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Vor kurzem äußerte Ihr Außenminister Sergey Lavrov laut RTD: „USA wollen Russenfrage lösen wie Hitlerdeutschland die Judenfrage“ (1). Diese Aussage hat mich als Nachkriegs-Deutschen, der seit einigen Jahre nicht mehr in seinem Heimatland lebt, äußerst betroffen gemacht. Wir „normalen, gesunden“ deutschen Bürger wollten weder die „Judenfrage lösen“, noch wie Hitler die Sowjetunion überfallen. Noch heute sagen wir Europäer NEIN zu einem Krieg gegen Russland! Diese Erklärung habe ich am 8./9. Mai 2018 zusammen mit einem Freund verfasst. Sie ist von vielen Mitbürgern mitunterzeichnet worden (2).
Nach wie vor bin ich gegen jeden Krieg, weil Krieg die Verherrlichung roher Gewalt ist und der Weg zwischen den Großmächten eine „friedliche Koexistenz“ sein sollte (Evgeny Chossudovsky).
Persönlich habe ich bereits mehrmals ihr wunderschönes Land bereist, war unter anderem in Moskau, in St. Petersburg sowie auf der Krim und habe mich jeweils wie Zuhause gefühlt. Beeindruckt war ich vor allem von der großen Gastfreundschaft, die mir, meiner Ehefrau und den Freund entgegengebracht worden ist. Das werde ich nicht vergessen. Seitdem haben wir viele Freunde in Ihrem Land.
Russland ist leider ein Dorn im Auge des kapitalistischen Systems. Tatsache ist, dass das heutige kapitalistische System ohne Krieg nicht existieren kann. Der Westen kämpft mit allen erlaubten und unerlaubten Mitteln gegen den Osten. Und die Herrschenden sind so krank, dass mit ihnen ein Verhandeln in der Regel fast nicht möglich ist.
Hitler ist groß geworden, weil er den Kriegstreibern im Westen in „Mein Kampf“ versprochen hatte, dass er gegen die Sowjetunion in den Krieg ziehen werde. Darum hat man Hitler sozusagen „aufgepäppelt“; man hat ihm geholfen, sich aufzurichten, damit er diesen Krieg beginnen kann. In Wirklichkeit weiß doch jeder politisch Orientierte, dass die Sowjetunion damals in arger Bedrängnis war. Die ganze Arbeit Hitlers war gegen den Osten gerichtet. Doch die Sowjetunion konnte sich gegen ihn nicht erwehren. Die Sowjetunion war wohl bereit, gegen Hitler zu marschieren, doch die Machthaber im Westen haben abgelehnt.
Hitler war ihnen recht. Er hat in Deutschland die Arbeiterbewegung zerschlagen und die Gewerkschaftsführer umgebracht. Für die Kriegsdienstgegner und alle links Orientierten hat man die ersten Konzentrationslager geschaffen. Die ganze sogenannte kapitalistische Welt war mit Hitler einverstanden.
Das Prinzip in der Sowjetunion war – trotz einiger Fehler – das Gerechtigkeitsprinzip; man wollte die Ungerechtigkeit abschaffen. Wie würde Russland heute dastehen, wenn es sich hätte ruhig entwickeln können und nicht ständig boykottiert worden wäre. Russland fühlt sich vom Westen bedroht – mit gutem Recht. Noch heute könnte von Russland Frieden ausgehen – Russland benötigt keinen Krieg.
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Schul-Rektor, Erziehungswissenschaftler (Dr. paed.) und Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych.). Nach seinen Universitätsstudien wurde er wissenschaftlicher Lehrer (Professor) in der Erwachsenenbildung: unter anderem Leiter eines freien Schul-Modell-Versuchs und Fortbildner bayerischer Beratungslehrkräfte und Schulpsychologen. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. Bei einer Öffentlichen Anhörung zur Jugendkriminalität im Europa-Parlament war er Berichterstatter für Deutschland. In seinen Büchern und Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung sowie eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Für seine Verdienste um Serbien bekam er 2021 von den Universitäten Belgrad und Novi Sad den Republik-Preis „Kapitän Misa Anastasijevic“ verliehen.
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Recently, according to RTD, your Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said:
“The USA wants to solve the Russian question like Hitler’s Germany solved the “Jewish question”” (1).
As a post-war German who has not lived in his home country for several years, this statement made me extremely concerned. We “normal, healthy” German citizens did not want to “solve the Jewish question”, nor did we want to invade the Soviet Union like Hitler. Even today, we Europeans say NO to a war against Russia! I wrote this statement on 8/9 May 2018 together with a friend. It has been co-signed by many fellow citizens (2).
I am still against any war because war is the glorification of brute force and the way between great powers should be “peaceful coexistence” (Evgeny Chossudovsky).
Personally, I have already visited their beautiful country several times, among others in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Crimea, and felt at home in each case. I was particularly impressed by the great hospitality shown to me, my wife and my friends. I will never forget that. Since then, we have many friends in your country.
Russia is unfortunately a thorn in the eye of the capitalist system. The fact is that today’s capitalist system cannot exist without war. The West is fighting the East with all permissible and impermissible methods. And the rulers are so sick that it is almost impossible to negotiate with them as a rule.
Hitler became great because he promised the warmongers in the West in “Mein Kampf” that he would go to war against the Soviet Union.
That is why Hitler was “nurtured”, so to speak; he was helped to build himself up so that he could start this war. In reality, everyone with a political orientation knows that the Soviet Union was in dire straits at the time. All Hitler’s work was directed against the East. But the Soviet Union could not defend itself against him. The Soviet Union was probably ready to march against Hitler, but those in power in the West refused.
Hitler was fine with them. He crushed the workers’ movement in Germany and killed the trade union leaders. The first concentration camps were created for the opponents of war and all those with a left-wing orientation. The whole so-called capitalist world agreed with Hitler.
The principle in the Soviet Union – despite some mistakes – was the principle of justice; they wanted to abolish injustice. How would Russia be today if it had been able to develop calmly and had not been constantly boycotted. Russia feels threatened by the West – with good reason. Even today, peace could emanate from Russia – Russia does not need war.
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a school rector, educationalist (Dr. paed.) and psychologist (Dipl.-Psych.). After his university studies, he became an academic teacher (professor) in adult education: among other things, he was head of an independent school model experiment and in-service trainer of Bavarian guidance counsellors and school psychologists. As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in private practice. He was rapporteur for Germany at a public hearing on juvenile delinquency in the European Parliament. In his books and articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education and an education for public spirit and peace. For his services to Serbia, he was awarded the Republic Prize “Captain Misa Anastasijevic” by the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad in 2021.
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The United States has had the privilege of dominating the global monetary system since 1944’s Bretton Woods agreement.
It’s often presented to the public like it’s the natural order of things, such as the law of gravity.
Or that it’s a given… like oxygen will always be there to breathe.
This assumption-based narrative leads people to think that the rest of the World is happy with the U.S. being the global reserve currency.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The U.S. must vigilantly maintain U.S. dollar hegemony. And the playbook looks like this:
The U.S. can devalue the Federal Reserve note “dollar” to oblivion while other countries receive it in exchange for their tangible goods and hold it in reserve.
The U.S. can confiscate other countries’ assets and currency reserves because of our military advantage. That is what just happened with Russia.
The U.S. can also block other countries from using the global financial system (SWIFT) it set up and controls.
Naturally, many countries are look for ways to exit this type of system.
The de-dollarization process is well underway and now involves far more countries than the U.S. expected. Even Saudi Arabia, the key country in the petrodollar, is beginning to trade outside the dollar and accept the Chinese yuan.
Golden Ruble 3.0 – Courtesy of Russian Economist Sergey Glazyev
Russia believes the “gold-pegged ruble” is part of the strategy to topple the U.S. dollar on the World stage. Here is how it came into existence…
Russian economic advisor to Putin, Sergey Glazyev, was one of the first people the U.S. sanctioned during its prior round of sanctions in 2014.
This was quite mysterious because Glazyev isn’t an oligarch or military general. He is an economist and the architect of Russia’s new monetary system, aka the Golden Ruble 3.0.
“The more aggressive the Americans are the sooner they will see the final collapse of the dollar as the only way for the victims of American aggression to stop this aggression is to get rid of the dollar.
“As soon as we and China are through with the dollar, it will be the end of the United States’ military might,” Sergey Glazyev said in 2017.
Glazyev has more recently stated, “In the face of sanctions, Russia’s task is not to learn to play by the crooked rules of the West but to build transparent and mutually beneficial rules of trade with friendly countries, to create their own pricing systems, exchange trading, and investment.”
Glazyev continued, “Gold will be a unique tool in the fight against Western sanctions inclusive of all major international commodities (oil and gas, food and fertilizer, metals and solid minerals).”
After newsanctions in 2022 from the West, including kicking Russia out of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), Moscow began launching its own bullion exchange to trade in physical gold with its allies.
The Challenge of Trade Deals with “Soft” Currencies
Many members of BRICS countries are beginning new trade agreements with one another outside the U.S. dollar system using “soft” currencies like rupees and rubles.
But the use of “soft” currencies can be tenuous. For example, Russia may tell India, “you can buy our oil, and we will accept your rupees.” India may agree to accept Russian rubles.
This system is flimsy because as more countries participate, nations begin collecting a lot of currencies they don’t need and will have to unload in the forex markets.
Also, nations don’t trust each other (counterparty risk), so gold is the perfect medium of exchange and is a measure to limit the abuse by the world reserve currency issuer.
Sergey Glazyev and his eastern and southern partners are seizing this unique chance to “jump off” the sinking ship of the dollar-centric debt economy.
Glazyev stated, “The sanctions imposed on Russia have boomeranged the Western economy. In 2023, all these circumstances will objectively affect the change in the stereotypes of investment policy in the World — from risky investments in complex financial instruments to investing in traditional assets, primarily gold.”
Glazyev continued, “Large gold reserves allow a country to pursue a sovereign financial policy and minimize dependence on external creditors. The amount of reserves affects the country’s reputation, credit rating, and investment attractiveness. Moreover, large reserves make it possible to plan the state budget for a long time, stopping many economic and political risks.”
Gold Scoreboard
Gold’s estimated market cap is $12.1 trillion (by multiplying the current gold price by the world’s above-ground gold reserves.)
BRICS are estimated to hold over 80% of this $12.1 trillion in gold.
India (the citizens, not the government) are the largest collective owners of gold, with more than 50,000 tons of gold.
China’s government is likely to have over 20,000 tons of gold.
Unanswered Questions
Has gold remained in the vaults of Western Central Banks? Has it been encumbered through swaps and leasing?
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Jon Forrest Little graduated from the University of New Mexico and attended Georgetown University’s Institute for Comparative Political and Economic Systems. Jon began his career in mining industry and now publishes “The PickAxe” which covers topics surrounding precious metals, energy, history, and politics.
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DNA coding in your digital ID – soon to come to your home? If you don’t like it, the military may inject it into your digital ID chip, somewhere under your skin.
The DNA is the most intimate part of our life’s identity.
Is the idea far-fetched?
Not so far.
If WHO gets its ways with the “Pandemic Treaty” overruling this planet’s every country’s health sovereignty, you may soon be forced to get your most intimate ID, your DNA, “branded” onto your digital ID.
Imagine! Klaus Schwab’s (World Economic Forum) joy!
A step closer to absolute and total control.
Don’t sweat it. Neither the Pandemic Treaty nor the Digital ID has been “worldwide approved”. It’s so far just talk. Scare-talk. And you know, fearful people submit much easier to tyrannical rules, than self-assured men and women – who know who they are, and who are self-assured, despite the 24/7 “social engineering of the masses”.
That’s the name of the game. And we can resist it. We are many, they are few.
But very importantly, we need to wake up from our comfort slumber, look reality in the eyes and say NO, in unison and solidarity.
According to a press release on 18 January 2023, Veridos GmbH, headquartered in Berlin with operating facility in Munich, just announced “Innovatrics” as Strategic Partner for Advanced DNA ID Verification.
Veridos calls itself “A world-leading provider of integrated identity solutions. Governments and public authorities in more than 100 countries trust the company’s uniquely comprehensive product portfolio.
“The company creates end-to-end solutions and services perfectly tailored to meet every government’s identity need. These range from paper to security printing, electrical chip components, enrollment, identity management systems, personalization and issuance, mobile ID solutions, and border control solutions including eGates.
“Governments can acquire best-in-class passports, ID cards, driver’s licenses, and more, or even the facilities to manufacture their own.”
Innovatrics is based in the European Union (EU), with Headquarters in Bratislava, Slovakia.
The company calls itself “an independent EU-based provider of trusted biometric solutions for governments and enterprises.”
It boasts that “our algorithms consistently rank among the fastest and most accurate in fingerprints and face recognition. For over 16 years, we have partnered with all types of organizations to build trusted and flexible biometric identification solutions. Our products are being used in more than 80 countries, benefiting more than a billion people worldwide.
Biometrics is this “thing” that you don’t know where it begins and where it ends – and you have no clue what’s “in it”.
The pair calls it a Strategic Partnership for Advanced DNA ID Identification. The Veridos – Innovatrics joint venture name their invention a “holistic VeriDNA solution elevating civilian use of DNA IDs to the next level. This marks a turning point in the DNA-based identification and verification of individuals which has long been used only in the field of forensics.”
Innovatrics has a long experience in ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System) technology which allows government agencies to store biometric data of all types, such as fingerprints, iris scans and facial geometrics, and compare them with biometrics from checkpoints at lightning speed.
Wow! That’s precisely number one on Klaus Schwab’s wish list to tag every one of the surviving humans. “Surviving” because after the massive population reduction, part of the WEF’s Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030, also according to Schwab’s, Soros’, Gates’, Rockefeller’s et al, the production and implantation of DNA IDs may be faster and more efficient, then “stamping” today’s 8 billion people.
The Veridos’ and Innovatrics’ dream would allow VeriDNA generated DNA-IDs taking verification of individuals to a new dimension – offering benefits in sensitive areas such as border crossing, behavior control, as well as monitoring people’s cashflow, food intake and – listen well – controlling individuals environmental and climate footprints.
If there is any serious message coming out of the currently ongoing 2023 WEF in Davos, it is a “climate tyranny”. If you don’t believe it, just listen to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy to Davos, speaking like an Avatar from a different planet.
Kerry’s words,
“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we – a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives – are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”
United States climate envoy John Kerry tells the World Economic Forum that the "select group of human beings" in Davos are talking about "saving the planet," even if that sounds "crazy, tree-hugging, leftie, liberal do-gooder." pic.twitter.com/mfWDwDxQGA
Unfortunately, during the past several decades people’s minds have been so radically geoengineered through organizations like the little-known UK-based “Tavistock Institute” and the Pentagon-linked DARPA, and possibly others, to have them fully believe the totally anti-science climate hoax.
A DNA-tracing tool is perfect for the globalist elite’s goals. In warp speed you identify the misbehaviors, creating a permanent ambiance of fear, a subdued society under permanent climate lockdown and glanced upon from the high-above cruising private jets of the super-billionaires.
Let’s hope it will just remain a dream – a fading dream – of the wannabe tyrants because We, the People, will not let it happen.
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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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The Chairman of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, posted a statement to his Telegram account calling for an international military tribunal of Angela Merkel and François Hollande.
«Such confessions made by the representative of the Kyiv regime and former leaders of Germany and France should be used as an evidence base for an international military tribunal»#Russia#Merkel#Hollande
“Such confessions made by the representative of the Kyiv regime and former leaders of Germany and France should be used as an evidence base for an international military tribunal,” Volodin said.
Here is Vasily Nebenzya, the Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, weighing in on duplicity.
13 Jan UNSC Russia's Nebenzia: Everything could have been different if Kiev had implemented Minsk but thanks to the revelations of Merkel and Hollande we learned that the Minsk process was just a cover for the West to arm Ukraine for a conflict with Russiahttps://t.co/VGo4cmQHzwpic.twitter.com/CSap5e53J0
Merkel and Hollande conspired to undermine the 2015 Minsk agreement. France and Germany deceptively agreed to the Minsk deal that would have halted the persecution and murder of ethnic Russians in Donbas, and also require Ukrainian neutrality.
Merkel and Hollande conspired with the USG and NATO to exploit the agreement. The peace deal was ignored in order to build up Ukraine’s nazified military and make way for NATO and its missiles and tanks to be placed on Russia’s doorstep.
In the West, this plot to start a world war barely made the news.
I’m not surprised. Here in America, the loud, persistent, and manipulative lies of the state insist Ukraine is winning the war, which is obviously untrue.
Information contrary to Big Lies cranked out on a daily basis by the USG and its script-reading media will be ignored. Reality is at odds with the war narrative.
Pretty interesting how the revelations by former German chancellor Angela Merkel (& later backed by France’s Hollande) that the West never intended to honour Minsk 2 has barely made a dent in the media in the Western warrior states. pic.twitter.com/lga6vP1xT6
More than ever, the words of George Orwell are prescient.
In his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Orwell wrote, “War is Peace” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Both are applicable when sociopaths such as Merkel and Hollande are allowed to subvert peace and encourage ethnic-inspired animus, cruelty, sadism, torture, rape, and mass murder.
Volodin will be ignored. His demand for justice will not be honored, let alone acknowledged by the USG and its dissembling corporate propaganda appendage masquerading as a “free press.”
Merkel revealed the truth about the betrayal of Minsk. She will not be held to account, as most western “leaders” are above the law, even if a violation of the law results in the murder of countless innocent victims.
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Let’s start with three interconnected multipolar-driven facts.
First: One of the key take aways from the World Economic Forum annual shindig in Davos, Switzerland is when Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan, on a panel on “Saudi Arabia’s Transformation,” made it clear that Riyadh “will consider trading in currencies other than the US dollar.”
So is the petroyuan finally at hand? Possibly, but Al-Jadaan wisely opted for careful hedging: “We enjoy a very strategic relationship with China and we enjoy that same strategic relationship with other nations including the US and we want to develop that with Europe and other countries.”
Second: The Central Banks of Iran and Russia are studying the adoption of a “stable coin” for foreign trade settlements, replacing the US dollar, the ruble and the rial. The crypto crowd is already up in arms, mulling the pros and cons of a gold-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC) for trade that will be in fact impervious to the weaponized US dollar.
A gold-backed digital currency
The really attractive issue here is that this gold-backed digital currency would be particularly effective in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Astrakhan, in the Caspian Sea.
Astrakhan is the key Russian port participating in the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with Russia processing cargo travelling across Iran in merchant ships all the way to West Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean and South Asia.
The success of the INSTC – progressively tied to a gold-backed CBDC – will largely hinge on whether scores of Asian, West Asian and African nations refuse to apply US-dictated sanctions on both Russia and Iran.
As it stands, exports are mostly energy and agricultural products; Iranian companies are the third largest importer of Russian grain. Next will be turbines, polymers, medical equipment, and car parts. Only the Russia-Iran section of the INSTC represents a $25 billion business.
And then there’s the crucial energy angle of INSTC – whose main players are the Russia-Iran-India triad.
India’s purchases of Russian crude have increased year-by-year by a whopping factor of 33. India is the world’s third largest importer of oil; in December, it received 1.2 million barrels from Russia, which for several months now is positioned ahead of Iraq and Saudi Arabia as Delhi’s top supplier.
‘A fairer payment system’
Third: South Africa holds this year’s rotating BRICS presidency. And this year will mark the start of BRICS+ expansion, with candidates ranging from Algeria, Iran and Argentina to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor has just confirmed that the BRICS do want to find a way to bypass the US dollar and thus create “a fairer payment system not skewed toward wealthier countries.”
For years now, Yaroslav Lissovolik, head of the analytical department of Russian Sberbank’s corporate and investment business has been a proponent of closer BRICS integration and the adoption of a BRICS reserve currency.
Lissovolik reminds us that the first proposal “to create a new reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of BRICS countries was formulated by the Valdai Club back in 2018.”
Are you ready for the R5?
The original idea revolved around a currency basket similar to the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) model, composed of the national currencies of BRICS members – and then, further on down the road, other currencies of the expanded BRICS+ circle.
Lissovolik explains that choosing BRICS national currencies made sense because “these were among the most liquid currencies across emerging markets. The name for the new reserve currency — R5 or R5+ — was based on the first letters of the BRICS currencies all of which begin with the letter R (real, ruble, rupee, renminbi, rand).”
So BRICS already have a platform for their in-depth deliberations in 2023. As Lissovolik notes, “in the longer run, the R5 BRICS currency could start to perform the role of settlements/payments as well as the store of value/reserves for the central banks of emerging market economies.”
It is virtually certain that the Chinese yuan will be prominent right from the start, taking advantage of its “already advanced reserve status.”
Potential candidates that could become part of the R5+ currency basket include the Singapore dollar and the UAE’s dirham.
Quite diplomatically, Lissovolik maintains that, “the R5 project can thus become one of the most important contributions of emerging markets to building a more secure international financial system.”
The R5, or R5+ project does intersect with what is being designed at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), led by the Macro-Economics Minister of the Eurasia Economic Commission, Sergey Glazyev.
A new gold standard
In Golden Ruble 3.0 , his most recent paper, Glazyev makes a direct reference to two by now notorious reports by Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the IMF, US Department of Treasury, and New York Federal Reserve: War and Commodity Encumbrance (December 27) and War and Currency Statecraft (December 29).
Pozsar is a staunch supporter of a Bretton Woods III – an idea that has been getting enormous traction among the Fed-skeptical crowd.
What’s quite intriguing is that the American Pozsar now directly quotes Russia’s Glazyev, and vice-versa, implying a fascinating convergence of their ideas.
Let’s start with Glazyev’s emphasis on the importance of gold. He notes the current accumulation of multibillion-dollar cash balances on the accounts of Russian exporters in “soft” currencies in the banks of Russia’s main foreign economic partners: EAEU nations, China, India, Iran, Turkey, and the UAE.
He then proceeds to explain how gold can be a unique tool to fight western sanctions if prices of oil and gas, food and fertilizers, metals and solid minerals are recalculated:
“Fixing the price of oil in gold at the level of 2 barrels per 1g will give a second increase in the price of gold in dollars, calculated Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar. This would be an adequate response to the ‘price ceilings’ introduced by the west – a kind of ‘floor,’ a solid foundation. And India and China can take the place of global commodity traders instead of Glencore or Trafigura.”
So here we see Glazyev and Pozsar converging. Quite a few major players in New York will be amazed.
Glazyev then lays down the road toward Gold Ruble 3.0. The first gold standard was lobbied by the Rothschilds in the 19th century, which “gave them the opportunity to subordinate continental Europe to the British financial system through gold loans.” Golden Ruble 1.0, writes Glazyev, “provided the process of capitalist accumulation.”
Golden Ruble 2.0, after Bretton Woods, “ensured a rapid economic recovery after the war.” But then the “reformer Khrushchev canceled the peg of the ruble to gold, carrying out monetary reform in 1961 with the actual devaluation of the ruble by 2.5 times, forming conditions for the subsequent transformation of the country [Russia] into a “raw material appendage of the Western financial system.”
What Glazyev proposes now is for Russia to boost gold mining to as much as 3 percent of GDP: the basis for fast growth of the entire commodity sector (30 percent of Russian GDP). With the country becoming a world leader in gold production, it gets “a strong ruble, a strong budget and a strong economy.”
All Global South eggs in one basket
Meanwhile, at the heart of the EAEU discussions, Glazyev seems to be designing a new currency not only based on gold, but partly based on the oil and natural gas reserves of participating countries.
Pozsar seems to consider this potentially inflationary: it could be if it results in some excesses, considering the new currency would be linked to such a large base.
Off the record, New York banking sources admit the US dollar would be “wiped out, since it is a valueless fiat currency, should Sergey Glazyev link the new currency to gold. The reason is that the Bretton Woods system no longer has a gold base and has no intrinsic value, like the FTX crypto currency. Sergey’s plan also linking the currency to oil and natural gas seems to be a winner.”
So in fact Glazyev may be creating the whole currency structure for what Pozsar called, half in jest, the “G7 of the East”: the current 5 BRICS plus the next 2 which will be the first new members of BRICS+.
Both Glazyev and Pozsar know better than anyone that when Bretton Woods was created the US possessed most of Central Bank gold and controlled half the world’s GDP. This was the basis for the US to take over the whole global financial system.
Now vast swathes of the non-western world are paying close attention to Glazyev and the drive towards a new non-US dollar currency, complete with a new gold standard which would in time totally replace the US dollar.
Pozsar completely understood how Glazyev is pursuing a formula featuring a basket of currencies (as Lissovolik suggested). As much as he understood the groundbreaking drive towards the petroyuan. He describes the industrial ramifications thus:
“Since as we have just said Russia, Iran, and Venezuela account for about 40 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and each of them are currently selling oil to China for renminbi at a steep discount, we find BASF’s decision to permanently downsize its operations at its main plant in Ludwigshafen and instead shift its chemical operations to China was motivated by the fact that China is securing energy at discounts, not markups like Europe.”
The race to replace the dollar
One key takeaway is that energy-intensive major industries are going to be moving to China. Beijing has become a big exporter of Russian liquified natural gas (LNG) to Europe, while India has become a big exporter of Russian oil and refined products such as diesel – also to Europe. Both China and India – BRICS members – buy below market price from fellow BRICS member Russia and resell to Europe with a hefty profit. Sanctions? What sanctions?
Meanwhile, the race to constitute the new currency basket for a new monetary unit is on. This long-distance dialogue between Glazyev and Pozsar will become even more fascinating, as Glazyev will be trying to find a solution to what Pozsar has stated: tapping of natural resources for the creation of the new currency could be inflationary if money supply is increased too quickly.
All that is happening as Ukraine – a huge chasm at a critical junction of the New Silk Road blocking off Europe from Russia/China – slowly but surely disappears into a black void. The Empire may have gobbled up Europe for now, but what really matters geoeconomically, is how the absolute majority of the Global South is deciding to commit to the Russia/China-led block.
Economic dominance of BRICS+ may be no more than 7 years away – whatever toxicities may be concocted by that large, dysfunctional nuclear rogue state on the other side of the Atlantic. But first, let’s get that new currency going.
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This article was originally published on The Cradle.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
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***
As a participant in the 20th century Cold War, I can tell you that the Cuban Missile Crisis had the effect of convincing the leaders of the US and the USSR that trust had to be created between the two nuclear superpowers in order resolve differences and prevent a reoccurrence of tensions at the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev worked together independently of their military/security bureaucracies to resolve the issue. Both paid a price.President Kennedy was murdered by the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff who were determined not to lose the Soviet enemy that justified their power and budgets.Khrushchev was removed from power by Communist Party hardliners suspicious of accommodation to the capitalist enemy.
PX 96-33:12 03 June 1961 President Kennedy meets with Chairman Khrushchev at the U. S. Embassy residence, Vienna. U. S. Dept. of State photograph in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston.
After President Johnson destroyed himself in the military/security complex’s Vietnam War, President Nixon renewed the tension reducing policy of President Kennedy.The Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) and arms limitations agreements followed.President Nixon topped them off by opening to China and replacing that tense relationship with the “one China” policy.This was again too much for the US military/security complex, and they orchestrated with the Washington Post the “Watergate” scandal to remove him from office.
President Carter tried to continue building bridges. He signed the SALT II agreement that Nixon had initiated, but Carter had his hands full with Israel and Palestine.The situation awaited President Reagan to bring about the end of the Cold War.
President Reagan was a cold warrior who wanted to end it.He hated what he called “those godawful nuclear weapons.”He thought it was terrible that the world continued to live under the threat that they might be used.
President Reagan was convinced that the Soviet economy was broken and could not be fixed, whereas the right policy could fix the US economy. Once the US economy was fixed, he could put pressure on the Soviet leadership to come to the negotiating table by threatening an arms race that the broken Soviet economy could not meet.
The problem was stagflation, and the fix was the Kemp-Roth bill which I had drafted and explained to the House and Senate. The Republican minority on the House Budget Committee supported it. Democrat Senator Russell Long, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee supported it as did Democrat Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee Lloyd Bentsen and Democrat Senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn.Energetic new Republican senators such as Orrin Hatch and S.I. Hayakawasupported it.Reagan accepted it, campaigned on it, and appointed me to the US Treasury to get the bill out of his administration so that Congress could vote on it.
Faced with yet another president determined to wind down the Cold War, the CIA told President Reagan that he must not renew the arms race, because the Soviets would win. The agency’s reasoning was that the Soviet economy was planned, and thereby the Soviet leadership could put a far greater percentage of the society’s resources into the military than could Reagan.
To deal with the CIA, Reagan established a secret committee to examine the CIA’s case.He put me on it.The committee’s conclusion was that the CIA’s position was based on its power and stratus that a continuation of the Cold War ensured.
The Reagan/Gorbachev rapprochement held together in the George H.W. Bush administration.President Bush (senior) and Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev that there would be no movement of NATO east if he agreed to the reunification of Germany.
Some American conservatives misinterpret President Reagan’s policy as a hostile one against Russia designed to win the Cold War.Reagan told us the goal was not to win the Cold War but to end it.The Soviet collapse was the result of hardline Communist Party members, disturbed at Gorbachev’s rapid release of Eastern Europe, placing him under house arrest, thus setting in motion the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet government.This was as much a surprise to Washington as it was to Moscow.
The point of this brief history is to contrast the efforts of American presidents to reduce tensions during the 20th century Cold War with Washington’s efforts in the 21st century to undo this accomplishment and to elevate tensions to their current high peak.
We owe this disaster to the neoconservatives.The neoconservatives were responsible for Iran-Contra and were fired and prosecuted by President Reagan.They were pardoned by Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush and wormed their way into conservativeranks and into policy positions in government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they came up with the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a declaration of US hegemony over the world as the principal goal of US foreign policy.
An early manifestation of neoconservative treachery was on March 12, 1999 when the Clinton regime expanded NATO eastward to incorporate the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in NATO in violation of the promise giving to Gorbachev by President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. This was the fledgeling Russian state’s first indication that the word of the US government means nothing.
A false argument was made that no such pledge had been made or if it had, it didn’t count because it wasn’t in writing.I know for a fact that the promise was made, and not only by Washington but also by NATO itself.See this.
The 1999 NATO enlargement was followed in 2004 by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.In 2009 Albania and Croatia were added, and in 2017 Montenegro and in 2020 North Macedonia.
Readers need to understand what this means.The US government took what was formerly the Soviet Empire and transformed it into Washington’s empire.Washington proved that the Soviet Communist hardliners were correct that it is a mistake to trust the West.
Twelve days after putting the Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles in NATO, without UN approval NATO began a three month bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading to the breakup of the country.
In 2001 the neoconservative regime of President George W. Bush pulled the US out of the ABM Treaty, the cornerstone of the arms control and reduction agreements achieved in the 20th century.Washington’s withdrawal also had the effect of cancelling START II, because Russia’s agreement to START II was conditional on the US remaining in the ABM treaty.
This was followed by the further additions to NATO described above.
In 2007 the US government announced that nuclear capable missiles would be placed in Poland on Russia’s borders. The blatantly false claim was made that these were a defense system agains an Iranian attack on Europe.Such a claim must have amused the Kremlin in addition to worrying them.
In 2008 a US trained and equipped Georgian army (a province of the former Soviet Union) invaded South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers.The Russian Army entered the conflict, quickly defeated the Georgian Army and withdrew, disproving the claim that Putin intended to restore the Soviet empire.Washington and its whore media misrepresented the conflict, as they have done the Ukrainian one, as a Russian invasion of Georgia.
In 2014 Washington overthrew the government of Ukraine and established a puppet regime.The regime began attacking the Russian population of Donbass. For the next 8 years thousands of Russians were murdered by neo-Nazi militias and Ukrainian armed forces while President Putin tried to obtain to no avail Western compliance with the Minsk Agreement. The French and German leaders who signed the Minsk Agreement have recently acknowledged that it was a trick to deceive Putin while the US and NATO built and equipped a large Ukrainian army.In February, 2022, this army was poised to invade the Donbass region and to do away with the two independent republics, thus provoking the Russian intervention.
2014 also brought the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 which, falsely blamed on Russia, served to initiate a propaganda campaign against Russia and justify the initiation of economic sanctions against Russia.
In 2018 President Trump, beat up by the false “Russiagate” narrative, withdrew the US from the INF treaty to prove he was tough on Russia and not a Russian agent.
Also in 2018 there was the concocted case of alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK with Russian nerve gas which they somehow survived.The alleged event was blamed on Putin.The Skripals mysteriously disappeared and have not been seen or heard from since.
In 2020 Washington withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty.
In December 2021 and January 2022 the Kremlin made strenuous efforts to reach a mutual security treaty with the US and NATO and was coldly rebuffed by the US Secretary of State and the NATO Secretary General.Instead, a large Ukrainian army was poised on the Donbass border and heavy shelling began, bringing in the Russians in February 2022.
In 2022 more sanctions were applied to Russia, and Russia’s foreign reserves were seized.Massive arms shipments from the US and NATO began arriving in Ukraine.In September 2022 the US and UK blew up the Nordstream gas pipelines. Washington accused Russia of sabotaging its own pipelines.
The efforts of 20th century American presidents to end the Cold War, restrain armaments, and reduce the possibility of nuclear war have been completely overturned by neoconservative-dominated governments in the 21st century.The tensions today are far greater than at any time during the 20th century Cold War.Today the Kremlin openly states that the Russian government has zero trust in the West and believes that the West intends to destroy Russia.This is extremely dangerous.During the Cold War there were numerous incidences of false alarms of incoming ICBMs, but neither side believed them because the ongoing negotiations had created a framework of mutual trust.This achievement has been squandered by America’s 21st century leadership which in pursuit of the neoconservative goal of US hegemony has left the door wide open to Nuclear Armageddon.
The situation is even worse than the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock indicates.The correct time is one nano-second to Midnight.
And there is no one in the West to take this into account.There are no more Presidents such as Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan or experts such as Steven Cohen.America’s foreign policy “experts” are a collection of whores on military/security grants and consultancies, and the presstitutes support rather than investigate official narratives.As I have previously reported, David Johnson at George Washington University provides a daily list of media and academic comment on US/Russia relations.The unreality of almost all of it is beyond belief.It is difficult to believe that the foreign policy community that got us through the Cold War has been replaced by Russophobic emotions incapable of objective reasoning and unaware of the dangerous situation that they have created.
Instead we have neoconservatives blabbering about how we can win a nuclear war.
Here we are a superpower made dangerous to ourselves and to the entire world by the total absence of any awareness and any leadership whatsoever.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
As a former scientist at the UK government, Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, and at the UN, I know that climate change is a political scam, and that the production of electric cars causes a lot of ‘real’ pollution. Thousands of other diligent, honest scientists also know this.
New studies from Sweden, China, Australia and the U.K. shed light on human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from wireless technologies, but the authors of one study alleged industry tried to censor their research, and in another case, critics accused researchers of having conflicts of interest with the telecom industry.
By now, you’ve probably heard there’s a new COVID variant making the rounds, and it’s said to be “the most transmissible” variant to date. To hit the proper emotional note where propaganda becomes effective, the new variant, XBB.1.5, was quickly dubbed the “Kraken,” which is a moniker referring to a legendary sea beast that could not be defeated.
The most recent approval was on January 5: From now on, after mealworms, grasshoppers and crickets, the grain mold beetle can also be used as an ingredient in foods such as bread, soups, pasta, snacks, peanut butter and chocolate products.
Liberal billionaire George Soros is tied to some of the most influential media figures in the United States and abroad through cash he provides to groups affiliated with them, according to a new study conducted by MRC Business.
The defiant declaration by Benjamin Netanyahu that he is going to press ahead and complete Israel’s colonial project in Palestine must be challenged by the world. Regardless of international law and conventions, his government is going to continue to defy them.
The takeover of our society by the billionaires and their lackeys cannot be understood unless we grasp how a veil of secrecy has been spread over most of the government and over corporations for the last twenty years that makes it impossible for people to even speak about the horrific crimes that are destroying our nation.
The US claimed unelected coup leader Juan Guaidó was “interim president” of Venezuela from January 2019 to December 2022, when his former allies in the right-wing opposition removed him from the position. Washington however still refuses to recognize elected President Nicolás Maduro.
Any reform of the corrupted and rotten system would undoubtedly again be carried out by those corrupted cultists that have rotten humanity and our values in the first place. The same that have fractured the world. They have the power to fake a reform of the People for the People, while fracturing the world to bits and pieces, then pull the broken pieces together and reign over a new globalist world with a tyrannical fist.
Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as ‘one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last’. Let’s keep this in mind as the World Economic Forum meets in Davos. Because our real pandemic is willful naiveté, and our greatest danger cowardice.
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***
I bet $1M that the vax causes strokes. Any takers? They knew this at the very start of the vaccination campaign if they were paying attention to the adverse event reports. I’ll show you how they knew.
Executive summary
The COVID vaccines cause strokes. There is no doubt about it.
In fact, I’m so sure of this, I will bet anyone $1M that I got it right and the CDC got it wrong by dismissing the signal.
I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is. Are any of the drug companies willing to do that? If they don’t, you should be worried. Very worried.
Surely there is someone at the CDC or FDA who will take my bet? If not, then why not admit the truth: that they have absolutely no confidence at all when they claim that the COVID vaccines don’t cause strokes and there is nothing to worry about.
Will anyone in the entire world take my bet? Of course not. You have to ask yourself, why not? Don’t you believe the CDC? Apparently, NOBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD believes them.
In this article, I’m going to prove to you I’m right.
But, hey, if you think I’m wrong, accept my bet please! Because I could always use an extra $1M.
Introduction
Thanks to the heroic work of Dr. Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly in investigating the Pfizer documents, it was recently brought to my attention that Pfizer knew about 300 stroke-related events that happened in the first 3 months after the vaccine was released.
Check out this document which summarizes the stroke data from the new unredacted Pfizer 5.3.6 document. There were a total of 42,086 adverse events, but it was initially a secret as to how many people that represents (the denominator).
We can estimate it though because they told us that there were 611 anaphylaxis events. We know from the Blumenthal paper that there are 2.4 cases of anaphylaxis per 10,000 shots. This implies 2.5M shots were given which means 1.25M people reported events here. This is an estimate of the “denominator” that Pfizer didn’t disclose.
The reason for redacting the denominator is simple: if anyone knew how small that number was, they’d have stopped the vaccine immediately. If the denominator was large, Pfizer would be willfully supplying the denominator. The fact that they redacted the denominator is a sign that they knew that the adverse event rate was unacceptably high. But maybe not. This isn’t the crux of my argument.
What’s interesting is that the disclosed the recently disclosed denominator: 126,212,580 which is 63M people. OBVIOUSLY THE EVENTS WERE SEVERELY UNDERREPORTED as we can see from the anaphylaxis data. We know from the calculation above that the minimum underreporting factor (for serious events) is 50.4 (63/1.25). This is quite comparable to the minimum underreporting factor of 41X for VAERS! That’s a good sanity test.
The reporting is for a 90 day period starting Dec 1, 2020
Within the stroke data set, there are 275 patients with 300 different events reported; and 20% of the stroke events were fatal.
Half the events happened within 2 days of the shot.
Is the temporal proximity to the shot a smoking gun? Sort of…
OK. When I read that my first reaction was, “Wow, half the events happened in 48 hours after the shot. That’s not normal at all…it should be spread out evenly over time if there is no causality.”
However, upon further investigation, many of the AEs reported by Pfizer have relatively short median time frames so there is a bias to report things that happened in close proximity to the shot and to not report things that happened a week or more after the shot.
Even with all that, a 48 hour median is short compared to the other AEs and suggests there might be causality here since otherwise it would be more spread out like some other AEs are.
The rate of stroke events vs COVID events is 1:4… that’s way too high
Let’s look at the rate of stroke events to COVID events reported in the trial.
We’ll limit ourselves to the first two days since that is when we get the most accurate rate.
So we have 150 stroke events in the first two days as noted above.
We have 3067 COVID events with a median of 5 days, so basically 613 events in the first two days.
That means that during the first two days after the shot (which is the only period where we get reliable reports), you were 4 times more likely to get COVID than get a stroke.
Whoa! That’s way too high for a safe vaccine that doesn’t cause stroke, don’t you think?
The absolute number of stroke events is 10X normal
150 stroke events in 2 days for 1.25M people reporting is a rate of stroke 21,900 strokes per million per year.
The normal rate of stroke is 800,000 strokes/yr. But there are 340M people. So the rate is 2353 strokes/M-yr.
This means that the observed rate of stroke is 10X normal after the shot.
That sounds pretty darn causal to me.
But let’s do another check just to make sure.
After all, we wouldn’t want to leave any stone unturned for Dr. Susan Oliver and her dog Cindy, to use to make a video criticizing these calculations. Confidentially, I’m not that worried about Dr. Oliver; it’s her dog Cindy I worry about.
The VAERS data makes it OBVIOUS
Here’s a simple search that took me all of 30 seconds to do. I searched ALL vaccines for ischaemic stroke and look what I found. A signal. A big signal! It jumps off the page. You can’t miss it if you are looking!
INSTRUCTIONS: View the chart above. Can you spot the unsafe vaccine? Hint: It causes strokes at a much higher rate than all the other vaccines combined. Can you guess which one it is?
If you guess the COVID vaccine, you’re right!
If you didn’t guess the COVID vaccine, you should immediately apply for a job with the CDC in the safety monitoring department. They are looking for people with your analytical skills.
The 1,549 death reports
The surveys of dead people show (I limited the records to US only, sanity checked, and deaths from 2021 onwards):
10/170 unvaccinated died of neurological causes: 5.8%
75/666 vaccinated died of neurological causes: 11.2%
The percentages should the the same. They aren’t.
The result is statistically significant with p=.0455.
However, there can be age confounding.
Let’s look at <50 year olds
1/18 unvaxxed=.055
5/78 vaxxed = .064
So these are closer as we’d expect, but the numbers are too small here to get a good signal. Too noisy.
Let’s look at those over 65:
unvaxxed 7/104=.067
vaxxed 53/400=.1323
Big difference.
We have a very dangerous vaccine here. Too bad the CDC doesn’t do their own survey of dead people by vaccination status, isn’t it? They’d have found this out 2 years ago.
Oddly, to this day, they don’t want to look at this. It’s so easy. It took about an hour of my time to do this. Why don’t they want to know.
Personal anecdotes
There is nothing like personal experience to make sure we got it right. I hear these stories of young people dying of strokes or bleeding in the brain. Horrible. You don’t forget these.
People who have seen multiple black swans
Have you ever heard of a healthy 23 year old who has 8 strokes after getting vaccinated? I got this note from Marc on Jan 18, 2023:
Dear Steve,
I had a dear friend who had been in remission for some sort of cancer and was doing week then he died suddenly from stroke IN HIS SUKKAH in Sept 2021.
Not long after his 2nd vaxx as I understand it. His name was Harry. We drank coffee together and I miss him. He used to pick up my daughter from school or work if my wife had our car. We learned torah together and were a bit late starters with our Judaism. We both have a daughter.
We know of another beautiful 22 yr old – friend of our daughter – from South Africa, was living near TelAviv and had something like 8 strokes after her 2nd vaccination (Pfizer). She finally went back to South Africa and had open heart surgery. I hear she is thank G’d doing well. We pray for her every day. I met her finally last year at a wedding. Beautiful person – inside and out.
It is a tragedy beyond comprehension what has gone on here and how there is STILL no accountability.
Keep going.
Mechanism of action
The PEG enables the LNP to cross the blood brain barrier. There, the vaccine causes both clotting and inflammation. This is well know.
The safety signal in VAERS and VSD: The final nail in the coffin
I originally wrote this as a $10M dollar bet but realized that would work against me (even though it would be more profitable).
The $1M is a much lower bar… it shows that they wouldn’t even bet $1M that the CDC is right.
If there are no takers, maybe I should lower the bet until I get a taker. This will quantify in dollars just how much people believe the CDC. Wouldn’t that be cool? I think the number will be vanishingly small.
I want to acknowledge the work of Dr. Naomi Wolf, Amy Kelly, and the rest of the dailyclout.io for their excellent work in surfacing the data and bringing it to people’s attention.
Here are a couple of links you can follow to learn more.
The birth rates are dropping all over the world. In some countries, the drop is more than they’ve seen in the last 150 years. AFAIK, we have never seen a simultaneous drop in birth rates worldwide like we are seeing today.
I asked one of the fact checkers about what is causing this and he said, “it could be lots of things such as nervousness about the economy.” I asked for the evidentiary basis for that hypothesis but it was not provided. That’s just the way science works. If things don’t go your way, just make something up.
Remember: if someone tries to bamboozle you like that, always ask for the data behind their hypothesis. It’s rarely there.
In this video, Dr. Naomi Wolf talks about all the evidence Pfizer knew very early in the rollout that this was not a safe vaccine.
Dr. Naomi Wolf: The Pfizer Documents Reveal "The Greatest Crime Against Humanity" Since WWII
• Pfizer knew the mRNA injections did not work within a month after rollout. • Pfizer and the FDA knew the risk of heart damage in adolescents months before issuing a press release. pic.twitter.com/tI4hP29JvH
Finally, this is so obvious to everyone that I am certain that NOBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD BELIEVES OTHERWISE.
If anyone believed I was wrong, they’d be rushing to take my $1M.
I predict no takers. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong.
*
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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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***
New studies from Sweden, China, Australia and the U.K. shed light on human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from wireless technologies, but the authors of one study alleged industry tried to censor their research, and in another case, critics accused researchers of having conflicts of interest with the telecom industry.
In the first example, an international peer-reviewed journal — Annals of Case Reports — on Jan. 10 published a Swedish case report showing 5G radiation causes symptoms indicative of “microwave syndrome.”
The report initially was censored by the telecom industry, the study authors said.
Dr. Lennart Hardell, Ph.D, retired professor of oncology at the Örebro University Hospital in Sweden, and Mona Nilsson, managing director of the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation, co-authored the report.
“A representative of the Ericsson company — the world leading 5G infrastructure provider — and the umbrella organization for 1,200 tech companies, all the major telecom companies in Sweden, wrote to the editor of the Swedish magazine and asked him to withdraw the article,” she explained.
“This is the first case report of the microwave syndrome caused by 5G,” Hardell told The Defender, adding that “historically, many risk factors for human health have first been identified by clinical observations.”
According to Nilsson, the study — which examined the change in physical symptoms experienced by a 63-year-old man and a 62-year-old woman when a 5G cellular tower was installed on the top of their apartment building — “confirms the concerns raised for several years by hundreds of scientists and physicians about the dangers of the 5G rollout.”
Nilsson pointed out that 5G was rolled out “without any previous studies showing that 5G is safe for humans or the environment.”
Nilsson continued:
“It is a scandal that this industry, in spite of the complete lack of evidence showing that 5G is safe, has obtained the right to expose people without their consent, in their own homes to massively increasing levels of pulsed microwave radiation that have the capacity to rapidly destroy their health.”
“The telecom industry knows about the effects on people’s health, but are doing all they can to cover up the harms.”
Numerous people, she said, contacted the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation with reports of their health being destroyed by 5G equipment installed in their neighborhoods.
“Based on the measurements of massively increased radiation from 5G and what we know this far,” Nilsson said, “we can conclude that 5G is very dangerous and must be halted.”
Cellphone use linked to brain cancer, Chinese study concludes
The brain cancer research, carried out by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in conjunction with the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, was published on Sept. 1, 2022, in Neuro-Oncology.
