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The necessity and benefits of a broad natural diet are evident from Egyptian skeletal remains from 6000 years ago, which suggest scurvy—a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C. In 1753 a Scottish surgeon, James Lind demonstrated that scurvy could be treated with citrus fruit. The New Zealand government seems intent on changing history.
Just before Christmas, our Government introduced the Therapeutic Products Bill for its first reading. Public consultation is being rushed through the summer holidays here in the southern hemisphere and closes on February 15th. The Bill contains 423 pages of dense provisions with countless cross references. I am not sure whether any MPs actually read it before voting for its acceptance or whether the public could stand to do so. You can view my video summary of its draconian provisions here.
You might be interested in the kind of nation we will end up inhabiting:
Reverse Patenting
If a Natural Health Product is found to benefit a serious illness (such as lemons which benefit scurvy), according to the Bill it should be classed as a medicine. Consequently, according to the letter of the new law, only doctors will be allowed to prescribe lemons. Joking apart, most foods benefit serious illness. You might think there is no need to pass a law classifying them as medicines, but according to the government you would be wrong.
80% of drugs are in fact derived from the properties of plants. For years pharmaceutical companies have been trying to patent medicinal plants and secure a monopoly of their supply and use. But this effort largely failed in the patent courts. The remedy for pharmaceutical companies is contained in the Bill being introduced by our Labour government. If a plant is used to make a medicine or the molecular structure of any of its compounds is mimicked by a medicine, then the use of the actual plant should be restricted.
For this reason, in 2016, a bevy of well-paid Ministry of Health experts (???) produced an idiotic list of common plants that they envisioned should be restricted. Natural products in this list included cinnamon, eggplant, almond, mustard, tea (yes you did read that correctly), coconut, and many many others. The present Bill (the third attempt over the years to get this past Parliament) sets up the same conditions that prompted the 2016 list of restricted plants. A sort of frenzied desire to control the minutia of individual life driven by a mad instinct that the government always knows best.
More than 50% of NZ citizens use natural products, so you might think their availability should not be controlled by the government. Wrong again. The Bill requires the appointment of a regulator who will decide for us what among what we have eaten for millennia can be sold openly and what should be restricted. The idea that one person can decide for all of us what plants that grow in the earth, can be sold, eaten, or used puts New Zealand in a unique class among tin pot kingdoms. We can imagine as we gather around the family breakfast table a swarm of well-paid government experts with pens and questionnaires hovering close by for a final check.
The situation at the border is very similar. If a herb benefits health, it will be a medicine and therefore cannot be imported except with a permit. Border officials will be very busy examining packages and if they find anything healthy, tossing it in the bin. Am I exaggerating? No. Rauwolfia Serpentina is an Indian herb that reduces blood pressure. Studies such this one published in 2015 show it is a safe and effective treatment for high blood pressure, but it is banned here in New Zealand because some hypertension drugs contain synthetic copies of one of the many alkaloids found in the whole plant—reverse patenting at its best.
Why is the Government Intending to Regulate Natural Health Products?
A rational answer to this question is hard to find. A recent EU study found that natural health products are 45,000 times safer than pharmaceutical drugs. The government, however, apparently believes they are unsafe, but where is the evidence? It doesn’t exist. An imaginary NZ doctor explains to their teenage patient:
“Years ago, before you were born, dearly beloved, a person whose name is lost in the mists of time might have felt a little off colour after taking a vitamin tablet and then recovered quickly. Ever since then, the New Zealand government has quite rightly been very suspicious of vitamins and plants grown in soil. So they are introducing a new and very honest law for us all.” or words to that effect.
There are many continuous traditions of natural approaches to health that have been followed by cultures on every continent for thousands of years and still are. There are more modern ones too that have attracted followers guided by trained practitioners. These include Indian Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Chiropractic, Homeopathy, etc. The idea that a regulator who is unfamiliar with these traditions should control their practice and availability is inherently flawed.
This Bill represents an attempt to impose a modern medical/pharmaceutical straight jacket on the process of medical choice. A straight jacket that will no doubt be administered by people who are unfamiliar with and even opposed to natural medicine. The apparent intention is to drive people towards pharmaceutical-based medicine. It is worth noting that modern medical misadventure and misprescription is the third leading cause of death—hardly a direction that deserves a monopoly.
The logic of insisting on total government control of medical choice escapes me. It fits with a perspective that has been steadily growing throughout the pandemic: the government is seeking to control every aspect of life and impose a kind of uniformity on the nation. This originates from a distorted one size fits all view of reality. Diversity is actually a great source of progress and happiness, not something to be stamped out—a discredited communistic perspective.
It is rather curious that for two years the government has been denying there is any connection between serious illness and mRNA vaccination despite tens of thousands of instances of illness proximate to inoculation and studies showing a statistical connection, as well as plausible biomolecular mechanisms. In contrast, on account of a very, very small handful of unproven historical complaints about natural health products, despite widespread safe use, they wish to control what we eat and what health choices we can make.
Whichever side of the vaccine debate you are on, it should be clear that the government cannot have it both ways. They can’t apply different and incompatible logic as it suits their agenda. All the more curious when many vaccine injured and long Covid sufferers are relying on natural health products to help get them through conditions which many of our medical professionals deny exist.
Last night I spoke to a medical doctor who described how his comments on the benefits of Vitamin C and D have been censored by his colleagues and officials. No surprise really, doctors only spend an hour or two learning about the principles of nutrition during the entire course of their long training. One of his colleagues told him the only benefit of vitamins is to change the colour of urine. That just about says it all. James Lind, who found that lemons cure scurvy, must be turning in his grave.
There is in fact no reasonable rationale for introducing restrictions on Natural Health Products, they are not harming anyone and studies show that many of them have significant benefits for health. The introduction of the new law will cost a lot and it will be paid for by financial levies on manufacturers, importers, suppliers, practitioners, and retailers. A single company selling 300 products, each making two health claims, will be liable for as much as $3 million in government charges. Ultimately these costs will be passed onto the public making natural health products unaffordable.
What the Bill Doesn’t Do
Gradually over the last few years, synthetic flavours and additives have been turning up in processed supermarket items. If you are buying vanilla ice cream, it is now usually labelled as containing natural vanilla flavour. This is not in fact made from natural vanilla beans, it is a synthetic flavour. The use of the term “natural” is intended to disguise this fact. In 2016 our Ministry of Health approved over 3,000 synthetic ingredients, many of them without safety testing. The Therapeutic Products Bill will do nothing to correct the sleight of hand that is describing synthetic additives with an unknown safety profile as ‘natural’. I discuss many of the ways synthetic additives are affecting health in my book Your DNA Diet.
Nor will the Bill encourage the distribution of information about natural approaches to health that studies show are very beneficial in controlling common serious health conditions. Advice for example about diet, exercise, and the curbing of unhealthy habits such as smoking, excessive drinking, or ultra processed foods. Changes in lifestyle can be very influential in reducing cardiac problems as this BBC interview reports. Many other serious health condition outcomes could be improved in this way including cancer, obesity, diabetes, blood pressure, etc.
If the government wishes to encourage improvements in health and longevity, it would do well to launch a public education programme about natural health products and approaches rather than seek to limit their use.
What You Can Do
If we wish to be able to continue to freely choose natural health options, herbal medicines and supplements without government interference, we will need to speak up. Go to this link to make a submission before February 15th. Write to your MP and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open ended blank cheque to control the sale and use of products used by more than 50% of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use. Moreover, it will put many NZ businesses out of action. I could say a lot more but now is the time for all of us to have a go and hold up our hands. If we don’t, we will only have ourselves to blame. Given the short submission time available, we have to take a scattershot approach, contact as many people as you can and explain how this is going to seriously affect their health options now and down the line.
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Guy Hatchard, Ph.D., was formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID, a food testing and certification company (now known as FoodChain ID).
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A startup claims it has launched weather balloons that may have released reflective sulfur particles in the stratosphere, potentially crossing a controversial barrier in the field of solar geoengineering.
Geoengineering refers to deliberate efforts to manipulate the climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, mimicking a natural process that occurs in the aftermath of large volcanic eruptions. In theory, spraying sulfur and similar particles in sufficient quantities could potentially ease global warming.
It’s not technically difficult to release such compounds into the stratosphere. But scientists have mostly (though not entirely) refrained from carrying out even small-scale outdoor experiments. And it’s not clear that any have yet injected materials into that specific layer of the atmosphere in the context of geoengineering-related research.
That’s in part because it’s highly controversial. Little is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scales, but they could have dangerous side effects. The impacts could also be worse in some regions than others, which could provoke geopolitical conflicts.
Some researchers who have long studied the technology are deeply troubled that the company, Make Sunsets, appears to have moved forward with launches from a site in Mexico without any public engagement or scientific scrutiny. It’s already attempting to sell “cooling credits” for future balloon flights that could carry larger payloads.
Several researchers MIT Technology Review spoke with condemned the effort to commercialize geoengineering at this early stage. Some potential investors and customers who have reviewed the company’s proposals say that it’s not a serious scientific effort or a credible business but more of an attention grab designed to stir up controversy in the field.
Luke Iseman, the cofounder and CEO of Make Sunsets, acknowledges that the effort is part entrepreneurial and part provocation, an act of geoengineering activism.
He hopes that by moving ahead in the controversial space, the startup will help drive the public debate and push forward a scientific field that has faced great difficulty carrying out small-scale field experiments amid criticism.
“We joke slash not joke that this is partly a company and partly a cult,” he says.
Iseman, previously a director of hardware at Y Combinator, says he expects to be pilloried by both geoengineering critics and researchers in the field for taking such a step, and he recognizes that “making me look like the Bond villain is going to be helpful to certain groups.” But he says climate change is such a grave threat, and the world has moved so slowly to address the underlying problem, that more radical interventions are now required.
“It’s morally wrong, in my opinion, for us not to be doing this,” he says. What’s important is “to do this as quickly and safely as we can.”
Wildly premature
But dedicated experts in the field think such efforts are wildly premature and could have the opposite effect from what Iseman expects.
“The current state of science is not good enough … to either reject, or to accept, let alone implement” solar geoengineering, wrote Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, in an email. The initiative is calling for oversight of geoengineering and other climate-altering technologies, whether by governments, international accords or scientific bodies. “To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea,” he added, comparing it to Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s decision to use CRISPR to edit the DNA of embryos while the scientific community was still debating the safety and ethics of such a step.
Shuchi Talati, a scholar in residence at American University who is forming a nonprofit focused on governance and justice in solar geoengineering, says Make Sunset’s actions could set back the scientific field, reducing funding, dampening government support for trusted research, and accelerating calls to restrict studies.
The company’s behavior plays into long-held fears that a “rogue” actor with no particular knowledge of atmospheric science or the implications of the technology could unilaterally choose to geoengineer the climate, without any kind of consensus around whether it’s okay to do so—or what the appropriate global average temperature should be. That’s because it’s relatively cheap and technically simple to do, at least in a crude way.
David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, warned of such a scenario more than a decade ago. A “Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet … could force a lot of geoengineering on his own,” he said, invoking the Goldfinger character from a 1964 James Bond movie, best remembered for murdering a woman by painting her gold.
Some observers were quick to draw parallels between Make Sunsets and a decade-old incident in which an American entrepreneur reportedly poured a hundred tons of iron sulfate into the ocean, in an effort to spawn a plankton bloom that could aid salmon populations and suck down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Critics say it violated international restrictions on what’s known as iron fertilization, which were in part inspired by a growing number of commercial proposals to sell carbon credits for such work. Some believe it subsequently stunted research efforts in field.
Pasztor and others stressed that Make Sunset’s efforts underscore the urgent need to establish broad-based oversight and clear rules for responsible research in geoengineering and help determine whether or under what conditions there should be a social license to move forward with experiments or beyond. As MIT Technology Review first reported, the Biden administration is developing a federal research plan that would guide how scientists proceed with geoengineering studies.
Balloon launches
By Iseman’s own description, the first two balloon launches were very rudimentary. He says they occurred in April somewhere in the state of Baja California, months before Make Sunsets was incorporated in October. Iseman says he pumped a few grams of sulfur dioxide into weather balloons and added what he estimated would be the right amount of helium to carry them into the stratosphere.
He expected they would burst under pressure at that altitude and release the particles. But it’s not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches.
“This was firmly in science project territory,” he says, adding: “Basically, it was to confirm that I could do it.”
A 2018 white paper raised the possibility that an environmental, humanitarian, or other type of group could use this simple balloon approach to carry out a distributed, do-it-yourself geoengineering scheme.
In future work, Make Sunsets hopes to increase the sulfur payloads, add telemetry equipment and other sensors, eventually move to reusable balloons, and publish data following the launches.
The company is already attempting to earn revenue from the cooling effects of future flights. It is offering to sell $10 “cooling credits” for releasing one gram of particles in the stratosphere—enough, it asserts, to offset the warming effect of one ton of carbon for one year.
“What I want to do is create as much cooling as quickly as I responsibly can, over the rest of my life, frankly,” Iseman says, adding later that they will deploy as much sulfur in 2023 as “we can get customers to pay us” for.
The company says it has raised $750,000 in funding from Boost VC and Pioneer Fund, among others, and that its early investors have also been purchasing cooling credits. The venture firms didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review before press time.
‘A terrible idea’
Talati was highly critical of the company’s scientific claims, stressing that no one can credibly sell credits that purport to represent such a specific per gram outcome, given vast uncertainty at this stage of research.
“What they’re claiming to actually accomplish with such a credit is the entirety of what’s uncertain right now about geoengineering,” she says.
Kelly Wanser, executive director of SilverLining, a nonprofit that supports research efforts on climate risks and potential interventions, agreed.
“From a business perspective, reflective cooling effects and risks cannot currently be quantified in any meaningful way, making the offering a speculative form of ‘junk credit’ that is unlikely to have value to climate credit markets,” she wrote in an email.
Talati adds that it’s hypocritical for Make Sunsets to assert they’re acting on humanitarian grounds, while moving ahead without meaningfully engaging with the public, including with those who could be affected by their actions.
“They’re violating the rights of communities to dictate their own future,” she says.
David Keith, one of the world’s leading experts on solar geoengineering, says that the amount of material in question—less than 10 grams of sulfur per flight—doesn’t represent any real environmental danger; a commercial flight can emit about 100 grams per minute, he points out. Keith and his colleagues at Harvard University have worked for years to move forward on a small-scale stratospheric experiment known as SCoPEx, which has been repeatedly delayed.
But he says he’s troubled by any effort to privatize core geoengineering technologies, including patenting them or selling credits for the releases, because “commercial development cannot produce the level of transparency and trust the world needs to make sensible decisions about deployment,” as he wrote in an earlier blog post.
Keith says a private company would have financial motives to oversell the benefits, to downplay the risks, and to continue selling its services even as the planet cools to lower than preindustrial temperatures.
“Doing it as a startup is a terrible idea,” he says.
For its part, the company says it’s operating on the best modeling research available today, and that it will adjust its practices as it learns more and hopes to collaborate with nations and experts to guide these efforts as it scales up.
“We are convinced solar [geoengineeering] is the only feasible path to staying below 2 ˚C [of warming over preindustrial levels], and we will work with the scientific community to deploy this life-saving tool as safely and quickly as possible,” Iseman said in an email.
But critics stress that the time to engage with experts and the public would have been before the company began injecting material into the stratosphere and trying to sell cooling credits—and that it’s likely to face an icy reception from many of those parties now.
James Temple is senior editor for energy at MIT Technology Review, focussing on renewable energy and the use of technology to combat climate change. Previously, he was a senior director at the Verge, deputy managing editor at Recode, and columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.
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First published on January 15 2023
Remember Nuremberg
A reminder to the participants (government officials, heads of state, heads of government, billionaire philanthropists, UN officials et al) of the 2023 WEF Davos Venue regarding what is best understood and described by Peter Koenig below, as
The Globalists’ Criminal agenda directed against humanity:
“The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law, acted as Head of State or responsible government official, does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law. (Nuremberg, Principle III)
“Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy [WEF] to commit any of the foregoing crimes [see full text] are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan” (Nuremberg Principle VI)
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The World Economic Forum (WEF) – with its noble logo: “Committed to Improving the State of the World” (really?) – will be holding its 53rd Annual Meeting from 16-20 January 2023 in Davos Switzerland.
The official WEF Agenda for 2023 is known and available on WEF’s website. This year’s Conference goes under the honorable title of “Cooperation in a Fractured World”.
Attendance
About 2700 participants are expected, including over 50 heads of state, and some 380 public officials of governments around the world, plus the European Union (EU). Slightly more than in May 2022 (WEF 52) – but fewer of the important “political influencers”.
To the delight of the climate freaks, and similar to other years, the elite – government and private sector honchos – are expected to arrive in about 1000 to 1500 private jets, clogging both the Zurich and Geneva airports.
