Moldova found Russian President Vladimir Putin to have the highest approval rating out of all foreign leaders in the country, with 38% of the vote.
This was followed by Romanian leader Klaus Iohannis in second place with 36.6%, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with 35.3%, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko with 35%, French President Emmanuel Macron with 34%, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with 30.3%, US President Joe Biden with 25.2%, and Chinese President Xi Jinping with 22%.
In this way, the actions of the Moldovan government are actually in opposition to most citizens, despite what Popescu might claim. Although they might deny Lavrov’s charges, it cannot be overlooked that the Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister for Reintegration met with the US ambassador in Chisinau on February 3 to discuss the situation in Transnistria. It can be safely assumed that Washington’s interest is not for a successful mediation between Moldova and separatists in Transnistria, but rather to try and create a new flashpoint to distract and waste Moscow’s attention and resources.
Ahmed Adel, Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher
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After the defeat of the Confederacy in April 1865, the central question for a post-civil war structure of governance revolved around the status of the more than four million people of African descent.
As the document cited below makes clear, even President Abraham Lincoln, some one year after the beginning of the civil war remained a proponent of the government-sponsored migration of Africans from the continental United States.
“By an act of April 16, 1862, which abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, Congress made an appropriation of $100,000 for voluntary Negro emigrants at an expense of $100 each; and later, July 16, an additional appropriation of $500,000 was made at Lincoln’s request. The President was authorized ‘to make provision for transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States, of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this act, as may be willing to emigrate, having first obtained the consent of the government of said country to their protection and settlement within the same, with all the rights and privileges of freemen.’”
In 1816, the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, later known after 1837 as the American Colonization Society (ACS), was formed with the expressed intent of cleansing the U.S. of free Africans. In 1847, the West African state of the Republic of Liberia was founded with expatriates from the U.S. as the dominant political grouping within the government. Liberia, as well as Sierra Leone, which was founded by the British after the American War of Independence during the late 18th century, were designed as solutions to the race question in North America and the United Kingdom.
Although there are revisionists who claimed that the civil war fought between 1861-1865 was not inevitable and was waged over “states’ rights” and “regional sovereignty,” if this was in fact the case, then there would have been no need for the Fugitive Slave Acts during the antebellum period and the establishment of legalized segregation after the collapse of Reconstruction.
Moreover, no serious student of the historical trajectory of the U.S. during the 19th century can deny the pivotal role of African labor in the overall economic development of the country. After the invention and deployment of the cotton gin, the production of this commodity would provide the raw materials for the expansion of the textile and other industries which characterized modern day capitalism.
The planters sought to maintain a stranglehold on Black labor in the wake of their failed attempt at secession. Therefore, despite the insurrectionist effort to either build a sustainable separate slave state or destroy the Union, the Confederates wanted to reenter the U.S. by reasserting their political and economic authority irrespective of the rights of the emancipated Africans.
Nonetheless, there were others including the Radical Republicans in Congress who realized that unless the slavocracy was fully disarmed, disenfranchised and monitored until a bourgeois democratic dispensation could be enacted, the stability of the Union could not be guaranteed. As a result of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and several Civil Rights Acts, a small number of African Americans were elected to the Senate, the House of Representatives, state legislative offices as well as local municipalities between the late 1860s and the conclusion of the 19th century.
Resistance to the formation of a democratic state which included the rights of African people continued after the assassination of Lincoln and the ascendancy of his vice presidential successor President Andrew Johnson. Although Johnson, who came from the slaveholding state of Tennessee, had rejected secession, he opposed the disempowerment of the planters and the most important policies of the Reconstruction era.
Johnson was the first U.S. president to be impeached in 1868 by the House of Representatives. However, the Senate failed by a narrow margin to convict him. The contentious atmosphere which prevailed in Congress during 1868 prefigured the eventual collapse of the Reconstruction process after the elections of 1876. By the following year, a compromise between the dominant political forces in the U.S. sealed the continuation of the national oppression of the African people.
Tenant Agriculture and Racial Terror
There were several factors involved in the overthrow of Reconstruction. One of the most important was that the Black Union soldiers and state militias, empowered by the U.S. government during and immediately after the civil war, were systematically disbanded in the South. African Americans with arms and the right to the franchise was a threat to the supremacy of the planters and their allies after the war.
In Memphis during early May 1866, white mobs made up of police officers, former Confederate soldiers and racist sympathizers attacked the African American community. They robbed, assaulted, raped and murdered until the state authorities called for the restoration of civil order.
These episodes of racial terror were widespread throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Underlying the enactment of Jim Crow laws was the economic exploitation of the formerly enslaved people through tenant agriculture, widely known as sharecropping. Forced labor was also utilized through the criminal justice system by sentencing African Americans to prison terms where they were required to perform labor without compensation.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution ostensibly freed the enslaved Africans yet upheld the legalization of involuntary servitude within penal institutions. Both sharecropping and peonage became indistinguishable due to the complete dictatorship of the landowners during the post-civil war period.
V.I. Lenin, the co-founder of the Russian Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), some two years prior to the Revolution of October 1917, published a study on southern agriculture. In his report he noted the near slave-like conditions that African Americans were still enduring a half century since emancipation.
“In 1910, free, republican-democratic America had 1,500,000 sharecroppers, of whom more than 1,000,000 were Negroes. And the proportion of share-croppers to the total number of farmers is not decreasing, but is on the contrary steadily and rather rapidly increasing. In 1880, 17.5% of the farmers in the U.S.A. were sharecroppers, in 1890, 18.4%; in 1900, 22.2%; and in 1910, 24%…. For the ‘emancipated’ Negroes, the American South is a kind of prison where they are hemmed in, isolated and deprived of fresh air…. Thus it turns out that there is a startling similarity in the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia who ‘were formerly landowners’ serfs’.”
Flight as a Form of Resistance to National Oppression
Migration among African Americans became a form of resistance during and after the antebellum period. Many Africans voluntarily migrated to Liberia believing that there was no potential for achieving a quality life inside the U.S.
During the period of the 1880s to the early decades of the 20th century, many African Americans migrated to the western states of Kansas and Oklahoma. Nonetheless, the most notable outmigration from the South came with the rapid growth of industrial capitalist production largely centered in Northern cities during the first half of the 20th century.
Even prior to World War I, Ford Motor Company began to recruit African Americans from the rural South with promises of $5 per day salaries, oftentimes a tenfold increase in their daily allotments from working in the cotton fields and households of the white ruling class. World War II prompted even more outmigration from the South creating the conditions during the 1950s to the 1970s for the rise of a new sense of political empowerment.
Lenin, in the same above-mentioned study says:
“Negroes are in full flight from the two Southern divisions where there is no homesteading: in the 10 years between the last two censuses, these two divisions provided other parts of the country with almost 600,000 “Black” people. The Negroes flee mainly to the towns: in the South, 77 to 80% of all the Negroes live in rural communities; in other areas, only 8 to 32%. Thus, it turns out that there is a startling similarity in the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia who were formerly landowners’ serfs.”
However, after arriving in large numbers in the northeastern, midwestern and western states, African Americans were still subjected to de jure and de facto segregation. African American labor was super-exploited in the factories and steel mills while deliberate governmental policy forced them into substandard housing, educational and other public facilities.
These social problems and forms of national oppression remain well into the 21st century. The necessity for a revolutionary transformation of racial capitalism continues as an imperative of the African American people in their quest for full social equality and national liberation.
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Palestine cannot survive without foreign aid. For several years the EU has been the main donor. However, funding conditions are becoming ever more stringent and are steadily squeezing the Palestinian society to death. Meanwhile, the right to self-determination for Palestine and the Palestinian people is being buried deep underground.
Black Lists and Secret Files
Once again, on the 22th of October 2021, the solidarity movement with Palestine and the Palestinian people was put into a state of alert. The Israeli Minister of Defense, Benny Gatz, had decided by military decree that another six Palestinian human rights organizations would be added to the list of terrorist organizations. Some European donors decided to temporarily suspend their financial support or simply stopped funding. The Belgian Minister for Development Cooperation, Meryame Kitir, kept cool and decided to wait for the results of further investigation.
It would take nine months, till July 2022, for nine European Member States to agree upon a joint, but brief, press release declaring that Israel failed to sustain the allegations with hard evidence, hence there was no reason not to resume financial support or to end it right away.
The response of Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Palestine, was much more courageous. He took immediate action and needed only two days to unite other human rights experts in an explicit condemnation of Israel’s decision together with a fierce reminder that counter-terrorism measures cannot be misused to silence human rights organizations.
Earlier upon that same year, in May 2021, the Belgian parliamentary Commission for Foreign Affairs had already summoned Minister Kitir. She had to justify her decision to allocate 8 million euro for humanitarian aid to the Gaza. For eleven days Israel had been serving the Gazans on one of the severest bombings ever.
The reason of the unrest among some of the commission members were not so much the 256 dead nor the 1,700 wounded, nor the 100,000 internally displaced, nor the thousands of homeless people. Their alarm went off because of a “secret file” that the Israeli security services had deposited on the desks of the European embassies in Tel Aviv.
Supposedly the file contained proof of Western funding for development aid that would have been channeled through European donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to Palestinian terrorist organizations. Minister Kitir had already ordered an internal inquiry. Just like her colleague in the Netherlands, who had immediately suspended all funding as a matter of precaution, she would come to the conclusion that the evidence submitted by Israel was not convincing.
The Game of the Cat and the Mouse
For years EU aid for Palestine has been snapped on and off like a flash light. Whenever Israel shows up with “incriminating” evidence, aid to Palestinian organizations is being cut or suspended. This was also the experience of the Palestinian Authority.
The EU Directorate-General for Neighborhood and Enlargement Negotiations (NEAR) is the main EU financing instrument for humanitarian aid to Palestine and support to the Palestinian Authority (PA), including the Ministry of Education. Olivér Várhelyi, the EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, was not pleased by the content of 156 textbooks and 16 teacher manuals for primary and secondary schools.
He demanded a thorough screening of the text materials. The final report of some 200 pages caused worldwide commotion. It did not contain recommendations, only conclusions. These were interpreted either as very positive, or, on the contrary, as devastating, depending on the political preferences of the reader. Várhelyi belongs to the latter and decided to withhold the remaining funding for 2021 until all anti-Semitic paragraphs were adapted or removed.
The consequences of this measure did not pass unnoticed. The Palestinian Authority was forced to look for budgets elsewhere for paying the salaries and pensions of some 140,000 PA employees, including teachers and health staff, who lost 20% of their income. The hospitals in occupied East-Jerusalem were unable to find the financial resources needed for initiating the cancer treatment of 500 Palestinian patients. Some 115,000 vulnerable families, who try to cope with a monthly income of 231 US dollar or less, did no longer receive additional financial support.
Eventually Várhelyi had to give in. On the 14th of June 2022 the EU committed to unlocking the remaining 224.8 million euro of the year 2021. The conditionality to change the content of the text books was removed, but no apologies were given for the human suffering inflicted.
The Israeli Master Plan
Ever since 2013 Israel has been continuously reinforcing its campaigns targeting Western donors, and more particularly the EU, against Palestinian organizations from, what Israel calls, “the extreme left”. The European Parliament and the EU Member States are systematically being approached and put under pressure to review their financial support to “the bad civil society”, meaning those NGOs that denounce the Israeli policy with regard to Palestine and hereby “promote violence” and “glorify terrorism”. In doing so Israel focuses particularly, but not exclusively on those organizations that support the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
Campaigns are being launched at a steady space: The Money Trail 1 (2018), The Money Trail 2 (2019) and Terrorists in Suits (2019). The Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA) plays a key-role and uses NGO Monitor as one of its basic tools.
NGO Monitor was created in the year 2002 as a conservative Israeli think tank. Its activities build on the premise that the occupation of Palestine is an Israeli “internal affair”. On its website some 250 Israeli, Palestinian, European and international organizations are blacklisted, allegedly because they constitute a threat for Israel as a sovereign state.
An investigation conducted by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) revealed that NGO Monitor presents its reports as if they were the result of thorough research but lacks all transparency regarding the methods used. NGO Monitor claims to be independent but is actually completely dependent on external funding, particularly from the USA. NGO Monitor also has close ties with the Israeli government, to such an extent even that its reports are published by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs as official documents to which NGO Monitor can refer afterwards as a legitimate and credible source of information.
The way in which the MSA operates definitely bears fruits. Donors are terrified by the idea of being associated with terrorism. In the year 2017 the donor consortium consisting of Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Denmark, took its hands of from the Palestinian Human Rights/International Humanitarian Law Secretariat. The secretariat was created with the aim to strengthen the human rights organizations in Palestine with the support of the University of Bir Zeit. The reason for the closure of the secretariat was the latest NGO Monitor Report entitled “Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat: Abusing Public Funds to Perpetuate Conflict.”
The MSA has also fiercely targeted financial institutions in Europe and North-America. Showing supposedly “hard evidence” it has succeeded in blocking some 50 bank accounts. Even digital platforms such as GoFundMe, PayPal and Venmo, cramped and keep their portals closed.
To Bend or to Break
The system of “secret files”, “black lists” and “official reports” does not fail to achieve its purpose. European donors are getting nervous and keep on imposing a growing number of administrative and financial monitoring and controlling measures. For some years now, Palestinian organizations that are interested to apply for European governmental or non-governmental aid, have been facing another major hurdle, i.e. the notorious Article 1.5 bis, one more trophy that the MSA proudly claims.
In the year 2019 the EU added Article 1.5 bis to its grant contracts. It is a counter-terrorism clause providing that all organizations granted or contracted by the EU must give proof that they have no links whatsoever with individuals or organizations on the lists of the EU “restrictive measures”.
Not only staff and board members must be screened for potential terrorist relations or sympathies, but also sub-contractors, persons attending activities organized within the framework of the aid programs, people benefiting from financial support and recipients of financial support to third parties. This obligation goes for both development programs and humanitarian aid programs.
The EU defines terrorist offences as acts committed “with the aim to seriously intimidate a population” and/or “to unduly compel a government or international organization to perform or abstain from performing any act” and/or “to seriously destabilize or destroy the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organization”. For the definition of an offence the EU relies on the national legislation of the respective country where the acts are committed. In practice this means that, in the case of Palestine, it is up to Israel to determine what is right and what is wrong. Just for clarification: there is no such thing as an universally agreed definition of terrorism.
It needs no further explanation that a mention on the NGO Monitor list, however fraudulent it may be, is not an advantage. What is worrying the Palestinians even more, though, is that this new condition is the start of a process to gradually exclude all Palestinians who are politically and socially active from foreign aid.
Considering the fact that the EU Member States are increasingly more operating as One Team Europe and that there is a growing tendency within the EU to delegate the execution of its programs to the Member States, this kind of measures gradually grows into a silent killer intoxicating the development cooperation policies of the respective States.
The EU got the inspiration for this clause with the US Agency for International Development, USAID, which had already introduced a partner vetting system in Palestine in the year 2003. The USAID version is even more intrusive. The vetting and screening is not limited to the USAID funded programs. It must be done for all of the grantee’s global sphere of action. On top, USAID demands a retroactive vetting and screening going back ten years in time.
The USAID counter-terrorism obligations also apply to the UN agencies. The USA refuses to rely on the UN counter-terrorism measures and imposes its own rules and regulations. In July 2021 this became once more evident when the USA decided to resume its aid to UNRWA, the UN agency that was specifically created back in 1949 with the aim to organize the aid to the Palestinian refugees.
Palestine on the Decline
The EU together with the respective EU Member States, Norway and Switzerland is the main donor of Palestine and the Palestinian. The average annual budget amounts to 1.24 billion euro, or 2/3 of the official development aid (ODA) worldwide for Palestine. At the same time, though, there has also been a steep decline in the global budget support of the Palestinian Authority, which since has decreased with 85% from 1.24 billion euro in the year 2008 to a disastrous 191 million euro in the year 2020.
For quite some time the Palestinian authorities are no longer a privileged partner as donor distrust prevails. To a certain extent the Palestinian authorities are still being informed or consulted but donors prefer to maximally assign the execution of the programs to non-Palestinian non-governmental organizations, UN agencies and expensive consultancy bureaus, which have their liaison offices in Brussels, Washington, New York and Geneva where they co-decide on the development agenda.
Palestinian NGOs are increasingly used as mere executors of programs that have been conceived at embassies’ and consulates’ desks or elsewhere in the world. Structural, long-term funding that allowed them to develop their own programs based upon their own priorities, has been replaced by short-term projects with a duration of only a few months and loads of administrative work.
Moreover, this way of operating generates a cascade of both visible and hidden overhead costs. Each organization in the aid-pyramid can charge office, management, administration and logistics costs. These can amount to several dozens of percentages of the total budget, sometimes even up to more than half of it, hereby reducing even further the amount of resources available for the ultimate beneficiaries, i.e. the Palestinian people.
The Moral Bankruptcy of International Aid to Palestine
All of this is happening against the background of an unscrupulous military occupation and colonization. Some 400 Palestinian organizations are blacklisted. More than 4,000 Palestinian people are detained in Israeli prisons for political reasons. For decades the Gaza has been turned into the biggest open air prison in the world. Eighty percent of the 2 million Gazans are dependent on foreign aid.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were deported from their homes in occupied East-Jerusalem to “behind the Wall”, a monstrous construction with a total length of 712 kilometers enclosing the West Bank. Over time the West Bank has been split up in 165 separate enclaves, which are under continuous military control through 593 road blocks and checkpoints. And all of this is supposedly meant to protect 700,000 Israeli settlers who moved into 300 “legal” and “illegal” settlements all over the West Bank. Poverty among the Palestinian population has never been so appalling.
The “European Joint strategy In Support of Palestine 2021-2024” acknowledges that the situation in Palestine has never been worse. The EU even expresses its concerns about the “de-development” of Palestine and, indeed, recognizes that to a certain extent this is due to the Israeli occupation.
Officially the EU still claims to support the Two State Solution, but a critical reading of the strategy learns that this path was abandoned many years ago. In its strategy 2017-2020 the EU had already moved away from the right to self-determination to replace it by “the questfor self-determination”.
In support of this “quest” the EU focuses on the strengthening the “agency” of the Palestinian civil society. This agency is basically meant to counter radicalization.(1) Respect for and protection of human rights are a main pillar, but the focus is restricted to the role of the Palestinian authorities. It is not about denouncing the role of Israel.
The title of the EU strategy could not be more cynical: “Towards a Democratic, Accountable and Sustainable Palestinian State”. Palestine cannot survive without international support. The Palestinians are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, between resigning and not complaining or keeping their head high up and drowning.
Marleen Bosmans is a political scientist and has been working as a human rights expert in different areas of the Belgian international cooperation (non-governmental, governmental, multilateral and university cooperation) for more than 40 year. She visited Palestine on various occasions as a researcher, an electoral observer and technical expert in charge of the formulation of human rights programmes. This article is the result of her experiences in the field and underpinned by publicly accessible documents.
(1) The terminology “agency” is used to indicate that the Palestinian grantees are responsible for the execution of the programs and the activities and bear the ultimate responsibility in case of failure.
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***
After the Russiagate Hoax, the Covid hoax, and the Insurrection hoax, We now Have the Chinese Spy Balloon Hoax
According to Washington and the media, China sent a balloon that the Pentagon said “could” be loaded with explosives to spy on America.A top general said that similar balloons have entered US airspace undetected before.The balloon is huge–200 feet tall weighing in excess of a couple thousand pounds.So if such a large object can enter our airspace undetected, does this mean far smaller ICBMs can also?
Do understand that what is going on here is the purposeful creation of an incident for propaganda purposes to stoke up more animosity against China, and to spend more money on defense in Asia.We don’t have a Malaysian airliner to blame on China, but we do have a weather balloon.
After receiving a brainwashing by a Pentagon briefing, Rep. Jim Himes (D,Conn.) says that US officials will “learn a lot” from the pieces of the “Chinese spy craft” that was shot down.
Two other House members, one a Republican, one a Democrat declare the blown-off-course weather balloon “a violation of American sovereignty.”
The Chinese explanation is the only one that makes any sense:
“It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course.The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to an unforeseen and unintended outcome. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by wind and limited steering capability.” (A translation uses the term “force majeure,” an unforeseen event.)
But the spy story continues.It is needed in order to worsen relations with China, the second nuclear power that Washington is doing everything it possibly can to antagonize.Keep in mind that in these days spying is done by satellites, not by weather balloons.If China is using balloons to spy on the US, why did China send a balloon over Columbia.Why is China spying on South America?
The Columbian military determined that the balloon posed no threat to national security, defense, or air safety.Washington lacks the capability of the Columbian military, because Washington is in the business of creating a hoax issue.
Try to think of something the government has told the truth about.Tonkin Gulf?Ruby Ridge?Waco? Oklahoma City Bombing? 9/11? Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?Assad’s use of chemical weapons? Gaddafi? Russiagate? January 6 insurrection? Covid? Covid vaccine? Ukraine?Malaysian airliner? Find one thing that was true.
All the government’s lies, parroted by the press-titutes, are designed to advance secret agendas.The people are brainwashed with lies so that they go along with the agendas.That is the way the US government functions.There is no longer an American media.Just an indoctrination ministry.Only official narratives please.All else is misinformation.
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***
From inventing the need for mass-scale baby formula leading to the deaths of infants, to redirecting much needed water from impoverished areas to bottle and sell back to the same communities, to exploiting child labor and slavery, Nestlé will stoop to any moral low to make a buck.
This article inaugurates Ms. Gjovik’s new column for CovertAction Magazine spotlighting the abuses of U.S. multinational corporations worldwide.—CAQ Editors
***
Corporations like Nestlé are essentially doomsday machines: man-made creations that will ultimately destroy humanity if allowed to continue as they are. Multinational corporations are required by law to place the financial interests of shareholders above all other matters, even if that requires them to prioritize the bottom line above the common good. In this nightmare of our own creation, if it is more cost-effective for corporations to commit mass atrocities and pay a fine, than to not commit atrocities, the corporation is compelled to commit atrocities to ensure shareholder returns.
Further, this maximization of profit through unhinged business practices and investment tactics creates a cycle of destruction further fed by governments and institutions relaxing rules to entice companies to do business in ways that financially benefit that government. This enables the businesses to create more profit by cutting corners around labor rights, safety protections, and environmental standards. As negligence is further normalized, governments must entice businesses with more concessions, which encourages even worse behavior from corporations. Governments and business then race each other to the bottom in a destructive spiral that harms everyone.
In the Unites States, corporations claim a legal status as if they were human beings. While this is a fictional concept, if the corporation Nestlé were a person—Nestlé would be the worst kind of person, someone you would never want to be in the same room with. Nestlé is the American Psycho of corporations.
Yet, a company like Nestlé only exists because of the acquiescence and facilitation of its gross misconduct by governments and society. This case study on Nestlé’s business practices highlights some of the most egregious behavior by corporations.
Founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé, today the Nestlé corporation owns more than 2,000 brands.[1] Nestlé is the world’s largest food company and is one of the most multinational of companies, with more than 450 manufacturing facilities in more than 79 countries, sales in 186 countries, and employment of 276,000 workers. In 2021, Nestlé reported $87 billion in sales and $22 billion in global profit. Around 30% of Nestlé’s total sales came from the United States, where Nestlé reported $26 billion in sales. [2]
The Nestlé name is widely associated with a controversy. Nestlé’s success is arguably due to its incredible brutality—from inventing the need for mass-scale baby formula leading to the deaths of infants, or redirecting much needed water from impoverished areas to bottle and sell back to the same communities, to exploiting child labor and slavery to gather ingredients for consumer products it admits have no nutritional value—Nestlé is an incredibly unethical company.