“Our study provides the most up-to-date evidence on the global distribution and risk factors of and trends in primary brain cancer,” said Dr. Martin Chi-sang Wong, senior corresponding author of the study, and professor from The Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care, Faculty of Medicine, Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a Jan. 5 press release.
According to the researchers, the rate of brain cancer was higher in high-income jurisdictions, and was closely related to the per capita gross domestic product, the human development index and the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries, occupational carcinogen exposure and mobile phone use.
“Policymakers in different regions should implement evidence-based, targeted prevention strategies to control relevant risk factors,” Wong added.
Australian researchers: Wireless technologies ‘an environmental stressor’ for humans
Another recent peer-reviewed study — published Dec. 20, 2022, in Frontiers in Public Health — further underscored the potential impact of the electromagnetic signals from wireless technologies such as cellphones.
According to researchers with the Oceania Radiofrequency Scientific Advisory Association (ORSAA) in Brisbane, Australia, and the Centre for Environment and Population Health at the School of Medicine and Dentistry at Griffith University in Brisbane, there is an “extensive evidence base revealing that significant stress to human biological systems is being imposed by exposure to everyday wireless communication devices and supporting infrastructure.”
“This evidence is compelling enough to warrant an update in medical education and practice,” they added.
In their report, the researchers reviewed the methods and findings of 1,106 experimental and epidemiological studies collated within the ORSAA database that were focused on the biological and health effects of electromagnetic fields and radiation.
The results showed that two-thirds of the experimental and epidemiological papers found significant biological effects, the researchers said, adding:
“The breadth of biological and health categories where effects have been found was subsequently explored, revealing hundreds of papers showing fundamental biological processes that are impacted, such as protein damage, biochemical changes and oxidative stress.”
The researchers also suggested a set of “best practice guidelines” for treating patients affected by electromagnetic exposures and for using technology safely in healthcare settings.
U.K. study finds 32% increase in cellphone-related RF-EMF in teens’ brains, but researchers ignore biological implications
Additionally, a peer-reviewed article accepted for publication in Environmental Internationalmeasured levels of electromagnetic radiation in adolescents in the U.K. — but, according to critics of the study, researchers failed to measure the potential biological effects of that radiation.
They found that RF-EMF doses to the brain increased 32% over a two-year period. The main contributor? Talking on a cellphone.
The study is part of the Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones, or SCAMP, the authors said.
In the study, the team of 11 researchers — including Martin Röösli, Ph.D., associate professor of environmental epidemiology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and head of the environmental exposures and health unit at Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute — estimated the daily “dose” of RF-EMF that adolescents received from their daily activities, such as using a phone, laptop, tablet or sitting near a Wi-Fi router.
Using reports from the participants and statistical analyses, the researchers estimated the adolescents’ daily RF-EMF dose — by measuring the specific absorption rate (SAR) in millijoules per kilogram per day (mJ/kg/day) — for eight tissue areas of the participants’ bodies at two different times.
First, they made a “baseline” assessment between November 2014 and July 2016, when the adolescents were roughly 12 years old. About two years later, they completed a “follow-up” assessment.
The researchers then compared the baseline and follow-up numbers to get an estimate of the change in daily RF-EMF dose the adolescents received — both in their body overall and in specific areas of the body — over the two-year period.
They noted, however, that while initially there were 6,605 adolescents in the study, they were able to get both baseline and follow-up data only for 3,384 of the teens, mostly due to attrition.
The researchers noted that the RF-EMF dose was highest in the right temporal lobe of the brain, at the beginning of the study and again two years later.
Moreover, they noted that while the whole-body dose was similar at the two time points, they saw a 32% increase in RF-EMF dose for the temporal lobe of the brain at the two-year follow-up.
Making and receiving phone calls were the main activities contributing to participants’ daily RF-EMF dosage, the researchers said, both at baseline and two years later. The teens were for the most part making calls on the 2G network, before the 5G rollout.
U.K. study is ‘industry-friendly,’ critics say
Commenting on the U.K. study, Alasdair Philips, scientific director of Powerwatch, a forum for “knowledgeable engineers, scientists and medical researchers who are concerned about the consequences of irradiated ‘blue world’ we are creating,” told The Defender he had “problems with the approach and understanding of the authors.”
“In my view, it is industry and government’s way of finding no cognitive, behavioral or health problems related to wireless device use, ” Philips, an electrical and agricultural engineer who worked in industry and academic research for more than 50 years, said.
Philips is not alone in pointing to collusion between the telecom industry and the study’s authors, including Röösli.
In July 2020, Hardell wrote a letter — endorsed by seven additional researchers — to the president of the Swiss Federation alerting her that Röösli, who chaired the Swiss advisory expert group on electromagnetic fields and non-ionizing radiation, had verifiable “conflict of interest” and a “history of misrepresentation of science.”
“The keywords for the paper are ‘estimate and assumed’ with the focus placed on the specific absorption rate (SAR), which only refers to emissions from mobile phones that can heat biological tissue,” she said.
Indeed, in 2013, a team of researchers evaluated SAR as a method for quantifying the possible biological effects from electromagnetic fields and concluded that “SAR actually refers to thermal effects, while the vast majority of the recorded biological effects from man-made non-ionizing environmental radiation are non-thermal.”
“Even if SAR could be accurately estimated for a whole tissue, organ, or body, the biological/health effect is determined by tiny amounts of energy/power absorbed by specific biomolecules, which cannot be calculated,” they added.
Similarly, Philips questioned the researchers’ choice of methodology. “Are 24-hr. whole-body SAR totals (assuming they are realistic which is dubious) a relevant exposure metric for exposures under ICNIRP [International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection] levels?” he asked.
“I think not,” Philips added.
Commenting on the researcher’s finding of increased radiation in the temporal lobe of the brain, Philips noted, “The temporal and frontal lobes are where most GBM[glioblastoma] tumors arise.”
The researchers did not discuss the risk of tumors in their study.
Philips also pointed out that the researchers did not take into consideration RF-EMF exposure during the night. “Many have their handset on standby under the pillow or next to them overnight so that they don’t miss messages from friends,” he said.
According to O’Connor, the study also fails to address and reference official U.K. guidance for children on reducing RF-EMF exposure from cellphones.
O’Connor said, “The time has come and as a matter of urgency to demand the inclusion of truly independent scientists.”
She added:
“It is not acceptable to exclude scientific research that exposes the inconvenient truth when making critical and important decisions while accepting flawed industry-funded poor quality papers to support the short-term economic interests of today.
“Delay and denial may hold enormous ramifications beyond imaginable proportions for public health and the environment.
“It is not just the citizens at risk today, but future generations due to the epigenetic properties this agent carries. Ignoring this situation today will lead to a false economy and a public health crisis due to the impact this technology is having on public health and the environment.
“The public may have no alternative but to make a criminal complaint against decision makers and seek prosecution and claims for compensation. Decision makers who fail to protect public health should be held personally responsible for this serious breach of duty and put on notice for betraying the public trust by ignoring the overwhelming evidence on the hazards of RF-EMF.”
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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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There’s a new COVID variant making the rounds, and it’s said to be “the most transmissible” variant to date. The new variant, XBB.1.5, was quickly dubbed the “Kraken,” which is a moniker referring to a legendary sea beast that could not be defeated
But there’s nothing particularly noteworthy, and certainly nothing scary, about this new variant. It’s more transmissible but causes milder disease than previous Omicron variants. Most experience only mild cold symptoms
Behavioral scientists have long known that fear of contagion makes people both intolerant toward others and compliant with authority. As such, fear is an indispensable social engineering tool, and we know The Great Reset pushers need the pandemic to keep chugging or else their plans will get seriously hampered. Big Pharma also need people to remain in fear in order to keep sales of their useless COVID shots going
A large Cleveland Clinic study found that, compared to the unvaccinated, workers who had received one COVID jab were 1.7 times more likely to test positive for COVID. Those with two doses were 2.63 times more likely to test positive, those with three doses had 3.1 times the risk, and those with four or more doses were 3.8 times more likely to get infected
In the same quarter that president Biden introduced COVID jab mandates to corporate America, excess mortality was 78% for the 25 to 34 age group and 100% for the 35 to 44 age group
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By now, you’ve probably heard there’s a new COVID variant making the rounds, and it’s said to be “the most transmissible” variant to date. To hit the proper emotional note where propaganda becomes effective, the new variant, XBB.1.5, was quickly dubbed the “Kraken,” which is a moniker referring to a legendary sea beast that could not be defeated. As reported by NBC Chicago:1
“A highly contagious ‘recombinant’ variant composed of two different BA.2 strains, the ‘kraken’ variant has quickly become the dominant form of COVID in the U.S. and is continuing to spread nationwide. Also known as XBB.1.5, the variant quickly rose to prominence as experts say it is more contagious than many of its predecessors.
‘It went from 4% of sequences to 40% in just a few weeks,’ Dr. Ashish Jha, White House COVID czar, tweeted last week. ‘That’s a stunning increase.’ Jha said the variant is likely more immune evasive, even ‘more than other omicron variants.'”
There’s nothing particularly noteworthy, and certainly nothing scary, about this new variant. Despite the hype at the beginning of the article, NBC actually makes this plain in a later paragraph where they quote the Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady:2
“Arwady noted symptoms haven’t changed with the new variant, though she noted that symptoms similar to the flu are less common … ‘COVID is showing up very much like it already has. I think, if anything, we are seeing it a little bit less likely to have the more severe symptoms,’ Arwady said.
‘Definitely people get the severe symptoms still … But more often now we are seeing people … just have cold-like symptoms, less likely to have those flu-like, really feeling very sick, the high fevers.'”
‘Rise of the Kraken’ Is a Baseless Fear Campaign
In other words, this is an entirely baseless fear campaign. The primary “novelty” about the scary-sounding Kraken is that it causes MILDER symptoms than the already mild symptoms of Omicron and its sublineages.
This is entirely logical, as XBB.1.5 is a recombination of two Omicron strains, and as Dr. Dennis Cunningham, medical director of infection control and prevention at Henry Ford Health in Detroit told NBC Chicago:3
“The omicron symptoms have been pretty consistent. There’s less incidence of people losing their sense of taste and smell. In a lot of ways, it’s a bad cold, a lot of respiratory symptoms, stuffy nose, coughing, body aches and fatigue … I haven’t seen anything suggesting that this new subvariant [XBB.1.5] is clearly making people sicker.”
Big Pharma also needs people to remain in fear in order to keep sales of their useless COVID shots going. Ironically (although perhaps it was planned this way), the more COVID shots you get, the greater your risk for infection.4 So, the shots have quite literally become the foundational drivers of the pandemic.
More Shots Result in More Infections
In the video above, posted January 4, 2023, former nurse educator John Campbell, Ph.D., reviews some of the latest evidence showing that the more mRNA COVID shots you get, the more likely you are to get infected. The study5,6 in question was done by the Cleveland Clinic, which assessed outcomes among its 51,011 employees.
In summary, they found that, compared to the unvaccinated, workers who had received one dose were 1.7 times more likely to test positive for COVID during the three-month study. Those with two doses were 2.63 times more likely to test positive, those with three doses had 3.1 times the risk, and those with four or more doses were 3.8 times more likely to get infected.
So, it’s not hyperbole to say that these shots are “useless.” They’re actually less than useless, seeing how they have negative effectiveness. The graph below, from the study, clearly illustrates how the risk of infection rises in tandem with each additional dose.
The bottom black line represents the background risk (the risk among the unvaccinated population), and the colored lines above it show the number of infections that occurred depending on the number of doses received.
Boosters Only 30% Effective Despite Strain Match
Overall, the Cleveland Clinic study7 concluded the bivalent booster shots were only 30% effective in protecting against SARS-CoV-2 infection. For reference, 89% of employees received the Pfizer jab and the rest received Moderna. No other brands were used.
Perhaps the most important detail here is that the mRNA in the bivalent boosters matched the Omicron strains in circulation, so the shots were not mismatched (as often happens with the flu vaccine). Yet, despite being perfectly matched to the strains that were actually causing the infections, the boosters were only 30% effective.
By extension, that means their effectiveness is likely to be even lower once the circulating strains change, which has already happened. By the end of December 2022, XBB.1.5 already accounted for 40.5% of all new infections, followed by BQ.1.1, responsible for 26.9% of new infections, and variant BQ.1 at 18.3%.8 Considering the increased transmissibility of XBB.1.5, it’s unlikely that the now unmatched booster shots will offer much protection at all.
As noted by Campbell, at the beginning of the pandemic the World Health Organization required any qualifying “vaccine” to be at least 50% effective, yet now everyone is perfectly content to settle for boosters that are only 30% effective — and that’s in addition to increasing the risk of infection with each dose given.
Natural Infection Still Offers Best Protection
What does offer protection? Natural infection. The Cleveland Clinic did find that natural immunity lessens over time, as new, more immune-evading variants become prominent, but recent natural infection offered good protection. The graph below shows the likelihood of getting infected depending on if or when you were infected with COVID previously.
Those with no previous history of COVID infection had the highest risk of infection during the study period. Day zero was September 12, 2022, which was when the bivalent booster began being offered to Cleveland Clinic employees.
Those who had previously been infected during the pre-Delta and Delta phases of the pandemic had the next-highest risk. Those with the lowest risk of infection (meaning they had the greatest protection) were those who had previously been infected during the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 wave (the most recent wave), followed by those who’d been sick during the earlier BA.1/BA.2 wave.
Excess Deaths and the COVID Jab
In related news, Sally Beck, writing for the British website The Conservative Woman (TCW), recently highlighted Edward Dowd’s work on excess deaths statistics, collated and published in the book “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022.” Beck writes:9
“Former Wall Street executive Edward Dowd … has been dissecting excess mortality statistics recorded since the COVID pandemic began three years ago. He has analyzed and reanalyzed the numbers and has concluded that excess death rates, in those aged 26-41, are closely related to the administration of COVID vaccinations.
‘From February 2021 to March 2022, millennials experienced the equivalent of a Vietnam war, with more than 60,000 excess deaths,’ he said. ‘The Vietnam war took 12 years to kill the same number of healthy young people we’ve just seen die in 12 months.’
This 12-month period covers the COVID vaccination rollout for that age group so in theory we would have expected to see a decrease in excess mortality, not an increase …
Comparisons with normal years was key. All-cause mortality remains relatively constant, and in 2017, 2018 and 2019 around 2.8 million Americans died. Figures spiked in 2020 (COVID), although less than you might imagine, but in 2021 the stats were off the charts.”
Young Americans Are Dying in Record Numbers
In a January 2022 press conference, Scott Davidson, CEO of the mutual life insurance company OneAmerica, shocked the world with his announcement that the death rate among working-age Americans was 40% higher during the third quarter of 2021 than prepandemic levels, and that these deaths were not due to COVID infection.10
Dowd described it as “an earth-shaking statistic,” as a 10% increase would be a 1 in a 200-year event. Davidson, too, stressed the unprecedented nature of the increase, stating that “40% is just unheard of.”11 From there, matters have only worsened.
Dowd’s research shows excess mortality among Millennials was 84% above baseline in the second half of 2021.12 Teens are even dying in their sleep nowadays, and at least two such deaths have been confirmed as being due to COVID jab-induced myocarditis,13 and, as reported by Conservative Woman:14
“The Society of Actuaries Research Institute (SOA) published their COVID-19 mortality survey report on 17 August 2022. It represented approximately 80% of the group life US revenues.
One of their tables showed clearly that excess mortality was 78% for the 25-34 age group and 100% for the 35-44 age group in the same quarter that Biden introduced vaccine mandates and corporate America complied.
Another independent source showed the same disturbing data. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre (CRC) and the Johns Hopkins Centre for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) tracked and analyzed COVID data worldwide.
They said that 68% of the world’s population was vaccinated and 13 billion doses administered. If they had been safe and effective, how could they explain that the highest death rate occurred after mass vaccination?”
Deaths Among Athletes Up Nearly 1,700%
While death comes to all, the most tragic part of this trend is that it’s young and healthy people who are being prematurely killed, including high-performance athletes.
Approximately 1,65015,16,17,18,19,20 professional and amateur athletes collapsed due to cardiac events in 2021 and 2022. Of those, 1,14821 were fatal. That gives us an annual average death rate of 574 for 2021/2022. For comparison, the historical annual average has been between 2822 and 29.23
How can an increase in athlete deaths of nearly 1,700%24 be explained? Is there another global environmental change that can account for this other than the sudden introduction and widespread uptake of experimental gene therapy? I can’t think of any.
Pfizer Pressured Twitter to Censor Critiques
Despite all the evidence showing the COVID shots are decimating populations around the world, Pfizer is hell-bent on keeping the booster train running. As previously reported, Pfizer quadrupled the price of its COVID jab in the wake of it being added to the U.S. childhood, adolescent and adult vaccine schedules.
Pfizer had forecasted expected revenues, and when demand for never-ending boosters started to drop off, they simply jacked up the unit price to make up the difference. The COVID shots are the company’s most profitable product to date, and it apparently doesn’t matter that they’re killing the user base. That should tell you something.
No criticism of any kind is permissible, as it might impact Pfizer’s bottom line. To protect its interests, Pfizer has even pressured social media companies to censor views on its behalf, including science-based opinions shared by actual scientists, researchers and even a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief. Evidence of this is found in the Twitter files released by Elon Musk. As reported by investigative journalist Alex Berenson:25
“August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb — a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers — saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.
The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after COVID infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to ‘follow the science’ and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.
It came not from an ‘anti-vaxxer’ like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who had briefly followed Gottlieb as the head of the Food and Drug Administration. Further, the tweet actually encouraged people who did not have natural immunity to ‘Get vaccinated!’ No matter …
Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year. Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.
The post was ‘corrosive,’ Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would ‘end up going viral and driving news coverage’ … Through Jira, an internal system Twitter used for managing complaints, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to the Twitter ‘Strategic Response’ team …
‘Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,’ O’Boyle wrote — failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots. A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules.
Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it. It remains tagged even though several large studies26,27 have confirmed the truth of Giroir’s words.”
When in Doubt, Blame ‘Dangerous’ Ideas
Gottlieb also asked Twitter to remove a post by Justin Hart that said “Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of <>0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”
That time, to their credit, Twitter’s Strategic Response Team couldn’t identify a “crime” for which they might justify its removal. Gottlieb was also a central instigator for Twitter’s banning of Berenson. According to Berenson:28
“Gottlieb’s action was part of a larger conspiracy that included the Biden White House and Andrew Slavitt, working publicly and privately to pressure Twitter until it had no choice but to ban me. I will have more to say about my own case and will be suing the White House, Slavitt, Gottlieb, and Pfizer shortly.”
When confronted about his behind-the-scenes correspondence with Twitter during an interview with CNBC host Joe Kernan, Gottlieb claimed he only asked Twitter to censor certain posts because he was concerned they might result in “physical threats” against vaccine advocates. He actually welcomes “respectful debate and dialogue,” he claimed.
Yet as Berenson notes, there was no insinuation of threat in Giroir’s tweet, or Hart’s for that matter. What’s more, in his email about Giroir’s tweet to O’Boyle, the only concern he raised was that it might drive news coverage in an unwanted direction.
The Truth Is Scarier Than Any Fiction
If we’ve learned anything these past three years, it’s that we’re in a propaganda war. It’s a war for our mind, and if the globalist cabal wins that war, all freedom will be lost too. This is why it’s so important to understand how we’re being manipulated.
Fear is a primary tool, and as demonstrated in the NBC Chicago piece quoted from at the beginning of this article, they know how to make something completely innocuous sound scary.
In this case, the mildest variant to date is simply given a scary-sounding name (the Kraken), the World Health Organization warns it’s the “most transmissible” to date, and anyone with even the minutest amount of worry about COVID will be off and running.
The fact that experts say it causes nothing more than a mild cold won’t even register at that point. Nor will data showing the “vaccine” is dramatically increasing their risk of the very thing they fear — infection — and killing loads of people to boot.
That’s what’s so crazy about it, but it just goes to show how effective this kind of fear propaganda is, and the actual danger of falling for it. Believing the propaganda — that the shots are “safe and effective” — can literally kill you. The sooner a majority of people realize this, the safer we will all be.
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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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The most recent approval was on January 5: From now on, after mealworms, grasshoppers and crickets, the grain mold beetle can also be used as an ingredient in foods such as bread, soups, pasta, snacks, peanut butter and chocolate products.
The mealworm received the first approval for a so-called “edible insect” in June 2021: The EU Commission’s Implementing Regulation 2021/822 approved the placing on the market of dried larvae of Tenebrio molitor (meal beetle) as a “novel food”.
The SAS EAP Group from France has submitted the application and is allowed to market the mealworm in the Union. It may be sold individually or with a maximum content of 10 grams in protein products, cookies, dishes made from legumes and pasta products.
If insects are used, there must be a note on the packaging of the food that consumption may cause allergic reactions in people with known allergies to crustaceans and molluscs and their products and to house dust mites.
In November 2021, the second “edible insect” was approved by Implementing Regulation 2021/1975 : “Fair Insects BV” from the Netherlands has since been allowed to market frozen, dried and powdered Locusta migratoria (migratory locusts) in the EU.
Depending on the form of processing, the locusts may be used as ingredients in different maximum levels in the products such as processed potato products; dishes made from legumes and products made from pasta, meat substitution, soups and soup concentrates, legumes and vegetables in cans/jars, salads, beer-like beverages, alcoholic beverage mixes, chocolate products, frozen milk-based fermented products, cured meats.
Since 2022 and 2023 respectively, the domestic cricket (Acheta domesticus) has been permitted in various forms of processing. Implementing regulation 2022/188 allows the use in frozen, dried and powdered form. The application came again from “Fair Insects BV”. The house cricket, just as locusts, may be used in similar foods.
Since January 3, the Vietnamese company “Cricket One Co. Ltd” has also been allowed to sell “partially defatted powder from Acheta domesticus” in the EU by implementing regulation 2023/5 . Potentially affected foods are multigrain bread and rolls; crackers and breadsticks, cereal bars, dry bakery premixes, cookies, pasta products and many more.
The executive order 2023/58 of January 5 allows “Ynsect NL BV” from the Netherlands to bring larvae of Alphitobius diaperinus (grain mold beetle) in frozen, paste, dried and powdered form as a new food to EU citizens. The list of food categories in which the larvae can be used as an ingredient in most processed foods.
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Featured image: Mealworms. Photo credit: Robert Gunnarsson
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Liberal billionaire George Sorosis tied to some of the most influential media figures in the United States and abroad through cash he provides to groups affiliated with them, according to a new study conducted by MRC Business.
“The over $32 billion that leftist billionaire George Soros poured into his organizations to spread his radical ‘open society’ agenda on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism around the globe has paid dividends,” MRC Business analysts Joseph Vazquez and Daniel Schneider wrote.
“In fact, his funding has helped him establish ties with some of the biggest name media personalities in the United States and abroad which help indoctrinate millions with his views on a day-to-day basis. MRC Business found at least prominent 54 media figures … who are tied to Soros through their connections to organizations that he funds,” Vazquez and Schneider continued. “These include personalities like ‘NBC Nightly News’ anchor Lester Holt and The Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee.”
MRC Business, part of the conservative Media Research Center, unveiled the final report of a three-part series exploring the extent of Soros’ influence over the international media. The study previously revealed that Soros shelled out at least $131 million between 2016 and 2020 to influence 253 media groups.
“This network of media ties allows Soros to hold sizable influence over the stories that the media covers, how they cover those stories, and what stories they don’t cover,” Vazquez and Schneider wrote.
The study found at least 54 media figures linked to Soros’ cash, with Bloomberg News co-founder Matthew Winkler and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour also among them.
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The defiant declaration by Benjamin Netanyahu that he is going to press ahead and complete Israel’s colonial project in Palestine must be challenged by the world. Regardless of international law and conventions, his government is going to continue to defy them.
Knowing full well that Israel has America’s backing, and that western capitals are far too scared to call him out, Netanyahu made the following brazen statement:
“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
This leaves no room for ambiguity. He has set out the outcome of his pact agreed with the small far-right parties in what has been described as the “most extreme” right-wing regime in Israeli history. The implications of this for the Palestinians are dire; Netanyahu and his ghastly regime intend to ethnically cleanse them.
His categoric statement implies that Palestinians either do not exist or, if they do, they have no right to continue living in Palestine, to which “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas”. Netanyahu, of course, uses the term “the Land of Israel”, but in case some apologists for apartheid Israel try to play down the enormity of Netanyahu’s declaration by suggesting that he is referring to the 1949 Armistice (“Green”) Line, do not be misled.
By spelling out and identifying the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) in Zionist terms as “Galilee, Negev, Golan, Judea and Samaria”, all of which are, he says, “parts of the Land of Israel” earmarked for development with more illegal Jewish settlements, he has expressed the unambiguous intention to expand and entrench the settler-colonial state across all of occupied Palestine. And perhaps even beyond. Israel, remember, has never declared where its borders are; it’s the only UN member state not to do so.
Such unilateral expansionism is not unique to the current regime because all previous Israeli governments since 1948 have conducted similar illegal and immoral projects including land grabs, forced evictions and the creation of “facts on the ground”. This enforced Judaisation of Palestine has been at the core of Zionism’s colonial project. Now Netanyahu has reiterated his regime’s commitment to complete it. Moreover, he has made that commitment in public, in full view of the world’s media; he is both brazen and unrepentant about it.
In doing so, he has exposed for all to see that the whole “peace process” and so-called “diplomatic” moves have been and remain shameless charades. He has thus pulled the rug from under the feet of the UN. The question now arises as to whether this international institution will react and, if so, what its response will be.
The same can be asked of Israel’s Western allies. Will they continue to behave like proverbial ostriches and stick their collective heads into the ground? After all, the US and Western Europe are complicit in Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians.
Ever since the British colonial era, which implanted Israel in the heart of the Muslim world, the Zionist regime has been a major source of destabilisation, terror and wars in the region and beyond. Indeed, as an integral part of the West’s military industrial complex, Israel has amassed a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, making it extremely dangerous. It is a rogue state totally out of control; its recklessness is evident in Netanyahu’s bravado.
However, instead of a comprehensive review and assessment by the US to realign its policy on Israel in line with global conventions on human rights, true to form the Biden administration has opted to reward it. Writing in Mondoweiss, Mitchell Plitnick reminds us of Biden’s recent elevation of Israel to a “full military partner” that, apart from setting a “dangerous precedent”, actually works against US interests.
South Africa stands with Palestine – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
Plitnick’s warning is backed up by analyst Paul Pillar, who correctly points out that:
“The risks of a closer military relationship with Israel centre on Israel’s tendency to get involved in deadly scrapes. Israel is the Middle Eastern state that has thrown its military weight around, with multiple attacks on other nations, more than any other state in the region. Israel has repeatedly initiated wars, including the big one in 1967, which began with an Israeli attack on Egypt. Later came repeated Israeli invasions of Lebanon, multiple devastating military attacks on the Palestinian-inhabited Gaza Strip, an attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor (an attack that revived and accelerated a covert Iraqi nuclear weapons programme), and a later similar attack in Syria.”
These warnings should not be treated lightly, especially by countries such as South Africa, whose foreign policy in respect of Israel needs to undergo radical transformation. That the ANC-led government has recalled its ambassador and campaigns vigorously on various platforms, including the African Union, falls far short of the expectations that Palestinians very rightly have of post-Apartheid South Africa.
In the Middle East, apartheid Israel has by far outstripped the evils of South Africa’s racist regime, yet retains a proud presence in Pretoria with its flag fluttering in the skies of a democratic country. It is shameful that Israelis are able to travel freely from Tel Aviv to Johannesburg and Cape Town without any hurdles, while Palestinians are burdened with severe visa restrictions.
It is equally deplorable that many South African Jewish citizens serve in Israel’s occupation army, an army of terrorists that’s known to be engaged in horrific crimes against Palestinians in a daily ritual of slaughter. These include war crimes and crimes against humanity.
These facts scream at us in news reports, television broadcasts and social media platforms. And while President Cyril Ramaphosa routinely expresses the South African government’s dismay at all of this, such words are hopelessly inadequate. If apartheid South Africa was subjected to sanctions by the UN and isolated by the community of nations, surely consistency in enforcing the same against the apartheid state of Israel is a reasonable expectation?
Netanyahu’s declaration is not only a reminder that Israel is a serial violator of international law, but also dares the world to take punitive measures by subjecting his regime to sanctions and isolation. Will South Africa step up to take on this challenge? Does it have any other option?
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***
The takeover of our society by the billionaires and their lackeys cannot be understood unless we grasp how a veil of secrecy has been spread over most of the government and over corporations for the last twenty years that makes it impossible for people to even speak about the horrific crimes that are destroying our nation. It has become common sense for most people in the upper middle class to simply assume that there is a set of issues which are simply taboo, which cannot be brought up in any context, ever.
President John F. Kennedy addressed this crisis of governance by secrecy at the beginning in a brave speech he delivered in April of 1961.
President Kennedy spoke,
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.
We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.”
A massive increase in secrecy in the United States started after President Kennedy’s assassination in1963, a blatant attempt by global finance to intimate all politicians that was complemented by the expansion of classified status to cover any document that revealed criminality in government. This move was combined with a purging of committed and responsible individuals from the Department of Defense and from intelligence.
That trend towards secrecy went into an exponential upwards curve after the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks involved massive conspiracies to destroy the functionality of government, to mislead the public about fundamental policy decisions, and to threaten, or suppress, opposition while launching endless foreign wars. Laws were set in place, many of which remain illegal to even mention, that set stiff punishments for the disclosure of the truth in any format, for any reason.
To this day, although the contours of the fraudulent attacks on the World Trade Center are known to many, the actual internal process by which it was planned, coordinated, and implemented remains obscure.
There are three main approaches to making secret the corruption and criminality that has spread across government and corporations, and to punishing anyone so foolish as to search for the truth: 1) the use of classifications (secret and top secret), 2) the use of secret law, and 3) the use of non-disclosure agreements.
Rendering corporate and government documents detailing institutional criminality as “secret” and “top secret” and punishing anyone who refers to the criminal actions with massive fines and jail terms for violating the conditions for security clearance, is an old trick that has been radically expanded over the last decade. Numerous whistle blowers have gone to jail and have been driven into bankruptcy, for simply speaking the truth for the good of the nation. Many are subject to courts agreements, to keep them out of jail, that bar them from even discussing what was done to them illegally.
These days, whistleblowers are few and far between because in the current reign of secrecy, those who violate the rules will be punished without anyone ever knowing what happened to them. There seems little point in the growing darkness of risking one’s life and livelihood.
Just about anything that might get someone in trouble for corruption is immediately stamped as classified and thereby rendered off limits. This practice is what has allowed for the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars by investment banks and multinational corporations from the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency (and elsewhere) over the last two decades—without a trace. It is also the means that permitted investment banks to steal trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve in 2020, an act that fundamentally transformed American society by creating such a concentration of wealth as to establish an untouchable all-powerful ruling class.
That could not have been done if most pertinent documents in the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve had not been classified as top secret (in an egregious act without precedent).
These days, documents are classified by the FBI, the Treasury Department, the Coast Guard, the Department of Commerce, and yes, of course, the Center for Disease Control, on a daily basis to protect the interests of investment banks and the billionaires who run them.
This new culture has rendered a government that was already fatally wounded by 9/11 into an undead, zombie criminal syndicate that does the bidding of the very few.
Secret law, as opposed to classification, is a law, or laws, passed by the Congress which has the full impact of Federal Law, but that remains secret and for which you can be punished for discussing the existence of.
The very concept of secret law is so blatantly unconstitutional that you would have thought people would be screaming from the rooftops about it. But, in our sad age, decadent intellectuals are too compromised, too caught up in their own little worlds, to worried about their retirement funds, to care about such matters.
I cannot describe here all of the ways in which secret law is employed in the United States to support a shadow government that makes decisions long before any institution described in the Constitution can take action. Secret law is employed to block people from running for public office, or to make sure their ideas are never covered in the media—no matter how relevant their arguments may be.
Secret Law renders topics taboo in debates on policy in government, think tanks, universities and the media, debates on many important issues. It is not simply that the media does not want to cover the truth because of its corporate interests. It legally is not permitted to do so.
Those who violate the regulations of secret law in their pursuit of truth are brutally punished, but their punishments remain unknown to the public, or even to friends.
Finally, there are non-disclosure agreements which people in business and government are forced to sign from the start if they want to have a job at all. These agreements include enormous fines, and other punishments, for any disclosure of the criminal actions of the organizations that demand the use of these agreements.
In addition, there are non-disclosure agreements that are forced upon citizens by courts whereby, in order to avoid jail and fines for speaking the truth, citizens must sign agreements that prohibit them, forever, from relating the details of the criminal actions by corporations or governments that led to their misfortunes.
The implications of this sweeping institutional secrecy in the United States, at all levels in the Congress, and in the Federal Government, and extending to corporations, banks, and privatized intelligence and law enforcement, are grave.
More and more critical issues in the United States are becoming taboo, more and more criminal conspiracies are off limits for the media, for academics, and even for the man in the street.
This empire of secrecy is the primary driver, not the foibles of any particular politician, that is behind the catastrophic institutional collapse taking place in the United States today—a collapse that is starting to resemble, under the COVID19 regime, the end of the Roman Empire.
We cannot make any progress in stemming the flow of the lifeblood of our nation until we take on the unconstitutional walls of secrecy that have shut citizens out of the policy process, shut down the fundamental functions of government, and made possible the current totalitarian governance system.
At this point, all classified materials must be made public with only exceptions for ongoing discussions on treaties and agreements. All secret law must be deemed to be illegal and unconstitutional by its nature and made public, and the criminal enforcement of non-disclosure agreements must end.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
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Aryeh Deri, Israel’s interior and health minister, has been disqualified from holding his office by the High Court in a bombshell judgement that has implications for the future of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the judiciary itself.
Deri is one of Netanyahu’s most experienced allies and head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
Ahead of the judgement, his Shas ally Yaakov Margi, who is welfare minister, told an Israeli radio station if Deri is disqualified then “there will be no government”.
“If the court disqualifies him, the prime minister will have to decide what to do,” Margi said. “We have said all along that there is no reason for Aryeh Deri not to serve as a senior minister in Israel.”
Deri was convicted of tax crimes in 2022 and submitted his resignation from the Israeli parliament.
He struck a plea bargain with the courts, in which he said he would quit parliament and political life, only to return to it nine months later and take the position of interior and health minister.
The Israeli high court was deliberating whether Deri’s appointment contravenes his plea bargain.
Deri has a controversial legal history. In 2000, he was sentenced to three years in prison for taking $155,000 in bribes while serving as interior minister.
He served 22 months in prison, and though remaining an influential figure didn’t rejoin public life until 2011. He was re-elected to parliament in 2013.
Shas won 11 of the Israeli parliament’s 120 seats in November’s elections, making it the fifth-largest party. With the Netanyahu-led coalition governing with a majority of three seats, the withdrawal of Shas would collapse his new government.
Publicly, Deri has said that he will not step down and intimated that Netanyahu would have to fire him.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has told the High Court that she also opposed the appointment of Deri.
Baharav-Miara said Deri’s appointment as minister, despite repeated convictions, does severe damage to the public’s trust in the ethical conduct of elected officials.
High court under pressure
The ruling comes amid unprecedented pressure on the Israeli justice system.
Last week almost all the prosecutors and state attorneys that have served in Israel in the last half century jointly warned that planned reforms to the country’s justice system would “destroy” judicial independence.
“We call on the government to withdraw the proposed plan and prevent the serious harm to the justice system and the rule of law,” they said in the letter, referring to a new plan that would expand the government’s power to appoint judges and impede the High Court’s power to restrain parliament.
Currently, the High Court can disqualify government legislation if it contradicts Israel’s 13 basic laws, particularly the Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law. Israel’s basic laws are intended to be part of the future constitution, which does not exist yet.
The reform plan, however, proposes an “override clause”, which will allow parliament members to reenact a law disqualified by the High Court with a simple majority of 61 MPs.
Netanyahu, who is backing the changes, would also personally benefit from the weakening of the courts.
The prime minister is on trial for corruption, and the law could enable him to evade conviction or make see his case dismissed. Since being indicted in 2019, Netanyahu has railed publicly against the justice system, calling it biased against him.
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***
Among the lesser-known holes in the U.S Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.
Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.
Here is the backstory.
After President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Congress investigated his abuse of the FBI and CIA as domestic spying agencies. Some of the spying was on political dissenters and some on political opponents. None of it was lawful.
What is lawful spying? The modern Supreme Court has made it clear that domestic spying is a “search” and the acquisition of data from a search is a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime presented under oath to the judge for a search or seizure to be lawful. The amendment also requires that all search warrants specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.
The language in the Fourth Amendment is the most precise in the Constitution because of the colonial disgust with British general warrants. A general warrant was issued to British agents by a secret court in London. General warrants did not require probable cause, only “governmental needs.” That, of course, was no standard whatsoever, as whatever the government wants it will claim that it needs.
General warrants, as well, did not specify what was to be searched or seized. Rather, they authorized government agents to search wherever they wished and to seize whatever they found; stated differently, to engage in fishing expeditions.
When Congress learned of Nixon’s excesses, it enacted FISA, which required that all domestic spying be authorized by the new and secret FISA Court. Congress then lowered the probable cause of crime standard for the FISA Court to probable cause of being a foreign agent, and it permitted the FISA Court to issue general warrants.
How can Congress, which is itself a creature of the Constitution, change standards established by the Constitution? Answer: It cannot legally or constitutionally do so. But it did so nevertheless.
Yet, the FISA compromise that was engineered in order to attract congressional votes was the wall. The wall consisted of regulatory language reflecting that whatever data was acquired from surveillance conducted pursuant to a FISA warrant could not be shared with law enforcement.
So, if a janitor in the Russian embassy was really a KGB agent who was distributing illegal drugs as lures to get Americans to spy for him, and all this was learned via a FISA warrant that authorized listening to phone calls from the embassy, the telephonic evidence of his drug dealing could not be given to the FBI.
The purpose of the wall was not to protect foreign agents from domestic criminal prosecutions; it was to prevent American law enforcement from violating personal privacy by spying on Americans without search warrants.
Fast forward to the weeks after 9/11 when, with no serious debate, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. In addition to permitting one federal agent to authorize another to search private records — contrary to the Fourth Amendment — it also removed the wall between law enforcement and spying.
Of course, the language in the statute sounds benign and requires that the purpose of the spying must be national security and the discovered criminal evidence — if any — must be accidental or inadvertent. Last week, the FBI admitted that it intentionally uses the CIA and the NSA to spy on Americans about whom the FBI is interested, but as to whom it has neither probable cause of crime nor even articulable suspicion of criminal behavior.
Articulable suspicion — the rational ability to point a finger at a criminal actor, and a lower standard than probable cause — is the linchpin for the commencement of all criminal investigations. Without it, we are back to fishing expeditions.
The FBI admission that it uses the CIA and the NSA to spy for it came in the form of a 906-page FBI rulebook written during the Trump administration, disseminated to federal agents in 2021 and made known to Congress last week.
Needless to say, the CIA and the NSA cannot be pleased. The CIA charter prohibits its employees from engaging in domestic surveillance and law enforcement. Yet, we know the CIA is present physically or virtually in all of the 50 U.S. statehouses.
The NSA is required to go to the FISA Court when it wants to spy. We know that this, too, is a charade, as the NSA regularly captures every keystroke triggered on every mobile device and desktop computer in the U.S., 24/7, without warrants.
What is startling is that the FBI actually reduced to writing its contempt for the Constitution that its employees have sworn to uphold; and Congress and President Joe Biden have done nothing about this.
The FBI works for the Department of Justice. The CIA and the NSA work directly for the president. With a pen and paper, he can stop all domestic spying without search warrants. He can re-erect the wall between spying and law enforcement. He can forbid all in the executive branch from engaging with the secret FISA Court. Biden can do all these things if he didn’t fear the revelation of the dirt his own spies have on him.
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It’s unbelievable that a rising Great Power like Brazil can’t organize more than one major multilateral summit in a single year. What appears to be going on is that Lula is doing a favor for the US as a quid pro quo for its intelligence agencies helping to orchestrate the January 8th incident that’s consolidating his power.
Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told the global elite at this year’s Davos Summit on Wednesday that his country wants to delay its planned 2024 BRICS presidency until 2025. According to him,
“We have put off our presidency in BRICS so that it doesn’t coincide with the G20…(in order to) do quality work in both cases.”
This explanation is extremely suspicious though since it’s unbelievable that a rising Great Power like Brazil can’t organize more than one major multilateral summit in a single year.
What appears to be going on is that three-time President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who’s popularly known as Lula and returned to office this year, is doing a favor for the US as a quid pro quo for its intelligence agencies helping to orchestrate the January 8th incident that’s consolidating his power. Those readers who aren’t aware of the Brazilian leader’s surprising closeness to the US in spite of that declining unipolar hegemon being responsible for his prior jailing should review the following analyses:
In short, Lula’s domestic ideological alignment with the US’ ruling neoliberals is stronger than his international ideological alignment with Brazil’s BRICS partners. That’s not to downplay the latter, but just to emphasize the strength of the former, which explains why he’s unexpectedly seeking to delay his country’s planned BRICS presidency from 2024 to 2025 instead.
He of course can’t openly say that this is a favor to the US lest he risk riling his multipolar base, hence the ridiculous excuse that he told his Finance Minister to tell the global elite in Davos, which unbelievably implies that Brazil can’t organize more than one major multilateral summit in a single year. It remains to be seen what else Lula might do for the US in exchange for its support in helping him consolidate power, but this latest development raises serious concerns about his larger intentions.
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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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***
“As long as there are nuclear weapons, they are—like Chekhov’s gun—waiting to go off.”
The tit-for-tat coded rhetorical threats would sound fantastical and John le Carré-esque if they weren’t so real. In September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited U.S. “precedent” in using nuclear weapons in Japan and said Russia would “use all the means” at its disposal to “defend” itself in its war against Ukraine. About two weeks later, President Joe Biden said on CNN that the Pentagon did not need to be directed to prepare for a nuclear confrontation and warned that even accidental nuclear war could “end in Armageddon.”
The U.S. military also took the unusual step, in October, of publicly disclosing the locations of its Ohio class submarines in the Arabian Sea and the Atlantic — within range of Russia. Each can unleash 192 nuclear missiles in one minute.
The Pentagon and the Kremlin rattling rusty old nuclear-tipped sabers is scary enough; these two powers possess more than 90% of all nuclear weapons between their two arsenals. But the new phase of this three-quarter-of-a-century-old rivalry includes Russian missile tests in April and October 2022, and a reported foray by the nuclear-capable submarine USS Rhode Island into the Mediterranean in November.
How likely is the use of nuclear weapons in the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Matthew Bunn, an analyst at Harvard, puts it at 10% to 20%, based on Putin’s public statements and increasing desperation after Russia’s military setbacks. Usually, those might be pretty safe odds, but in the context of weapons far more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 77 years ago and killed tens of thousands of people in flashes of light, those odds are not nearly slim enough.
One of the more likely scenarios discussed is Russia firing a so-called tactical nuclear warhead into Ukraine. Any U.S. or NATO military response, even without nukes, would risk an escalation into a broader nuclear conflict. A 2019 simulation by researchers at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security showed how one tactical nuke could trigger a total nuclear exchange that kills 34 million people in just five hours.
Even this vocabulary of “tactical” weapons and nuclear “exchanges” reduces the real dangers of a nuclear attack to the scale of a skirmish on a Risk game board. The reality is that life after any nuclear war would be pretty awful for all survivors, even for those of us who live relatively far away from the flashpoints. An August 2022 paper in Nature Food found that a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia would shroud the planet in 150 million tons of soot, making food production nearly impossible and starving most of humanity. The ejection of nearly 50 million tons of soot into the upper atmosphere from fires following a hypothetical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan would decimate crops and fish globally, leaving more than 2 billion people dead within two years. These nightmare scenarios don’t even include the death and suffering from hazards like radioactive fallout and scorching sun exposure after the ozone layer is shattered by an atomic blast. As writer and activist Jonathan Schell puts it: “The birth of nuclear weapons in 1945 opened a wide, unobstructed pathway to the end of the world.”
Clear and present danger
U.S. peace activists are calling for the United States to play an active role in de-escalating the Russia-Ukraine war, given the nuclear threat and the war’s immense human toll. The tactics range from brokering a ceasefire to bringing both sides to the negotiating table to address grievances, including the ways the United States has encouraged the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War.
CODEPINK “No War with Russia Rally, Negotiate Ukraine, Don’t Escalate.” (2022)
If the world can make it back from this brink, then perhaps a silver lining to this devastating, 21st-century war might be a new urgency behind the work for nuclear disarmament. The public has been reminded of the vast U.S. and Russian stockpiles of more than 4,000 nuclear warheads each, of which a total of more than 3,000 are actively deployed. To avoid finding ourselves here again, we need nuclear disarmament.
As long as there are nuclear weapons, they are — like Chekhov’s gun — waiting to go off.
We know it’s possible to move the world toward disarmament because we’ve done it before. During the Cold War, an enormous movement — made up of lobbyists and Greenpeace activists, scientists and Catholic nuns and priests, Black Power proponents and Pan-Africanists, Pacific Islanders and Native American nations, lawyers and hippies, and so many others — turned the tide toward disarmament. Through a series of arms control agreements, Russia and the United States reduced their nuclear arsenals by about 87% from a peak of a combined 63,000 warheads in the mid-1980s.
As public attention moved away from nuclear weapons, weapons manufacturers fought to maintain and increase their market share in a changing world. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman lobbied and threw around campaign contributions to push for increased weapons spending and more open markets for their weapons, including the expansion of NATO into former Soviet states. By 2009, the United States was spending $29 billion on the maintenance, operation and upgrading of its nuclear arsenal. Now, the only remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia expires in 2026, and Russia pressed pause on scheduled talks in November 2022. The United States is investing up to $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years on updating and modernizing its nuclear weapons and their air, sea and ground delivery systems. We don’t have hard numbers for Russia, but they are spending billions as well.
Tough times require bold vision. We can’t rest until the weapons are eradicated. Our demand can be nothing short of abolition.
Bright lights, big bombs
Cross-movement solidarity around a single cause is never easy — why unite around this cause and not another? — and the call to abolish nuclear weapons can sound like a distraction from work on other pressing concerns, like prison abolition or workers’ rights.
The antinuclear movement has experimented with different ways to remind everyone that nukes kill everyone. For example, when talking to someone from the Audubon Society, you might say, “If you care about birds, you should care about nuclear weapons — they’ll kill off all the birds!” But that strategy comes off as condescending and simplistic.
There is a more profound way to get at it: “Is your movement animated by a beautiful and equitable vision for the future of life on earth?” There’s a growing understanding that we’re all climate activists now, that because we all care about the future of human and nonhuman life, climate must be woven into everything, from how a municipality responds to the needs of the unhoused to what food or education policy should look like in 10 years. The Movement for Black Lives has a Red, Black & Green New Deal initiative, for example.
Nuclear war is on the same existential scale as climate change. Progressives of all stripes don’t have to drop everything to come to the “abolish nukes” demonstration, but we need to use all of our platforms and modalities to keep a spotlight on the nuclear stockpile until it is dismantled.