From there to Davos, most will not take a train, but a helicopter.
Davos is besieged for “security” by military and police. This year, maybe the first time, the Davos population has voiced its unhappiness about this unelected NGO’s extravagant, self-serving, life-interrupting event. After all, Davos is for the people of Davos.
It’s winter sport season. Tourists are not interested in the police and military protected WEF chaos.
Interestingly, other than Olaf Scholz, German Chancellor, none of the G7 heads of state will be present. None of the presidents or PMs of France, Italy, UK, Japan, and Canada have registered their attendance.
However, female top shots include Kristalina Georgiewa, Managing Director of the IMF; and Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB). [criminal record in France]
Likewise, none of the heads of state of what would appear to be important countries, China, Russia, US, India, Iran – and none of the re-emerging BRICS+ except for South Africa’s President, Cyril M. Ramaphosa – are going to be present. No delegates from Russia and Iran will attend.
On Russia, WEF Director, Alois Zwinggi, said that no Russian delegates will be attending. Same as last year. The Ukraine situation remains unchanged.
However, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, was invited to the WEF 2023, with a big virtual embrace by Klaus Schwab.
Pretty similarly, as he was invited by the US for a “ten-hour” visit, during which he embraced Nancy Pelosi, then still Speaker of the House, and had a special fire-place chat with Joe Biden. After the 10-hour warp-speed money-weapons begging sessions in the US, he was jetted back to Kiev by the US Air Force.
The short visit was apparently due to a “security issue”. In other words, Zelenskyy, highly unpopular in his country, risked to be banned from access to Ukraine.
Probably for the same reason, he is not planning to physically attend the 2023 WEF, but rather by video, alongside NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg and CNN’s anchor, Fareed Zakaria. We can just imagine what his plea to Stoltenberg will be.
Other key figures for the WEF 2023 will include:
The UN Secretary General, António Guterres,
WHO’s Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
and of course one of the WEF’s important trustees, Madame Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (EC),
as well as a key trustee and simultaneously the WEF’s main sponsor, Larry Fink, CEO BlackRock, will be there with special roles to play in this “fractured” world – among them – rebuilding Ukraine.
Notice: The peaceful concept “multi-polar world” is not part of the agenda’s vocabulary. The WEF agenda may seek collaborators – instead of cooperators – to pull the “fractured” together, possibly towards a new model of “globalism”, and away from a multi-polar world vision.
See this for the full attendee list as of 10 January 2023
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What will Cooperation with the fracturedGlobalism entail?
Already at the recent G20 meeting in Bali, Klaus Schwab seemed to have realized that “globalism” is dead. Already then, he talked about a fractured world, never about a multi-polar world. As if the “fractured” bits and pieces of this broken world could eventually be put together again under a Global Governance.
Actually, globalism’s demise is logical. As people start awakening – they realize what it means. Nobody wants to be “globalized” – governed by a One World Dictatorship.
Instead of the usual globalist talk, Schwab concentrated in Bali on talking about his dream of the all-digitized 4th Industrial Revolution – about AI, (5G-generated) transhumanization, robotization – and frankly, even though the attendees to his speech politely applauded, though none of them would like to be chipped for mind manipulation by electronic signals.
Agenda
Here is the WEF’s website and the official agenda – and topics that will be discussed. See this and this.
Will the elite realize that the only way for their own survival is Cooperation with the rest of the world – Cooperation – as in equals with equals, not a mass reduction of the world population, as in eugenists?
– And as practiced with the fake covid “plandemic”, followed by a mass “vaccination” with experimental, non-tested and deadly mRNA jabs, that may have caused already millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of deaths and seriously injured around the world.
None of these tragedies are covered by the bought and corrupted mainstream media. And we are only at the beginning. Mainstream doesn’t keep track of such non establishment narratives.
To a large extent the vaxxes have been coerced with blackmail (job loss, barred from social events and social places, unless vaxxed, crime against humanity – crime under the Nuremberg Codex), or through well planned mind manipulation of individuals as well as of the masses. See “Tavistock Institute – Social Engineering of the Masses”, by Daniel Estulin.
We may see what emerges from the 2023 WEF regarding the covid cum pandemic agenda.
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On the eve of the WEF’s 53rd Summit, journalist Philipp Dahm had this to say: “The luster of WEF is fading. Basically, all has been said”.
Elon Musk doubles up with – “boring like shit”. See this in German, Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger.
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Agenda – Behind the Curtain
Elon Musk may be wrong.
Every year, in addition to the official agenda with more or less open meetings, dozens of secretive clandestine meetings take place behind closed doors, not accessible to anybody who has not been personally invited.
It is in these secret meetings, where real “decisions” are taken. Mind you, these are decisions taken above the people, for top-down executions – with lies and deceptions, i.e., social engineering of the masses (see “Tavistock Institute”, mentioned above).
Top Topics with Top Secrecy to be imposed Top-Down on Populations, may include those stated below – and more. They are not listed in order of priorities. But be aware, they are all related and connected – as we are talking about total attempted control and take-over of the world population. Notice: attempted – the cabal is not there yet. People’s awakening and resistance is growing.
WHO – Pandemic Treaty: Both, the WHO DG Tedros and UN Secretary General, António Guterres, are present, plus key delegates of the World Health Assembly, to debate with Schwab how to best bulldoze this Treaty through. So far it has encountered serious resistance, mainly from blocks of African countries.
As stated by section 593 — (a) Decisions of the Health Assembly on important questions shall be made by a two-thirds majority of the Members present and voting. The Pandemic Treaty is considered an important question. – It would give WHO’s DG authority above all sovereign member states in all matters of health. For example, Tedros could decide that the common flu is henceforth a pandemic and vaccination is compulsory, could even be military enforced.
The world would be subject to WHO tyranny. Already now, before the Pandemic Treaty is decided on, all member countries are urged to leave WHO – to preserve their political and societal sovereignty over issues of health. To protect their people.
The depopulation / eugenist agenda – The eugenists – Gates, Soros, Kissinger et al – present at the WEF 2023, will most likely debate whether and rather how, to continue their depopulation drive. It’s part of Agenda 2030, of the Great Reset – will timelines be adjusted, or the target abandoned? – Legal systems throughout the world are currently paralyzed. But what if people, a critical mass, are bringing back law and order for the people by the people?
Pushing the Covid vaxx-drive – will despite all odds, protests and foremost scientific evidence against covid vaxxes – what is also called bioweapons which kill in the millions; and render hundreds of million men and women infertile, with vaxxes and boosters the average human immunity is reduced up to 80%, rendering them vulnerable for all kinds of diseases – leading to early death (depopulation) – will the Death Cult continue pushing this agenda? – Will it depend on the approval of the “Pandemic Treaty”? – People – force your governments to exit WHO.
Ukraine – “reconstruction” – sale to BlackRock – Larry Fink, CEO BlackRock and Volodymyr Zelenskyy may make their previous negotiations over BlackRock’s reconstruction of Ukraine plans “official” – sign a deal, witnessed by the unelected NGO, called WEF, possibly as much a selling what’s left of Ukraine with all its riches to BlackRock.
A third to half of Ukraine’s agricultural land has already been sold or leased to international ag-corporations, most of them planting GMO crops, for which Ukraine had to change her legislation. It would be the first official privatization of a country – a precursor for others to follow? – Understand why Zelenskyy is most unpopular with Ukrainians?
Continued, permanent intimidation: Climate lockdowns – Oxfordshire County; energy shortages; food shortages – famine; high inflation; job insecurity. How to continue, how to circumvent ever-growing popular resistance? – These may be topics of debate.
Fifteen-minute cities – may be the fate of Oxfordshire County; no further travel radius allowed, being digitally surveilled everywhere you go. A strong popular resistance is emerging – that will unlikely fall for the dictate of the planned climate lock-down;
Eliminating 3000 Dutch farms, about a third of Netherland’s agriculture economy. Holland is the world’s second largest agriculture exporter, after the US. Farmers, supported by the people resisted since 2021. The Ag-Minister has recently resigned – and government is making concessions… This may be a theme for secret WEF debate – to continue with bulldozing, or letting go; and
Famine – leading to disease and death – is part of the depopulation agenda.
These are possible closed-door discussions with selected Death Cultists.
NATO – Ukraine – Russia – where is the war going? It is a war of US / NATO against Russia. The faltering US empire, made up of psychopaths and sociopaths – cannot admit to living in a multi-polar world in peace. The megalos want to control and possess the world’s largest and by far most resource richest country.
Will their dystopian minds opt for going nuclear – total annihilation of mankind? – It would certainly feed into depopulation. But there is no guarantee that the perpetrating elite would be protected and survive.
Will the WEF and those who command the WEF, give Peace a chance? Will humanity prevail over evil minds?
How to rigorously ban “misinformation” – censuring is in full swing. Never in remembered history has men’s free expression been curtailed to this extent – yet, the truth eventually prevails.
Since the beginning of the covid-craze, WHO has been requesting social media platforms to delete or “shadow banning” more than 10,000 covid and vaxx-related “fake news” – censuring of the truth. Yet the truth still prevails. See this.
Will the WEF / WHO perpetrators continue suppressing the truth despite the people’s upraising? – Or, again, will they make it dependent on the passing, or not, of the Pandemic Treaty?
Globalization is dead – how to cooperate / collaborate – the cultists against the world – to reassemble the fractured world? – This is certainly close to Klaus Schwab’s heart. Globalization, alias centralized tyranny – is a fascist concept, difficult to drop for somebody with Schwab’s background. – But he is not alone. His and his WEF’s sheer survival depends on the sponsorship of other megalo-psychopaths, who do not want to lose out in a possible collapse of the world economy – from mere limitless over-reach. – There is hope.
4th Industrial Revolution – digitization of everything is almost certainly a key debate among the “controller-pathologists”. The tools – 5G and soon to come 6G (the latter to span the world by 2030 is the plan) – are ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven transhumanization and robotization.
This may be a sick man’s – Schwab’s – dream, but who of the elite-clan wants to run the risk of being overtaken, controlled by AI that becomes – or is already – smarter than mankind? – Even megalo-sickos may come to this conclusion. – Another spark of hope that people’s resistance and the Cult’s self-preservation might help bury Schwab’s dream.
Universal digital ID – Digital money – QR-Coding – data collection – everything digital is in the end humanity’s demise. Accidental or deliberately caused blackouts could wipe out all vital data and money for common people – the cultists might safe themselves with alternative schemes. See this on QR-code control.
Yet, when it comes down to controlling an ever-more subdued population – a hapless society – what is there to control? Without human interaction – let me quote Elon Musk – “The world would be f***king boring”.
Let us hope the WEF comes to senses.
Simultaneously, let us resist.
Let us lobby in solidarity at home and worldwide – to exit WHO. Once a country is no longer a member, WHO has no power over this nation.
Let us create a world By the People for the People – independently of the corrupted country governments, independent of WHO, WEF and the bought UN system.
We don’t need them.
Our independence, autonomy and sovereign authority over our lives and over our newly created society – shall be our new future.
With a People for the People movement we will make it – without the WEF, WHO and the entire UN system – and certainly without our WEF and BlackRock compromised governments.
*
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
All Global Research articles can be read in51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
“Radhika Desai’s Capitalism, Coronavirus and War explains why the dream of a neoliberal ‘end of history’ has turned out to be a dead end. Her excellent book provides a clear perspective to frame the internal contradictions of America’s neoliberal policies that are driving Western capitalism into austerity and a chronic health crisis as its New Cold War actually is a class war.” Michael Hudson [1]
It has been close to three years now since a teenie-weenie little virus made its debut on the world stage and wreaked havoc on our health care system, our education system, our political gatherings, our recreation time and practically every aspect of our lives. Or so we are told anyway. [2]
Regardless, the panic generated by “V the virus” was enough to institute lock-downs, new social distancing, masking rules and all the other efforts that are all to familiar to every listener not entirely isolated from humanity even in the smallest villages. By March of 2020, for a time, it was really the dominant story to appear regularly in the mainstream news. [3]
Three years later, experts are saying this crisis is far from over. Nevertheless, we are now largely looking at the crisis through the rear view mirror and can assess how well and how poorly each country fared against this demon which we came to label SARS-CoV-2. [4]
Not surprisingly, judging by the data, some societies coped far better than others.
Professor of political studies Radhika Desai noticed that while countries like the U.S., the UK, and younger brother Canada were advanced countries compared to most, the death toll stemming (allegedly) from COVID-19 was much larger than in China and other countries around the world! She found through her research that the tendency since the 1970s to embrace neoliberal financialization, devoted to protecting what she calls “predatory” capitalist giants as opposed to more ‘people-centred’ policies was a likely culprit in turning the health-care nuisance caused by SARS-CoV-2 into a major health and economic catastrophe from which we are all still reeling.
This episode of the Global Research News hour focuses much of the program interviewing Professor Desai about her recently published book, Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy, which delved not only into the span of the pandemic, but also explored a history of capitalism confronting its own crises from 1914 and the Thirty Year Crisis that followed, to the age of neo-liberalism from the 70s to the present, to the now largely self-defeating NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
This is followed by an interview with Mahdi Nazemroaya, who has done a lot of field work in China, who could add his own insights into China’s COVID-19 approach and its economic and political relationship with the United States.
Radhika Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba in Canada; she edits newcoldwar.org, a project associated with GERG, and is the Convener of the International Manifesto Group. Her book is available free for download here.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) specializing in geopolitics and strategic issues.
Global Research: Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War is the latest book by Professor Radhika Desai. It makes the point that the economic crisis ultimately was a crisis at the very heart of the neoliberal financialised capitalist system. And the virus only served to accelerate the decline of the US-dominated world capitalist imperial order. And measures taken in the wars that followed only accelerates it. It accelerates the decline even further.
This model follows a history going back to the very beginnings and plots other times where capitalist power ran up against issues and used state power to help them emerge from the pressures that would lead to eradication.
What steps should the Left take today to prevent this same state rescue attempt, or possibly something even worse from succeeding. The book’s author is here with me to share a little of her understanding. Dr. Radhika Desai is a professor at the Department of Political Studies, and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba in Canada. She is the author of several other books, now including “Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire.”
Radhika, thank you for joining us. It’s good to have you back on.
Radhika Desai: Always a pleasure to be on your show, Michael.
GR: Now, in your book, you contend that – and Marx and Engels contend – that capitalism runs up against internal contradictions. The capitalist trajectory takes it from competitiveness, to monarchy capitalism which, combined with pressure from the working class, ultimately results in socialism. And that, historically, it is the actions of the capitalist state that force systems to remain capitalist as opposed to going socialist.
With this pandemic situation that we are sort of coming out of, the latest crisis that pushed – you know, challenging our model, you know. This points to how the neoliberal systems put the capitalist state and particularly their strongest advocates, the US and Great Britain, at a supreme disadvantage in dealing with the situation. Especially when you compare it to socialist economies or countries where neoliberalism is not as strong a factor.
There are all kinds of factors affecting which countries go through chaos as opposed to a nuisance but manageable disease. Could you explain your claim that capitalists and neoliberal policy did indeed exacerbate these difficulties in dealing with Covid-19?
RD: Yeah, thanks Michael. So, this is really the core of the book, you know? You know, as you know, we can’t really work for all the writings and publications on the pandemic. But where this book is unique is that it demonstrates – or the main question it asks is – yes, the Covid-19 pandemic was certainly a big shock. It was a major public health emergency.
But why is it that this – what should have been ultimately just a serious public health emergency – why did it turn into such a knockdown political – knockdown economic crisis of capitalism? And I say “economic,” but of course it is an all-pervasive crisis. Because if you think about it, the very weaknesses that I identify are also associated with increasing social inequality, increasing political division and breakdown. And even to a great extent, the cultural disintegration we are facing. With the extent of dis-information coming both from the social media and from the mainstream media.
So, to get back to the main point, what I argue is that what becomes clear after 40 years of applying neoliberalism, is that neoliberalism, which was supposed to solve the problems of capitalism after capitalism entered the 1970s stagflationist period. Neoliberalism was bandied about as this thing that was going to resolve the crisis of capitalism. It would restore capitalism’s productive dynamism.
But in reality, what has happened is that neoliberal – the application of neoliberal policies – has actually weakened capitalism further. So much so, that we have now lived through 40 years of relatively low growth. Forty years in which our productive economies have become considerably weakened through very systematic processes of de-industrialization. Now, to which of course phenomena such as Trump and Brexit have been the result.
So, we have been de-industrializing. Meanwhile, the application of neoliberal policies which have dumbed down our productive economies have actually encouraged the explosion of activity in the financial sphere. And the financial sphere basically is essentially parasitic upon the productive sphere. So, we have a shrinking productive sphere, on which a growing financial sphere is increasingly parasitic.