1911 Nestlé ad in Good Housekeeping magazine. [Source: zmscience.com]
Yet, most of us probably regularly purchase Nestlé products, even if we think we avoid doing so. Nestlé’s owns an impressively extensive list of popular brand names including: Acqua Panna, Alpo, Beneful, Blue Bottle Coffee, Boost, Buitoni, Carnation, Cheerios, Coffee Mate, DiGiorno, Dreyer’s, Fancy Feast, Garden of Life, Gerber, Haagen Dazs, Hot Pockets, Kit Kat, Lean Cuisine, Nature’s Bounty, Nescafe, Nespresso, Nesquik, Ovaltine, Perrier, Purina, Pure Life, Stouffers, Starbucks Coffee at Home, Sweet Earth, San Pellegrino and Tombstone Pizza.[3]
Nestlé is also a major shareholder in L’Oréal, the multinational cosmetics conglomerate, which Nestlé reports as an “associate” on its financial reports.[4] L’Oréal itself owns many popular personal care brands like Lancôme, Garnier, Maybelline, Essie, Redkin, NYX, CeraVe, Urban Decay, and Kiehl’s.[5]
Nestlé’s most infamous scandal is around its baby formula products.
If mothers are able to breastfeed their babies, they are advised to provide their babies only breast milk for the first six months of life.[6] However, in the 1970s, Nestlé began sending representatives dressed as nurses to hospitals in impoverished countries to promote the company’s baby formula as replacement for breast milk, including sending families home with one free can. In these areas, the water that must be used to mix up the formula and clean the bottles was not safe.[7] Nestlé convinced these mothers to reject their own breast milk in favor of its infant formula.[8] Then, the mothers could not switch back to breastfeeding because, after one can, it was too late in the lactation cycle.
The result was an estimated one million dead babies every year from malnutrition or diseases contracted from dirty water or bottles.[9] In 1974, a report was published in Switzerland titled “Nestlé Kills Babies.”[10] All of this led to massive boycotts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nestlé insisted that the real problem was only access to water, while at the same time beginning to seize public waters for bottling and polluting the water that remained.[11]
Protests in 1970s against Nestlé. [Source: listverse.com]
In May 2007, an investigation found evidence Nestlé was still engaging in questionable infant-formula marketing practices in Bangladesh.[12] Then in 2011, Nestlé was investigated for bribery in the Chinese baby formula market—including bribing medical staff to promote its infant formula to new mothers.[13]
Undeterred, in April 2012, Nestlé deepened its involvement in the market by purchasing Pfizer’s baby formula business (SMA) for more than $11 billion.[14] In 2019, Nestléʼs own report still found at least 107 instances of non-compliance with international baby milk marketing rules.[15]
Last year, the World Health Organization and UNICEF issued a report finding ongoing “extensive and aggressive marketing practices used by the formula milk industry to target new and prospective parents” which “exploit emotions, the fears and the ambitions of women and families at a time they’re potentially most vulnerable.”[16] Nestléʼs baby formula practices are a stunning example of free-market murder over decades.
Bottling the Commons
In poor regions, Nestlé and others have been taking water from aquifers, springs, rivers and lakes—and putting it in plastic bottles or turning it into flavored and sugary drinks—then dumping their used and dirty water back into water sources. Locals are then not able to drink tap water and end up paying extortionate prices to the European and U.S. corporations for bottled versions of their own previously uncontaminated tap water.[17] In 2020, Nestlé reported $6.4B in bottled water sales.[18]
For years, activists have accused Nestlé of lining its own pockets through back-door privatization of public water supplies. Access to water is a human right.
Corporate privatization of the commons seizes a public resource and converts it to a private good, and Nestlé has been implicated in this for decades. In fact, the source of America’s corporate water crisis can be traced back to 1976 when Perrier opened an office in New York.[19] The firm partnered with a U.S. executive who had recently left Levi Strauss, and they built a marketing campaign to convince Americans to pay for water.[20]
Nestlé acquired Perrier in 1992 for $2.6B.[21] At that time, Perrier had issued a recall due to reports of benzene in the bottled water and also faced a fine in New York for false advertising.[22] Perrier was apparently a culture fit for Nestlé.
By 2016, bottled water sales had surpassed soda as the largest U.S. beverage category, with Americans consuming 12.8B gallons that year.[23] In addition to seizing public waters, Nestlé’s manufacturing process uses far more water than the output provides (only about 70%). Meanwhile, Nestlé also dumps a significant amount of now polluted water back into water basins and aquifers.[24]
While other companies moved their operations out of drought-ridden California, Nestlé’s CEO said he would pump more out of the San Bernardino National Forest if he could. Nobody actually knows how much Nestlé extracts from this source—which it has been doing without a permit since 1988—paying only $524 a year to bypass the requirement.[25] In 2021, California’s Water Resources Control Board asked Nestlé to stop the unauthorized water diversions after a probe revealed multiple violations and depleted resources.[26]
Nestlé has shown no shame or contrition for any of this. In fact, former Nestlé chief executive and chairman Peter Brabeck called water a “grocery product” that should “have a market value.” He later amended that, arguing water can be a human right, but only 25 liters a day.[27] Today, Nestlé’s website continues to argue that “non-essential” use of water is not a human right and should “carry a cost.”[28]
Slavery-made
Nestlé’s unlawful business practices are not limited to fatally unethical marketing. Nestlé has also been implicated in child labor.
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that more than 1.5 million children work in the cocoa industry in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, which produce 60% of the world’s annual cocoa harvest. More than 40% of those children are exposed to dangerous working conditions, including chemical usage, burning fields, swinging machetes, and heavy lifting—activities that international authorities consider the “worst forms of child labor.”[29]
Nestlé child laborer in the Ivory Coast. [Source: change.org]
In Nestlé USA v. Doe (2021), former child slaves who were trafficked into Côte d’Ivoire to work on cocoa farms filed suit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against Nestlé USA.[30]They accused the corporation of aiding and abetting the illegal enslavement of thousands of children on cocoa farms in Nestlé’s supply chains.[31]
Nestlé USA effectively controls much of the cocoa production in the Ivory Coast and operates “with the unilateral goal of finding the cheapest source of cocoa in the Ivory Coast,” resulting in a “system built on child slavery to depress labor costs.”[32] Nestlé knowingly profited from the illegal work of children and Nestlé’s contracted suppliers were able to provide lower prices than if they had employed adult workers with proper protective equipment.[33]
In Nestlé’s Petition for Certiorari, Nestlé’s lawyers did not deny there was slavery in its supply chain but instead argued, among other things, that corporations cannot be liable for violations of customary international law or human rights violations.[34] Nestlé lawyers extensively referenced the Nuremberg Trials in their argument for impunity, desperately pleading that even the corporation that supplied Zyklon B gas, which the Nazis used to kill millions, was not convicted during that trial.[35]
During oral arguments, the U.S. Justice Department, on behalf of the U.S. government, supported Nestlé. Deputy Solicitor General Curtis E. Gannon contended that a new act of Congress would be needed to create liability for domestic corporations under the ATS (liability which the lawyer described as corporations being “discriminated against”).[36]Gannon, on behalf of the United States, said the case against Nestlé alleging child slavery could “threaten foreign affairs interests” for the U.S. government.[37]
Upon inquiry from Chief Justice John Roberts as to whether the U.S. government believes a corporation could ever be liable for setting up a U.S. corporation and sending U.S. employees to the Ivory Coast for the express purpose of setting up a cocoa farm that uses child slavery, Gannon responded, “Well, I think that it—it depends on how much conduct happens in the United States and how much conduct happens overseas.” [38]
Deputy Solicitor General Curtis Gannon, the U.S. government’s lawyer, famously authored the Justice Department memorandum approving President Trump’s “Muslim Ban” (Executive Order 13769) in 2017, when he was Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Before joining the Justice Department, Gannon worked at the infamous union-busting firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.[39]
Nestlé USA v. Doe was dismissed in favor of Nestlé.
The decision was the latest in a series of U.S. rulings imposing strict limits on lawsuits brought in federal court based on human rights abuses abroad.[40] To make matters worse, which is only possible with the depravity of a corporation like Nestlé, the company was also alleged to have orchestrated a chocolate price-fixing conspiracy, violating antitrust laws in the sales of its products manufactured with child slave labor.[41]
Nestlé’s human slavery supply chain is not exclusive to chocolate. In 2020, a documentary exposed Nespresso’s supply chain use of child labor on Guatemalan farms.[42] The documentary visited seven farms linked to Nespresso and found children working eight hours a day, six days a week, and who looked as young as eight years old.[43]
Earlier, investigations also found migrants were lured by false promises to work in Thailand’s seafood sector, then kept in debt bondage and degrading conditions. When workers died on the job, it said the bodies were simply “thrown into the water.” In 2014, Nestlé confirmed the forced labor was part of its supply chain in Thailand.[44]
Waste… All the Way Down
Nestlé’s misconduct also includes degradation of the environment and a direct role in causing the current climate crisis.
Nestlé’s plastic packaging is produced from plastic resin created by petrochemical companies like Exxon, Total, Aramco and Shell. The process of manufacturing plastic, as well as the extraction of the raw materials for it, releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, approximately 108M metric tons per year.[45]
Plastic also enters into the product. Concentrations of microplastic in bottles of Nestlé Pure Life water were as high as 10,000 pieces of plastic per liter of water, the highest of any brand tested.[46] Some of the microplastics the researchers found in Nestlé’s water included polypropylene, nylon, and polyethylene terephthalate.[47] Nestlé was sued in 2018 over the high levels of microplastics, with plaintiffs alleging Nestlé “intentionally, negligently and recklessly concealed and omitted the truth” about the plastic contamination.[48]
Nestlé released a statement saying that it had “ambitions” for its packaging to be 100% recyclable or reusable by 2025. However, environmental groups and other critics pointed out that Nestlé had not released clear targets or a timeline to accompany its ambitions, nor made additional efforts to help facilitate recycling by consumers. [49] Greenpeace released a statement saying,
“Nestlé’s statement on plastic packaging includes more of the same greenwashing baby steps to tackle a crisis it helped to create. It will not actually move the needle toward the reduction of single-use plastics in a meaningful way, and sets an incredibly low standard as the largest food and beverage company in the world.”[50]
In the organization “Break Free From Plastic”’s 2020 report, Nestlé was named one of the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row.[51] Nestlé even admitted that most of its bottles are not recycled, even while Nestlé concurrently flooded the market with misleading advertisements claiming the opposite. Only about 31% of plastic bottles end up getting recycled, creating millions of tons of garbage every year, much of which ends up in landfills or the ocean.[52]
A single plastic bottle can take anywhere from 450 to 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill.[53]
After so much controversy, Nestlé largely divested from its North American water-bottling hustle, selling most of the business in 2021.[54] While Nestlé is no longer the face of the U.S. bottled water problem, it is still responsible for the damage to the environment and the terrible systems it put in place.
Nestlé was also caught purchasing palm oil from mills with reckless means of production, including chopping down millions of hectares of forests and removing Indigenous peoples from their lands.[55] In 2010, Greenpeace campaigned for Nestlé to end deforestation in its supply chain.
Nestlé promised to do so by 2015, but in 2017 Nestlé noted 47% of its palm oil still came from problematic plantations.[56] Then in 2019, Nestlé was also accused of sourcing palm oil from producers linked to the forest fires in Indonesia.[57] A recent Global Witness report documented the still ongoing harm, terror and impoverishment of communities due to corporate pursuit of palm oil, including by Nestlé.[58] Rest assured, Nestlé still claims to be “working hard” on the issue.[59]
Further, a former Nespresso executive warned in 2016 that Nespresso pods create extensive waste. Made from a combination of plastics and aluminum, the coffee pods are not biodegradable. It can take between 150 to 500 years for the aluminum and plastic capsules to break down in a landfill. In order to recycle the pods, the aluminum capsules have to be shredded, the coffee has to be taken away with water, the varnish has to be burned and the aluminum has to be re-smelted.[60]
Nespresso capsules are not pure aluminum due to Nestlé’s intellectual property and anti-competitive interests: The capsules contain silicon as part of a patent which was used to prevent rivals from making their own pods that could work in Nespresso machines.[61] As of 2019, 70% of Nespresso pods were assumed to be headed to landfills.[62]
L’Oréal has its own shameful history, starting with the company’s founder, known Nazi sympathizer Eugène Schueller.[63]
L’Oréal faced protests and boycotts due to testing cosmetics on animals,[64] suspected use of child labor to obtain mica for cosmetics,[65] deceptive advertising,[66]and high levels of lead in lipstick products.[67]
L’Oréal also allegedly uses carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in its beauty products, including: formaldehyde, PFOAs, carbon black, titanium dioxide, BHA and others.[68] L’Oréal is currently facing numerous lawsuits over PFAS contents in its beauty products.[69]. [Source: whathappensinthechairstaysinthechair.blogspot.com]
Nestlé’s food products have also been found to contain not just toxic chemicals, but also low-quality filler products, including a “horsemeat” scandal in one of its pasta brands in 2013.[70]
A Friend of Paramilitaries
Nestlé apparently does not care who it harms with its supply chain or marketing, so why would labor rights be any different?
In the U.S., the National Labor Relations Board’s public database shows 169 Unfair Labor Practice charges filed against Nestlé (though there may be more under the names of other subsidiaries).[71]
In one recent case, the NLRB found against Nestlé USA in 2020, issuing an order against the corporation for unfair labor practices at a Wisconsin facility that produces DiGiorno pizza.[72]
The NLRB ordered Nestlé USA to cease and desist from, among other things: coercively interrogating employees about their protected concerted activities, and suspending or discharging employees because they engage in protected concerted activities.” [73] The Board ordered Nestlé to post a notice to employees admitting it violated federal labor laws and promising to follow federal labor laws going forward. [74]
The year before, a report by AFL-CIO alleged that Nestlé had been involved in several workers’ rights abuses, that Nestlé USA management had continually interfered with workers’ organizing rights, and Nestlé was involved in anti-union campaigning.[75]
Nestlé’s union busting is deadly in South America. A Colombian trade unionist, Luciano Romero, campaigned for the rights of workers at Nestlé’s factory in Colombia for years, including documenting violations of human rights at the factory. Before his murder, Romero was repeatedly falsely branded as a guerrilla fighter by the local representatives of Nestlé. He was also accused, without grounds, of being responsible for a bombing on the factory premises in 1999. In Colombia, a defamation of this kind can effectively amount to a death sentence.[76]
In September 2005, Luciano Romero was stabbed 50 times in a murder by paramilitaries.[77]
In 2006, Nestlé and the paramilitary members were sued for the murder of Romero, as the company had a long-standing relationship with the paramilitary forces and Romero’s widow alleged the murder was in retaliation for his blowing the whistle on Nestlé’s use of expired milk in its popular Milo brand drink.[78]
In 2007, Romero’s killers were convicted and, while passing sentence, the judge also ordered an investigation into the role of management at the Nestlé subsidiary where Romero worked.[79] A criminal complaint was filed against Nestlé in Swiss courts in 2012, but then dismissed in 2013 due to the statute of limitations having expired.[80] The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights then submitted a complaint calling on the European Court of Human Rights to examine the judiciary that dismissed the complaint, which was also promptly dismissed.[81]
In 2012, a flyer was left at the home of Rafael Esquivel, another Nestlé labor union leader, with a death threat stating “you will have to be exterminated, you have until first December to disappear from Valle, otherwise you will see blood running on second December.”[82] In 2013, more death threats were sent to dozens of trade union members and human rights defenders, including other members of a Nestlé labor union.[83]
In 2013, the same trade union Romero had worked with accused Nestlé of ordering the murder of Oscar López Trevino, who had worked for the company for 25 years. Trevino was shot and killed by paramilitaries that year, following the initiation of a hunger strike campaign by workers against Nestlé over unfulfilled labor agreements.[84]
Today, Nestlé has a page on its website entitled “Does Nestlé allow labor unions?” which Nestlé answers: “Nestlé supports collective dialogue and negotiations with employee unions…wherever local legislation applies…Nestlé suppliers should allow Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining, unless government policies or other norms prevent them from doing so.”
Nestlé’s own website says it does not believe suppliers need to allow for human rights if it is contrary to local “norms.”[85]
Spying on Critics
Nestlé is just as bad with its critics. In 2003, Nestlé used a private security company to infiltrate the anti-globalization group ATTAC. Nestlé planted a spy who joined ATTAC’s editorial board and monitored ATTAC’s research and drafting of a book criticizing Nestlé’s practices that was published in 2004 (“Attac Contre L’Empire Nestlé”).[86] The spy even attended workgroup meetings at members’ homes.[87]
The spy was employed by a company called Securitas and run by a former MI6 officer working for Nestlé. ATTAC took legal action over the breach and expressed concern that trade unionists at Nestlé sites in Colombia who have been targeted by paramilitaries may have been put in danger.[88] Nestlé was found liable for the spying and a Swiss court ordered Nestlé and its security company to pay compensation .[89]
Just this year, Nestlé was caught offering “quid pro quos” to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an influential U.S. policy group.[90] Nestlé was identified as a top “contributor,” sending the policy group hundreds of thousands of dollars.[91]
Boycott Nestlé poster from 1978. [Source: zmscience.com]
Taking Until There Is Nothing Left
There appears to be no line that Nestlé is unwilling to cross, with a key example being Ethiopia.
Following 30 years of wars and famines, the people of Ethiopia were suffering terribly in the 1990s.[92] Nestlé acquired a company whose subsidiary was nationalized by the Ethiopian government in 1975 (decades prior) and then sold in 1998.[93]
In 2001, despite the struggles in Ethiopia, Nestlé filed a claim for $6 million from the Ethiopian government, “as a matter of principle.”[94] $6 million is only 0.01% of Nestléʼs annual sales, but would be a devastating loss to an already struggling country.[95] Nestlé eventually reduced the request to $1.5M following public outrage.[96]
Conclusion
Nestlé’s rebuttal to most accusations of misconduct is essentially to claim it is an ethical, caring and child-friendly teddy-bear of a transnational corporation which just does not know what goes on in its supply chain and always wants to do better, but is constantly harassed by hateful critics. When caught red-handed, Nestlé is then willing to point to IG Farben and use the legal precedent from the Holocaust to argue why it should be granted impunity for egregious human rights abuses.
Since 2000, only considering the United States, Nestlé and its subsidiaries were cited for more than a hundred legal violations, facing $27 million in fines.[97] One must ask: Is all of this misconduct and devastation contributing to anything actually beneficial to society? No. Nestlé, a food company, has recently acknowledged that more than 60% of its food and drink products do not meet a “recognized definition of health” and that some products “will never be healthy.”[98] Nestlé does not even sell food with nutritional value. Nestlé sells terrible ideas and filler, produced through human rights violations, but which drive billions in profit for the soulless corporation.
However, as terrible as Nestlé is, it is only one head of the corporate hydra. There are many others. We can talk about protests and boycotts—we can write exposés and file lawsuits—but this only attempts to hold the line. To actually stop the downward spiral, we must abolish the atrocity of capitalism and globalization that is the multinational corporation.
While claiming corporations have the rights of a human, yet also requiring these corporations to only prioritize shareholder profit and pleasure, we have created a demented Dionysian monster that happily views fiscal opportunity in the destruction of humanity.
We cannot sit back and hope the United States will intervene for the benefit of the common good. When the democratically elected government of Guatemala decided to impose obligations on real estate owned by the United Fruit Company, the U.S. violently overthrew that government. When Chile elected a socialist president who wanted to nationalize copper mines, that democratic government was destroyed by the U.S. and replaced with a dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.[99] The U.S. has a long history of siding with corporate interests at all costs.
Diego Rivera’s famous painting “Glorious Victory” about United Fruit and the 1954 coup in Guatemala, hanging in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. [Source: pinterest.com]
With Nestlé, the United States has already worked to fight lawsuits and dismiss charges attempting to hold Nestlé accountable for horrendous human rights violations. The U.S. is apparently happy to race to the bottom, hand-in-hand with these monstrous corporations. The corporation and the state have already become one institution, with extensive centralized economic power, and increasingly destructive behavior.
We need a global awakening and revolution by the people. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said in 1809: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
We are not free and together we are our only hope to stop this downward spiral of environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
Notes
“The Case Against Nestlé,” Lakota People’s Law Project, June 14, 2018, https://lakotalaw.org/news/2018-06-13/the-case-against-Nestlé ↑
Joanna Moorhead, “Milking It,” The Guardian, May 15, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/may/15/medicineandhealth.lifeandhealth ↑
Chris Zhang, “Where Is China’s Corruption Crackdown,” The Diplomat, July 21, 2017, https://thediplomat.com/2017/07/where-is-chinas-corruption-crackdown/ ↑
Perkins, “The Fight to stop Nestlé from taking America’s water to sell in plastic bottles.” ↑
Nestlé, “Does Peter Brabeck-Letmathe believe that water is a human right?” https://www.Nestlé.com/ask-Nestlé/human-rights/answers/Nestlé-chairman-peter-brabeck-letmathe-believes-water-is-a-human-right ↑
“U.S. Supreme Court Holds Claims Against U.S. Corporations for Aiding and Abetting Child Slavery Impermissibly Extraterritorial, Declines to Resolve Domestic Corporate Liability,” American Journal of International Law, 2021, Vol. 115 Issue 4, pp. 739-44. ↑
“Nestlé USA v. Doe,” Oyez, 2020, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2020/19-416 ↑
Oliver Balch, “Mars, Nestlé and Hershey to face child slavery lawsuit in US.” ↑
Nestlé USA v. Doe, On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (2015). ↑
Peter Whoriskey, “Supreme Court weighs child-slavery case against Nestlé USA, Cargill,” TheWashington Post, December 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/01/cocoa-supreme-court-child-labor/; Nestlé USA v. Doe, On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (2015). ↑
Nestlé USA v. Doe, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 19-416, Oral Arguments, December 1, 2020, https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2020/19-416_dc8f.pdf ↑
Nestlé USA v. Doe, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 19-416, Oral Arguments, December 1, 2020. ↑
Nestlé USA v. Doe, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 19-416, Oral Arguments, December 1, 2020. ↑
Martin Macias, Jr., “Nestle’s ‘Pure Life’ Water Filled With Plastic, Class Says,” Courthouse News, April 13, 2018, https://www.courthousenews.com/nestles-pure-life-water-filled-with-plastic-class-says/ ↑
Macias, “Nestle’s ‘Pure Life’ Water Filled with Plastic, Class Says.” ↑
Perry Wheeler, “Nestlé misses the mark with statement on tackling its single-use plastics problem,” Greenpeace, April 10, 2018, https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/nestle-aiming-at-100-recyclable-or-reusable-packaging-by-2025/ ↑
Break Free From Plastic, “Branded: Global Audit Report.” ↑
Zoe Ferguson and Margot O’Neill, “Former Nespresso boss warns coffee pods are killing environment,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), August 24, 2016. ↑
Carriedo, A., Pinsky, I., Crosbie, E., Ruskin, G., & Mialon, M., “The corporate capture of the nutrition profession in the USA: the case of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics,” Public Health Nutrition, 25(12), 2022, 3568-3582. doi:10.1017/S1368980022001835 ↑
The White House announced Friday that it would send long-range missiles capable of striking nearly 100 miles into Russian territory to Ukraine, in one of the most significant escalations of US involvement in the war with Russia to date.
Following Washington’s tradition of the “Friday afternoon news dump,” the announcement was timed so as to garner as little public attention as possible.
The pliant American media supported the Biden administration’s goal of keeping the American public from understanding the consequences of this action. This massive escalation of the war against Russia received effectively no media coverage. It was not featured on the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Washington Post, and was not reported on the evening network news shows.
The weapons system, known as the ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb, is a rocket-launched maneuverable glide bomb with double the range of the HIMARS missiles Washington has already provided.
Airmen with the 3rd Munitions Squadron assemble a rack of inert small diameter bombs during readiness training at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, Feb. 9, 2018. The small diameter bomb is a precise and accurate weapon that allows the the F-22 Raptor to deliver decisive air power. (U.S. Air Force photo by Alejandro Peña)
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The announcement marks a repudiation of Biden’s pledge in May that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders,” and his declaration that “We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia.”