And there is a straightforward goal we can unite behind: Getting the United States to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty is the only comprehensive, legally binding instrument that bans the development, possession, threat and use of nuclear weapons, and it includes a framework for verifiable nuclear dismantlement. The organizers of this crucial treaty won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. So far, 68 nations have ratified the treaty, but the list does not include any of the nuclear weapons states. If nuclear nonproliferation wasn’t a niche issue, there would be a massive call for the United States to sign the treaty, which commits any holder of nuclear weapons to “destroy them … in accordance with a legally binding, time-bound plan.”
If the idea of the United States committing unilaterally to disarmament sounds ludicrous, listen to the past. Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev got close, pushed hard by the 1980s peace movement. Former President Barack Obama is the most recent U.S. president to pledge nuclear disarmament, and just the idea won him a Nobel Peace Prize. International goodwill flows to whomever is willing to take the first step. Once the pledge has been made, incremental and verifiable disarmament — weapons system by weapons system — is how trust will be built. The antiwar movement in Russia is paying a very high cost for opposing their nation’s invasion of Ukraine, so the U.S. peace movement will have to push on both nations.
Getting there will take massive public pressure and a really big spotlight. Because, if there is one thing the anti-nuclear movement has learned, it’s that nuclear weapons thrive in darkness.
Desensitized destruction
After interviewing Hiroshima survivors, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton coined the term “psychic numbing” to try to capture the human brain’s inability to grasp catastrophe on a massive scale. One death matters greatly, but faced with 100,000 deaths, the brain shuts down. Psychologists of the 1980s documented psychic numbing in the American public around nuclear war, and Dr. Thomas Wear labeled the failure to have an appropriate fear of country-crushing weapons as “nuclear denial disorder.”
Psychic numbing and nuclear denial are dangerous for decision-makers and war planners as well as the public. The language of mass annihilation becomes sanitized into meaninglessness.
In 1954, U.S. General Curtis LeMay, as the head of Strategic Air Command, drew up plans for using 750 nuclear warheads preemptively against the Soviet Union. Tacticians under “Bombs Away” LeMay estimated the firepower would kill up to 100 million people. Such thinking isn’t just ancient history; a 2019 military briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff was similarly bullish on winning a nuclear war. “Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the document enthused.
Talk about psychic numbing! The only real conditions created by nuclear war would be decisive death and the restoration of pre-civilization.
In 2021, I gave a talk on civic engagement to students at Connecticut College. The conversation turned to nuclear weapons, as it always does when nuclear-armed submarines slice through the waters of the river right below the campus (the Groton Naval Submarine Base sits two miles away). Afterward, a young woman asked if I had ever heard of Roger Fisher; I hadn’t. She told me about his simple proposal to end nuclear war: Surgically implant the nuclear codes into the heart of a volunteer who would always be near the U.S. president. The aide carries a sharp knife, and if the president decides to launch an attack, they murder the aide and access the codes.
We locked eyes, this young person and I, in mute and mutual recognition that no less than this is what it should take to start a nuclear war that would kill millions and poison the world. Primal, visceral, messy, unprovoked murder.
I am so grateful to this young person for introducing me to this new idea, this way of cutting through the distancing verbiage that obscures most discussions around nuclear weapons. Later I learned that Fisher was a veteran, lawyer and Harvard professor who helped negotiate the end to the U.S.-backed civil war in El Salvador. He wrote up his nuclear solution in a 1981 essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.”
The idea resonated extra loud for me as the daughter of ardent antinuclear activists, both of whom spent long stretches in prison for their dramatic actions aimed at cutting through the mind-fog of nuclearism. As a kid, I spent winter vacations outside the (now inaccessible) Riverside entrance to the Pentagon. There, my parents and their friends would make a regular spectacle of ashes and blood. People dressed as death specters rang gongs while others dropped to the ground, writhing and screaming, dramatizing the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. One year, a group of women burnt locks of their hair in metal bowls to hang the awful, acrid smell of death over the whole mess. The Pentagon’s Riverside entrance has wide stone steps and tall limestone pillars that my father would take at a run, arcing a bottle of blood as high as he could while trying to outmaneuver po lice. As the blood ran down the pillars, it mingled with the ashes on the steps of the Pentagon. Arriving workers would fix their eyes on the door and pick their way over the writhing bodies, tracking the blood and ash into the building.
Resisting atomization
Not every nuclear abolitionist needs to throw blood on the Pentagon; the true power of the antinuclear movement came from the breadth of its participants and the diversity of their tactics. The movement encompassed analysts and lobbyists in three-piece suits wearing down their heels in the halls of power and the Greenpeace activists whose small boats interrupted sea-based nuclear testing from the Arctic to the South Pacific. It stretched from the Women’s Strike for Peace activists dogging U.S. lawmakers to the European feminists who camped at Greenham Common for nearly two decades starting in 1981, and it included the Catholics who exorcized nuclear facilities, held liturgies on missile silos and repeatedly trespassed on nuclear installations to beat swords into plowshares.
These activists were motivated by information and analysis from self-taught antinuclear investigators. The nuclear-industrial complex thrived in secrecy; when forced to be honest, it divulged mostly impenetrable information. In the face of this data-dumping, the movement built its own brain trust and established a cottage industry of think tanks and alternative research entities to counter and correct government misinformation. It tracked nuclear activities and disseminated its analysis to the grassroots, who organized in their local communities against the nuclear facilities scattered through literally every congressional district in this nation.
Even before the internet, antinuclear activists tracked down and exposed secret nuclear shipments and mobilized to block the trains or trucks. They filled jails, marched across countries, held massive teach-ins and convened international symposiums. They launched newspapers and magazines that remain vital today, including Nukewatch, Nuclear Watch and The Nuclear Resister.
New scholarship from historian Vincent Intondi seeks to recenter Black leadership in the antinuclear movement. He speaks to a new generation, reminding those who claim that the antinuclear movement was too white that the NAACP issued statements against nuclear weapons in 1946, while the vast majority of white Americans were pro-nukes. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Zora Neale Hurston all took early stands against nuclear weapons. As DuBois cannily observed, “If power can be held through atomic bombs, colonial people may never be free.”
The antinuclear movement was also intentional in building relationships with communities hit hardest by nuclear testing and mining, from the South Pacific to the Indigenous nations throughout the United States. The amplification of South Pacific and Native American voices put a human face on the mushroom cloud, helping to counter the abstraction of nuclear talk from our lived reality. The work to make nuclear dangers concrete and unite the non-nuclear nations as a bloc laid the groundwork for the Nuclear Weapons Free Zones — Latin America (1967), Southeast Asia (1995) and Africa (launched in 1996 and signed by all but 12 African countries), as well as the international movement that birthed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The movement also fostered international solidarity and people-to-people connections across Cold War fault lines through bike rides and marches, joint declarations and synchronized demonstrations. These activities allowed activists to build an enduring trust and friendship that provided openings for state-level initiatives. An alphabet soup of treaties followed, building on one another like acronymed Lego bricks — SALT, START, ABM, CTBT. Each treaty has a compelling backstory, with activists pushing for unilateral disarmament, world flashpoints that pulled backroom negotiations onto front pages, and suited negotiators sparring over commas.
These small, decentralized, broad-based activities added up to the survival of the species.
The famous rally that drew some one million people to New York’s Central Park on June 12, 1982, is often seen as the pinnacle of the antinuclear movement’s power. The sun shone, the subways came to a standstill and the signs were homemade and beautiful and from all over the country. The days of action that followed were built around the UN’s Second Special Session on Disarmament. On June 14, a broad coalition put out the call “Blockade the Bombmakers,” and 161 groups worked in waves of blockades at the Permanent Missions to the UN of the five nuclear states. New York police made 1,691 arrests.
It is not hyperbole to assert that these actions drove Reagan and Gorbachev to the negotiating table. Gorbachev says as much in his 2020 book, What Is At Stake Now, writing how “millions of people took to the streets, engaged in people-to-people democracy, voiced their demands, found a common language — and politicians in the East and West finally responded.” Chronicler Lawrence Wittner notes that Reagan, too, responded to antinuclear pressure by making “disarmament a top priority.”
A new abolition
After the Cold War, the antinuclear movement dissipated but did not disappear.
Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, who oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear warheads during the Clinton administration, now has a podcast with his granddaughter, “At the Brink,” which maps out a road to disarmament.
Activism by faith groups still carries moral authority and reaches people who don’t get their news from Democracy Now. The archbishop of Santa Fe, N.M., for example, breathed new life into Catholic antinuclearism in January 2022with a 50-page pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament.”
Indigenous activists have carried out decades-long efforts against the devastation of their land by nuclear industry extraction. In the American Southwest — home to the National Nuclear Laboratories that, along with Lawrence Livermore in California, birthed nuclear weapons — the Indigenous-led Haul No! Coalition is fighting uranium mining and nuclear colonialism.
Internationally, the movement is still robust. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)— the group behind the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — was itself inspired by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines a decade earlier. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, ICAN has grown to 600 organizations across 110 countries since 2007.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons corrects the flaws of the keystone 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which erringly enshrined a nuclear hegemony even as it kicked off disarmament. The United States, the Soviet Union, China, France and the United Kingdom promised to disarm (and help develop projects for nuclear energy) as long as the rest of the world agreed not to pursue their own nuclear weapons. Of course, the five acknowledged nuclear nations also happened to serve as the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, with veto power over all initiatives. This so-called Grand Bargain, built on hegemonic imbalance, failed, and a succession of countries “achieved” nuclear weapons, including Israel in 1986 and India, Pakistan and North Korea in 1998.
The new global abolitionist movement understands there must be no more loopholes. The fact that Russia invaded Ukraine — twice! — undermines the very logic of a “nuclear peace,” the notion of geopolitical stability from nuclear parity. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons plots a way forward out of the long nuclear nightmare and toward a more horizontal internationalism.
Anyone who cares about the future of life on this planet can be an antinuclear activist. We can muster our towns to join Mayors for Peace and declare ourselves “nuclear free,” a gesture that’s more than symbolic in military-dependent communities like my own city of New London. We can ask our faith communities, unions and municipalities to divest from nuclear weapons manufacturers with the Don’t Bank on the Bomb campaign. All of our left movements can lift up the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, demanding that the annual $50 billion spent on nukes in the United States be redirected to human needs.
And we can fill the streets, starting with dozens and building until we are millions.
We did it once. We can again. We have to.
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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***
E. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., an old-line conservative who is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, has recently weighed in on the Kennedy assassination. In his article, Tyrrell regurgitates the popular official narrative of the 1960s — that Kennedy was killed by a communist former U.S. Marine.
Notable about Tyrell’s piece is that it omits any reference to the Assassination Records Review Board, which was in existence in the 1990s. Why is the ARRB important? Because it was the paradigm shifter. With the long-secret evidence it uncovered, it blew the official lone-nut narrative of the assassination out of the water.
Unfortunately, Terrell’s mindset seems to be stuck back in the 1960s, when conservatives were convinced that the CIA was a nice, saintly, wonderful organization — a force for good in the world, one that was protecting America from a Red takeover.
Later, Americans would discover that the CIA was actually an evil, vicious, malignant cancer on American society, one that wielded omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination. Americans would discover that the CIA was in the murder business and that it in fact had no reluctance to snuff out the lives of political leaders that it deemed a threat to “national security.” Just ask the descendants of Congo president Patrice Lumumba or the family of Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces in 1970, or the people of Cuba, where the CIA repeatedly tried to murder Cuban president Fidel Castro.
Why would the CIA snuff out the life of President Kennedy? Because Kennedy was determined to snuff out the life of the CIA, which the CIA, not surprisingly, considered would be a grave threat to “national security.” Kennedy also was determined to move America in a direction different from that of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which they considered would result in a communist takeover of the United States. Worst of all, Kennedy was saying good things about Russia and establishing friendly and normal relations with both Russia and Cuba. In the eyes of the national-security establishment, what Kennedy was doing was not only cowardly incompetence that would result in a communist takeover of the United States, it also consisted of treason. We all know what happens to traitors.
Thus, this was a war to the finish. If Kennedy lives, the CIA is put down, America makes friends with Russia and Cuba, and America’s militarist direction comes to an end. If Kennedy dies, the CIA survives and prospers, the never-ending hostility toward Russia and Cuba continues, and America’s militarist direction proceeds indefinitely. The die was cast, but Kennedy obviously proved to be no match for the overwhelming power of the national-security establishment.
As I have long written, anyone today who continues to defend the old conservative 1960s official lone-nut narrative of the assassination must confront and address the fraudulent autopsy that was conducted on President Kennedy’s body on the evening of the assassination. That’s why the ARRB is so important. The evidence it uncovered sealed the case for the fraudulent autopsy — evidence that the Pentagon and the CIA had successfully kept secret for more than 30 years.
As I have long emphasized, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! No one has ever come up with one. No one ever will. After a team of Secret Service agents forced their way out of Parkland Hospital in Dallas in order to prevent the Dallas County medical examiner from conducting the autopsy that was required under Texas law, they delivered the body to President Johnson. He flew the body to Maryland and placed it into the hands of the military, which conducted the autopsy and shrouded it in official secrecy.
Although evidence of fraud had surfaced before the term of the ARRB, it was the ARRB that uncovered the evidence that conclusively established that the military had conducted a fraudulent autopsy and then did everything it could to keep it secret.
1. The military pathologists who conducted the autopsy claimed that there was only one examination of the president’s brain. The ARRB caught them lying. There were actually two. And the second brain exam involved a brain that didn’t belong to Kennedy. How did the ARRB determine that? Because the official photographer for the first exam testified that the first brain had been “sectioned” or cut like a loaf of bread. The second brain exam involved a fully intact brain.
2. A Navy petty officer named Saundra Spencer told the ARRB that she had been asked to develop the autopsy photos, on a top-secret basis, on the weekend of the assassination. The ARRB showed her the official autopsy photograph showing the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact. Spencer said no — that the autopsy photograph she developed showed a massive exit-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. Her testimony matched what the Dallas physicians and other eyewitnesses stated. That established that the military’s photograph was fraudulent.
3. Marine Sgt. Roger Boyajian told the ARRB that his team carried the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m. The ARRB also uncovered a long-secret memorandum from Gawler’s Funeral Home that confirmed the early entry of the president’s body into the morgue. Yet, the official entry time of the president’s body into the morgue was 8 p.m. Why was the body secretly sneaked into the morgue almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time? There is no doubt that the military was up to no good in those 1 1/2 hours.
What does Tyrrell say about these events? Nothing! My hunch is that he doesn’t even know about them. Like so many other old-line conservatives, his mind appears to be still stuck back in the 1960s insofar as the CIA is concerned. He cannot bring himself to acknowledge the paradigm shift that took place in the Kennedy assassination in the 1990s. Perhaps it’s just too painful and too scary to do so.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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***
In the wake of the covid pandemic lockdowns and mandates, many western nations and states in the US witnessed a new eye opening level of government intrusion into the daily lives of citizens. Some, however, dealt with worse scenarios than others.
New Zealand in particular has popped up time and time again over the past couple of years with some of the most draconian restrictions on the public, and sadly the trend has not stopped just because the pandemic lockdowns stopped. The island nation seems to be intent on setting the standard for authoritarian policies and government micromanagement, and a series of recent laws are driving home the reality that they do not intend to relent.
Flashback: In 2018, New Zealand banned all offshore oil drilling exploration in the name of instituting a “carbon neutral future”, meaning tight energy restrictions are forthcoming in NZ as the decade progresses.
In 2019, NZ banned all semi-automatic weapons after the Christchurch mosque shootings, punishing millions of law abiding citizens for the crimes of one man. Video evidence of the Christchurch shootings is suspiciously illegal in NZ, and anyone caught viewing or downloading the event can be prosecuted. The gun bans were enforced just in time for the pandemic lockdowns.
In 2020, the government introduced internet censorship legislation which would give them the power to selectively filter “dangerous content.” Most of the provisions were ultimately scrapped after a public backlash, but future censorship remains a priority for the government.
In 2021, New Zealand Prime Minister and associate of the World Economic Forum, Jacinda Ardern, openly admitted to constructing a two tier society in which the vaccinated enjoy normal access to the economy, travel and social interaction while the unvaccinated would be deliberately choked with restrictions until they “chose” to comply and accept the mRNA jab.
It should be noted that the Ardern and the New Zealand government were made aware on multiple occasions in 2021 by medical professionals of the risks of Myocarditis for people 30 years old and under associated with the vaccines. They ignored the warnings and pushed forward with mass vaccination campaigns anyway, including attempts to introduce vaccine passports.
This was not necessarily unique, though, as many western countries made similar dismissals of vaccine concerns and tried to promote passports. That said, New Zealand was one of the few in the west that built actual covid camps designed to incarcerate people with the virus in forced quarantine. The camps, referred to as “compulsory quarantine facilities”, were administrated by the NZ military, leaving no doubt that these were prisons rather than resorts.
The Primer Minister was finally forced to scrap a large number of covid mandates last year as evidence mounted that lockdowns and masks were mostly useless in preventing the spread of the virus, and that the vaccines do not necessarily stop covid contraction and transmission. The fact that the vaccinated now make up the majority of covid deaths is proof enough that the vaccines do not function as officials originally promised. The process of centralizing power has not stopped, though – The tactics have simply changed.
NZ has introduced a multitude of oppressive laws post-covid that add up to a freedom suffocating atmosphere for the public.
In November, the government implemented a law which forces large financial institutions to disclose climate related risks associated with their investments. The implications are far reaching, and ostensibly this puts pressure on banks and lenders to avoid financing businesses that are a “carbon emissions risk.” Meaning, if you want a loan from a bank and the government determines you are a “carbon polluter,” then you likely will not get the loan. This could include anything from large manufacturers to dairy farms.
Speaking of farms, NZ has banned the use of caged chicken farming across the country, creating a massive egg shortage which has led to high prices (This is taking place coincidentally right after the US government culled over 50 million chickens in 2022 due to “avian flu”, also causing high prices in America).
Feeling stressed about this mess and want to smoke a cigarette? Those are getting banned in NZ, too. In an unprecedented move, the government has passed a law which blocks any person under the age of 18 as of 2023 from buying cigarettes for their entire lives. Meaning, cigarettes will be slowly phased out as the younger generation grows older. Are cigarettes a health risk? Yes. But, governments claim that costs to socialized medicine give them a rationale to control people’s personal habits. Today it’s cigarettes; tomorrow it could be anything bureaucrats deem unhealthy regardless of actual science.
And that brings us to NZ’s latest authoritarian measure, the Therapeutic Products Bill, which if passed will give the government far reaching authority to manage and restrict the manufacture or sale of natural health supplements. Want to avoid big pharma and their untested products by taking care of your own body? You’re not allowed. Alternatives will be erased leaving only drugs and jabs.
This is not only the end result of the western fall into socialism, New Zealand seems to represent a test case for increasing violations of individual liberties and individual choice. New Zealand could yield a vision of the future for many other nations should western populations respond passively.
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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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***
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has reached a new climax. It apparently has become a hub for high-flier and high-priced prostitution, pardon, “Escort Services”. Like never before. This is amply covered by the international media. With exception of a few, the major Swiss media remain silent. Why?
Why is Switzerland still hosting this new Sodom and Gomorrah? Politely called the Chaos of Davos? The citizens of Davos dislike the WEF meeting ever more vehemently. It destroys not just their tranquility, but also their winter sport pleasure and business. Tourists stay away.
They do not want to be confronted with up to 5000 – or more – police and military. “For security” of course. Looking down a gun-barrel at every street corner is not pleasant.
In the last two to three decades – since the neoliberal ascent on humanity – any unpleasant imposition on the people of the world is, indeed, “for their own security”, and by inference, “for their own good”. That shuts up any critic. And it’s repeated so often, we start believing it.
That the WEF has been an attraction for high-flying whores, who now for better blending in to the regular WEF attendees, appear in smart business attire is not new. But the WEF 2023 has reached new dimensions.
This new Escort High, plus every and ever-more dystopian themes that accompanies the WEF-magnates’ sexomania, may signal the end phase of the WEF. The world would be a much better place without it, and without the oligarchs and financial behemoths, like BlackRock et al, which support and amply fund WEF – invading Davos.
Not to speak about the millions of Swiss tax-payer money the government spends in support of the WEF’s annual meetings and police and military protection.
This man, Klaus Schwab, a megalomaniac who looks like a phantom from outer space and speaks like a humanity-hating monster, is so unpopular worldwide, it seems he himself doesn’t have a clue.
His unpopularity is perhaps best reflected by a reader’s commentary after Schwab’s speech at the recent G20 / B20 meeting in Bali: “I wish Klaus Schwab will get everything that people in the world wish him…” Say no more. It’s all bottled-up in these few words. See this.
Wouldn’t that be the moment to gracefully disappear and let the WEF noiselessly collapse – and vanish? After 52 years and 53 Davos meetings – enough damage was done. Go away!
Will the WEF have a well-deserved Sodom and Gomorrah ending – as religious history portrays?
While the global elite pretends tackling the world’s greatest problems – including gender inequality – the Davos summit is fueling a surge in prostitution. Escort and sex services are booming in Davos where political and financial titans gather during the WEF’s 53rd annual edition from 16 to 21 January 2023.
Sexual harassment by wealthy men at WEF is “so common” that female guests are advised not to attend events alone, the Austrian EXPRESS reported.
According to a 2020 report from the UK Times, women – even if they are accredited WEF attendees – are “routinely harassed” by the men who dominate the conclave. Indeed, the event began warning women that year not to go out alone after dark, “because if something happens with some big CEO, who is going to be believed? You or them?”
WEF’s female staff in Davos were warned to beware of accosting politicians and business magnates.
As one luxury Escort Lady said, “Believe me, you don’t want to go into litigation with them.”
Now on a more serious note. Criticism and even ridicule of the WEF’s dictatorial and dystopian approach to the world’s problems has reached in 2023 a new pinnacle. Though the words “democracy” and “freedom” are always in the forefront, they are hardly applied. They are merely the deed of nonstop propaganda for something that isn’t. And as Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, said already almost 80 years ago, “If a lie is often enough repeated, it becomes the truth”.
This false truth has brainwashed almost every Western citizen. We are being gradually enslaved while still believing we are living in a democracy. The WEF is part of the steady flow of propaganda but also a master tyrant, in the person of Klaus Schwab and his Israeli top adviser, “You useless eaters”, Mr. Yuval Noah Harari.
Switzerland boasting of “democracy”, if they were serious, they would have expelled Schwab and the WEF years ago, or even arrested Schwab for crimes against humanity.
Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and his wife were invited to speak at the WEF, rather to beg for more money and weapons so as to “defeat” Russia. And yes, NATO, please help us, and make us a member of your war clan. The pair bashed Russia and especially President Putin with lie after lie, after miserable lie.
More war crimes were committed by the Zelenskyy regime, which massacred his own people in the Donbas area and elsewhere just so he could blame the Russians for the bloodbath. Journalists on location who saw the truth were threatened to shut up, or else. Several “disappeared”.
Democratically speaking, President Putin should have also been invited to present his truth. He was not invited. With his presence, the WEF could have created a platform for peace. The WEF, true to its mission statement – “committed to improving the state of the world” – could have sponsored peace negotiations.
Instead, Schwab and his invited top political honchos facilitated more weapons, more killing machines, being shipped to Ukraine – so this dystopian government supported by a dystopian US / EU leadership – without any strategy to end the war, keep giving the most corrupt country in Europe, unconditional war assistance, sending endlessly without any criteria of “end-in-sight”, canons, tanks, and missiles, keep encouraging Zelenskyy to fight to the end, to the last Ukrainian, so to speak.
Thereby, doesn’t Schwab and all the other EU / NATO / US weapons deliverers become murderers by association; and shouldn’t they be arrested immediately and put on trial?
In the long-run, or maybe already in the short-run, the WEF could become a burden for Switzerland. It is already a burden for Switzerland – and the world.
Talking about dystopia and “burden” – for whoever has to listen to this nonsense, listen to the ridicule of John Kerry’s, former US Vice President and now special Environment Envoy for the US. Kerry’s words, “A select group of human beings have a plan for “saving the planet” and its almost extra-terrestrial”. See this short video (40 sec).
John Kerry at the World Economic Forum:
A 'select group of human beings' have a plan for 'saving the planet' and it is almost 'extra terrestrial.' pic.twitter.com/nJbLPWNBMQ
For God’s sake, let’s stop him from “saving the planet”!
The “Weltwoche” (Swiss newspaper) Chief Editor, Roger Koeppel, sums up the 2023 WEF event in his Daily Special as depressive, giving the impression we are living the worst times in our lives, humanity is fast moving towards a climate apocalypse, especially when listening to the US / WEF puppet, UN Secretary General Guterres. How can he have forgotten that since about 30 years we are listening to the same narrative – we are just before the final climate collapse – and for 30 years the collapse has not happened… See this (in German), you may also view below.
The way the western WEF and lie-circus moves on – it is well possible that the Guterres-predicted apocalypse may happen in a form reflecting on the biblical legend of Sodom and Gomorrah.
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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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***
The US claimed unelected coup leader Juan Guaidó was “interim president” of Venezuela from January 2019 to December 2022, when his former allies in the right-wing opposition removed him from the position. Washington however still refuses to recognize elected President Nicolás Maduro.
US President Donald Trump appointed Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s supposed “interim president” in January 2019, despite the fact that the little-known right-wing opposition politician had never won a single vote in a presidential election.
Under President Joe Biden, the US government continued formally recognizing Guaidó, until Venezuela’s opposition-controlled parallel “National Assembly” voted to oust him in December 2022.
This marked the end to a nearly four-year US-led coup attempt against Venezuela’s leftist Chavista government.
Yet Washington has still refused to formally recognize Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro – who always remained recognized by the United Nations, throughout the coup attempt.
Instead, State Department spokesman and CIA veteranNed Price announced that the US only recognizes Venezuela’s opposition-controlled parallel “National Assembly” – which is competing with the Venezuelan government’s own National Assembly, which is part of the constitutional Venezuelan state recognized by the UN.
Geopolitical Economy Report editor-in-chief Ben Norton discussed the end of Guaidó with Venezuelan journalist Jesús Rodríguez Espinoza, who runs the independent news website Orinoco Tribune.
They analyzed the economic situation in the oil-rich South American country, which suffers under an illegal US embargo. The top UN expert on unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, reported that Western sanctions caused the Venezuelan government’s revenue “to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income”.
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The purpose of this Notice of Funding Opportunity is to support research to develop a predictive forecasting model that identifies new or reemerging misinformation narratives that are likely to disseminate widely and have a high potential for impact on vaccine confidence. The information from this model will then be used to develop a tool that public health agencies could use to predict misinformation trends in the populations served. Finally, the researchers will evaluate the tool’s predictive capabilities on both future social media misinformation narratives and real-world events.
The successful applicant will receive a million dollars over two years.
The documentation explains that “vaccine misinformation” leads to “negative public health consequences,” including “delayed vaccination and acquired vaccine-preventable diseases.” Until now, CDC thought police have had to deploy a “reactive approach” to this misinformation. Alas, “new misinformation that may impact vaccine confidence develops regularly,” which makes it “difficult for public health agencies to know the type of misinformation that will spread and be impactful.”
They hope, therefore, that somebody somewhere will do a science and help them predict emerging thought pathogens before they spread:
Regression analyses and machine learning approaches to identifying the future virality of misinformation in the peer-reviewed literature have so far been very limited in their capacity to identify actionable predictors that can be used by public health agencies to identify misinformation that may impact vaccine confidence before it becomes pervasive. More research needs to be conducted to identify ways to predict future misinformation, and to develop identification tools for public health agencies and community partners, so they can proactively mitigate the spread and potential harm caused by misinformation in their communities.
In much the same way, publishers would like to know which books will become bestsellers before they’re published, film studios would like to know which films will become blockbusters before they’re produced, and investors would like to know which stocks will increase in value before they’re traded. If “regression analyses and machine learning approaches” ever become capable of predicting viral trends, vaccinating schoolmarms will be the last to benefit from it.
Still: It’s interesting to consider that the CDC was founded in 1946 as an outgrowth of a malaria eradication programme, and that it took less than three generations for it to metastasise from those small beginnings into the hypervaccinating mass-containing thought-policing pharmaceutical scam-promoting multidimensionally tentacled tumorous vampire squid that it is today. With every crisis, every crusade and every bad flu season, it’s gotten just a little bigger, a little more comprehensive, down to the present moment, in which it’s soliciting an algorithm that will identify opinions it doesn’t like, in advance of anyone even having heard of them.
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Featured image is from the author
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 American Centers for Disease Control Pledge a Million Dollars for the Development of “a Public Health Tool to Predict the Virality of Vaccine Misinformation Narratives”
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***
Following are the words of a renowned University Professor, a scientist of mathematics, the chairman of the Supervisory Board of a famous German university hospital. And he is not alone. By far.
Millions, tens of millions around the world speak with the same ardor of voice. They are an eye-opener. They are being heard by more and more people around the globe:
“I’m fed up, or to put it even more clearly: I’m sick and tired of the permanent and increasingly religious climate gobbledygook, with energy turnaround fantasies, with electric car worship, with scary stories about doomsday scenarios, alleged overpopulation, CO2 dramas from Corona to conflagrations to weather disasters.
I can no longer stand the people who shout this into microphones and cameras every day or print it in newspapers. I suffer from having to witness how natural science is turned into a whore of politics.”
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And then what?
Yes, let’s get these monsters and suckers out of government, out of their self-made international arena – out from the globalist dictatorial phantasies. Let’s abolish the ambiance and conditions under which the fractioneers and ruler over a fractioned world are able to reign.
Let us do away with the world of luxury and luster – where this diabolical cult can prevail.
But, what if we can’t? Because this cult is backed by the powerful and sickening wealthy – and because the majority of We, the People, is still asleep?
Then let’s start by us, a minority, building a new society.
That’s probably what we have to do anyway sooner or later if humanity is to survive.
Are we ready?
Are we ready to throw our cell phones in the garbage?
Are we ready to thrash and boycott our TVs and mainstream medias?
Are we ready to start local and afresh again?
Local, like in “Local production for local consumption, with local money and trading with likeminded groups of people, according to the principles of comparative advantages and win-win conditions?”
Are we ready starting from scratch?
Forget reform.
The system is rotten and cannot be reformed.
Any reform of the corrupted and rotten system would undoubtedly again be carried out by those corrupted cultists that have rotten humanity and our values in the first place. The same that have fractured the world. They have the power to fake a reform of the People for the People, while fracturing the world to bits and pieces, then pull the broken pieces together and reign over a new globalist world with a tyrannical fist.
That’s the way it goes if we let others do our work.
We have to start from scratch – a dynamic evolving of a dynamic group of people.
We may have to live like indigenous people in the highlands of the Andes, the Himalayas, or the rainforests of Amazon region.
Yes, that might be our salvation in this man-made devastated world.
We, the People, with our brainless drive for “growth”, for more and more consumption, have let it become what it is today, have allowed to become enslaved by luxury and artificial comfort.
Once our civilization collapses, as it happened already several times before on Mother Earth’s watch, if there is any chance for a human continuation, a survival of the human genome – it would be through these indigenous people, the unpolluted minds and genes.
They may survive and will carry humanity forward. Perhaps towards a new awakening. A new civilization? Moving an inch closer to the Fifth Dimension?
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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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***
“Here’s something you must understand. We were not given any opportunity to act differently.” — Vladimir Putin
The plan to engage Russia militarily is a tacit admission that the United States can no longer maintain its global dominance through economic or political means alone. After exhaustive analysis and debate, western elites have settled on a course of action aimed at dividing the world into warring blocs in order to prosecute a war on Russia and China. The ultimate strategic objective of the current policy, is to tighten the grip of western elites on the levers of global power and to prevent the dissolution of the “rules-based international order.” But after 11 months of nonstop warfare in Ukraine, the US-backed western coalition finds itself in a worse position than when it began.
Aside from the fact that the economic sanctions have severely impacted Washington’s closest European allies, the West’s control of Ukraine has plunged the economy into a protracted slump, destroyed much of the country’s critical infrastructure and annihilated a sizable portion of the Ukrainian Army. More importantly, Ukrainian forces are now suffering unsustainable casualties on the battlefield which is laying the groundwork for the inevitable splintering of the state. Whatever the outcome of the conflict may be, one thing is certain: Ukraine will no longer exist as a viable, independent, contiguous state.
One of the biggest surprises of the current war, is simply the lack of preparedness on part of the US.One would assume that if the foreign policy mandarins decided to “lock horns” with the world’s biggest nuclear superpower, they would have done the necessary planning and preparation to ensure success. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. US policymakers seem surprised by the fact that the economic sanctions backfired and actually strengthened Russia’s economic situation. They also failed to anticipate that the vast majority of countries would not only ignore the sanctions but proactively explore options for “ditching the dollar” in their business transactions and in the sale of critical resources.
We see the same incompetence in the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine. How do we explain the fact that the NATO nations have been frantically scraping the bottom of the barrel to find weapons for Ukraine? Did our leaders really start a war with Russia not knowing whether they had sufficient supplies of weapons and ammo to fight the enemy? That appears to be the case.
And were our leaders so sure that the conflict would be a low-intensity insurgency that they never planned for a full-blown, combined-arms, ground war? Once again, this appears to be true.
These aren’t trivial mistakes. The level of incompetence in the planning of this war is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. It appears that all the preparation was focused on provoking a Russian invasion, not on the developments that would happen soon afterwards. What’s clear, is that the Pentagon never “gamed out” the actual war itself or the conflict as it is presently unfolding. Otherwise, how does one explain these glaring errors in judgement:
They never thought the sanctions would backfire
They never thought they’d run out of weapons and ammo
They never thought Russia’s oil receipts would skyrocket
They never thought that the majority of countries would maintain normal relations with Russia
They never figured they’d actually need a coherent military strategy for fighting a ground war in eastern Europe.
Is there anything they got right?
Not that we can see.
Take a look at this excerpt from an interview with ex-Brigade General Erich Vad who served as Angela Merkel’s policy advisor from 2006 to 2013:
Question– You too have been attacked for calling for negotiations.
Brigade General Erich Vad–Yes, as did the Inspector General of the German Armed Forces, General Eberhard Zorn, who, like me, warned against overestimating the Ukrainians’ regionally limited offensives in the summer months. Military experts – who know what’s going on among the secret services, what it’s like on the ground and what war really means – are largely excluded from the discourse. They don’t fit in with media opinion-forming. We are largely experiencing a media synchronization that I have never experienced in the Federal Republic…
Military operations must always be coupled with attempts to bring about political solutions. The one-dimensionality of current foreign policy is hard to bear. She is very heavily focused on weapons.The main task of foreign policy is and remains diplomacy, reconciliation of interests, understanding and conflict management. I miss that here. I’m glad that we finally have a foreign minister in Germany, but it’s not enough to just use war rhetoric and walk around in Kyiv or Donbass with a helmet and flak jacket. This is too little….
Brigade General Erich Vad–Then the question arises again as to what should happen with the deliveries of the tanks at all. To take over the Crimea or the Donbass, the martens and leopards are not enough. In eastern Ukraine, in the Bakhmut area, the Russians are clearly advancing. They will probably have completely conquered the Donbass before long. One only has to consider the numerical superiority of the Russians over Ukraine. Russia can mobilize up to two million reservists. The West can send 100 martens and 100 leopards there, they don’t change anything in the overall military situation. And the all-important question is how to end such a conflict with a warlike nuclear power – mind you, the most powerful nuclear power in the world! – wants to survive without going into a third world war….
You can continue to wear down the Russians, which means hundreds of thousands of deaths, but on both sides. And it means further destruction of Ukraine. What is left of this country? It will be leveled to the ground. Ultimately, that is no longer an option for Ukraine either. The key to solving the conflict does not lie in Kyiv, nor does it lie in Berlin, Brussels or Paris, it lies in Washington and Moscow…. A broader front for peace must be built in Washington…. Otherwise we wake up one morning and we’re in the middle of World War III.” (“Erich Vad: “What are the War Aims”, Emma)
Let’s summarize:
The media is “overestimating the (effect of) Ukrainians’ regionally limited offensives”. In short, the Ukrainians are losing the war.
The Russians are winning the war. (“The Russians are clearly advancing. They will probably have completely conquered the Donbass before long.”)
Weapons alone will not change the outcome of the war. (“the martens and leopards are not enough.”)
There is no evidence that the west has clearly defined strategic objectives. (“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely? There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism…Military operations must always be coupled with attempts to bring about political solutions.”)
This is not just an indictment of the way the war is being conducted, but of the strategic objectives which remain murky and poorly-defined. NATO is being led around by the nose by Washington, but Washington has no idea what it wants to achieve. “Weakening Russia” is not a coherent military strategy. It is, in fact, an aspirational phantasm nurtured by hawkish neocons playing armchair generals. But that is why we are in the predicament we are today, because the policy is in the hands of deranged fantasists. Does anyone seriously believe that the Ukrainian army will recover the territories in east Ukraine that have been annexed by Russia?
No, no serious person believes that. And, yet, the illusion that the “plucky Ukrainians are winning” persists, even while the casualties mount, the carnage increases and millions of Ukrainians flee the country. It’s beyond belief.
At the United Nations—China’s critique of Washington’s “rules-based international order”, which is designed to circumvent international law through violent unilateralism
Remember the Powell Doctrine? “The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:
Is a vital national security interest threatened?
Do we have a clear attainable objective?
Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
Is the action supported by the American people?
Do we have genuine broad international support?
The former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell developed his Doctrine to avoid any future Vietnams. And while the Biden administration has not yet committed US combat troops to Ukraine, we think it’s only a matter of time. After all, the media is already beating the war drums while demonizing all-things Russia. That is traditionally how they prepare the public for war. (“Russophobia … is all about dehumanizing one’s opponents to make killing more acceptable (and destroying) all the mental restraints that keep men from barbarism.” Gilbert Doctorow)
Meanwhile, the US continues to pump Ukraine full of weapons while the Pentagon has begun training Ukrainian servicemen in Germany and Oklahoma. It looks like the decision has already been made to embroil the US in another conflict for which there is no vital national security interest and no clear path to victory. In other words, the Powell Doctrine has been shrugged off and replaced with another lunatic neocon plan aimed at dragging Russia into a bloody “Afghanistan-type” quagmire that will drain its resources and prevent it from blocking US expansion into Central Asia.
And how is the neocon plan working so far?
Here’s what Colonel Douglas MacGregor said in a recent interview:
“There are now 540,000 Russian troops stationed around the outskirts of Ukraine preparing to launch a major offensive that I think will probably end the war in Ukraine.540,000 Russian troops, 1,000 rocket artillery systems, 5000 armored fighting vehicles including at least 1,5000 tanks, hundreds and hundreds of tactical ballistic missiles. Ukraine is now going to experience war on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.”
And if that wasn’t bleak enough, here’s more from a recent video with Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou:
Alex Christoforou–“There is just a general panic that is gripping the Ukrainian military, NATO and the west. … The Russians have been masterful in concealing their fighting forces …so you have 500,000 thousand military (combat troops) waiting in the wings which leaves Ukraine wondering, “What do we do? We’re bogged down in this Bakhmut-Soledar area when these 500,000 Russian troops could be planning to hit us from any direction and we have no idea where the attack is going to come from?
Alexander Mercouris–“You are exactly right. The Russians have completely gained the strategic initiative. They’re keeping everyone guessing, and to increase the sense of panic in Kiev even more, a Russian general Sulukov has just visited the Russian grouping in Belarus which is growing in size all the time… Does that mean the Russians are planning to advance south from Belarus? We don’t actually know…. But there is this enormous buildup taking place on every front on an order of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen before. Not just hundreds of thousands of troops deployed, but hundreds of tanks…infantry fighting vehicles, ammunition, artillery pieces…and it’s building up on an enormous scale ….and the fighting in Donbass in the last couple of weeks has been the work of two bodies that are not part of the regular Russian army (The Wagner Group and the Donbas Militia) The main force of the Russian army which has been building up in extraordinary numbers, has not yet been committed to the battle to any great extent. So, I think everybody is expecting that some big blow is coming. No one knows for sure where it will happen. I don’t know (but) the Russians have managed again to keep it all extraordinarily secret. … No one knows what they are going to do, but what we can see is these vast numbers of forces gathering around Ukraine where they Ukrainians are obviously panicking (because it looks like something is going to hit on a huge scale (but) I don’t know where it will come from.” (“Russia’s next move, keeps collective west guessing”, Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris, You Tube, 15:25 minute)
Bottom line: While Washington and its NATO allies do not have a coherent strategy for winning the war in Ukraine, it’s clear, the Russians do. In the four months since Putin ordered his partial mobilization, 300,000 additional reservists have joined their units on the battlefield or along Ukraine’s northern perimeter. The stage is now set for a conventional ground war the likes of which no one in Washington ever anticipated. We expect that the outcome of this conflict will reshape Europe’s outdated security architecture and force a realignment that will mark the end of the unipolar era.
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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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***
As a child curious about my Italian heritage I was encouraged to read about the glories of Rome.
And so I did.
Much to my surprise, instead of finding a legacy that would swell my bosom with pride for my forbears, I discovered a history of law-breaking brutality, betrayal, inconceivable sadism and endless conspiracies – a history of little regard for the rank and file citizenry of the Republic and Empire but endless appetite for intrigue, conquest and murder. Tactitus, Plutarch, Suetonius – even Caesar and Cicero themselves in their own works – gave me ample evidence for a chapter best closed, and an overwhelming appreciation for having been born into a time far removed from such inescapable monstrosities. And during the power games played out by the elite of that time – as, for example, the period of the two Triumvirates – even an ordinary pleb was inevitably forced to take sides. Most striking, however, was my discovery of the gladiatorial games held at the famed Colosseum of Rome, the details of which, filled with elaborate stagecraft and human sacrifice to delight and divert the masses, were, quite literally, impossible to stomach.
‘But think of the roads and aqueducts!’ my mother rejoined; and yes, I did think of them, along with the toil of the innumerable slaves and ordinary Romans and soldiers and who knows who else enjoined to construct them.
I studied Latin nonetheless when I grew older and the poetry of Catullus and Virgil wooed me into a more mature appreciation of ancient strife and the contextual politics of civilizations, though the intricately long-winded speeches of Cicero always had me rooting for his opponents.
I prefer to think of Rome these days from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita with the magical Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni at the Fontana di Trevi late at night – my personal antidote to the unbearable reality of history. It is not, however, this charming scene that comes to mind today, mired as we are in a web of such cleverly constructed and murderous evil: it is the Rome of Power, the succession of emperors and their ruthless contempt for law and decency, the ever-murdering Rome of imperial rule, all well documented and described and perhaps epitomized by Nero, a man who had his mother murdered, who pushed his tutor Seneca into preemptive suicide, who dispatched his perceived rivals to oblivion on a whim, and who, with ineffably macabre irony, demanded adulation for his artistic ambitions.
We are now roughly 2000 years removed.
For those of us who, like myself, were born in the United States after World War II – the war that succeeded ‘the war to end all wars’; for those of us who were steeped in the notion of inalienable rights, and who were raised during a time when merit and hard work could surmount the hitherto class-stratified and class-imposed obstacles to a fine education and livelihood, our world was a vast improvement over that of the ancients. We believed that our democracy was the fulfillment of the fledgling and exclusionary democracy founded in Athens. We believed in a rule of law that presumed innocence before guilt and that gave even the least of us a fighting chance in a system of justice blind to inequities of social status and money.
I suppose one might say that we were both naive and lucky, and perhaps too, given the inescapable realities of the Vietnam ‘conflict’ (it was, remember, never a declared war, despite the fighting and the death of millions, mostly non-Americans), ignorant of the depraved extent to which a country founded on freedom and principles of justice could embark so relentlessly on martial rampages around the globe.
I was nine years old when JFK was assassinated and I was somehow moved to describe that fateful event in my very first poem, a rhyming poem embarrassing now to recollect, written on the eve of the murder, but which, as I review it with an analytic eye, even then harbored the notion that the killing was a set-up. Call it poetic licence or poetic intuition, but even a child might perceive that the government’s narrative was suspect. My family were no fans of JFK, but they too smelled a rat, and I recall many discussions about the real culprits behind this bloody business – after I had penned my composition.
In the summer after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, which occurred within a span of two months in 1968, when I was fourteen, I developed a fear of traveling over the bridges that connected Philadelphia to New Jersey. It was, of course, an unconscious reaction to accompany the conscious worries that my country was collapsing.
By the time 9/11 came along I was well into my career as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. It didn’t take me very long to determine that the official story was as truthworthy as an advertizing campaign for cigarettes. In the aftermath of the event I remember seething at the airport searches and restrictions that made travel somewhat ominous: how easy it was to use the fist of authority over a compliant populace concerned about safety! By this time we were in another kind of war, the war on terror, which meant that potential enemies were everywhere all the time. Hearing the stentorian loudspeaker announcements at Penn Station in New York, played every five minutes or so, advising us to be watchful of our neighbours and to report suspicious activity as we waited for our trains, made my stomach turn.
Little did I know even then that I had been traveling along a well-defined arc, an arc that has touched home in our current Covidian catastrophe, an arc that followed the singular points of State-sponsored assassinations, wars, and spectacular calamities, all of which were designed to induce, foster, fertilize and promote a never-ending state of fear for the purposes of never-ending control.
The abrupt efficiency with which the entire world was shut down in 2020 does not lend itself to an ‘organic’ development, but rather to a fairly well organized and highly successful dictate. The preposterous imposition of a hastily manufactured injection and the seductive and coercive means used to ensure its uptake upon the global population, all while basic of principles of medicine were ignored –principles such as treatment, natural immunity, caution and individualized care – was also not an ‘organic’ process. Doctors who attempted to be doctors by advocating for such principles found themselves under attack: licences were suspended as an example to any like-minded colleagues to make sure to keep their mouths shut lest they suffer a similar fate and lose their livelihoods.
The tools to wield power are more concentrated, far-reaching and facile than ever before. But the personalities who wield power now are no different from those personalities of ancient Rome. If anything, killing is far easier because it can be done with such bloodless and sterile detachment.
How many people have perished from the Covid jabs? How many more will die, suddenly or not so suddenly in these coming years?
Worse still, how many of us ordinary folk will go along with this bloody charade, wherein we believe that our ‘masters’ in government and organized medicine have only our good health at heart?
In Shakespeare’s rightly famous play about Julius Ceasar, Cassius, referring to Caesar, says to Brutus:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
(Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2)
The underlings around us who accepted without question the dissolution of their inalienable rights; the underlings who masked up and didn’t make a peep when they were denied a visit to a dying relative; the underlings who practiced medicine but abandoned their ideals; the underlings who turned blind eyes to apartheid and censorship; the underlings who think that the sudden deaths among children, athletes and otherwise healthy people are ‘normal’; the underlings who still yet refuse to say a bad word about politicians, bureaucrats and billionaires who advise us to eat bugs and work from home and inoculate ourselves with their potions forever – these are the mobs that pose a danger even greater than the orchestrators of the depopulating wealth-shifting so-called ‘reset’ that seeks to enslave its survivors.
Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as ‘one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last’.
Let’s keep this in mind as the World Economic Forum meets in Davos. Because our real pandemic is willful naiveté, and our greatest danger cowardice.
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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand.