And we also know, of course, that the financial sphere is also – the explosion of financial activity is also at the root of these intolerable levels of social inequality that we are looking at. So, my point was that the system was already very weakened when the pandemic came along. And so, the pandemic essentially hit an already weakened system.
On top of that, there is one other thing. So, there is an underlying weakness. But you know, you earlier referred to the different reactions of the capitalist classes in responding to crises. So, as we know, for example, the capitalist world went through a deep crisis in the early part of the 20th century. Some people even call it a “30-Years Crisis,” running from 1914 to 1945, including the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and all of these. And capitalist powers at that time were forced to respond to this crisis in a relatively progressive way.
So, as we know, in the post-Second World War period what has happened. What happened was that capitalist societies, the leading capitalist societies, borrowed from the toolkit of socialism. And they instituted full-employment policies; they instituted the welfare state; they instituted an enormous amount of regulation of industry and capitalism generally.
And finally, they also adopted a very high degree of state ownership, something we tend to forget today. So, this was the policy paradigm which enabled the golden age of growth of capitalism. But, of course the system, in the Western countries remained capitalist.
So, it’s own operation, as you rightly pointed out, I argue along with Marx and Engels that capitalism is not only prone to contradiction and crises, but it is prone to contradiction and crises at many many levels in practically every area of activity. What capitalism needs and demands from society, and often gets from society, is almost impossible. Therefore, trying to achieve that end makes capitalist society get ensnarled in all sorts of contradictions.
So inevitably, this post-war arrangement which left the underlying structure of capitalism in place ran into crisis in the 1970s. And at that point, our government basically said, ‘Look, these old socialistic measures: the welfare state and full-employment policies, et cetera are no longer working. We’re going to throw them out. We are going to give capitalism all the freedom it wants, et cetera, and this is going to restore the productive dynamism of our economies.’
Now, it would have been fine, you know, the neoliberal ideology tends to assume a competitive capitalism. But you are applying a remedy that might have worked in the case of competitive capitalism. I underline “might,” we can discuss that. But they were actually applying it to a capitalism that already become a monopoly capitalism. And so, giving monopoly capital the same freedoms was not going to lead to the restoration of productive dynamism, so instead it has lead to financialization.
So, we have weakened our productive structures and we have expanded the prerogatives and freedoms of what is essentially a predatory, speculative, parasitical financial capitalism. And so, these are the people we have privileged, our governments have privileged, for 40 years. You know, year-in and year-out. Even though these policies were not restoring productive dynamism, our governments continued with them.
So, the other thing this book argues, is that if we look at what happened during the pandemic, the responses on the public health front, on the economic front in particular but practically every front, were actually designed not to address the underlying public health crisis or to restore jobs or economy. They were designed primarily to keep in place the incredible power of a small number of increasingly unproductive, speculative, predatory, and financialized corporations. And this is what has made the crisis so serious, because our governments are essentially encouraging the worst elements, the elements that suck up the results and the fruit of the productive labours of whether a small business, or workers, or what have you, instead of engaging in the investment, the investment in production that is required for us.
GR: Yeah, yeah. I think I really see the question that I want to put to you, and it concerns the whole idea of managing human health, because it is increasingly managed by private companies, known as pharmaceutical corporations, “Big Pharma.” You know, these companies which, while they deal in health, are also motivated by private profit-making. And increasingly in this world, there is a tendency to push their prescription treatments, vaccines and so on, where they make money and generic medication is sidelined. There is a whole lot of information about this subject outside of Covid. But the healthcare regulators have it, it is argued, it’s been subject to regulator capture by private companies. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and associated entities have arguably influenced the WHO. And there you’re talking about monopoly capitalism right there, it seems to me.
It is compliance with these institutions, they are heavily influenced by private profit-seekers, that determines the healthcare treatment. Whether you’re a capitalist or not, we all prescribe to it, right? So, doesn’t this faction also play a role in how we deal with and cover —
RD: Absolutely. Yes, in fact. So, one of the major chapters in the book deals with how the leading neoliberal financialized capitalism, then here I focus chiefly on the US and the UK, because they are the leading financialized neoliberal capitalisms. The same would apply to other countries with adjustments and adaptations and so on.
But anyway, if you look at the responses of these countries, undoubtedly they have been governed by the interests, not only of Big Pharma, but generally the plethora of big monopoly corporations that ring around the healthcare sectors, you know, whether it’s hospital management companies, or Big Pharma, or – and other such, you know, testing and all that. And even companies that have nothing to do with this.
So, for example, in the United Kingdom, the entire job of testing and tracing infections was given over to a company that had absolutely no experience with this. You know, merely in order that they would essentially purpote to employ largely untrained people and pay them in largely embezzlement of money, basically. So, there are numerous open questions about the way in which such governments, our governments, have addressed the pandemic.
So, definitely Big Pharma has profited. Amidst all this, the other thing that has happened, of course, is that, you know, you see that, you know, when such a big crisis happens, and so on, you would expect that the Left would be on the forefront of criticizing the horrible way in which our governments managed the crisis.
But, throughout this period of crisis and then subsequently war and so on, we have found the Left either on the backfoot, unable to respond vigorously with determination, with clarity, with purpose, et cetera. And if not on the backfoot, of course in the case of the war, they are openly allying with the imperialist and pro-financial capital actions of our government. And in the place of the Left, in fact what we have seen is something far more dangerous. It is the Right that has been in the forefront of opposing the governments, on the basis of enormous amounts of misinformation, and so on.
And I think the reason for that is also quite interesting. I mean, we can discuss the Left’s failures in a minute. But the reason why the Right has been in the ascendant in many ways, is primarily because it is very clear to a lot of people that our governments were acting – not acting entirely in good faith, and that – the problem – the incredible death rate that we have experienced, the fatalities that we have experienced, have been because of the bad faith in which our governments have dealt with us. Telling us that they are working to save our lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile, in reality, working to benefit Big Pharma, to benefit the medical industrial complex, and so on.
So, when people sense that there is bad faith, they respond to anybody who is going to say, ‘Well, you know, I know the reason for that.’ And that’s why, you know, if the Left has been in the ascendant it’s because of this bad faith on the part of our government. And of course, the failures of the Left.
So, if I may just simply clarify, the actual contrast I make in my book between a Big Pharma and medical industrial complex-fueled response as we have seen in Western countries, particularly in the US and the UK. The main contrast should be between them and what has happened in China. That is to say, for almost three years, the Chinese government prioritized the saving of lives over anything: livelihoods and everything. And they actually managed to have a – to manage to save both, because they have actually had far greater economic growth, economic dynamism, et cetera. And at the same time, kept debts to an absolutely really, very low level. So, this is what I would – this is the contrast I would like to give. And this is the contrast I actually give in my book.
And this is also supported by all those people who have generally supported a zero-Covid policy. Zero-Covid policy doesn’t mean an unending lockdown. Nor is that what happened in China. China did not have any sort of unending lockdown. China has had a very collaborated policy of reducing and minimizing the number of infections.
The problem is that the rest of the world has not gone along with them. And China, is today changing its approach because it senses that the nature of the threat has changed. And I think this is what we have to keep our eye on. And what I would like to say is that: in China, China did not say, ‘Oh, we have to balance savings of lives versus livelihoods,’ which essentially gives you the opportunity to support the big financial capitalists, and so on, in the name of saving livelihoods. In reality, China prioritized saving lives and it managed to save both lives and actual livelihoods. Not the livelihoods of the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos’ of this world. But of ordinary people.
GR: So, on the title of “War,” you point to the current war in Ukraine as an example of the desperation of the US hegemonic states and their allies to maintain hegemony following the pandemic, and the negative effects on the economy. And I’m not sure, though, how it is anymore hawkish than any other time in the past, in the last 30 years. I mean, invading countries in the name of “human rights” is something that they’ve always done. But what’s noticeable —
RD: No, I agree, of course. At one level what the current war, the current conflict over Ukraine, which I see as essentially a proxy war being waged by the United States against Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy. And as many people have pointed out, in a war in which the United States seems set to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Yes, this is in line with the whole post-Cold War, and even generally imperialist – long history of imperialism of fighting wars and subjugating people in the name of giving them civilization and democracy and human rights and white man’s burden, and whatnot. I totally agree there is a great continuity. At the same time, I do think that President Biden has landed the United States, and the world, in fact, into a qualitatively more dangerous situation because this is the first time that he is provoking in a very real way, and waging a war against a nuclear-armed power. A permanent member of the Security Council. And President Biden also seems set to expand the conflict beyond that, as well.
So, to China, which in many ways will prove an even more formidable enemy. And in the context – so, in this context, what we are looking at – so, to me, what’s happening is that the same problems of neoliberal capitalism are involved in the current aggression of the United States. And this is also going to accelerate a trend which we have been seeing all along, — for a long time anyway, for a decade or two, anyway – which is the increasing disillusion of the rest of the world, the non-imperialist parts of the world, the Third World, these countries are increasingly becoming disillusioned and realizing that they have much more to gain from allying with countries like China and today even Russia, than to gain from allying with the West. So essentially, these policies are creating a new bipolar division of the world.
GR: Yeah. Sort of like every, you know, every action taken by the United States is boomeranging back and it’s hitting them —
RD: Absolutely.
GR: — harder than Russia is. But —
RD: Exactly, because this is – it’s not making the West any stronger. It’s only making the West weaker and that much more desperate.
GR: Yeah. Let’s look at previous examples of capitalist crises. There were several examples from 1914 – to the period of neoliberalism since the late ‘70s. Could you examine the current crisis and compare it to the 30-Years Crisis, I mean when there was another stock market crash in 1929 leading to the Great Depression. And there were rising hordes of frustrating workers and also fascism on the rise in countries around the world. Today, we also had a stock market crash and a similar making of a recession that could turn into a depression. Could you please point out —
RD: Yeah.
GR: — similarities and also prominent differences between these two areas —
RD: Yes. Absolutely. So, first of all, let me say that, that crisis, like I said earlier, you know, there was a – it was really a pretty big 30-Years Crisis, you know, in which a whole range of – you know, there were two great imperialist wars; there was this big economic depression; and so on. And I would say that, you know, looking back from the vantage point of 2022/2023, after 40 years and more of neoliberalism, I think certain things are becoming very clear.
So, first of all, I would say that 1914 and the early part of the 20th Century generally can be regarded as sort of the peak of capitalism and capitalist imperialism. Since then, they’ve kind of been on a decline. So, you know, as I narrate in the book, towards the end of that period of crises, as the Second World War was winding to a close, many leading intellectuals actually thought that the world would turn towards socialism because capitalism had kind of exhausted it’s – whatever historical utility it may have had. And in doing so, it had demonstrated the havoc it could cause, the disasters it could cause in the form of imperialist wars, Great Depressions, and so on. So, people felt that the world would move in a socialistic direction.
And then, you had the so-called golden age of capitalism. So, a lot of people, including many Marxists began to say, ‘Ah well, capitalism is alive and well there’s nothing wrong with it,’ et cetera. But in reality, when we look back as I was saying earlier, what enabled the golden age to occur was the fact that the First World countries, the imperialist core, was forced to employ socialistic measures of, you know, full-employment, macro-economic policies, welfare states, state-ownership, great industrial regulation, et cetera, et cetera, progressive taxation and so on. Meanwhile, of course a large part of the world was already socialist and communist and growing at a relatively high rate.
And then, finally Third World countries, newly independent Third World countries were embarked on attempts at national autonomous development. So, it was a really – it was really a configuration which may not have been socialist. I mean, it’s not going to be possible to build socialism in a day. But nevertheless, the world that was leaning in that direction, even though First World countries did not become socialist, they did become social democratic and that’s what enabled the golden age. When the underlying capitalism led to crisis and we applied neoliberalism, we see the true debility of capitalism. It is not capable anymore of productive dynamism, only capable of creating a predatory parasitical financial system that sucks like, you know, a giant vampire squid the earnings based on production of ordinary people.
So, what is very clear, in retrospect, is that today capitalism has exhausted its utility. There is also a difference in the response of government, the response of government in the post-Second World War period which created the welfare, the Keynesian welfare states in Western countries, were necessary and possible. Capitalist states could not do otherwise, because working people were strongly organized.
By contrast, by today even though neoliberalism has been attacking the rights of working people right, left, and centre. In most Western countries, working class organizations and parties are on the backfoot. They are not on the ascendant. They should be, but they are not. And in my book, I have a very long discussion of how to understand this inability of the Western Left.
And I do make a couple of points, but maybe I should just summarize that by saying that basically, what it amounts to is that both intellectually and politically, the Left in the Western imperialist core has kind of made a Faustian bargain with their own governments, in which they support their governments imperialist ventures in return for a few crumbs from the capitalist table.
But today, even the capitalist table doesn’t have much to give. So, working class people are being attacked anyway. They are not able to respond. Large parts of the Left are still engaged in supporting imperialist ventures by claiming to stand up for democracy and for human rights against this or that dictator and authoritarian ruler, and so on.
And the big opportunity, which is to create a Left which unites working people and all the institutions that support them, which may include many socialist states, that unites all these forces against the forces of capitalism which are creating economic crisis, war, et cetera. This opportunity is being missed.
GR: Well Radhika, you know, your book has been praised by the likes of Michael Hudson, as well as Arnold August and other people who have been on the show before. So, it’s really been quite an honour to be able to provide it for our readers. And you can get a free copy, you know, go to —
RD: Yes. Let me emphasize that, you know. I would like to emphasize that this book is available free because a foundation called “Knowledge Unlatched” shows this book to make – one of the few that they will make available free for anybody who wants them. So, you can download a PDF copy for free at the link that Michael is going to give to his show.
GR: Thanks a lot, Radhika. It’s been a pleasure having you on.
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Royston Sim (January 20, 2023), ‘Covid-19 pandemic far from over, says public health expert on Davos panel’, The Straits Times; https://www.straitstimes.com/world/covid-19-pandemic-far-from-over-says-public-health-expert-on-davos-panel
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First published on December 29, 2022
***
At a press conference in Geneva, on the afternoon of February 20th, 2020 (CET), The Director General of the WHO Dr. Tedros intimated that the COVID-19 pandemic was imminent.
The WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that he was
“concerned that the chance to contain the coronavirus outbreak was “closing””
“I believe the window of opportunity is still there, but that the window is narrowing.”
“Window is narrowing? A rapidly expanding Worldwide epidemic?
According to the PCR test, the recorded number of so-called “confirmed Covid cases” (by the WHO) on that same day (outside China) was 1,073 of which 621 were passengers and crew on the Diamond PrincessCruise Ship (stranded in Japanese territorial waters).
The above numbers do not under any circumstances confirm an unfolding global health crisis.
Examine the WHO graph below. The blue indicates the confirmed cases on the Diamond Princess (international conveyance which arrived in Yokohama on February 3, 2020), many of whom were sick, confined to their rooms for more than two weeks (quarantine imposed by Japan). All passengers and crew took the illustrious RT-PCR test (which does not detect or identify SARS-CoV-2).
Needless to say, this so-called data was used to spearhead the fear campaign not to mention the collapse of financial markets in the course of the month of February 2020.
Source: WHO, February 2020
The official story is as follows:
-A Hong Kong-based passenger who had disembarked from the Diamond Princess in Hong Kong on January 25 developed pneumonia and was tested positive for the novel coronavirus on January 30.
-The Diamond Princess arrived in Yokohama on February 3. A quarantine was imposed on the cruiser, Many passengers fell sick due to the confinement on the boat. All the passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess undertook the PCR test. The number of confirmed cases increased to 691 on February 23
Read carefully: From the standpoint of assessing worldwide trends of a “deadly disease”, the official WHO data doesn’t add up.
Without the Diamond Princess data, the so-called number of confirmed cases worldwide outside China on February 20, 2020 was of the order of
452 cumulative confirmed cases, out of a population of 6.4 billion.
Did Tedros’ Statements Serve to Trigger the Financial Crash?
452 cases. These “shock and awe” statements contributed to triggering panic, despite the fact that the number of confirmed cases outside China was exceedingly low.
The statement by Dr. Tedros (based on flawed concepts and statistics) set the stage for the February 2020 financial collapse triggered by inside information, foreknowledge, derivative trade, short-selling and a galore of hedge fund operations.
452 cases were sufficient to destabilize stock-markets all over the World?
The Virus was narrowly identified as the catalyst of the financial crash. Who was behind this catalyst?
Who was behind the fear campaign which contributed to triggering chaos and uncertainty on financial markets?
The small number of “COVID-19 confirmed cases” outside China (1,073) did not in any way point to an unfolding worldwide epidemic. But this did not prevent the markets from plummeting.