The announcement is the latest in a whirlwind escalation of US involvement in the war over the past week. On January 26, the White House declared that it would send 31 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine, as part of a coalition of NATO countries sending over 120 main battle tanks in the first “wave.”
No sooner was this announcement made than the White House revealed that it was in discussions to send F-16 fighters to Ukraine, against the backdrop of demands by Democratic and Republican politicians and dominant sections of the US media to send the aircraft.
The expected announcement of the new long-range weapons comes as press reports indicate that the Biden administration is discussing openly endorsing a Ukrainian assault on the predominantly Russian-speaking peninsula of Crimea, which Russia has claimed as its territory since 2014.
While the Biden administration endorsed the Zelensky government’s Crimean Platform back in 2021, which entails the “retaking of Crimea,” since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Washington had toned down its explicit endorsement for the official war aim of the Zelensky government in order to hide the massively escalatory character of its involvement in the war.
Now, however, the New York Times reports, “(T)he Biden administration is finally starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”
The Times writes that “the Biden administration is considering what would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula.”
In an article for the think tank magazine Foreign Affairs, entitled “What Ukraine Needs to Liberate Crimea,” United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman declared, “Washington should give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively.” Vindman is the former director for European affairs for the US National Security Council.
In the article, Vindman explained how a NATO-backed Ukrainian offensive against Crimea would proceed:
The first step would be to pin down Russia’s forces in the Kherson and Luhansk regions and in the northern part of Donetsk. Next, Ukraine would free the remainder of Zaporizhzhia Province and push through southern Donetsk to reach the Sea of Azov, severing Russia’s land bridge to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces would also need to destroy the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean Peninsula and allows Moscow to resupply its troops by road and rail.
What none of the planners of this offensive admit, however, is that its implementation will require a massive expansion of NATO involvement in the war, including not only the deployment of advanced weapons systems, but the direct deployment of NATO troops.
Last week, explaining the deployment of the M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the WSWS outlined how such a scenario could unfold:
The significance of Biden’s announcement lies less in the battlefield impact of the tanks than in the consequences of deploying them. The turbine-driven Abrams tanks will require a massive logistical network inside Ukraine, involving large numbers of specialist American contractors. Attacks on these supply networks and American personnel servicing the tanks will then be used to press for implementation of a “no-fly zone” and the deployment of US and NATO troops to Ukraine.
Just one week after these words were written, the initial stages of this scenario are already being put into place.
On Friday, Politico reported that “A group of former military officers and private donors is raising money to send Western mechanics close to the Ukrainian frontlines, where they will repair battle-damaged donated weapons and vehicles that have been flooding into the country.”
The report continued, “The plan is to find 100 to 200 experienced contractors who would travel to Ukraine and embed themselves with small units near the front lines. Under the project, called Trident Support, those contractors would in turn teach the Ukrainian troops how to fix their equipment on the fly.”
The claim that this initiative is being led by “retired” officers is merely a fraudulent pretense distancing the Biden administration from this deployment. While the deployment of the contractors may be “voluntary,” threats to the safety of the hundreds of American personnel on the front lines maintaining American vehicles could serve just as well as a pretext for US escalation of the war.
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There is a fierce war waging in Ukraine. A war instigated by NATO, as is well known. Nonetheless, a serious and deadly war in which once more the US of A, too cowardly to confront Russia’s military directly, has chosen a proxy partner, the Ukraine whose population is devastated and their infrastructure as well as their lives destroyed.
And to be clear, the infrastructure destruction and killing of Ukraine’s own people was largely done by the Ukraine military, so they may claim Russia for the deaths and devastation. This is well known to western media. But they do not report on it, to the contrary, they support Zelenskyy’s lies.
The colossal corporate “financial cult – some call it the Deep State – has a specific agenda which is not new, fracture and destroy Russia. Before it was destroying the Soviet Union because Russia is by far the world’s largest and resources richest country on the planet.
Their planned One World Order cannot tolerate the forces of Russia and / or China as independent sovereign nations. And much less so, as an ever-stronger alliance, what they have become during the past decade or so. The diabolical OWO, they believe, will also be much more efficient in running the worldly universe with a massively reduced population.
This war, while dead serious, is largely used by the west to deviate people’s attention worldwide from the diabolical plan being prepared for execution behind the black curtains – see below.
Let’s start with the delivery of German Leopards to Ukraine. What was made to believe a “hard” decision for Chancellor Scholz was, of course, ordered by Washington a couple of weeks ago: deliver 14 German made Leopard II tanks to Ukraine to fight Russia on the ground.
These tanks will have to be delivered by road and rail, most likely through Poland. Any clear-thinking mind would wonder – how stupid! As soon as they are on Ukraine territory, they will be wiped out by Russian precision missiles. And that before Zelenskyy could even start thinking where to begin using them.
Indeed, in a recent interview (video 51 min) with General Douglas MacGregor on the overall interesting topic, “Russia’s Deliberate and Methodical Conquest of Ukraine”, the General explains at 00:25:00 how Russia will destroy the arriving tanks as soon as they enter Ukraine territory. Russia has high-technology precision missiles – so, no problem.
However, according to General MacGregor, Russia will NOT do anything while the tanks are in transit through Poland or any other country. See full video below.
At the same time, Joe Biden promised to deliver 31 M1 Abrams tanks, say, within the next 6 to 8 weeks – see this.
Notwithstanding this generosity, according to CNN, Western allies envisage supplying altogether 321 tanks to Ukraine within the coming few months. See this.
The Russian army better stock up on precision missiles.
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But now comes the little talked-about hammer and wanted confusion. Shortly after Chancellor Scholz’s “decision” on the 12 Leopards II, the German Ministry of Defense decided to replace the latest technology Leopard II by the older and mostly obsolete Leopard I. According to The Guardian, Germany would deliver a “package” of 29 largely discarded Leopard I. See this.
Ammunition might be a problem because they were not sure whether the shells for the Two model would also be adequate for the One model. What a nonsensical problem being highlighted by the western media! For what? More confusion? More mind-trickery? It’s so obvious that the last deep-sleeper must wake up.
Contradicting or completing The Guardian, Politico reports Germany will send 88 obsolete Leopard I tanks to Ukraine after “repairing” them for about 100 million euros… see this.
The tank story becomes ever more confusing. On purpose, of course.
Deviating people’s attention from more important things because, make no mistake, these tanks will be destroyed almost instantly as soon as they enter the Ukraine.
Of course, Germany knows that any tanks arriving by land on the territory of Ukraine will be wiped out. That’s probably the reason why they decided shipping the outdated Leopard I’s. It is a cheap way of demolishing and getting rid of them on foreign territory.
In the meantime, the French Ministry of Defense sends signals that President Macron “is not ruling out” “the idea of sending fighter jets to Ukraine”, as Kiev ramps up its campaign to pressure the West into donating combat aircraft to its military. See this.
So, what’s the story? Will French deliver fighter jets or not? And if they do, how long will they be in the air before being “neutralized” by the Russian Air Force?
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The “Chinese Spy Balloon”
Seemingly unrelated with a huge brouhaha, the US shoots down an alleged Chinese spy balloon which enters the US from the Pacific on the West Coast, crosses the entire US of A from west to east then in North Carolina entering the Atlantic. That’s when it’s finally safe to shoot the balloon down. And this with a fighter jet-launched precision missile under jeering of spectators.
Never mind, whether it was really a Chinese spy balloon or not. We may never know the truth. Because whatever may be the official version may be the biggest lie.
As former CIA Director, William J. Casey, said, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
Nothing is coincidence, and everything is connected.
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Now you may ask yourself, what is this all about?
A Chinese spy balloon over the US of A; maybe French fighter jets for Ukraine, for sure lots-of-lots-of tanks for Ukraine. Where is the logic?
A deviation game for mind-controlling people by BS, à la Tavistock, while in the deep dark back the real diabolical Reset / Agenda 2030 is being advanced without being noticed?
For example, based on a Press Conference journalist Katherine Watt attended on 24 January 2023, she reveals how the US military has subcontracted to the banksters to carry out a ‘global genocide” (see video below)
She sets out how long this has been going on, and all the steps involved up to the present moment.
She says this is not over – this is only the beginning. But she concludes they will not achieve their criminal objectives as western people and state and country legislators are waking up.
The press conference discussed the ongoing emergency use rollout of bioweapons being marketed as Covid vaccines.
Katherine discussed the legal framework for which this is happening.
She describes the unholy alliance between WHO, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, also called the Central Bank of all Central Banks, and the US Department of Defense (DOD); their intent on undermining nations and people’s sovereignty.
Public Health worldwide has been militarized, creating “Kill Zones” for Global Depopulation and Control.
See full video (16 min).
The January 24, 2023 Press Conference seems to indicate that given the ever faster evolving people’s alertness, the Reset and Agenda 2030 plans are being accelerated.
The bulldozer rolls on despite all the awakening. Depopulation must advance. At the same time, new western legislation in the US and European countries are introduced, pressing their sovereignty as nations and for the people.
The race between the tyranny of globalists and the newly perceived and implemented national autonomies and people’s sovereignties, will be won by the People for the People.
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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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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***
GR Editor’s Note
Is this initiative to undermine Turkey’s tourism industry in any way related to the fact that Turkey, which is a “NATO heavyweight” is also a firm ally of the Russian Federation, who is “sleeping with the enemy”. Sounds contradictory.
Turkey has opted in favor of Russia’s “State of the Art” S-400. That acquisition of Russian military technology is part of a concurrent military cooperation agreement as well an alliance between Turkey and Russia established in the immediate aftermath of the failed July 2016 US sponsored coup d’Etat directed against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Is the destabilization of the tourist industry a preamble to US interference in Turkey’s May elections?
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, February 6, 2023
The outrage was prompted after Washington and eight European countries issued travel warnings over possible terror attacks in Turkey. The US and its western allies have attempted to connect a recent Quran burning in Sweden with travel danger inside Turkey. Muslim countries worldwide have denounced the burning as hate speech, not free speech, but this has no apparent connection to travel safety issues inside Turkey.
The US travel warning is tantamount to a declaration of economic war on Turkey who is in an economic downturn of its tourism sector, which was 11 % of the GDP in 2019, representing $78.2 billion, and rose to $17.95 billion in the third quarter of 2022, of which 85.7 percent came from foreign visitors. In 2018, tourism directly accounted for 7.7% of total employment in Turkey.
“Every American ambassador wonders how they can hurt Turkey. This has been one of Turkey’s greatest misfortunes over the years. It gathers other ambassadors and tries to give them advice. They are doing the same thing in Europe, the American embassy is running Europe,” said Soylu.
Soylu has criticized the US and blames Washington for the 2016 Turkish regime change attempt, and has accused the US of ruling Europe. In foreign policies, the EU follows US directives implicitly.
“I’m being very clear. I very well know how you would like to create strife in Turkey. Take your grinning face off from Turkey,” said Soylu.
Ankara warned its citizens abroad to be aware of possible anti-Islamic attacks in the US and Europe following the burning of the Quran in Sweden. Turkey later summoned the nine ambassadors, including Flake, for talks over the warnings.
Soylu condemned the European consulate closures in Turkey as an attempt to meddle in campaigning for Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for May 14.
Soylu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have suggested that the western states had issued the security warnings in order to pressure Turkey to tone down its criticism of the Quran burning and resolve the NATO dispute in which Erdogan has voiced opposition to Sweden joining the bloc.
After a right-wing Swedish Radical Christian burned the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, Erdogan threatened that he would never consent to Swedish accession.
Sweden previously has refused to extradite the 120 terrorists Turkey has demanded, and the US Senate has made it clear that if Turkey does not approve Swedish accession, arms sales to Turkey, specifically F-16s, will not be authorized.
Turkish elections
Turkish elections are scheduled for May 14, and will be the toughest reelection fight of Erdogan’s career, and he and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) may lose the election.
The six-party opposition coalition, composed of two larger and four smaller parties, has managed to present a unified front. The opposition to Erdogan support the restoration of Turkey’s parliamentary system and the curtailment of presidential powers.
Erdogan’s fear has grown so strong that he used the courts to ban a leading potential opposition candidate, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, from running for the CHP. However, polls suggest that Ankara’s mayor, Mansur Yavas, could beat Erdogan.
The state has more overtly targeted some political parties, especially the pro-Kurdish, People’s Democracy Party (HDP). This left-leaning party was not invited into the opposition coalition, but HDP supporters will vote against Erdogan.
Biden supports opposition to Erdogan
US President Joe Biden hosted an emergency meeting on Nov. 16 in Bali, Indonesia, with NATO and EU leaders to discuss a response to a missile blast in Poland, but Turkey was not invited. The meeting was held during the Group of 20 summit, and Turkey was present, but Biden snubbed them from the emergency meeting.
Turkey has been a full-fledged member of North Atlantic Treaty Organization since 1952, commands its second-largest military and has protected the southern flank of the alliance for 70 years.
Erdogan was again snubbed by Biden in December 2021 at the US hosted virtual ‘Summit for Democracy’. In a New York Times interview published in 2020, the then candidate Biden called Erdogan an “autocrat.”
“What I think we should be doing is taking a very different approach to him now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership,” Biden said.
“He has to pay a price,” Biden said, adding that Washington should embolden Turkish opposition leaders “to be able to take on and defeat Erdogan. Not by a coup, not by a coup, but by the electoral process.”
Turkey recognized a clear attack by Biden using election meddling as a tool.
The main opposition CHP party quickly distanced themselves from Biden’s remarks of election meddling, calling for “respect for the sovereignty of Turkey”.
Turkey’s six-party opposition will select its candidate to run against Erdogan on February 13, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said.
Obama and Erdogan
When President Obama conceived of his attack in Syria for regime change in 2011, using Radical Islamic terrorists as his foot soldiers, he called upon Erdogan to play a crucial role. Turkey hosted the CIA office which ran the Timber Sycamore program which trained and provided weapons for the Free Syrian Army. Erdogan also took in over 3 million Syria refugees fleeing the violence. Erdogan authorized his security forces to transport weapons to the terrorists in Syria.
Erdogan was a follower of the Muslim Brotherhood who provided the political ideology for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), who were terrorists attacking unarmed civilians, but were reported by the US and western media as ‘rebels’.
However, the FSA disbanded due to lack of public support in Syria, and Al Qaeda stepped in the take its place, and finally ISIS emerged as the toughest terrorist group.
In 2017, President Trump cut off the CIA program in Turkey, and supporting of the Al Qaeda branch in Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was left to Erdogan. The US-NATO attack on Syria failed to produce regime change, but the country was partly destroyed in the process. Now, Erdogan proposes a reset in relations with Damascus, and is on track to establish business and diplomatic ties once more.
The US State Department has issued warnings and threats to Erdogan if he follows through on his plan to have a neighborly relationship with Syria. Erdogan needs to make peace with Syria to return the 3.6 million Syrian refugees back home, and revive exports to Syria which will be a huge boost to the Turkish economy. If he accomplishes this soon, he has a good chance at winning reelection in May.
Kurds-PKK-YPG
A deadly terrorist bombing of a shopping district in Istanbul last November was carried out by a Syrian Kurd. The message was directed at Erdogan: don’t attack the YPG in north east Syria, or else. Those Kurds are supported by the US military illegally occupying parts of Syria.
The US partnered with the YPG to fight the ISIS, and both Erdogan and the opposition view that as a betrayal of a fellow NATO member, and US ally. The YPG is directly linked with the PKK, an internationally designated terrorist organization and a threat to Turkey’s national security.
Erdogan has threatened a new military operation in Syria to disarm the YPG regardless of their US partnership. The Syrian special enjoy under Trump, James Jeffrey, advised the Kurds to repair their relationship with Damascus, as the US was not going to fight any war to defend them. The Kurd’s usefulness to the US was over. Recently, the Turkish air force has been bombing them, with shells falling a few hundred feet from US personnel stationed there.
Erdogan has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for a green light to attack the Kurds in Syria, but was cautioned against it. However, the time might be ripe for a Turkish attack on the Kurds, which would disarm them and probably would lead to a withdrawal of the 200 American troops.
Turkey removed M4 outpost
On February 2, Turkish troops in Syria evacuated a military outpost near the M4 highway that connects the cities of Aleppo and Latakia. The former Al Qaeda branch in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), occupy Idlib, the last terrorist controlled area in Syria.
Turkey had been defending the HTS from attacks from Syrian Arab Army, and the Russian military. However, Erdogan has decided to drop his support of the armed opposition as he repairs his relationship with Syria.
On January 31, Ankara informed the HTS leadership of its plan to conduct patrols on the HTS-controlled portion of the M4 (Aleppo-Latakia) road, which “may be followed by joint patrols with Russia, and eventually with Syria.”
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Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
“Never Again Is Now Global,” a five-part docuseries highlighting the parallels between Nazi Germany and global pandemic policies.
Each one-hour episode focuses on recent testimonies by Holocaust survivors and their descendants who discuss comparisons between the early repressive stages under the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust and global COVID-19 policies.
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Question: How does one best explain the brutal crackdown on COVID-19 protesters worldwide for the sake of Public Health™ while, at the same time, Black Lives Matter was permitted to run hog-wild on America’s streets?
The term anarcho-tyranny, on its face, is an oxymoron, a glaring contradiction. Indeed, it’s the biggest possible contradiction of political system descriptors, as anarchy and tyranny occupy diametrically opposite ends of the government force continuum.
So it’s obvious nonsense, right? Well, if we lived in a politically coherent environment, governed by rule of law, it would be. But in a Kafkaesque world of arbitrary exercise of government power, it becomes much more descriptive.
Samuel Francis first coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” in a 1994 essay titled Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A., summarized as:
“A concept where the state is more interested in controlling citizens so that they don’t oppose managerial class, rather than tending to real criminals. Laws are argued to be enforced selectively depending on what is beneficial to the ruling elite.”
It essentially describes a situation in which the government has the necessary tools and capabilities to wield oppressive power over its subjects, and does so to further its own interests.
On the other hand, the government actors themselves — and, importantly, their footsoldiers (like Antifa and BLM in the modern American context) — act with impunity, immune from legal consequences.
Exhibit A: the recent hullabaloo over classified documents. When Trump was discovered to have stashed them in his private residence, the full weight of the state fell upon his estate in the dead of night.
“Why [would] anyone be that irresponsible?” an exasperated Biden quipped, his sentiments echoed over and over and over in corporate media.
When Biden, the favored son of the corporate state, committed essentially the same offense, no such law enforcement raid commenced, and the corporate press ran to his defense.
There is no substantial difference between the cases. Both men were sheltering classified documents that they were not authorized to possess on private property. But they received different treatment based on the actor, not the actions.
Moving back a little further in recent political history, let’s look at the COVID lockdowns.
They were brutally enforced in the US against all manner of public gatherings – including church ceremonies – until the death of George Floyd. Suddenly, all restrictions went out the window as BLM ravaged cities from coast to coast with carte blanche endorsement by the state.
Suddenly, the BLM rioters became heroes “braving” the coronavirus risk, rather than domestic terrorists targeting grandmothers for euthanization.
There is obviously no legitimate public health rationale to allow street riots involving thousands of people in close quarters while California beaches remain closed and patrolled by agents of the state.
Contradiction is the point, because there are contradictory legal standards of behavior, depending on whether the actor is favored by the political establishment.
Under anarcho-tyranny, inconsistency in the application of the law is the feature, not the bug. And, as Francis further explains, it’s a tool to propagate a never-ending state of “permanent emergency”:
“Under anarcho-tyranny, the state creates a problem, declares an emergency or crisis – the drug war, the carjacking crisis, Islamic fundamentalism – and then exploits that problem as an instrument by which it continues to enhance its power, though neither the fake problem it exploits nor the real problem that exists is affected.”
Fixing COVID isn’t the goal; using it as the pretext to enforce arbitrary social control measures against opponents of the state is. In fact, the SARS-Cov-2 virus itself is a gift to be treasured rather than a problem to be remedied. The powers that be would release a new virus every day of the week if they thought they could get away with it and believed it would further their interests.
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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During a recent interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, former Chancellor and European political heavyweight Angela Merkel revealed that the Minsk accords, a comprehensive 2015 diplomatic treaty, agreed by the EU, United States, Russia, and Kyiv to end the civil war in eastern Ukraine, was essentially subverted by the Ukrainians in an attempt to buy time to expand its military capabilities.
The fact that the accords, which were widely regarded as a truly workable solution to the conflict, were not prioritized by the U.S. for implementation, speaks volumes when assessing the sincerity of the U.S. position. Just prior to Merkel’s stunning revelations, Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was also covertly recorded admitting that the process was abused by Ukraine and used to prepare for war with Russia.
Given the high level of interface between NATO and Ukraine during this period, it is difficult to imagine that this manipulation of the peace process was not carried out with the full knowledge, and probable assistance, of NATO and the U.S. It is now abundantly clear, at least to all objective observers, that the U.S. never seriously intended to prevent the current conflict in Ukraine. On the contrary, any cursory assessment of their past and contemporary covert and overt involvement in the region suggests they have been working to destabilize Russia via Ukraine for decades.
Facts such as their encouragement, and material assistance, in the building of a huge 250,000-man, NATO-trained and equipped army facing Russia’s border, illustrate the reality of what the U.S. project in Ukraine was about, regardless of their diplomatic pronouncements.
Despite decades of Russian warnings on NATO expansion, and despite the sincere attempts of some European countries, NATO and its U.S. kingpins forged ahead along a path to what would become an inevitable war. Considering this, can any of the numerous U.S./NATO statements suggesting they “exhausted all diplomatic efforts” to prevent this conflict be taken seriously? The facts suggest not.
As the second phase of the conflict in Ukraine grinds toward its first bloody anniversary, the first being the post-Maidan civil war which erupted in 2014, the grim realities of this conflict, both economic and human, are now indelibly burned into the global consciousness not only of the Ukrainian and Russian populations, but also the pro-war political aristocracy in the U.S. and their client EU/NATO allies.
In recent weeks, whispers of peace have emerged, uncharacteristically, from the eternally hawkish, “absolute victory” brigade in Washington. It is undeniable that these war hawks wield a disproportionate influence on Zelensky’s government, with many dissenting analysts suggesting it is they who essentially operate the levers of power in his Kyiv palace.
Before accepting this dubious kite flying for peace as genuine, observers would be advised to research the long, determined and cynical march into this inevitable conflict, a clash long predicted by scholars like Mearsheimer and Chomsky, who have persistently highlighted the central role that the United States and its proxies in the EU had in willfully manufacturing its inevitability. Conflicts between great powers tend not to occur overnight, and with this being such a high-stakes game, where the very balance of global power is potentially shifting, nothing happens unless it is supposed to happen. Essentially, when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine, the power bloc that emerges victorious will potentially dominate a new global order; in other words “this game is for all the marbles.”
This conflict has evolved into one unlike any other, the weaponization of social media, of culture, and the revision of history itself, have become second fronts, central to the anti-Russian, pro-Atlanticist narrative at the center of the EU/NATO pro-war rationale. It is critical that the Western public, who have been bombarded 24/7 by a propaganda Leviathan of previously unseen proportions and resources, explore the factual realities of how the “scaffold” that this conflict now burns on was deliberately built, not over a matter of months or years but over a matter of decades.
Of course, having any opinion other than the prescribed Western view is portrayed as dangerous and subversive. Any view, other than the stock mainstream narrative, which alleges that a maniacal imperialist Russia, wishing to regain tracts of previously conquered territory, is cast as Russian propaganda. This authoritarian and dangerous. corporate position has led to people such as your author being labeled as pro-Putin advocates, and paid propagandists for an authoritarian, genocidal and hateful state.
Of course, the opposite is quite true. Your author and many others like me are essentially anti-war advocates, who earnestly seek to challenge the profit-fueled neo-liberal hegemony that has led Europe, blindly, to the brink of a third world war.