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***
Former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter has not only warned that Russia is escalating its special military operation in Ukraine, but that this will result in “a slaughter, a massacre” for Ukraine. His statement comes as a lot of speculation is circulating following the appointment of Valery Gerasimov as commander of the overall Ukraine campaign, with the pre-eminent idea being that there was a “reshuffle”.
Russia’s Defence Ministry announced on January 11 a realignment of the commanders leading the war in Ukraine, with General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, becoming the overall commander of the campaign. The former commander, Sergey Surovikin, is now one of his three deputies.
“The time has come where 300,000 reservists have been mobilised, trained, equipped. Russia is getting ready to change the nature of the conflict,” said Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD’s.
Ritter said how the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are evidently preparing to expand the special military operation in Ukraine to a full war effort. From his experience, there has not been a great Russian failure, as Western media would have you believe, and rather, placing Gerasimov in his position is an indication that the military operation in Ukraine will expand.
The former intelligence officer believes that Russia will complete its demilitarisation and deNazification of Ukraine in 2023. Gerasimov having greater responsibilities is an indication of this.
“When Russia finishes this current military campaign, I believe the Ukrainian Army will be physically destroyed,” he said. “Tragically this means that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are going to lose their lives. This is going to be a slaughter, a massacre, but they opted for this so they pay the price.”
He also warned that there will likely be a “dedicated Strategic Air Campaign” with the aim of destroying Ukraine so-much-so that “there will be no viable functioning nation.” Ritter explained that this will force the final collapse of the Zelensky regime and allow a new government to come to power and accept surrender.
However, for the next phase of the expanded campaign to be a success, someone of Gerasimov’s experience is most suitable as he will contribute to improving the effectiveness of decision-making and coordinating the actions of the Russian armed forces in the combat zone and their provision of equipment.
Although Russia already had a commander, his authority did not cover the full range of tasks necessary for the military operation to be successful. With Russia evidently preparing for a major offensive, many issues need to be resolved, and quickly, such as the effective supply of arms and equipment to troops, the evacuation of the wounded, and others.
It is recalled that the commander of the Air Force, Army General Sergey Surovikin, who was appointed as the commander of the Ukraine military operation in October 2022, was only responsible for the units that were directly on the front lines of the fighting. However, some military units involved in combat operations, mainly aviation and the Navy, were located outside the area of the operation, which caused some problems in coordinating decisions and synchronising actions.
Now, Gerasimov will be on the ground among his soldiers on the front line. In modern warfare, the physical presence of the highest-ranking military office on the battlefield is exceptional, especially given the hybrid nature of modern conflicts which empowers advanced technology. None-the-less, technology cannot completely replace troops on the ground, and the presence of Gerasimov will surely be a massive morale boost.
As Gerasimov will have more leverage to ensure a better coordination of Russian air, land and naval forces against the Ukrainian military, it can be safely assumed that there will be an intensification of the conflict, likely in the springtime. This also aligns with Ritter’s belief that the total destruction of the Ukrainian state is an inevitable eventuality in 2023.
It is for this reason that only weeks before the first anniversary of the military operation, the West is scrambling to send a flurry of offensive armoured vehicles and other equipment to the Ukrainian military, even though there were initial fears on how Russia would react. Unfortunately for the West though, the war in Ukraine has reached a phase where all new equipment is quickly being turned into scrap metal.
Now, the current situation is about to become even more difficult for Ukraine with the reassignment of Valery Gerasimov.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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***
There’s nobody more credible than the Polish leadership, apart from the American one of course, to decisively flip the “official narrative” from prematurely trumpeting Ukraine’s supposedly inevitable victory to direly warning about its supposedly inevitable defeat.
The “official narrative” about the UkrainianConflict up until this week was that Kiev would “inevitably win”, but that prediction has since suddenly been turned upside-down after the Polish Prime Minister and President both warned that it might actually soon face defeat. Mateusz Morawieckisaid that “The defeat of Ukraine “might become a prelude to World War III” during his trip to Berlin on Monday while Andrzej Dudaoutright questioned whether “Ukraine will survive or not” when in Davos on Thursday.
It would be absurd to speculate that either of them are so-called “Russian propagandists”, let alone both, since they’ve proven themselves to be among the world’s top Russophobes. Their country has done more than any other apart from the US to support Ukraine in NATO’s proxy war on Russia through that former Soviet Republic. In fact, it was Duda himself who unveiled the de facto Polish-Ukrainian Confederation during his trip to Kiev last May, so it’s clear that Warsaw really wants its neighbor to win.
These facts mean that there’s nobody more credible than the Polish leadership, apart from the American one of course, to decisively flip the “official narrative” from prematurely trumpeting Ukraine’s supposedly inevitable victory to direly warning about its supposedly inevitable defeat. As was explained at length in this analysis earlier in the week, Russia’s liberation of Soledar was actually a tactical military game-changer despite the Mainstream Media’s (MSM) prior gaslighting to the contrary.
It was that development, after all, which set into motion the irreversible rewriting of the MSM’s “official narrative” about the conflict. CNN even jumped on the bandwagon in an attempt to lead the way on Wednesday when one of its top perception managers, Stephen Collinson, warned that “a vital new tipping point” has been reached that’ll put the Biden Administration’s commitment to Ukraine to the test. Duda simply took everything to its logical end by explicitly wondering whether Ukraine will survive.
While those three – the Polish President, Prime Minister, and CNN – undoubtedly dramatized the present state of military-strategic affairs for political reasons, their warnings should nevertheless be taken seriously since it’s truly the case that Kiev is on the brink of defeat. The only way to avert this scenario is if unprecedented aid like modern tanks is shipped to it as soon as possible and/or if Kiev launches a new offensive, the first of which is politically risky while the second is militarily risky.
In the absence of either happening, and provided that Russia doesn’t inexplicably go back on its pledge to carry on its counteroffensive by engaging in another “goodwill gesture”, then the Battle of Donbass will almost certainly end with Kiev’s defeat. The consequences of that outcome would most directly affect Poland, which is in a de facto confederation with Ukraine like was earlier mentioned and already gave its neighbor a whopping 260 of its own T-72 tanks like Duda just admitted in Davos.
It would therefore be an epic embarrassment for the Polish leadership if Kiev loses the Battle of Donbass since this would be akin to a defeat for Warsaw itself due to how much it’s already militarily and politically invested in what it previously predicted up until this week was Ukraine’s “inevitable victory”. Unless Poland intervened in Western Ukraine right afterwards so as to “save face”, which would entail considerable military and political risks, then the ruling party might lose re-election this fall.
The ”Law & Justice” (PiS per its Polish acronym) party wouldn’t have any remaining credibility in the eyes of its (faux) conservative base and so-called “moderates” alike, the latter of which have rallied around it on an artificially “patriotic” pretext due to its support of mass Ukrainian immigration. Poland as a whole would appear toothless after talking so tough all last year about doing its utmost to help Ukraine win, which would shatter its envisioned regional “sphere of influence”.
The US-led West’s GoldenBillion of which it’s a part would almost certainly also look for a scapegoat to blame Kiev’s defeat on, with PiS being the most attractive target since it doesn’t hew to this de facto New Cold War bloc’s liberal-globalist ideology as closely as most of its other members do. Germany would therefore be expected to resume its Hybrid War on Poland in partnership with its recently restored American overlord to manipulate voters into kicking PiS out of power during fall’s elections.
Should those two succeed in that superficially “democratic” regime change plot against their shared nominal Polish partner, then Chancellor Olaf Scholz would make tangible progress in advancing the hegemonic ambitions contained in last month’s manifesto. The installation of a bonafide pro-German liberal-globalist government in Warsaw would result in Poland becoming Berlin’s largest-ever proxy state, which would in turn imbue the EU’s de facto leader with truly hegemonic sway in Europe.
Morawiecki and Duda are both keenly aware that their political careers are about to be ruined if they can’t convince their Western partners to scale up their support for Ukraine at this crucial moment in Russia’s special operation there. These self-interested motivations explain why they rewrote the “official narrative” about the conflict in order for it to more closely align with the facts, though it remains unclear whether the West will react as they demand to help Kiev survive and thus keep those two in power.
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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.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: “Brotherly friends”: Ukrainian President Zelensky (R) and visiting Polish President Andrzej Duda, Kiev, May 22, 2022
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***
Last August, I wrote an article asking why we expect the government to insist on informed consent for vaccines when they don’t do the same for alcohol:
When someone goes into a pub, the bartender doesn’t hand them a consent form before pouring him a pint. He doesn’t say, “Hey Bob, just want to make sure you know that a Johns Hopkins University study of 1,909 men and women found a link between low to moderate alcohol consumption and a decrease in the brain size of middle-aged adults leading to impaired cognition and motor functions.”
Or when someone drops by the liquor store for a bottle of red wine, the clerk doesn’t say, “Hey, Maria, remember that the Italian Association for Cancer Research (of all places) showed that even moderate consumption of vino tinto will increase your risk of cancer by 30%.”
“The pressure on the government to put cancer warning labels on alcohol containers is growing, as experts say the majority of Canadians don’t know the risks that come with consuming even moderate amounts.”
From cancer to heart disease, the suppressed truth by Big Booze is coming out. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction reviewed over 6,000 studies (mainly conducted in the last decade), concluding that “no amount of alcohol is safe and that consuming any more than two drinks a week is risky.”
I couldn’t agree more, but…
Is this some kind of red herring to distract from the rise in cancer and heart disease resulting from those “safe and effective” COVID-19 injections? More than two 34 ml shots of whisky, each week, over the course of 30-40 years certainly appears to put you at greater risk for a host of horrible ways to die. But just one 0.3 ml shot of the Pfizer vaccine can do the same in 30-40 days.
There’s no comparison about the risks involved.
At least with alcohol people are getting some “benefits” in the way of (albeit fleeting) euphoria, reduced anxiety and increased sociability. I don’t drink and am not recommending the stinky stuff, but am just pointing out that there’s an opportunity with alcohol for some semblance of a risk-benefit analysis.
With the vaccine there’s nothing. No benefit, big risk.
Anyway, I hope Health Canada doesn’t start putting cancer warnings on alcohol. They’ve lost the trust of most thinking people that such a warning might only increase consumption.
Maybe government needs to stop trying to protect people from disease, and focus on the hard enough job of protecting individual freedom and the right to personal autonomy.
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John C. A. Manley is the author of the full-length novel, Much Ado About Corona: Dystopian Love Story. He is currently working on the sequel, Brave New Normal, while living in Stratford Ontario, with his wife Nicole and son Jonah. You can find out more about his controversial work of fiction at MuchAdoAboutCorona.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
On January 18, a helicopter carrying senior Ukrainian officials crashed on the suburbs of Kiev, killing 14 people, including interior minister Denys Monastyrsky and his first deputy Yevgeny Enin. There are different narrations of what happened. At first, media said that the incident occurred due to a malfunction in the helicopter’s engine, but there are a number of contradictions between the versions, with people believing that it was a planned sabotage.
The helicopter crashed at 8:20 am on January 18, in Brovary, a city of the Kiev oblast. The site was in foggy conditions according to local informants, but so far there is no data to prove that the weather could really disturb the flight. The fall took place near a kindergarten, which led the tragedy to reach even greater proportions, as dozens of children were affected – three of them dying. As many people, including several children, remain hospitalized, it is possible that the number of deaths will increase in the coming days.
The helicopter was a French Airbus H225 (also known as Eurocopter EC225 Super Puma) and belonged to the Ukrainian emergency service since 2018. The reasons for its collapse are still being investigated. The most commented hypothesis is that there has been a technical malfunction, although all possibilities are considered – including sabotage. A report from the local Ukrainian media states that it was already known that this helicopter model had many technical difficulties:
“The helicopter that crashed today in Brovary was from a batch of helicopters purchased from France in 2018. The EC225 (or H225) model, the fall of which the authorities confirmed today, had a number of technical problems. At that time, Airbus Helicopters had several lawsuits over ‘inherent’ malfunction”.
Indeed, one question remains: if it was already known that there were technical problems with the equipment, why did the Ukrainian authorities continue to use it to attend important officers?
This is why many unofficial narratives about the possibility of deliberate assassination have emerged on the internet. The Ukrainian government admits the possibility, claiming to be investigating a hypothesis of sabotage against the Minister, but obviously it does so based on the idea that there would be an intention on the part of the Russian forces to kill him – which is doubtful, considering the low military relevance of such an act.
However, an even more curious fact is that several residents of Brovary commented that they saw a missile in the air hitting the airbus. The rumors have been reported by independent channels on social media, mainly through on the ground journalists who are investigating the case unofficially. The news raises a series of other possibilities.
It is important to remember that the Ukrainian air defense system has made serious mistakes recently, destroying civilian areas and killing innocent people due to the inaccuracy of its attacks. There are many factors that help to understand this process. First, since the beginning of the conflict, Kiev has shown that it does not have a military doctrine concerned with civilians, so there does not seem to be any special care on the part of artillery operators to avoid non-military casualties.
Second, there is the technical issue. Currently, due to significant losses on the battlefield, Kiev is recruiting personnel without military qualifications, incompetent to operate the war equipment that is being used in the conflict. The case becomes even more serious considering that the neo-Nazi regime is receiving NATO’s weapons with which its soldiers are even less familiar, increasing the possibility of errors.
It is important to remember that Monastyrsky was the second major official that the Zelensky government lost in less than twenty-four hours. Earlier, top adviser Alexey Arestovich had resigned precisely for accidentally revealing mistakes made by the Ukrainian artillery.
The fact is that if a projectile did hit the Ukrainian helicopter, it is much more likely that it came from Kiev’s own artillery – accidentally or intentionally – than from Russian artillery, which was not shelling the place at the time. Furthermore, the mere point that Kiev was allowing a top official to fly over a country at war using an unsafe airbus already shows that either the government simply did not care about his safety.
It is important to mention that Monastyrsky, as Interior Minister, was the head of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias, as since 2014 the ultranationalist gangs have been incorporated into the Kiev’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. So, he certainly had sensitive information about how the neo-Nazi regime manages its security forces.
In July, Kiev bombed a Russian prison in Olenivka where Azov’s militants were placed after their surrender in Azovstal. On that occasion, 50 neo-Nazi soldiers died in what was probably an attempt by Kiev to avoid confessions that could threaten the confidentiality of some data. Ukraine obviously tries to hide information about the practices of its neo-Nazi troops, such as war crimes, training camps for children, arms trafficking, terrorism, among others. In this sense, considering that Monastyrsky had much more concrete information about these same crimes, it is possible that there was an intention to eliminate him, in case Zelensky was really promoting a purge.
So far, the data are uncertain, and many questions remain unanswered. But the evidence seems to point to yet another criminal incident.
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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.
We bring to the attention of Global Research readers the text of an unpublished Lecture delivered in 1992 by the late Sean Gervasi on the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US Strategy formulated during World War II to bring down the USSR.
The full transcript and video of Sean Gervasi’s presentation is preceded by Dennis Riches’ Introduction.
Scroll down for the Video
Introduction
We defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic simultaneously… We worked together in a completely bipartisan way to bring down communism… So now we have to use our political processes in our democracy, and then decide to act together to solve those problems. But we have to have a different perspective on this one. It [global warming] is different from any problem we have ever faced before…[i] – Al Gore
These words above were spoken by former US vice-president Al Gore in 2007 in his film An Inconvenient Truth. Because audiences at the time were in rapt awe of him, treating him as a savior in the campaign to solve the global warming crisis, they never seemed to reflect on the outrageous assumptions underlying his comments about “defeating totalitarianism” and “bringing down communism.” These are worth examining for what they say about perceptions of world history among the American political class, and they even hint at how the errors in these perceptions led Mr. Gore to being self-deceived about what would be necessary to solve the problem he has devoted himself to since he has been out of power.
Although the United States played a crucial role in WWII, it was slow to get involved and it let the Soviet Union do much of the heavy lifting and suffer the heaviest losses. The United States had a lot of help in achieving the victory Mr. Gore claims for America, and we could assume he knows this, so the way he chose to describe historical events is telling.
Perhaps acknowledging the reality would have detracted from his second point about “bringing down communism.” Everyone knows that what he is referring to so proudly is the destabilization and destruction of the USSR, the Warsaw bloc nations, and Yugoslavia, not the abstract notion of communism. He is referring to a “victory” which precipitated civil wars and a disastrous collapse of the economy and social welfare systems in these countries, one that killed and impoverished millions. In China, Cuba and the DPRK, contrary to what he stated, these nations’ versions of socialism haven’t been brought down at all. [1992]
Explicitly describing the “bringing down of communism” as America’s deliberate actions to dismantle the USSR might run the risk of reminding the audience about the illegality of interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and it might have reminded people of what a betrayal this was of America’s WWII ally and partner in the détente of the 1970s. The inconvenient truth is that the USSR was the WWII ally that played a crucial role in the victory that Mr. Gore claimed solely for America.
Nonetheless, the comment about “bringing down communism” is refreshingly, and maybe accidentally, very honest. Most descriptions of the Soviet collapse, even those done by historians specializing in this field, pay little attention to American efforts to undermine the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The political class always denied that America had a plan to dismantle the USSR, and denied having any significant influence on events which they claim arose from domestic causes. If America’s influence is addressed at all, it is considered as a matter of speculation, a mystery hardly worth thinking about when one can more easily look at the dramatic events that occurred on the surface within the Soviet Union in the last decade of its existence. The following transcript of the lecture by Sean Gervasi, delivered in 1992, shortly after the collapse, is unique and valuable for what it reveals about the significant, and perhaps decisive, American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his conclusion, Mr. Gervasi came to this judgment:
The Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out, extremely costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society struggling through great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the kind that it was. It would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think, therefore, that Western intervention made a crucial difference in this situation.”
The journey to how he came to this conclusion is well worth the reader’s time.
A final comment about Mr. Gore’s remarks: He is oblivious to the inconvenient solution that has been staring him in the face all these years: that the necessary reduction of carbon emissions will require severe constraints on capitalism, a thesis developed by Jason W. Moore in Capitalism in the Web of Life.[ii] Mr. Gore should know that a radical solution is needed. In his recent sequel to An Inconvenient Truth he complains about the undue influence of “money in politics” that has gotten so much worse over the last ten years, but that’s as deep as the class analysis and ideological exploration can go in America. He evinces no awareness of the historical figures who developed answers to the problem of unaccountable private control of a nation’s government, resources and productive capacities. Gore is still proud of having actively worked against a revolution in human affairs that aimed to curtail the savage capitalism that led to the present ecological catastrophe.
In spite of the flaws one might see in what the Soviet Union actually became, flaws that arose to a great extent because it had to fight against external threats throughout its existence, the goals of the revolution of 1917 are still relevant to the crises of the 21st century, and this is what makes Sean Gervasi’s research so valuable now, after a quarter century in which America doubled down on its “winning ways” and worsened the crises that were evident long ago in 1992.
About Sean Gervasi
Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death.
Gervasi was an economist trained at the University of Geneva, Oxford and Cornell. His political career began when he took a post as an economic adviser in the Kennedy administration. He resigned in protest after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
After his resignation, Gervasi was never able to get work again in the United States as an economist, despite his impressive academic credentials. He became a lecturer at the London School of Economics after leaving Washington. Notwithstanding his great popularity, the school refused to renew his contract in 1965.
During the 1970s and 1980s he was an adviser to a number of governments in Africa and the Middle East, helping them navigate the hostile and predatory world of transnational corporations and megabanks. He also worked for the UN Committee on Apartheid and the UN Commission on Namibia.
In addition, Gervasi was a journalist, contributing to a wide range of publications, from the New York Amsterdam News to Le Monde Diplomatique. He was a frequent commentator on the listener-supported Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York. In 1976, Gervasi broke the story of how the U.S. government was secretly arming the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In the late 1980s, Gervasi began to focus on the Cold War and what he called the “full court press,” a basketball term for a highly aggressive “all in” strategy. In an article published in the Covert Action Information Bulletin in early 1991[iii], when the breakup of the USSR was imminent, Gervasi showed how the Reagan administration’s strategy of economic isolation, a gargantuan arms buildup with the threat of a nuclear attack, overt funding of internal dissent, and CIA-directed sabotage had been decisive in bringing down the USSR. Gervasi backed up his analysis with careful scholarship and documentation.
Gervasi was widely respected as a leading independent figure in the left, but his views were contrary to the fashionable dogma that attributed the USSR’s collapse almost exclusively to such things as failures of leadership, centralization of the economy, the black market, Chernobyl, or independence movements, and not to external hostility. These are the subjects which he addressed in the following lecture given to a small audience in January 1992. The lecture can still be found on internet video sites, but the thesis of this lecture still remains marginal and obscure two decades later, even though it is highly pertinent to the Cold War replay that is underway in the second decade of the 21st century—one in which Russia stands accused of turning the tables and doing a comparatively very tame version of the propaganda war waged on the USSR in the 1980s.
After 1992, Gervasi focused his attention on the breakup of Yugoslavia, which he discovered was a replay of the strategy used to break up the Soviet Union. He became active in exposing the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the civil war in the Balkans. His view that the war in Bosnia was sparked by the aggressive machinations of these nations, and not age-old ethnic rivalries, alienated Gervasi from much of the liberal and progressive movement.
Journals to which he had once regularly contributed would no longer print his articles. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the Balkans, but some of his research on this topic can be found in the article “Why Is NATO In Yugoslavia?”[iv] published by Global Research in 2001.[v]
Dennis Riches, November 2017
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VIDEO
Scroll down for the full Transcript
Byline of the video:
Propaganda expert reveals details in 1992 of RAND Think Tank plan under Reagan to bring down USSR, the major socialist challenge to capitalism in crisis, called Operation Full Court Press when announced at a Reagan limited invitee press conference upon its launch. It involved targeting mid-level Soviet bureaucrats with publications and Air America broadcasts pointing to problems they were facing having better outcomes in the US, military provocations when they were considering their budget in order to spend them into bankruptcy, luring them into Afghanistan followed by arming the Mujahadeen with surface to air missiles and such; and fanning flames of ethnic rivalries within the Soviet Union, like by sending publication equipment to Baltic ethnic groups.
In first 20 minutes Sean prophetically lays out the impending crisis of capitalism that drives their urgency to stamp out socialist competition. Sean died under mysterious circumstances in Belgrad where he had set up shop pointing out a PR effort in the US Congress by Ruder Finn hired by Croats and Kosovo Albanians to start a US war against Yugoslavia for their secession.
Event January 26, 1992 arranged by Connie Hogarth of WESPAC, Camera: Beth Lamont
Transcript
(edited by Dennis Riches)
Introduction
I’ve been speaking in the last year or so about developments in the Soviet Union from the perspective of a person who follows the workings of the Western intelligence agencies, something in which I was tutored while I was working at the United Nations, and was on the receiving end of quite a lot of that activity.
That is an important theme that one needs to look at: the role of the West in developments which have taken place in the Soviet Union, and it’s one that I’ve been focusing on, but of course the wider and more important issue is: how shall we understand the meaning of events in the Soviet Union in the last five, six, ten years? That’s really the critical question.
As you know, the developments, particularly the end or collapse of communist rule in the Soviet Union, and finally the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, have been presented in our media insistently and incessantly as evidence that socialism or social democracy, or what-have-you, which we’ll discuss, is unworkable. And this, of course, in tandem with the theme which has been disseminated so energetically by these same people in the last decade, that capitalism:
a) is more or less the same thing as democracy, and
b) must be seen as the core and triumphant achievement of Western civilization…
Hence the thesis that this is the end of history, that we have achieved everything that there is to achieve, that the present system of institutions in which we live in the West represents the pinnacle of human capacities, intellectually and organizationally, and is the best of all possible worlds.
That’s the thesis, or those are the twin theses which surround us and which have been, I think, creating an enormous amount of confusion and consternation because I think people sense there is something wrong with this idea, and the effort to close off all discussion about alternatives to, what I would term, our “regime” in the United States today, and possibly in Western Europe, which is a moving backward from the more enlightened and liberal capitalism, liberal democracy and capitalism, which evolved after the Second World War in Western Europe and the United States.
We are today, I think, living in an irrational and savage capitalism of the 19th-century variety, which for particular reasons, people who have power in this society either have acceded to or have energetically worked to institute.
Part 1. The Crisis in the United States
The question is whether this great wave of propaganda makes any sense, and so I think we should examine whether the idea that socialism and alternatives to raw capitalism are impossible, undesirable, and unworkable. I think we have to look at that in two ways. First of all, we have to examine our own situation in the United States, historically, and we have to also, I think, look at what has happened in the Soviet Union because what has happened in the Soviet Union is really very different from what we are told by the mass media. We have not merely witnessed a collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. We have seen something really very different, but it has been systematically misrepresented in the Western media.
There’s a great deal of misunderstanding about the kind of society that American democracy really represents, and that misunderstanding is both historical and contemporary. There is a tremendous tension which we are all aware of in our society. It is a tension between egalitarianism and inequality. It is a tension born of the evolution in the in the 16th, 17th and 18th century in England, and the transfer of a particular kind of society onto American soil through British political traditions, notwithstanding our rebellion as colonists at the end of the 18th century. And that is the particular set of institutions known as liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is a combination of parliamentary government and capitalism, and liberal democracy inevitably, therefore, contains some very serious tensions because the progressive development of parliamentary democracy has tended to give greater and greater scope to the principle of equality in human life and politics. That’s why in the course of British 19th century political development there was a progressive expansion of the franchise. And that’s why in the United States there was also an expansion of the franchise. The United States did not have the same encumbering property qualifications in the beginning, although we did have property qualifications in the 18th century in the United States, but eventually we had the full franchise extended to all adults, and we’ve been redefining adults most recently. We’ve dropped the level of political maturity or political enfranchisement to 18 years.
Capitalism, on the contrary, is a system of economic and social institutions based on the principle of inequality, and there’s a rationale for that inequality which also comes from the 18th century, but the idea, essentially, is that it makes sense from the point of view of efficiency, and indeed equity, given all the considerations that one must take into account, to have a society based on the unequal distribution of property organized around that institution, to have an economy based on private property because, in the final analysis, it is most efficient, and in the long run holds the greatest promise of continuous progress. By the way, that’s an argument that Marx made at a certain point—that at a certain stage of history a capitalist society is extremely progressive, that it gathers the technical capacities of mankind, personkind, and develops them and accumulates and accumulates until it creates something new, which we won’t talk about just now.
But historically and currently in the United States we very strongly sense this tension so that we go back and forth between periods when we have enormous pressures to give predominance to the principle of inequality, to pay attention to the rights of property, and periods when egalitarian tendencies have been very strong. For instance, as in the turn of the century during the expansive phase of American populism and during the antitrust… of the great popular movements that sought—not just popular—but that sought to contain the power of the cartels and the trusts in the United States. And today we sense that too. We passed the law in 1946 that’s called the Employment Act. By the way, it’s not called the Full Employment Act. You have to remember that legislation. And yet we realize that our adherence to the principle of full employment was tenuous even in the 25 years which followed the Second World War, and completely spurious today. Why is that? It’s because of this tremendous tension between the realities of power under capitalism and the rather fragile hold which democratic principles and institutions have on that power.
Let’s go back to the Constitution and the Philadelphia Convention. I’ve been rereading Beard and I’m very impressed by his grasp of who predominates really in this delicate balance in liberal democracy between the principles of egalitarianism, the principles of parliamentary democracy and the enormous concentration of power, which even then was inherent in the dominance of the institutions of private property. Beard’s argument essentially is that in the final analysis a small group of men, whom he refers to as one-sixth of the adult male population—the only people who ratified the Constitution, the participants in the ratifying conventions who voted positively for the Constitution—represented one-sixth of the adult male population. That is to say 8% of the adult population in today’s terms. Against our values that represents 8% of today’s population—the equivalent.
Now, what was obtained in that framing of the Constitution? What was obtained was a system of political science, a system of government which was so structured as to ensure the dominance of private property, the power of private property in any contention between the forces of democracy and the forces of private property, and the forces of inequality, if you like, so that the structure which constitutes, at the founding of this republic, which constitutes the framework within which we operate today, is one which ensures that predominance.
I know that Beard has been attacked by many people, and it’s perfectly understandable when you read Beard carefully, but it seems to me that today Beard becomes more illuminating. Why? I say I pay attention to the Constitution, to the Philadelphia Convention, to its ratification, to the numbers who ratified it and to the purposes which they saw themselves as furthering by their framing and ratification of this constitution because that is the framework within which the United States experienced the most successful and untrammeled Industrial Revolution in the history of mankind. Untrammeled. We had a straight run of industrialization which was the first to transform the condition of man in human society, by which I mean something very, very specific. And here I speak to things which were said by people like [John Maynard] Keynes, by people like [Joseph Alois] Schumpeter, but really ignored because they’re extremely uncomfortable.
The rationalization for inequality in the institution of private property, in the thinking of eighteenth century philosophers, was that property had to be shared unequally and income had to be unequal because this inequality provided incentives which would constitute a constant assurance of the drive to the expansion of production. That was the rationalization, but in the 20th century, according to the economic historians and according to people like Keynes, countries like the United States and Great Britain began to end, began to transform the historical situation within which these institutions were conceived. How? By developing such a capacity to produce that gradually more and more numbers were lifted out of anything which could be historically or comparatively called poverty so that scarcity, which dominates the reasoning of economists, was really beginning to end in many respects. And Joseph Schumpeter was able to say, for instance, in 1928, that if economic growth continued in the United States for another 50 years we would see in 1978 the end of anything that could reasonably be called poverty.
Now that didn’t quite happen. That didn’t quite happen because of the enormous influence of inequality in the distribution of this productive abundance. But what it did transform was the lives of many, many people, and it transformed everyday life and the historical condition. Look between 1870 and 1970 at how the number of hours that the average American works falls. In the period between 1945 and 1970, per capita production trebled, just in that period, and we already had a huge industrial base at that time, so I would argue [agree], with Galbraith, who—because he was right was vilified and ignored by the economist profession and studiously made little of by the mass media—that indeed America began to be transformed with the success of its enormous industrial revolution by the end of the period after 1865, when really heavy industrialization began to take place. And indeed I would argue that the reason for the Great Depression was that the United States had lost the ability to continue to absorb everything that it could produce in an adequate way, given the institutions of the time.
So what happened then was that within this framework, which is the same framework conceived by the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. To further the purposes of property and to insure against what Madison called “the leveling attacks of democracy,” we have industrialization enhance the expansion of an enormous power, which is the power that controls the machinery and the resources of that productive system. That is to say large corporations. The largest 500 corporations in the United States today, plus the largest 500 banks and the largest 50 financial corporations control more resources than the Soviet planners ever dreamed of controlling. The control of those resources, which is made invisible by the clever workings of economists, inheres in the ability to make investment decisions. Investment decisions are the key decisions in any economic system. The power to make those decisions is the power to continuously transform and to determine the terms of everyday life among human beings in any society. That power is not only invisible in our system of thought, carefully hidden by the descendants of the 18th century philosophers, but it is also totally unaccountable.
Now maybe you could say, and we did say this between 1945 and 1975:
“OK this is a contradiction of democracy. This is the inheritance from the Philadelphia Convention, the Constitution in its ratification and the dominance of this one-sixth of the male adult population in 1789, but this system is so productive that we can alleviate the resulting social and political tensions by raising the standard of living of ordinary folks.”
And that was the whole philosophy of the sophisticated American leadership in the first generation after the Second World War. That was the philosophy of the Rockefellers when they talked about the new enlightened capitalism of 20th century. Capitalism could deliver the goods and hence people would be content, despite the fact that the realities of power born at the end of the 18th century, and essentially enhanced by the enormous accumulation of power represented by industrialization and the growth of large corporations and their concentrated power in the economy. We could live with that because the United States economy was so productive.
Now, that’s our history, and the tremendous tension of our situation today as contrasted with the post-war period because one thing is very clear today: that for 20 years in the United States this system has not been working. There has been a systematic retreat from full employment, high wages, advancing standards of living, security in one’s job, and the advance of the welfare state. We have systematically been retreating from those things so that we have higher and higher official and real unemployment, which of course is about double the official unemployment—and the statisticians work very hard to hide the realities of life.
Sean Gervasi
Between 1977 and 1992, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 70% of American families have seen their after-tax income fall. 70%! In the lower ranges of the income distribution those falls are quite sharp. Purchasing power falls by twenty 20.8% for the poorest fifth, by something like 12% for the next fifth, by something like 11% for the third fifth, and by smaller amounts for those in the middle of the income distribution system. So I would say that that represents, and people are increasingly becoming aware of it, a collapse of the American standard of living. And this collapse of the American standard of living is related to a gradual economic decline which is causing the post-war system, as we have known it in the United States between 1945 and 1970, to begin to disintegrate. And I think this is the reality of what is happening so that today even according to Wall Street forecasters like the Levies, attached to Bard College up here in the county, we are facing what they call a contained depression, which may be worse than the kind of depression we saw in the 1930s because the stabilizing role of the government makes it possible not to avoid some of the awful horrors that occurred in the depression, but to diminish them to a degree which makes them almost invisible.
So we have a very tense situation. I ask you to reflect on that when we confront the enormous economic difficulties from which there follow all kinds of social problems in our society today which we face. These are connected to, and, if you like, made possible by the arrangements conceived by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. If this crisis which we have been living in for 20 years, and have become more acutely aware of in the last 10, is intractable, it is, above all, intractable because of this invisible concentrated power which exists today after industrial growth—the rise of the large corporations in the framework conceived by Madison, Hamilton and the other Federalists.
So if you want to argue today that we need to reconsider this framework, you run into very fundamental problems. You run into the problem that the Constitution is treated like an icon, that people are unaware that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is not the law of the United States, that people are unaware of the fact that the Bill of Rights, which is supposed to compensate for some of the failings of our constitutional system, has been systematically shredded by the two most recent administrations. Witness William Kunstler and his remarkable talks on what has happened to the Bill of Rights in the last ten years.
Part 2 . The Crisis in the Soviet Union
Now, let’s get to the Soviet Union, keeping in mind always that it is against this background of crisis and the intractability of crisis, and it’s rooting in the historical origins of the Constitution that we are asked, that we are invited—without anybody saying that that’s the background—that we are invited to ponder the proposition that there is no alternative to the kind of capitalism that we have, and that this capitalism is the quintessence of democracy.
Now let us look at that proposition against a second set of data, if you like, which is supposed to prove the case that there was socialism in the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union then, along with its Eastern European partners, collapsed in chaos owing to the essential unworkability of this kind of a system. Let’s look at that.
When the Reagan administration came into office we all became aware rather quickly that something new was happening. We should have known that something new was happening because, in fact, the arrival of the Reagan administration in power had been preceded by a very careful build-up which was, in part, visible in the American polity, and that was the emergence of the development and the elaboration of the power of a group which we now call the new right—people who 20 years ago, 28 years ago in 1964, after Goldwater lost the Republican National Convention. Rockefeller took command of the party that had been relegated to what every major political commentator at the time called the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. These were the people who, particularly in California, were coming out of the walls in the late 1970s, creating foundations, buying chairs of economics at universities. Look at it: the Coors, the Mises, with all of their contacts. These were the people who were building a new group, and the purpose of this group was to put a stop to the kind of systematic democratic entrenchment which they thought had been going on in the 1960s and the 1970s.
In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were three movements: (1) the movement for workers’ rights, for unionization, the expansion of unionization, particularly among city employees and for raising wages, and the tremendous industrial disruption that attended the 1960s and the early 1970s in the industrial sector, (2) the civil rights movement, which preceded that, beginning in the late 1950s, and (3) the movement against the war in Vietnam, the war in Vietnam being one of the ways in which this society managed to utilize, in a profitable fashion, its enormous productive capacity without giving it to ordinary folks, without giving its fruits to ordinary folks.
The new right was determined to do something quite new. One of the new things that it did, and Reagan really was not its spokesman because that implies a degree of activity which I think he’s incapable of. You can always program a spokesman. I don’t think he had the wheels to do that.
Reagan launched, as you know, a massive, serious, intense, ugly confrontation with the Soviet Union, ideologically. At the same time we became aware that there was a significant drive on to re-arm the United States, to throw enormous resources— ultimately it was in excess of 1.7 trillion dollars during the 1980s—to throw enormous resources into the military sector, to throw enormous resources into shifting the technology of the military sector to war in space, SDI [Space Defense Initiative], etc. All of those things were on the agenda, but many of us at the time puzzled about this. I remember asking myself, “What is it with these folks? Do these fellows really want a world war? Can they not see that this can be the outcome?”
And I remember those discussions, and I remember when many of you and I on June 12, 1982 were at the demonstration of 750,000 to 1 million people in the center of New York City, which was an expression of the alarm that people felt at this enormous aggressive policy which was coming out of the Reagan administration, which threatened to shred US-Soviet relations.
But in fact, retrospectively, we can see that there was something else behind it, that it was not just irrational madness. There was a bit of that, but there was a rationality to what was being done, and in fact, to understand that, it’s important to see that it is connected to every single major line of innovative policy that the Reagan administration developed. It was extremely well thought-out, extremely shrewd. And [it involved] the military buildup and the aggressive rhetoric towards the Soviet Union, the deliberate effort to create difficulties in the relationships between the Soviet Union and the European powers. You remember that in 1982 the United States tried to force the European powers not to accept natural gas from the Soviet Union, to deny shipments of technology to the Soviet Union which would make it possible for the Soviet Union to exploit that natural gas, to earn foreign exchange, etc. It was all part of a very complex strategy, but it was a very clear strategy.
Let me say, though, that many of us, at least I at the time, missed that. We didn’t quite comprehend what was going on, but we had in the back our mind flickers that something was wrong. There were people who were saying or hinting clearly at what was happening, and shrewd people, intelligent people who did begin to grasp what was happening.
Let me quote from one or two. Writing in 1982, Joe Fromm, who was then the editor of the United States’ US News and World Report, said,
“There was something behind,” I’m quoting him, “the shift to a harder line in foreign policy.” The US, in fact, seemed to be “waging limited economic warfare against Russia to force the Soviets to reform their political system.” That suggests… that’s a nice journalist, a reasonably liberal journalist at US News and World Report, but Joe then quoted a State Department official saying (actually, a National Security Council official), “The Soviet Union is in deep, deep economic and financial trouble. By squeezing wherever we can, our purpose is to induce the Soviets to reform their system. I think we will see results over the next several years.” That’s in 1982.
Robert Scheer wrote a book in 1982 called With Enough Shovels: Reagan and Bush and Nuclear War. I think I’ve got the title almost right. This is a very interesting book in which Scheer saw that there was something behind this enormously aggressive foreign policy, foreign and military policy, that the Reagan administration was deploying. And he saw that the United States was not simply playing nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union, as he put it, but that it was embarked on a policy designed to create such pressure for the Soviet Union as to force changes within the Soviet Union.
Now of course it had always been the case that the Cold War consisted of moves designed to affect the behavior of others. The Cold War, from the point of view of the West, had always aimed at modifying, as the State Department cookie pushers liked to put it in their delicate prose, the behavior of our antagonist. But this, I think you will see, went beyond that because, in fact, the Reagan administration embarked on a policy of many dimensions which included pressure around the world on countries with close ties to the Soviet Union. Insurgencies were initiated in Mozambique, Angola, Cambodia against Vietnam, Nicaragua, and, quite a lot, Afghanistan.
I don’t want to get into too many complicated discussions of Afghanistan, but I think anybody who reflects upon the United States’ response to the Soviet entry into Afghanistan in 1979 must realize that the United States did not want the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan, and in fact the purpose of these insurgencies around the world, which as you know, had expended billions of dollars, was to pin the Soviet Union down, and to inflict economic costs upon the Soviet Union. The purpose of the remilitarization in the West was to force the Soviet Union, at the risk of exposing itself to the pressure of escalation, to meet our resource commitments, to defend itself, or to place itself in a position to resist our pressure.
The purpose of escalating the technology of nuclear warfare, again, was to impose costs upon the Soviet Union. [This was ] the purpose of every principled measure, such as withholding advanced technology from the Soviet Union, foreign assistance programs aimed not at assisting countries on the basis of their needs, but on assisting countries on the basis of the contribution they would make to putting pressure on the Soviet Union. All of these things were part of a systematic strategy designed to create havoc in the Soviet Union.
Now I’ll say a little bit more about what the purpose of that was, but first let me point out that this is a systematic strategy consisting of a number of pieces, and that it did pose enormous economic and other costs upon the Soviet Union.
But who is Gervasi [the speaker] to say that this is so, beyond quoting Joseph Fromm? Well, let me tell you a little bit about an interesting experience I had. I had lunch one day with a friend who was passing through the United States, who had been in jail in South Africa for eight years, and had just got out. He had been engaged in planning one of the principal sabotage operations against the South African nuclear installations, and he was very happy to be out of jail. We sat at lunch and he said to me—we talked about many things, mostly about Africa which he and I had worked on together—and he said to me,
“What’s going on in the Soviet Union?” I said to him, “Well, you know, I really can’t figure this out. I can’t figure out what’s going on.” He said, “It seems to me that the Soviet Union is being destabilized.” “My goodness,” I say to myself quietly.
The thought had never passed my mind, but when my friend, Christie, said this I thought I should look into this, and I did.
The first thing I found was… I spent a little bit of time on a computer and some things came up, and I said that looks very interesting. Within a very short time I had discovered reams of material being generated at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s by organizations like the RAND Corporation. You know what the RAND Corporation is. It’s an Air Force/CIA contracting agency in Southern California, very large, very powerful, very influential in the so-called intellectual defense community, the military industrial complex, and in Washington. People go back and forth from the CIA, from the DIA to the State Department to the RAND Corporation. And what were the chaps at the RAND Corporation doing? Well, they were producing very interesting studies with titles like Economic Factors Affecting Soviet Foreign and Defense Policy: A Summary Outline, The Costs of the Soviet Empire, Sitting on Bayonets: the Soviet Defense Burden and Moscow’s Economic Dilemma: The Burden of Soviet Defense, Exploiting Fault Lines in the Soviet Empire: Economic Relations with the USSR.
Anyway, I started reading the stuff. First of all, I started collecting it and I started reading this stuff, and I found out something very interesting: that these fellows at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were clearly fashioning a plan in which we began to see the pieces of in the emerging parts of foreign and military policy, foreign and military and economic policy under the Reagan administration. And the basic reasoning of this plan—I’ll give it to you—is as follows: the Soviet Union was in a dual crisis. They knew what was going on in Soviet Union. Economic growth in the Soviet Union had begun to slow down. It had been very rapid, by the way, in the period from 1950 to the early 1970s. Between 1960 and 1984 per capita income and per capita production in the Soviet Union trebled, so it wasn’t slow. That was a 4 or 5% rate of growth, very rapid considering that we’re growing at about 1.5 which, is about, by the way, equivalent to the rate of growth on average during the decade of the 1930s in the United States.
Now, what I found out was that they also understood there was a leadership crisis in the Soviet Union. The old line of principal Soviet leaders born in the early stages of Soviet redevelopment after the Revolution, formed in the Second World War—that leadership was dying out, as we all knew. And in fact Mikhail Gorbachev, selected by Andrei Gromyko, was the first representative of a new generation of Soviet leaders, but in the late 70s and early 80s, people were dying. The major figures Andropov, Chernenko and Brezhnev, were dying, and there was a very great confusion about succession.
So the country was in a kind of crisis. The CIA calls it a dual crisis, a leadership crisis, not knowing to which new people of a new generation the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union should pass, and at the same time a beginning of faltering of economic growth, which was serious because since the Soviet Union had to always, like any country, choose between investing, competing in the arms race, and raising the standard of living of its population. The fact that economic growth fell off made that more difficult.
Now the next step in the reasoning of the RAND Corporation, gentlemen and ladies from the RAND Corporation, was that the United States and its allies could take various actions which would force the Soviet Union to increase its defense spending and its military assistance to allies and friends. They could take measures to deny the Soviet Union credits, which they did, and to deny it technology. They could also take measures which would reduce the overall volume of resources available to the Soviet Union and hold back the growth of productivity, which would exacerbate the problem, or force them to shift resources from consumers to investment. And [they knew] that all of these effects would (to quote them) “aggravate the difficulties confronting the Soviet leadership in a stagnant economy. So, a combination of these measures to impose costs on the Soviet Union could be expected to lead to falling investment and/or living standards, and such measures consequently might generate pressures within the Soviet Union for withdrawing from the world stage, and for political reform.”
So the purpose of this operation, which I will try to define more clearly in a moment, was to impose, in a variety of ways, enormous costs on the Soviet Union, or to reduce the resources available to them in such a way as to exacerbate their economic difficulties. Let me quote from Abraham Becker, one of the shrewder Rand analysts:
Thus the Reagan administration seized Soviet economic troubles as an opportunity to complicate further their resource allocation difficulties dilemma, in the hope that additional pressures would result in a reallocation of resources away from defense, or would push the economy in the directions of economic and political reform.
The purpose of this new aggressive multi-dimensional strategy was to force reform upon the Soviet Union. What that reform was to be is a later chapter. Now, it’s one thing to say that these plans exist, and I’ll talk about other plans. For instance, I managed to pull together a collection of documents from the National Endowment for Democracy, which as you know, is supposed to be a quasi-government institution. It’s not a quasi-government institution. It’s funded by Congress. It’s a government institution funded by Congress, which sees it to be its business to “promote democracy outside the United States” in the rest of the world, where by “democracy” one means essentially, and when you come down to it it’s clear now in the Soviet Union, “capitalism” and “liberal democracy,” if you like [the latter term].
Now, it’s one thing of course to talk about all this planning, to try on your own to reason that all of these things fit together, but in fact we began to get official indications and documentation, as early as the spring of 1982, that the government had signed on to this strategy, that this was not the wild thinking of a few eager folks in a few think tanks, that it was policy and that it was policy which the American public knew very little of, did not understand the purposes and consequences of, but would nonetheless be required to pay for to the tune of several trillion dollars, which did indeed help to create the situation in which we presently find ourselves at home, locked in the Philadelphia Convention.
In the spring of 1982 I had spoken to two of the participants in this little meeting. A senior National Security Council official charged with responsibility for Soviet affairs called a number of influential Washington correspondents and asked them to come to the National Security Council for a briefing. Two of them told me that they left this briefing extremely shaken. They didn’t want to say too much about it, but they gave me to understand that they thought that this was an extremely aggressive, dangerous, and highly risky strategy which the administration was describing and stating that it was about to embark upon.
Helen Thomas of UPI was one of the people who was in that meeting, and she described the results of the briefing—this briefing on the Soviet Union—in the following manner:
A senior White House official said Reagan has approved an eight-page National Security document that undertakes a campaign aimed at internal reform in the Soviet Union and the shrinkage of the Soviet empire. He affirmed that it could be called a full-court press against the Soviet Union.[vi]
A little later, just a few days later, in fact, further evidence, this time quoting official documentation, not hearsay from a briefer at the National Security Council, but quoting official documentation: Richard Halloran, the defense correspondent of The New York Times published an article in that paper on May the 30th of 1982, just a few days really after Helen Thomas sent out her UPI dispatch. Halloran quoted from the fiscal years 1984-1988 Defense Guidance, of which The Times stated that it had a copy.[vii] The Secretary’s Guidance Document recommended what Halloran called “a major escalation in the nuclear arms race.” Apart from that it indicated that a number of other measures were being taken “to impose costs on the Soviet Union.” Note the language is the language of the RAND planners. Some of the same people probably wrote the document. I quote from Halloran’s direct quote from the National Guidance document of the Secretary of Defense:
“As a peacetime complement to military strategy, the Guidance Document asserts that the United States and its allies should, in effect, declare economic and technical war on the Soviet Union.”