The markets had been manipulated. Whoever had foreknowledge (“inside information”) of the WHO Director-General’s February 20, 2020 statement (at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, early afternoon at WHO Headquarters in Geneva) would have reaped significant monetary gains.
Was there a conflict of interest (as defined by the WHO)? The WHO is partly funded by the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates has “60% of his assets invested in equities [including stocks and index funds]”, according to a September 2019 CNBC report.
The stock market crash initiated on February 20th referred to as the 2020 Coronavirus Crash (February 20-April 7, 2020) was categorized as:
“The fastest fall in global stock markets in financial history, and the most devastating crash since the Wall Street Crash of 1929.”
The alleged cause of the financial crash was “The Virus”, (according to prominent “analysts”) namely, the “massive spread” of the epidemic outside China. But that was an outright lie, refuted by official WHO data. Media disinformation played a key role in spearheading the fear campaign.
“Blaming the Virus”: The Most Corrupt and Fraudulent Financial Crash in World History
The possibility of financial fraud and “insider trading” (which is illegal) was casually dispelled by financial analysts and media reports.
Without the human hand, there is no causal relationship between a microscopic virus and the complex gamut of financial variables.
The “killer virus” fear campaign coupled with Dr. Tedros’s timely “warnings” of the need to implement a worldwide pandemic indelibly served the interests of Wall Street’s institutional speculators and hedge funds.
The financial crash led to a major shift in the global distribution of money wealth.
For a more detailed and comprehensive analysis (Book released in August 2022)
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’État Against Humanity
Translations in several languages are envisaged. The book is available in print form in Japanese. 仕組まれたコロナ危機:「世界の初期化」を目論む者たち
As a means to reaching out to millions of people worldwide whose lives have been affected by the corona crisis, we have decided to distribute the eBook for FREE.
You are welcome to forward it to family and friends.
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***
On Friday, Jan. 13, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote to Congress that the U.S. government will hit its borrowing limit on Jan. 19, forcing the new Congress into negotiations over the debt limit much sooner than expected. She said she will use accounting maneuvers she called “extraordinary measures” to keep U.S. finances running for a few months, pushing the potential date for default to sometime in the summer. But she urged Congress to get to work on raising the debt ceiling.
Lifting it above its current $31.385 trillion limit won’t be easy with a highly divided and gridlocked Congress. As former Republican politician David Stockman crowed in a Jan. 11 article:
15 [House] votes and the slings and arrows of MSM opprobrium were well worth it. That’s because the GOP’s anti-McCarthy insurrection obtained concessions which just might slow America’s headlong rush to fiscal armageddon. And just in the nick of time!
We are referring, of course, to the Speaker elect’s promise that there will be no more debt ceiling increases without off-setting spending cuts; and that in the event of a double-cross a single Member of the House may table a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair.
Even if Congress succeeds in raising the debt ceiling, the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes are likely to push interest on the federal debt to unsustainable levels. The problem was detailed by the House Republican Policy Committee like this:
As of December 8, 2022, the U.S. gross national debt stood at nearly $31.5 trillion, $8.5 trillion higher than it was just three years before and the highest level in our nation’s history. Last year [in March 2021], the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected the federal government would spend $282 billion servicing our debt in 2022, but that projection ballooned to nearly $400 billion as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy and the debt continues to grow.
… While interest rates have been low by historical standards, if interest rates rose to 5 percent, where they were as recently as 2007, net interest payments on the current debt level held by the public would be over $1 trillion, more than the federal government spends annually on everything but Social Security [emphasis added; endnotes omitted].
San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said during a live-streamed interview with The Wall Street Journal that she expects policymakers to raise interest rates to somewhere above 5%, and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said it “may very well” raise rates to 6%.
The global debt cycle has reached the stage where, historically, a major “monetary reset” has been required. In 1913, it was done by instituting the Federal Reserve to backstop a banking system unable to meet withdrawals in gold. In 1933, it was done by taking the dollar off the gold standard domestically; in 1969, by taking the dollar off the gold standard internationally; and in 2008-09, by bailing out the banks with quantitative easing.
Resetting the Game Board in Line with the Constitution
What about today? In a Jan. 11 article in Forbes, after discussing the limitations of the “extraordinary measures” to which the Treasury can resort, investment advisor Simon Moore wrote:
Some have also argued that the government could go further, perhaps invoking the 14th Amendment, or minting an enormously high-value coin as further strategies to sidestep debt ceiling issues. However, these ideas are untested …
The 14th Amendment says the validity of the government’s debt shall not be questioned. Fixing the budget deficit by minting some trillion dollar coins would be a radical monetary “reset,” but the approach is not actually untested. Abraham Lincoln did something similar to avoid a usurious national debt at 24 to 36% interest during the Civil War, and he was drawing from the playbook of the American colonists a century earlier.
Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution says, “The Congress shall have Power … To coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof …“ When the Constitution was ratified, coins were the only officially recognized legal tender. By 1860, coins made up only about half the currency; and today, they make up only about $1.19 billion of a $21.352 trillion circulating money supply (M2). These coins, along with about $239 million in U.S. Notes or Greenbacks originally issued during the Civil War, are all that are left of the Treasury’s money-creating power.
The vast majority of the money supply today is created privately by banks as deposits when they make loans, usurping the power to issue the national money supply from the people to whom it constitutionally belongs. Lincoln avoided a massive debt to private British-backed banks by restoring the government-issued money of the American colonists. In the 1860s, these newly-issued U.S. Notes or Greenbacks constituted 40% of the national currency. Today, 40% of the circulating money supply would be $8.5 trillion. Yet, this massive money-printing during the Civil War did not lead to hyperinflation. Greenbacks suffered a drop in value as against gold, but according to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwarz in A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, this was not due to “printing money.” Rather, it was caused by trade imbalances with foreign trading partners on the gold standard.
The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln’s government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent.
Congress could avoid its debt crisis today by calling for a new issue of debt-free U.S. Notes. That, however, would require legislation, probably a greater uphill battle in the current Congress, even than getting the debt ceiling lifted.
Reducing the Federal Debt
Another way to alleviate the debt crisis with government-issued money was proposed by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and endorsed by Democratic Representative Alan Grayson during the last debt ceiling crisis: the Federal Reserve could be ordered to transfer to the Treasury the federal securities it has purchased with accounting entries through “quantitative easing.” The Treasury could then just void this part of the debt, which stood at $6.097 trillion as of Dec. 2, 2022. That alternative would be legal, but it would require persuading not just Congress but the Federal Reserve to act.
A third alternative, which could be done very quickly by executive order, would be for the federal government to exercise its constitutional power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof” by minting one or more trillion dollar platinum coins.
The idea of minting large denomination coins to solve economic problems was first suggested in the early 1980s by a chairman of the Coinage Subcommittee of the House of Representatives. Not only does the Constitution give Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value, he said, but no limit is put on the value of the coins it creates.
In 1982, Congress chose to choke off this remaining vestige of its money-creating power by imposing limits on the amounts and denominations of most coins. But it left one exception, the platinum coin, which a special provision allowed to be minted in any amount for commemorative purposes (31 U.S. Code § 5112). When Congress was gridlocked over the debt ceiling in 2013, attorney Carlos Mucha proposed issuing a platinum coin to capitalize on this loophole; and the proposal the proposal got picked up by Paul Krugman and some other economists as a way to move forward.
Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed that the coin would be legal tender. He said:
In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years . . . under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).
What about Inflation?
Prof. Randall Wray explained that the coins would not circulate but would be deposited in the government’s account at the Fed, so they would not inflate the circulating money supply. The budget would still need Congressional approval. To keep a lid on spending, Congress would just need to abide by some basic rules of economics. It could spend on goods and services up to full employment without creating price inflation (since supply and demand would rise together). After that, it would need to tax — not to fund the budget, but to shrink the circulating money supply and avoid driving up prices with excess demand.
An alternative for stabilizing the money supply and avoiding inflation without resorting to taxes was developed by the Pennsylvania colonists in Benjamin Franklin’s day. The American colonies were then printing paper scrip, following the innovative lead of Massachusetts in 1691. This paper money was considered an advance against taxes, but it was easier to issue the scrip than to collect it back in taxes; and the result was to inflate and devalue the currency.
The Pennsylvania colonists avoided price inflation by forming a “land bank.” The colonial government issued paper scrip in return for goods and services, and it lent scrip to the farmers at a reasonable rate. The interest returned to the colonial treasury, balancing the budget.
Today we could do the same: we could offset the money issued for government expenses with interest instead of taxes. But that would effectively mean nationalizing the banking system, again not something that is likely or even desirable in a major economy with many competing economic interests. As U.K. Prof. Richard Werner observes, nationalizing the banking system in Soviet Russia did not work out well. But the Chinese approach, involving many small local public banks, proved to be very efficient and effective; and German local bankers developed such a system long before the Chinese, with their network of local public Sparkassen banks. We could follow suit with a network of public banks spreading to local needs, thus turning banking into a public utility while keeping credit under local management and distribution.
We Could Go Further…
As the chairman of the Coinage Subcommittee observed in the 1980s, the entire federal debt could actually be paid with some large denomination coins. Again, the concern will be that it will inflate the money supply and devalue the currency; but the Federal Reserve showed after the “Great Recession” that it could issue trillions of dollars in accounting-entry quantitative easing without triggering hyperinflation. Indeed, the exercise did not trigger even the modest inflation for which it was designed.
As with QE, paying off the federal debt with trillion coins deposited in the Treasury’s account would just be an asset swap, replacing an interest-bearing obligation (bonds) with a non-interest-bearing one (bank deposits paid to the bond sellers). The market for goods and services would not be flooded with “new” money that would inflate the prices of consumer goods, because the bond holders would not consider themselves any richer than before.Joseph Wang, a former senior trader on the Fed’s open market desk, explained the difference between QE and direct payment of stimulus checks in a Jan. 9, 2023 article. He wrote:
The enormous fiscal stimulus in 2020 created a few trillion out of thin air and just gave it away to the public – predictably supercharging growth and inflation. Note that fiscal stimulus is very different from QE, which merely exchanges Treasuries for cash. QE changes the composition of liquid assets held by non-banks (fewer Treasuries, more cash), but not their purchasing power. In contrast, stimmy checks and forgivable loans are essentially free “helicopter money” that increase potential demand.
“QE changes the composition of liquid assets held by non-banks (fewer Treasuries, more cash), but not their purchasing power.” The non-bank holders of Treasuries could have sold their securities at any time if they had wanted cash. They had their money in government securities in the first place because they wanted to save it rather than spend it. If they were cashed out, they would presumably continue to save the money, probably by investing it in other interest-generating securities.
Something to Think About at Least
Granted, those proposals are unlikely to pass now, and it would take unusual courage just to introduce them; but we are living in unusual times. The time will soon come for bold leaders to take the reins and do something radical. The alternative that is barreling down on us is the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset,” in which “you will own nothing and eat bugs” (basically neo-feudalism).
The status quo is clearly unsustainable, and the Fed’s current tools cannot set it right. The inflation problem has been thrust in its lap, although fiscal spending and supply shortages are key drivers of today’s price hikes; and the Fed’s traditional tools won’t fix those problems. The higher that interest rates are raised, the harder it will be for people and businesses to pay their credit card debts. That means businesses will go bankrupt, people will get laid off, and tax receipts will go down, further driving up the budget deficit.
We need a new approach, at least one that is new in modern times. We would do well to return to the solution of our forefathers – a monetary system backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States,” a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln intoned. That may not be the government we have now, but it could be and should be. Before we can have a trustworthy national currency, we need a transparent and accountable government that is responsive to the will of the people. When the old system finally breaks and we are primed for a new one, those are the principles that should guide us in its development.
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Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is approaching its first birthday. Top military brass in Russia have long declared that the conflict is not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather Russia and NATO. Simply put, Ukraine is a pawn in another U.S. war. Europe’s economy and military have been sacrificed on the altar of U.S. warmongering toward Russia. Winter is here and Ukraine’s prospects for getting out of the conflict with anything resembling “victory” have dissipated, if they ever really existed at all.
Such has been admitted by two of the foreign policy establishment’s most criminal members: Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. In an op-ed with the Washington Post, Rice and Gates argue that time is not on Ukraine’s side. The U.S. must act fast or watch Ukraine suffer eventual defeat. Of course, for neocon hawks like Rice and Gates, a negotiated settlement is simply out of the question. The only option for the U.S. political and military establishment is to fortify Ukraine with the heaviest military equipment such as armored tanks to ensure victory on the battlefield.
As geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic notes, a major problem stands in the way of Rice and Gates’s demand: NATO is running out of weapons. The U.S. produces about 30,000 rounds per year for its 155 mm Howitzer long-range systems, a number that Ukraine uses in just two weeks of fighting Russia on the front lines. Russian missile strikes have made quick work of heavier equipment such as the vaunted HIMARS systems. Only larger NATO states like the U.S. and Germany have anything left to provide. So when Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky came to Congress begging for more weapons, he was likely disappointed in Joe Biden’s remark that the U.S. was not going to make promises to arm Ukraine with anything that could possibly lead to a World War III scenario between NATO and Russia.
Russia’s critical victory in Soledar has only intensified concerns among a major faction in the foreign policy establishment that Ukraine is depleting the U.S.’s capacity to wage war elsewhere. In this regard, no other matter of U.S. “national security” is more important than China. The RAND Corporation, a research arm of the Pentagon, has called China a “peer” competitor and the U.S.’s greatest long-term threat. Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has also called China the greatest threat to the U.S.’s “security.” NATO labeled China a “malicious actor” in the alliance’s latest Strategic Concept document and pledged to play a larger role in curbing the so-called “threats” presented by its rise.
An article penned just after the New Year in Foreign Policy, however, has blown the lid off of any subtleties to the U.S.’s preparations for a war with China. The article features twelve essays from all corners of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Contributors include former Obama-era CIA director and US army commander David Petraeus, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and former Under Secretary of State and Trump-era NATO Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller. Also included are representatives from a litany of think-tanks such as the US government funded Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Their essays cover twelve areas of economic, cyber, military, diplomatic and propaganda warfare. An important thread runs through each contribution: Russia has failed in Ukraine (a fabrication mixed with imperial hubris), making the present moment a perfect opportunity to prepare for an upcoming war in Taiwan against China. Foreign Policy’s chief editor Stefan Theil makes the aim of the article quite clear,
“Drawing the right lessons from the first 10 months of the Russian invasion, then, not only matters for the survival of Ukraine. It is also vital for deterring and preventing a future conflict—and, if necessary, fighting one (emphasis my own). The most obvious potential hot spot and one that involves even greater stakes is, of course, Taiwan.”
Beyond repetitive lip-service to “deterrence,” contributors make concrete suggestions on the best means to wage war with China. David Petraeus’s co-authored piece asserts that:
Ukraine points to the imperative for the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies to prioritize the near-term ability to field large numbers of relatively inexpensive, highly mobile anti-ship and anti-air missiles that can be dispersed and maneuvered throughout the first and second island chains against Beijing’s increasingly formidable naval and air forces. Large quantities of unmanned air, sea, and ground systems can amplify these missiles in the U.S. order of battle.
In other words, the U.S.’s $858 billion military budget needs to grow even larger to meet the challenge of China. Petraeus was directly responsible for targeting weddings and civilian areas during his time leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan, giving him first-hand knowledge of the capabilities of the U.S.’s military arsenal. Former Obama-era NATO Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen backs up Petraeus’s emphasis on pumping weapons into Taiwan, stating “weapons are what counts . . . With the help of its partners [Taiwan] must become a porcupine bristling with armaments to deter any possible attempt to take it by force. China must calculate that the cost of an invasion is simply too high to bear.”
However, Foreign Policy’s war stenographers clarify that preparing for war with China is about much more than weapons. Maria Shagina, research fellow on sanctions at the weapons industry and State Department-funded International Institute for Strategic Studies, argues that the U.S. and its allies should devise a coherent plan of “economic statecraft” against China as soon as possible. Elisabeth Braw of the Carlyle Group-funded American Enterprise Institute proposes that the U.S. and its allies secure control over the information airwaves to ensure citizens “know exactly what to look for” from so-called “subversive” state and non-state actors that counter U.S. and NATO talking points. Of course, these so-called “preparations” are already underway. The U.S. spends hundreds of millions in its information war against China and has recently banned Chinese semiconductor exports to compliment an already wide-ranging economic war on China.
Foreign Policy’s article was part of a flurry indications that the U.S. foreign policy establishment is preparing for war with China. Two days following Foreign Policy’s article, top U.S. General in Japan James Bierman made the stunning admission in the Financial Times that U.S. is “setting the theater of war” by goading China into a Ukraine-style war over Taiwan. The next day, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a war simulation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Predictably, the U.S. government concluded that Chinese efforts to invade the island would fail at a great cost to the militaries of all parties. Back in May 2022, The Center for New American Security (CNAS), which is principally funded by military contractors, showcased its own war simulation on NBC’s Meet the Press.