The reality that I, and many others have long held these anti-imperialist views, is discarded along with all objectivity, independence and balance. It is now undeniable that the pan-Atlanticist perpetual war cult has gone “all in” on Ukraine. Turning a blind eye to Nazism, gross corruption and human rights abuses, while gleefully depriving American and European populations of their right to dissent, their right to disagree and their right to challenge the rationale for this terrible conflict.
The reality that is consistently hidden is that the only winner, if there is one, is the military industrial complex which is profiting grotesquely from the human misery that abounds in the ditches and trenches of Ukraine today.
It is incumbent on the United States to question the veracity and sincerity of U.S. diplomacy, given that any initial hopes of a negotiated peace in the east, which had erupted into a brutal civil war in 2014, were dashed by the persistent failures of U.S. ally Petro Poroshenko’s government to act on central parts of the Minsk deal, most notably the federalization of Donbas within Ukraine and the preservation of rights for millions of ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine who had rejected the pro-EU Maidan coup.
Today, an increasingly fractious NATO/EU Washington-led alliance seems determined to compound its continuing foreign policy failures by deeming Russia a “Terrorist State.” It seems that the irony—that recently released U.S. data confirm that America has killed more than 900,000 people in dozens of countries in the past 20 years alone—is seemingly lost on the U.S. State Department.
This escalatory move demonstrates that any semblance of the grudging but mutual respect between U.S. and Russian diplomats during the Cold War is now sadly a romantic memory. It is worth recalling that these official and unofficial diplomatic channels not only steered the U.S. away from nuclear Armageddon, but they also fostered, and indeed encouraged, pragmatism on both sides, with the idea that a deal could be done and had to be done thankfully prevailing. Today, however, diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States are at their lowest point since their establishment in 1933, and that is bad news for almost everyone.
When examining the background to today’s conflict, it is important to interrogate the abject failure of Western diplomacy, firstly to de-escalate the 2014 post-coup civil conflict in eastern Ukraine, and more recently to defuse the standoff which culminated with the Russian military intervention in February. How could such a potentially catastrophic conflict between an increasingly boxed-in Russia and a hawkish NATO/Ukraine have come to this? Surely the many voices of geopolitical realism and restraint were being heard?
If not, maybe the persistent and increasingly resolute warnings of “red lines being crossed” by a concerned Moscow? No? Well then, shouldn’t the U.S./NATO at least have respected the democratic wishes of 73% of the Ukrainian people? After all, they voted Zelensky into power on his promise to “end the war”? It seems none of these crucial realities registered with the ever expanding “freedom machine” that is NATO, most interestingly the mandate of the Ukrainian people for peace in the east was conveniently ignored.
When Moscow deployed its troops to the Ukrainian border in the closing months of 2021, it was seen by many (including your author) as elaborate sabre-rattling to demonstrate the seriousness with which the Russians viewed the situation; of course, it turned out to be quite the opposite.
As the Russian Army crossed the Ukrainian border in the early hours of February 24th, not only did it spell the end of decades of Russian warnings about NATO’s eastward expansion onto its borders, it may also have marked the end of a global world order dominated by the U.S. and its dollar. When objectively evaluating the global impact of this crisis and the potential spoils to the victor, it becomes increasingly likely that the widely publicized last-minute attempts for peace were mere PR outings, box-ticking for future deniability.
When did the U.S. “project” in Ukraine begin?
When Western narrators insert the now seemingly obligatory phrase “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine” when writing on the crisis, it would be useful to point out that it is undeniable, but not widely known, that the United States has been agitating to wrestle Ukraine away from the influence of Russia since the end of World War II.
Despite the complex demographic and geopolitical realities of the region, and in spite of the deep and ancient social, linguistic, and historical ties between Russia and Ukraine, Uncle Sam has had his eye on Kyiv for a very long time. As far back as 1949 the relatively young Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a priority target for initially the OSS and then the newly formed CIA, which aimed to exploit the complex ethnic and historic differences in the region to undermine the Soviets.
The long-term U.S. strategy involved overt and covert actions to influence and fund various Ukrainian nationalist and paramilitary organizations. As with innumerable other CIA-led regime-change operations, the morality or political persuasion of their partners mattered not, and they included the openly Nazi collaborators of the ultranationalist OUN and UPA led by recognized mass murderers like Stepan Bandera, a man now widely and openly deified in Zelensky’s Ukraine by recently instituted national holidays and countless statues.
An examination of the recent activities of CIA cut-outs such as the “National Endowment for Democracy,” “Freedom House,” the “National Democratic Institute,” the “International Republican Institute” and the “Eurasia Foundation” confirms the deep-seated persistence of U.S. intelligence-backed subversion in Ukraine. These organizations like to describe their “mission” as “assisting the building of Ukrainian civil society” but, in reality, their multimillion-dollar task is part of a broader U.S. strategy to remove “unfriendly” governments as per the CIA regime-change playbook.
The successful U.S.-sponsored coup d’état against the legitimately elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 was the culmination of those decades of efforts to install and propagate a pro-Western, anti-Russian, pro-EU government in Kyiv, much as it had worked to do in many post-Soviet republics like Belarus. It was now glaringly apparent that, rather than respecting the very democracy that it selectively supports, the U.S. has preferred an “à la carte” approach to the democracy and freedom it purports to represent: If it is pro-U.S.A., defend it; if it is not, destroy it.
“Maidan” an unmissable opportunity
The depth of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs has been truly astounding. It has also been intentionally overlooked by mainstream media and their client analysts when evaluating the apparent failure of diplomatic attempts to avert today’s conflict in Ukraine.
Instead of accepting the democratic mandate of the imperfect Yanukovych government, the U.S. and its EU allies openly supported the Maidan coup. The U.S. and its European allies even went so far as to brazenly suggest that, if Yanukovych performed an “about face” and accepted the agreement to move closer to the EU economically, he might be permitted to remain in power.
Inevitably, the usual suspects began to queue up to support the nascent “Euromaidan” movement. When the perennially hawkish and boorish Republican Senator John McCain arrived in Kyiv to “show his support” he proceeded to openly wine and dine unsavory key players in the Euromaidan movement. McCain’s newly found friends included the known racist and ultra-fascist Oleg Tyagnibok, leader of the far-right Svoboda party.
McCain even thought it would be a good idea to stand brazenly with Tyagnibok on a stage in Maidan Square, proclaiming to thousands of protesters that “the free world is with you, America is with you, I am with you.”
Incredibly, the United States senator made this speech while the democratically elected government of Yanukovych and the millions of Ukrainians who had legitimately given him their votes looked on in dismay. In the Donbas, millions of ethnic Russians looked on fearfully as the U.S. lit a touch-paper that would ultimately end in a brutal civil war.
If McCain’s theatrical “freedom-loving war-hero” routine was seen as brazen by the Kremlin, along admittedly by some less hawkish EU observers, it was a model of diplomatic restraint compared to the conduct of Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and high priestess of American neo-liberal hegemonic foreign policy.
As Ukraine’s political crisis deepened, Nuland and her subordinates became increasingly aggressive in favoring the anti-Yanukovych demonstrators. Nuland proclaimed in a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation in December 2013 that she had gone to Ukraine three times in the period following the start of the Maidan demonstrations. On December 5, she handed out cookies to those assembled and doubled down on her support for their cause.
The granular level of the Obama administration’s interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs was indeed incredible. This was confirmed in a crucial phone call intercept by Russia’s FSB security service that was then widely distributed to foreign news services. During the call Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt discuss, in great detail, their preferred leadership choices in a post-Yanukovych administration. The U.S. plumped for Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed became prime minister once the democratically elected Yanukovych was chased from office.
During the astounding call, Nuland says enthusiastically that “Yats is the guy” who would do the best job. The current Mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko is also featured in the bizarre discussion but is bounced out of the running by Nuland.
Another interesting element of Nuland’s conspiratorial call with Pyatt is her suggestion that Vice President Joe Biden should be dispatched to Kyiv to “get it over the line.” This again illustrates the high-level knowledge, and support within the Obama administration, for this potentially illegal agitation against a democratically elected and sovereign government.
It is critical to point out that Nuland and Pyatt, two senior American government officials, were engaged in such detailed planning to overthrow a legitimate government at a time when Yanukovych was still Ukraine’s lawfully elected president. This is irrefutable evidence, if evidence were required, that the country that persistently lectures the global village on the sacrosanct nature of sovereignty and democracy, was yet again riding roughshod over both. Use of the term “diplomacy” is almost embarrassingly inappropriate to describe the covert, regime-change scheming of Pyatt and Nuland.
It is also important to remember that all of the above took place with the full support and knowledge of those at the highest levels of the U.S. government and the White House, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, now of course President, funder and admirer-in-chief of Volodymyr Zelensky.
America’s behavior not only constitutes interference, but it also constitutes the micromanagement of an anti-democratic coup d’état, regardless of your political opinions about the obviously flawed government of Viktor Yanukovych. That fact is inescapable.
Given the widely documented manipulations and infiltrations of 2014, all sanctioned at the highest levels of the American state, those with any doubt as to the current influence of the U.S. government on the Zelensky regime in Ukraine today should seriously reconsider their view. While a very generous observer might suggest that, despite the level of interference outlined above, the U.S. was at least ostensibly, on the outside pulling the strings during Maidan, today it is undeniably on the inside, steering the Ukrainian ship both militarily and economically. While the conflict may have begun with NATO supporting Ukraine, today the sad reality is that it is Ukraine supporting NATO in a proxy war against its nuclear-armed neighbor.
It is worth considering whether the “diplomacy” which the United States declared to be one of its central pillars of influence for peace in Ukraine prior to the current crisis is the same brand of “diplomacy” it was engaged in prior to the Maidan coup? No objective analysis of this period could, with any seriousness, absolve the United States of a central role in destabilizing and overthrowing the legitimate government of a sovereign state and a democracy to boot.
Can the narrative widely peddled by Western power brokers—that it was Russia and not the West that stymied diplomatic efforts to avert war in 2022—be taken as sincere? Given the Machiavellian machinations of the U.S. security state prior to, during and after the Maidan coup, it is a very hard ask to believe they were sincere during the 11th hour negotiations to avert this conflict. The dismal reality of this terrible and seemingly inevitable conflict in Ukraine is that it has not dulled the appetite of hawkish perpetual-war advocates in the U.S., and to a lesser extent in Europe.
Ursula von der Leyen, the archetypal bureaucrat and queen of Europe’s woke Eurostocracy, has emerged to epitomize the total victory cult that evangelizes an “absolute truth” regarding Russia. Von der Leyen routinely peddles a factually flimsy and theatrical narrative about an alleged Russian desire to conquer Europe, enslave its peoples and vaporize those who refuse to bend their knees.
Von der Leyen has become a caricature of reverse Euro-racism, turning a blind eye to gross Russophobia, violence and the revision of European history, particularly regarding the reality of the incalculable Soviet sacrifice in the struggle to defeat Nazism. There is also a renewed attempt to diminish the central role Russia has played in the global economic and cultural ecosystem. The EU, and particularly its smaller member states, have enthusiastically made a bonfire of our rights to dissent from their narrative on Russia, banning TV channels, sanctioning journalists and growing increasingly authoritarian in pursuit of their failing econo-cultural war on Russia.
I would suggest that all who value balanced debate, freedom of speech and their right to disagree consider who built the scaffold upon which this war is now blazing? What military-industrial complex stands to benefit from its perpetuation? And how could any diplomatic process that ran alongside the creation of a de facto NATO army in Ukraine be taken as sincere?
Regardless of the above, the potential for catastrophic escalation remains dangerously high, but then again, so do the profits of major American defense contractors and energy companies. Given the dystopian reality we find ourselves in, where truth is an “à la carte” commodity, and mainstream assigned narratives becoming akin to pseudo religious obligations, a battlefield resolution to this conflict sadly seems more and more likely.
In this burgeoning war of attrition, all objective observers and those interested in non-aligned analysis of how this conflict will end should be asking themselves this single, simple question: Which side can in reality afford to lose this conflict in Ukraine, America or Russia? The answer, while obviously eluding ill-advised EU and State Department hawks, is, in my humble view, abundantly clear.
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Chay Bowes is a campaigner, for independent journalism, entrepreneur and writer from Ireland. Chay is interested in geopolitics and history and has a masters degree in strategic studies. Chay can be reached at [email protected].
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For the last several days, the mainstream propaganda machine diverted its attention from the mandatory “evil Russia” narrative and focused on 24/7 coverage of a weather balloon. Although the media frenzy was part of the “evil China” narrative, this one is not as omnipresent as that about Russia, at least not yet. The rather bizarre overfocus on such a trivial matter still has its propaganda purpose, as the “spy balloon”, while insignificant at a glance, fulfilled an important geopolitical goal for the United States.
First, the idea that a superpower such as China needs weather balloons to effectively spy on the US is quite laughable, as the Asian giant has more than enough surveillance satellites for that purpose, both military and civilian, to say nothing of its intelligence services and other means of collecting information. Second, weather balloons are simply too obvious and, thus, too (geo)politically sensitive to be used for that purpose, not to mention they’re not exactly the most steerable aircraft and are also quite slow, meaning they take quite a lot of time to reach the desired location.
Eventually, the US Air Force sent its much-touted F-22 fighter jets to shoot down the balloon. The coverage of the shootdown was quite embarrassing, to say the least, as the F-22 “Raptor” is an extremely expensive aircraft and it made no sense to use it for such a trivial matter. The jet that costs $334 million apiece and nearly $70,000 per flight hour fired a nearly half a million dollar missile to down a weather balloon, but the media presented it as if the target was no less than an alien spacecraft invading the US. There are now even photos of an F-22 with the balloon painted on it as its first air-to-air kill.
The balloon was also presented as some pinnacle of Chinese technology, despite the fact that Beijing operates satellites, hypersonic surveillance drones and other truly high-end technologies, some of which even the US itself lacks. Additionally, according to the US, China suddenly decided to send a weather balloon to spy on America’s “Minuteman 3” ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos right after it invited the US Secretary of States Anthony Blinken to visit Beijing. Worse yet, it supposedly did so on the eve of the visit, despite China’s insistence that Blinken also meets President Xi Jinping.
Such diplomatic and (geo)political absurdity can hardly be expected from China, as it simply makes no sense for Beijing to try and make yet another peaceful overture toward the US only to sabotage its own efforts by sending a “spy balloon” over the most obvious spy target in the continental US. Even the Pentagon confirmed that “it had been tracking the balloon for quite some time” and that “it wasn’t the first time such an incident occurred”. So, again, the question is, why did the US military decide to go public with the “spy balloon” story at this exact moment? The fact that Anthony Blinken announced he is postponing his visit to China is quite indicative of America’s goal in this case.
China insists that the weather balloon is indeed just that – a weather balloon that has drifted too far from its course and ended up in US airspace. The Washington Post quoted national security experts who confirmed this and stated that “the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitude balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting.” The Pentagon itself also confirmed this and stated that “the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites” and that “the balloon posed no serious physical or intelligence threat”.
Again, this begs the question as to why the Pentagon even made the public announcement and why the US corporate and state-run media decided to go for such bizarre coverage. It’s simply impossible not to connect the story to the deteriorating US-China relations and the fact that Washington DC is doing everything in its power (bar direct war, for now, at least) to make sure the relationship between the two global powers stays on the collision course. Blinken’s visit, as previously mentioned initiated by Beijing, could have been a crucial step toward some form of detente between the US and China.
However, with an “evil Chinese spy balloon flying over American ICBM silos” Washington DC has a “perfect” (in reality, ludicrous) excuse to continue its incessant escalation with the Asian giant. The continuous US belligerence can only be explained by the fact that Washington DC is simply afraid to let China develop peacefully, since American political elites are perfectly aware that they are falling behind the Asian giant in virtually every metric, be it economy, technology, military, etc. It’s the only viable explanation for such a sudden obsession with a weather balloon.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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Whether one regards this stance as innocently optimistic or irredeemably delusional, there’s no denying that President Xi is still clinging to the New Détente, though it might ultimately be for naught.
The balloon incident is shaping up to be the most decisive moment in the New Cold War since the start of Russia’s special operation a year ago. The Sino-American New Détente was unexpectedly derailed due to the subversive intervention of their hardline factions that were both opposed to this potentially game-changing rapprochement. Nevertheless, President Xi still isn’t giving up on his goal of improving ties with the US as evidenced by his country’s reaction to this incident.
It was expected that China would put forth a “plausibly deniable” explanation instead of outright admitting to the reconnaissance that it’s accused of, but it wasn’t foreseeable that it would downplay Blinken’s decision to postpone his trip to Beijing by claiming that it was never confirmed. That narrative was designed to “save face” and leave open the opportunity for rescheduling his visit, which adds credence to the observation that President Xi still hopes to save the New Détente.
Furthermore, he tried to throw a proverbial bone to the Republicans by firing the head of his national weather service in accordance with the “plausibly deniable” narrative that his side put forth alleging that the suspected reconnaissance vehicle was just a wayward civilian airship researching the weather. Nevertheless, CNN noted that this individual was already expected to leave his post sometime soon anyhow after previously being appointed to another position, which thus makes this move ring hollow.
Upon the US finally shooting down the balloon, China warned that it “reserves the right to use necessary means to deal with similar situations”, which can be interpreted in two ways that aren’t mutually exclusive despite appearing so on the surface. It hints that the military’s anti-US hardliners have a free hand to resort to a tit-for-tat response if the opportunity arises, which could also serve the purpose of “escalating to de-escalate” by prompting a call between their leaders, but it also “saves face” too.
To explain, it’s unrealistic to expect that China wouldn’t have conveyed such a warning after what happened since it’s a self-respecting and sovereign state that obviously has the right to react similarly to any US aerial asset that intrudes upon its borders. Should that happen, then there’s no doubt that the military would shoot it down out after the US just shot down China’s balloon instead of letting political officials try to quietly resolve the incident behind the scenes like countries usually do in such situations.
Even so, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng also released a statement shortly after that one where he said that
“What the US did severely impacted and endangered the efforts and process for the two sides to stabilize bilateral relations since the meeting in Bali. China is firmly opposed to and strongly protested US’ actions. China urged the US not to take further moves that violate China’s interests, or to escalate the fraught situation.”
This strongly suggests that China would prefer not to have its hand forced and thus be compelled to go through with the abovementioned scenario of shooting down a US aerial asset in the event that one intrudes upon its borders. Xie’s lamentation of the damage that this incident inflicted upon their leaders’ hoped-for New Détente is yet another signal that President Xi still isn’t giving up on their potentially game-changing rapprochement despite the seemingly insurmountable odds after what just happened.
Quite clearly, improving bilateral relations remains so important for the Chinese leader that he won’t do anything that could further complicate this grand strategic goal that he’s personally invested his reputation into advancing after initiating this process during the G20 Summit in mid-November. Whether one regards this stance as innocently optimistic or irredeemably delusional, there’s no denying that President Xi is still clinging to the New Détente, though it might ultimately be for naught.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Recently, Maryland swore in its first Black governor, Wes Moore, in a “historic” ceremony cemented with a tearful introduction by Oprah Winfrey and a hand on Frederick Douglass’ Bible. The Black elite flocked to fill the rooms of the inauguration to witness the third elected Black governor in U.S. history. Yet, this “first Black” gubernatorial win is history repeating itself.
African/Black communities have witnessed “first Blacks” consistently continuing over-policing, surveillance, criminalization and austerity policies.
As Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member organization Ujima People’s Progress Party understands,
“The Black middle-class’ allegiance to capitalism, and not Black liberation, has largely led the Black political leadership class to function as a comprador misleadership class over the Black majority of working peoples on behalf of the capitalist parties, and political machines they are members of.”
For nearly a century, radical African/Black people have criticized elements of the African/Black community as being designed to serve as buffers to ruling class elements. Whether discerned as “neocolonial,” “the comprador class,” or “the Black Misleadership Class,” this sector has evaded accountability to the masses of African/Black people, while using their Black identity as cover for self-serving opportunism.
Moore first became famous for his 2010 bestselling memoir, The Other Wes Moore, an inspirational story of two boys with the same name and ties to Baltimore City. In interviews, Moore is depicted as a Black boy from an economically struggling background who became formally educated, rising to become a U.S. military veteran, and thus a socioeconomically developed Black man. The framing of his “life story,” as told through the book, not only helps manufacture an Obama-like image, politically. But in juxtaposition to the “other Wes Moore,” it leaves room to question how this narrative will affect his policies.
It remains unclear if Moore had been raised in Baltimore City. Yet, as the backdrop of Moore’s life story, the city has been central to his platform on crime. The Public Safety and Criminal Justice page on wesmoore.com states, “Violent crime is on the rise across Maryland and people are dying in our streets.” The solutions presented, however, will be nothing short of a plan to continue what former Governor Larry Hogan started in his campaign to “refund the police,” which increased resources for state law enforcement agencies following the 2020 uprisings.
Citing an “ineffectiveness of leadership,” Moore ignores that not only is Baltimore City already occupied with an array of federally funded police directives, it has just received an additional $7.9 million in federal funds to “fight crime.” This funding is a part of the Biden administration’s $350 million American Rescue plan to “fund the police,” as he enthusiastically announced in his 2022 State of the Union address. Unsurprisingly, in 2022, 1,192 people were killed by police, exceeding any other year in U.S. history. Also, Moore has ignored the existing consent decree issued in 2017, acknowledging the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, and specific provisions of federal statutory law.
“The BPD has access to the Department of Defense (DOD) 1033 program budget. They also train with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) through the ‘deadly exchange program’ and continue to receive federal agents through Trump’s 2020 Operation Relentless Pursuit policy,” says Petros Bein, member of the Baltimore City Wide Alliance of the Black Alliance For Peace (BAP-Baltimore). “This is in addition to the approved privatized policing for universities, like Johns Hopkins, engulfing Black communities.”
These continued failed approaches to “crime” have only proven that added resources, as well as changes in policy or the law, will not contribute to public safety. Moore cannot “rebuild and strengthen relationships between communities and law enforcement agencies” by “increasing accountability and transparency” in a city in which the police department constantly violates its consent decree. Nor should funding community-policing initiatives that “recruit diverse officers that reflect the diversity of communities they serve” be taken seriously. The recent death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee (a city also operating under Operation Relentless Pursuit) has been the most illuminating example of the fallacy of Black faces occupying these spaces to the benefit of the African/Black community.
Policies that address crime in an over-policed city cannot be presented in the abstract. As the country celebrates a “first Black” governor, Maryland continues to imprison more African/Black people, per capita, than any other state. Moore needs to provide more specifics to explain what will be done and how this builds or departs from existing efforts to return control of the Baltimore City Police Department from the federal government to Baltimore City.
“Wes Moore’s connections with Mayor [Brandon] Scott’s office and the city design/city planning committee will shape or harm what’s happening in Baltimore. With no control over the city’s policing, Moore’s decisions directly affect the most marginalized of us,” acknowledges BAP-Baltimore core member, Kimya Nuru Dennis.
The Democratic Party has been able to depict Moore as a trusting solution for Maryland, in general, and for African/Black people, specifically. His socioeconomic status, as well as that of his donors, indicates to BAP-Baltimore what will undoubtedly shape whose voices matter most in prioritizing health, education, and safety-based policies and laws.
The lack of equitable housing that causes displacement, as well as food deserts, and low wages, have been pressing issues in Maryland. African/Black elected officials have not resolved the economic and social crisis facing the African/Black working class of Baltimore City. Instead, their lack of solutions have resulted in the overt criminalization and over-policing of African/Black communities. Police are constantly and consistently well-funded and well-resourced. BAP-Baltimore understands police are used to enforce the status quo of white power and colonial control over the lives of African/Black and other oppressed nations of people. This comes as the city has increasingly privatized and priced out our people. More police funding, while ignoring the causes of crime, cannot resolve the ongoing dilemma facing the African/Black working class in Baltimore City.