This is interesting. “And so I think,” it went on. They wrote,
“to put as much pressure as possible on the Soviet economy already burdened with military expenditure, they should develop weapons that are difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition, and obsolesce,” (Nice English. I’ve put sic in my article) “precious Soviet investments.”
So I think it’s safe to say, and a number of people prove it to us a little later on, that this policy was instituted. Let me just race ahead to one of the more recent proofs. David Ignatius, who is a correspondent at The Washington Post, published a very remarkable article about “spyless coups” not long ago, in October, if I’m not mistaken. Perhaps it was September. Ignatius is a correspondent with very close ties to the intelligence community, to be very polite about it. I quote from his article: “Preparing the ground…” This is immediately after the Yeltsin double event of August 1991 in which Mr. Gorbachev was seemingly threatened by a coup and in which Mr. Yeltsin did not seem to take power but did. He described the event in this way:
Preparing the ground for last month’s triumph was a network of overt operatives who, during the last ten years, have quietly been changing the rules of international politics. They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private, providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule.[viii]
Could he have written that in The Washington Post in 1982? It’s difficult, I would have thought. It might not have passed muster. Some people might have noticed, but in 1991, evidently, it was all right to say that this is what we were doing.[ix]
If you look very carefully you can find many traces by officials stating that the United States had embarked upon a strategy which, retrospectively, it is very clear, was nothing more and nothing less than a strategy to destabilize the Soviet Union. Mr. Casey’s magnificent and expansive imagination had carried covert operations beyond the narrow confines of Third World countries and aimed them at the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. If you go back and look at the history of these events in this perspective, reading some of the documents, you’ll see things very differently
Judd Clark [name indistinct, spelling uncertain], for instance, speaking at a private seminar at Georgetown University, again around 1982, said,
“We must force our principle adversary, the Soviet Union, to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings.”
Well, that’s slightly veiled language that means the same sort of thing that everybody else was saying. It wasn’t, though, until 1985, that the redoubtable and incomparable Jeane Kirkpatrick appeared on the stage with the full text of the play in hand, and she gave a speech, not surprisingly in front of the Heritage Foundation, at a conference room on Capitol Hill in which she said, “The Reagan doctrine, as I understand it, is about our relations with the Soviet Union,” and she then described every principal element of the strategy which Helen Thomas in 1982 called, repeating the NSC briefer’s statement, “a full-court press against the Soviet Union.”
If you read her speech to the Heritage Foundation, which everybody should read because it was 1985, she was saying that the United States is bent upon a strategy aimed at overthrowing the Soviet Union through internal and external pressures. She principally described the external pressure.
I want to say a little bit about the debate over the internal pressure. Again, in 1982, there was a nasty little debate between some members of Congress and the then-Secretary of State General Alexander Haig. Mr. Haig was very anxious that the United States should embark upon the program which Ronald Reagan was going to describe before the British Parliament in June 1982, at just about the time most of us were going to be in the streets of New York to protest some of the things that he was doing. And Hague said in the debate over the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, which the Congress had insisted should not spill over into efforts to meddle in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, Mr. Haig said,
“Just as the Soviet Union gives active support to Marxist-Leninist forces in the West and the [Global] South…” [ironic commentary:] (because it owns Newsweek, for instance and it manipulates the Columbia Broadcasting Company… such enormous power the Soviet Union has in the West) “…we must give vigorous support to democratic forces wherever they are located, including countries which are now communist. We should not hesitate to promote our own values, knowing that the freedom and dignity of man are the ideals that motivate the quest for social justice. A free press, free trade unions, free political parties, freedom to travel, and freedom to create are the ingredients of the democratic revolution of the future, not the status quo of a failed past.”
The founder of the Central Intelligence Agency said that propaganda is the first arrow of battle. A statement by Alexander Haig in 1982 to the Congress signals what the United States would attempt to do with the National Endowment for Democracy, that it would try to create and participate in the creation of [a false narrative of ] a failed past in the Soviet Union. And, in fact, as you know, all that went ahead.
Now, let’s look at that for a second. I know that it’s very difficult to believe this. I ask you to look at the second of the articles which I read, or to search for what I’ve written. You can read it and search for some of the documentation easily available. You will find that the mission statement of the National Endowment for Democracy, which functions as a kind of consortium bringing many of the pressures of the US government to bear inside the Soviet Union.
Destabilization requires external pressure and a manipulation of the internal situation to move political developments in the direction you desire. That’s what targeting a country for destabilization involves. We deprive Cuba of sugar, of medicines etc. and that creates internal pressure, and utilizing the internal pressure, you insert yourself, create groups, diffuse ideas which are inconsistent with those prevailing and suitable to power, and you begin to work on that discontent. If the discontent deepens and spreads, you get better and better odds, and because the Soviet Union was already in a kind of crisis, which, as Abraham Becker said,
“the United States then systematically sought to intensify and exacerbate.”
The National Endowment for Democracy and literally dozens and dozens of pseudo-private foundations, which I’ll talk about in a second, went into the Soviet Union under the new umbrella of glasnost, created academic presses, created newspapers, created radio stations, and began to mobilize and to work upon the natural dissent and discontent that existed in the Soviet Union, not only because of the historical past but also because of the difficulties of the present as exacerbated by the United States and its Western partners.
If you look at how much money… I’ll just give you an idea of some of the projects that were involved, and this is just one agency. You have to recognize that if this was going on in the National Endowment for Democracy that there were many, many other channels of finance and influence into the Soviet Union that were working on this.
For instance, in 1984 the NED gave $50,000 to a book exhibit in the Soviet Union: America through American Eyes. At the book fair in 1985 (I mean I’m just selecting [a few]): $70,000 via the Free Trade Union Institute, which is part of the National Endowment, to Soviet Labor Review for research in publications on Soviet trade union and worker rights.
In 1986, $84,000 to Freedom House to expand the operations of two Russian language journals published in the US and distributed in the higher levels of the Soviet bureaucracy and intelligentsia, already an arresting description. Imagine the Soviet Union publishing two English-language journals in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and having them distributed and eagerly read in the highest levels of the United States bureaucracy and intelligentsia. I don’t think that would have stuck very well in the United States.
In 1987, Freedom House, for the Athenaeum Press, rushed $55,000 for a Russian-language publication house in Paris to publish unofficial research conducted in the USSR by established scholars writing under pseudonyms. Now what does that mean? If you get down to 1989, we’re talking already in the $200,000 category.
For instance, the Center for Democracy, which is related to the National Endowment for Democracy, began to create a center for assistance to independent and nationalist groups, including the Crimean Tatar movement for human and national rights. In other words, they began to finance ethnic and nationalist separatism, began to finance separate trade unions, began to finance their own academics etc., except this is open, but it’s very large-scale, very large-scale.
I’ve done a little calculation and I can tell you that very large amounts of money were being spent, probably on the order of, by all the Western allies, minimum, inside the Soviet Union in the period from the mid to the late 1980s, one hundred million dollars a year—a hundred million dollars a year to finance organizations which might begin like WESPAC but would then grow, develop, have outreach, which would become extraordinary with that kind of funding, and did finally change things.
If you look at perestroika in the Soviet Union, [we know it started when] Mr. Gorbachev became the Soviet leader. This is the background to the two stages in which we must understand perestroika. In the first stage it was clear that the Soviet leadership was desperate to find a way to renew socialism, that Mr. Gorbachev was bent upon the reformation of the notion of socialism, and that he had widespread support inside the Soviet Union.
There were genuine economic improvements which took place between 1986 and, sort of, let’s say, the end of 1988, in the Soviet Union, as a result of those efforts, but the principal question we have to ask ourselves, since today we confront a fragmented, or, if you like, disassembled Soviet Union, the supremacy of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and Mr. Yeltsin—who represents an extremely right-wing constituency at the present moment—and the supremacy of capitalism. And a capitalist society is now being created in the Soviet Union, ending Mr. Gorbachev’s experiment… the crucial question to ask ourselves is a very simple one: how is it that between 1985 and 1990 a movement which began as an attempt to transform and renew socialism in the Soviet Union was supplanted by a right-wing movement aiming at the creation of a capitalist society in the Soviet Union? That is the key question. That is the key question because that’s what’s happened, and it’s strange.
That’s why many of us were puzzled about the contradictory evidence coming out of the Khrushchev [sic? Brezhnev?] era. It was very difficult to understand. At first, it seemed very positive, and then from the end of 1988, the fall of 1988, it became increasingly clear that things were going to pieces, that Mr. Gorbachev was either not able to control the forces which he had unleashed or that indeed he was bent upon creating, as I heard on the French radio in 1988 for the first time stated very clearly—it arrested my attention: the purpose, said Mr. [name indistinct], on the radio in his not-bad French, was to create a regulated market economy. That was the purpose of perestroika, not when it began, but somehow something had happened.
In fact there’s a lot of very interesting information out there now on the whole process. There was clearly a large dissatisfied set of strata in the Soviet intelligentsia. What has happened in the Soviet Union is more complex than the collapse through its own internal contradictions of the system of socialism in the Soviet Union. I really don’t want to talk very much about whether the Soviet Union was a socialist society. There are people who say it was and people who say it wasn’t. It’s a long discussion between Trotsky and Stalin etc., but for my part I would say this: that the Soviet Union began as a genuine attempt to establish socialism. There were always in the Soviet Union people genuinely seeking to further socialism, and people who didn’t give a damn. On balance, the thing we have to ask ourselves is whether the existence of the Soviet Union, as an apparently perceived socialist society, was a positive thing in the world equation at this particular time of history. I, on balance, having spent years in the United Nations, seeing that under the attacks of the Western countries, which in many cases were very ugly, most of the Third World countries which emerged in the late 1950s and 60s and early 70s were really only barely saved by the few sources of support which they got in the socialist world. And when the Soviet Union went down, they went down too; [for example] Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua.
So in many respects I would have thought that the Soviet Union, for all its defects, stood as a positive development in history, with all of the horrors that took place. The United States has had its horrors.
The question is this: did the Soviet Union collapse because socialism is unworkable and central planning doesn’t work? No, it didn’t.
There was a crisis in the Soviet Union. I would argue that in the absence of the kind of pressure [that was applied], it’s very difficult to weigh the balance.
How important were the internal forces?
How important were the difficulties experienced internally, and how important was the external pressure and the externally intervening force?
How important that balance was is very difficult to get. We have to read through all a lot of intelligence to understand that, to begin to get a grasp of things, but that’s our duty as people who are living history, or who seek to understand history.
We have to try to do that, and my basic conclusion still at this moment is this: the Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out, extremely costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society struggling through great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the kind that it was. It would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think, therefore, that Western intervention made a crucial difference in this situation. That’s a judgment.
Conclusion
All right. Now, there is a question irrespective of that: what does it mean that the Soviet Union now has disappeared as a result of the kind of process that I’m talking about, a combination of internal difficulties and external pressure and intervention? Does it mean that socialism doesn’t work? Does it mean that [there is no alternative to] the kind of capitalism that we live in today, which I think increasingly of as a return to irrational and savage 19th century capitalism? If you walk through the Bronx and Brooklyn and Harlem, how can you not conclude that we are living in an irrational and savage capitalism in which the leveling attacks of democracy have been dealt with, in which the possibility of remedying that situation by the constitutional means which exist in the normal political channels of our government are very small, that electoral changes, in other words, are not going to be very significant, until there’s a mass mobilization of American people to make something happen.
If this is so, then the fact that what has happened in the Soviet Union has happened as it happened has no bearing whatsoever on our problems, and we should not be confused or pushed into consternation by it. Why? Primarily, for a very simple reason: The Soviet Union was conceived at a time when, in Marxist terms, it was not ready. The Soviet Union did not have the material base of abundance which would make it possible to create a society at once egalitarian and democratic because the struggle to create that base would require a degree of repression and authoritarianism, particularly heightened by external intervention and attack, which inevitably would distort the nature of socialism.
I sympathize with Isaac [name indistinct], but I think it’s too simple when he says socialism in a backward country is backwards socialism. But the critical fact for us is this: the Soviet Union was a society conceived as a socialist society prior to the creation of the economic base which would permit the creation of a socialist society with ease. We live in a society whose capacity to produce, whose potential abundance is so great that the inability to make use of it is literally tearing this society apart.
We live in a society which is ready, and when I say that, I want to go back to the terms of the discussion on the constitutional conventions. Well, why can’t we have economic democracy? What does economic democracy mean? Economic democracy inevitably would mean a number of these things: the accountability of the enormous concentrated power which exists in our society today to public democratic institutions. The planned rational use of resources at the public level, with democratic participation in the same manner that that planned rational use is conceived within the framework of the corporations, where the exercise of those decisions is not accountable. So it seems to me that in our day, when our society is riven by its contradictions, unable to use its abundance, unable to use its productive capacity in a rational, humane and democratic manner, that what is on the agenda today is the democratization of economic power, the rendering accountable of the enormous economic potential and power that exists in our society to make this a better and decent and democratic world.
Voilà.
End of lecture
Question Period
Well, dear friends, first of all, we have to have this serious debate because the real terms of the debate are rendered invisible by the absurd rhetoric and the absurd way in which we speak about ourselves, and by the mass media whose power and determination is to keep the real terms of the debate invisible. The real terms of the debate are: why is this society collapsing? Why does this economic machine not work? Who is responsible? If the people who are responsible are not going to do something about it, let them get the hell out.
Moderator: I know there have got to be lots of questions. We’ll allot a certain amount of time. We’ll try to recognize everyone.
Question: You’ve analyzed this quite well, but what does one do to change [the situation]?
Well, I think part of the problem… I don’t mean to be repetitious… but I think that people are clearly immobilized and confused at the moment. I think one of the reasons that people are immobilized and confused is that the proper debate is not out there. It’s not possible for people to express what they know from their experience to be true, to assert its truth. The public debate rejects our experience and understanding because the public debate is designed to contain us, to make us accept and even to believe in the superiority of this situation. I think people know what needs to be done out there. In a sense the quintessential problem confronting our country is the enormous concentrated power to shape people’s lives, to define discourse, as [name indistinct] pointed out, which is accountable to no one. The democratization of that power means, I think, certainly radical changes in the structure of our society, but ones for which in many respects people are ready and which indeed are supported by most of the values that this society has lived by historically and attests to.
It seems to me it’s really quite simple. We don’t have democracy in the sense in which we normally understand ourselves to have democracy in which people often speak of us as having. We don’t have that. Why do we not have it? Because of this eternal and now much more intensive, much more intense tension that has existed from the beginning between property and democracy, between popular majorities as the Federalists called them, disdainingly, and the rights of property. This now has become an enormous incubus on American society. We have enormous concentrated power for which nobody is accountable, and this is not acceptable. Roger and Me [the documentary film] is a reflection of a sensitivity that says, “We’ve got to talk about this, Roger. You’re responsible for this.” So I really think by not knowing these things, not changing the discourse of our lives, and the discourse in the public arena, coming to agreements amongst one another by hard work, by hard discussion, how can we know it’s true?
And by the way, I don’t think this can be done in the absence of action. That is to say, in a haltingly naive phase of my recent existence, I tried to convince some people in the Congress that we were headed into a really horrible situation, and they didn’t want to know. They didn’t. They don’t want to believe what is uncomfortable for them to believe, so my decision was that you have to go into the trenches, that you have to work on projects that are going to materialize these ideas, that you have to work against plant closings, that you have to work for measures that alleviate the social burdens that exist in a city like New York, that you have to work for things while articulating these ideas because it seems to me it’s only in the combination of action and debate of ideas that people will begin to understand the relevance and the necessity of a new discussion. You can’t have in that sense—I cede your point—you can’t have a drawing-room discussion which will prevail.
Certainly the people in the National Endowment for Democracy believe that. They don’t just sit back and spend millions of dollars on printing books and making radio tapes and television shows. No. They created new political institutions. They then created new political parties, financing people like Arkady Murashev, the Inter-Regional Group in the Soviet Parliament, until recently. It doesn’t exist anymore. The Inter-Regional Group was the group of pseudo-democrats, pro-capitalists, speaking, in many respects for the interests represented in the agglomeration of black market operations in the Soviet Union. Arkady Murashev was systematically cosseted, financed and trained by an organization in Washington very closely tied to certain agencies whose names we don’t want to pronounce in the present circumstances. Murashev was a liaison man between Washington and Yeltsin. The National Endowment for Democracy gave $40,000 just for the faxes, and the printing machines and the telephones in the Initiatives Foundation, which was the organization that the Inter-Regional Group used to put out its messages, get itself organized, make contacts, etc. The United States was financing that operation. Arkady Murashev is now the chief of police of the city of Moscow.
This is heavy stuff. I mean, really, it’s incredibly dramatic, but we mustn’t go on in this vein because there are questions to be answered.
Question: Does every country have to go through this period of savage capitalism to become socialist?
No. I don’t believe that. No.
Question: Bush seemed to like Gorbachev. Was Gorbachev foolish? Was he taken for a ride?
These are the great mysteries. There are, as you know, there are a different views. There are different theories about that. One of them is that Gorbachev was a mole, that Gorbachev was a deep-cover or Western intelligence agent. I believe that’s exaggerated. I believe that’s off the wall, but I do believe that there’s an element here that’s important to understand.
There was in the Soviet Union, as a result of the very success of the industrialization of the Soviet Union, an enormous alienated set of strata amongst the educated population because the Soviet elite absorbed people at a very small rate. It didn’t reach out to large numbers of people. They were educating enormous numbers of people, professional scientific workers, managers, and these people were mostly urban people. They were the fruit, in many respects, of industrialization. At the same time, being urban people, they found themselves trapped in the most difficult conditions in the Soviet Union because in its industrialization the Soviet Union really ignored a lot of problems. Theyfound themselves, in many respects, in a similar situation as the United States, where the decay of urban areas, the lack of equipment, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of adequate facilities for health or education etc. became a real problem. They didn’t have the resources to industrialize, to raise the standard of living in the really poor republics of the Soviet Union, and to deal with the urban problem, as we call it in the United States.
So these people were… imagine… all educated people earning this education and looking upon themselves as deserving of the advantages and prerogatives of their Western counterparts, living in the equivalent of New York City, but earning the wages of a skilled worker. They didn’t like it. They felt shut out. They were angry, and it’s those people that the neoliberals were recruiting, not just the American neoliberals but their own neoliberals. There were neoliberals in the Soviet Union. There were reactionary people in the Soviet Union this [name indistinct] operation out in Siberia, the so-called sociological think tank. There are people who, I don’t know why… Perhaps when you become very isolated from the world and separated from reality you conjure up the most amazing dreams in your mind. I think Marx called it idealism. In any case, these people were very much Western idealists and they came, frankly, into Moscow and Leningrad fervent believers in the need to embrace Western institutions because of their frustration, because of their understanding of their own past. Whether it was distorted or not, it’s not for me to say. It’s because of the way they viewed and felt about their past, because of their own personal frustration, because of the problems which were very real that they experienced by the Soviet leadership, by the Soviet economy and society. They were alienated, and that’s where there was recruitment. When economic growth slowed down it made it much worse, and it spread the basis of recruitment very effectively.
There is a collection of essays which I think is quite remarkable and valuable, which gives you some background about the incredible contradictions in the Soviet Union, and how the Soviet Union, in fact, more than a decade and even two decades ago, was in fact being prepared for what is happening. It was ripening for some big bull shaking the tree, which is eventually what happened. That’s the collection that The Monthly Review has published recently, After the Fall, something like that. After the Fall of the Soviet Union is really a very valuable collection of essays on the Soviet Union, or whatever it is after communism. Very useful stuff.
Question: Could you talk about Third World countries?
That’s a really hard question. I’ve worked in Third World countries which were socialist countries and which were under attack. I worked in Mozambique in the beginning of the 1980s when the South African-Western-CIA operations were really beginning to [take a toll], and people were dying by the tens of thousands because the roads had been cut, and the supplies had been cut, and the health stations blown up, and I think that it was very hard for them to survive that. Socialism proved very frail in Mozambique, even though the leaders of the revolution had been born in armed struggle, formed by armed struggle, were dedicated to armed struggle, but the society just couldn’t withstand that kind of pressure.
In some ways I think that’s true of the Soviet Union. There was a war in the shadows waged against the Soviet Union on a massive scale, and what these events prove is the Soviet Union was insufficiently strong to stand up to those pressures, and I think this is all the more true in the Third World. I don’t know, but I don’t want to say that I know the answer, whether they should try to make that jump or not. I think that will depend on what happens in the Western world. I don’t see any reason why the jump couldn’t be made if the West, Western Europe and the United States, in particular North America saw [supported] significant transformation of the present system of power. Then it’s not a problem, but with this massive opposition coming from the West, it’s very difficult to survive.
Question (apparently edited from video recording): __________________
These same people today, and we’re talking about within a few months, within the end of the year there being not 50,000 but between six and eight million unemployed people in Russia, 130 million people, labor force of 65 or 70 million, and I saw this same thing happening in East Germany.
I was very briefly in Humboldt University in 1989 or 1990, I can’t remember which now. The whole situation was in upheaval, and I saw many intellectuals genuinely enraged by the arrogance of the Honecker regime, and at the same time, unfortunately, completely unaware of what would happen if that regime went down, taking everything, “really existing socialism,” with it. And my question would be, OK, it’s a question. You know the old version of this question used to be what about Stalin, but it’s a little different now.
My problem is this: let’s look at it in human terms, OK? Just forget ideology. What has happened as a result of the materialization of the dreams of the so-called reformers and democrats in the Soviet Union? What has happened is what has happened in Poland, and worse: that the standard of living of ordinary people is going to collapse, that old people will be destitute, that children will be without health care, that the transportation system is collapsing, that there will be no food distribution by spring, that people will starve, that there is continuous ethnic conflict. Now, the Soviet system of prices and of raw material supplies were such that enormous quantities… that the supply system worked in a way which led to the waste of vast quantities of raw materials and semi-finished products. I mean vast quantities.
So the idea was to go in to work at the enterprise level to create incentives to create better accounting, a system of prices which would reflect the real value of these raw materials and not the fact that they could be replaced anytime you wanted because all you have to do is put an order in. It didn’t matter what you did with them. It [the reform] was focused on the enterprise, on profit incentives, and this loosening of the tight bonds on the enterprise, really did lead to a recrudescence of output. For instance, between 1986 and 88 there was a 17% increase in housing production in the Soviet Union. There was a 30% increase in overall production. The production, the economy, accelerated in the period 1986-88. In those three years the economy accelerated, but as I said, there were two stages of perestroika. There was a stage of perestroika where the effects were quite beneficial, where it was clear that perestroika and glasnost were aiming to energize and develop andfree and move forward the Soviet Union.
As a friend of mine said, the only way to ensure the social development of the Soviet Union is to undertake these reforms, but there was another stage, a second stage beginning in late 1988 to, obviously, the end of 1991, where the forces that were unleashed utilized the reform program to destroy socialism, clearly to destroy socialism, and Mr. Gorbachev was either helpless before that or a willing apprentice of that process. I could not pretend to pronounce which of those was the case. It’s very difficult to say.
On the other hand, I really don’t know how anybody in his right mind could have conceived of the notion that the way forward for the Soviet Union—and this was the quintessential statement of perestroika by the principle Soviet leaders in the mid-1980s—the way for the Soviet Union was to integrate the Soviet Union into the world economy. I mean to an economist with any degree of sophistication and critical approach, that is sheer unadulterated madness. It’s like saying that the North American free trade agreement will lead to real economic development in Mexico. It’s absurd. I mean we know what those processes are. How can a much weaker, less industrialized Soviet Union hope to stand up against the economic forces arrayed against it and capable of penetrating it, once it declares its intention to integrate itself into the world economy? When I heard that, I said, “It’s all over, boys. These people don’t know that they’re doing,” and indeed, listening to Soviet economists as I did when I was still teaching in Paris, and meeting with some of these people, until 1989, I got the impression of two things: they had not the least actual understanding of what was going on in the West, and that their theoretical conceptions were taken out of a handbook by Voltaire making fun of the French aristocracy.
Transcript produced by Youtube “auto-caption” speech recognition software, corrected and edited by blog author, Dennis Riches.
Notes
[i] Davis Guggenheim (Director), Al Gore (Writer), “An Inconvenient Truth,” Paramount Classics, 2006.
[ii] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), 267-268. “What is really needed is proper planning of available resources globally, plus a drive, through public investment, to develop new technologies that could work… and, of course, a shift out of fossil fuels into renewables. Also, it is not just a problem of carbon and other gas emissions, but of cleaning up the environment, which is already damaged. All these tasks require public control and ownership of the energy and transport industries and public investment in the environment for the public good.”
The reference appears to be to this article. The dates 1984-1988 may appear to be an error because the report referred to was written in 1982. However, the Defense Guidelines were focused on plans for the future, fiscal years of 1984-1988.
[ix] As we know from the perspective of 2017, the normalization of such interventions continued shamelessly, going from a bad habit to a deranged addiction. The political establishment in America now resorts to economic warfare, violence and military intervention as the solutions for every problem in international relations.
All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.
This confidential Pfizer Report provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months). The data from mid-December 2020 to the end of February 2021 unequivocally confirms “Manslaughter”. Based on the evidence, Pfizer had the responsibility to immediately cancel and withdraw the “vaccine”.
Among those attending this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos are Chrystia Freeland, (Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and avid supporter of the Ukrainian State) Ursula von der Leyen and of course the founder of the WEF Klaus Schwab who have in common that their fathers or grandfathers were leading Nazis.
There is considerable hypocrisy in the US/European point of view as the US and NATO have been invading and regime changing governments in a number of countries since 9/11, including that of Ukraine in 2014.
German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock is nursing a fantasy. She believes one day Vladimir Putin will be hauled into The Hague and tried for war crimes. Her dream is to punish Putin for fumigating Nazis in Ukraine.
This is an extraordinary exhibition, the significance of which can hardly be overstated. One can perceive these ceramics fashioned by the hands of slaves, as the material incarnation of human freedom: on one hand, they are the work of men in bondage and yet they stand witness to an inwardness, a human core that cannot be enslaved.
The self-appointed Davos “elites” are afraid. So afraid. At this week’s World Economic Forum meetings, mastermind Klaus Schwab – displaying his trademark Bond villain act – carped over and over again about a categorical imperative: we need “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”.
Canadian Academics for Covid Ethics (CA4CE) is a group of researchers and scholars from fields spanning the natural and social sciences and humanities. We are greatly concerned about the mismanagement of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic response in Canada and around the world. We are publicly funded experts trained in thinking through problems, integrating knowledge, and sharing our findings in written and spoken form. Therefore, it is our duty to raise these concerns.
Facebook willingly and enthusiastically participated in a cruel, dishonest, manipulative scheme that ended up with millions affected by Covid vaccines. Was it done “for the good of humanity”? Was it an honest mistake? It was NOT an honest mistake.
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected.
In the October 2022 version of the FAA Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners, the FAA quietly widened the EKG parameters beyond the normal range (from a PR max of .2 to unlimited). And they didn’t widen the range by a little. They widened it by a lot. It was done after the vaccine rollout.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: Video: Pfizer’s “Secret” Report on the COVID Vaccine. Beyond Manslaughter. The Evidence Is Overwhelming. The Vaccine Should be Immediately Withdrawn Worldwide
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Among those attending this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos are Chrystia Freeland, (Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and avid supporter of the Ukrainian State) Ursula von der Leyen and of course the founder of the WEF Klaus Schwab who have in common that their fathers or grandfathers were leading Nazis.
The basis of Nazism and fascism is corporatism – that democracy-bypassing, unholy alliance between right wing big business and left wing socialism, both sustained by and exploiting the totalitarian State. The biggest parade of that combination today is the “World Economic Forum” and its annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. How politicised this “economic” forum has become can be seen in the above image. And how disreputable in other ways is reported here:.
The “Stakeholder Capitalism” which Schwab promotes is of course classic corporatism which Schwab sees as a positive aspect of “the Chinese model”. He describes China as
“a very attractive model for quite a number of countries” because like all corporatist fascists Schwab wants to enforce “Order” on the world:
“If no one power can enforce order, our world will suffer from a ‘global order deficit.‘
Dictators and imperialists always seek “Order” (their own) while democrats seek international competition, a myriad forms of freedom and development daily challenging economic and political power with individuals and countries seeking advancement as an example for others. Only through competition between alternatives can truth be revealed and prosperity promoted.
But the Nazi and fascist traditions persist, nurtured by the European Union, founded as it was by leading Nazis and Fascists and latterly by NATO in which, post 1945, many leading roles are filled by “former” Nazis. Werner von Braun became the Head of NASA, Kurt Waldheim became the Secretary General of the UN, Walter Hallstein became the first President of the European Union (EEC), Adolf Heusinger became NATO chief of Staff, Hans Globke became State Secretary under Adenauer – to mention but a few. (see my book And into the Firehttps://www.amazon.com/and-into-the-fire-ebook/dp/b00e68o9sg)
But what of the trio of Nazis children/grandchildren who are attending this year’s WEF meeting in Davos?
Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister sits on WEF’s board of trustees and is a fanatical Ukrainian apologist identifying with extreme Ukrainian Nationalists. Her grandfather was a Jew hating Nazi and editor of the fascist Polish newspaper Krakivski Visti which operated under the notorious rule of Hans Frank (executed after the war). Expropriated from a Jewish owner under Nazi law, Krakivski Visti published an editorial on 6th November 1941 which said:
“There is not a single Jew left in Kiev today, while there were 350,000 under the Bolsheviks, the Jews “got their comeuppance.”(referring to the mass shooting of Kiev’s Jewish population at Babi Yar. In just two days, Sept. 29-30, 1941, a total of 33,771 people were murdered.)
No wonder Freeland uncritically supports the politically ugly State of Ukraine today.
Klaus Schwab the Dr Strangelove figure who dresses in quasi masonic regalia and boasts of controlling governments through his “graduates” – ie attendees at his World Economic Forum conferences. A world hegemonist promoting corporatist power, transhumanism, technocratic elites, the end of private property and the end of nations.
No wonder – since his father Eugen Schwab headed the Nazi supporting Swiss engineering firm Escher Wyss which used slave labour (it maintained a small special camp for forced labourers on the factory premises) and helped to produce heavy water for the Nazis nuclear programme in Norsk Hydro’s plant in Norway. Despite British and Norwegian resistance raids on the plant (depicted in the film The Heroes of Telemark!) Escher Wyss’s technology came close to providing Hitler with a war winning nuclear bomb. Escher Wyss was praised personally by Adolf Hitler and was designated a “National Socialist Model Company”.
Schwab became a director of the merged Sulzer Escher Wyss in the mid 1960s when the firm was involved with the supply of nuclear technology for the development of South Africa’s nuclear weapon.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission has a slightly less pernicious connection to the Nazi period (and ironically Ukraine). Her grandfather Carl Albrecht a Bremen Cotton trader who spoke Russian, worked for the Nazi Ministry of Foreign Affairs and arranged the economic aspects of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, her grandfather was important for the Foreign Ministry. Carl Albrecht was mainly active in Ukrainian matters from 1941 to 1943 – at the height of Nazi and Ukrainian Nationalists atrocities in Ukraine.
RE-SETTING A DISASTER
Addressing his WEF Schwab boasts:
“Let’s also be clear: The future is not just happening. The future is built by us – a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state of the world, but two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities, that we serve not only our self-interest, but we serve the community. That’s what we call ‘stakeholder responsibility’. And second, that we collaborate. This is the reason why you find many opportunities here during the meeting to engage in very action- and impact-oriented initiatives to make progress related to specific issues on the global agenda.”
The point about the “global agenda” is that its proponents are unconstrained by public discussion and election to parliament or the messy business of offering a manifesto to the peoples of nations. A few people organise and summarise the discussions and expect their “graduates” to install their conclusions in Government programmes. Schwab does not even bother with the UN’s legislative dictates to Government. His people work inside those governments and inside the large corporations which lobby them.
That is corporatism. That explains the mess the world is in. Schwab’s “Great Re-set” is no more than perpetuating the power structures which brought about the chaos, the debt crisis, the pandemic and its COVID dictatorship and excess deaths, the powerlessness of parliaments and the road to world war.
In other words it is not a world solution but re-setting a world disaster.
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And Into The Fire
Fascist elements in post war Europe and the development of the European Union
By Rodney Atkinson
With contributions from William Dorich and Edward Spalton
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In spite of an overwhelming flood of disinformation coming from the Western mainstream media and governments, there continue to be obviously widely divergent views on the current war between Ukraine and Russia. The official and media supported narrative is that Moscow attacked its neighbor in violation of “rule based” principles of international relations, whereby an attack on any nation by a neighbor with the intent to seize territory is always and unambiguously wrong. That line of thinking, summed up in the media by the endlessly repeated phrase “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression” has provided justification for the US/NATO intervention to support the Volodymyr Zelensky government’s effort to fight back against the Russians. It has also fed into the line that Ukraine and its supporters are standing up for “freedom,” “democracy” and even “good against evil.”
Flipping the argument to the Russian point of view, the Kremlin has argued that it has repeatedly sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on two fundamental issues that it 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.
Since that agreement however, Ukrainian militias and other armed elements have been using artillery to shell the Donbas, killing an estimated 15,000 mostly Russian residents. Second, Russia has balked at plans for NATO to offer membership to Ukraine, which would place a possibly superior hostile military alliance at its doorstep.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has 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. 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.
There is considerable hypocrisy in the US/European point of view as the US and NATO have been invading and regime changing governments in a number of countries since 9/11, including that of Ukraine in 2014. Some critics of the fighting consider the Russian demands to be legitimate in that Putin has laid down very clear markers and is genuinely protective of his country’s security, though one might agree that it is a step too far to embrace any armed attack by one country on another unless there is a clear and imminent threat. But in this case, the escalating involvement of the US and NATO in the fighting is an extremely dangerous development because it could easily escalate the conflict and turn it into what might become a devastating nuclear exchange. One would like to see a truce initiated to stop the fighting right now 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 surrender all occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. In other words, he must surrender.
Concerns that the fighting in Ukraine might somehow involve more players and could become regional and even grow beyond that point seem to be borne out by the content of a New York Times article that appeared recently. It is entitled U.S. Scrambles to Stop Iran From Providing Drones for Russia and subtitled “As the war in Ukraine grinds on, some officials have become convinced that Iran and Russia are building a new alliance of convenience.” Now bear in mind that anything appearing in a major American news outlet is likely to be a placement or leak by the US government itself. The Times sources the report to “…interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials [who] have described an expanding US program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned ‘kamikaze’ aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.”
All of that means that the sources of the information are unnamed and should be consider anonymous and therefore not verifiable, but the article is intriguing nevertheless. Its lead paragraph states “The Biden administration has embarked on a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.”
So, it would appear that the proxy war against Russia has now entered the Middle East, more specifically Iran, where the United States and Israel have long engaged in assassinations of scientists and technicians as well as sabotage of facilities and introduction of cyberattack “worms” (Stuxnet) into computer operating systems at research facilities. Indeed, the article states that Israel and the US have been engaging in discussions regarding exactly how to proceed in targeting the Iranian drone production. On December 22nd, a secure video meeting took place between Israel’s top national security, military and intelligence officials and Jake Sullivan, the Biden Administration’s national security adviser. The participants “discussed Iran’s growing military relationship with Russia, including the transfer of weapons the Kremlin is deploying against Ukraine, targeting its civilian infrastructure and Russia’s provision of military technology to Iran in return.”
There certainly is a large measure of hypocrisy clearly evident in Washington’s efforts to stop Iran’s sale of weapons to Russia while the US is simultaneously giving many billions of dollars-worth of weapons to Ukraine. Initial US efforts to reduce the alleged impact of the drones on the battlefield have up until now focused on blocking the sale or distribution of the non-Iranian produced technology that goes into the construction of the drones. The US military has, as well, provided Ukraine with intelligence that would enable counter-strikes on the Russian launch sites. But these efforts have only been partially successful as the electronic components being used are widely available or can be adapted employing “dual use” components if one source of supply is cut off. Also, those crafty Russians have apparently learned to change launch sites frequently as the drones and the trucks they are mounted on are very mobile.
But the Times article raises more questions than it answers. For example, it appears that the Iranians have sold to the Russians something like 1,700 drones and as of mid-December an estimated 300 of them have been used, hardly a game changer in the type of fighting taking place in Ukraine, particularly as their use in a so-called kamikaze role means that they strike their target detonating an explosive attached to the drone. That means they are destroyed in one use. And there have also been reports of supply chain problems, so it is not clear how many of the drones have actually been delivered. And the Russians certainly have their own drone factories as part of their highly sophisticated arms industry, so it is not like they were desperate for assistance from Iran in spite of claims to that effect in the US media.
To be sure, Iran has an active drone program and Iranian drones have been used in attacks directed against US military bases in Syria as well as against Saudi Arabian refineries. The “Shahed” drones are cheap and simple but effective and it is believed that Iran can mass produce them, if necessary, as long as it can continue to obtain the necessary components. It might be said that they constitute a “poor man’s” choice of weapon to use against much more powerful and sophisticated enemies like the United States or Israel.
Be that as it may, there is something that makes no sense about the Biden Administration’s sudden desire to take on Iran in a more active way, with Israel as a partner, using the Ukraine war and Russia as an excuse.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have walked away from renewing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear monitoring agreement with Iran even though Tehran was prepared to make concessions and it is in the US national security interest to have such an agreement in place. Newly reinstalled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already addressed the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and called for a “close alignment” with Washington to work aggressively against Iran. A series of meetings between Israeli and US intelligence and national security personnel are now scheduled to be held in January. And, of course, the Biden State Department and National Security agencies are full of advocates for a hard line vis-à-vis Iran, Russia and now even China. Most of them are also outspoken Zionists, many with close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu, which makes them partial to Israeli interests.
Iran, which does not actually threaten either the US or any identifiable strategic interests of Washington, is already on the receiving end of virtually every sanction imaginable put in place over more than forty years by successive American presidents. And now, because Iran is friendly with Russia and supplying that country with weapons that are surely welcome but unlikely to change the course of the war, the US is again preparing to make and take on yet another enemy, possibly with Israeli clandestine or even open help. One wonders nevertheless how much of the posturing by the White House is real and how much of it is fake. Since the United States is now approaching a $1 trillion defense budget for 2023, somebody has to figure out a way to both justify the expenditure while also making all that money politically useful by telling the public that the spending is making Americans “safe.” And what could be better than using all those shiny new weapons on a few “enemies” here and there, guaranteeing that the defense contractors will get even richer and will kick back even more to the very politicians who are the source of the largesse. Could it all be as simple as that?
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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Early in 2021 the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology accepted an undisclosed amount of money from the US government (HHS WH) as part of the COVID-19 Community Corps Program. From that point forward, ACOG broke with traditional practice on experimental and and novel therapies being contraindicated, and with federal dollars in hand, moved to a wholesale endorsement of COVID-19 vaccination with no assurances on short or long-term safety. Throughout the campaign, enthusiasm for vaccination was tepid among gravid women with <20% at any time having accepted a vaccine. However, the sharpest decline in rates of uptake occurred in the gravid and by summer of 2022, fewer than 2% were getting vaccinated.
There were no large scale randomized, placebo-controlled double blind clinical trials demonstrating safety in pregnant women. The non-randomized literature was prone to financial conflict-of-interest bias since the doctors and editors were likely affiliated with ACOG, and influenced by the government money and aspiration to promote mass vaccination. Thus, as a clinical scientist, my concern is only the neutral papers on safety were being written and published. A paper by Dick et al, caught my attention by reporting a nearly fourfold post-partum hemorrhage rate among those triple compared to double vaccinated. One could imagine how large the magnitude would have been compared to unvaccinated where hemostasis is not impaired.
Dick A, Rosenbloom JI, Karavani G, Gutman-Ido E, Lessans N, Chill HH. Safety of third SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (booster dose) during pregnancy. Am J Obstet Gynecol MFM. 2022 Jul;4(4):100637. doi: 10.1016/j.ajogmf.2022.100637. Epub 2022 Apr 7. PMID: 35398583; PMCID: PMC8988438.
In 2021, McCullough and Stricker published that because of the known dangerous mechanism of action of COVID-19 vaccination and the lack of any assurances on maternal-fetal safety, that all of the products are considered pregnancy category X which means they should not be used. This message got out to the community and rates of vaccination have progressively winnowed. As we sit here today, we should understand that ACOG and the OB/GYN community is compromised and thereby putting the maternal-fetal health of women at risk by promoting COVID-19 vaccination. Under no circumstances should a woman of childbearing potential or gravid should receive a COVID-19 vaccine. It is absolutely contraindicated.
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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
January 18th, 2023 by Canadian Academics for COVID Ethics
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Canadian Academics for Covid Ethics (CA4CE) is a group of researchers and scholars from fields spanning the natural and social sciences and humanities. We are greatly concerned about the mismanagement of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic response in Canada and around the world. We are publicly funded experts trained in thinking through problems, integrating knowledge, and sharing our findings in written and spoken form. Therefore, it is our duty to raise these concerns.
Please note that the following publications and media appearances do not necessarily represent CA4CE-wide consensus and should always be attributed to the named author(s) or speaker(s).
Completed Group Publications
Post-secondary COVID-19 policies in Canada must end. Troy Media, 27 September 2022. In this commentary, we reiterate the ineffectiveness and outright absurdity of the “health & safety” policies for COVID-19 on Canadian post-secondary campuses. We extend the argument of the preceding open letter to mask mandates and natural immunity. References for scientific claims made include articles in Nature, Environmental Research and Public Health, and the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, which are available upon request.
COVID-19 vaccination policies at post-secondary institutions in Ontario. Open letter, 9 February 2022. Letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, copied to Ministers Dunlop (Colleges and Universities) and Elliott (Health) and Drs. Moore (Chief Medical Officer of Health) and Gardner (Chair, Council of Ontario MOHs), requesting the immediate removal of campus vaccination policies in light of recent acknowledgements that the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent virus transmission.
Another year of chaos at Ontario’s universities and colleges. Troy Media, 23 December 2021. In this article, we discuss the futile attempts at the province’s higher-education institutions to return to a “normal” winter 2022 semester. We are concerned about the push for total vaccination of students and the impact of campus mandates on employees like ourselves.
Five facts all parents should know about the mRNA vaccines. Troy Media, 24 November 2021. In this article, we remind parents that the available mRNA injections are experimental, genetic-based therapeutics not comparable to traditional childhood vaccines; that the under-powered safety trials were not designed to detect serious side effects such as myocarditis; and that children are at statistically zero risk from COVID-19. Therefore, applying an oft-cited “abundance of caution”, we should not be vaccinating children, youth, or any other sensitive group.
Hands off our children! Open letter, 6 November 2021. Letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford emphasizing the unfavourable benefit-risk ratio of COVID-19 “vaccines” for children, the minimal contribution of young people to the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and the existence of safe and effective drugs—written in response to a recent science brief by the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table titled “Behavioural Science-Informed Strategies for Increasing COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake in Children and Youth”.
Mandatory experimental shots – Canadians are being tricked, not treated. TrialSiteNews, opinion article, 1 November 2021. Commentary on the experimental nature, unproven safety, and failing efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, co-authored with members of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance. Full text also available here.
Response: COVID-19 vaccine mandates for Ontario’s hospital workers. United Health Care Workers of Ontario, 28 October 2021. Open letter to Premier Doug Ford providing scientific evidence supporting the right of health care workers to make an informed decision about their own health.
The problems with The Canadian Press – and those who spread its message. Exclusive to OpEdNews, 15 October 2021. Rebuttal of a Canadian Press article that perpetuates misinformation about early treatment options for COVID-19 and uncritically reports on the silencing of an independent physician.
COVID Policies and Universities. Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, Newsletter No. 90, 10 October 2021. Special issue containing several contributions by CA4CE members.
The Mandates, Restrictions and Propaganda: The Death Knell of Universities? Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization, 7 October 2021. Polemic arising from a group email thread about the failure of academics, faculty associations, and university leadership to support critical dialogue about the mishandling of the corona crisis.
The Greater Toronto Declaration. Petition, 5 October 2021. We ask governments and public health officials to re-focus the global pandemic response on medical treatment options for the ill, encourage broader scientific and public discourse, and restore all suspended democratic processes and civil liberties.
Vaccine concerns weighed against natural immunity. Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 21 September 2021. Informational summary of the state-of-the-science on natural immunity against COVID-19 compared to the limited protection from the vaccines, written for a lay audience.
Open Letter to Public Health Officers. Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 13 September 2021. Call for the resignation of all medical officers of health in Ontario, due to their unfounded, ill-advised, and unconstitutional emergency orders.
A Letter to the Vaccinated. Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 30 August 2021. Open letter denouncing the transient nature of ‘fully vaccinated’ status and the growing rift in society.
Some CA4CE members have published written work and photography in the recently created Toronto Moon. The Moon is not formally associated with CA4CE.
Drs. Julien Beillard, Jeff Graham, and Claus Rinner on The Amity Project Podcast with Curtis Heinen (multiple video snippets extracted from each interview, ca. 20 June to 25 July 2022).
Dr. Jeff Graham on the The Richard Syrett Show, News Talk Sauga 960 AM, 1 April 2022 (starting at 0:47:00 into the recording).
Urgent appeal by COVID-19 vaccine survivor Gordon Polevoy asking Ontario Premier Doug Ford to stop new post-secondary campus vaccination mandates. Mr. Polevoy was injured by the mRNA injection that he took due to his workplace vaccination mandate. The acceptances of his adverse event report, long-term disability claim, and WSIB file cannot make up for a destroyed career and constant agony from the neurological injury he suffers.
Vaccine Mandates are the Rehearsal, the Future will be Worse by Dr. David Millard Haskell, professor of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. Published 27 November 2021. Prof. Haskell is shown speaking at an event for students resisting coercion under campus vaccination policies across Ontario.
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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
First, that lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry launched a ‘massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine,” according to The Intercept‘s Lee Fang. As part of this effort, lobbying group BIO “wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines.”
Of note, Pfizer and BioNTech raked in $37 billion in revenue in 2021 alone from the COVID-19 vaccine, while Moderna made $17.7 billion the same year (and has recently announced a plan to hike the price of the Covid-19 vaccine by approximately 400%).
BioNTech, which developed the Pfizer vaccine, “reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines.”
5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines. pic.twitter.com/6cVIRcUDZV
According to Fang, “Twitter’s reps responded quickly to the pharma request,” while “A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine.”
Meanwhile, the “fake accounts” flagged by the pharmaceutical companies for action were real people – one of whom Fang spoke with on the phone.
8. It's not clear what actions Twitter ultimately took on this particular request. Several Twitter employees noted in subsequent messages that none of this activism constituted abuse. But the company continued monitoring tweets.
“For more than two years, a global movement has been speaking out against pharmaceutical greed and demanding that everyone, everywhere has the tools to combat pandemics,” said Maaza Seyoum, a campaigner for the People’s Vaccine Alliance. “Whatever nasty tricks companies and governments pull,” she continued, “we cannot and will not be silenced.”
Second, ‘Pfizer & Moderna’s lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects (PGP), which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid “misinformation.”‘ according to Fang.