It’s important to note that U.S. war preparations with China have little do with Taiwan specifically. They’re a response to imperial decline and the rise of China and Russia. China and Russia both present their own specific challenges to U.S. hegemony. Russia’s growing sovereignty and political independence from the U.S.-led West has undermined the Wolfowitz Doctrine of full-spectrum dominance over all territory of the former Soviet Union. China’s massive socialist-led market economy is set to surpass the U.S.’s stagnant finance capitalist system in GDP terms by 2035.
Worse for the U.S. is that Russia and China have grown closer together. In economic terms, the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership has grown by leaps and bounds since the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation was established in 2001. Bilateral trade is expected to increase by 25 percent and reach a total volume of $200 billion ahead of the 2024 target date. Surging economic ties with China have given Russia further protection from U.S.-E.U. sanctions, with agricultural and energy exports to China increasing by the month. Russia and China have also increased coordination on matters of military coordination, color revolutions, and diplomacy in the face of a common threat: U.S. imperialism.
But perhaps the biggest threat to U.S. hegemony resides in China and Russia’s leadership in the global movement for integration and de-dollarization. China and Russia are the principle leaders of multilateral institutions such as BRICS+ mechanism and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These multilateral institutions set out to strengthen investment in all sectors of economic and social development between participating countries, especially in the realm of finance. In response to starvation U.S.-E.U. sanctions and predatory loans from Western financial institutions, BRICS+ has united the largest Global South economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in an effort to develop an alternative to the U.S. petrodollar-dominated neoliberal economy.
The strength of BRICS+ grew immensely in 2022. Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iran, Argentina, and several other countries expressed interest in or applied to join BRICS+. BRICS+ is complimented by China and Russia’s own integration projects which aim to develop the infrastructure necessary to break free from the petrodollar. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) sports major cooperation agreements with more than 140 countries and consists of at least 2,000 development initiatives, many of which are completed or under construction. Talks of possibly merging Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the BRI are already underway between the two countries.
Virtual picture taken of BRICS 2022 Summit hosted by China. Photo credit: CGTN
The same forces preparing for war with China have expressed deep concern about the future of the dollar amid growing Eurasian integration. Foreign Policy admitted in its marathon 12-essay piece that U.S. sanctions have led China to pursue alternatives to the dollar with its trading partners. Zolton Pozsar, an economist and former strategist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, recently sounded the alarm about what he termed “BRICSpansion” and the potential of China, Russia, Iran, and the Global South uniting around a new currency system backed by the wealth of commodities in their possession. Pozsar warns of “commodity encumbrance” or the growing possibility that resource-rich nations like Russia will use their commodities as collateral to increase reserves of credit and financing. China and Saudi Arabia’s interest in trading oil in Chinese yuan, Russia’s pursuit of an international reserve currency, and the idea of “BRICS coin” are presented as major threats to Western financial dominance.
The U.S.’s answer to fading imperial hegemony is war, and more of it. War is an inherent feature of predatory neoliberalism where corporations seek favorable conditions to exploit and plunder the planet’s laboring classes and resources. War is also a permanent, and very profitable, industry dominated by a tiny few military contractors. The ruling elite has calculated that U.S. imperialism cannot compete with China and Russia, making the rise of both an existential threat to the future of U.S.-led neoliberalism and imperialism. This sentiment has been expressed by NATO’s Atlantic Council think-tank and in the U.S.’s successive national security strategies of “Great Power” and “Strategic” Competition.
That U.S. foreign policy strategists and experts are planning for the next war should come as no surprise. U.S. imperialism has does not target singular “enemies.” It targets alternative development models and the nations attempting to build them. The Ukraine proxy war is thus a testing ground for the larger U.S. agenda of imperial expansion. A common condition of peace and prosperity for humanity will depend in large part on undermining of this agenda, particularly within the citadel of imperialism: the United States.
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Featured image: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Moscow, 2019. Photo credit: Xinhua
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There has been much coverage over the resurfacing of former CNN host Brian Stelter as the host for a panel at the World Economic Forum on alleged disinformation and “hate speech.” Stelter previously called for censorship under a “harm reduction model” and led a panel at a conference where Democrats discussed how to shape the news. He was confronted over his own dissemination for false stories targeting Republicans on CNN. Yet, I was most struck by a statement from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger who described “disinformation” as the “most existential” problem the world is facing today. Sulzberger insisted that disinformation is the reason why there is a loss of “trust” today. He ignores his own history in eroding that trust in the media through flagrantly biased decisions at the New York Times.
Former NYT editor Jill Abramson also slammed the participation of Sulzberger and the New York Times at Davos, denouncing it as a “corrupt circle-jerk” between media and business. She said that “the coverage was a sweetener to flatter the CEOs by seeing their names in the NYT.”
The panel was titled, “Clear & Present Danger of Disinformation” included panelists: New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Vice-President of the European Commission Vera Jourová, CEO of Internews Jeanne Bourgault, and Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. The entire conference was notable in its omission of free speech advocates while inviting long advocates for censorship like Stelter.
Stelter asked his panel, “How does this discussion of disinformation relate to everything else happening today in Davos?”
Sulzberger responded:
“Well, first, thanks for having me is as part of this conversation. As you can imagine, this is something I really care deeply about. So, I think if you look at this question of disinformation, I think it maps basically to every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society, and particularly the most existential among them. So, disinformation and in the broader set of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information that’s corrupting information ecosystem, what it attacks is trust. And once you see, trust decline, what you then see is a society start to fracture, and so you see people fracture along tribal lines and, you know, that immediately undermines pluralism. And the undermining of pluralism is probably the most dangerous thing that can happen to a democracy. So I really — I think if if you’re spending this week thinking about the health of democracies and democratic erosion, I think it’s really import to work your way back up to where this starts.”
It was a telling statement. Sulzberger suggested that allowing some opposing views undermines “trust.” Indeed, allowing opposing views on Covid or election or global warming does erode trust in the media and the government. Society would be so less “fractured” if information is controlled and consistent.
There is a perfectly Orwellian element to Sulzberger’s words. Democracy is being threatened because there is too much “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “bad information,” and other harmful views being expressed. After all, without such views, there was be less “fracture” and more “trust.”
What is most notable about the comment, however, was the date. This is after many of those censored and blacklisted in the media and social media have been seemingly vindicated in raising questions over masks or vaccines.
Among the suspended were the doctors who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration,which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdowns as well as the real value of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.
Some of us have been raising concerns over the emergence of a “shadow state” where corporations carry out censorship the Constitution bars the government from doing. Leading Democrats have been open about precisely this type of corporate manipulation of political speech on social media. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called upon these companies to use enlightened algorithms to protect users from their own bad reading choices.
Even President Joe Biden called for such regulation of speech and discussions by wise editors. Without such censorship and manipulation, Biden asked, “How do people know the truth?”
The last year has shown how media censorship resisted scientific debate and buried legitimate stories. Yet, Sulzberger is still unrepentant and views disinformation rather than censorship to be the problem…Indeed the world’s most existential problem.
Sulzberger’s position is nothing if not consistent. He was involved in one of the lowest moments in modern media when the newspaper turned not only on a U.S. senator but its own editor to yield to the mob.
Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet recently said Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” in the Cotton column controversy.
The treatment of the Cotton column shocked many of us. It was one of the lowest points in the history of modern American journalism. During the week of June 6, 2020, the Times forced out Bennet and apologized for publishing Cotton’s column calling for the use of the troops to restore order in Washington after days of rioting around the White House.
While Congress would “call in the troops” six months later to quell the rioting at the Capitol on January 6th, New York Times reporters and columnists denounced the column as historically inaccurate and politically inciteful. The column was in fact historically accurate, even if you disagreed with the underlying proposal (as I did).
Reporters insisted that Cotton was endangering them by suggesting the use of troops and insisted that the newspaper should not feature people who advocate political violence. Writers Taylor Lorenz, Caity Weaver, Sheera Frankel, Jacey Fortin, and others also said that such columns put black reporters in danger and condemned publishing Cotton’s viewpoint.
Critics never explained what was historically false (or outside the range of permissible interpretation) in the column.
In a breathtaking surrender, the newspaper apologized and not only promised an investigation into how such an opposing view could find itself on its pages but promised to reduce the number of editorials in the future:
“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reduction the number of op-eds we publish.”
“blew the opportunity to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality. That was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength. He still could have fired me…I actually knew what it meant to have a target on your back when you’re reporting for the New York Times.
None of that mattered, and none of it mattered to AG. When push came to shove at the end, he set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me,. This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had what felt like all my colleagues treating me like an incompetent fascist.”
These controversies are the reason why trust in the media is at an all-time low. However, figures like Sulzberger still blame too much free speech as opposed to his own role in biased coverage that has undermined that trust.
That is why, in 2023, it is so glaring to see Sulzberger is being interviewed by Stelter on how disinformation is the greatest existential threat to the planet. Not nuclear proliferation, over-population, war, famine. It is the danger of allowing too much free speech that undermines “trust.”
The key however is that there was no “fracturing” at the World Economic Forum. It was the same figures voicing the same criticism of free speech as the scourge of our time. The problem is the vast global unwashed who fail to put their trust in the right people and sources. Fortunately, all the right people are gathered at Davos to show the way.
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Many Syrians may have left as refugees, but the country seems very crowded. The US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change began in 2011 and brought in outside actors: Iran, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the US.
Turkey is working to rebuild diplomatic, security and trade ties with Syria. Arab states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia are supportive of bring peace to Syria.
The YPG is a totalitarian Marxist militia and the Syrian wing of the Kurdish terrorist group PKK, which operates under the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
With so many issues at stake in Syria today, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Dr. Ahmad Alderzi, the noted microbiologist and political activist, to gain more insight.
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Steven Sahiounie (SS): The Russian Center for Negotiation in Daraa, Syria was active in concluding a security agreement in Daraa. But, we have seen continuing violence against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), even recently. In your opinion, will we witness a military operation in southern Syria to secure Daraa?
Ahmad Alderzi (AA): The story of reconciliation in Daraa differs from the rest of the stories that took place in the rest of the regions, due to the nature of the interfering forces in southern Syria from the rest of the forces in other regions, and due to the post-war changes with NATO in Ukraine, especially the “Israeli” factor who is afraid of transforming the Syrian southern region into an area similar to southern Lebanon and Gaza, and would allow the repetition of Hezbollah’s experience.
In the Golan region, launching a resistance that disturbs the “Israeli” security supported by Iran and Hezbollah, in addition to the Jordanian and Saudi factor, who do not want Iran and Hezbollah to be present on these borders with the Golan and Jordan. The fragile reconciliation was just for appearance, and to keep the armed groups under Russian auspices under the name of “the Eighth Brigade”, and turned a blind eye to the survival of the other groups with their individual and medium- weapons, which made these factors have a major role in southern Syria.
To maintain the state of security chaos to constitute a barrier against fears of the expansion of Iranian influence, in addition to the Russian factor, which is working to formulate a new regional order for contradictory and conflicting regional powers, including “Israel” that allows Russia to be a guarantor reference for all.
However, the Russian position began to shift after the war in Ukraine, and its relations developed rapidly with Iran to something like a security, military, and economic partnership, and its reflection on the relationship between them in Syria, which prompted those factors. The United States moved in the southern Syrian region and started working on connecting the Al-Tanf region with the regions of Al-Suwayda, Daraa, and Quneitra in a way that can isolate these areas from the partial control of Damascus over it. Therefore, a major military operation in southern Syria is linked to the level of progress of what the US is planning to do, although it is more likely to focus on the regions of northern Syria after the tripartite meeting in Tehran on July 19 of last year.
SS: Recently the defense ministers of Russia, Turkey, and Syria meet in Moscow. In your opinion will that meeting have concrete results?
AA: If we look at the nature of the historical and geographical relationship between what remains of Syria, the Levant, and Turkey, the Anatolian plateau importance of geography, history, and the nature of the successive crises in the two countries, the options available between them will force them to walk towards the middle of the road, and push them towards thinking outside the box. Here comes the importance of the meeting between the three defense ministers of Russia, Syria and Turkey, and it comes within the framework of the great international conflict, and the reshaping of the West Asian region, which pushes the Americans to get out of northeastern Syria. We only have to look at the event as a result of the tripartite meeting in Tehran, the sponsor of countries meeting.
Astana which is the other side of the Eurasian project which is based on its three pillars, which are the three countries. This imposes itself on Syria and Turkey with issues that push towards a political solution to the ongoing war in Syria, which is about to enter its thirteenth year in a few months. The results will begin at the security and military levels, and proceed to political and economic levels.
SS: The Russian president has a good reputation with both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In your opinion, will Russia encourage the reform of the relationship between Damascus and Riyadh?
AA: Since 2013, President Putin has moved to work to persuade Saudi Arabia to get out of the war in Syria. Foreign Minister Lavrov’s visit to Saudi Arabia was to clarify the security risks to the region due to the possibility of the collapse of the Syrian state, and its repercussions on the geographical maps of the entire region.
The situation was different after the advent of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the center of Saudi decision-making, who invested in the American retreat in West Asia, expanding the margin of freedom of movement for Saudi Arabia, especially after Donald Trump lost the US presidential elections, and the Democrats returned to gripping the joints of American political decision-making.
The data confirms that the Saudis want to return to the relationship with Syria.
This is what prompted the Bahrainis to open their embassy in Damascus, but the obstacles to their return are still continuing until now, as they demand the exit of Iran from Syria which they consider a threat to their regional role through their support for the resistance movements in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen. They also suffer from a dilemma: their war in Yemen, which constitutes a security threat to them especially with regard to the Saudi Plan 2030, which needs security stability that allows for this transformation and therefore, the return of relations with Syria is possible if they reach a basic conclusion that Iran is an essential part of the fabric of the region, and its exclusion is not possible. By virtue of its geopolitical weight and that the relationship with Israel cannot serve Saudi Arabia with anything, especially at the level of balancing the Iranian role.
Israel with its new extremist face after Netanyahu’s victory, and his alliance with Ben Gvir, constitutes a burden on the Saudi bets, and the last good thing is their conviction that has begun to form of their inability to win in Yemen, and defeat is close, and this is what prompted them to search for a way out, to withdraw in exchange for Yemeni security guarantees.
SS: Syria and Turkey have a common interest in returning northeastern Syria to the Syrian government. In your opinion, can Russia play a role in this?
AA: The matter for Russia is very vital as there are a group of factors pushing Russia to return northeastern Syria to the Syrian government, as it needs to prove that its foreign policies depend on fulfilling its legal and moral obligations towards states not dismantling states, but rather restoring the sovereignty of their governments over all of their lands, and this is what it expressed. By answering to the Syrian government’s call for military intervention in Syria, and on the other hand it seeks to secure the YPG, the Kurdish militia.
Those who supported them before the collapse of the Soviet Union by abandoning the protection of the Americans and providing a safe environment for their continuation. It has an interest in achieving national security for Turkey because it is certain that what the United States is working on is dismantling the region more than Britain and France did after the First World War and therefore, it is making great efforts on the level of the Syrian and Turkish states on the one hand, and on the YPG in particular, and the Syrian Kurds in general.
Russia seeks to find a political solution that gives the Syrian state the restoration of control over the region, the removal of Turkish national security concerns, and making the Kurds partners in the political solution, in exchange for their giving up arms, and breaking their alliance with the Americans. This will play a key role in restoring the regions of northeastern Syria.
SS: Recent reports indicate that there will be an imminent combined military operation between Russia, Syria and Turkey. What can you tell us about this upcoming military operation?
AA: One of the outcomes of the tripartite meeting of the Tehran Summit, which I mentioned earlier, is related to the common threat to the survival of the American forces in northeastern Syria against the three countries, in addition to Syria, and depriving it of its lands and wealth. It was agreed that the American forces should leave it, and the matter requires a Syrian-Turkish reconciliation. It also requires the YPG to disengage from their association with the Americans, and the second option is the passage of the SAA, and its allies, to the areas east of the Euphrates.
Reaching the alignment of the Americans, by neutralizing the SDF, by imposing a fait accompli, without a clash. If it understands its risks, but if it does not accept, then a clash with it will be inevitable, and with the support of the Russian aviation. I believe that this process is postponed because of two factors: the first is, the necessity of quick action on the Syrian-Turkish reconciliation, on and the second, is to continue the attempts with the YPG to return to the Syrian state with gains, which will be determined through negotiations between them and Damascus, which if successful will push the Americans out of the region.
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According to a study conducted by the World Population Review statistical organization, the population of India has surpassed that of China. The United Nations has not confirmed the announcement and instead expects India to reach the milestone later this year. None-the-less, what is universally agreed is that India’s population will surpass China’s this year. What does this mean?