No Compromise! No Retreat!
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Featured image: Wes Moore with Joe Biden at a gubernatorial campaign rally in Rockville MD, August 2022. (courtesy Dominick Sokotoff/Rex/Shutterstock)
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Introduction by Colin Todhunter
Dr John Campbell in the UK says vitamin D is more effective than the jabs. It is certainly safer, and he presents several scientific studies that show conclusively it is highly effective in preventing COVID-related hospitalisation/death.
Instead of recommending vitamin D, it was dismissed. Because if proven alternative treatments had been available, the money-spinning jabs could not have been rolled out under emergency use authorisation. The public was locked down, told to wait for the jab and protect the NHS – for which the UK govt now shows utter contempt.
Watch the video below.
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Featured image is from Flickr
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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A war between China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America’s Frontier Fund, a tech investment outfit whose co-founder and CEO sits on both the State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board and President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board, according to audio from a February 1 event.
The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. According to attendee Jack Poulson, head of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, an individual who identified himself as “Tom” attended the event in place of Jordan Blashek, America’s Frontier Fund’s president and chief operating officer.
Following the panel discussion, “Tom” spoke with a gaggle of other attendees and held forth on AFF’s investment in so-called choke points: sectors that would spike in value during a volatile geopolitical crisis, like computer chips or rare earth minerals. It turns out, according to audio published by Poulson, that a war in the Pacific would be tremendous for AFF’s bottom line.
“If the China-Taiwan situation happens, some of our investments will 10x, like overnight,” the person who identified as “Tom” said. “So I don’t want to share the name, but the one example I gave was a critical component that … the total market value is $200 million, but it is a critical component to a $50 billion market cap. That’s like a choke point, right. And so if it’s only produced in China, for example, and there’s a kinetic event in the Pacific, that would 10x overnight, like no question about it. There’s a couple of different things like that.”
AFF is surely not the only venture fund that would see stratospheric returns throughout their portfolio in the case of a destabilizing global crisis, like a “kinetic event in the Pacific” — that is to say, war. Unlike most other investment firms, though, AFF is closely tied to the upper echelons of American power, the very people who would craft any response to such a war.
Gilman Louie, AFF’s co-founder and current CEO, serves as chair of the National Intelligence University, advises Biden through his Intelligence Advisory Board, and was tapped for the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022. Louie previously ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.
In other words, AFF stands to massively profit from a geopolitical crisis while its CEO advises the Biden administration on geopolitical crises. (America’s Frontier Fund did not respond to a request for comment.)
AFF was founded in 2021, according to its website, “to build the companies, platforms, and capabilities that will generate once-in-a-generation returns for investors, while ensuring long-term economic competitiveness for the U.S. and its allies.” Last year, the New York Times reported the techno-nationalist fund had met with U.S. lawmakers to request a $1 billion injection. AFF currently leads the Quad Investor Network, a White House-sponsored alliance of investors from the so-called Quad: a geopolitical bloc aimed at countering Chinese hegemony constituted by the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan.
The fund also has close ties to some of the American private sector’s most vocal and influential China hawks. AFF was founded last year with support from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose closeness to Biden’s government is attracting growing scrutiny and skepticism, and investor Peter Thiel. Thiel and Schmidt, whose business interests in national security and defense both stand to profit immensely from war in the Pacific, have both advocated for a more hostile national stance toward China.
Schmidt is particularly dedicated to China alarmism, having spent much of his post-Google career thus far drumming up anti-China tensions; first at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which he chaired, and today through his new think tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project, which regularly depicts China as a direct threat to the United States.
AFF’s own Schmidt connections run deep: Louie, the CEO, worked alongside Schmidt at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, while Balshek, the fund’s COO, was previously an executive at Schmidt’s philanthropic fund.
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***
Some analysts have opined that Lula 3.0 will be a very different Lula, and we should expect a more pro-American and “Atlanticist” turn. They argue the green agenda focused on the Amazon would be the trigger for “reboosting” American-Brazilian bilateral relations – with Western aid becoming a kind of “quid pro quo” for a Brazilian support of Ukraine.
Too much was made of Lula’s recent “condemnation” of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. In fact, in the same statement, Lula quoted Pope Francis’ remarks about NATO “barking” at Russia’s door having provoked Moscow into acting. Moreover, the Brazilian leader has rejected sending tank ammunition to Germany over fears it would be transferred to Ukraine.
It is true that Brasilia and Washington seem to share a concern for the rainforest. In November 2022, US special envoy for climate, John Kerry, showed interest in working with Lula “to save the Amazon”. And right now, Lula’s government is actively pursuing partners to help finance a number of projects to save the rainforest.
Germany, for instance, has outlined more than $200 million in contributions for Brazilian environmental programs. The Amazon Fund, which had been frozen since 2019, was reactivated by Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva. It is a billion-dollar initiative funded by Norway and Germany to fight deforestation.
During his visit to Brasilia on January 30, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz talked about the need to help “the lungs of the world”. Scholz was also interested in boosting cooperation with Latin American countries regarding renewable energies, and green hydrogen, as Europe goes through its own (largely self-inflicted) energy crisis.
Lula is visiting the US on February 10, to meet Biden. They will discuss climate change and food security among other issues. It remains yet to be seen what Washington, under Biden’s presidency, can offer, having a Republican Senate.
The US and European powers both weaponize the green agenda against emerging and developing nations. Though it is true that for decades the Brazilian state has been turning a blind eye to illegal deforestation and cattle ranching in the Amazon. This also involves powerful private interests, corruption and even some popular support, as those illegal operations have become a part of local economies.
The situation got even worse under Bolsonaro and he openly supported the aforementioned interests but this, ironically, backfired. The European Union, US and China have been increasingly demanding full traceability of cattle, wood and other items and through different legislations being proposed to obstruct and even ban Brazilian products associated with illegal deforestation and invasion of indigenous lands.
By finally putting the house in order and bringing law and order to the Amazon, Brasilia would “save face” before the international community. This would also empower the country to legitimate and reassert its sovereignty in a region which is so important for the globe. Western powers can help with aid, although often with a veiled agenda.
The Amazon issue does open a window of opportunity for Biden-Lula’s dialogue, but it remains to be seen how much actual cooperation Washington can really offer, beyond the rhetoric and the diplomatic nods, as Biden himself faces a divided country. In any case, Biden will increasingly “court” Lula now, especially after Beijing has done the same, and there are talks about Brazil joining the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. China remains Brazil’s main trade partner, followed by the US.
For South American emerging powers, maintaining a good relationship with their northern neighbor is strategic. Even in the early 2000’s, a more left-wing Lula managed to maintain a good relationship with then US President George W. Bush, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – at the same time.
Lula now faces a political crisis, in a polarized country, with the specter of domestic terrorism and a new “military question”. The military particularly, due to nationalist ideology, are very suspicious of any international cooperation on the Amazon resulting in a loss of sovereignty. Lula, in turn, does not trust the military over suspicions and an increasingly large body of evidence that point to some military cooperation with the recent Bolsonaro supporters’ attempt at a coup.
No one knows if Lula will achieve “zero deforestation”, but there certainly is much he can do to try and improve the situation. So far concrete international help in that regard came from Europeans, not the US. And it would be too soon to talk about a Lula-Biden alliance of any kind over the rainforest.
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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the West’s unsubstantiated narrative that Russia sabotaged the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines. Now, even some German officials are beginning to admit that there is no evidence to blame Moscow for the crime. Indeed, as the question about the real culprit remains, at some point Berlin will have to investigate the possibility of sabotage by countries it considers as “allies”.
German Prosecutor General Peter Frank during an interview with Die Welt newspaper on February 4 stated that there is no evidence to blame Russia for the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September last year. According to him, the investigation is still ongoing, but so far nothing has been found to blame Russia.
“It currently has not been proven (…) The investigation is ongoing (…) We are currently evaluating all this forensically. [The suspicion] that there had been a foreign sabotage act [in this case], has so far not been substantiated”, he said during the interview.
As we can see, the prosecutor seems to be skeptical about the very possibility of foreign sabotage, which seems irrational, since several experts indicate that the explosions in the two gas pipelines did not occur spontaneously or due to a mere malfunction, but by deliberate interference. This has been confirmed even by Western authorities, such as the Swedish government, which conducted unilateral investigations in November and concluded that sabotage had taken place, although it has not said anything about which country would be the saboteur.
A few days before Frank’s interview, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had refused to comment on the investigation, claiming that he would wait for concrete evidence to be obtained before making any public statements. At the time, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized Scholz’s omission, stating that his lack of transparency on the matter made it appear that “Berlin has something to hide”.
Zakharova’s words indicate a suspicion on the part of the Russians that the Germans could be somehow wanting to forge evidence against Russia to please their NATO partners. Another possibility is that they are preparing a narrative to claim that there was not any sabotage, as the prosecutor seems to have suggested when he said that no evidence of a foreign operation was found so far.
These maneuvers on the part of the German government would be happening because of the absolute impossibility of blaming the Russians for the attack. On the 1st of February, The Times published a report stating that the German investigators are “open to theories that a Western state carried out the bombing with the aim of blaming it on Russia”. Obviously, no Berlin official has confirmed this, but it is possible that this information has leaked and that now the Germans are trying to justify themselves to the West through this statement by Peter Frank, alleging the lack of evidence of foreign attack (Western or Russian).
In fact, this constant repetition of mistakes only undermines the credibility of the German government. Rather than denying that sabotage took place, the best thing to do would be to simply admit that it did happen, and the responsibility was not Russia’s, but some other country’s. If concrete evidence is found that a Western state destroyed the pipelines, Berlin should admit this and publicly condemn the aggressor country, reacting by imposing coercive measures, sanctions and breaking diplomatic relations – just as it certainly would do if Russia were responsible.
It must be remembered that experienced military experts, such as Donald Trump’s ex advisor Colonel Douglas Macgregor, suggested that the US and UK were responsible for the attack. According to Macgregor, only these two countries have naval forces capable of carrying out this type of sabotage. He categorically states that the Russians were not involved in the case, considering the way the operation was carried out.
“You have to look at who are the state actors that have the capability to do this. And that means the [UK’s] Royal Navy and the United States’ Navy (…) I think that’s pretty clear (…) The Russians did not do this”, Douglas Macgregor said in early October.
Admitting that Russia is not involved is an important step, but it is still insufficient. The German government, if it really wants to defend its sovereignty, must continue the investigations, and admit what already seems clear to all specialists: Berlin was the target of sabotage planned by its own “allies”.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
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First, it appears I was wrong about the ability of the USG to shoot down China’s weather balloon. However, there is a persistent caveat here—never take at face value what the government and its propaganda media “report,” especially in regard to manufactured enemies.
🚨#BREAKING: Incredible HD footage of the Chinese surveillance balloon being shot down
Watch incredible HD video of the moment when the Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down by a single missile from an F-22 fighter jet from Langley Air Force Base pic.twitter.com/KjwTrgcvcb
The above video is very interesting. Notice how the missile apparently hits the payload. Now that the payload was blown to smithereens, there will be no way to verify exactly what the purpose of this balloon was. Anything that remained went into the drink.
Even if the USG navy manages to raise this wreckage from the ocean floor, I would not believe what they’d say about it, considering the long USG history of pathological lies.
I don’t think this thing was a surveillance balloon.
The question is, why would China use a slow-moving and easily detectable balloon for surveillance when it has three Yaogan-31 “observation” satellites in addition to the Jianbing-8 constellation of surveillance satellites? In short, China has the technical capability to put surveillance satellites in orbit. This includes its top-secret, geostationary orbiting Tongxin Jishu Shiyan-1.
In fact, China has a large number of military satellites in orbit. According to Business Standard, “China’s 2015 Defense White Paper described space as a military domain, and China currently has 75+ military satellites operated by the Strategic Support Force of the People’s Liberation Army.”
the experts point out that balloons can be fitted with modern technology like spy cameras and radar sensors, and there are some advantages to using balloons for surveillance—chief of which is that it is less expensive and easier to deploy than drones or satellites.
Indeed, and easier to detect and shoot down.
The USG insists—as usual, void of evidence—the balloon was surveilling nuke silos in Montana. This is a load of propagandistic hogwash.
The fact is, we don’t know for sure what the purpose of the balloon was, and we never will. The logical assumption is this was a weather or meteorological research balloon that had blown over USG territory due to prevailing westerlies.
According to the “Sage from South Central,” blue-checker and talk radio host Larry Elder, the balloon had something to do with nukes.
The Washington Examiner, owned by “conservative” billionaire Philip Anschutz (associated with the neocon-infested American Enterprise Institute), is pushing this scary story on largely ill-informed and easily frightened Americans.
High-altitude balloons, such as the one China has floated over mountain state military bases this week, are considered a key “delivery platform” for secret nuclear strikes on America’s electric grid, according to intelligence officials.
Ah, yes, intelligence officials, the same folks who lied America into the Iraq war, claiming Saddam had WMDs and fallaciously warning we were all going to die if we didn’t invade and kill 1.5 million Iraqis.
Of course, when that bogus science fiction story was exposed, it was explained away as an “intelligence failure,” when in fact it was a series of lies told to a compliant stenographic media by pathological neocon liars in the Bush regime.
The EMP “threat” is pushed by the American Leadership & Policy Foundation. Additionally, Congress has established an EMP commission “pursuant to title XIV of the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001.”
“China’s recent balloon flyover of the United States is clearly a provocative and aggressive act. It was most likely a type of dry run meant to send a strategic message to the USA. We must not take this for granted,” warned Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg in a 2015 foundation report.
“Not since WWII has North America faced a threat of this nature. Project FuGo in Japan used balloons to float bombs on the trade-winds across the Pacific to the U.S. and Canada.”
Blue checker and former Speaker of the House, the “honorable” Newt Gingrich, also apparently believes the commies want to take down our civilization.
Newt fails to mention the obvious fact China would not attempt this because it would result in USG thermonukes reducing China to a radioactive wasteland. Neocons and their neolib buddies think you’re stupid—and, unfortunately, far too many Americans are.
The Hill division of war propaganda incorporated is more subtle. Note here that, despite a complete lack of supporting evidence, the balloon is described as a surveillance device.
Bill Clinton’s former Defense Secretary and former Republican senator William Cohen has thrown his weight behind the cynical EMP farce to stir up paranoia and fear. Or maybe, now well into his dotage, he believes this nonsense.
“I think we would have because the first thing we need to do is, number one, is the balloon a military or security threat, but number two, can we get information out of it before we destroy it? We didn’t know, for example, if it could have contained something within the balloon other than helium that could have posed a threat to us. Do we know if it has any kind of biological component to it? So you want to ask those questions.”
Too late, Bill. The remains are on the ocean floor. The payload was targeted and blown up. All that is left is speculation, fear-mongering, and scary stories of lights out and cannibalism.
In other words, political manipulation as usual.
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On an official visit to Tripoli, President Meloni committed Italy to “360°all-round cooperation with Libya”. But which Libya? The Libyan “Government of National Unity”, “internationally recognized”, and chaired by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah. It was “elected” in 2021 in Geneva by a Forum of 73 “Libyan representatives” chosen and directed by the UN representative Stephanie Williams, a US State Department official.
Meloni’s meeting with Dbeibah was sealed by an 8 billion dollar agreement between ENI and the Libyan National Oil Corporation for the exploitation of an offshore gas field off the coast of Tripoli. However, this agreement was immediately disavowed by the Minister of Gas and Oil of the Dbeibah government, who declared it “illegal“. At the same time, in Tripolitania protesters occupied the control room of the Greenstream gas pipeline demanding to stop pumping gas to Italy.
This is the result of the fact that Italy does not recognize the real Libyan government: Prime Minister Fathi Bashagha, appointed by the duly elected Parliament, which provisionally operates from the cities of Sirte and Benghazi because the “Dbeibah government” militias prevent him from entering Tripoli. The Bashagha Government, which controls most of Libya’s territory and energy resources, offers Italy oil and gas at very low cost: as Michelangelo Severgnini showed in his reportage on Byoblu, in Benghazi petrol costs 3 cents of euro at the pump per litre. In compliance with NATO and EU directives, Italy refuses this possibility. Italian imports of Libyan gas have dropped from about 8 billion cubic metres per year before the 2011 NATO war to about 2.5 billion in 2022. Even if the agreement concluded in Tripoli becomes operational, Libyan gas imports could not recover to previous levels. Italy thus remains in the pincers of the “energy crisis”, deliberately provoked by the USA and the EU with the blockade of Russian gas supplies to Europe, paid for increasingly heavily by Italian and European citizens.
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This article was originally published on byoblu.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)
Last month, at the billionaire confab in Davos, “a European Union official predicted to a U.S. congressman that the U.S. would ‘soon’ enact laws on ‘illegal hate speech’ similar to those in the EU,” according to American Military News.
How should you and I and several citizens throughout the Western world react to a war waged because of the coup our own leaders orchestrated? As well, what about individual Ukrainians who don’t quite fit the standard “thank you for helping save us from the Russians!” stereotype? We have taken the time to sample these voices on this week’s show if the legacy media will not!
The Federal government gave up all pretensions that money is backed by the gold held at the Federal Reserve, or backed by anything concrete, in 1972. The dollar became a fiat currency, money that is not tied to anything but reputation. Since that fatal day, the powers behind the curtains have maintained the value of the dollar in various ways.
The American public and the world have long since been warned of the dangers of allowing the military industrial complex to become such an integral part of our economic survival. The United States is the self-proclaimed angel of democracy in the world, but just as George Orwell warned, war is the health of the state, and in the language of newspeak, democracy is the term we use to hide the reality of the nature of our warfare state.
This is the pattern that has been used ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991 when the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for America’s post-WW-II global imperialism has no longer been available to use (such as had earlier been the case in Korea, and in Vietnam, and in Guatemala, and in Iran, and in Chile and so many other lands), prior to 1991.
The US Ambassador to Canada, David Cohen, has characterized the members and supporters of the Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy as “extremists” who are “subverting democratic processes and voices to further the cause of authoritarianism.”
In late January, a top US general declared that a war over Taiwan could break out in as soon as two years. Are we shortly to find ourselves confronted with a second flashpoint in Asia after Ukraine? We put the question to China expert Dirk Nimmegeers.
Pfizer on Tuesday announced 2022 profits of $31.4 billion on record sales of $100.3 billion. Sales from its COVID-19 vaccine and Paxlovid, used to treat COVID-19, totaled $56 billion — more than half the vaccine maker’s annual revenue.
There are 55 documented cases of performers collapsing, dying, or falling ill in late 2022 through 2023 in this video. And in almost all of these cases, the media will say: “We don’t know what caused this, but it was definitely not the COVID vaccine.”
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The European Patent Office (EPO) has revoked an EU patent held by Impossible Foods, maker of the Impossible Burger. In the US, Impossible’s fake meat products are manufactured with GMO yeast-derived soy leghemoglobin, a controversial ingredient that makes the fake meat look as if it’s bleeding, like undercooked real meat, and that we have argued may not be safe to eat.
Following the EPO’s decision, another fake meat company, Motif FoodWorks, has filed a suite of new petitions with the US Patent and Trademark Office challenging US patents held by Impossible Foods over the use of heme proteins (such as that present in soy leghemoglobin) in meat alternatives, as it defends itself against Impossible’s accusations of patent infringement, according to Food Navigator USA.
Fake meat industry “a flop”
The news about Impossible’s patent fights comes in the wake of an article by Bloomberg describing the rapid decline in the fake meat industry, which it branded “a flop”. The article is titled, “Fake meat was supposed to save the world. It became just another fad”.
Impossible shares, the article said, are currently trading at around $12 – about half the price during its last fundraising round. And more recently Bloomberg has reported that Impossible is preparing to lay off about 20% of its staff, following another round of cuts in October when about 6% of its staff got laid off.
The latest patent wars will only add to the industry’s woes.
Impossible patents
Motif FoodWorks said that many of the claimed inventions in Impossible’s patents are obvious and already disclosed in prior art, which means they cannot be patented. Motif added that the EPO’s decision to revoke Impossible’s patent “affirms our belief that Impossible’s patents are invalid and never should have been issued in the first place”.
Impossible Foods told Food Navigator USA that its plans to launch its full range of products in the EU have not changed. Its soy leghemoglobin “fake blood” product is currently being evaluated for EU use by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
The EPO-revoked patent is not on soy leghemoglobin itself. It is a broad patent on food products containing iron complexes such as heme-containing proteins, combined with flavour precursor molecules.
Twisted logic
The EPO’s reasoning has not yet been published online, but GMWatch has long argued that GMO developers cannot tell patent offices that their product is novel, non-obvious, and has an inventive step – all requirements for a patented invention – yet tell regulators and the public that the same product is natural, nature-mimicking, or able to arise in nature or from natural breeding. The GMO developers can’t have it both ways; if one of these statements is true, the other must be false. If it’s patented, it can’t be natural, and if it’s natural, it can’t be patented.
The UK government is currently deregulating a subclass of GMOs that it claims could have arisen through “traditional processes“. Earlier drafts used the wording “natural processes”, but government amendments changed “natural” to “traditional”. It is possible that the change of wording is intended to avoid GMO developers running into difficulties with patent offices over whether their products are genuine inventions.
The opposition to the EU patent, filed by the law firm Reiser & Partner Patentwälte mbB in Germany, alleges that Impossible’s claimed invention is not novel, lacks an inventive step, fails to sufficiently describe the invention, and extends beyond the application as originally filed.
However, a spokesman for Impossible Foods told Food Navigator USA that the EPO’s decision was not made on the basis of lack of novelty and that the review compared Impossible’s patent against its own prior invention. The spokesman is not quoted as addressing the alleged lack of inventive step.
Impossible is appealing against the EPO’s decision.
GMWatch will update readers on the reasoning of the EPO, once it is published, and its potential relevance to GMOs that are claimed to be natural or nature-mimicking.
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Turkey‘s interior minister railed against the US ambassador to Ankara on Friday, telling him to take his “dirty hands off of Turkey”.
Suleyman Soylu, an ardent critic of the United States, whom he blames for the 2016 military coup attempt, has been hitting out at Washington since they issued a travel warning to their citizens of increased risk of attacks in Turkey last week.
The US, along with eight European countries, have either temporarily closed embassies and consulates in Turkey or issued travel warnings after the Quran-burning protests in Europe.
The US consulate in Istanbul, which is located far from the city centre and less vulnerable to attacks, remained open.
Turkish officials say the closures and warnings are an attempt to portray Turkey as an unstable state.
“Every US ambassador who arrives in Turkey is hurrying to find out how to make a coup possible in Turkey,” said Soylu, referring to US Ambassador Jeffry Flake, during an address made at a ministerial event in Antalya on Friday.
“I address the US ambassador from here. I know the journalists you made write articles,” he added.
“Take your dirty hands off of Turkey. I’m being very clear. I very well know how you would like to create strife in Turkey. Take your grinning face off from Turkey.”
Soylu continued by accusing US embassies in Europe of convening together in an attempt to control the continent. He added that US efforts in Turkey were futile thanks to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Diplomatic tensions
The closure of western diplomatic missions has been met with scorn in Turkey.
In response to the initial security alerts issued on Friday, which warned against “possible retaliatory attacks by terrorists against places of worship,” Turkey responded by issuing similar warnings.
Ankara cautioned its citizen against “possible Islamophobic, xenophobic, and racist attacks” in the United States and Europe.
Turkey later summoned the nine ambassadors, including Flake, for talks over the warnings.
On Thursday, Soylu condemned the closures as an attempt to meddle in campaigning for Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for 14 May.
He and other officials suggested that the western states had issued the security warnings in order to pressure Turkey to tone down its criticism of the Quran protests and resolve the Nato dispute.
“They are waging psychological war against Turkey,” Soylu told NTV television. “They are trying to destabilise Turkey.”
The Turkish interior ministry earlier this week said authorities had arrested a number of suspects after an allied country passed over a security warning.