BIO funded the PGP campaign, “Stronger,” to the tune of $1.275 million. Its focus? Helping Twitter ‘create content moderation bots,’ selecting which public health accounts would be verified, and helping to crowdsource content takedowns.
Of note, the Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included regular emails to Twitter officals with takedown and verification requests.
“Here’s an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter’s lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended.”
Fang includes a screencap of an email with two excel spreadsheets containing said requests.
13. Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry. https://t.co/FTzQsGKM9i
From Fang’sIntercept piece, below is one of the flagged tweets in question – which links to a ZeroHedge article aggregated from NakedCapitalism, and which logically posits; “if a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person have roughly the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus, particularly in its Delta form, what difference does implementing a vaccination passport actually make to the spread of the virus?”
"if a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person have roughly the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus, particularly in its Delta form, what difference does implementing a vaccination passport actually make to the spread of the virus?"https://t.co/HNiND8uInP
“To try and stifle digital dissent during a pandemic, when tweets and emails are some of the only forms of protest available to those locked in their homes, is deeply sinister,” said Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now.
More on one of the people behind this effort, courtesy of Twitter user @TexasLindsay
2. The woman advocating for the censorship of inconvenient truths at the behest of her funders rife with COI’s is Savannah Knell, MPH MSSP, the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at The Public Good Projects (PGP). pic.twitter.com/vkdUaAt5xQ
4. Knell claims to have extensive experience in Public Health Comm. & Social Marketing. And aims to “largely focus on managing the development & execution of strategically targeted & tailored behavior change campaigns with an eye toward health equity.” pic.twitter.com/2N7yFsBGsn
“To translate the above into layman’s terms she is a narrative enforcer. She’s funded by Big Pharma and aided by Big Brother to be the ministry of truth. She aims to create social norms by means of censorship and propaganda. She wants to tell you & I—how/what to say and think.”
Meanwhile, as this bullying progressed this was happening…
*PFIZER JUMPS AS MUCH AS 6.8% TO RECORD DEFYING MARKET ROUT
Finally, as this latest ‘Twitter Files’ thread spreads across a holiday market, Elon Musk himself has opined on the efforts to bully the former Twitter executives into censoring ZeroHedge:
Zerohedge can be jerks at times, but they did nothing warranting suspension
We’ll take the ‘being jerks’ jab… isn’t that what the media is supposed to be?
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Featured image is from Zero Hedge
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
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock is nursing a fantasy. She believes one day Vladimir Putin will be hauled into The Hague and tried for war crimes. Her dream is to punish Putin for fumigating Nazis in Ukraine.
But there is a problem. Russia and Ukraine are not parties to the Rome statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC), thus the court does not have jurisdiction in those two countries. Ukraine tried to circumvent this by accepting ICC jurisdiction.
Russia removed itself from the ICC after the court declared the referendum-backed liberation of Crimea to be an occupation. The peninsula, for centuries part of Russia, was rife with Nazi psychopaths determined to find and kill ethnic Russians.
In Odesa along the coast of the Black Sea, Stepan Bandera worshippers burned people alive and beat others to death with metal pipes for the crime of their heritage and language spoken. No investigation or prosecution of the perpetrators followed.
Anna Baerbock would like to see this barbarism and sadistic mistreatment of largely defenseless civilians continue. She proposed a “new format” for the court, that is she would have the ICC set up a court in Ukraine and “derive its jurisdiction from Ukrainian criminal law.”
In short, the ICC would be working with ultranats and Nazis. Baerbock apparently does not see a contradiction.
“That would be different to tribunals under international law, such as those for the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia,” the AFP notes. “And while tribunals for Cambodia and Kosovo have used local laws, they were not able to try aggression between one state and another.”
Baerbock’s proposal is likely to hit a brick wall. The other option is to take the case to the United Nations, but that is also a dead end. Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, will undoubtedly veto any such move.
According to Baerbock’s fantasy,
A special tribunal would target Russia’s civilian and military leadership for ordering and overseeing the invasion of Ukraine, Baerbock said.
While the ICC could charge Russian soldiers and commanders on the ground, Baerbock said it was “important that the Russian leadership cannot claim immunity.”
Aggression was the “original crime that enabled all the other terrible crimes”.
Hypocrisy abounds, yet few seem to notice. Baerbock’s Germany was deeply involved in the effort to kill Afghans for the crime of attempting to end the occupation of their country. The Bundeswehr was told they didn’t have a combat mission in Afghanistan, but that was nothing more than a flimsy cover.
“US troops as well as the Bundeswehr and other allies not only supported war criminals on the ground, they also committed serious crimes themselves. None of the perpetrators was ever convicted in court for this,” Fabian Scheidler wrote for the Orinoco Tribune.
Germans under NATO command “bombed a mainly civilian trek… with over one hundred dead or seriously injured, including children. The proceedings against those primarily responsible, Colonel Georg Klein and Defense Minister Jung (CDU), ended with acquittals.”
The ICC is apparently fond of European and USG war criminals. Recall the USG shelling the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.
“The attack, which was clearly a war crime according to different human rights organizations including the United Nations, killed at least 42 civilians, mostly medical staff members and patients,” teleSUR reported in 2016. “ The ‘punishments’ are largely administrative, such as letters of reprimand and no further promotion.”
Back in 2009, WikiLeaks published an internal Bundeswehr (German army) field report on a massacre in the Afghan province of Kunduz, which resulted in the deaths of up to 142 people, including “children and adolescents.” The bombardment of two fuel trucks was the bloodiest military action by the modern Bundeswehr, and marked a turning point in German post-war history.
As we know, Julian Assange is now locked up in Belmarsh prison for the crime of revealing USG and European war crimes.
The German “leadership” was eager to enter the war against the CIA-created Taliban. The German political elite wanted to show they are back in the game of killing officially designated (and created) enemies. Peter Schwarz writes,
German imperialism did not want to be left out of this war for the re-division of the world. On 11 October 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Schröder announced a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy to the Bundestag (federal parliament).
Amnesty International is more focused on Taliban war crimes and abuses than those committed by USG, UK, Australian, and NATO troops over the course of twenty years of war and occupation.
This is quite natural and to be expected, considering where Amnesty’s funding comes from: the UK Department for International Development, the USG State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation (funded by the CIA).
Anna Baerbock is not alone. In December, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested the creation of a special court to prosecute the New Satan, Vladimir Putin. Politico reported the following on von der Leyen’s statement,
“Russia must pay for its horrific crimes, including for its crime of aggression against a sovereign state… This is why, while continuing to support the International Criminal Court, we are proposing to set up a specialized court, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute Russia’s crime of aggression.”
It should be noted, to put this in its proper perspective, von der Leyen lied about the number of dead, saying (minus evidence, of course) “more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far.” The claim was later removed from the official statement.
The ICC didn’t approve of von der Leyen’s proposal. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, attempted to defend his turf. He said the ICC is capable of dealing with war crimes on its own, the Associated Press reported in early December.
The ICC will not prosecute USG, British, Australian, and German war crimes, but it will, minus the legal ability to do so, attempt to prosecute Putin and selected Russian officials. This is, of course, nothing if not an exercise in futility.
Do Anna Baerbock and Ursula von der Leyen actually believe Vladimir Putin, General Sergey Surovikin, Colonel General Andrei Serdyukov, Major General Yevgeny Nikiforov, Lieutenant General Sergei Yudin, and other military officers of the Russian military command will get on a plane and fly to the Netherlands to be prosecuted?
USG, NATO: Long Record of War Crimes
The NATO and USG use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Basra, Samara, Baghdad, and Mosul is apparently not considered a war crime by the ICC. Habib Siddiqui writes,
The use of firebombs puts the US in breach of the 1980 Convention on Certain Chemical Weapons (CCW) and is a violation of the Geneva Protocol against the use of white phosphorous, “since its use causes indiscriminate and extreme injuries especially when deployed in an urban area.”
For well over a century, the USG has avoided responsibility for a large number of war crimes.
The genocide of “Indians” in America by the USG in the 1800s was an act of fumigation to open the West for unfettered exploitation. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” declared Colonel James W. Forsyth during the Wounded Knee massacre.
During the 1899 USG invasion of the Philippines, the order was given by General Jacob H. Smith to “kill everyone over ten.” American history books drastically undercounted the number of Filipinos killed during the invasion, occupation, and subsequent colonial rule. The actual number of dead was over 3 million.
No Gun Ri, Korea, 1950. The USG 7th Calvary massacred Korean refugees attempting to escape the war. The refugees
were machine-gunned, mass-executed, and strafed by planes. Children, the elderly, and the disabled were all killed by the Americans. Survivors were forced to hide under corpses. It’s thought over 400 refugees died at No Gun Ri alone… When the Army’s subsequent cover-up was finally revealed by the Associated Press in 1999, the Pentagon refused to accept any responsibility.
The USG occupation of Haiti. “In addition to executions and violence against unarmed combatants, the US Army and its Haitian auxiliaries (the gendarmerie) allegedly committed massive killings and acts of violence against the civilian population… These included summary executions, rapes, setting houses on fire after gathering their inhabitants inside them, lynchings, and torching civilians alive.”
In 1945, 2 million German Wehrmacht POWs were held in 19 camps, known as Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps). The camps were in violation of the Geneva Conventions. “Prisoners mostly slept without shelter, exposed to the elements. Rations were generally between 1000 and 1550 calories per day. There was often little or no access to clean drinking water. Thousands died,” writes Colin Fraser for War History Online.
Eisenhower decided to circumvent the Conventions by classifying the captured Germans not as POWs, but rather as “disarmed enemy forces.” The Red Cross was prevented from visiting the camps.
Henry Kissinger, grotesquely characterized as an “elder statesman,” presided over the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia (600,000 civilians killed). This destabilized the Lon Nol government and made way for the massive atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The campaign of indiscriminate violence during the Vietnam War also resulted in the murder of 350,000 civilians in neighboring Laos.
Did China ever target a USG embassy? Not to my knowledge. However, the USG, in its violent effort to break up Yugoslavia (resulting in the states of Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro), bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists and injuring 20 staff. It used its notorious JDAMs to accomplish this war crime.
“NATO claimed it was acting on information that the embassy was actually the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement,” the National Interest reported in 2017.
This is an outright lie. Recall Clinton’s Secretary of State, William Cohen, declaring NATO and the USG had used “the most precise application of airpower in history.” NATO said targets were “carefully selected,” thus we should have no doubt the Chinese embassy was deliberately targeted.
The above is a small sample of the manifest war crimes and violations of international and humanitarian law committed by the USG and its NATO attack dog. The crimes are largely ignored and never cited when the propaganda media “objectively” discusses the unverified war crimes of Russia in Ukraine.
Of course, the double standard blather of German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will predictably come to naught.
In response to calls for a war crimes tribunal in the EU, Russia may hold war crimes tribunals of its own and showcase the disgusting crimes of Ukrainian ultranats and neo-Nazis, guilty of torturing, murdering, and attempting to ethnically cleanse any person daring to speak Russian, celebrate Russian cultural events, object to the war, establish an opposition party, or attend the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Russians have commenced an International Public Tribunal on Ukraine, initiated in April. The objective of the tribunal is to “collect data and prove the commission of war crimes by the Kiev regime, discrimination against its own citizens, persecution on linguistic, national and ideological grounds,” according to a report posted by the Center for Information Resilience.
In order to understand the goal of this organization, consider that it has “partnered” with the Institute for War & Peace, and in turn consider the Institute works with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, doing what the CIA formerly did), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. These are described as “strategic partners” and sponsors of “soft power,” working for regime change behind the scenes.
The corporate propaganda media will continue to omit the crimes committed by the USG and NATO while pointing out Russian war crimes that have little evidentiary standing.
As I said in a previous post, all warring parties commit war crimes, either intentionally or “collaterally.” However, the war crimes of the USG, going back more than a century, cast a large shadow over the finger-pointing of German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Unfortunately, that shadow will remain invisible to those indoctrinated by revisionist history and the deliberate omission of the manifest crimes committed by the USG and its NATO attack dog.
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In 1919, South Carolina’s Charleston Museum acquired an unusually massive jar bearing the inscription “made at Stoney bluff; / for making dis old gin enuff / May 13 – 1859 – / Dave & / Baddler”. The following year another large, alkaline-glazed vessel came into the museum’s possession bearing the same date and names within its inscription. At the time little was known about South Carolina’s pre-war stoneware industry or the highly skilled enslaved labor that it relied on at every level of manufacturing. It would not be until 1930 that “Dave” was identified as the “might good” potter, David Drake. The unadorned elegance of Drake’s stoneware is at the heart of Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is an extraordinary exhibition, the significance of which can hardly be overstated. One can perceive these ceramics fashioned by the hands of slaves, as the material incarnation of human freedom: on one hand, they are the work of men in bondage and yet they stand witness to an inwardness, a human core that cannot be enslaved. The exhibition includes, for example, a storage vessel that Drake produced in 1858 and inscribed with a couplet: “A very Large Jar which has 4 handles = / pack it full of fresh meats – then light candles –” Another states: “I made this Jar = for cash – / though its called = lucre Trash / Dave / Lm Aug. 22, 1857 / Dave”. Notice that Drake has signed his name not once but twice, and boldly affirms his role as both potter and poet.
Image: Face jugs were made by African American slaves and freedmen working in potteries in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, an area of significant stoneware production in the nineteenth century. Unrecorded Edgefield District potter (American) Miles Mill Pottery (American, 1867-85) (Source: The MET)
Slaves were forbidden from learning to read and write, as part of the general priority to keep them mentally degraded, spiritually isolated, and unable to communicate with each other through the written word. Those caught violating the prohibition on literacy could be brutally whipped or worse; as one enslaved Georgian recalled: “if they caught you trying to write they would cut your finger off and if they caught you again they would cut your head off.” Given that Drake was known to be missing a leg, it is very possible that he too suffered grievously for some such transgression.
Each of Dave’s poetic inscriptions was in its way an act of resistance, a rebellious declaration of his humanity, and the independence of his mind. As G.W.F. Hegel observes, “through the rediscovery of himself by himself, the slave realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.” Hegel’s celebrated analysis of the relationship between dominion and servitude in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) can shed light on the admittedly uncomfortable intersection between creativity and coercion that this exhibition forces us to confront. The master is defined by his power to command the labor of another and affirms himself through the appropriation and consumption of objects which he himself does not produce. Inevitably, he finds that he is in fact utterly dependent on the slave who labors for him. The same holds true for antebellum America where, as the historian Walter Johnson points out, enslaved artisans possessed expertise and know-how that slaveholders “might command or even claim as their own, but they could never fully understand.”
With no need to engage the natural world, his needs being satisfied immediately, the master proves his position to be non-dynamic, non-developmental and ultimately a dead end. Even his satisfaction must ultimately be fleeting because he has reserved for himself the complete negation of the object, and as the object disappears so must the gratification. In work, however, we see something quite different: desire is “… held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.” What Hegel wants to say is that in working, the slave achieves something the master was unable to do: that is, in shaping and fashioning the object, the laborer imprints his consciousness upon it, such that it is no longer a dead thing confronting him, but an expression of his independence given objective form. Instead of the transient enjoyment that is the master’s portion, the laborer enjoys seeing his essential action preserved in the object, “which in this externality is seen by him to be the truth.”
Image: Inscription: “this jar is to Mr Segler who keeps the bar in orangeburg / for Mr Edwards a Gentle man — who formly kept / Mr thos bacons horses / April 21 1858” “when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace, – / Dave”. This monumental storage jar—a masterwork by the enslaved African American potter and poet David Drake—reveals his unmatched technical facility and command of language. (By Dave (later recorded as David Drake) (American, ca. 1801–1870s) ; made at Stony Bluff Manufactory, Old Edgefield District, Sout, Stony Bluff Manufactory) (Source: The MET)
Perhaps the most important aspect of Drake’s pottery is, precisely, its truth. As elaborated by Alain Badiou, truth is the “general name that philosophy gives to… the productions in time and space of something that may, for solid reasons, assume to have a universal value.” In this sense, truth can be “a painting by Picasso, the Bolshevik Revolution, Romeo and Juliet, or the Pythagorean theorem.” The crucial point is that truths arise within the world, but always have an exceptional quality which makes them both unforeseeable, and irreducible to the given state of affairs or status quo. Hence, a truth is an “immanent exception,” and in precisely this sense we can understand the universal value of the truth that is embodied in the pottery of David Drake. When, in 1857, he inscribes the words: “I wonder where is all my relation / Friendship to all – and every nation,” he is bearing witness to his own experience, the enduring trauma of forced family separation, but also, in some sense, transcending it. Drake’s couplet pronounces the truth of the situation from which it emerged, the reality of slavery, while in and through that same operation it intervenes itself and breaches the established order.
Hear Me Now also includes several dozen nineteenth century ceramic objects from the Old Edgefield district, the most remarkable of which are face vessels, also referred to as “grotesques,” and “voodoo jugs.” These bizarre looking faces, with their exaggerated features, their bulging eyes, and bared teeth, have an unmistakable power, an intensity that cannot be grasped solely in terms of the so-called primitive, “aboriginal” or West African art from which they are thought to be derived. Many of them unquestionably convey a certain horror, a sense of man in extremis, literally stretched to the brink, but somehow maintain an element of whimsicality, and even levity – a kind gallows humor.
The exhibition concludes with contemporary works by artists such as Simone Leigh, Theaster Gates, Woody De Othello, and Adebunmi Gbadebo – contributions that attest in various ways to the continued relevance of the older stoneware. Which is just to say that the truth of what David Drake and the enslaved artisans of Old Edgefield produced has not been exhausted: it continues to exert a claim upon us, such that we remain beholden to the universal value of their achievement, and the truth of their exceptionality.
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Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Why are so many people worried about the World Economic Forum?
Every few seconds the trending Twitter hashtags #NoNewWorldOrder, #ResistTheWEF, #WEFIsEvil, #Anti-WorldEconomicForum, and#WEFPuppets echo citizen concern.
These forebodings from ordinary people are signalling danger for our world.
Little wonder. The WEF, while failing to address the major problems facing humanity, is normalizing our minds to the Brave New World of centralized financial control and a transhuman makeover.
This quest to redesign humanity and its future is being carried out through a directed influence on our very perception of what is right, real, and true.
Understanding this surreptitious thought control will equip us to recognize and resist the WEF’s disturbing rise to functionally worthless power.
Introduction: What has the World Economic Forum actually achieved to help humanity?
Since 1971, elite thought-leaders have gathered in Davos, Switzerland to share ideas about redesigning the world through new values and new data technologies.
Yet the WEF has failed to take effective action to reverse the three most destructive policies currently harming humanity:
Failure to transition the $5.9 trillion in annual global fossil fuel subsidies to renewable energy (cited by the IMF for 2020[i]);
Unscrupulous failure to challenge the coordinated suppression of proven early Covid treatments[ii] to save untold lives;
Failure to constrain the wholesale printing of national currencies to shore up the dangerously indebted Western economy – while instead promoting centralized digital currencies.
Each of these failures will be briefly summarized in Part I, followed by classic, traditional solutions in Part II.
Part III will explore the question, “Is WEF’s Globalism the Inevitable Destiny for Humanity?” in context of the threat of centralized technology wresting power from our democracies.
PART I: WEF Mission Statement, Composition, and Failures to Act
WEF Mission Statement
The WEF has no goal-oriented mission statement.
From its website, under Our Mission, is the self-congratulatory, non-specific rhetoric:
The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.
The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.
It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests. The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.
Our activities are shaped by a unique institutional culture founded on the stakeholder theory, which asserts that an organization is accountable to all parts of society. The institution carefully blends and balances the best of many kinds of organizations, from both the public and private sectors, international organizations and academic institutions.
We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.[iii]
Under its letterhead appear the words, “Committed to Improving the State of the World.” (a play on words: “State of the World” globalism)
WEF Composition
The World Economic Forum is a non-profit Swiss-based NGO founded in 1971 by German engineer and economist, Klaus Schwab. Schwab draws an annual salary of about one million Swiss francs from the WEF, which does not pay taxes.[iv]
It is more than 60% funded by 121 corporate “Strategic Partners”, which include large oil, automotive, pharmaceutical, media, tech companies, and banks.[v]
It has succeeded, over 50 years, in becoming the control center of the West’s financial-political complex. It started by bringing large corporations together, then national leaders, and later the invited major media.
It has infiltrated many Western governments through its Young Global Leaders programme.
Academia, which was the basis of the first conference in 1971, has been marginalised to the smallest participant group – according to The Economist – which also reported that of the 2,622 invitees to Davos, Switzerland in 2014, “just 15% are women. Two-thirds are from Western countries representing just 12% of the world’s population. Some 60% are from business, and 14% from government. The 46 presidents and prime ministers represent 1.8 billion of the world’s 8 billion people.[vi]
Three Critical Failures to Act
1. The failure to transition the $5.9 trillion in annual global fossil fuel subsidies to renewable energy
Although WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s introductory article on the “great reset,” published in June 2020, briefly mentioned “the withdrawal of fossil fuel subsidies,”[vii] a plan scheduling the withdrawal of subsidies has yet to be announced.
Instead, the WEF website page, “What’s the World Economic Forum Doing about Climate Change,” urges better consumer choices, more informed consumers, and a 2017 admonition to “Speed up Action on Climate Change” with “bold action” collaboration from civil society.[viii]
Unfortunately, the vested interests of the Davos banking, oil, automotive, pharma, and media elite do not lie in the direction of renewable energy as long as the fossil fuel energy system owes its existence to the heavy taxation of earth’s peoples.
2. The unscrupulous failure to challenge the coordinated suppression of proven early treatments for Covid-19
Before reading further, please glance briefly at this astonishing home page showing over 2000 early Covid treatment studies.
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which according to the World Health Organization kills only 0.23% of those infected,[ix] enormous fear and panic were fuelled by the hourly drumbeat of a “one-voice” media, claiming that “delivery will come only with a vaccine.”[x]
The WEF is strongly pro-vaccine, having maintained an active vaccination news page since September, 2017.[xi]
In January, 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)[xii], a global initiative to fight epidemics, was launched at the WEF in Davos.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, plus several European governments, CEPI secures vaccines for global emergencies and pandemics.[xiii] Public, private, and philanthropic contributions to CEPI were $2.3 billion in 2021.[xiv]
Very early in the Covid outbreak, from January 21-24, 2020 – with a total global case number of 274 people, and total loss of life from the virus at 16[xv] – CEPI met at Davos with leaders from Moderna to establish plans for a Covid-19 vaccine.[xvi]
The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency 6 days later, on January 30.[xvii]
The first year of Covid (2020), while awaiting vaccine development, major public health agencies, including WHO and the US-based National Institutes of Health, CDC, and FDA, ignored and discouraged the use of 80%-effective, cheap, safe and abundant repurposed-drugs for the early treatment of Covid-19.[xviii]
Meanwhile, these drugs were being prescribed off-label with remarkable success by frontline doctors in Europe and America. To illustrate, Santa Monica cardiologist Dr. Dan Wohlgelernter said in a June 18, 2020 interview:
“I’ve prescribed it [hydroxychloroquine]…recommended it to people…had conversations with physicians literally around the globe…and I’ve read the literature extensively. Hydroxychloroquine definitely has a role; that role is specific. It’s an antiviral agent that is effective in early stages of infection; when used in that context it is effective and it is safe.[xix]
In May, 2020, well-known Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch reported that “HCQ + AZ[ithromycine] has been widely misrepresented in both clinical reports and public media…and should be made widely available and promoted immediately for physicians to prescribe”.[xx] Amazingly, his article in the top-ranked American Journal of Epidemiology never made the media.
Although hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin had both been on the WHO list of essential medicines for decades, the only officially sanctioned treatment option throughout 2020 was to sicken at home until difficult breathing required going to emergency.
The vaccinating of earth’s eight billion people began in late December, 2020. A tragic story unfolded in January, 2021, when the disease prevention organization, Unitaid,[xxi] influenced a British virologist not to medically publish the positive findings[xxii] of his meta-analysis of Ivermectin efficacy.
The researcher, Liverpool virologist Dr. Andrew Hill, had been seeking a global recommendation on Ivermectin – which at that point could have saved an estimated 500,000 lives in the ensuing weeks – but under pressure he suddenly downplayed his recommendation and revised his conclusions. That he or his university was probably compensated is documented by a fellow researcher.[xxiii] [xxiv]
The drug industry had won. Not a single major health agency has challenged the suppression of the cheap and effective drugs[xxv] hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Indeed, the WEF added to the suppression of ivermectin in August, 2022 by publishing an article about its “fake research”:
“Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that is typically used in veterinary medicine and that was promoted by some without evidence as a treatment for COVID-19, was widely embraced in some parts of the world. However, after ruling out fake or flawed studies, a systematic review of research on ivermectin found that it had “no beneficial effects for people with COVID-19.”[xxvi]
3. The failure to discourage the wholesale printing of national currencies to shore up theWestern burden of debt
In Davos, Switizerland, on January 24, 2020, six days before WHO declared a global Covid emergency, the WEF announced:
“Today, the World Economic Forum announces the first global consortium focused on designing a framework for the governance of digital currencies, including stablecoins – the Global Consortium for Digital Currency Governance.”
Executive chairman Klaus Schwab said, “…we hope that hosting this consortium will catalyse the conversations necessary to inform a robust framework of governance for global digital currencies.”[xxvii]
Why did the WEF make this announcement at this time?
In May, 2022, as Covid concern was winding down, Ellen Brown, American attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, described a situation that had been developing for years:
“When the Fed bailed out Wall Street banks following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09 with quantitative easing [i.e., increasing the money supply]…quantitative easing did not fix the debt buildup, which today has again reached unsustainable levels.
As of March, 2022 the US federal government has a cumulative debt burden of $133.38 trillion… European countries have 44 trillion euros in unfunded pensions, and there is no source of funds to meet these obligations…The concern is that when people realize that the social security and pension systems they have paid into for their entire working lives are bankrupt, they will take to the streets and chaos will reign.”[xxviii]
This precarious situation – which was made considerably worse by the global lockdowns used to combat a virus that kills only 0.23% of infected people[xxix] – may have influenced the WEF’s announcement re the globalization of digital currencies.
Progress towards a global digital currency system has been greatly aided by two years of digital vaccine certificates and mandates recommended by the WHO, CDC, and FDA, and vigorously pursued in countries where the leaders had been schooled and infiltrated by the World Economic Forum Global Leaders Program (Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand).
One analyst summarized the downsides of a digital currency:
“Given the ubiquity of credit and debit cards, payment apps and other online payment systems, digital money has been bound to happen for some time. The risk isn’t the electronic part, that’s inevitable – it’s the fact that a central bank will oversee the digital currency…It’s impossible to overstate the risk presented by CBDC. Whether it’s a utopian vision based on good intentions or a sinister plot to crush our sovereignty, the result may be the same: control. A Central Bank Digital Currency has all the downsides of fiat money, plus the added layers of surveillance and programmability overseen by the state.”[xxx]
The movement towards digital currencies does not stop with individual central banks. In October, 2022, following an 18-month experiment on technologies and currencies, the financial messaging system SWIFT laid out a blueprint for a global central bank digital currency network.[xxxi]
Meanwhile, the WEF has declined to address the critical issue of national debts.
PART TWO: Working Toward National and Intergovernmental Democratic Solutions
To address the failed policies above, three approaches to action could be planned immediately and cooperatively by sovereign democratic nations under an intergovernmental public, non-corporate umbrella:
1. Schedule a redirection of the $5.9 trillion in global subsidies away from the fossil fuel industry towards renewable energy
A global transition to responsible energy financing suggests an approach such as the ancient Public Trust Doctrine (PTD), which requires government stewardship of “the common wealth” – the natural resources upon which society depends for the benefit of existing and future generations.
A trust is a fiduciary relationship that imposes on trustees a duty to act for the benefit of beneficiaries. In the Public Trust Doctrine, government acts as a trustee, with the management accountability similar to that of an estate or investment account.
In her book “Nature’s Trust,” Professor Mary Christina Wood of the University of Oregon wrote:
“The res of Nature’s Trust consists of ecological assets, natural wealth that must sustain all foreseeable future generations of humanity. It amounts to humanity’s survival account – the only one it has. Government trustees must protect trust resources for the benefit of present and future generations.”[xxxii]
The Atmospheric Trust Litigation (ATL) attempts to do this. It “’simply applies the public trust doctrine to the atmosphere,’ says Wood. This doctrine concerns ‘resources that the public relies on for its very survival,’ and ‘the atmosphere certainly qualifies.’”[xxxiii]
The international PTD movement is counting on domestic judiciaries to play their role. Prof. Wood explains further:
“As a legal doctrine, the public trust compels protection of those ecological assets necessary for public survival and community welfare. The judicial role is to compel the political branches to meet their fiduciary obligation through whatever measures and policies they choose, as long as such measures sufficiently reduce carbon emissions within the required time frame.”[xxxiv]
It is hoped that judiciaries around the world will do this in their own countries as a support to the international treaty system – especially with regard to Atmospheric Trust Litigation.”
Transnational public trusts could urge a global transition of fossil fuel subsidies to renewables at 7-8%/year for 10 years until the transition is complete. Working together through intergovernmental organizations, national governments could schedule a transfer of fossil fuel subsidies to non-resource-extracting nuclear, geothermal, and tidal energy projects.
The main thing is to devise a framework for the Public Trust Doctrine and the Atmospheric Trust Doctrine, promoting the two ancient doctrines as the philosophical and legal bases for earth management.
2. Reform major public health agencies to use repurposed-drugs for saving lives
With regard to the long-recognized[xxxv] efficacy of a cheap, safe, early treatment for Covid-19 during the first week (pre-pneumonia phase) of the illness, it is astonishing that none of the now largely corporate-funded, but originally fully tax-supported public health agencies, ever referred to the early treatment efficacy of hydroxychloroquine[xxxvi] – even though it was championed by the most downloaded article in the history of the American Journal of Medicine,[xxxvii] written by 23 authors and published August 6, 2020 – before the Covid vaccines arrived.
Nor did the vaccine-oriented WEF ever refer to the treatment efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
Throughout the pandemic, the mainstream media regularly disparaged hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, while social media accounts were suspended if either of these drugs – both on the WHO list of essential medicines – were mentioned in relation to Covid-19.
How are we to prevent a recurrence of this mind-numbing censorship? How are we to re-organize society when the crisis was exacerbated and prolonged by power, money, and propaganda?
In a superb podcast entitled “Collapse of the Public Health Narrative, and the Gathering Storm,”[xxxviii] evolutionary biologists Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Chris Martenson consider the urgent need for social reform:
Dr. Weinstein: I am certain that the system must be reformed – that’s the only thing we can do. You cannot rebuild the system. You’re going to have to take the edifice and figure out how to make it function in spite of the fact that it is completely riddled with corruption of various kinds.
As the narrative comes apart, I don’t need to see Fauci punished…he has visited one of the most colossal catastrophes on planet Earth that we have ever seen…
Now we have also learned the names of many people who are willing to stand up to garbage narratives and tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear.
So there is an obvious solution but we’re going to watch everything thrown at the question of how to avoid it; everything will be thrown at the process of derailing an attempt to simply take the people who make sense and put them in positions where they can do good.
So my hope is that if we actually do manage to put decent people with the proper expertise in the roles at the heads of these organizations – yes, they have some bad apples but also a lot of decent people who haven’t been given a decent choice – and that maybe suggests that reform could work…
The post-Covid moment is critically important for reform:
Dr. Martenson: The fear that they have been putting out has been very contagious, but I’ve watched the opposite: courage can be just as contagious. And so it’s really important that the people who have that capability to be courageous do so…
This is the time for us to stand up and stand together as courageously as we can. It is the biggest moment in history I’m aware of, so many things are going to be decided in the next few years.
Dr. Weinstein:
This is a truly global process that has unfolded… Something that can amplify a microscopic error into a global catastrophe, that tells you where we are and how much danger there is…
This is telling us that our lives – whether we like it or not – are overlapping a moment on which everything hangs. We are stuck with the responsibility of solving a problem no one has seen before and we have to get it right.
Dr. Martenson: I don’t know that in our lifetimes we will get a better opportunity to have the conversation we need about civilizational collapse, which is looming, because our systems have stopped doing what they’re supposed to do. So my greatest fear is waking up one day and Biden and Macron and all the other leaders are going say: this is just like the seasonal flu, it’s endemic, we’re done, and let’s move on.
Why is that a fear? Because it means that we won’t have the accounting that we need – they’ll just try and slide past those failures. I think those failures need to be brought forward…because they’re indicative of a larger system issue.
I think this is one of the most pivotal moments in human history… and the way we begin to address this is we have to have really open honest conversations where no ox is too sacred to gore – everything is on the table. We need all hands on deck…
Regarding health agency failure, Dr. Martenson recommends:
No more revolving doors. Working in any decision-making capacity at any health agency means zero money or employment from any related industry for a period of 10 years post exiting your position.
No more funding the FDA through pharma “fees.”
Eliminate the so-called randomized control trial standard. Observational data is equally good if done right and ten times better than a scammed RCT.
Create a parallel body to the FDA which is equally funded and charged with using any combination of therapies or repurposed drugs to address any particular disease.[xxxix]
3. Follow classic fiscal management practices to rescue national currencies from debt
We know that national and global debt levels are unsustainably high. The following points show ways to restore responsible fiscal management to the present moment:
a) “When a central bank creates trillions of dollars out of thin air with no link to an underlying real asset, that dollar is nothing more than a symbol of broken faith rather than a store of genuine value. Since 1971, and when measured against a single milligram of gold, the USD, like all other fiat currencies, has lost greater than 95% of its value.”[xl]
“Will a new currency system solve the problem? It may delay the inevitable, and it will certainly further centralize control, but it is unlikely to do much else. …This once-in-a-lifetime situation creates the perfect tailwinds for gold’s eventual meteoric rise. Gold is fundamentally insurance against currency and bond market cataclysm, and nothing has changed its role as such.”[xli]
b) “The Norwegian Krone is perhaps one of the best examples of a real currency that correlates closest to its commodity assets.,,It is one of the largest exporters of oil globally with a high percentage of its overall economy reliant on natural gas and oil. This is the closest we have in the modern world of a system that works similar to the gold standard (other than gold itself) where countries buying power and reserves are related to the price of a commodity such as gold.
For comparison the US could sell all it’s gold reserves and not be able to pay down even 5% of it’s national debt. It has no wealth fund, and its gold reserves are less than 5% of it’s GDP. Unlike Norway, the US government is essentially bankrupt.”[xlii]
c) For a survey of effective historical measures that have been used to restore fiscal balance following periods of massive debt, see the work of attorney and advocate for public banks, Ellen Brown.[xliii]
Instead of imposing the global WEF-promoted digital financial system, Brown’s tried-and-true measures would allow sovereign nations to pursue and endure a responsible debt recovery period.
PART THREE: Is WEF’s Globalism the Inevitable Destiny for Humanity?
More than 20 years ago, while discussing who was eligible for Davos, Klaus Schwab told Forbes: “Forget it if you’re retired. Even if your former job was running France or General Electric, you must be in power. No oldies.”[xliv]
The impact of this power policy on the status of world democracy is astutely summarized by Nick Buxton of the Transnational Institute:
Less well known is the fact that WEF since 2009 has been working on an ambitious project called the Global Redesign Initiative, (GRI), which effectively proposes a transition away from intergovernmental decision-making towards a system of multi-stakeholder governance. In other words, by stealth, they are marginalising a recognised model where we vote in governments who then negotiate treaties which are then ratified by our elected representatives, with a model where a self-selected group of ‘stakeholders’ make decisions on our behalf.
Advocates of multi-stakeholder governance argue that governments and intergovernmental forums, such as the UN, are no longer efficient places for tackling increasingly complex global crises. The founder of WEF, Klaus Schwab, says “the sovereign state has become obsolete”.[xlv]
Schwab is an engineer. In the three years (1967-70) before the World Economic Forum was founded in 1971, he was on the board of directors of the Sulzer industrial giant,[xlvi] which during his tenure illegally helped to develop six South African thermonuclear weapons.[xlvii]
Now Schwab is trying to replace the “obsolete” democratic constitutions that have been in force for hundreds of years with a digital-based global model that offers no constitutional protection for the citizens of self-governing nations.
Worse yet is that the WEF supports high-tech efforts to redesign the human being. For example, Young Global Leader Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government has quietly developed an extensive bio-digital convergence initiative headed by a director general.[xlviii]
In 2021, an analyst from the Spanish Republic identified the authoritarian role of thought control (“a new rationality”) during the Covid epidemic:
The global management of the coronavirus crisis is completely modifying citizens’ relationship to both science and the public sphere of life, two social spaces that are fundamental to the survival of modern democratic republicanism…Science and the public sphere have been subjected during the last year to the epistemic authoritarianism of algorithms and mathematical models.
This covert epistemic dictatorship aims to naturalize the emergence of a new rationality that, in the name of a digital-algorithmic conception of truth, completely transforms our conceptions of the res publica,[xlix] and gives rise to a new political regime that we can call digital ultra-liberalism.
Inspired by the ideology of trans-humanism and technological singularity, digital ultra-liberalism imposes on us the idea that the evolution of the digital revolution is not subject to discussion or to republican control, but rather an inevitable destiny for humanity.[l]
Nothing could be more evil or dangerous than an “inevitable” new rationality – not subject to discussion – replacing the God-given perception of truth that has served humanity for centuries:|
“Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it.” — Mahatma Gandhi
This is all we need to know to save our natural selves, our democracies, and our human destiny.
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Elizabeth Woodworth is highly engaged in climate change science and activism. She has published 42 articles on Global Research, is co-author of “Unprecedented Climate Mobilization”, “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival,” and co-producer of the COP21 video “A Climate Revolution For All.” She is author of the popular handbook on nuclear weapons activism, “What Can I Do?” and the novel, “The November Deep”. For 25 years, she served as head medical librarian for the BC Government. She holds a BA from Queen’s and a Library Sciences Degree from UBC.
[ix] Ioannidis J. “The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data,” Bull World Health Organ., Epub Oct. 14, 2020 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/).
[xxiii] World Council for Health, “Dear Andy,” March (https://worldcouncilforhealth.org/multimedia/dear-andy-dr-tess-lawrie/, 4 March 2022, 18:53 min.) Dr. Tess Lawrie recites a letter to Dr. Andrew Hill and asks him what made him turn his back on a potential cure for Covid-19. The tweets that Dr. Hill erased are shown. Link includes the transcript.
[xxix] Ioannidis J. “The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data,” Bull World Health Organ., Epub Oct. 14, 2020 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331/).
[xxxii] Mary Christina Wood, “Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age,” Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 143.
[xxxiii] Fen Montaigne, “A Legal Call to Arms to Remedy Environment and Climate Ills,” Yale Environment 360, 2 January 2014.
[xxxiv] Mary Christina Wood, “Atmospheric Trust Litigation Across the World,” In: Charles Sampford, et al., Fiduciary Duty and the Atmospheric Trust, Routledge, 2012, 112.
[xxxv] Martin J. Vincent, et al., “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” J. Virol., 22 August 2005 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16115318/).
[xxxvi] “HCQ for COVID-19: Real time meta-analysis of 376 studies,” 28 November 2022 (https://c19hcq.org/).
[xxxvii] Peter McCullough, et al., “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection,” American Journal of Medicine, 06 August 2020 (https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext).
[l] My italics. David Souto Alcalde, “The Covid-19 Crisis and the Emergence of Digital Ultra-Liberalism. An Approach to Republicanism From Polysystem Theory,” in: Circuits in Motion: Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture,” David Souto, Aiora Sampedro, and Jon Kortazar, eds., Universidad des Pais Vasco, 2021 (https://webargitalpena.adm.ehu.es/pdf/USPDF212888.pdf.)
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I am very pleased that I have not used Facebook since 2021.
It turns out that Facebook enthusiastically removed (H/t Paul Thacker) and suppressed truthful content and groups devoted to discussions of such at the behest of Pfizer and/or the White House.
In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. This is often-true content … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.
We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.
Facebook willingly and enthusiastically participated in a cruel, dishonest, manipulative scheme that ended up with millions affected by Covid vaccines.
Was it done “for the good of humanity”? Was it an honest mistake?
It was NOT an honest mistake.
Watch this Zuckerberg/Fauci discussion where Fauci, in 2020, shows full awareness of the dangers of unproven, poorly tested vaccines and informs Zuckerberg. Fauci mentions the failed HIV vaccine trials, with the outcome of making people less resistant to the infectionafter vaccination, the same thing that happened with Covid vaccines.
Video: Fauci explained to Mark Zuckerberg that it’s possible for “a vaccine that looked good in initial safety [tests] actually made people worse.”
Totally unrelated, many countries/US states at 60-70 percent C19 vaccination have now same/worse case counts than pre-vaccines. pic.twitter.com/sLLSnEgwQn
So both Zuckerberg, and Fauci, were fully aware of the risks of unproven and rushed vaccines. And yet, both disregarded these risks and suppressed truthful discussion of them. This cannot be explained away as a well-intentioned mistake caused by ignorance.
Beware of Facebook, fact-checkers, and the White House asking for a “pandemic amnesty” and pretending that they “did not know.” They did. We have receipts.
As I wrote in September, both Google and Facebook are responsible for what happens to the health of billions of people worldwide. They recklessly breached their duty to allow potential victims to be informed of risks.
Google and Facebook will have to compensate their victims.
Would such compensation from businesses that made trillions while suppressing us be fair? Is asking for justice, investigations, and fair sanctions extremist?
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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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The self-appointed Davos “elites” are afraid. So afraid. At this week’s World Economic Forum meetings, mastermind Klaus Schwab – displaying his trademark Bond villain act – carped over and over again about a categorical imperative: we need “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”.
While his diagnosis of “the most critical fragmentation” the world is now mired in is predictably somber, Herr Schwab maintains that “the spirit of Davos is positive” and in the end we may all live happily in a “green sustainable economy.”
What Davos has been good at this week is showering public opinion with new mantras. There’s “The New System” which, considering the abject failure of the much ballyhooed Great Reset, now looks like a matter of hastily updating the current – rattled – operating system.
Davos needs new hardware, new programming skills, even a new virus. Yet for the moment all that’s available is a “polycrisis”: or, in Davos speak, a “cluster of related global risks with compounding effects.”
In plain English: a perfect storm.
Insufferable bores from that Divide and Rule island in northern Europe have just found out that “geopolitics”, alas, never really entered the tawdry “end of history” tunnel: much to their amazement it’s now centered – again – across the Heartland, as it’s been for most of recorded history.
They complain about “threatening” geopolitics, which is code for Russia-China, with Iran attached.
But the icing on the Alpine cake is arrogance/stupidity actually giving away the game: the City of London and its vassals are livid because the “world Davos made” is fast collapsing.
Davos did not “make” any world apart from its own simulacrum.
Davos never got anything right, because these “elites” were always busy eulogizing the Empire of Chaos and its lethal “adventures” across the Global South.
Davos not only failed to foresee all recent, major economic crises but most of all the current “perfect storm”, linked to the neoliberalism-spawned deindustrialization of the Collective West.
And, of course, Davos is clueless about the real Reset taking place towards multipolarity.
Self-described opinion leaders are busy “re-discovering” that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was set in Davos – “against the backdrop of a deadly disease and an impeding world war” – nearly a century ago.
Well, nowadays the “disease” – fully bioweaponized – is not exactly deadly per se. And the “impending World War” is in fact being actively encouraged by a cabal of US Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons: an unelected, unaccountable, bipartisan Deep State not even subject to ideology. Centenary war criminal Henry Kissinger still does not get it.
A Davos panel on de-globalization was rife on non-sequiturs, but at least a dose of reality was provided by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.
As for China’s vice-premier Liu He, with his vast knowledge of finance, science and technology, at least he was very helpful to lay down Beijing’s five top guidelines for the foreseeable future – beyond the customary imperial Sinophobia.
China will focus on expanding domestic demand; keeping industrial and supply chains “smooth”; go for the “healthy development of the private sector”; deepen state enterprise reform; and aim for “attractive foreign investment.”
Russian resistance, American precipice
Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview.
Todd spoke to Le Figaro – the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.
Todd joked that he has the – absurd – reputation of a “rebel destroy” in France, while in Japan he’s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): “The Third World War Has Already Started”.
Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU/NATO line on Ukraine.
The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd).
So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.
A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.
The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.
Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”
Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.
Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.
And that’s why “we are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.”
On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: “That’s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.”
As for the Russian economy, “it does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.”
And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.
On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”
So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”
Based on all of the above, Todd smashes the myth sold by EU/NATO “elites” – Davos included – that Russia is “isolated”, stressing how votes in the UN and the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, “described by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.”
Between light and darkness
Could it be that Russia – alongside the real Quad, as I defined them (with China, India and Iran) – are prevailing in the anthropological stakes?
The real Quad has all it takes to blossom into a new cross-cultural focus of hope in a “fragmented world”.
Mix Confucian China (non-dualistic, no transcendental deity, but with the Tao flowing through everything) with Russia (Orthodox Christian, reverencing the divine Sophia); polytheistic India (wheel of rebirth, law of karma); and Shi’ite Iran (Islam preceded by Zoroastrianism, the eternal cosmic battle between Light and Darkness).
This unity in diversity is certainly more appealing, and uplifting, than the Forever War axis.
Will the world learn from it? Or, to quote Hegel – “what we learn from history is that nobody learns from history” – are we hopelessly doomed?
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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
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***
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected.
A number of international declarations and measures have targeted Myanmar’s regime for its blood-soaked brutality, its genocidal practices against the Rohingya, and its general contempt for the human rights of its citizenry. In a statement last November, US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken took note of the military’s “brutal campaign of violence against the people of Burma, carrying out lethal air strikes against the political opposition and the broader civilian population.”
In response, the US Department of Treasury designated Sky Aviator Company Limited and its owner and director, Kyaw Min Oo “for operating in the defense sector of the Burmese economy.” The company in question had “received multiple arm shipments from sanctioned entities”, while Kyaw had been responsible for facilitating “foreign military officers’ visits to Burma as well as the import of arms and other military equipment and provided assault helicopter upgrades.”
Despite such seemingly bold responses, Myanmar’s military junta is not short of business partners. Indeed, business, notably in the arms market, continues unabated and with some energy. Such conduct has also done much to make a mockery of the suite of sanctions and injunctions being imposed by the EU, United States and other states upon the country’s entities and its military personnel, notably since the February 2021 coup.
Last year, for instance, the Indian company Sandeep Metalcraft supplied 3000 fuses to Creative Exploration Ltd, Myanmar’s arms broker (formerly known as MySpace International). This is despite India being a signatory to the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies, which obliges it to apply export controls on ammunition and associated products. This becomes particularly important where the supply of such material might be used in violation of the Geneva Conventions, or to aid and abet the commission of crimes and atrocities.
In August that same year, Justice for Myanmar also noted that as many as 116 Myanmar and Singapore companies with 255 directors and shareholders brokered deals involving the furnishing of weapons and other equipment to the regime, including the period since the February 1, 2021 coup.
In a report from three former United Nations experts as part of the Special Advisory Council on Myanmar (SAC-M), the verdict about companies in the United States, Europe and Asia is distinctly negative. Such entities are officially domiciled in thirteen states, including France, Germany, China, India, Russia, Singapore and the United States. Using source materials comprising leaked budget documents from the Ministry of Defence, interviews with contacts with the Myanmar military, and statements from witnesses of human rights violations showing security forces armed with various weapons, a dark picture emerges.