India’s population was 1.417 billion at the end 2022, five million more than the 1.412 billion reported by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The bureau announced on January 17 a decrease of 850,000 people compared to the previous year, the first decline in China’s population since 1961.
Chinese leaders identified in the 1960s and 1970s that because population growth was outpacing food production capabilities, poverty was a constant factor in hindering the development of the People’s Republic of China. At first, ideological campaigns were launched to limit births, and then in 1980 the one-child policy was announced, accompanied by abortion and mass sterilisation. As a result, the birth rate plummeted, a trend that experts anticipate will continue.
Declining birth rates and increasing life expectancy will mean a reduction in the number of young workers in China. Currently, 62% of the working-age population in China is between 16 and 59 years old, but their share is inexplicably declining. That means that it will be necessary to allocate more money to pensioners from the state budget.
Meanwhile, although there has been no official confirmation from New Delhi, experts believe that India’s population will certainly overtake China this year. The population difference is only a matter of a few million, miniscule when discussing two countries with well over a billion people.
For India, this is an important moral and psychological milestone. By becoming the world’s most populated country, India strengthens its quest to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a distinction only held by China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
It also ensures that India maintains a young and vibrant population which will contribute to the country’s rapid development and treasury. With quick development and enriched coffers, India can continue building its military capabilities, an especially important matter considering its border issues and tense relations with China and Pakistan.
Just as importantly, Indian soft power is growing as expatriate communities around the world continue to expand. It cannot be overlooked that US Vice President Kamala Harris and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are of Indian descent. Although Harris and Sunak are undoubtedly servants of their countries of birth, it does signify that Indians can sit at the highest level of any democratic government. This will inevitably lead to these countries having friendlier relations with India, as seen now in the US, UK and Canada.
As for the military, the general consensus is that a war in the 21st century is not just won because of troop numbers, but also because of modern technology and weapons. Compared to China, the process of modernising the Indian military is much slower. For example, while the Indians are assembling their second aircraft carrier, China already has four.
According to the Global Fire Power (GFP) 2023 Military Strength Ranking, China and India maintain third and fourth spot respectively, and in consecutive years. However, the GFP index indicates that it is more likely for China to take second spot from Russia than it is for India to move into third place. In this way, India’s population explosion will have little impact on its military capabilities, and rather the effects will be felt as secondary outcomes because of the country’s brain gain and continuing technological advancements.
A Morning Consult poll, published on January 17, revealed that Indians see China as their country’s “greatest military threat.” Forty-three percent of respondents named China as India’s greatest military threat, while only 13% cited Pakistan. Surprisingly though, 22% of respondents said that the US was India’s greatest threat, a massive nine percentage points difference with historic rival Pakistan. Therefore, Indians do not only view neighbouring and global power China as a major threat, but even the far-off US.
What is seemingly apparent though is that India’s global importance and stature is growing. Although one would traditionally view a large population as being synonymous with poverty and underdevelopment, China broke that stereotype and India too is quickly providing another example. India is now exhuming more confidence in its own development, progress and power, and this will contribute to a greater division of global power away from complete US hegemony. None-the-less, issues with China remain unresolved and will continue being a plight in bilateral relations in the foreseeable future.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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Virtually every day in the news we hear about a young person, perfectly healthy, with no antecedent illness drop dead without explanation. As the cases roll in it has been my general observation that if the cardiac arrest is witnessed and there is prompt defibrillation, as in the case with Demar Hamlin, then neurologic and overall survival is possible.
Out of guilt, remorse, shame and in the stupor of a COVID-19 vaccination trance, the victim and the family usually make no statement about vaccination status—something that would have been a proud point of a selfie or a tweet a few years ago. In a recent paper by Li et al, the cellular basis for the wide range of mechanisms the lead to cardiac arrest in a COVID-19 vaccinated person are described. I was alarmed that the authors considered cardiac arrest and death “common” as listed in Table 2.
Li YE, Wang S, Reiter RJ, Ren J. Clinical cardiovascular emergencies and the cellular basis of COVID-19 vaccination: from dream to reality? Int J Infect Dis. 2022 Nov;124:1-10. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2022.08.026. Epub 2022 Sep 6. PMID: 36075372; PMCID: PMC9444584.
Of note, the authors point out that Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, coronary ischemia, and myocarditis as underlying conditions have been found as the cause of cardiac arrest as reported in safety databases. A surge in adrenalin with the injection, during the later hours of sleep, and with athletics appears to play a role in the precipitation of the lethal arrhythmia. The authors also raise the issue of Kounis syndrome, or histamine and inflammatory factors triggering a heart attack. In the title, Li and coworkers imply that mass vaccination was a “dream” and now the cardiovascular complications including large-scale death represent the “reality” we are facing with this public health debacle.
Papers such as this are important as they may lead to more applied research on therapies to prevent arrythmias and help navigate patients through high risk periods after ill-advised COVID-19 vaccination. On a population level, the best strategy to save lives is to remove all the vaccines off the market and start cardiovascular screening programs for high risk individuals.
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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 American narrative – and other stories
Most of the world in which there is a decent educational system knows the foundational myths of the United States. Essentially a bunch of oppressed settlers could no longer tolerate the weight of the taxes imposed on them by the King of England, they threw a tea party in Boston as a demonstration against too high taxes – and the revolution was on. It was a revolution for freedom from the tyranny of a governing system that took too much wealth from the colonies when it should remain within the colonies.
That narrative is more truthful in the latter aspect of the loss of wealth to the King. A more cynical narrative describes the elite of the colonies wanting to guard their own wealth and power and fomented rebellion among the masses – many of whom were not interested in rebelling – in order to capture their own markets, one of the principal factors being ownership of land and the need for an expanding market into the ‘uncivilized’ areas of North America. The leaders of the revolution were all large landowners looking out for their own interests and property.
That narrative carries even more truth with the recognition of what they considered to be property. Not only were land and ‘things’ property, but people were property as well, and could be bought and sold like any other commodity – except that other commodities did not rebel and fight back from time to time. This third narrative establishes the basis of the common thread of racism, inequality, militarism, inequality, and general violence against persons from the inception of the U.S. to its current condition. The tea party has little consideration in this narrative, which is based more on the value of black slaves and their forced contribution to the economic wealth of the new territories – and as property their potential to be taxed . The original ‘Fathers of Confederation’ were mainly enslavers from the prime slave state of Virginia not from the elites of Boston.
1619 and all that
The roots of the slave holdings of the U.S. revolution is examined in the recent work “The 1619 Project – A New Origins Story” originally published in the New York Times in 2019 and formed into a book in 2021.
NYT Magazine, 2019
It demonstrates how King’s concerns originated with the founding of the country, and as witnessed by current events, still plagues the U.S. system. The U.S. has 40 million and growing living in poverty, ranking 33rd out of 36 OECD countries for inequality [1], has by far the largest military and military budget in the world with over 800 military bases overseas and a similar number domestically , and incarcerates over 3 million of its own people within a largely privatized profit seeking prison system.
1619 marks the year the first slaves were sold into the new British colonies of North America. Marked as property, it was their value as enslaved labour that helped build the wealth of the new colonies, and in this argument, were the principal factor in growing the wealth of the establishment, the enslavers, the large landowners, who harvested the wealth of their slaves. As property, bought and sold, they had absolutely no rights and no way to gain their freedom unless otherwise having it given to them by their owners.
Along with that was the racism rampant within the Christianized world of Europe, stemming in part from the Papal Bull of 1452 (Doctrine of Discovery) declaring all lands open to be christianized and the savages dealt with as best befitting a colonial-settler people – as savages, to be killed or controlled for the ‘discoverers’ benefit. The indigenous people were subject more to genocide; the imported slaves were subject to the laws of property – combined with the self righteous racism of the colonists.
Sugar and Cotton
Sugar was the original wealth creator throughout Latin America and in Louisiana, “None of this growth was possible without trafficking in human lives….The domestic terrorism that ended Reconstruction and destroyed so many black lives was particularly vicious in the sugar region.” But the larger culprit was cotton, the economic power of the southern states from its harvesting, the economic power of they northern states from their manufacturing, and finally the demand for cotton products throughout the British empire and beyond:
“Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation….’American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism.’
The importance of this specific kind of property – enslaved people – was both enshrined in the Constitution itself and affirmed by the Supreme Court’s interpretations….After the Civil War, legal provisions originally developed to protect slavery were extended to strengthen corporate interests and prompt laissez-faire capitalism….fundamentally shap[ing]the nation’s economy and the political institutions that governed it.”
In spite of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (with its declaration of citizenship by birthright), and the series of Civil Rights Acts in the LBJ presidency, black citizens still face the unequal application of laws and regulations governing the U.S.
From highways destroying and bisecting black neighbourhoods, criminal laws and resulting court convictions favouring whites, rights of self defense, and poor medical care, the fear of blacks as seen by many current police actions and the presumed guilt in white neighbourhoods of blacks working or passing through – discrimination against blacks has escaped the confines of “We the people” “indivisible with justice and liberty for all.”
Music and Guns
Two items highlight the racism endemic to the U.S. in different ways: the less violent actions concerning black musicians and their music; and the much more violent actions surrounding the Second Amendment for gun rights.
The discussion on music is interesting in showing the strength of black history and its cultural influences on U.S. music and society in general. From an outside perspective there is no music sourced in the U.S. that does not have its roots or is not strongly influenced by black musicians, artists, and producers. Current white pop culture quickly adopts many of the creations and adaptations made by black artists.
While music operates mainly in a non-violent manner, the rules and regulations on gun rights have a dark and violent past within the Constitution and the manner in which it was formed. The right to own guns is accorded to all citizens in the Second Amendment; however the amendment was enacted when neither slaves nor freedmen were considered citizens. Arguments were made and are considered throughout the foundation mythology that its purpose was to prevent an uppity government from over-taxing, over regulating, or creating whatever transgressions an aggrieved people might feel towards their government.
The position present in 1619 argues that the amendment had a larger purpose.
“Though it did not explicitly say so, the Second Amendment was motivated in large part by a need for the new federal government to assure white people in the South that they would be able to defend themselves against Black people.”
Foreign Affairs
The U.S.’ contemporary record domestically and in foreign affairs carries forward their history of violence and racism. The Christian Doctrine of Discovery (see Papal Bull, above) turned most of western Europe’s empires into oppressive regimes creating global empires by militarily dominating other regions of the world, creating major problems in all indigenous areas they tried to control. The British set the stage for future U.S. tendencies, establishing colonial settler colonies around the world, militarily subjugating many other people, and joining freely into the slave trade. The legacy the British left behind in the U.S. is seriously contaminated with the racism and fear of its slavery colonization.
The newly formed U.S. carried the fear, the racism, and the violence forward. Becoming the global hegemon after World War II only seemed to increase their desire for more power and more wealth, from the U.S. dominated global financial institutions to the series of CIA instigated coups beginning with Guatemala and Iran in 1953. Through Haiti, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Argentina, Philippines, Cuba, Venezuela and others the U.S. exported its racist fear and violence around the world in order to harvest the wealth for its corporate elite.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the path was cleared for total dominance, the “full spectrum dominance” advocated by many neocon warhawks in the U.S. establishment. Most of it continued through its violent racism against more of the world, focussed on the Middle East and Africa: Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and others have and are suffering the depredations of the U.S. military in the name of “freedom” – freedom for U.S. and global corporations to harvest the land and reduce the people to poor labourers suffering the abuse of a neocolonized people.
Israel is the U.S’ militarized outpost in the Middle East, although at this conjuncture in time it is difficult to tell as to who is directing the relationship – it is a symbiotic match of racial hatred and militarized control of ‘other’ people. The Palestinians suffer from this relationship as do other people in the region either through violent conflict, sanctions, or occupation – or combinations of them all.
China and Russia are now challenging U.S. dominance economically and militarily. The world is now multipolar without clear divisions as to which countries are on one side or another, having to balance the current financial power of the U.S. to its gradual (so far) economic decline.
The NATO-Russia war in Ukraine is currently a slow grinding affair threatening the power of the U.S. to maintain its dominance in opposition to the rising power of Russia’s industrialized military warfare along with China’s creation of alternate trading paradigms evading and avoiding as much as possible the use of the US$ for its trade currency.
Unfortunately the U.S. has a history of overseas violence, overtly and covertly. That should not surprise anyone as its entire history is one of violence over land, over people, all to maintain the supremacy of its self appointed exceptionalist mythology. Reading “The 1619 Project – A New Origin Story” provides a set of perspectives that everyone interested in U.S. history should read and absorb for understanding its foundational narrative, and its ongoing actions domestically and abroad.
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Jim Miles is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The year 2022 that became a turning point in the history of Ukraine is coming to an end. Thirty one years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, military conflict continues to rage in a number of Ukraine’s former regions while new hotbeds are smoldering. The military conflict in Ukraine has become the world’s largest, as measured by its impact on the global economy and by the ever-present danger that it could escalate into a new world war. Even the Pope in December identified the conflict in Ukraine as a “world war” which won’t see an “end” anytime soon.
Background to the conflict
Evidence that the Russian special military operation in Ukraine was inevitable and that all parties were preparing for it is shown by the continued shelling of Donbass towns and cities by Kyiv. This has been continuous during the past eight years. Donetsk city and region remains even now under intense fire by the artillery and mortars of the Kyiv regime, generously supplied by Western countries.
The Russian operation in Ukraine is actually the continuation of this long civil war in the Donbass region. Kyiv and its Western backers have refused to comply with the ‘Minsk 2’ peace agreement of February 2015. This envisioned a semi-autonomous status for the two Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk within a new, power-sharing federal structure for Ukraine. But the Western countries involved wished to maintain a subjugated status for the two republics and to use that as a point of conflict aimed at weakening the Russian Federation.
For eight long years, the Russian Federation sought a diplomatic solution to the conflict using ‘Minsk 2’ as a political framework. By late 2021, it was clear that Kyiv and its NATO backers would continue to reject this and would continue their war. Failure to act was no longer an option for Moscow, not least because it would be discredited at home.
When Russia did intervene in February 2022, harsh sanctions by the West followed. The purpose of these was to bring down the Russian economy, stir popular discontent among the Russian people, and discredit the Russian leadership. In other words, the goal of the conflict in Ukraine since 2014 has not been change or improvement in Ukraine, but regime change in the Russian Federation. In the minds of the architects of that policy, regime change would open up free access by Western corporations to Russia’s huge energy resources.
A weakening of Russia would also see Western threats heightened against Russia’s neighbour in Asia, the People’s Republic of China. It is facing its own economic and ‘regime change’ threats, centered on the ‘weak link’ of Taiwan, the island province of China that has been courted and armed by the West to be used as a wedge to divide and weaken the People’s Republic.
Concerning ‘what happened’ to Minsk 2, former German chancellor Angela Merkel let the cat out of the bag in several interviews in early December (Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel) of this year discussing the fate of that agreement. She admitted that Minsk 2 was used by her government to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military strength and continue striking against Donbass. In Russia, Merkel’s revelations were met with astonishment, for they meant that the words of Western leaders mean nothing and they can no longer be trusted.
Vladimir Putin had always maintained cordial relations with Merkel. When Merkel’s revelation hit the news, he told Russian journalists, “It is disappointing. I did not expect to hear something like that from the ex-Chancellor. I always hoped that the German leadership was genuine. Yes, she was on Ukraine’s side, supporting it. But nevertheless, I genuinely hoped that German leadership expected a settlement based on the principles achieved… during the Minsk negotiations.”
He continued,
“It appears to me that nobody planned to live up to these Minsk agreements… They lied to us, and the only reason for these processes was to pump Ukraine up with weapons and get it ready for military action. Well, we can see that. Maybe we were too late to realise what was happening. Maybe this [Russian military intervention] should have been started earlier.”
Since the Ukraine coup of 2014, pressure on the Russian government to act in defense of Donbass has come from the millions of Ukrainians who have moved to Russia for safety as well as large part of the Russian population as a whole.
Social versus neoliberal government policy
The basis for pro-Russian sympathies and influence in Ukraine comes not so much from any ethnic feelings (notwithstanding the fierce, right-wing and anti-Russia ethnic nationalism promoted by the governments of Ukraine) as the desire for greater social equality for the poorest in society. A significant role is played here by the social and economic conditions in Russia, which are far superior to those in Ukraine.
The Russian Federation has much higher social assistance, pensions and salaries as well as low prices for electricity and heating. Ukraine, on the other hand, has been stubbornly following the recommendations of the IMF in recent years to subsidize and enrich local and foreign capitalist investors through the privatizations of state industries while cutting social spending.
Even a few Western journalists have reported on this. Russian troops withdrew from Kherson city and surrounding region in November. A report in France’s Le Monde on December 19 was headlined,
‘Through propaganda based on nostalgia for the USSR and generous pension payments, Russian occupation authorities found support among the elderly in Kherson’.