“No weapons, ammunition, or signs of action were detected during the searches,” the ministry said. “However, the investigation is carried out meticulously in all aspects, including digital material reviews.”
A total of 15 suspects were detained, Soylu said, but only five of them were kept in custody.
Soylu and Washington have a longstanding animosity. In 2018, the Trump administration temporarily sanctioned Soylu and Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul over the arrest and detention of Pastor Andrew Brunson, a US citizen.
The following year, the US again sanctioned Soylu and other Turkish officials over Turkey’s offensive against US-backed Kurds in northeastern Syria. “There hasn’t been any change in my declaration of property since the last sanction,” he joked at the time. “I don’t have any properties in the US.”
Both designations were short-term and later lifted.
Since Soylu came into office in 2016, he has gradually suspended intelligence sharing between the US and Turkey. He blamed Washington for the deadly Istanbul bombing in November last year.
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Featured image: Süleyman Soylu, Turkish Interior Minister (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)
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Locals and medical personnel from the Syrian city of Douma in the Damascus countryside confirmed on 2 February during a press conference in the country’s Foreign Ministry headquarters that the alleged 2018 chemical attack on the city was, indeed, staged.
This follows the release of a new report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on 27 January, which once again renewed the accusation that Damascus was behind a 2018 chlorine gas attack on civilians in Douma.
“I live 400 meters from the place of the alleged incident, and I only learned of its occurrence the next day through social media,” Syrian lawyer Muhammad al-Naasan said during the press conference.
Another testimony is that of Dr. Hassan Oyoun, an ambulance worker at Douma Hospital, who claimed that “information was published a day before the alleged incident that it was necessary to prepare for an event that would result in a large number of injuries.”
This confirms that “prior preparations” were underway for the staging of the attack, Oyoun said, referring to the incident as a “fabricated play that was filmed.”
“What the terrorists announced about 800 injuries from chemical substances is incorrect, and the number of people who visited the hospital that day did not exceed 35,” he added.
According to Dr. Mumtaz al-Hanash, a Douma local, Douma Hospital announced just one day after the alleged attack that no chemically induced deaths were recorded whatsoever. He went on to say that the “photographed cases” did not provide evidence that chlorine, or any other weaponized chemical, was used.
An imam and preacher at a local mosque, Sheikh Ratib Naji, said: “We did not see with our own eyes any injured or dead, as they claimed, and those whom the terrorists claimed were dead, their bodies did not appear, and when we demanded them, they assaulted us.”
Syria’s permanent representative at the Hague-based chemical weapons watchdog, Milad Attiya, affirmed that Damascus does not recognize the OPCW investigation team’s third and latest report, as it rejected the last two. Attiya added that the report relies heavily on western sources, as well as groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the White Helmets, an Al-Qaeda affiliated rescue organization with links to organ trafficking networks in Syria.
Since 2013, armed groups in Syria have attempted to pin chemical attacks on the government to instigate internationally-led regime change operations against it. This comes in the form of staged attacks, or actual false-flag chemical attacks which leave many dead and are designed to implicate Damascus – as was the case in Ghouta in 2013 and in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017.
On 28 January, the Syrian government released a statement rejecting the OPCW report, which it said ignored “objective information which was provided by some … experts … and former OPCW inspectors with knowledge and expertise,” referring to the fact that the organization suppressed the findings of its initial report on Douma, as revealed by WikiLeaks in 2019.
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South Korea and Japan trying to attend to their own business by inviting unbidden guests to the region should be well aware that they are getting closer to the extreme security crisis, far from defusing security uneasiness.
It was reported that the secretary general of NATO embarked upon his trip to South Korea and Japan.
The high-ranking chief of the military organization which turned Ukraine into a theatre of proxy war is flying into the Asia-Pacific region of the eastern hemisphere across the sea and land, which is not even part of its operational sphere. This fact itself gives rise to concern.
It is well known that NATO has long made persistent attempts to expand its sphere of influence, limited to European defense, to the Asia-Pacific region, which rose to be the strategic center of the world.
NATO stages bilateral and multilateral joint military exercises under various titles by introducing armed forces of its member states, including aircraft carriers and fighters, under the pretext of opposing the so-called “change of status quo by force”. It is also mulling extending its influence to the Asia-Pacific region by expanding and strengthening cooperation with such exclusive security allies as AUKUS, Quad and Five Eyes.
In particular, NATO has put unprecedented spurs to the strengthening of bilateral relations with South Korea and Japan in recent years, regarding them as a key link in realizing its ambition for hegemony.
This is proved by the fact that the chairman of the military committee of NATO visited South Korea and Japan, respectively in April and June last year, to discuss closer partnership and military cooperation and, at the end of June, South Korea and Japan participated in the NATO summit in Madrid of Spain for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, in May last year, the Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence under NATO registered South Korea as its full memberو and in October a delegation of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly was dispatched to South Korea to discuss the strengthening of bilateral cooperation.
South Korea signed a huge sales contract for arms including heavy tanks, self-propelled guns, and fighters valued at tens of billions of US dollars with Poland, a member state of NATO, and Japan agreed to jointly develop the next generation fighters with Britain and Italy. This clearly proves to what extent NATO’s sinister intention to use South Korea and Japan for expanding its influence has reached.
NATO, which specified Russia as the “greatest and direct threat” and China as a “systematic challenge” in its new “strategic concept” last year, is now openly stretching its long arm to South Korea and Japan. Its aim is quite clear.
It is the general orientation sought by the US-led NATO to cook up an Asian version of NATO to serve the maintenance of its hegemonic position and order in collusion with its vassal forces.
Over the recent worrying moves of NATO, it is quite natural that countries in the region have warned that NATO seeks to apply the method of collective confrontation in Asia-Pacific, which had already been used in Europe, and South Korea and Japan should not introduce NATO forces into the Asia-Pacific region.
It is as clear as noonday that the secretary general of NATO flying to south Korea and Japan, at a time when the Ukrainian crisis has entered a new critical stage with the US and Western decision on supplying tanks, will shore up the “theory of threat from China” to emphasize again the need to build Asian version of NATO and put pressure on them for their passive military support to Ukraine.
Thus, it’s only a matter of time before the military hardware of South Korea and Japan flowing into NATO is seen in the Ukrainian battlefield.
South Korea and Japan trying to attend to their own business by inviting unbidden guests to the region should be well aware that they are getting closer to the extreme security crisis, far from defusing security uneasiness.
It will be nothing good if NATO, a synonym for war and confrontation, puts its military boots on the region.
The trip of the NATO secretary general to South Korea and Japan is a prelude to confrontation and war as it brings the dark clouds of a “new Cold War” to the Asia-Pacific region.
Regional countries and the international community should remain highly vigilant against the frequent footsteps of NATO toward Asia-Pacific.
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Apprehension about Russia’s war against Ukraine has produced speculation about the possibility of limited Russian nuclear strikes against targets in that country. Especially worrisome is the danger of a local conflict escalating quickly into a major nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States and other NATO countries. However unlikely that prospect, a large-scale nuclear war involving countries with strategic nuclear forces could cause huge numbers of fatalities and injuries in addition to the losses produced by climactic impacts. A recent study in the journal Nature projects a catastrophic 5 billion deaths.
Once nuclear weapons became a significant element in US military force structures and planning, beginning in the late 1940s, government agencies began estimating nuclear war fatalities. Over the years, fatality estimates—usually classified top secret—were embedded in nuclear war plans, strategic force requirements, strategic balance assessments, and arms control decisions. The estimates, which often left out important effects of nuclear detonations, sometimes conveyed the shifting “balance of strength” between the two superpowers. The magnitude of these numbers sometimes shocked US officials, who eventually sought options intended to make nuclear war less catastrophic.
While a considerable number of important estimates from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have been declassified, government agencies have refused to declassify other fatality numbers, and estimates from the 1980s and beyond remain unavailable. With the war in Ukraine once again raising the prospect of a nuclear war, accurate estimates of such a war’s human impacts are more important than ever. But it is not even clear whether the US government continues to make such estimates.
Cold War calculations. Casualty estimates were part of the war planning effort from the beginning, a recognizable element of ascertaining the impact of nuclear strikes on a given country or set of targets. Estimates made during the late 1940s projected millions of deaths from atomic bombings. By the mid-1950s, with thermonuclear weapons becoming available, deaths in scores of millions became certain. These hydrogen bombs were “area weapons” that could destroy large cities and their surroundings, or large areas around military targets.
With thermonuclear weapons becoming integral to the US arsenal, government officials drew a frightening picture of their effects. In 1959, David Z. Beckler, executive director of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee, declared that the radioactive fallout from an all-out US-Soviet nuclear war would cause “enormous” numbers of casualties, but they “would represent only a small portion of the total casualties from all causes (blast, thermal radiation, fire, and local fallout).”
The work of the National Security Council’s highly secret Net Evaluation Subcommittee supported Beckler’s conclusions. As part of its effort to gauge the overall impact of nuclear strikes on each side, the subcommittee prepared casualty estimates. In its 1958 report, the subcommittee imagined a devastating Soviet attack in 1961 involving the detonation on the United States of 553 nuclear weapons with a total yield exceeding 2,000 megatons—more than 130,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which had an estimated yield of 15 kilotons. An estimated 50 million Americans would die, with nine million sick or injured, out of a pre-attack population of 179 million. The US retaliatory attack would include every city in the “Sino-Soviet” bloc with a population of over 25,000. It would completely destroy “command facilities” in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang and kill 71 million people at once; 30 days later, a total of 196 million people would be dead (out of a population of 952 million people in the bloc).
According to the report, the US counterattack “would virtually eliminate [the Soviet Union] as a world power.” As devastating as this picture was, the report nevertheless found that at the end of the nuclear exchange, “[t]he balance of strength would be on the side of the United States.” That confidence would erode as the Soviet Union’s capability to inflict deaths and destruction increased during the 1960s.
Military planning. Estimating of deaths and destruction went hand in hand with US nuclear planning. As the Cold War developed, and atomic weapons became a bigger part of the US arsenal, military planners and civilian authorities began preparing for the possibility of a confrontation. For that worst case, a failure of deterrence in which war was imminent and civilian authorities were ready to authorize nuclear weapons use, military officials developed plans to use these weapons—either in retaliation or preemptively—to destroy the adversary’s key military and industrial installations. In that context, Soviet nuclear weapons sites (delivery systems and stockpiles) became prime targets, as did civilian and military headquarters and key industrial facilities.
Beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, target planners developed methodologies to estimate requisite levels of destruction for targets. Usually, explosive blast effects were the chief metric for measuring destruction.
To obtain the desired outcome, target planners assigned warheads and delivery systems, and collaborated with military commanders to develop tactics for optimizing destruction. By 1960, war planning was centralized at the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, located at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. The planning staff had responsibility for preparing the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the US warfighting strategy for the use of nuclear weapons.
A 1961 report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff exemplified the potentially catastrophic impacts of the operational plan’s targeting. The report included estimates of casualties associated with a military conflict over West Berlin. According to numbers drawn from the war plan, a full-force attack on the Soviet Union’s major cities, government control centers, and nuclear threat targets would kill some 50 percent of its total population—some 108 million out of its then-population of 217 million. If the smaller alert force (with bombers on 15-minute to two-hour alert) was used, total Soviet casualties would be 37 percent, or about 80 million.
The total estimated deaths, including Chinese, from a full-force attack, 212 million, were fewer than the estimate of 600 million that the Joint Chiefs provided to the Kennedy White House in 1961, as disclosed in jaw-dropping detail by Daniel Ellsberg. The revelation of these startling numbers was important, but the documentary record is elusive. (Significant Pentagon records from the early 1960s remain unprocessed at the National Archives, so the document may be found someday.)
Estimates of fatalities were also built into decision making on strategic and defensive force levels. For example, in 1962, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explained to President Kennedy why he rejected Air Force proposals for a first-strike capability. McNamara observed that the latest estimates showed that in a projected 1968 nuclear conflict a strategic strike by the Air Force’s proposed force would leave 100 surviving Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. If the Soviets targeted those missiles against US cities, “they could inflict roughly 50 million direct fatalities in the United States, even with fallout protection.” That was not an “‘acceptable’ level of damage.” Kennedy let McNamara’s recommendation stand.
McNamara and Kennedy during a 1962 meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Credit: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs
Shifts in strategic balance. Over the years, fatality estimates reflected the changing strategic balance. During the 1950s and the early 1960s, estimated Soviet fatalities were proportionately higher than US fatalities. As Soviet strategic forces caught up in their lethality, however, estimated US fatalities markedly increased, and optimism about a “balance of strength” favoring a post-nuclear-war United States faded.
Exemplifying the catastrophic scale of destruction and the growing numbers of estimated US fatalities was a 1967 interagency report describing the comparative vulnerabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union. According to the report, in 1964 the Soviets could kill 48 million Americans in a preemptive attack; by 1968, with greater numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles in place, they would be able to kill 91 million.
By contrast, Soviet fatalities remained relatively constant during the decade, because the United States already had large strategic forces by 1964. In a US retaliatory attack on Soviet cities in 1964, some 77 million would be killed, the report estimated. Under the same circumstances, 81 million would be killed in 1967.
A “political-psychological” burden. While all the estimates were conjectural, some admittedly were underestimates. The authors of a 1969 study prepared for strategic arms control talks estimated scores of millions of fatalities on both sides but acknowledged that they “underestimat[ed] the resulting fatalities.” They based their appraisals on fatalities caused by explosive blast damage and did not include impacts such as radiation and mass fires, which were certain to cause many more deaths.
When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was briefed in 1955 on the destruction that thermonuclear weapons would inflict, he was initially incredulous. Dulles had to be re-briefed before he accepted the analysis.
The prospect that decisions to use nuclear weapons would cause tremendous death and ruin troubled US officials. As Deputy Secretary of State Elliot Richardson put it years later, there was a “political-psychological” issue: “the imbalance between [the] ability to inflict fatalities and [the] reluctance to accept or cause large numbers of deaths.” Well before then, US presidents and their advisers had become strongly averse to nuclear weapons use, with the “nuclear taboo” stigmatizing these weapons because of the terrible and disproportionate dangers that their combat use would cause.
Huge casualty estimates and the enormous scale of nuclear strikes influenced President Richard Nixon to seek alternatives to apocalyptic attacks, eventually leading to a 1974 directive calling for options to control escalation and limit the scope and intensity of destructiveness. During the following years, the Defense Department tried to break down the operational plan into smaller attack options (Major, Regional, and Selective) to give the president and command authorities less destructive and possibly more credible options. But into the 1980s the options developed by the planning staff continued to require large numbers of nuclear weapons, despite attempts by presidents to scale back the plans.
Presidents Carter and Reagan successively levied explicit requirements for reduced “collateral damage”—civilian casualties—in their targeting policy directives (Presidential Directive 59 and National Security Decision Directive 13, respectively). While target planners prepared still-classified studies on collateral damage, their impact is unknown. It was not until the late 1980s, when the Cold War was winding down, that the White House and Pentagon officials induced target planners to produce attack options that could reduce deaths and destruction. What planners actually did—for example, whether they adjusted target planning to reduce “collateral” damage to civilians—is highly secret. In any event, it’s unclear whether any estimates of casualties were produced.
A Presidential Review Memorandum issued during the Carter administration acknowledged that a major nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would be so devastating that it could never have a “winner.” Source: Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
Secrets and risks. The horrifying scale of fatalities estimated during the 1950s through the 1970s were classified for years, only becoming available through archival releases during the 1990s and later. With rare exceptions, nuclear casualty estimates from the 1980s or later years are unavailable. Indeed, in some instances, the Defense Department has refused to declassify estimates in reports from the 1960s and 1970s.
While non-governmental organizations such as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility have produced casualty estimates, the degree to which official projections continued into the post-Cold War period is unclear. In 2013, the Obama administration began to apply to nuclear targeting international rules of war presented in the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, such as proportionality and civilian-military target distinctions. The adoption of those rules in 2013 may have led to estimates of fatalities under more restrictive targeting options, but that is also unclear.
The dangers of superpower war and nuclear confrontation declined when the Cold War ended, and both the United States and the former Soviet Union/Russia made significant cuts in their strategic forces. In recent years, with tensions increasing and the future of Ukraine and Taiwan in dispute, risks have risen again.
Adding to the danger is the Indo-Pakistan nuclear arms race. Both countries have engaged in risky confrontations with significant escalatory potential; the perils of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan are grave, and the overall impact would be disastrous. The recent catastrophic flooding of Pakistan, made all the worse by climate change, may influence that country’s security priorities.
The war against Ukraine presents a newer danger. It can only be hoped that the leaders of nuclear weapon states avoid steps that would make Cold War nuclear casualty estimates more than historical curiosities.
Correction: The Joint Chiefs’ 1961 estimate of total deaths—disclosed in Daniel Ellsberg’s 2017 book The Doomsday Machine—was roughly 600 million, not 275 million as originally published. The latter estimate did not include all deaths in China, the Soviet Union, and Soviet satellites.
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First published on January 25, 2023
Introduction
In the course of the last 11 months, I have been reviewing on a daily basis numerous carefully documented articles on the unfolding war in Ukraine,
The evolving consensus — after eleven months which emanates from the senior ranks of the US military and intelligence establishment — is that Ukraine “has lost the war”.
What strikes me in this ingenuous assessment is something which should have been obvious to analysts from the very outset of Russia’s “Special Operation”.
Ukraine Had Lost the War Before it Even Started
I will start with the obvious, much of which has been confirmed by official sources and analysis.
From Day One, Russia was involved as part of it’s “Special Operation” in “precision” attacks against Ukrainian military installations, whichcommenced hours prior to President Putin’s February 24, TV address:
“I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border. It is a fact that over the past thirty years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries …In response, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail.”
From one week to the next, Ukraine was without a Navy and without an Air Force, destroyed at the outset in late February, early March 2022.
Part II of this article focusses in detail on another obvious concept, which has not been the object of media coverage or even analysis by the independent media:
Turkey, NATO’s heavyweight is “Sleeping with the Enemy”. It has a military cooperation agreement with Russia
What this means is that under present conditions a US-NATO war against Russia is an impossibility.
The Black Sea is strategic. While the Ukraine coastline is in large part controlled by Russia, Turkey controls the entire Southern coastline of the Black Sea as well as access to the Mediterranean. (under the Montreux protocol) (see map below)
Turkey is playing a double game, it is not acting on behalf of NATO in the war theater. It is “unofficially” collaborating with Russia. The March 2022 failed peace agreements in Istanbul were hosted by the Erdogan government.
The Obvious: How Could Ukraine Win a War without an Air Force and a Navy?
According to Russian Sources quoted by B. K, Bhadrakumar (March 25, 2022);
The Russian General Staff disclosed that Ukrainian air force and air defence is almost completely destroyed [March 2022], while the country’s Navy no longer exists and about 11.5% of the entire military personnel have been put out of action.
[Quoting Russian sources] Ukraine has lost much of its combat vehicles (tanks, armoured vehicles, etc.), one-third of its multiple launch rocket systems, and well over three-fourths of its missile air defence systems and Tochka-U tactical missile systems.
Sixteen main military airfields in Ukraine have been put out of action, 39 storage bases and arsenals destroyed (which contained up to 70% of all stocks of military equipment, materiel and fuel, and more than 1 million 54000 tons of ammunition.)
Ukraine had not only lost its naval power in the Black Sea, it had also lost its maritime access to the Sea of Azov and Eastern Ukraine.
That happened in February-March of last year.
The Kerch strait in Eastern Crimea is controlled by Russia. It constitutes a narrow maritime gateway which links the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov.
All major ports on the Sea of Azov are currently under Russian control.
The Dnieper Seaway
The Delta of Ukraine’s major river-way the Dnieper is controlled by Russia, despite Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson.
The Dnieper is a strategic seaway extending from Belarus, Northern Ukraine and Kiev down to the Black Sea.
The Dnieper is a major corridor for Ukraine grain cargo transportation and maritime commodity trade out of the Black Sea, which is controlled by Russia in collaboration with Turkey. (on Turkey’s role, see Part II)
According to congressionally passed statutes, research of active laws, and extra details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Department of Defense owns, implements, and oversees the COVID-19 vaccine program as a “Countermeasure” to foreign attack. While the public was bombarded with an orchestrated fear campaign, the U.S. Government managed the Covid response as a national security threat.
The undercover operation was orchestrated utilizing three critical legal maneuvers:
1. Emergency Use Authorization EUA.
2. Prep Act,
3. Other Transactions Authority
President Trump declared a Public Health Emergency (PHE) on March 13, 2020, under the Stafford Act, putting the National Security Council in charge of the Covid policy.Covid-19 vaccines are “medical countermeasures” – a grey area of products that are not regulated as vaccines or medicines.
“They put the National Security Council in charge and treated it as an act of war,” said Latypova.
According to Operation Warp Speed/ASPR reports, the DoD ordered, oversaw, and tightly managed the development, manufacture, and distribution of Covid countermeasures, mainly utilizing the DoD’s previously established network of military contractors and consortia.
Department of Defense, BARDA, and HHS ordered all Covid countermeasures, including “vaccines” as prototype demonstrations of large-scale manufacturing, avoiding regulations and transparency under Other Transaction Authority. As prototypes used under EUA during PHE, Covid countermeasures, including “vaccines,” need not comply with the U.S. laws for manufacturing quality, safety, and labeling.
“The implication is that the U.S. Government authorized and funded the deployment of noncompliant biological materials on Americans without clarifying their “prototype” legal status, making the materials not subject to normal regulatory oversight, all while maintaining a fraudulent pseudo- “regulatory” presentation to the public,” said Latypova.
“Most incredible is the fact that current Laws enacted by the United States Congress appear to make the coverup actions LEGAL!”
Under the PHE, medical countermeasures are not regulated or safeguarded as pharmaceutical products (21 USC 360bbb-3(k).
The American people were led to believe that the FDA, CDC, and figureheads like Anthony Fauci oversaw the COVID-19 vaccine program.
Their involvement was an orchestrated information operation. All decisions concerning the COVID-19 vaccine research, materials acquisition, distribution, and information sharing were tightly controlled by the DoD.
Hundreds of Covid countermeasures contracts have been uncovered. Many disclosures are in redacted form. However, Latypova and Watt have found sources to fill in the details.
A review of these contracts indicates a high degree of control by the U.S. Government (DoD/BARDA). It specifies the scope of deliverables as “demonstrations” and “prototypes” only while excluding clinical trials and manufacturing quality control from the scope of work paid for by the contracts. To ensure that the Pharma is free to conduct the fake clinical trials without financial risk, the contracts include the removal of all liability for the manufacturers and any contractors along the supply and distribution chain under the 2005 PREP Act and related federal legislation.
Why is no action by regulators or courts?
According to Latypova and Watt, a combination of recently passed legislation and executive orders make it LEGAL to LIE! The HHS Secretary is accountable to no one if the Health National Emergency continues to be extended by Congress every three months.
A significant information operation was set in motion the minute COVID-19 hit. The U.S. government, the intelligence community, the media, and Big Tech colluded to orchestrate and implement an intense pressure campaign designed to get the vaccine legally designated under the Emergency Use Authorization Act while vilifying dissenting doctors, critics, and viable alternative treatments. This designation allowed for speedy manufacturing devoid of the standard safety and public health protocols.
For a vaccine to receive designation under the EUA, there can be no other known treatments or cures. Therefore, many proven treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were blacklisted in the media and dismissed as “horse dewormers” when these cheap, readily available drugs were in the past heralded for their effectiveness.
Eminent COVID-treating doctors such as Peter M. McCullough and Pierre Kory have faced unprecedented attacks on their medical credentials.