The authors note that Myanmar’s military has progressively moved towards becoming more self-sufficient in weapons manufacturing in a number of areas. The state, however, is not entirely weaned off foreign assistance. The Directorate of Defence Industries (DDI) remains “reliant on international supplies, including for a variety of raw materials, parts and components and end-items, as well as machinery and technology, for the sustained production – both licensed and un-licensed – of the weapons in its arsenal.”
The DDI has also, whether through production taking place under license or not, “obtained the technology and know-how to produce a variety of its weapons through various types of transfer of technology (ToT) deals.” Such deals have involved the receipt of whole weapon production plants, also known as turn-key projects, accompanied by engineer support for those supplying the technology. These include State-owned companies from Italy to Ukraine.
The report identifies the role played by automated machines, including Computer Numerical Control machines, manufactured by companies with domiciles in Austria, Germany, Taiwan and the United States. These are currently being used by the Myanmar military at factories responsible for its weapons production. To accompany this are software programs made by companies which have their legal domicile in France, Israel and Germany.
The authors are keen to point out the role played by Singapore, which “functions as a strategic transit point for potentially significant volumes of items – including certain raw materials – that feed Myanmar military’s weapon production.” Companies legally domiciled in Singapore have played significant roles in brokering deals and exporting military related items to the DDI or relevant civilian front companies for the Myanmar military.
Not to be outdone, Taiwan also fulfills an important role as transit point for the DDI’s purchase of high precision CNC machines, including those from European manufacturers, that aid KaPaSa arms manufacturing, a country-wide complex which involves some 25 entities.
The authors are direct and unequivocal about their grisly findings. “In short, weapons produced by the Myanmar military in-country at its KaPaSa factories have been used in the military’s widespread and systematic attacks against civilian targets, prior to, during and after the 2021 attempted military coup, and continue to do so.”
A statement from the SAC-M’s Yanghee Lee, a former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, recapitulated the point: “Foreign companies are enabling the Myanmar military – one of the world’s worst human rights abusers – to produce many of the weapons to commit daily atrocities against the Myanmar people.”
Lee went on to make the obvious point that such companies and their home states had “moral and legal responsibilities to ensure their products are not facilitating human rights violations against civilians in Myanmar.” Not doing so made the parties “complicit in the Myanmar military’s barbaric crimes.” It is a complicity that continues to be lightly worn in capitals from Washington to Brussels.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image: Type-92ARV(ZSL-92) armoured recovery vehicle of Myanmar Army (Licensed under CC0)
In the October 2022 version of the FAA Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners, the FAA quietly widened the EKG parameters beyond the normal range (from a PR max of .2 to unlimited). And they didn’t widen the range by a little. They widened it by a lot. It was done after the vaccine rollout.
This is extraordinary. They did it hoping nobody would notice. It worked for a while. Nobody caught it.
But you can’t hide these things for long.
This is a tacit admission from the US government that the COVID vaccine has damaged the hearts of our pilots. Not just a few pilots. A lot of pilots and a lot of damage.
The cardiac harm of course is not limited to pilots.
My best guess right now is that over 50M Americans sustained some amount of heart damage from the shot.
That’s a lot of people who will be very upset when they realize the vaccine they took to reduce their chance of dying from COVID actually worked in reverse making it:
More likely that people will get COVID
Be hospitalized from COVID and other diseases
Die from COVID (and other diseases)
You also have an excellent chance of getting a lifetime of heart damage for no extra charge.
But don’t worry; you can’t sue them. They fixed the law so none of them aren’t liable (the doctors, the drug companies, the government). After all, you took the vaccine of your own free will. It’s not like you were forced (or coerced) to take it or anything like that! And there were plenty of people warning you not to take the shots (even though they censored most of them).
In this article, I will explain the evidence and thinking behind all my claims.
As I learn more, I will refine the estimate.
Introduction
On October 24, 2022, the FAA quietly, without any announcement at all, widened the EKG requirements necessary for pilots to be able to fly.
The PR (a measure of heart function) used to be in the range of .12 to .2.
It is now: .12 to .3 and potentially even higher.
This is a very wide range; it accommodates people who have cardiac injury. Cardiologist Thomas Levy is appalled at this change:
Why did they make the change?
Why would they do that?
I’ll take an educated guess as to why they did that. I believe it is because they knew if they kept the original range, too many pilots would have to be grounded. That would be extremely problematic; commercial aviation in the US would be severely disrupted.
And why did they do that quietly without notifying the public or the mainstream media?
I’m pretty sure they won’t tell me, so I’ll speculate: it’s because they didn’t want anyone to know.
In other words, the COVID vaccine has seriously injured a lot of pilots and the FAA knows it and said nothing because that would tip off the country that the vaccines are unsafe. And you aren’t allowed to do that.
Why we sure it was the vaccine that did it
There are several clues that are consistent with “it was the vaccine and not COVID”:
They were quiet about it. If it was COVID, you can be public. But the vaccine is supposed to be safe.
The timing. October 2022 is late for COVID. If it was due to COVID, it would have happened well before now. They can make changes every month.
The vaccine creates far more injury to the heart than COVID (which creates NO added risk per this large-scale Israeli study of 196,992 unvaccinated adults after Covid infection).
Anecdotally, cardiologists only started to notice the damage post-vaccine.
There was a study done on pilots. It will be published in The Epoch Times later this week. That indicated heart damage in over 20% of pilots screened (The Epoch Times will release the exact number).
VAERS shows that cardiac damage happens at all ages, not just the young:
Bottom line: The most logical conclusion is that the FAA knows the hearts of our nations pilots have been injured by the COVID vaccine that they were coerced into taking, the number of pilots affected is huge, the cardiac damage is extensive, and passenger safety is being compromised by the lowering of the standards to enable pilots to fly.
The right thing would be for the FAA to come clean and admit to the American public that the COVID vaccine has injured 20% or more of the pilots (based on their limited EKG screening), but I doubt that they will ever do that.
In the US, we are not allowed to do lab tests on people before and after the vaccine.
The reason for that is simple: it would make it crystal clear that the vaccines are unsafe. That is why there are no before/after studies in the US. There never will be.
Why? Because that is how science works in America today: it’s unethical to design a study that might expose that the COVID vaccines that they forced us to take cause harm.
Think I’m kidding about how they game the trials? Get yourself a copy of Turtles All the Way Down and just read the first chapter. It’s eye opening.
Even though we can’t do a before/after study in the US, they did such a study in Thailand on 301 kids. They found that 29.24% of the participants developed cardiac injuries within days after they got the second shot:
But here’s the most important part about that study that nobody points out:
None of the tests that were done in the Thailand study included doing a cardiac MRI with contrast on all the participants since that would be expensive and invasive. That test is the gold-standard for cardiac injury.
In other words, the 29% rate of injury was a lower bound of injury.
If you did a cardiac MRI on all those kids, you are going to find stuff that you will not find using the cheap and easy tests. Maybe a lot of stuff.
Summary
I believe that the actual rate of heart injury from these vaccines will be found to be well over the 29.7% rate of heart damage in the Thailand study.
At a more conservative 20% injury rate, we are looking at 50M Americans with heart damage caused by the jab.
As more studies are done, it’s going to be crystal clear why so many people are dying suddenly, especially kids. It’s also going to explain why nursing homes have lost up to 33% of their residents in 12 months where before they were losing only 1 or 2% a year. It’s going to explain why I was unable to find even a single nursing home where the all-cause mortality dropped after the vaccines rolled out. And it’s going to explain why none of the nursing homes wanted to talk to me about what happened to people after the shots rolled out.
Confidence in the CDC and the medical community should hit rock bottom after it is revealed how extensive the damage caused by these vaccines is.
The fact that the Thailand study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, that they only did the easy-to-do assessments (which only found a portion of the damage), and the FAA quietly changed their EKG guidance should at least open your mind to the possibility that I might be right.
This narrative is going to start falling apart at an accelerated rate.
Stay tuned. The best is yet to come. And it’s going to be epic.
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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
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
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Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country.
The assumption is that when it comes to spending on the military and related activities, more is always better.
There’s certainly no question that one group will benefit in a major way from the new spending surge: the weapons industry. If recent experience is any guide, more than half of that $858 billion will likely go to private firms. The top five contractors alone — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — will split between $150 billion and $200 billion in Pentagon contracts. Meanwhile, they’ll pay their CEOs, on average, more than $20 million a year and engage in billions of dollars in stock buybacks designed to boost their share prices.
Such “investments” are perfectly designed to line the pockets of arms-industry executives and their shareholders. However, they do little or nothing to help defend this country or its allies.
Excessive Spending Doesn’t Align with the Pentagon’s Own Strategy
The Pentagon’s long-awaited National Defense Strategy, released late last year, is an object lesson in how not to make choices among competing priorities. It calls for preparing to win wars against Russia or China, engage in military action against Iran or North Korea, and continue to wage a Global War on Terror that involves stationing 200,000 troops overseas, while taking part in counterterror operations in at least 85 countries, according to figures compiled by the Brown University Costs of War project.
President Biden deserves credit for ending America’s 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan, despite opposition from significant portions of the Washington and media establishments. Unsurprisingly enough, mistakes were made in executing the military withdrawal from that country, but they pale in comparison to the immense economic costs and human consequences of that war and the certainty of ongoing failure, had it been allowed to continue indefinitely.
Still, it’s important to note that its ending by no means marked the end of the era of this country’s forever wars. Biden himself underscored this point in his speech announcing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. “Today,” he said, “the terrorist threat has metastasized beyond Afghanistan. So, we are repositioning our resources and adapting our counterterrorism posture to meet the threats where they are now significantly higher: in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.”
In keeping with Biden’s pledge, U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia remains ongoing. Meanwhile, the administration continues to focus its Africa policy on military aid and training to the detriment of non-military support for nations facing the challenges not just of terrorist attacks, but of corruption, human rights abuses, and the devastation of climate change.
Consider it ironic, then, that a Pentagon budget crafted by this administration and expanded upon by Congress isn’t even faintly aligned with that department’s own strategy. Buying $13 billion aircraft carriers vulnerable to modern high-speed missiles; buying staggeringly expensive F-35 fighter jets unlikely to be usable in a great-power conflict; purchasing excess nuclear weapons more likely to spur than reduce an arms race, while only increasing the risk of a catastrophic nuclear conflict; and maintaining an Army of more than 450,000 active-duty troops that would be essentially irrelevant in a conflict with China are only the most obvious examples of how bureaucratic inertia, parochial politics, and corporate money-making outweigh anything faintly resembling strategic concerns in the budgeting process.
Congress Only Compounds the Problem
Congress has only contributed to the already staggering problems inherent in the Pentagon’s approach by adding $45 billion to that department’s over-the-top funding request. Much of it was, of course, for pork-barrel projects located in the districts of key representatives. That includes funding for extra combat ships and even more F-35s. To add insult to injury, Congress also prevented the Pentagon from shedding older ships and aircraft and so freeing up funds for investments in crucial areas like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. Instead of an either/or approach involving some tough (and not-so-tough) choices, the Pentagon and Congress have collaborated on a both/and approach that will only continue to fuel skyrocketing military budgets without providing significantly more in the way of defense.
Ironically, one potential counterweight to Congress’s never-ending urge to spend yet more on the Pentagon may be the Trumpist Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives. Its members recently called for a freeze in government spending, including on the military budget. At the moment, it’s too early to tell whether such a freeze has any prospect of passing or, if it does, whether it will even include Pentagon spending. In 2012, the last time Congress attempted to impose budget caps to reduce the deficit, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that a giant loopholewas created for the Pentagon. The war budget, officially known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, was not subjected to limits of any sort and so was used to pay for all sorts of pet projects that had nothing to do with this country’s wars of that moment.
Nor should it surprise you that, in response to the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, the arms industry has already expanded its collaboration with the Republicans who are likely to head the House Armed Services Committee and the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. And mind you, incoming House Armed Services Committee chief Mike Rogers (R-AL) received over $444,000 from weapons-making companies in the most recent election cycle, while Ken Calvert (R-CA), the new head of the Defense Appropriations Committee, followed close behind at $390,000. Rogers’s home state includes Huntsville, known as “Rocket City” because of its dense concentration of missile producers, and he’ll undoubtedly try to steer additional funds to firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that have major facilities there. As for Calvert, his Riverside California district is just an hour from Los Angeles, which received more than $10 billion in Pentagon contracts in fiscal year 2021, the latest year for which full statistics are available.
That’s not to say that key Democrats have been left out in the cold either. Former House Armed Services Committee chair Adam Smith (D-WA) received more than $276,000 from the industry over the same period. But the move from Smith to Rogers will no doubt be a step forward for the weapons industry’s agenda. In 2022, Smith voted against adding more funding than the Pentagon requested to its budget, while Rogers has been a central advocate of what might be called extreme funding for that institution. Smith also raised questions about the cost and magnitude of the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and, even more important, suggested that preparing to “win” a war against China was a fool’s errand and should be replaced by a strategy of deterrence. As he put it:
“I think building our defense policy around the idea that we have to be able to beat China in an all-out war is wrong. It’s not the way it’s going to play out. If we get into an all-out war with China, we’re all screwed anyway. So we better focus on the steps that are necessary to prevent that. We should get off of this idea that we have to win a war in Asia with China. What we have to do from a national security perspective, from a military perspective, is we have to be strong enough to deter the worst of China’s behavior.”
Expect no such nuances from Rogers, one of the loudest and most persistent hawks in Congress.
Beyond campaign contributions, the industry’s strongest tool of influence is the infamous revolving door between government and the weapons sector. A 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office found that, between 2014 and 2019, more than 1,700 Pentagon officials left the government to work for the arms industry. And mind you, that was a conservative estimate, since it only covered personnel going to the top 14 weapons makers.
Former Pentagon and military officials working for such corporations are uniquely placed to manipulate the system in favor of their new employers. They can wield both their connections with former colleagues in government and their knowledge of the procurement process to give their companies a leg (or two) up in the competition for Defense Department funding. As the Project on Government Oversight has noted in Brass Parachutes, a memorable report on that process: “Without transparency and more effective protections of the public interest, the revolving door between senior Pentagon officials and officers and defense contractors may be costing American taxpayers billions.”
Pushing back against such a correlation of political forces would require concerted public pressure of a kind as yet unseen. But outfits like the Poor People’s Campaign and #People Over Pentagon (a network of arms-control, good-government, environmental, and immigration-reform groups) are trying to educate the public on what such runaway military outlays really cost the rest of us. They are also cultivating a Congressional constituency that may someday even be strong enough to begin curbing the worst excesses of such militarized overspending. Unfortunately, time is of the essence as the Pentagon’s main budget soars toward an unprecedented $1 trillion.
A New Approach?
The Pentagon wastes immense sums of money thanks to cost overruns, price gouging by contractors, and spending on unnecessary weapons programs. Any major savings from its wildly bloated budget, however, would undoubtedly also involve a strategy that focused on beginning to reduce the size of the U.S. armed forces. Late last year the Congressional Budget Office outlined three scenarios that could result in cuts of 10%-15% in its size without in any way undermining the country’s security interests. The potential savings from such relatively modest moves: $1 trillion over 10 years. Although that analysis would need to be revised to reflect the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of its recommendations would still hold.
Far greater savings would be possible, however, if the staggeringly costly, remarkably counterproductive militarized approach to fighting global terrorism (set so deeply and disastrously in place since September 11, 2001) was reconceived. This country’s calamitous post-9/11 wars, largely justified as counterterror operations, have already cost us more than $8 trillion and counting, according to a detailed analysis by the Costs of War Project. Redefining such counterterror efforts to emphasize diplomacy and economic assistance to embattled countries, as well as the encouragement of good governance and anticorruption efforts to counteract the conditions that allow terror groups to spread in the first place, could lead to a major reduction in the American global military footprint. It could also result in a corresponding reduction in the size of the Army and the Marines.
Similarly, a deterrence-only nuclear strategy like the one outlined by the organization Global Zero would preempt the need for the Pentagon’s three-decades-long plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines at a cost of up to $2 trillion. At a minimum, hundreds of billions of dollars would be saved in the process.
And then there’s Washington’s increasing focus on a possible future war with China over Taiwan. Contrary to the Pentagon’s rhetoric, the main challenges from China are political and economic, not military. The status of Taiwan should be resolved diplomatically rather than via threats of war or, of course, war itself. A major U.S. buildup in the Pacific would be both dangerous and wasteful, draining resources from other urgent priorities and undermining the ability of the U.S. and China to cooperate in addressing the existential threat of climate change.
In a report for the Project on Government Oversight, Dan Grazier has underscored just who wins and who loses from such a hawkish approach to U.S.-China relations. He summarizes the situation this way:
“As U.S. and Chinese leaders attempt to jockey for position in the western Pacific region for influence and military advantage, chances of an accidental escalation increase. Both countries also risk destabilizing their economies with the reckless spending necessary to fund this new arms race, although the timing of just such a race is perfect for the defense industry. The U.S. is increasing military spending just at the moment the end of the War on Terror threatened drastic cuts.”
When it comes to Russia, as unconscionable as its invasion of Ukraine has been, it’s also exposed the striking weaknesses of its military, suggesting that it will be in no position to threaten NATO in any easily imaginable future. If, however, such a threat were to grow in the decades to come, European powers should take the lead in addressing it, given that they already cumulatively spend three times what Russia does on their militaries and have economies that, again cumulatively, leave Russia’s in the dust. And such statistics don’t even reflect recent pledges by major European powers to sharply increase their military budgets.
Forging a more sensible American defense strategy will, in the end, require progress on two fronts. First, the myth that the quest for total global military dominance best serves the interests of the American people needs to be punctured. Second, the stranglehold of the Pentagon and its corporate allies on the budget process needs to be loosened in some significant fashion.
Changing the public’s view of what will make America and this planet safer is certainly a long-term undertaking, but well worth the effort, if building a better world for future generations is ever to be possible. On the economic front, jobs in the arms industry have been declining for decades thanks to outsourcing, automation, and the production of ever fewer units of basic weapons systems. Add to that an increasing reliance on highly paid engineers rather than unionized production workers. Such a decline should create an opening for a different kind of economic future in which our tax dollars don’t flow endlessly down the military drain, but instead into environmentally friendly infrastructure projects and the creation and installation of effective alternative energy sources that will slow the heating of this planet and fend off a complete climate catastrophe. Among other things, a new approach to energy production could create 40% more jobs per dollar spent than plowing ever more money into the military-industrial complex.
Whether any of these changes will occur in this America is certainly an open question. Still, consider the effort to implement them essential to sustaining a livable planet for the generations to come. Overspending on the military will only dig humanity deeper into a hole that will be ever more difficult to get out of in the relatively short time available to us.
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New measures proposed by the Scottish government in a recent document outline a war on carbon and a war on cars. It includes a plan to implement restrictive 20-minute neighborhoods so that the Government can deliver on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Environmentalists have had it in for cars for years, wrote Spiked Online last year, we all know they’d like to ban cars altogether. In the age of “net zero,” the car is public enemy No1. And so, we’ve had a long line of proposals to make driving more expensive and difficult.
For example, in April 2022, Stefanie O’Gorman, who sits on the Scottish government’s Climate Emergency Response Group, said that the construction of houses with double garages drove her “bonkers.” She told the Edinburgh Science Festival that owning two cars ignores “the social and cultural changes taking place as we adapt our lives to live more sustainably… we can’t afford for everybody to have two cars.”
In November 2022, the Scottish government published a revised draft of their ‘National Planning Framework 4’ which dramatically begins:
The global climate emergency means that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the future impacts of climate change.
A few paragraphs later it states,
We have already taken significant steps towards decarbonizing energy and land use, but choices need to be made about how we can make sustainable use of our natural assets in a way which benefits communities.
Don’t be fooled by the fluffy language. The Scottish government’s efforts are not an attempt to “benefit communities.” As the draft itself states, the Scottish government is planning “future places” on six principles that “will play a key role in delivering on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”
Who do the SDGs benefit? To demonstrate who benefits we’ll use the example of SDG7 on which we have recently published two articles, see below, in a nutshell: SDG7 has the goal to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” We are told that the whole point of “sustainable development” is to mitigate the problems that will supposedly be caused by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. This fairy tale has left most people laboring under the illusion that the SDG7 energy transition, and the variations on the associated “net zero” policy commitment, will reduce CO2 emissions. That assumption is wrong. The reality is the UN’s “sustainable” goal for renewable energy is sheer fantasy, if not utter madness, and is a scam to enable the rich to become richer off the backs of the poor.
One of the Scottish government’s six principles to deliver on the UN’s goals in its National Planning Framework is “local living”:
Local living. We will support local liveability and improve community health and well-being by ensuring people can easily access services, greenspace, learning, work and leisure locally.
To understand what is meant by “locally” and how they plan to achieve “locally,” we need to read further into the draft, wade through more gibberish and follow the word trail.
The “national spatial strategy,” the draft says, will support the planning and delivery of “sustainable places,” “liveable places” and “productive places.” According to the Scottish government, a “sustainable place” includes:
Scotland’s Climate Change Plan, backed by legislation, has set our approach to achieving net zero emissions by 2045, and we must make significant progress towards this by 2030 including by reducing car kilometres travelled by 20% by reducing the need to travel and promoting more sustainable transport.
The draft then gives the precise method the Government plans to use to “reduce the need to travel.”
Several policies support more local living and limit the use of additional land for development, the draft says. One of these policies is Policy 15 “which promotes local living, including where feasible 20-minute neighbourhoods.” It almost sounds as if 20-minute neighbourhoods are an optional nice to have. But this is most likely more fluffy language because Policy 15 was written with one, and only one, purpose.
Policy 15 falls under the “intent” to encourage, promote and facilitate development by applying the “Place Principle.” Place Principle appears to be some sort of communist ideology but, to be honest, their gibberish is difficult to decipher while at the same time sifting through all the fluffy language. So, returning to the proposed restrictions on the freedom to travel, the sole purpose of Policy 15 is that:
Development proposals will contribute to local living including, where relevant, 20-minute neighbourhoods. To establish this, consideration will be given to existing settlement pattern, and the level and quality of interconnectivity of the proposed development with the surrounding area, including local access to:
sustainable modes of transport including local public transport and safe, high-quality walking, wheeling and cycling networks;
employment;
shopping;
health and social care facilities;
childcare, schools and lifelong learning opportunities;
playgrounds and informal play opportunities, parks, green streets and spaces, community gardens, opportunities for food growth and allotments, sport and recreation facilities;
publicly accessible toilets;
affordable and accessible housing options, ability to age in place and housing diversity.
“Publicly accessible toilets.” You can’t have employment or visit family members who live farther than 20 minutes away, but you will have access to public toilets. This could be useful for the elderly and parents with babies or toddlers who will, no doubt, be required to walk or cycle everywhere and so definitely won’t be visiting family unless they live practically next door.
As we have seen in Oxford, people do not take kindly to measures forcibly curtailing freedom of movement and freedoms in general. London boroughs are also preparing a defense against the attempted expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (“ULEZ”).
For those who are not resisting this scheme because they trust their government, we suggest you read the Scottish government’s National Planning Framework. You will note a lot of fluffy language mixed in with gibberish. That is by design because psychology and money – not facts – are driving the climate alarmist narrative.
As well as by “independent” groups of psychologists, these psychological tactics are being deployed by the UK government based on a document produced by the Environment and Climate Committee. Published in October 2022 and titled ‘In our hands: behavior change for climate and environmental goals’, it is a sinister document. In it, the Government openly states that all aspects of our life need to be managed to lessen the impact of climate change and that mind control techniques, very similar to the ones used to force the public into acquiescing to covid lockdowns, need to be used against the population.
The simple truth is that CO2 is Earth’s green gas. It is the elixir of life. It has been supporting plants since the world began, making virtually all life on Earth possible. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer. We should celebrate it, not demonize it. And we certainly should not be allowing the UN or governments to take control of it, monetize it and/or use it to control us while removing our rights and freedoms. Scotland’s entire National Planning Framework 4 should be scrapped.
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“Instead of holding Big Oil executives accountable for price gouging consumers at the pump, the committee will be dominated by the interests of extractive industries,” said one government transparency advocate.
A leading government accountability watchdog on Tuesday called out leaders of the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives while revealing that the 21 GOP members appointed by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to the Natural Resources Committee took a combined $3.8 million in campaign contributions from Big Oil.
Oil and gas industry contributions to the 21 right-wing lawmakers range from more than $850,000 for Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana—the nation’s third-biggest fossil gas producer and a top-10 oil-producing state—to $18,800 for Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, according to Accountable.US.
“The new MAGA-controlled House Natural Resources Committee aligns much closer with violent anti-public land extremists like the Bundys than they do with most Americans,” the group said in a statement, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” 2016 campaign slogan and the Nevada family that perpetrated an armed confrontation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over unpaid cattle grazing fees.
Accountable.US continued:
Of the Republicans on the committee, five outright oppose federal public lands, most have demonstrated support for election denial, and all have supported policies to expand industry-friendly federal leasing to Big Oil and other extractive sectors. While nearly all of the members have received donations from oil and gas companies, several have personal financial conflicts of interest in the form of either spousal employment or stock holdings.
“Big Oil’s investment is already paying off,” said Jordan Schreiber, director of energy and environment at Accountable.US. “McCarthy and his MAGA allies wasted no time delivering results for their wealthy industry donors, placing nine of the most extreme anti-conservation members on the House Natural Resources Committee.”
“Instead of holding Big Oil executives accountable for price gouging consumers at the pump, the committee will be dominated by the interests of extractive industries, enabling them to push bills that stymie cost controls, and clear the way for multibillion dollar corporations to exploit the American people’s land for private gain,” Schreiber added.
In addition to highlighting the money that the lawmakers have taken from the fossil fuel industry, the new report notes relevant actions and remarks, from Graves describing President Joe Biden’s climate plan as “ushering in a Soviet-style state” to Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming comparing conservation efforts to dictators starving and killing people, claiming that “it’s about controlling people through controlling the food supply.”
From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
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Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has forced a dramatic restructuring of energy markets in the west, with many European nations vowing to wean themselves off Russian energy products. The UK has been one of the more successful countries in achieving this target after committing to end imports of oil and coal from Russia by the end of 2022 and even recently legislated for a ban on Russian gas. By October, UK imports of Russian energy were down to a trickle, with the country buying just £2 million of oil, but zero coal or gas from Russia. But reports have now emerged that India has been offering a back-door for imports of Russian oil into Britain, blunting the country’s efforts to restrict funding for the Kremlin. Some British buyers have effectively replaced imports directly from Russia with imports from Russian-fed refineries, thereby indirectly supporting the Russian oil industry.
Although such a supply chain is actually legal under UK rules, still it cannot be overlooked because this is another covert way to fund Putin’s war. Before the war began nearly a year ago, it was pretty rare for Indian refiners to process Russian crude. The refiners have always exported to Europe, but they are now exporting even more because it’s more attractive as Europe’s diesel prices are higher and also buying more Russian crude because Russia is offering heavy discounts.
Indeed, Oleg Ustenko, adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, says these companies are “exploiting weaknesses in the sanctions regime”.
“The UK must close the loopholes that undermine support for Ukraine by allowing bloody fossil fuels to continue flowing across our borders. About one in five barrels of the crude oil that they process is Russian. A big chunk of that diesel they produce now will be based on Russian crude oil,’’ he has said.
Kpler data has revealed that the Jamnagar refinery on India’s west coast imported 215 shipments of crude oil and fuel oil from Russia in 2022, 4 times as much as it bought in the previous year. Meanwhile, the UK has imported a total of 10m barrels of diesel and other refined products from Jamnagar since the war began, 2.5 times what it bought during 2021 with Trafigura, Shell Plc (NYSE: SHEL), BP Plc (NYSE: BP), PetroChina Co. (OTCPK: PCYYF) and Indian multinational conglomerate Essar Group the key buyers.
According to Bloomberg’s oil strategist Julian Lee, Russia’s flagship Urals have been trading at a massive discount of as much as 40% to the international Brent crude oil. In contrast, in 2021, Urals traded at a much smaller discount of $2.85 to Brent. Urals is the main blend exported by Russia. Indeed, Moscow could be losing ~$4 billion a month in energy revenues as per Bloomberg’s calculations.
Europe Importing Russian LNG
But the UK is hardly the only culprit in Europe as far as helping fund Putin’s war machine goes. Whereas supplies of Russian pipeline gas–the bulk of Europe’s gas imports before the Ukraine war–are down to a trickle, reports have emerged that Europe has been hungrily scooping up Russian LNG.
Europe has been working hard to wean itself off Russian energy commodities ever since the latter invaded Ukraine. The European Union has banned Russian coal and plans to block most Russian oil imports by the end of 2022 in a bid to deprive Moscow of an important source of revenue to wage its war in Ukraine.
But ditching Russian gas is proving to be more onerous than Europe would have hoped for, with the Wall Street Journal estimating that the bloc’s imports of Russian liquefied natural gas jumped by 41% Y/Y in the year through August.
“Russian LNG has been the dark horse of the sanctions regime,” Maria Shagina, research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, has told WSJ. Importers of Russian LNG to Europe have argued that the shipments are not covered by current EU sanctions and that buying LNG from Russia and other suppliers has helped keep European energy prices in check.
Although Russian LNG has accounted for just 8% of the European Union and UK’s gas imports since the start of March, the trade runs counter to the EU’s efforts to deprive Russia of fossil-fuel revenue.
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Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com.
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The process toward a Turkish-Syrian rapprochement may lose momentum as a top aide to Turkish President Recep Erdogan threatened to derail it. On Saturday, Ibrahim Kalin, presidential advisor on foreign policy, stated during a media briefing in Ankara that the Russian push for peace did not mean that Ankara was abandoning the option of launching a new campaign in Syria.
To quote Kalin,
“A ground operation is possible any time, depending on the level of threats we receive.” But he also added, “Turkey never targets the Syrian state or Syrian civilians.”
This may seem like crying “wolf.” But Kalin’s comments came two days after Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad said that any future talks with Ankara should aim for “the end of occupation” by Turkey of parts of Syria.
Syrian Foreign Minister Fayssal Mikdad since said at a joint press conference in Damascus on Sunday with the visiting Iranian FM Hussein Amir Abdollahian that a suitable environment must be created for Syrian-Turkish meetings at higher levels if necessary, and that any political meetings must be built on specific foundations that respect Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the presence of the armed forces as a real guarantor of the Syrian and neighbouring lands, and this is the thing that determines the possibility of holding such meetings.
Abdollahian’s own remark was equally revealing:
“Syria and Turkey are important countries in the region, and Tehran has distinguished and good relations with both of them, and when there were threats of Turkish military attacks against northern Syria, we worked to prevent that, and we are happy that the diplomatic efforts we made led to dialogue taking the place of war.”
Plainly put, Tehran underscored that it has equity in any Syrian-Turkish normalisation.Arguably, Iran creates space for Syria to negotiate with Turkey. Iran is a balancer in the Syrian-Russian equations also, which has its complexities too. Basically, Tehran regards Damascus as part of the “axis of resistance” that is integral to Iran’s regional strategies.
Significantly, this is also the thrust of a commentary recently by the influential NourNews which is wired into Iran’s national security establishment.
Indeed, Assad told Abdollahian that Damascus is keen on “continuous communication and coordination of positions” with Iran, especially since the latter was one of the first countries to stand by the Syrian people in their war against terrorism, and furthermore, such coordination is of the utmost importance today to “achieve common interests” when the two countries are witnessing “accelerated regional and international developments.”
During Abdollahian’s visit, Syria and Iran agreed to renew an economic strategic agreement, which would be formalised during a forthcoming visit by President Ebrahim Raisi to Damascus.
Apart from the crucial security role by tens of thousands of Iran-backed fighters in tilting the balance of forces in the Syrian conflict in Assad’s favour, Iran has also been a critical economic lifeline for Syria, delivering fuel and credit lines worth billions of dollars to help Damascus offset crippling Western-led sanctions. Syria and Iran signed almost a dozen economic deals in 2019 as part of the long-term strategic economic agreement to bolster their commercial ties.
Moscow may have pursued Ankara’s interests more in its relations with Syria lately. But Moscow’s shrinking strategic band width and diminished influence in Syria in the downstream of the Ukraine conflict does not translate as retrenchment.
The redeployment of the Wagner Group from Syria’s southwest and far eastern regions to Ukraine, the transfer of a Syria-based S-300 missile defence system to Ukraine and even possible withdrawal of additional military assets from Syria can only be seen as tactical shift in Russia’s military footprint in Syria.
Plainly put, Iran’s role is a factor of stability in the Syrian situation lest an empowered Turkey feels tempted to expand its presence in Syria. Equally, Russia also plays a trapeze act, leveraging its presence in Syria to encourage a conflicted Israel to navigate a precarious balance between its interests in Syria and its support for Ukraine and the West.
The bottomline is that in the wake of the Ukraine conflict, the Syrian conflict’s power dynamic is dramatically shifting. On the one hand, there is a strategic “pull” toward a greater possibility of Damascus, Moscow, Tehran and Ankara working together to push US forces out of northeast Syria.
On the other hand, the power dynamic with Russia may be shifting in Ankara’s favour lately. Erdogan’s capacity to hold Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO hostage; Erdogan’s intensified threats to launch another incursion into northeast Syria; Turkiye’s role as the sole custodian of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits which regulate the access to the Black Sea — these are factors that may encourage Erdogan to press his demands more forcefully once the Turkish elections slated for June get over and Russia’s primary leverage on Turkiye, which is economic rather than military, loses its potency.
Make no mistake that Erdogan’s top priority will be the dismantling of the Kurdish project in northeast Syria. How Erdogan goes about it is the whole point. It may not be a bad thing for Russia since any such shift in the Syrian conflict landscape would ultimately cut down the Kurds, threaten the viability of the US-Kurdish partnership and eventually pressure the US to pull out of Syria.
But the catch is, it may entail another limited Turkish invasion of Syria. Should Erdogan believe that his victory in the forthcoming election depends on another Syrian incursion, Russia will be unlikely to prevent the attack. Hence Moscow’s positive attitude toward Erdogan’s proposal on a trilateral meeting between Turkey, Russia, and Syria to address Turkiye’s security concerns.
Any aggressive Iranian tactics at this point may weaken Russia’s capacity in fostering a Turkish-Syrian rapprochement. But then, the mitigating factor here is that in the present conditions under sanctions, Russia and Iran also have deepened their strategic ties well beyond their cooperation in Syria.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the semi-official Iranian news agency Tasnim reported on Sunday quoting an influential member of the Majlis that Tehran expects to take delivery of a number of Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets in the coming months plus “a series of other military equipment from Russia, including air defence systems, missile systems and helicopters.”
Su-35 is a 4++ generation twin-engine, super-maneuverable fighter jet and a game changer. It is for the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that Iran will be receiving advanced cutting-edge weaponry to boost its deterrence capability.
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Featured image: Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad met Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amir Abdollahian, Damascus, January 14, 2023 (Source: Indian Punchline)
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***
Two years ago, the outgoing U.S. administration of Donald Trump did some bureaucratic realigning of what countries fall under which military command groups. Israel, which had been part of the EUCOM (European Command) group was transferred to CENTCOM (Central Command), which encompasses the Middle East and some of South Asia.
It was the sort of boring detail that doesn’t generate headlines, and many who do hear about it yawn and move on quickly. But when it was announced on January 15, 2021, it was celebrated by pro-Israel groups in the United States and by Israeli officials.
At the time, I noted that this was part of capitalizing on the Abraham Accords and pushing forward with the idea of forming a “Mideast NATO.” I tweeted, “This bears close watching. The burgeoning #Israel – Arab States military alliance, built by the #Trump administration for a military confrontation with #Iran, is not something @JoeBiden is going to reverse. The question will be how he manages it and what he decides to use it for.” We’re starting to see what this Biden policy looks like.
This bears close watching. The burgeoning #Israel – Arab States military alliance, built by the #Trump administration for a military confrontation with #Iran, is not something @JoeBiden is going to reverse. The question will be how he manages it and what he decides to use it for. https://t.co/XADpT8xoR2
The Biden administration has pressed forward with the military aspects of the Abraham Accords’ vision, letting it be known at the end of 2022 that Israel, as part of its new position in CENTCOM, had been elevated to “full military partner” in terms of strategizing and planning with the United States.
In some ways, this is little more than a rhetorical change. After all, it’s no secret that the U.S. and Israel coordinate matters of regional strategy very closely, have lines of communication that are buzzing all the time between political and military planners from the top of the chain of command to the bottom, and work jointly throughout the Middle East region. But, as analyst Paul Pillar points out, this more public elevation of the U.S.-Israel military relationship brings the United States closer to a military alliance with Israel, a relationship which, if it results in an official alliance, runs the risk of an American commitment to Israel’s defense that could easily drag the U.S. into more fighting in the Middle East, even if that’s not Washington’s intention. And it would mean that commitment happens without any kind of public debate.
As Pillar notes,
“The risks of a closer military relationship with Israel center on Israel’s tendency to get involved in deadly scrapes. Israel is the Middle Eastern state that has thrown its military weight around, with multiple attacks on the territories of other nations, more than any other state in the region. Israel has repeatedly initiated wars, including the big one in 1967, which began with an Israeli attack on Egypt. Later came repeated Israeli invasions of Lebanon, multiple devastating military attacks on the Palestinian-inhabited Gaza Strip, an attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor (an attack that revived and accelerated a covert Iraqi nuclear weapons program), and a later similar attack in Syria.”
It is fair to argue that the de facto military alliance with Israel that Pillar fears already exists. If Israel goes to war, even if it’s a war of its own making, there is likely to be enormous pressure in Washington to support that effort. Whether that pressure would be successful is a matter of debate, a debate that could not happen if we officially commit to Israel as an ally.
We should keep in mind Pillar’s example of the 1967 war, a war that Israel started, but which is far more often described by Israel and its supporters as a “defensive war,” a claim which goes unchallenged the overwhelming majority of the time. (Note: This is a significant point that Israel still uses. To refute it and to see a more accurate history, see, among many sources, Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Even Israel’s former foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami refutes the pre-emptive strike idea.) The fact that there are relatively few people who understand that Israel was not facing an imminent attack, and both the United States and Israel itself knew it, illustrates the danger to the United States of an increased military commitment to Israel. The massive funding and diplomatic cover the U.S. gives Israel are bad enough. But as Pillar explains, the threat of Israel dragging the United States into another Middle East war, is already real and growing.
“With Netanyahu now back in power at the head of his radical coalition, and with Iran having expanded its nuclear program in response to Donald Trump’s foolish abandonment of the agreement that had severely restricted that program, the danger of Israel instigating a war with Iran is as great as ever,” he writes. “For Netanyahu, the preferred scenario would have the United States, rather than Israel, assume the main burdens and costs of such a war. Especially given Israel’s long record of covert operations against Iran, the ability of Netanyahu’s government to manipulate events and bring about such a scenario is substantial.”
Pillar, a longtime U.S. intelligence analyst, cautions that any U.S. military relationship, with Israel or any other country, entails serious risks and ought to be carefully weighed against the benefits to U.S. interests as well as widely debated and carefully considered.
Even aid to Ukraine is a matter of constant public debate, despite the fact that every aid package that is going there makes big headlines and remains quite popular with most Americans. Yet as Israel becomes a closer military partner, with the risks that entails, there is no more than a mention here and there.
What would that debate look like? As with any other policy matter that carries risk, it would depend on what you see as U.S. interests. Many of us believe that a more just, egalitarian world that respects human rights, shares resources equitably, and nurtures the human spirit is a U.S. interest. But that is clearly far from the world we live in.
Still, while we work to get more people to support those principles in a material way, we can also look at what a more conventional view of U.S. interests would include. Surely, it would include regional stability in the Middle East. But what does that mean?
I would argue that U.S. interests aren’t being well served by Joe Biden’s foreign policy in general. Even before he was elected, and certainly since he was elected, Biden has pursued a policy of belligerence toward China. He dragged his feet for an extended period regarding the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal until a more hardline and belligerent Iranian administration came in, compromising the international effort to get the deal back in place. I’ve described elsewhere at some length my issues with his approach to Russia, and how U.S. policy for decades has been misguided, although the invasion of Ukraine was an unmitigated and horrific crime for which Russia bears full responsibility. I do not think Biden’s zeal for revitalizing NATO (which Vladimir Putin, I assume unintentionally, has done an incredible job of helping with), and his utter refusal to deal with the ongoing refugee crisis that is largely the result of U.S. policies over decades in Latin America as well as Haiti serve U.S. interests well either.
In the Middle East, the elevation of Israel to partnership is meant in the short term to strengthen the idea of a regional alliance similar to NATO. Ironically, and rather foolishly, it’s an attempt by Biden to enhance the region’s ability to defend itself, but, as Pillar makes clear, it actually enables those very regional partners, Israel and the United Arab Emirates (which, itself, has considerable sway in Washington) to draw the U.S. into their conflicts.
Even aside from the more idealistic concepts of justice, freedom, and human rights, it is very much in the U.S. interest to distance itself from Israel’s ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people and its regional aggression, which so often takes the form of covert attacks in Iran and overt ones in Syria and Lebanon. It is also in the U.S. interest to distance itself from the devastation that Saudi Arabia is still wreaking in Yemen, as well as its ongoing funding of various militias across the region; and from the UAE, which behaves in a similar fashion in the region and, like KSA, is one of the most brutal autocracies in the world.
It is in the United States’ interest to find mutually beneficial accommodations with China because, as it will learn to its chagrin, its regional allies in the Gulf and in the Levant are going to pursue their own interests and maximize the benefits available in relationships with both the U.S. and China, as well as with Russia. Instead, Biden dreams of a “Mideast NATO” that will stand against not only Iran, but China and Russia as well.
If that seems unrealistic, it is. Regional stability and U.S. interests are served by promoting Palestinian freedom, and democracy throughout the region. That means supporting movements for freedom and democracy throughout the region. It does not mean the United States, with its compromised positions throughout the world, leading some neoconservative crusade to bring democracy at the point of a gun or with murderous sanctions. Rather, it means working with and through the United Nations and other global institutions to support and enable civil society groups in these countries and letting them do their work of promoting justice in their homes.
Even that is far off the table, such egalitarianism being foreign not only to the United States but to states in general. But what is not unrealistic, is for the United States to at least cease acting against its own interests. The U.S. gains nothing and loses much by covering for Israel’s apartheid system and constant violations and outright denial of Palestinian rights. It gains less than it loses by groveling before Mohammed Bin Salman in Riyadh and deepening its partnership with the dictatorial UAE. It is in U.S. interest to lower tensions with Iran and encourage its reintegration. Magnifying the belligerence, especially at the behest of the Saudis and Israelis who want to force the current Iranian rulers out (a strategy which only makes it more difficult for Iranians struggling for their freedom and for the change they want to see in Iran) is a self-defeating strategy.
Since taking office, Biden has, of course, nurtured this pipedream of a “Mideast NATO,” most recently this week at a meeting of the so-called “Negev Forum,” which brings together the Arab states that have relations with Israel to plan for major trade deals and build the military alliance, with smaller, minor working groups focused on efforts mostly meant for public relations such as cultural and scientific exchanges.
The pace of normalization has been slower than Washington probably hoped, and there are no immediate prospects of more Arab states following the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco into the Faustian bargain with Israel. Indeed, the Negev Forum itself highlighted the difficulties faced by Arab countries trying to work with Israel as Jordan boycotted the confab in solidarity with the Palestinian Authority, who have refused to join the Forum, which they correctly understand to be aimed at thwarting their ambitions of freedom from Israeli domination.
U.S. interests are best served not by facilitating trade and military deals between brutal autocracies and apartheid states. They are not served by inching toward a security pact with Israel. They are served by using the considerable leverage the U.S. has with allies like Israel, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, among others, to recognize the basic rights of those to whom they deny them. Continuing down the road of further enriching corrupt elites and ignoring or even shielding human rights violators from consequences in order to strengthen a belligerent stance against other states will only end in the same destruction, loss of life, and massive waste that have characterized U.S. policy in the Middle East for all of this century and much of the last one.
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***
The guest preacher last Sunday at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – the spiritual home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – praised King as “a nonviolent warrior for justice.” That preacher was President Joe Biden, a warrior, period.
“We come to contemplate his moral wisdom and commit ourselves to his path,” said Biden in his sermon in honor of the celebrated minister, assassinated in 1968. But King’s path was nonviolent, which does not describe the President (as we will see below).
King would have been 94, had he lived to the present. His birthday was observed nationally on Monday, the 16th. Senator Raphael Warnock, the church’s senior pastor, had invited Biden to highlight the church’s annual King commemoration.
A bust of King rests in the Oval Office. “He was my inspiration as a kid,” said the President. He called on churchgoers to make King’s “dream a reality.”
An argument is made that the King speech most significant for today’s world is not the famous “I Have a Dream” but the one he gave on April 4, 1967, pleading for peace. Delivered at New York’s Riverside Church one year to the day before his murder, it was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to break Silence.”
Half a million U.S. soldiers had been sent to fight in Vietnam. The US had already dropped more ordnance on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than it did on Europe during World War II. King condemned “an illegal and unjustifiable war.” Many condemned him for having done so, inasmuch as he was a civil rights leader. He needed to explain.
At a time of black unrest, King tied racism to war. “We have been repeatedly faced with the irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has not been able to set them together in the same schools.,… So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village but to realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago….
“As I walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles will not solve their problems … that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?” Their questions hit home.
“I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
King’s war views
King touched on the war’s history. He cited US support for up to 80 percent of war costs of the French in protecting their colonies from an indigenous, revolutionary movement seeking land reform; and US support for corrupt, inept, dictators, who lacked popular support and who resisted that revolution.
It was officially a war against Communist aggression. But King saw irony for the world’s most powerful nation to complain of “aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8,000 miles from its shores.” He pulled no punches in describing at length what the US was doing to Vietnam, in the name of democracy and defense against aggression. A few excerpts:
“… We herd them off the land of their fathers, into concentration camps…. we poison their water … kill a million acres of their crops … destroy the precious trees. … So far, we have killed a million of them, mostly children…. Thousands of the children homeless, without clothes…. They beg for food … selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers…. We test out our latest weapons on them…. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions, the family and the village…. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.”
The US ended its direct involvement in the Vietnam War fifty years ago this month, with the signing of a peace agreement in Paris. The war had taken the lives of as many as two million civilians and over 58,000 Americans.
King wanted a revolution of values that says of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” He called for an end, not only to the Vietnam War, but to “this business of burning human beings with napalm”; causing people to hate; and sending men to bloody battlefields.
“We have a choice today: nonviolent co-existence or violent co-annihilation,” King said – still a meaningful statement today.
Biden’s violent acts
During the Vietnam War, Joe Biden escaped the draft through student deferrals. While viewing it as “lousy policy,” he admittedly had a “lack of moral outrage” at the war.
He has long supported some wars, though not others. In the nineties he encouraged President Bill Clinton to bomb Yugoslavia. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Biden in 2002 eagerly pushed through the measure that let President Bush Jr. decide whether to attack Iraq. Bush’s aggressive war of “shock and awe,” begun in 2003, caused over a million deaths, by some estimates. Though the war supposedly ended in 2011, we may not be done with the killing.