In a random encounter with the Le Monde’s visiting correspondent, an elder resident of the city explains, “When the Russians were here, we had everything we needed and we were not afraid to walk in the street. Now we are just trying to survive!” Another says, “The Ukrainian soldiers are good for nothing, they don’t help us and only attract more shells.”
Pro-Western sentiments in Ukraine (as well as ‘pro-Ukrainian’ sentiments in the West) are mostly a result of large-scale media manipulations. In the Ukrainian conflict, the media component has sometimes been even more important than the economic or military campaigns. In this regard, Western media are far ahead of their Russian counterparts.
Ukrainian left-wing journalist Oleg Yasinsky, who lives in Chile, has written recently,
“Ukraine has become not only a flashpoint between the forces of neoliberalism and humanity but also the largest media clash of our time. It is a country with a hologram state. Using the latest media technologies, it is trying to convince the world of reality as it sees it in order to generate the ‘public opinion’ that planetary elites need.”
Yasinsky says Ukraine has become a model that is being tested for use in Western countries themselves. Social discussion and debate at the top levels of government and civil society are suppressed, while police, economic and cultural repression is waged against all dissenters. He writes that representatives of yesterday’s leading European democracies can no longer criticize the neo-Nazi/neoliberal dictatorship in Ukraine because with each passing day, they differ from it less and less.
In this war, the Ukraine regime (or rather, its Western sponsors) pay little attention to the views and needs of Ukrainian soldiers. Instead, those who matter are the bloggers and ‘influencers’ who are trying to convince Western audiences to send more food and other humanitarian aid as well as weapons to the Kyiv regime.
War and humanitarian aid as massive money laundering
Much of the humanitarian aid provided to Ukraine by the United Nations other international organizations ends up stolen. According to local journalists and aid volunteers, on average, about half of humanitarian aid arriving in Ukraine immediately ‘disappears’.
The Ukrainian news journal Strana.uapublished a story on December 15 showing photos by journalist Konstantin Ryzhenko of bread from the UN food mission being sold in a street market. The clear plastic packaging reads, ‘International Food Program of the United Nations’, implying, of course, that it was intended for free distribution to those in need.
“The information people are sending to me is shocking,” Ryzhenko tells Strana. “Quantity, quality… Where do hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid go? Wherever you go, 40-100-200 tons of humanitarian aid arrived but people have nothing. And if they do receive something, then it is bullshit [of poor quality]”, he explains. He calls the humanitarian aid that reaches people ‘bullshit’ because it often consists of date-expired food products that may no longer be edible.
While humanitarian aid from abroad is being stolen and resold, many people are receiving ‘aid’ in the form of expired products from Ukrainian supermarkets. On December 21, there was an attempted assassination of Konstantin Ryzhenko near his home in Kiev.
With such concerns of theft and reselling of humanitarian food aid, one can only imagine what is happening with the billions of dollars being spent on weapons aid. That information is strictly classified by the Ukraine regime. What was supplied to its military and by what company, how much profit was earned – only future generations may eventually unearth such information.
Suppression of free speech to fight the Russian threat
More than a dozen opposition parties have been banned and most media outlets have been closed in Ukraine this year. But that hasn’t stopped the outcries locally and abroad to ‘defend democracy in Ukraine’. What little free media remains in Ukraine is constantly obliged to simply reproduce the statements and information issued by the Office of the President of Ukraine, under threat of losing its licenses.
In December, Ukraine’s parliament passed a controversial media law allowing Kyiv authorities to shut down or block any media outlet without explanation and without a court decision. It prohibits any criticism of the actions of the Ukrainian government (excepting that media which receives Western grants). Months ago, the European Federation of Journalists called the proposed law “worthy of the worst of authoritarian regimes”.
Ukrainians as human shields
Ukraine initially appeared to adopt tactics of urban street fighting, on the advice of British military instructors. Evacuations of civilian populations were not necessarily carried out, or were not done so in a timely way. This is already something of a war crime. By contrast, defense lines built by self-defence forces for Donetsk city were situated well outside the city. Hundreds of thousands of Donbass residents were evacuated to safety and comfort in Russia in advance of it launching its military intervention.
According to Reuters, citing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, more than one million Ukrainians evacuated to Russia by the end of April 2022, including some 120,000 from the Donbass republics. Lavrov said Russia was expecting several million more. And indeed, Statistica reports that as of early October 2022, nearly three million Ukrainians have moved to Russia. (The pre-war population of Ukraine is estimated at 42 million.)
In November, President Zelensky bluntly explained why he had abandoned plans to evacuate Kyiv and other major cities after Russia began to strike electricity transmission stations located there. “If there are no people in the city, then the missiles will be everywhere,” Zelensky said, thereby contradicting claims by his own government that Russia was targeting the civilian population and confirming the accusations by critics that Kyiv is using civilians as human shields. Imagine for a moment the uproar in Western media if such a statement were made by the leader of a country in conflict with the West.
Instigation of religious wars
In December, Ukrainian intelligence agencies launched a campaign to ban the traditional Ukrainian Orthodox Church, accusing it of links to its ‘sister’ Russian Orthodox Church.
Searches and arrests have taken place in many monasteries throughout the country, despite the formal existence in Ukraine of ‘freedom of religion’. According to photographic ‘evidence’ provided to media by the SBU (Ukraine’s federal secret police agency), searches of monasteries have turned up such ‘incriminating evidence’ as a bust of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, a map of the Moscow Metro, prayer books published in the Russian Federation, and several Russian 10-ruble coins (worth about 14 US cents each).
In Lviv, one priest detained by police had correspondence on his phone in which he blamed NATO for the current conflict in Ukraine and wrote that Western countries intended to fight to the last Ukrainian. In Ternopil, the SBU reported a suspicion of treason against the rector of the Pochaev Theological Seminary. His accused “anti-Ukrainian activities” included the dissemination of “Russian narratives” in an anonymous Facebook profile.
Some of the arrested Orthodox monks and priests have been exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war. One of the reasons for the persecution of the church is precisely for the purpose of prisoner exchanges, since Russia is holding many times more prisoners of war than Ukraine. Thus has an already-inflated religious conflict between the Russian Orthodox Church and its breakaway Ukrainian counterpart intensified. In history, religious conflicts have always been very difficult to extinguish.
The search by the Kyiv regime, targeting Ukrainians, for “collaborators and Russian agents” has been significantly expanded and strengthened of late. In addition, under this pretext, personal vendettas are being waged. Businesses with alleged ‘Russian links’ are being squeezed out in the Kherson/Kharkov region. Extortion is demanded to ‘remove’ criminal accusations against individuals for ‘collaboration’ with Russia. Arrests are even made for correspondence with relatives deemed to be suspect. The Ukrainian Telegram channel ‘Resident’ writes that the SBU has arrested some 4,000 civilians for the purpose of prisoner exchanges with Russia.
The war loans funded by Western taxpayers
On December 6, the Day of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated that absolutely all taxes paid by citizens and enterprises are being directed to meeting military needs. The total military costs to Ukraine have amounted to more than $US 30 billion, of which two-thirds has gone to pay the salaries of the military. The remainder of military expenses, according to Shmyhal, are being borne by Ukraine’s Western allies. Earlier, the minister of finance of Ukraine, Serhiy Marchenko, argued that Ukraine finances only one third of its budget expenditures from its own revenues; the remaining two-thirds are provided by foreign sponsors and creditors.
In other words, Kyiv is conducting hostilities clearly beyond its means, and the functioning of the Ukrainian state is now dependent on the generosity of Western partners. This amounts to a loss of sovereignty, making all of Ukraine into a sort-of private military company.
Most of the funds allocated to Kyiv are in the form of loans, classified according to interest rate and repayment schedules. By the beginning of 2022, Ukraine’s external debt was already some 65% of the country’s GDP; by November 2022, the foreign debt had surpassed the country’s annual GDP.
In total, every Ukrainian, including children and babies, already owes some US$7,000 to Western creditors. But this figure is based on an estimated population of 42 million in 2014 (including the population of Donbass at the time). If we take into account that many millions of Ukrainians have left the country and a number of regions have seceded from Ukraine, then the remaining population will bear a double burden, perhaps in the order of $14,000 per capita. The average Ukrainian does not earn such an amount in a year. Simply put, the growing debt is unpayable. Ukrainians are repaying such loans with their lives, for the interests of foreign creditors.
Billions of dollars have been shelled out by Western taxpayers to assist the Kyiv regime’s war, but Ukrainians will be left indebted for generations to come. Funds that could otherwise serve to make social improvements and lessen the assaults on the planet’s natural environment, in Ukraine and in the West, are being wasted. This fraudulent scheme is very beneficial for Ukrainian and Western leaders and arms manufacturers. For them it is desirable that this war go on forever. For the rest of the world, this is a tragedy.
Anticipation of conflict in 2023
In 2023, both sides in the conflict are likely to continue and even escalate active hostilities. We do not know the military plans of the Russian, Ukrainian and NATO military leaders, but so far, all sides are talking about the need to defeat the enemy. The “peace initiatives” recently put forward by Zelensky require a surrender of the Russian Federation and the payment of reparations. This is quite unrealistic, to say the least. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in an interview with Magyar Nemzet at the end of December:
“Ukraine can continue to fight only as long as the United States supports it with money and weapons. If the Americans want peace, then there will be peace.”
In other words, even the leader of NATO member Hungary recognizes who the prospects for peace in Ukraine depend upon.
In military terms, terrible fighting in and around the small city of Bakhmut (population 75,000) is taking place. (In Donetsk, the city is called Artyomovsk, named after the famous Bolshevik Party leader Fyodor Andreyevich Sergeyev (1883-1921) whose code name was ‘Comrade Artyom’.) The fighting there has been going on for four months and the city has become a graveyard for thousands of Ukrainian servicemen. They talk on social media that fighting in Bakhmut means a quick death, or in the “best” case, a serious injury.
Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin claims that the armed forces of the Russian Federation are holding down Ukrainian troops near Bakhmut and thus giving time to prepare a large-scale offensive operation in the remainder of the Donetsk republic still in Ukrainian hands.
“The Russian Federation is building up forces. Indeed, there is an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes of the past and start moving forward again in the Zaporozhye and the Kherson regions.We need to liberate these regions. But first, you need to be well prepared. The choice of the season, by the way, is also important. Winter is ahead and the help of ‘General Frost’ will be useful,” says the Russian expert.
At the same time, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Galuzin says that any forecasts regarding the end of the Ukrainian crisis may turn out to be irrelevant if the military confrontation becomes protracted. The interests of the military-industrial complex of NATO countries, primarily the United States, also indicate that the conflict may take on a protracted character.
Ukraine is reportedly expending 14,000 shells every two days, yet the US military-industrial complex only produces such a quantity in one month.
Continued US military assistance to Kyiv will require a ramp-up of mass production of armaments and the construction of new military factories. Large investors will only invest in such military enterprises if they are confident that the war will not end quickly.
In other words, the more money American investors invest in long-term arms production programs, the longer Ukrainians will continue to die.
Indeed, this is what the Hungarian prime minister was talking about in the earlier citation from him. As the human resources of the Ukrainian armed forces are depleted, mercenary fighters from other countries may enter hostilities in larger numbers (as was the case in Syria). Thousands are already fighting on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The World Bank predicts that by the end of 2023, 55% of the population of Ukraine will live below the poverty line. The official poverty line in Ukraine is a mere 2,589 UAH per month ($70). That is about the daily cost of a loaf of bread and a liter of milk. How are electricity, heating and so many other costs of daily living to be covered?
The only area where Ukrainians now consistently receive a respectable salary is the armed forces, some 20,000 to 30,000 UAH per month (US$500 to $750). But the risk of death is very high. Despite the risk, amidst conditions of mass unemployment and impoverishment, this remains the only realistic source of income for many in the country.
Western countries may rightly fear that in the event of an end to the military conflict in Ukraine, some one million unemployed male Ukrainians with experience in military operations will seek to emigrate to the West, looking for work. Many will be suffering the psychological disorders associated with war, and in the West they will find radical, right-wing Ukrainian paramilitary groups urging them to join.
All these factors will contribute to prolonging the conflict in Ukraine.
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Seeds are an often-overlooked political battleground in industrialized countries like those of North America and Europe, but for peasant farmers in the Global South, the battle over seed rights is critical to their livelihoods.
Locally shared seeds are crucial for many rural communities—“genetic keys to biodiversity and climate change resilience,” as researcher Afsar Jafri states, as well as “records of cultural knowledge” and “the ultimate symbol of food security.” However, farmers’ ability to continue sharing and planting these seeds is under constant threat by multinational corporations and the states that back them.
In 2015, the six largest agribusiness corporations—BASF, Bayer AG, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—controlled 63 percent of the commercial seed market. In 2018, Bayer acquired Monsanto for $66 billion. The resulting corporate entity controls nearly 60 percent of the world’s proprietary seed supply.
Patented seeds against farmer livelihoods
The imposition of patented transgenic seeds onto rural communities has had a catastrophic impact on human livelihoods and biodiversity protection. In many countries, seeds have traditionally been the collective property of farmers—however, these farmers’ right to control their own seed supply is being attacked by corporate forces which have captured capitalist states around the world.
In 2010, the government of Colombia adopted Law 970 as part of a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States government. Under the terms of the FTA, Bogotá gave legal monopoly to seeds produced by US and European corporations and forced Colombian farmers to only use certified seeds manufactured by these companies. Farmers who were caught saving seeds or planting unregistered seeds were subject to fines or jail time. These laws were a condition for Washington to agree to the FTA.
Law 970 not only precipitated a rise in food production prices, since farmers were forced to purchase seeds from companies like Monsanto rather than use communally shared seeds; it also caused the Colombian state to destroy food products grown from saved seeds. This occurred in 2011 in towns like Campo Alegre, where Colombian authorities raided the warehouse and trucks of rice farmers and destroyed 70 tonnes of rice that was not produced in accordance with Law 970.
The state’s violent criminalization of seed saving and localized food production in Campo Alegre and other towns provoked a nationwide farmers’ protest, which succeeded in having the law suspended for two years and rewritten. However, these changes did not represent a policy reversal, as attacks on peasant livelihoods and targeted assassinations of peasant leaders continue to plague the countryside at a terrifying rate.
Seed monopolies and globalized capitalism
In India, the government’s imposition of the kind of industrial capitalist agriculture promoted by the IMF and World Bank has led to tremendous rates of dispossession and pollution—and, of course, mass resistance as demonstrated by the farmers’ protests of 2020-2021. Such policies also take aim at farmers’ ability to save and share seeds locally. One statistic claims that of the roughly 100,000 varieties of paddy seeds that existed in pre-independence India, there are only around 5,000 left today.
As Jafri writes:
The forced replacement of traditional seeds by chemical responsive hybrid seeds…is eroding the rich genetic diversity that India’s farmers have evolved over centuries, increasing farmers’ vulnerability to climate change, floods, droughts and other environmental disasters. At the breakneck speed which the traditional seeds are already being replaced with company seeds, [the] day is not far when Indian farmers will be forced to become completely dependent for seed supply from [transnational companies].
The corporatization of seeds and the criminalization of seed saving is a key feature of the post-Cold War push for capitalist globalization of the type embodied by the neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) advocated by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Washington Consensus. These austerity reforms and the aggressive push by Western countries for FTAs in the Global South have put tremendous pressure on rural livelihoods in many ways, including by attacking small farmers’ production and distribution of the local seed varieties. The planting of these seeds is ecologically, economically, and socially regenerative, but they earn no profits for the transnational companies whose interests are paramount in FTA negotiations.
The “colonial project” of genebanks
Seed saving is a key element of sustainable agricultural production because, as Canadian researcher Patrick Chassé writes, “this incremental selection process created unique landraces, or varieties of plants that are well adapted to their environment.” However, the national and international pressures exerted on seed-saving farmers are immense:
Some farmers still diligently save their seeds, but most have abandoned this tradition because they face financial pressure to produce large volumes of uniform crops that can be sold in grocery stores. Around the world, farmers have become dependent on large companies that sell specialized seeds that, by design, cannot be saved… Many heirloom varieties that were well adapted to specific eco-regions have been lost in this chase for maximum yields.
Seeds are still saved in Western countries like Canada, but they tend to be treated as artifacts, isolated in research centres called “genebanks” which are designed to preserve the seeds for decades. While genebanks may save the seeds from extinction, they are generally not concerned with reintegrating the seeds into their natural environment, a move which would threaten the profit margins of the large agribusiness corporations with which the Canadian state has historically allied itself. As Chassé writes: “This means that the naturally democratic act of seed saving has been replaced by a reliance on large research centres that store seeds far from the communities and landscapes that created the plant.”