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Featured image is from Armed Forces Press
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Comments Off on The US Department of Defense Controlled COVID ‘Vaccines’ from the Start Under A National Security Program. Lied the Entire Time – Were Never ‘Safe and Effective’
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First published by GR on January 27, 2022
***
Behind Washington’s desperate appeal for tanks and other lethal weaponry for Ukraine, looms the nagging prospect that Russia’s winter offensive may have already begun in the south where heavy fighting has broken out along the Line of Contact in the Zaporizhia region. While the information from the front remains sketchy, some analysts think that Russia is planning to send its troops and armored units northward in order to block vital supply-lines and trap Ukrainian forces in the east.
A Russian blitz northward would likely be synchronized with the movement of a second large grouping pushing south along the Oskil River. These two dagger-like thrusts would be accompanied by multiple missile strikes aimed at strategic bridges and railway-lines crossing the Dnieper River. If the Russians were able to succeed in such an operation, the bulk of Ukraine’s army would be effectively encircled in the east while Moscow would have regained control over most of its traditional territories. The offensive might not end the war, but it would end Ukraine’s existence as a viable, contiguous state. This is an excerpt from an article at Aljazeera:
Moscow’s forces are pushing towards two towns in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhia region, where fighting intensified this week after several months of a stagnant front… Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in the region, said offensive actions were concentrated around two towns: Orikhiv, around 50km (30 miles) south of Ukrainian-controlled regional capital Zaporizhzhia, and Hulyaipole, further east….
The Russian army later claimed for a second day in a row that it had taken “more advantageous lines and positions” after “offensive operations” in the Zaporizhia region…. In its daily report on Sunday,the Ukrainian army said “more than 15 settlements were affected by artillery fire” in Zaporizhia…. He also said this week that fighting has “sharply increased” in the southern region.” (“Russia advances towards two towns in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region”, AlJazeera)
Typically, I wouldn’t spend much time on a topic for which there is so little evidence and so much speculation. But people are following events very closely in Ukraine because they want to know what Putin plans to do with the 550,000 combat troops that are presently scattered across the theatre or gathered along the perimeter in Belarus. The assumption is that Putin will use these forces in a winter offensive that could dramatically impact the course of the war. I agree with that assumption, but I’m not entirely convinced that the fighting in the south proves that the offensive has already started. Even so, the buzz on the Telegram channels and Twitter is hard to ignore and could indicate that my skepticism is unwarranted. For example, here are a few blurbs from independent sites that suggest the offensive is already underway:
The Russian Army is still actively advancing in the #Zaporozhye direction, the front has been pressed to a depth of 7km. At the moment our advance in three directions on the #Orekhov section. On the west side there is fighting for #Novoandreyevka and #Shcherbaki, on the east for #Belogorye and Malaya Tokmachka, on the southeast there is fighting for #Novodanilovka, which is only 6.5 km from #Orekhov. A defensive breakthrough here will allow the RF Armed Forces to develop an offensive in several directions at once, literally cutting the AFU grouping into two parts. Telegram
Or this:
Zaporozhye update
The Russian army continues its offensive on the Zaporozhye Front
The troops of the Southern and Eastern military districts are conducting an offensive on a wide front – up to 60 km (in the Vasilyevsky and Pologovsky districts).
The advance of troops is slowed down due to many minefields.
Or this:
The offensive is going according to plan: close fights in several areas. Fortified positions and regions of the enemy are actively treated with bombs, mines, and howitzer shells; only then come armored vehicles with infantry.
According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Zaporozhye direction, the RF Armed Forces are hitting the Armed Forces of Ukraine with all types of weapons in areas of more than 25 settlements, including Olgovskoe, Gulyaipole, Volshebnoe, Novodanilovka, Kamenskoe and Plavni of the Zaporozhye region, Vremovka and Novopol DNR.
This is just a small sampling of the postings that have been flooding various sites for the last few days. A great number of the comments are from people who appear to have first-hand knowledge of events on the battlefield. I can’t speak for their accuracy, but the volume of reports (and their intensity) suggest that something out-of-the-ordinary is taking place.
There’s also a new post at Moon of Alabama in which Bernard states unequivocally that the offensive is already underway. Here’s what he said:
The long expected Russian offensive in Ukraine has begun….
I and others have suggested for quite some time that the Russian forces will use the southern Zaporizhia region for a large thrust into the far back of the Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut…
The Russian moves against the third and fourth Ukrainian defense lines will likely be supported by a move from the south that will liberate the rest of the Zaporiziha and Donetsk oblast…..
There is no Ukrainian artillery brigade in the sector. There are thereby no counter-artillery capabilities available…..The aim of the Russian thrust in the south will not be to take cities like Zaporiziha. The aim is to bring the main transport routes, railways and roads, from west-Ukraine to the front in east Ukraine under Russian artillery fire. This will prevent not only the re-supply for the Ukrainian troops on the eastern front but also their exit from the front line. A 100 kilometer (60 miles) thrust to the north would mostly do that. A complementary thrust from the north towards south, which may or may not be coming, would finally close the cauldron.” (“Ukraine – Russian Army Activates Southern Front”, Moon of Alabama)
Although I’m still not sure that the offensive has actually begun, I entirely agree with MoA that Russia’s plan will be some variation of the strategy he presents in his article. In fact, a similar strategy was laid out by military historian Big Serge in a recent Substack post titled “Russo-Ukrainian War: The World Blood Pump”. The two analysts appear to have drawn similar conclusions as to what we should expect in the weeks to come. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
At the moment, the majority of Russian combat power is uncommitted, and both western and Ukrainian sources are (belatedly) becoming increasingly alarmed about the prospect for a Russian offensive in the coming weeks. Currently, the entire Ukrainian position in the east is vulnerable because it is, in effect, an enormous salient, vulnerable to attack from three directions.
Two operational depth objectives in particular have the potential to shatter Ukrainian logistics and sustainment. These are, respectively, Izyum in the north and Pavlograd in the South. A Russian thrust down the west bank of the Oskil river towards Izyum would simultaneously threaten to cut off and destroy the Ukrainian grouping on the Svatove axis(S on the map) and sever the vital M03 highway from Kharkov. Reaching Pavlograd, on the other hand, would completely isolate the Ukrainian forces around Donetsk and sever much of Ukraine’s transit across the Dneiper.
Both Izyum and Pavlograd are roughly 70 miles from the start lines of a prospective Russian offensive, and thus offer a very tempting combination – being both operationally significant and in relatively manageable reach. Beginning yesterday, we started to see Russian advances on the Zaporozhia axis. While these consist, at the moment, mainly of reconnaissance in force pushing into the “grey zone” (that ambiguous interstitial frontage), RUMoD did claim several settlements taken, which could presage a genuine offensive push in this direction. The key tell would be a Russian assault on Orikhiv, which is a large town with a genuine Ukrainian garrison in it. A Russian attack here would indicate that something more than a probing attack is underway.
It is difficult sometimes to parse out the difference between what we predict will happen and what we want to happen. This, certainly, is what I would choose if I was in charge of Russian planning – a drive south along the west bank of the Oskil river on the Kupyansk-Izyum axis, and a simultanious attack northward past Zaporozhia towards Pavlograd. In this case, I believe simply screening Zaporozhia in the short term is preferable to getting bogged down in an urban battle there.
Whether Russia will actually attempt this, we do not know.Russian operational security is much better than either Ukraine’s or their proxy forces (Wagner and the LNR/DNR Milita), so we know significantly less about Russia’s deployments than we do about Ukraine’s. Regardless, we know that Russia enjoys a strong preponderance of combat power right know, and there are juicy operational targets within range.” (“Russo-Ukrainian War: The World Blood Pump“, Big Serge, Substack)
Not surprisingly, fighting has broken out around Orikhiv which Big Serge says “would indicate that something more than a probing attack is underway.” In other words, this could, in fact, be the opening phase of the winter offensive. And, if it is, then we should assume that there will be a shift away from the ‘positional battles of attrition’ we’ve seen up to this point. The Russia offensive will not face defensive lines of heavily fortified trenches that require weeks of softening with long-range artillery until armored units can be dispatched for mop-up operations. The Big Arrow moves that Serge anticipates suggests that we could see significant territorial gains in lightly-defended areas. That means that things will likely move much faster than they have in the last 11 months. It also means that Ukrainian forces in the Donbass will be effectively cut off from Kiev and left to fend for themselves. Naturally, the casualties are bound to be significant.
According to reports in the media, CIA Director William Burns secretly visited Kiev last week to warn Zelensky about the impending Russian offensive. Burns probably presented a scenario very similar to the strategy laid out by MoA and Big Serge. But whatever Burns may have said to Zelensky, it had no effect on the Ukrainian president at all. Zelensky has continued to send troops to the frontlines (Bakhmut) despite the hopelessness of the situation and despite the fact that the Ukrainian defensive positions are collapsing by the day. There’s no longer any doubt that Russian forces will eradicate pockets of resistance in the east or that the battered remnants of the Ukrainian army will be forced to retreat. It’s only a matter of time.
We’re not saying it’s all going to be “smooth sailing” for the Russians from this point on. No, there are going to be plenty of bumps in the road ahead. But given Russia’s superiority in manpower, firepower and industrial base, we think Russia will undoubtedly win this first phase of the war. The problem is that –even if the Russian army clears all the territory east of the Dnieper River and annexes it into the Russian Federation– that doesn’t mean the fighting will stop. It won’t stop. US-backed forces will continue to launch attacks from across the river, they’ll deploy commandos to strike behind Russian lines, they’ll train paramilitaries to ignite an insurgency, and they’ll fire missiles at Crimea, Russia and, perhaps, even Moscow itself.
Is Putin ready for that?
Washington is not going to throw in the towel because Russia won the first round in a 10-round fight. The United States is still fully committed to its plan to “weaken” Russia in order to become the dominant player in the world’s most promising market, Central Asia. In that regard, the fighting in Ukraine has not dampened Washington’s resolve at all, in fact, we think the conflict is feuling the widespread Russophobia and the relentless cries for revenge. How else do we explain the persistent escalation that has not yet sparked even a peep of public protest? And, keep in mind, the US has already blown up NordStream 2, pushed Europe into a severe Depression, sabotaged global supplylines for the foreseeable future, derailed the 40 year-long “globalization” project, and done everything in its power to goad China into a shooting war. What these incidents show is how much importance the US attaches to its priviledged role in the global order and the risks it is willing to take to preserve that role. In short, the United States will do ‘whatever it takes’ to maintain its iron-grip on power.
If I was Putin, I would prepare myself for a long and bloody struggle. Because that’s what he’s in for.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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***
First published by Global Research on Jan 16, 2023
In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an eloquent and stirring denunciation of the Vietnam war and US militarism. The speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” is relevant to today’s war in Ukraine.
In the speech at Riverside Church, King talked about how the US had supported France in trying to re-colonize Vietnam. He noted, “Before the end of the war we were meeting 80% of the French war costs.”
When France began to despair in the war, “We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war.”
King went on to recall that after the French finally left Vietnam, the United States prevented the implementation of the Geneva Accord which would have allowed Ho Chi Minh to unite the divided country. Instead, the US supported its preferred South Vietnamese dictator.
The U.S. has played a similar role in blocking compromise solutions and international agreements to the Ukraine conflict.
Following Ukraine protests in February 2014, the European Union negotiated an agreement between President Yanukovich and the opposition to have early new elections. The attitude of lead US official Victoria Nuland was crystallized in her secretly recorded comment, “F*** the EU!” Despite the agreement, a violent bloody coup led by ultra-nationalist Ukrainians was “midwifed”.
The ultra-nationalist coup government immediately started implementing policies hostile to the Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine. The coup and the new policies provoked the conflicts and resistance which have led to the situation today. The coup and policies were abhorred by a majority of Ukrainians, especially in eastern Ukraine. The Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and re-unify with Russia.
The Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015 were intended to resolve the conflict by granting some autonomy to the the Russian speaking sections in the eastern Donbass but keeping them within Ukraine. Thanks to the admissions of two prominent former European leaders, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, we know that the West and their Ukrainian government puppet never intended to implement the Minsk Agreement.
Like the 1954 Geneva Accords regarding Vietnam, the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements on Ukraine were never implemented because Washington did not want a compromise.
When Ukraine President Zelensky had negotiations with Russians in Turkey at the end of March 2022, UK PM Boris Johnson hurried to Kyiv to dissuade Zelensky from continuing serious negotiations to end the war.
Similarly, the US is providing the big majority of weapons, military supplies and financial aid to Ukraine just as they did to France and then the puppet government of South Vietnam. And similarly the US and allies do not want a resolution to the conflict which might in any way be seen as win for Russia.
Rationalization vs Reality of Wars in Vietnam and Ukraine
In April 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) explained why he was escalating US involvement in Vietnam. With an Orwellian touch, he titled the speech “Peace without Conquest” as he announced the beginning of US air attacks on Vietnam. He explained that
“We must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny and only in such a world will our own freedom be secure… we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence and I intend to keep that promise. To dishonor that pledge, to abandon the small and brave nation to its enemies and the terror must follow would be an unforgivable wrong…We are also there to strengthen world order… To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s words.”
President Biden and administration leaders sound similar to LBJ in the early stage of the Vietnam War. In his remarks to Congress asking for additional funding for Ukraine, Biden said,
“We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom…. The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen…Investing in Ukraine’s freedom and security is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.”
Both Russia and the US now acknowledge that the conflict in Ukraine is between Russia and NATO (led the US). Ukraine is a proxy for the US which promoted the 2014 coup and has been pumping weapons into Ukraine ever since. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has been explicit: “We want to see Russia weakened.” The Ukrainian Defense Chief says they are fighting “to fulfill NATO’s mission.”
These wars are unnecessary
Just as the US could have lived with Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh leadership without the war, the US could live with Ukraine being a neutral country and bridge between east and west, Russia and western Europe.
However, as ML King observed 54 years ago, that was not (and still is not) US policy.
“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” He went on to name many other countries which are victims of US intervention and aggression. He said, “And if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves … marching …and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam…”
Incrementally Increasing Conflict toward Total War
In 1965, when President Johnson announced the beginning of US air attacks on Vietnam, the war had been going on for many years. The US kept incrementally increasing its commitment – from political support to advisors and trainers and special operations. In spring 1965 “only” about 400 US soldiers had died in the conflict. The war was not yet widely unpopular. Americans who protested against the Vietnam War were a small minority.
We may be at a similar or earlier point in the conflict with Russia via Ukraine. While many tens of BILLIONS of dollars has been committed to Ukraine, plus advisors, trainers and other support, the US military has not yet been openly and actively deployed.
The incremental buildup in Vietnam ultimately led to over 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers being killed. US prestige and influence was severely damaged.
Martin Luther King Jr said in his 1967 speech [exactly two years after LBG hi,
“We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam …. The world demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people.”
If the incremental buildup toward war with Russia is not stopped, it will be immeasurably worse than Vietnam. Already we are seeing tremendous destruction with Ukrainians and Russians dying by the thousands. As with Vietnam in 1965, this could be just the beginning.
The costs of war and militarism
Dr King described the negative impact of the Vietnam war at home. He said
“A few years ago there was a shining moment …. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam and I watched this program broken and eviscerated … I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
Today, with nearly 60% of the federal discretionary budget going to the military, so called intelligence and nuclear weapon modernization, the situation is even more stark. While US infrastructure corrodes, homelessness, personal debt, suicides and addictions increase. Instead of spending resources improving the lives of ordinary people, the government is pouring borrowed billions into another unnecessary war.
Western Media Distortions
Western media portrayed the US and South Vietnam winning the war in South East Asia until the 1968 Tet offensive exposed the lies and reality. Similarly, western media portrays Ukrainians winning the war midst overwhelming Ukrainian public support. In reality, Russia and the secessionist areas control large areas and will advance in the near future. Ukrainian losses are already huge.
The idea that all Ukrainians love the West and hate Russia is false. As an indication of the mixed sentiments, the country having received the MOST emigrants from Ukraine is Russia. While a small number continue from Russia to west European countries, the big majority stay in Russia with many awaiting the end of warfare.
Just as South Vietnamese puppet leaders were built up the US for political reasons, so is Ukrainian President Zelensky. His speeches are written by Washington insiders. Largely censored from the media, Zelensky has overseen the imprisonment, torture and killing of opponents. The largest opposition party has been banned. Many Ukrainians oppose his policy and continuation of the war.
Ukrainians have become cannon fodder for the US geopolitical goals, just as the South Vietnamese were.
Will the US and allies continue to escalate the conflict in Ukraine, to “double down” on an intervention half way around the world with the goal of hurting Russia? Have we learned nothing from Vietnam and subsequent US/Western foreign policy disasters of the past 40 years?
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…When machines and computer, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered… A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death …..The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just… Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out in a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.”
Exactly one year after delivering the speech at Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
The Vietnam war continued for another seven years until the Vietnamese finally defeated and expelled the US military and their puppets. The disaster of the Vietnam War will be small compared to the disaster which may befall us all if US policy of attacking Russia through Ukraine is not stopped.
*
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Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can contacted at [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: U.S. tanks use flamethrowers in a field during the Vietnam War in 1970. /CFP
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***
CGTN Question: China’s economic performance during the past three years. Why did China outperform major economies including the US and EU?
Peter Koenig: China has entered new partnerships with the BRICS+, as well as a new strong alliance between China, Russia and Iran, as Iran has become a full-fledged member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – SCO.
China has already 2 years ago “discounted” trade and investments with the west, notably with the US and Europe, and instead concentrated on the ASEAN countries.
In fact, the Chinese initiated the world’s largest trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement – ASEAN+plus 5 (Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea) – entered into force on 1 January 2022.
While the RCEP impact on China’s economy may at this point be modest – the future looks extremely good, not only because of a new closer political alliance within the East, but also because it develops trade with China and with and among the RCEP member countries themselves.
Already today China’s trade with the various Eastern Associations has become more important than – and outranked – trade and investment exchange with the “West” – EU and US.
Just before the end of 2022, the special Russia-China strategic partnership, has been enforced by a virtual meeting between Presidents Putin and Xi – strengthening their politico-economic relationship for the future. They projected trade between the two countries to reach some 200 billion dollars equivalent by 2024.
And trade, which means economic growth, has already been enhanced during 2022, as the two countries are massively dedollarizing their economies, and dealing with local currencies, especially the Yuan.
The Yuan will in the future gain in importance due to China’s deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – 6 member countries, led by Saudi Arabia. Perhaps, a new “OPEC” is dawning – an eastern oriented hydrocarbon exchange. It may lead to a universal Petro-Yuan.
And finally – the Belt and Road – the BRI – has made a new start, as it is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year. Its expansion and new orientation on trade and joint infrastructure, production and investment projects, had already started in 2021/22 – especially with Russia, India and Iran, and in the future direction will include the revived BRICS+….
The BRI will also be an important driver for China’s future economic development – including that of countries that join the BRI, and more in general – countries that join eastern alliances and aim at new associations within a natural Continent – EURASIA – connecting people and countries in peace.
CGTN: How did China escape the global inflation in 2022?
PK: China had a “normal“ economy, over the past few years ever more detached from the western economy. For good reasons – sanctions, China bashing and so on…
Western inflation was manufactured, by the EU Central Bank (ECB) and country central banks, as one of the means to destroy the western economy, especially the European economy – along with artificial energy shortages, and related food shortages – all blamed on Russia’s war with Ukraine.
The purpose being creating poverty, bankruptcies, shifting assets from the bottom and the middle to the top, to the billionaire oligarchy – creating poverty, famine – total destitution and finally death.
Many people in Europe, maybe up to 20% will have to choose between buying food or heating their apartment this winter. Many may lose their living quarters, because they can no longer pay their rent…it’s a way of depopulation – it’s part of the UN Agenda 2030, and the WEF’s Great Reset ….
To answer your question, that’s why China had no inflation, because China has another agenda for her peoples’ development.
CGTN: Decoding latest sets of economic data (up till Nov 2022), what do they tell us?
PK: Well, the reason might be that China’s economy performed so much better than the west projected, despite covid restrictions. And better than western economies.
Some of western countries attempted to restart their economies and relied on trade with China. This is of course never mentioned in the western mainstream media.
What also helped – maybe indirectly – and with a look into the future, the US$ 18 billion equivalent of contracts that German Chancellor Scholz took home from his recent short trip to China.
As a result of this much better-than-expected Chinese performance, the IMF “upgraded” China’s economic growth forecast for 2023, from 4.8% to 5.2%.
In my opinion, that is still an underestimation, given the new alliances and trading and investment potential that China is pursuing with the expanded SCO, with the BRICS-plus and with the new larger alliance – the three letters of the BRICS – Russia – India China – plus Iran.
And of course, with the new Turbo BRI.
CGTN: What had been the major drivers of growth in the past three years?
PK: The short answer – the BRI – which in the future will be revamped into a BRI-plus – as it will focus more on the new and enhanced alliances – Russia, China – and BRICS+.
Also the reorientation away from western markets, towards ASEAN countries, and importantly, China’s “inside look” – concentrating on developing the lesser developed internal and north-western regions.
You may call them investments in internal “equilibrium” – which in themselves will yield economic returns to the nation.
China’s economy, especially the western Provinces, have benefitted from state-sponsored “structural adjustments” at favorable terms, easing infrastructure and industrial development and growth.
CGTN: Debate on Western observations. COVID impact on short term economic activities?
PK: In brief – devastating in Europe and the US; bankruptcies abound, skyrocketing unemployment, rapidly rising poverty – while China’s economy still grew with internal mechanisms of selective structural adjustments, helped ease the covid impact, and at the same time bringing more equilibrium between highly developed Eastern China and middle and western China.
CGTN: Outlook for consumption recovery?
PK: Depends on whether Europe will continue to pursue the UN Agenda 2030 / Great Reset, or whether the European people will come to their senses and reject such nefariously destructive policies.
Both Agenda 2030 / Great Reset are determined to crash the western, foremost the European economy.
The socioeconomic policies of Europe – and partly the US – today look like a suicide pact, both for the economy and the people. An instrument to get there is Russia sanctioning, banning Russia’s gas and oil, creating an artificial energy shortage and blaming Russia for it.
Why the planned destruction? – Because this is the way a Globalist One World Order can be forged, not with two major blocks of functioning economies, the US and the European Union.
In China, consumption is up and running again – soon reaching pre-covid levels.
As far as I can see, China is not following the destructive path of the UN Agenda 2030 which appears to me like the pursuit of a weird and deadly Cult.
CGTN: Housing market named a key driver of recovery in economic conference, will the sector rebound in 2023? What will it mean for consumption?
PK: In Europe, people are very insecure about the economy, especially their own place or home, in an insecure economy. This means, they are hesitant making big investments, and especially debt which in the west is intimately related to housing.
What will happen in the near future, will depend on EU policies – will they detach from the US Hegemon’s dictate?
My vision is that 2023 will be a year of transition, where the people in the west will take back their lives, away from what has become a tyrannical all-controlling governing style.
If We – the People, succeed, there will be a rebound of housing and consumption – of everything.
If not – I don’t even want to think of it.
CGTN: Is export greatly challenged amid a global recession? Is it fair to call the Chinese economy an export-and-investment-driven economy?
PK: Yes, exports are naturally challenged in a recession economy, as consumption is challenged.
The thing is, the western recession is not necessarily a “global” recession.
Much of Asia, especially China and Russia are not in a recession.
The Chinese economy is much more versatile than “export and investment-driven”. Suffice to look at the new initiatives, like the visit by President Xi to Saudi Arabia – the new hydrocarbon deals in Yuan – with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
The ramification of this new relationship is poised to become a generator of a new dimension – a shift from the falling powers of the west to a new growing and more equal and more peaceful – and, thus, more sustainable world economy.
Far from just an export and investment economy – China is already the driver of a new economic concept, based on peace, harmony and stability – back to the true meaning of “trade” which in ancient times had been described as win-win, meaning both parties benefit from it.
This concept is foreign to the west, also the long-term economic concept of “comparative advantage” has largely disappeared from western thinking, let alone from western vocabularies.