In aspiring to the presidency, Biden pledged to end “forever wars.” In February 2021, 37 days after his inauguration, he started bombing Syria. His first attack killed 22 people. They were supposedly “militants,” but how does a bomb distinguish one from a child or woman or peaceful man? Biden’s periodic attacks in Iraq and Somalia, as well as Syria, have taken many more victims.
Biden did end the Afghan war, as he said he would. But contrary to promise, he continues to aid the Saudi Arabian monarchy in its bombings of Yemen’s people in their homes, hospitals, markets, schools, buses, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Biden continues his predecessors’ program of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal, instead of trying to eliminate it in accord with the aim of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. His pledge to renew the Iran nuclear agreement, abandoned by Trump, remains unfulfilled. Nor has Biden sought to renew the Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty to scrap nuclear missiles up to intermediate range, which Trump tore up too.
In March 2022, risking a global conflagration, Biden promised that the US would defend “every inch” of NATO countries against Russia; and in May, he pledged to defend Taiwan against China. Warships approach both lands provocatively. His threats against two nuclear-armed, major powers were not authorized by Congress, nor were any of his bombings.
He sends arms to Ukraine continually, raising questions; What is the end game? Is he prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian – or until nukes start dropping? So far, the word “peace” evades his lips.
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Paul W. Lovinger, of San Francisco, is a journalist, author, editor, and antiwar activist. (See www.warandlaw.org.)
Today, many Israelis believe what Golda Meir had said, including Israel’s top cabinet member Itamar Ben-Gvir, a known far-right extremist who basically wants to annex the rest of what was once known as Palestine and expel the remaining Palestinians once and for all.
In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought guarantees from NATO and many of its European members that it would halt its eastward expansion and end military cooperation with Ukraine and Georgia, which are not members, observed Al Jazeera. Both Georgia and the Ukraine share borders with Russia and the latter has a significantly long border with the biggest former member of the Soviet bloc.
We have taken 16 loans from IMF since 1965, countless IMF officials have been landing & leaving advising every Government on how to manage the economy and yet we remain trapped into debt with no plan to come out. Instead of pruning the military, why doesn’t IMF insist on pruning the Govt starting off with reducing unlimited perks of politicians, the useless Provincial Council system along with unnecessary staff before trying to destabilize the national security apparatus of Sri Lanka?
The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised.
The US has been drawing on its strategic oil reserves for over a year while refining it into gasoline for internal consumption while trying to keep the cost of gasoline down. But why is there an energy crisis in the first place?
In real life, we are often presented with irrational proposals or events that are presented in a rational, calm, logical way by rational, calm protagonists; and where objectors are presented in caricatured ways as hippies, do-gooders, conspiracy theorists, liberals, commies etc., and we are persuaded that all is fine.
It should be obvious by now that pouring more military armaments into the USG-initiated conflict in Ukraine will result in a reciprocal response by the Russian armed forces. Russia’s SMO is tasked with disarming neo-Nazis and preventing them from killing the innocent people they hate in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The reason that the United States has been overrun with COVID-19 propaganda and that the government acted as a toy of the rich, pushing through policies that have no support, is that the entire system was gutted in the aftermath of 9/11 and a stark tyranny has replaced the flawed republic that once stood behind the halls of government.
As we enter the new year, America has passed far beyond the threshold when the public needs to put ideological beliefs and partisan politics aside and honestly reevaluate how our culture has become a toxic stew of maladaptive groupthink.
Remember Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) Academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL)? It looks like Dina Boluarte is one of Professor Schwab’s YGL academy graduates. And she knows her role. Not long ago, with regard to the YGL program, Schwab said, “We are proud having been able to infiltrate governments around the world with our YGLs.” See photo (origin ´Del Peruano’). Is Ms. Boluarte one of the infiltrees?
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***
A large majority – seven out of eleven, or 64% – of the members of an important new subcommittee tasked with evaluating the safety of GM foods and animal feed have potential, probable, or definite conflicts of interest, in the form of vested interests in the liberalisation or commercialisation of GM technologies or related products, according to our analysis.
Our finding comes shortly after the publication of an important paper in Nature Food, the highest ranking journal on food science and technology, which found extensive conflicts of interest in UK regulatory committees on GMOs and other food safety issues. The experts who undertook this analysis point out that conflicts of interest (COIs) are critical to public trust in decision making and conclude that ideally such regulatory or advisory bodies “should not include anyone with COIs that deserve to be declared”.
But in our GMWatch analysis of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee on products of genetic technologies destined for food and feed purposes, we found that four out of its 11 members have probable or definite conflicts of interest; and three out of the 11 have potential conflicts of interest that need to be clarified. In other words, only four out of the 11 (36%) have no apparent conflicts of interest.
Independent and transparent?
The ACNFP PGT Subcommittee was recently set up under the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP), with the vital role of conducting risk assessments of GM foods and feed under UK legislation. It reports to the ACNFP and advises the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland.
The ACNFP is sponsored by the FSA and calls itself “an independent expert committee”, which is why the issue of conflicts of interest is so important. The FSA is responsible for designing the risk assessment for the UK’s new regulatory regime on GMOs, including the policy on GMO labelling, although it is already clear that it has no intention of asking for GMO labels on new GMOs.
The ACNFP PGT Subcommittee met five times in 2022. Much of their business on GMOs is noted in agendas as “reserved” (or secret, at least for the time being), making a mockery of the FSA’s claimto act not just “independently” but “transparently”.
Study finds extensive conflicts of interest in UK’s GMO regulatory committees
Our findings on this important new GMO regulatory committee come soon after the publication of a paper by Profs Erik Millstone and Tim Lang on conflicts of interest in UK food regulatory institutions, including the FSA, the ACNFP, and another GMO regulatory body, the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE). Millstone and Lang found that each of them included members declaring interests at some point, with some panels having more experts with conflicts of interest than without.
Millstone and Lang based their findings on the declarations of interest of the members of the different committees. They did not analyse the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, probably because it was formed after they wrote their paper – hence the need for our analysis.
Millstone and Lang found that on the FSA’s Science Council, the proportion declaring conflicts of interest has been rising, and in November 2022 there was a six-to-five majority with such conflicts.
Of the FSA’s five topic-focused committees, all had majorities with conflicts of interest at some stage. At the ACNFP, the “parent” committee of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, the proportion of people with conflicts of interest has risen in recent years, with nine out of 16 members (56%) declaring such conflicts in 2020, 11 out of 19 members (58%) in October 2021, and a peak of 14 out of 21 members (67%) in November 2022.
Too close to industry
In GMWatch’s view, a cynic might conclude that the numbers of conflicted people have risen with the UK’s departure from the EU and consequent plans to liberalise GMOs. That said, conflicts of interest on GMO regulatory committees have long been a source of concern. For instance, over two decades ago a UK government minister pledged to overhaul of the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE) because there was “a general view that some of the people were rather too close to the industry and rather too pro-GM”.
Despite that, Millstone and Lang found that only one of the seven current members of ACRE declared no conflicts of interest in 2022. The other six (86%) had conflicts of interest with 16 different corporations.
Indeed, our own GMWatch analysis of March 2022 found that 100% of the members of ACRE have potential or actual conflicts of interest that may enable them to benefit from the weakening of the regulations around GMOs. For our analysis, we expanded our research beyond the members’ own declarations of interest, and termed some conflicts of interest “potential” as well as the more obvious “actual” ones – possible explanations for the small single-person difference in conclusions between us and Millstone and Lang.
Millstone and Lang also found that despite earlier ministerial assurances that those with commercial conflicts of interest would always remain a minority, by 2008, a majority (nine out of 14) of FSA Board members had active or recent commercial conflicts of interest. The proportion of FSA Board members who declared conflicts of interest peaked in 2008 but subsequently declined. In 2014, the numbers with and without conflicts of interest were equal, but the chair was among those who declared a conflict, and chairs have a casting vote in the event of tied votes. In December 2020, the FSA Board had a five to four majority of those declaring conflicts of interest, but in 2022, three of nine declared them.
Millstone and Lang write, “COIs are important because they may undermine public trust in decision-making and challenge the FSA as it tries to enhance public trust.”
They conclude, “If the FSA, or any such regulatory or advisory body, is completely to eliminate and avoid corporate capture, its board and advisory committees should not include anyone with COIs that deserve to be declared.”
We agree with this conclusion and warn the public that decisions on GMOs reached by the committees examined in this article cannot be assumed to be objective.
Our analysis of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee
We looked at the interests of the 11 members of the subcommittee, as they themselves declare them on the ACNFP website and from information available in the public domain, to identify actual or potential conflicts of interest that could compromise the person’s objectivity in evaluating the risks of GMOs.
We define conflicts of interest as vested interests in the liberalisation and commercialisation of GM technologies or products in the areas of agriculture, food, livestock animals, or food processing. “Vested interests” do not necessarily mean financial interests; instead they could be interests related to career progression and professional status.
Key
No conflicts of interest found: (-)
Equivocal or potential conflicts of interest: (+ -)
Probable or definite conflicts of interest: (+)
Members
Dr Andy Greenfield (chair) (-)
Dr Andy Greenfield, chair of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, has a background in medical genetics and animal welfare ethics. He is named as an applicant and inventor on patents on a gene therapeutic agent for transplant patients. However, as the development, regulation and use of genetic modification technologies in medicine are separate from their use in agriculture and food, and because no government in its right mind would try to deregulate medical uses of GM, neither his patents nor his declared interests on the ACNFP website would appear to constitute a conflict of interest with his role on the Subcommittee. We therefore conclude that we found no conflicts of interest.
Professor Paul Fraser (+)
Professor Paul Fraser is chair of the management board of BBSRC-NIBB phase-II High Value Biorenewables (HVB) Network in Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy, a public-private partnership that “actively promotes and facilitates collaboration between academia and industry in the Biorenewables sector”, including facilitating “partnership and knowledge transfer between UK academia and industry”. Within that research programme he has acted as chair of the management board for the BBSRC-NIBB Network for High Value Chemicals from Plants.
The John Innes Centre (JIC) and the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products, University of York are represented in the HVB executive group. The JIC is a GM crop research and development centrethat is heavily oriented towards corporate interests. The Centre for Novel Agricultural Products researches and develops GM plants for agricultural, “phytoremediation” (environmental cleanup using plants) and industrial uses.
The HVB management board includes Johnathan Napier of the GMO crop development institute Rothamsted Research and Andrew Collis, synthetic biochemistry technical lead of the pharmaceutical company GSK Pharma Supply Chain.
Fraser reports receiving research funding from the Gates Foundation as well as the agbiotech company Syngenta, which develops GM crops. Bill Gates is “an evangelist for genetically engineered foods” who predicts that “GMOs will end starvation in Africa” and GMOs can “end world hunger by 2030” and the Gates Foundation funds GMO research and development projects worldwide.
Due to Fraser’s roles in the BBSRC-NIBB public-private partnership, as well as his funding from the Gates Foundation and Syngenta, he has conflicts of interest in the form of vested interests in the liberalisation of GMOs and should be excluded from the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee.
Professor Wendy Harwood (+)
Professor Wendy Harwood is Head of the Crop Transformation Group at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, where she also manages the BRACT (Biotechnology Resources for Arable Crop Transformation) Crop Transformation/Genome Editing Platform.
In her declaration of interests she lists funding from the BBSRC and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for projects involving genetic transformation and genome editing.
Due to her role at the John Innes Centre and her Gates funding for GMO projects, Harwood has serious conflicts of interest that should exclude her from serving on an “independent” expert panel on GMOs.
Professor Huw Jones (+)
Professor Huw Jones declares that he is a member of the “EPSO Plants for the Future gene editing working group” and the Plants for the Future European Technology Platform (Plant ETP).
EPSO is a scientist group that is very active in lobbying at the EU level for deregulation of new GMOs. Sixty-four per cent of the members of the EPSO working group on Agricultural Technologies, which develops opinions in this field for EPSO as a whole, have vested interests in the commercialisation of new GMOs.
Plant ETP was set up by EPSO and the GMO industry lobby group EuropaBio in 2004. It published a report that advocates “lowering barriers to market access” for “plant-based innovation” via “innovation-friendly” regulation. Plant ETP is composed of agricultural biotech companies and Copa-Cogeca, the EU representative of national farmer associations. It counts among its members EPSO and the John Innes Centre, as well as the agbiotech companies BASF, Bayer CropScience, KWS, Keygene, and Syngenta.
EPSO’s and Plant ETP’s activities and corporate links mean that Jones’s roles in the organisations constitute conflicts of interest that should exclude him from the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee.
Dr Ray Kemp (+ -)
According to his declaration of interests on the ACNFP website, Dr Ray Kemp is “a social scientist specialising in risk perception and communication” – notably in matters to do with radiation risks. He is an expert adviser to the International Atomic Energy Agency and a non-executive director of the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), which is responsible for nuclear issues, including nuclear waste management, and a member of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM).
The public might reasonably wonder why, with this background, Kemp is on a committee dealing with GM foods. The website of his former company gives a possible clue. He was managing director of his own risk communication consulting firm, Ray Kemp Consulting Ltd (now dissolved). The company specialised in “addressing controversial health, safety and environmental issues” about a number of risky and unpopular technologies, including radioactive waste disposal; nuclear power plants; and 5G, mobile phone masts, and smart meters. Since his appointment to the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, we might add “GM foods” to that list.
The Oil, Gas and Energy Law website informs us of the stance he is likely to take on GM food risks. The website describes his speciality as “advising on projects, policies and programs where public and stakeholder perceptions of risk differ from the technically assessed levels”. For “technically assessed”, read “claimed by industry and accepted by compliant governments”. The cynical conclusion might be that he is on the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee in order to persuade the public to accept the risks posed by GM foods.
While such a role may not formally constitute a conflict of interest, it seems obvious that in the public interest, this “risk perception and communication” expert should be replaced by someone with a technical understanding of the risks posed by GM foods based on empirical research.
Dr Elizabeth Lund (-)
According to her declaration of interests on the ACNFP website, Dr Elizabeth Lund is a freelance consultant in the area of research ethics and nutritional study design and is alternate vice-chair of West London Gene Therapy Advisory Committee and Research Ethics Committee.
We did not identify any conflicts of interest for her.
Professor Hans Verhagen (+ -)
Professor Hans Verhagen is a board-certified toxicologist and nutritionist who is also the owner of his own consultancy business, Food Safety & Nutrition Consultancy, following his retirement from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in 2020, where he was Head of the Risk Assessment and Scientific Assistance Department, as well as a Senior Scientific Officer.
While toxicological and nutritional expertise is welcome in the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, Verhagen’s consultancy business may put him in an awkward position regarding his duty to serve the public interest rather than that of the GMO developer applicant company. Having served in EFSA for several years, he now offers corporate clients help and advice on “anticipating the outcome of the evaluation of a dossier by EFSA (based on 9 years of practical experience)” and in “actual building [of] a dossier for an application or for a notification”.
A “dossier” is the collection of data that a company wishing to commercialise a GMO must submit to the regulator – in this case, EFSA, but presumably also its UK equivalent, the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee. Could Verhagen find himself in a position whereby in his consultant role, he advises a company how to get its GM food approved, either by EFSA or the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, even perhaps helping the company compile the dossier, and then in his regulatory role on the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, evaluates the safety of the same product?
The same or a very similar dossier is routinely used across multiple regulatory authorities, thanks to widespread “regulatory harmonisation” around the globe. So it’s possible that even if Verhagen hasn’t helped prepare the dossier for submission to the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee, he may have helped prepare it for submission to EFSA. The two agencies may appear to be independent of one another, but any given company could submit substantially the same dossier to both. Alternatively, a company that has been a client of Verhagen’s consultancy firm may submit a dossier to the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee on a product that the consultancy firm has not specifically dealt with, but there would still be a conflict of loyalty in that Verhagen would be evaluating the safety of a product made by a company that was, is, or is likely to be in the future, a client of his consultancy firm.
As is often the case with the declarations of interest on the ACNFP website, not enough information is given about these potential conflicts of interest and how they would be managed if a relevant situation arose, for the public to make a judgement about whether Verhagen’s consultancy business constitutes a conflict of interest. We therefore provisionally conclude, pending clarification, that he has potential conflicts of interest that mean he should be excluded from the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee.
Professor Bruce Whitelaw (+)
According to his declaration of interest on the ACNFP website, Professor Bruce Whitelaw is the interim director of the Roslin Institute, a BBSRC-funded Institute embedded in the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the Easter Bush Campus of the University of Edinburgh. The Roslin gained fame (or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint) as the place where Dolly the sheep, the world’s first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was made. Dolly showed signs of accelerated ageing and developed arthritis and tumours in the lung, and had to be euthanised at only six years old. The natural lifespan of a sheep is 10-12 years.
Within the veterinary campus at Easter Bush, Whitelaw is Dean of Research and Innovation, Chairman of Roslin Innovation Centre (“the business location of choice for companies undertaking strategic, commercial and collaborative research in the animal and veterinary sciences”), and a director and non-executive board member of Roslin Technologies Ltd. Roslin Technologies is a private company with the objective “to advance disruptive biotechnologies to improve protein production”, in particular through lab-grown meat.
The ACNFP website clearly spells out Whitelaw’s vested interests in GM applications in livestock animals: “Through his bioscience research reflected in nearly 200 scientific manuscripts and 12 patents, he pioneers the application of genetic technologies in farmed animals. He currently focusses on genome editing technology and animal stem cells, aiming to advance novel applications for the agricultural and biomedical communities. He led the recent project to genetically engineer pigs to be resistant to Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Virus which has been taken forward into the commercial sector by Genus PIC Ltd.”
Due to Whitelaw’s patents (in the name of Christopher Bruce Whitelaw) and his various commercial interests in GM applications in livestock animals as well as lab-grown meat, he has conflicts of interest in the form of vested interests in the commercialisation of GMO animals and the foods derived therefrom, as well as in GMOs used in food production, such as in lab-grown meat. Therefore he should be excluded from the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee.
Professor Clare Mills (-)
Clare Mills is Professor of Molecular Allergology at the University of Manchester, where she applies molecular science to understand, better diagnose and treat food allergies. She is director and a founder shareholder of Reacta Biotech Ltd (mis-spelled as “React” on the ACNFP website), which develops, manufactures and commercialises oral food challenge materials to pharmaceutical standards for allergy testing.
Mills carried out unspecified work for the biotech company Solazyme (later TerraVia Holdings, Inc., now defunct), which specialised in food oils and algae products, as well as giving advice on allergens to Pepsico. However, these roles do not appear to constitute any conflict of interest with her role on the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee. We identified no conflicts of interest for her.
Professor Pete Lund (+ -)
Professor Pete Lund is a member of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee who is “co-opted” from ACRE (the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, which advises the UK government on the safety and acceptability of GMO releases). He is Emeritus Professor of Molecular Microbiology in the School of Biosciences and Institute of Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham.
The ACNFP website doesn’t give any information on Lund’s interests. However, according to our previous analysis of conflicts of interest of ACRE members, it appears that he has current career interests in biotechnology applications for various industries.
He “runs an active research programme funded by BBSRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh”. No details of the programme are given on the University of Birmingham’s website but his research interests are described in general as “how bacteria respond to different stresses in their environment”. It is unclear whether this is GMO work and this should be clarified in his ACRE declaration of interests.
The Darwin Trust was founded with royalties from the American multinational pharmaceutical biotechnology company Biogen, though this funding came to an end in 2020-21. The BBSRC, the UK public funding body for science, has employees from the JIC in its Pool of Experts and a Research Committee. The JIC, as explained above, is heavily oriented towards corporate interests. This matters because together, the BBSRC’s Pool of Experts and Research Committees assess funding applications and thus decide what kind of science or technology taxpayer money will support.
He leads an EU COST Action research project on “understanding and exploiting the impact of low pH on micro-organisms”, which is relevant to “the microbiology of food and drink, many aspects of industrial biotechnology and bio-processing, and clinical and veterinary treatment of infections in a time of increasing antimicrobial resistance”.
He also “runs an active research programme funded by BBSRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh”. No details of the programme are given on the University of Birmingham’s website but his research interests are described in general as “how bacteria respond to different stresses in their environment”. It is unclear whether this is GMO work and thus should be clarified in his ACRE declaration of interests.
Not enough information is given to know for certain whether Lund’s interests conflict with his role of assessing GM foods and processes on the Subcommittee, so we can only conclude that he has potential conflicts of interest that require clarification.
Professor Alastair Macrae (-)
Professor Alastair Macrae is a “co-opted member” of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee. He is a senior lecturer in Farm Animal Health and Production, and Head of the Dairy Herd Health and Productivity Service (DHHPS), an independent consultancy, at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The ACNFP website gives no information about his interests, but his biography on the University of Edinburgh website shows that he is an animal health expert with a strong interest in nutrition and the diseases of intensive livestock production.
We found no conflicts of interest that could compromise his objectivity on the Subcommittee.
Findings
No conflicts of interests found: (-) 4 out of 11 members
Potential conflicts of interest: (+ -) 3 out of 11 members
Probable or definite conflicts of interest: (+) 4 out of 11 members
According to our analysis of the limited information available on the ACNFP website and elsewhere, four out of 11 members of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee have probable or definite conflicts of interest, in the form of vested interests in the liberalisation or commercialisation of GM technologies or products in the areas of agriculture, food, livestock animals, or food processing. Three out of 11 have potential conflicts of interest that need to be clarified further. Only four out of 11 have no apparent conflicts of interest.
In total, a majority – seven out of eleven, or 64% of the members – of the ACNFP PGT Subcommittee have potential, probable, or definite conflicts of interest in the liberalisation or commercialisation of GM technologies or products in the relevant areas.
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We have taken 16 loans from IMF since 1965, countless IMF officials have been landing & leaving advising every Government on how to manage the economy and yet we remain trapped into debt with no plan to come out. Instead of pruning the military, why doesn’t IMF insist on pruning the Govt starting off with reducing unlimited perks of politicians, the useless Provincial Council system along with unnecessary staff before trying to destabilize the national security apparatus of Sri Lanka?
Contrary to IMF claims that it reduces poverty, studies reveal IMF borrowing countries experience higher rates of poverty via its “reforms” resulting in unemployment, lower government revenue, increased costs for basic services, higher taxes, cuts to pensions & social security.
Privatization/Sale of SOEs results in sacking of redundant state workers contributing to unemployment falling on the State & raising poverty as well as higher prices for public services (water, electricity etc)
IMF’s demand to abolish taxes on repatriation of foreign profits claiming it attracts capital from abroad results in reducing govt revenues & further lowers social spending on the nation’s poor. IMF’s demand to change labor laws to attract foreign investors also effects unemployment & increase to poverty. Imagine the state of affairs if 150,,000 armed force personnel are sacked – this means 150,000 unemployed.
IMF’s demand for free trade zones, reduced tariffs & import duties further reduces govt revenues to serve the people. Lifting of Govt-subsidized price controls also raises costs for consumers especially the middle class & poor.
IMF’s demand on property rights & other perks for foreign investors is again promoting elite privileges only. A Govt has no choice but to seek more loans but no means to repay as all avenues have been drained by IMF.
It is interesting the players promoting going to IMF.
Are we intentionally being kept in debt?
However much the pundits glorifying IMF loans may say, the reality is that money is artificially printed given electronically as SDRs (Special Drawing Rights). Sri Lanka has taken 3,586,000,000 SDRs. These are not currency but countries use them to transact as well as pay back loans even back to IMF.
More & more it becomes clear that Sri Lanka cannot delay formulating a national plan of growth, development where stimulus has to be given to the middle income citizens and austerity has to be implemented for the small segment of rich. The middle class & poor cannot be taxed any more than they have – economic pundits in Sri Lanka must realize this.
In drawing up the national plan, we will have to think of ways that the State apparatus can be both service & profit oriented while benchmarking where cost cutting can and should take place.
Politicians & their families have to wake up to some ground realities – they cannot bathe in riches and luxuries at the cost of the poor and pretend everything is honky dory having agreed to take more loans piling the poor with more debt. Cost cutting for politicians & their families is a must.
The rich & elite need to honestly ask themselves how many pay taxes for all that they enjoy given by the State. The manner companies evade tax, how they are sheepishly taking out their profits & depositing in foreign countries while making a fuss over the need for “good governance” reeks hypocrisy. They too are part responsible for the economic crisis.
The JVP emerged unannounced. The LTTE emerged & flourished with Western-Indian backing. Post-LTTE their sponsors sought revenge from the players that defeated them. So much for their forgive & forget reconciliation mantras. That LTTE ground force is no more does not lessen the threat for the operations of the LTTE fronts together with runaway LTTE have not diminished. Their quest with gun is now quest with pen & the quest to separate Sri Lanka, demands the presence of the Armed Forces.
Contrary to the silly notions of some Colombo elite, the Armed Forces cannot be disbanded & then recalled in an emergency. All of the Colombo elite and pundits would have disappeared if a calamity as that which we experienced with both JVP & LTTE emerges. The Easter Sunday was also a good example that we have another debacle in the horizon. This further requires the presence of the armed forces & intel on call. Let us not forget that the suicide bombers were all rich, educated, socially accepted individuals – therefore we may never know who else is being indoctrinated to become the next suicide bombers. This entails the presence of intel & armed forces to be ready for any unexpected circumstance.
Many may have forgotten that it was the armed forces that ran Public transport, driving trains and buses during JVP/LTTE periods of terror. It was the armed forces that functioned as TV presenters during JVP/LTTE height of terror when they set about killing artists. It was the armed forces that came to the rescue in disaster situation – not the NGOs & foreign salaried Civil Society groups who made dramatic videos & appealed for foreign funds & kept 80% of that funds for themselves & gave away only 20% as “charity”.
That the armed forces & civil defe hello dubnse force also have their own agri units, with storage & transportation was seen during the covid crisis where the armed forces again came to the rescue to provide vegetables to people, doing a yeomen service. This was immediately stopped as some powers that be panicked thinking the public-armed forces unity was not too good for their agenda. However, what needs to be highlighted here, is that the agri apparatus of the armed forces can and should be strengthened and there is no reason for anyone in particular the LTTE agents or the NGO agents or even IMF to object. What kind of a spineless Govt or Parliament do we elect if they can only bark at the people but worship the enemies?
If the IMF is so concerned about helping Sri Lanka get its house in order – why could they not do so the 16 times that IMF provided assistance to Sri Lanka?
If the IMF is so concerned about corruptions – why are they not going after the corrupt politicians and public officials & demanding they be sacked first?
If the IMF is so concerned about reducing the cost to the state – why are they not looking at the areas where the costs are more?
When the people are all claiming the Provincial Council system is a white elephant, why does the IMF want its continuance instead of asking to close the PC system & with it the staff in it who provide no meaningful service to the people & these roles can easily be handed over to the Local Govts to do. Restructuring of this is essential.
Should we not look at all of the over staffed Govt offices, corporations etc? Should they not be pruned before targeting the armed forces, who are a professionally trained outfit that cannot be trained over night or re-recruited overnight in case of emergency. Unless, this is the whole aim of disbanding the armed forces, with intent to dislocate Sri Lanka’s ability to bring reinforcements in the event of a terror situation!
When the entities that seek to prune the armed forces (local & foreign) are key players that supported LTTE terrorism, separatism & disunity in Sri Lanka, it is natural for the sane to wonder what their game plan is. This request to reduce is a carry forward of their demand post-LTTE defeat to confine the military to barracks, close down military camps & remove the military from the North & East. Now their latest sing song is “reduce the military”. By now, people should realize the sequence in their demands & the hidden motives behind it.
However, it is baffling that the politicians are in agreement, unless they are threatened to – either prune the armed forces or face pruning their own privileges & perks. Probably, this threat may be hidden from public & that is why they are boldly claiming to agree to IMF demands.
Would these politicians agree to reduce their own security contingents first! Why should their wives, children or their domestics be given military escorts even for private events!
The military men providing security to the extended families certainly should be reduced & instead these men can be used for more important roles, especially in times where strikes take place, they can be used to support essential services. They should also continue their agriculture drive, but that is unlikely to happen because the mafia & their international networks would not want a disciplined army venturing into areas that they cannot influence.
Sri Lanka can certainly get back on its feet, but to do so the cuts have to be done at the right places. What we have is a bunch of people thriving on the poverty of the people & to sustain their livelihoods, people are being unfairly taxed. IMF is simply watching as it enables the West to fish in troubled waters.
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Shenali D Waduge is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Anti-government protest in Sri Lanka on April 13, 2022 in front of the Presidential Secretariat (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
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***
In a live television appearance today on the BBC, cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra took the network by surprise when he made the “unprompted” suggestion that mRNA vaccines, such as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, pose a cardiovascular risk.
Malhotra later tweeted the video from his BBC appearance, accompanied by the celebratory message, “We broke mainstream broadcast media,” generating instant controversy in the Twittersphere and elsewhere — ranging from triumphant tweets by those skeptical of mRNA vaccines, to calls for Malhotra to be “canceled” and questioning his claims.
BREAKING BBC News:
Cardiologist says likely contributory factor to excess cardiovascular deaths is covid mRNA vaccine and roll out should be suspended pending an inquiry.
Malhotra’s father, Dr. Kailash Chand — a prominent general practitioner who was formerly deputy chair of the British Medical Association — died in July 2021.
Malhotra told Kennedy he was prompted to look into the safety data on the COVID-19 vaccine when his father — “a very eminent doctor in the U.K., considered one of the most prolific advocates for the National Health Service” — suffered an unexplained sudden cardiac death in July after getting an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
According to his online biography, Malhotra is a cardiologist and Visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health in Brazil. He is also an honorary council member of the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic and cardiology examiner at the U.K.’s University of Hertfordshire.
Malhotra: ‘mRNA vaccines carry a cardiovascular link’
Malhotra appeared on the BBC today to discuss a recent change in policy by the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) that loosened restrictions on prescribing statins — medications that reduce cholesterol in the blood — allowing general practitioners to prescribe them to anyone who wants them.
However, several minutes into his live appearance, in the context of a discussion of cardiovascular risk, he pivoted and addressed his views on mRNA vaccines. He said:
“What is almost certain — if I can just say this — my own research has found, and this is something that is probably a likely contributing factor, is that the COVID mRNA vaccines do carry a cardiovascular risk.
“And I’ve actually called for the suspension of this pending an inquiry, because there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment over what’s causing the excess deaths.”
Malhotra’s remarks caught the network — and presenter Lukwesa Burak — off guard. Visibly uncomfortable, Burak followed up by stating, “So what you’re saying in terms of the mRNA link to cardiovascular risk is that that’s been proven medically, scientifically?”
According to the U.K.’s Press Gazette, a BBC spokesperson later issued a response to the incident, stating:
“Dr Aseem Malhotra was invited on to the BBC News Channel to talk about the latest NICE [National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] recommendations on statins. During the discussion he made unprompted claims about the COVID mRNA vaccine.
“We then asked Professor Peter Openshaw, who represents the overwhelming scientific consensus on the vaccine, to be interviewed on air on this topic and he challenged and rebutted the claims that had been made.”
“Good job Aseem!! The interviewer was completely thrown and tried to challenge your statement regarding MRNA [vaccine] by suggesting your assertions unproven— but as soon as she realized she couldn’t, she quickly changed the subject. Doubt you’ll be invited back on the BBC anytime soon!”
Another Twitter user noticed that a copy of Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” was visible behind Malhotra:
And a prominent copy of Kennedy's "The Real Anthony Fauci" on your bookcase. . . Based!
“Excellent. You came across very well and put the point about the vax link in a balanced and reasonable way.”
Some other Twitter users were less pleased. One user openly asked Ofcom, Britain’s telecommunications regulator, why the “disgraced, lying fraud” Malhotra was “allowed to do this” on the BBC.
Deborah Elaine tweeted a message about the BBC broadcast to Timothy Caulfield, a professor of law at the University of Alberta in Canada and host of a television program known as “A User’s Guide for Cheating Death.”
Caulfield later followed this up with an enraged tweet asking:
“What the HELL is the @BBCNews doing giving a notorious & discredited anti-vaxxer THIS platform???
“NO evidence to support his claims. He published his ‘analysis’ in a vanity journal that he edits. Etc.
“Pls, get it together, @BBCBreaking @BBChealth! So much damage with this BS!”
The Press Gazette claimed “the overwhelming bulk of peer-reviewed literature suggests that mRNA vaccines are safe.”
Notably, the article was written by Bron Maher, whose Press Gazette bio states he previously worked for NewsGuard, a “fact-checking” firm that closely collaborates with the WHO and social media platforms, as previously reported by The Defender.
Malhotra previously published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Insulin Resistance, “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine.”
In July 2021, when his father died, Malhotra tweeted:
I’m left without any doubt that the mRNA product was a likely contributory factor in the sudden cardiac death of my father, Dr Kailash Chand Malhotra ( Honorary Vice President of the British Medical Association) https://t.co/XZRw7yh6EW
Malhotra said delays in an ambulance being dispatched by the U.K.’s beleaguered NHS to transport his father after suffering cardiac arrest also appears to have contributed to his death.
More and more studies demonstrating link between mRNA vaccines, cardiac problems
In a recent video, New Orleans-based emergency medicine physician Dr. Joseph Fraiman also called for the immediate suspension of the administration of mRNA vaccines.
Fraiman co-authored a peer-reviewed article, “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults,” published in August 2022 in Vaccine.
In his video, Fraiman stated:
“I was the lead author of a peer-reviewed study that reanalyzed the original Pfizer and the Moderna clinical trials for the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines. We found the vaccine increased serious adverse events at a rate of one in 800.
“At the time of publication, my co-authors and I did not believe our single study warranted the withdrawal of the messenger RNA vaccines from the market. However, since its publication, multiple new pieces of evidence have come to light, and this has caused me to reevaluate my position.
“An article published in The BMJ regarding the FDA’s [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] own observational surveillance data found the messenger RNAs were associated with multiple of the exact same serious adverse events identified in our original study. But the FDA had failed to inform the public of these findings.
“In addition, now we have multipleautopsystudies that find essentially conclusive evidence that the vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac deaths. Yet the rate of these vaccine-induced deaths remains unknown.
“I believe, given the information, the messenger RNA vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market until new randomized controlled trials can clearly demonstrate the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the serious harm now we know the vaccines are causing.”
Earlier this week, Andrew Bridgen, a member of Parliament with the U.K.’s ruling Conservative Party, had his whip removed — meaning he was suspended by his party pending “formal investigation” — for tweeting that COVID-19 vaccines are “causing serious harms” and repeating a quote from a cardiologist who told ZeroHedge the COVID-19 vaccination campaign is “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”
Numerous U.K. politicians, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, quickly condemned Bridgen’s remarks. Bridgen is known for being outspoken regarding his views on COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines, including during parliamentary speeches.
On Jan. 10, Kennedy, CHD and others sued the BBC, the Associated Press, Reuters and The Washington Post, which are all members of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership spearheaded by the BBC.
The plaintiffs allege TNI members colluded with Big Tech to censor and de-platform voices questioning official COVID-19 and 2020 U.S. presidential election narratives.
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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.”
Featured image is from CHD
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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***
Between the documentation obtained through a recent lawsuit against the White House and the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, it’s become quite clear that every facet of the U.S. government, including its intelligence agencies, are involved in illegal and unconstitutional censorship
We now have proof that the FBI has been acting as the key instigator and implementer of the government’s illegal censorship of Americans. The FBI has also actively interfered in multiple elections — all while inventing the narrative that foreign nations were interfering
Twitter has worked hand in hand with the U.S. Department of Defense to aid U.S. intelligence agencies in their efforts to influence foreign governments using fake news, computerized deepfake videos and bots
The Twitter files also reveal members of Congress have a direct line to Twitter and have had accounts suspended on their behalf and content removed at their whim
Discovery documents from a lawsuit against the White House filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana show at least 67 federal employees across more than a dozen agencies are also engaged in illegal censorship activities. This includes aides to President Biden, who pressured social media companies to change their policies to fit White House demands for censorship
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Between the documentation obtained through a recent lawsuit against the White House and the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, it’s become quite clear that every facet of the U.S. government, including its intelligence agencies, are involved in illegal and unconstitutional censorship.
In the video above, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviews independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who has spent weeks sifting through the released Twitter files and reported on the contents.
FBI Has Gone Off the Rails
Importantly, we now have proof that the FBI has been acting as the key instigator and implementer of the government’s illegal censorship of Americans’ political and medical views. The agency has also, on a regular basis and for unknown purposes, asked Twitter to reveal the location of specific Twitter users, such as actor Billy Baldwin.
What’s more, internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos, emails and documents show the DHS has worked on expanding its influence over tech platforms for years, so, government censorship is not something that came about in response to the COVID crisis. Nor is the censorship limited to COVID or public health information in general.
Evidence shows the FBI has actively interfered in multiple elections — all while inventing the narrative that foreign nations were doing the interfering.1 As noted by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., these kinds of activities are “the biggest threat to our constitutional democracy today.”2
As just one example, we now know the FBI plotted to quench the Hunter Biden laptop story well before the first report about it was published. In collaboration with Twitter, Facebook and the Aspen Institute, the FBI held a tabletop exercise to practice the shaping of the media’s coverage of a potential “hack and dump” operation involving Hunter Biden material.3,4 As reported by the New York Post:5
“[The] drill was put into practical use weeks later, when The Post broke the news about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — which was either ignored or downplayed by most mainstream news outlets and suppressed by both Twitter and Facebook.”
There’s also evidence showing the FBI has been shielding Hunter Biden and working with social media to censor bad press about him as far back as 2018.6 That job was probably made easier by the fact that reportedly former FBI agents work at both Twitter and Facebook.
For example, Jim Baker spent three decades with the FBI before becoming Twitter’s head lawyer,7and Facebook employs no less than 115 “former” employees of the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies, most of whom now work in Facebook’s content moderation department.8
Twitter Paid to Censor Americans and Promote US Propaganda
Disturbingly, we now also have evidence showing that while Twitter insisted it was cracking down on covert government propaganda accounts, they only tracked down and banned foreign government-affiliated propaganda while working hand in hand with the U.S. Department of Defense to aid U.S. intelligence agencies in their efforts to influence foreign governments using fake news, computerized deepfake videos and bots.9 As reported by The Intercept:10
“Behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval and special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used overt identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around two years or more. Some remain active …
In 2017 a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts ‘we use to amplify certain messages.’ The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one and ‘whitelist’ abilities for the others.”
Whitelisted accounts have a “validated” status similar to that of the blue check mark, which ensures they are promoted in searches. These accounts also don’t get shadow-banned or limited by other means. Adding insult to injury, the FBI has been using taxpayer dollars to pay Twitter for their censorship and propaganda services — more than $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 alone.11
Congressional Members Involved in Censoring Americans
The FBI has not acted alone, however. Far from it. The Twitter files reveal members of Congress have a direct line to Twitter and have had accounts suspended on their behalf and content removed at their whim. As reported by MSN:12
“… Taibbi … reported that Twitter ‘received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned.’ An example he shared was one sent in November 2020 by [Rep. Adam] Schiff’s office, who contacted Twitter hoping the tech giant would take action regarding ‘alleged harassment from QAnon conspiracists’ against Schiff’s staff, including aide Sean Misko.
‘Remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content,’ the request to Twitter read. ‘Suspend the many accounts, including @GregRubini and @paulsperry, which have repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies.'”
Other government leaders have been less clandestine in their censoring operations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, wrote an open letter to Amazon demanding they ban my book, “The Truth About COVID-19.”
Discovery documents from a lawsuit against the White House13 filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) show at least 6714,15 federal employees across more than a dozen agencies are engaged in these kinds of illegal censorship activities. This includes officials from:
Consultants from the strategic communications and marketing firm Reingold16 were also hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media in this intentional effort to violate our Constitutional right to free speech.
A Look Inside the White House Censorship Machine
In a January 8, 2023, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty reviewed a series of emails between White House digital media director Rob Flaherty and a Facebook executive, illustrating how the White House pressured the company to censor and remove vaccine content even though Facebook itself characterized the material as “often-true content:”17
“Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty … and social-media executives prove the companies put COVID censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House — not voluntarily.”
Flaherty also demanded Facebook limit the spread of viral content on WhatsApp, a private messaging app with broad reach among “immigrant communities and communities of color.” In the end, Facebook acquiesced to all of Flaherty’s demands to prevent the spread of vaccine hesitancy and control political speech. As noted by Younes and Kheriaty:18
“President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy … publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden [about] his ‘message to platforms like Facebook.’
He replied, ‘They’re killing people.’ Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.”
White House Pressured Google and YouTube to Do Its Bidding
Flaherty also had Google in his crosshairs, and accused YouTube of “‘funneling’ people into vaccine hesitancy,” adding that this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the White House.”
“These emails establish a clear pattern,” Younes and Kheriaty write. “Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor COVID-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government approved COVID narratives.
Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line — for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need COVID vaccines …
The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly.
Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.
The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about COVID-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific ‘consensus’ on critically important issues around COVID-19.”
Weaponization of Government Select Committee Impaneled
Taken together, the revelations from the Twitter files and this lawsuit clearly demonstrate that most, if not all, aspects of the U.S. government have been secretly weaponized to undermine and circumvent the Constitutional rights of the people.
As noted by Taibbi in his Fox News interview:
“This is not a partisan story. It’s a story about the architecture of the intelligence community and law enforcement getting its hands on speech, and on the ability of people to communicate with one another through platforms like Twitter and Facebook. And they’re doing this in a very profound way — it’s much more serious than what I thought at the beginning …”
While the danger we’re in as a nation is far more dire than anyone suspected, there is some good news. A new select committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, has been launched to investigate the weaponization of government, the politicization of the FBI and the DOJ’s investigation into and harassment of parents who spoke out against COVID mandates, critical race theory and the sexualization of their children at school board meetings. As reported by The Post Millennial:19
“This investigative panel will demand emails and correspondence between the Biden administration and big tech companies, and follows the massive revelations that came to light through the recent release of the Twitter files. Newly minted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy … was asked to form the committee as part of the negotiations that brought him to power …
The probe into communications between tech giants and President Biden’s aides will look for government pressure that could have resulted in censorship or harassment of conservatives — or squelching of debate on polarizing policies, including the CDC on COVID …”
While it’s likely that government personnel and agencies will try to ignore the committee’s requests for information, the committee does have subpoena power, and hopefully will not be too timid to use it.
Unfortunately, since the GOP does not control the Senate, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to pass any new laws based on the committee’s findings. That said, legislation to penalize government censorship has already been introduced, and you can help push it forward by asking your representatives to support it.
Support Legislation to Penalize Government Censorship
The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act20 (HR.8752), introduced by three Republican House Representatives on the House Oversight and Reform, Judiciary, and Commerce committees, including Jordan, is specifically aimed at preventing federal employees from using their positions to influence censorship decisions by tech platforms.
The bill would create restrictions to prevent federal employees from asking or encouraging private entities to censor private speech or otherwise discourage free speech, and impose penalties, including civil fines and disciplinary actions for government employees who facilitate social media censorship.
While the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids government censoring and restricting free speech, HR. 8752 could be a helpful enforcement tool — and we clearly need enforcement, seeing how more than a dozen agencies are flouting the Constitution and have done so for years. People might tend to think twice, though, when they know there’s a personal price to pay.
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In a “national consultation”, the Hungarian government asked Hungarians about the sanctions against Russia. Some 97 percent of the participants voted against the sanctions. The government regards the result as “indicative”.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is one of the harshest critics of sanctions against Russia. He saw this confirmed by the most recent survey in Hungary.
The results of the survey are “pointing the way”, said government spokeswoman Alexandra Szentkirályi on Facebook. It should also be heard in Brussels. The embassy is clearly in favor of a reassessment of the sanctions.
The Hungarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán repeatedly holds “national consultations” in which votes can be mailed or sent online. However, the surveys have no legally binding consequences.
Questions about sanctions with regard to energy sources, raw materials, tourism, inflation
This time, Hungarians were asked if they agree with EU sanctions against Russia on energy, raw materials and nuclear fuel rods. The referendum also dealt with the consequences of the sanctions policy for tourism and the rise in food prices due to the sanctions.
Orbán’s opponents have long considered the questions suggestive, manipulative and misleading. They claim that in practice, only answers in favor of the government were allowed. Eight million people are entitled to vote in Hungary and 1,4 million citizens took part in the vote.
Critics also pointed out that Hungary had actually agreed to all EU sanctions packages against Russia so far.
Last year, in October, the government launched a campaign against the EU’s policy: “Sanctions from Brussels are destroying us!” they warned in reference to multiple rounds of measures targeting Russia.
Orbán justified the appointment of the consultation at the end of September 2022 with sharp criticism of the sanctions: “The sanctions were not decided in a democratic manner, but Brussels bureaucrats and European elites decided on them.”
Hungary alone not strong enough to take on Brussels
In an interview with Radio Kossuth, Orbán explained:
“Hungary’s strength is not enough for that, and so mine is by definition. One thing I can do is to try to stop the damage, to say that this is going to be a problem, where we feel that the Hungarian national interest is being fundamentally harmed, we veto there, we stand up for Hungary there, we don’t allow it, but we don’t know how to change, to set the sanctions policy on a different track.”
He said this would simply require a political decision to be made in Brussels. The courage to counter Brussels also exists, he added.
“Here we are, for example, or me personally, only this is of no importance, because in order for this to change, for this brave opinion to have consequences, it would have to be a German or a French person who are strong enough to be able to change the position of the entire union.”
Orbán underscored that if the sanctions were to be lifted, “the price of energy would drop in no time and the general price level, i.e. inflation, would immediately be halved with it – so the rate of inflation would be reduced by at least half, but maybe even more”.
He said that unfortunately the sanctions policy would continue in Brussels:
“We will introduce sanctions, which will turn out not to work. Behind this, there is another culture shock that affects us Hungarians. It’s about the Germans. I grew up always being told at home that the German is right! The German is precise, the engineer, he calculates, he doesn’t rush, he knows what he’s doing.
“Now I’m looking at what they’re doing, the Brussels committee has a German president, these sanctions are being imposed, and they’re not fully calculated from a professional point of view. So, our belief in the crisis management ability of the Germans, stemming from German engineering precision, has decreased significantly in the past period.”
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Featured image: PM Viktor Orbán speaks to a crowd in Budapest. Facebook via Free West Media
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The top US general is observing new, expanded combat training for Ukrainian forces in Germany. The German foreign minister is exploring ways to bring Russian President Putin to justice in The Hague. DW has the latest.
The US military’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is visiting the Grafenwöhr training area in southern Germany on Monday to observe a program that trains Ukrainian forces.
The US military started giving hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers new combined arms training in Germany on Sunday to aid the troops in defending their homeland against Russian invasion, the top US military official said. Milley added the goal was to get some 500 troops combat-ready within five-to-eight weeks.
Milley told reporters traveling with him that the training was vital in aiding Ukraine’s forces to recapture territory seized by Russia in past months, the Associated Press reported.
“This support is really important for Ukraine to be able to defend itself,” Milley said. “And we’re hoping to be able to pull this together here in short order.”
He said he hoped the newly trained troops would be able to use freshly delivered Western weaponry and equipment before rainy weather sets in during the spring.
A full set of weapons and equipment is being provided to the Ukrainian soldiers in Germany.
The combined arms training provided in Germany will give participants the ability to launch offensives against the invading Russian forces and counter their attacks.
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