These are reasons contributing to the western demise and the unstoppable shift from western power based on conflict, to eastern power based on peace and harmonious cooperation.
CGTN: How will aging affect China’s growth? What are the compensating factors?
PK: In China, as in many eastern cultures, age is considered also wisdom – thus, older people keep an important role in society – as with sharing their experience converting it to advice for younger generations.
Older people’s lesser physical productivity, may be at least partially compensated by ever-updated new technologies.
In short, aging in China may have none, or a much lesser negative impact on the economy.
Whereas in the west, aging may impact societal well-being, because older people are often discriminated and separated from the “working society” – that has a psychological and social cost – and eventually, it also impacts on the welfare system.
CGTN: China’s interaction with global economy. What does China easing COVID policies mean for the world?
PK: It could be very positive, and it will be positive for part of the global economy, namely for the Asian and the Global South socioeconomy.
As to western economy, the west has no shortfall of stalling China – now with travel restrictions, and soon with new sanctions – probably linked to Taiwan…
The west has still not understood that they cannot, never, curtail, control or limit China’s growth, with her 5000 years of history.
It eclipses all of the Global North.
CGTN: Outlook for 2023 growth?
PK: The Outlook for growth in China is good – as mentioned before – the BRI – new and strengthened strategic relations with Russia, and new enhanced association with India and Iran, as well as the BRICS+.
As mentioned before, the IMF forecasts an upward adjusted growth of 5.2%.
CGTN: Does the PBOC (China’s Central Bank) has enough room for policy adjustments and why?
PK: At first sight I would say yes – but cannot substantiate it, other than “structural adjustments” with Chinese characteristics – is a good instrument, as proven in the past.
CGTN: With innovative developments and technological progress, is China becoming a big contributor for a cleaner global economy?
PK: Definitely. As compared with western large powers, like the US and the EU, China is already today contributing more to a cleaner environment. Also, research into alternative sources of energy, are taken seriously in China – less so in the west – and therefore in China they are already much more advanced than in the west.
The west has been captured by a neo-liberal Green Agenda – many have not even noticed it. What used to be a center-left agenda, has become an outright fascist party concept.
The “Green Agenda” in the west is everything else than green and clean. It is a way of oppressing people’s freedom, through new lockdowns and life-restrictions, rather than seeking cooperation in reducing pollution and all levels.
In fact, CO2 is not a pollutant; it’s a vital gas for all life. Without ti, there would be no life on earth.
CGTN: How did the structural adjustments in the last 10 years in China have paved way for a new round of growth?
PK: Structural adjustment – Chinese style – and adapted to local circumstances, has helped shape investment strategies for the interior and western China – thus contributing to people’s well-being, reduction of migration and a better equilibrium with the highly developed eastern China.
CGTN: How will walking out of the pandemic shadow help to accelerate China’s involvement in global economic activities, such as the BRI?
PK: The Chinese easing on covid restrictions is certainly a driver for more connectivity with the “global” economy. Wat will however be the main driver is the “new” BRI.
The re-orientation of the Belt and Road to new or enhanced alliances, like Russia-China, and China-India-Iran — BRICS-plus and SCO — and so on, will be also a potential driver for associated countries’ economies.
This for now will be most visible in Asia, and in a larger sense, EURASIA – with the Middle East, especially the new GCC alliance.
It may be wise to limit the term “global” to Asia, and Asian / Eurasian associations. Unfortunately, the west, as of now, is not trustworthy – and is on a destructive and hostile drive.
CGTN: Uncertainties for China’s growth in 2023?
PK: Considering all the foregoing – especially BRI – my short answer is NO.
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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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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).
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First published by Global Research on November 9, 2022
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Way back in 2017 I created a country-by-country guide to the biometric ID control grid that was coming into view even then. In that editorial I noted that “it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to understand where this is all heading: From the cashless society and the biometric ID grid to the cashless biometric grid.”
Well, here we are. It’s 2022 and the merger of the cashless society and the biometric ID grid is nearing completion. In fact, the current iteration of this control grid agenda is even worse than predicted. Now known as Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, this programmable digital money offers the banksters numerous options, including the ability to combine the cashless society with the biometric ID grid and even a social credit system. If and when CBDCs replace other payment methods, the banksters’ control over society will be unprecedented.
But however closely you might be following the drive toward the CBDC dystopia, you might be missing the forest for the trees. Although each country’s central bankers talk as if they have come up with the idea for a digital currency all by themselves and that there is no international coordination behind the CBDC agenda, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as a recent Bank for International Settlements report indicates, 90% of central banks around the world are currently studying the feasibility of issuing their own CBDC.
Today, I am going to drive home the point that the coming CBDC prison is truly global in nature by demonstrating that it is not just being put into place in one or two totalitarian countries, but nearly every country in the world.
Only when we recognize how dire the situation is can we hope to motivate communities to implement the survival currencies that will see us through the controlled demolition of the existing monetary order.
Australia
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has been exploring the possibility of an Australian Central Bank Digital Currency since at least 2019, when its “Innovation Lab” drafted a Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology, which states that “the Bank is conducting research on the technological and policy implications of a wholesale CBDC.”
It made good on this threat in November 2020 with the announcement of a partnership between the RBA and Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Perpetual, and ConsenSys Software to “explore the potential use and implications of a wholesale form of central bank digital currency.” Philip Lowe, governor of the RBA, has publicly expressed skepticism about the need to implement a retail CBDC in Australia, but the door is still open to the possibility.
The Bahamas
The Bahamas became the unlikely location of the world’s first nationwide CBDC when they launched the “Sand Dollar” back in October 2020. The island archipelago—with one of the highest per capita incomes in the Americas and a 90% mobile device penetration rate—was viewed as an ideal laboratory for the CBDC experiment by central bankers and hyped as a harbinger of a “new world economy” by the global financial press. . . .
But the banksters have not been thrilled with the results so far. The IMF told the Central Bank of The Bahamas earlier this week that it needs to “accelerate its education campaigns and continue strengthening internal capacity and oversight” of the currency.
Brazil
Roberto Campos Neto, president of the Central Bank of Brazil, confirmed last month that the bank will be running a pilot test of its CBDC, the digital real, before the end of the year. “This is a way to create currency digitization without creating a break in bank balance sheets. This project should have some kind of pilot in the second half of the year,” Neto said at the press conference announcing the pilot’s launch.
Canada
This past March, the Bank of Canada (BoC) announced that it had partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to “collaborate on a twelve-month research project on Central Bank Digital Currency.” The project—which the BoC describes as “part of the Bank’s wider research and development agenda on digital currencies and fintech”—will “explore how advanced technologies could affect the potential design of a CBDC.” This will in turn “help inform the Bank of Canada’s research effort into CBDC.”
Chile
Chile’s central bank issued a report this week on its plans for a future Chilean digital currency. Spouting the usual bankster platitudes about how a CBDC “would contribute to achieving a competitive, innovative and integrated payment system that is inclusive, resilient and protects people’s information,” the review ultimately concludes that “a deeper analysis of the benefits and risks” is in order, and promises (or threatens, depending on your perspective) to issue a new report on the subject toward the end of the year.
In the meantime, the Chilean Central Bank governor, Rosanna Costa, has said that Chile’s CBDC “should operate both online and offline” and that it should “allow the authorities to trace the transaction afterwards” while paradoxically “safeguarding personal data.”
China
The digital yuan (as readers of this column will already know) has been in the works for at least five years. It is no surprise, then, that China’s CBDC—already operational in various trials—is seen as one of the most developed CBDC projects in the world and is held up by various Western countries as the bogeyman justifying their own CBDC experimentation (“We can’t let the ChiComs beat us to the punch!”).
As you may or may know (depending how closely you’re tuned in to CBDCInsider and other such sources of info), the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) did a “test rollout” of the currency at the Beijing Olympics this year, offering athletes, attendees and press the chance to use the new CBDC at the Games. That test was deemed a success, with the PBoC later declaring that the digital yuan was used to make 2 million yuan ($315,000) of payments per day during the event.
Now, in the latest move toward full implementation of the Chinese CBDC, three cities across China have declared they will accept the digital yuan for tax payments.
European Union
The EU is currently conducting “in-house experiments” for a digital euro and expects to start working on a prototype next year. As part of its ongoing “research” process, the European Central Bank released a working paper this past week on “The digital economy, privacy, and CBDC.” The paper suggests that a digital euro could strike a happy balance between “inefficient” offline cash transactions that preserve anonymity and “efficient” online bank deposit transactions that do not preserve anonymity.
The best kind of digital currency, the report concludes, is a “CBDC with data-sharing,” a conclusion they arrive at by redefining privacy: “Privacy is not the opposite of sharing—rather it is control over sharing.” Actual Europeans are not buying this self-serving twaddle, but the ECB, unsurprisingly, seems not to be listening to them.
Ghana
The Bank of Ghana was one of the first African countries to announce that it was developing a digital currency. And now, with the release of a design paper for the eCedi—its retail token-based CBDC—it is one step closer to implementing that vision. The bank is currently soliciting feedback on the proposal from the public.
Hong Kong
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has released a number of studies, white papers, proposals and discussion papers surrounding the topic of CBDCs over the past few years, from the 2019 announcement of Project LionRock-Inthanon (a joint project with the Bank of Thailand to study the application of CBDC to cross-border payments) to last month’s “Discussion paper on e-HKD from policy and design perspective.”
This paper invites “views from the public and the industry on key policy and design issues for introducing retail central bank digital currency,” leaving little doubt that the introduction of a digital Hong Kong Dollar is now all-but-inevitable.
Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made waves earlier this year by announcing that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) would launch a CBDC sometime in the next fiscal year. Lest there be any doubt about the Indian government’s intention to make good on its digital currency threat, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar asserted in March that the digital rupee is a “natural progression” of the digital payment ecosystem.
But for those worried about what life in the coming digital dystopia will be like, relax! RBI Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar says the bank “will probably go in for a very careful and calibrated, nuanced manner” as it springs its CBDC trap on the Indian public.
Iran
There’s an old canard in conspiracy realist circles that there are only three (?) central banks on the planet that aren’t owned by the Rothschilds. The exact list of these supposedly independent central banks varies in the telling, but Iran is usually included among them. Well, guess what? The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) is all on board with the CBDC revolution!
This past January, Abutaleb Najafi—the head of CBI’s information services company—revealed that, after two years of “continuous work” on the platform, “the infrastructure needed for CBI’s cryptocurrency and now its pilot version is ready.”
Details on the pilot test of the Iranian CBDC are scarce, but Najafi has confirmed that both state-run and private banks in the country will allow customers to open digital wallets for the currency during the trial.
Israel
Generally speaking, central banks are finding CBDCs to be a public relations disaster. In every country they hold “public consultations” about a central bank digital currency and solicit comments from the citizens, but find the overwhelming majority of those responses are negative. As it turns out, people are wary of a government-issued programmable money that could be used to completely exclude them from the financial system itself if they dare engage in activities the government disapproves of.
The Bank of Israel (BoI) has decided to do an end run around this problem by simply declaring (without showing proof) that it has “received public support for its plans to possibly issue a digital shekel on grounds it would help the economy by supporting innovation in the payments system, reducing the amount of cash and bolstering the fintech sector.”
Yes, the banksters actually want you to believe that the majority of Israelis support the idea of a digital shekel because it will reduce the amount of cash. Riiiiiiight. Don’t worry, though. The BoI says it “has still not made a final decision on whether it will issue a digital shekel” even though “all of the responses to the public consultation indicate support for continued research.” Riiiiiiight.
Japan
In March, Bank of Japan (BoJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda declared that the BoJ has no plan to issue a digital currency as of yet but that it “will prepare ‘thoroughly’ to respond to changing circumstances that could require it to do so in future.” Last month, BoJ Executive Director Shinichi Uchida clarified that the bank would not introduce a digital yen as a means of achieving negative interest rates, as some have warned.
Around the same time, Kazushige Kamiyama, head of the bank’s payment system, pledged that the BoJ would follow Sweden’s slow, cautious approach to CBDC testing before any digital yen is actually implemented.
In a sign that plans for a Japanese CBDC may be further along than publicly acknowledged, however, Kuroda took a moment from fearmongering about decentralized digital assets to state that a CBDC “could be an option to secure a seamless and safe [payment and settlement] infrastructure in Japan.”
Namibia
The Bank of Namibia revealed its plans last month to launch a CBDC. “We cannot ignore CBDC, it is a reality out there and for that reason, the Bank of Namibia has started researching CBDCs and they very soon will go out with consultations,” the Bank of Namibia Governor Johannes Gawaxab said at a press conference announcing the move, adding that a consultation paper on the plan is nearing completion.
Nigeria
As discussed on a recent edition of New World Next Week, Nigeria is one of only two countries in the world with an official, nationwide CBDC (the other being The Bahamas, mentioned above). The eNaira is a stablecoin minted by the Central Bank of Nigeria, making it a true digital version of the fiat currency.
This CBDC has already been declared a success by the bankster class, with the IMF predicting that the eNaira will be adopted by 90 percent of Nigeria’s population. An upgraded eNaira wallet app will be available this coming week that will allow Nigerians to “do transactions such as paying for DSTV or electric bills or even paying for flight tickets.”
Last year, the CBR announced the creation of a “pilot group” of 12 banks that will test a version of the digital ruble later this year. According to statements from CBR representatives, citizens will be able to use the CBDC “for purchases, transfers to individuals, firms and the state, tax payments, conversions to foreign currencies in e-wallets and as a store of value.”
Rwanda
Rwanda hopped aboard the CBDC bandwagon last June, with John Karamuka, the Director of Payment Systems at the National Bank of Rwanda, telling The New Times that the central bank was “studying the possibilities of issuing its own Central Bank Digital Currency in response to global trends in digital currency.”
Earlier this year, central bank Deputy Governor Soraya Hakuziyaremye confirmed that the bank was still in the investigation phase and that it will reveal its stance on implementing a CBDC by the end of December 2022.
Saudi Arabia
In 2019 Saudi central bank (the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, or SAMA) announced Project Aber, a partnership with the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, to determine whether a new, dual-issued digital currency could be used as a unit of settlement between the two countries.
The final report of that project was released one year later, concluding that “a cross-border dual issued currency was technically viable and that it was possible to design a distributed payment system that offers the two countries significant improvement over centralized payment systems in terms of architectural resilience.”
This led to an admission last October by a SAMA official that the central bank is now actively exploring CBDC as a means to digitize payments, with an ambitious target of having 70% of all payments in the country being conducted digitally by 2030.
SouthAfrica
The country’s central bank, the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), revealed in May 2021 that it had commenced a feasibility study for a general-purpose retail central bank digital currency. Earlier this year, it announced that it had completed the second phase of a separate trial, known as Project Khokha 2, focusing on the creation of a wholesale central bank digital currency.
Its project report on the trial concluded that the trial was successful and that the next steps should include further testing and collaboration with other countries on the development of a cross-border digital currency.
To that end, the bank announced in September 2021 that it signed up to a pilot program to develop a shared platform to enable cross-border digital currency transactions with Malaysia, Australia and Singapore.
The Bank of Korea (BoK) launched a “forward-thinking” digital currency pilot program in August 2021 with the aim of exploring the feasibility of a retail CBDC. Selecting Ground X—the blockchain subsidiary of Kakao, Korea’s largest social network—as its blockchain simulation provider and partnering with Samsung to research cross-border payments to other mobile phones or connected bank accounts, the BoK has reportedly invested 5 billion won in the project. Phase 2 of the trial, testing “payments using CBDC, remittances between countries, and applications of privacy technologies,” is slated to wrap up this June.
Switzerland
In December 2020 the Bank for International Settlements launched Project Helvetia, a “proof-of-concept experiment to integrate tokenised digital assets and central bank money” in conjunction with the Swiss National Bank (SNB). In January of this year, the SNB revealed the results of that experiment: Project Helvetia “has successfully used central bank digital currencies to settle transactions with five different commercial banks.”
The results of the test, we are told, will allow the bank to proceed with some of the most advanced CBDC testing in Europe and “could pave the way for the implementation of a digital currency in Switzerland.”
Ukraine
Remember Bitt, the Barbadian fintech firm that helped to develop the eNaira for Nigeria? Well, guess what Bitt’s working on now? An electronic hryvnia for Ukraine. That’s right, the Ukrainian government paved the way for a CBDC last year by announcing a test pilot of the digital currency, which was slated to begin this year.
No word yet on how Russia’s ongoing “special operations” in the country have affected that plan, but so far there has been no formal announcement that the CBDC idea has been scrapped.
United Kingdom
The Bank of England (BoE) has been looking into the possibility of creating a digital currency in the UK since at least 2015. They are still officially in the “research” phase, with the bank releasing “Responses to the Bank of England’s March 2020 Discussion Paper on CBDC” in June 2021. In November 2021, the BoE released a statement that it will “launch a consultation which will set out their assessment of the case for a UK CBDC” sometime in 2022.
United States
As you may have heard by now, the Biden White House issued an Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets this past March. Although the order generated a lot of stories about how the administration was clearing the way for the possible introduction of a digital dollar, it should be noted that the Federal Reserve has been actively exploring the concept for some time now; the “go ahead” from Biden was more window dressing than substantial policy shift.
Specifically, the Boston Fed has been collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Project Hamilton—a “multiyear research project to explore the CBDC design space and gain a hands-on understanding of a CBDC’s technical challenges and opportunities”—since the summer of 2020.
The first fruit of that collaboration—a report on Phase 1 of the project—was released earlier this year, resulting in new “learnings” about the best way to design a CBDC and clearing the way for Phase 2, which, we are told, “will explore new functionality and alternative technical designs.”
Venezuela
Although The Bahamas and Nigeria are now touted as the first countries to have a national CBDC in place, Corbett Reporteers will remember that Venezuela launched its own “cryptocurrency” in 2018.
Of course, as I pointed out at the time, it isn’t really a cryptocurrency; it’s a Central Bank Digital Currency. It’s completely centralized, it’s closed source and there’s only one government-run block explorer and one government-issued official wallet. You might also recall that, in a remarkable coincidence, Venezuela introduced its social credit ID card—the “fatherland card”—later that same year.
Well, in case you were wondering, Venezuelans are continuing to be pushed off the digital cliff into technocratic tyranny. Just this past March, President Maduro announced that the country’s minimum wage would now be pegged to the digital currency.
Day Two of Commie Balloon Madness. The primary feature here is an inflow of “public servant” careerists clogging the interwebs with condemnation of something they hardly understand.
In Neocon slash Neolib Bizarro World, a helium bag the length of three school buses with an unknown payload and solar panels attached has become a declaration of war for the uniparty political class. Consider the former vice president under Orange Man:
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Mike Pence @Mike_Pence
Shoot down the Chinese spy balloon. Go ahead and send the Secretary of State to China next week. Have @SecBlinken Look them in the eye and tell em- it better never happen again. That’s Peace Through Strength🇺🇸
Pompeo’s Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School is of little help in understanding balloons, missiles, and the Stratosphere.
Politicians and blue-checkers on Twitter are not inclined to compare and contrast. The “threat” posed by what is either an errant weather balloon or a clumsy surveillance device doesn’t hold a candle to the threat of the USG surveillance state.
The National Security Act, signed into law by a nuclear terrorist in 1947, resulted in mass surveillance of the American people. The FBI was established as a political police force, while the CIA concentrated on overthrowing foreign governments (it also violated its supposed charter to spy on domestic antiwar activists).
The Church Committee of the mid-1970s revealed how presidents used the CIA, FBI, and NSA to destroy political enemies (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—all employed the FBI to neutralize the opposition). No balloons were required.
The list of subversive, liberty-destroying programs and operations is long and sordid—ECHELON, COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS, Project Mockingbird, Projects RESISTANCE, MERRIMAC, HT/LINGUAL, and the Cactus program, which tied it all together. This is a short list of known USG anti-liberty programs. No doubt many others remain classified and secret.
Following 9/11, the USG used “terrorism” as an excuse to violate the civil liberties of Americans. The so-called PATRIOT Act was rushed through Congress, resulting in illegal and “warrantless” surveillance of “tens of millions” of Americans.
In 2014, it was revealed the NSA had built a system designed to infect target computers with malware. The USG surveillance state went so far as to masquerade as a Facebook server in an effort to exfiltrate data. The overall objective was to “own the Net.”
The obsessive-compulsive effort by the state to disrupt the constitutionally protected political activity of its subjects—including the destruction of careers, frame-ups, and assassinations—is a topic far too lengthy for this Substack post.
Hypocrisy abounds, even though none of us know for certain what the ominous balloon is meant to do. Regardless, it was exploited to condemn China, resulting in Antony Blinken canceling a trip to the authoritarian crony capitalist “communist” nation.
It should come as no surprise Pence, Pompeo, Haley, and the majority of Congress critters and bureaucrats of the state, not only approve of tyrannical surveillance and “neutralization” of folks not on narrative but also enthusiastically support implanting military bases in foreign lands, thus creating endless tension as it develops and fields ever-evolving mechanics of death and mass murder.
For instance, consider the following:
Imagine the response of the USG if China moved troops near the Canadian and Mexican borders.
The Doomsday Clock would be a nanosecond before midnight.
But arguably the most obvious reason: pure profit and market-cornering.
In the 2010s, the Coca-Cola corporation and competing soft drink manufacturers had a big problem. In New York and elsewhere, local governments were considering banning or limiting the sale of soda on public health grounds.
Some were even threatening to remove soda from the accepted foods available for purchase through SNAP programs (publicly funded food assistance, aka “food stamps”).
“SNAP households spend about 10 percent of food dollars on sugary drinks, which is about three times more than the amount they spend on milk. In New York City alone, as we’ve reported, this translates into more than $75 million in sugary drink purchases each year that are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers…
As Congress debates a new farm bill containing billions in SNAP funding, there’s an increasing appetite to overhaul the program while at the same time preserving the benefits it provides in keeping low-income Americans fed.”
Removing sodas from the list of acceptable purchases for food stamp holders might have been good for the peasants’ personal health. The proposed changes may have alleviated the public health burdens of obesity and heart disease and diabetes.
But it would have devastated Coke’s bottom line.
So, how best to protect their interests and keep SNAP people hooked on the bottle?
“According to a new report issued by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, that case, in which the state chapter of the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation unexpectedly joined Big Soda’s legal fight, is just the latest illustration of the persuasive power of “philanthropic” grants from the sugar-drinks industry.
Both groups received grants from Coca-Cola, with the national NAACP receiving at least $2.1 million from the soda giant since 1986, including $100,000 as recently as December. The Hispanic Federation also lists Coke as a donor, and in February 2012 its president, Lillian Rodriguez Lopez, left the nonprofit group to become director of Latin affairs at the company.”
As they were contracted to do on behalf of Coca-Cola™, the NAACP and dozens of other groups funded by the corporation attacked proponents of the proposed SNAP regulations to ban soda as “discriminatory, paternalistic, and ineffective.”
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Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation – both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association.
The issue here isn’t whether the New York soda ban was ethically justified. Most rational people agree that the role of the state isn’t to protect people from their own destructive decisions that don’t directly affect anyone else.
The key issue is the cynical weaponization of identity politics to enhance market and political power among disingenuous actors.
The result is that liberal/”progressive” actors otherwise ostensibly opposed to big business become the willing tools of profiteering at a cost to the health of the very communities they purport to serve.
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
“By an act of April 16, 1862, which abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, Congress made an appropriation of $100,000 for voluntary Negro emigrants at an expense of $100 each; and later, July 16, an additional appropriation of $500,000 was made at Lincoln’s request. The President was authorized ‘to make provision for transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States, of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this act, as may be willing to emigrate, having first obtained the consent of the government of said country to their protection and settlement within the same, with all the rights and privileges of freemen.’”
states of Kansas and Oklahoma. Nonetheless, the most notable outmigration from the South came with the rapid growth of industrial capitalist production largely centered in Northern cities during the first half of the 20th century.