After visiting Plant Gene Resources of Canada (PGRC), a genebank on the University of Saskatchewan campus, Chassé was unable to shake the impression that the facility and others like it are a “colonial project.”
Genebanks store thousands of plant varieties, but most of these were created by anonymous farmers and peasants. This crop diversity now often benefits industry. Around the world, small producers have struggled to remain competitive against industrial farms that invest heavily in increasing production and minimizing costs. These monolithic operations are always searching for new crop variants, hybrids that produce more while resisting the spectrum of diseases that are created by relentless monocropping. These desirable traits that favour commerce are often extracted from the ‘heritage’ varieties that were created by centuries of small farmers. As Michael Taussig acerbically observed, “seeds banks are booty, relics of despoliation.”
Agriculture in Chávez’s Venezuela
Venezuelans have decided to take an entirely different approach to seed politics. With the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999, rural development and self-government were foregrounded through laws focused on agrarian reform and land redistribution. Additionally, the new constitution, approved by popular referendum in December 1999, emphasized the importance of food security “through the promotion of sustainable agriculture as a strategic basis for integrated rural development.”
Chávez himself railed against transgenic foods on many occasions, highlighting the ways in which this model of agriculture dismantles a nation’s food sovereignty. In 2004, for example, he terminated a contract with Monsanto to plant 500,000 acres of transgenic soybeans on Venezuelan soil, announcing instead that the land would be used to grow yuca, an indigenous crop.
The Venezuelan government promoted local organization via participatory measures like the Organic Law of Communal Councils, placing more democratic control of production in the hands of both rural and urban communes and thus eroding the central role of national and multinational agricultural companies.
In addition to supporting grassroots production in urban centres, Chávez sought to engineer a rural renaissance by encouraging migration out of cities and into agricultural careers. He stressed the need to attain national food sovereignty by moving away from imports toward self-sustaining networks producing indigenous crops in ecological ways. He explained that people in Venezuela were drawn to the cities by a “centripetal force,” and that his policies aimed to reverse the trend in order to “occupy the geographic space of the country in a more harmonious and balanced way.”
One of the most progressive steps toward protecting small-scale agriculture in the country came after Chávez’s death, with the National Assembly’s passage of a new Seed Law in 2015. But while the Seed Law was approved after his death, its roots can be found in the agricultural philosophy and doctrine of popular participation espoused by his government from 1999 to 2013.
Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez recording a TV show in Hacienda Bolívar in the southwest region of Colón. Photo by Prensa Miraflores/Flickr.
The 2015 Seed Law
Telesur contributor Quincy Saul referred to the passage of the 2015 Seed Law as “arguably the biggest thing to happen in Venezuela since the death of Hugo Chavez,” an occurrence in which “a movement of small farmers took on one of the largest corporations in the world [Monsanto], and won.”
imported seeds (especially of garden vegetables) have practically disappeared, entering into the illegal economy. Meanwhile, seeds for more traditional crops, which have always been under popular control, have become more important in campesino production…In that sense, the law is more than a law: it is a plan for action to gain seed sovereignty.
While the radical land reform measures pursued under Chávez have stalled under Maduro, the passage of the Seed Law at a time of increasing political and economic crisis represented a major win for the scientists, small farmers’ movements, and local organizations who had been pushing the state to enact such legislation for years.
The Seed Law was the result of years of consultation with social movements and peasant organizations in the country. In addition to prohibiting transgenics and the privatization of seed varieties, the law promises governmental support for the protection and expansion of farmer-run seed systems. The stated objectives of the law as outlined by the Association for Plant Breeding for the Benefit of Society (APBREBES) are to:
support a transition from industrial agriculture to agroecology and an eco-socialist agriculture; promote the production of seeds at national level and ensure self-sufficiency; protect agrobiodiversity; promote the traditional and local knowledge and practices of peasants, afro-descendant and indigenous peoples, and other local communities; prohibit patents and plant breeders’ rights on seeds; prohibit transgenic seeds; and guide public policies so that differentiated standards and policies are applied according to the scale of production…the law prohibits seeds that endanger ecosystems, biodiversity, human health and food sovereignty. Violation of these prohibitions may be penalized with 5 to 10 years of prison.
The Seed Law created a National Seed Commission, comprised of four governmental representatives and three representatives from social movements, as well as a Popular Council for the Protection of the Local, Peasant, Afro-descendant and Indigenous Peoples’ Seeds. As APBREBES explains, “The Council’s role is to promote peasant seeds systems, including the conservation, use and exchange of seeds, local seed banks, community seed production enterprises, collaborative breeding and participative certification mechanisms; as well as to participate in policy making and provide inputs to the National Seed Commission.”
Implementing the Seed Law from below
As political confrontation intensified in Venezuela, the oppositional-controlled National Assembly passed a different seed law that called for the return of imported transgenic seeds and seed patents. At the same time, opposition demonstrations against the state sometimes vandalized government-run food research and distribution centres, including the National Institute of Nutrition and laboratories for the production of ecological farming inputs. Meanwhile, US-led sanctions precipitated a collapse of government revenues, meaning the state had few resources to support the implementation of the Seed Law.
Nevertheless, local organizations and communities began to implement the Seed Law from below. Plan Pueblo a Plan, a peasant-created initiative to push back against Venezuelans’ reduced access to food as a result of sanctions, joined with Proinpa (Integral Producers of the Páramo) to establish five centres for the local production and distribution of native potato seeds. Pueblo a Pueblo producers also began efforts to recover corn, legume and tuber seed varieties that had largely vanished under the pre-Chávez industrial agriculture model.
And it isn’t only Pueblo a Pueblo and Proinpa. Seed production centres were built throughout the country after the passing of the Seed Law – but, at the same time, the Bolivarian Revolution’s precarious position resulted in the re-emergence of more market-centred forces in the state and the increased power of interest groups such as agribusiness. As a result, the gains made after 2015 are in a dangerous position.
The Seed Law in danger
Despite the fact that the Seed Law prohibits the use of transgenic seeds, there have been reports of companies using genetically modified seeds on Venezuelan land. In November 2022, Esquisa Omaña of the organization Venezuela Free from GMOs stated: “Campesinos have denounced the presence of GMO seeds in different parts of the country. This violates the 2015 Seed Law.” The organization called on the National Seed Commission to look into the complaints but apparently found “no capacity or interest” from state institutions to investigate.
Ricardo Vaz blames the increased influence of private companies since 2015 for the state’s lack of interest in investigating allegations of Seed Law violations. “[T]here is a reconfiguration process going on that surrenders protagonism to the private sector and multinational corporations,” he argues. “In what concerns food production, agribusinesses have become the main actors, with the government openly calling for foreign investment in the sector and offering all possible advantages.”
In 2022, several Venezuelan officials floated the idea of revising the Seed Law in order to drum up international investment in the country, while elements of the press have condemned seeds traded between farmers as “pirate seeds.” Venezuelan agribusinesses have organized events around the reintroduction and promotion of transgenic seeds, including an April event in the city of Maracay titled “Future of the Technology of Genetically Modified Organisms.” One of the groups behind such events, the Venezuelan Association of Seed Companies (AVESEM), is associated with multinational giants Bayer and Syngenta.
Pablo Alvarado, representative of the state of Guárico for the Pátria Para Todos (PPT) party, has called for a revision of the Seed Law in order to generate more foreign investment. “Intellectual property must be protected,” he stated, “because we need to adapt to globalization, to new investors, we have to protect ideas, technology.”
While Alvarado asserts that he is not calling for the reversal of the Seed Law, peasant organizations and agroecologists in Venezuela find such statements worrisome. Activist and biologist Giselle Perdomo has said that there are clear economic interests behind such calls to alter the Seed Law:
The interests are clearly economic, with a desire to bring transgenic seeds to the country, particularly corn, and thus develop this type of industrial agriculture with pesticides, which on the one hand promises productivity, and on the other hand contaminates rivers, soils and affects food sovereignty… The Seed Law also reinforces the viability of the peasant seed trade. We see in different press articles a desire to criminalize the trade of what they call “pirate seeds.”
The Seed Law as a global model
Despite the pushback the Seed Law continues to face, it remains a model for how countries around the world can safeguard their biodiversity, ecology, social and economic fabrics, and food production systems from national and transnational agribusiness.
Other social movements in the region have clearly taken notice. For example, the Colombian House of Representatives has been presented multiple times with draft legislation “to prohibit the entry, production, commercialization and export of genetically modified seeds.” These proposals were rejected under former President Iván Duque, but current leader Gustavo Petro, who criticizes genetically modified crops and used the language of food sovereignty to promote sustainable agricultural practices, may revisit the question in the future.
While Venezuela has often been discussed in the media, usually as a simplistic cudgel against the left, the realities of political struggle in the country have produced numerous gains that can and should inspire others, foremost among them being the 2015 Seed Law. The law provides a model for how the knowledge and traditions of small-scale farming can be defended against corporate dispossession—but ongoing debates about its revision also highlight the precarity of such changes and the need to continue defending gains even after they have apparently been secured.
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Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com.
Featured image: A farm worker holds bell peppers during a harvest in Cubiro, Venezuela. Photo from Shutterstock.
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Russian officials on Thursday reacted to a report from The New York Times that said the US was warming to the idea of helping Ukraine strike Crimea despite the risk of a Russian escalation.
When asked about the report on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Ned Price didn’t deny its contents and said, “Crimea is Ukraine,” as the US hasn’t recognized Crimea as Russian since Russia took control of it in 2014.
Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the US, responded to Price’s comments and the reports, likening the plans to potential “terrorist attacks” and warning of escalation.
“The State Department, through out-of-touch assertions that ‘Crimea is Ukraine’ and that the Armed Forces of Ukraine can use American weapons to protect their territory, is essentially pushing the Kiev regime to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia,” Antonov said, according to a press release from the Russian Embassy in the US.
“Hearing such remarks from Washington, the criminals in Kiev will once again feel complete permissiveness. The risks of conflict escalation will only increase,” he added.
Over in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the US delivering weapons for attacks on “Russian soil” was “extremely dangerous.” The Times report said that the Biden administration previously avoided supporting strikes on Crimea due to the risk of escalation, but that concern of Russia resorting to nuclear weapons has waned in Washington even though the risk clearly still exists.
“Naturally, the very discussion of the acceptability of supplying Ukraine with arms which would allow strikes to be delivered on Russian soil … is potentially extremely dangerous,” Peskov said. “This will mean taking the conflict to a whole new level which certainly will not bode well in terms of global European security.”
The US reasoning for being less concerned about escalation is based on the fact that Russia hasn’t used a nuclear weapon up to this point. But Moscow has shown a willingness to massively escalate the war in response to attacks on Crimea.
Russia didn’t start large-scale missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure until October, after the truck bombing of the Kerch Bridge, which connects Crimea to the Russian mainland. Since then, the bombardments have become routine, and millions of Ukrainians are struggling to power and heat their homes.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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Ringing in the New Year with price rises on more than 350 drugs they market in the United States, senior pharma industry executives will have been busy rehearsing their well-worn claim that such increases are necessary to support research and development costs. Lowering drug prices, they argue, would reduce profits and stifle product innovation. If we examine the evidence, however, the truth turns out to be rather different. A recent study shows that between 2012 and 2021, major pharma companies in the United States spent more money on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends than they did on research and development.
Authored by economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a researcher at Brown University on Rhode Island, the study describes how evidence strongly contradicts the pharma industry’s assertion that it is necessary for drug prices to be unregulated in order to generate profits for reinvestment in innovative new medicines. In reality, rather than using profits to increase investment, pharma companies focus instead on maintaining high drug prices so that, by making massive distributions to shareholders, they can boost the yields on their publicly traded shares.
The study reveals that between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharma companies in the United States spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends – an amount that exceeds the $660 billion they spent on drug research and development. Stock buybacks are increasingly being used by firms as a means of manipulating their share prices. By repurchasing shares of their own stock, they reduce the number of shares available and increase the value of those that remain. As such, the value of a company can be artificially inflated irrespective of the efficacy or safety of its products. While this practice has been legal in the United States since 1982 and has since become widespread, the study authors argue that it should be banned.
The need for radical reform of the global healthcare system
The findings of this study clearly demonstrate that at its core, the pharma industry isn’t really a health industry; it is an investment industry whose primary purpose is enriching the bank balances of its shareholders. To the senior executives heading the world’s pharma companies, the needs of human health come a very poor second behind the generation of stupendous wealth and profit. As perverse as it might seem, it isn’t even in the interests of the pharma industry to prevent diseases. To the contrary, in fact; the continued existence and expansion of human health problems is a precondition for the industry’s financial growth.
With even the British Medical Journal now openly admitting that the pharma industry has corrupted medicine, the need for radical reform of the global healthcare system has never been more urgent. An alternative model – focusing on disease prevention and the use of science-based natural health approaches – already exists. Implementing it in a not-for-profit form and providing free health education to people of all ages will be vital towards ensuring its long-term success and survival. Meantime, as Lazonick and Tulum’s study essentially proves beyond doubt, the pharma industry’s financialized business model is terminally sick and incapable of reform.
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The tranche of weapons includes 90 Strykers and 55 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which the US first pledged to send to Ukraine as part of an over $3 billion arms package that was announced earlier this month.
The package also includes munitions for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs), and other equipment.
The Strykers are made by General Dynamics and are designed to transport troops with extra protection, similar to the Bradleys. The Stryker is lighter and faster than the Bradleys and is on wheels as opposed to tracks.
Both vehicles can be used to go on the offense, and that’s what US officials have in mind for the new transfer. Germany and France have also pledged to send similar armored vehicles.
The UK said it would send 14 of its main battle tanks, the Challenger 2, but it’s not clear if Kyiv will get more Western-made heavy tanks. Berlin is hesitant to sign off on deliveries of its Leopard 2, and US officials signaled this week that they wouldn’t be sending the M1 Abrams.
While Ukraine is receiving a significant amount of new armor, Valery Zaluchny, the commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, said in Decemberthat he needs at least 300 heavy tanks and 600-700 fighting vehicles if he is to stand a chance to drive Russia out of the territory it’s captured.
According to the Pentagon, the full $2.5 billion arms package includes the following:
Additional munitions for NASAMS
Eight Avenger air defense systems
59 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) with 590 TOW anti-tank missiles and 295,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition
90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) with 20 mine rollers
53 MRAPS
350 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs)
20,000 155mm artillery rounds
Approximately 600 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds
95,000 105mm artillery rounds
Approximately 11,800 120mm mortar rounds
Additional ammunition for HIMARS
12 ammunition support vehicles
6 command post vehicles
22 tactical vehicles to tow weapons
High-speed Anti-radiation missiles (HARMs)
Approximately 2,000 anti-armor rockets
Over 3,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition
Demolition equipment for obstacle clearing
Claymore anti-personnel munitions
Night vision devices
Spare parts and other field equipment
US military aid for Ukraine is being pulled from funds that have already been authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, which at this point amounts to about $113 billion.
Several other NATO members pledged more military aid for Ukraine on Thursday as their defense ministers met in Brussels. The UK announced it would send 600 Brimstone missiles, and Poland said it would provide S-60 anti-aircraft guns with 70,000 rounds of ammunition.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
Featured image: A US Army Stryker armored vehicle (Source: Antiwar.com)
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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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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
The depopulation / eugenist agenda – The eugenists – Gates, Soros, Kissinger et al – present at the WEF 2023, will most likely debate whether and rather how, to continue their depopulation drive. It’s part of Agenda 2030, of the Great Reset – will timelines be adjusted, or the target abandoned? – Legal systems throughout the world are currently paralyzed. But what if people, a critical mass, are bringing back law and order for the people by the people?
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’État Against Humanity
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
The WEF and WHO – Are They Running a Death Cult? A WHO / Pharma controlled Worldwide Tyrannical “health system”
All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front. The Davos Freak Show.
Is Biden Being Blackmailed to Send US Combat Troops to Ukraine?
Davos 2023: Fragmenting the World
Ten Inconvenient Truths About Ukraine Largely Ignored by the Media
Prelude to the 2023 WEF Davos Meetings. “Cooperation” in Triggering “Depopulation” and a “Fractured World”
Bomb Cyclones and Atmospheric Rivers: Is Someone Messing with the Weather?
Video: Pfizer’s “Secret” Report on the Covid Vaccine. Beyond Manslaughter. The Evidence is Overwhelming. The Vaccine Should Be Immediately Withdrawn Worldwide
Look Up! Wake Up, People! You Are Being “Suicided in Warp Speed”.
“Orders to Kill” Dr. Martin Luther King: The Government that Honors MLK with a National Holiday Killed Him
Nazis’ Children at the World Economic Forum
The Covid “Killer Vaccine”. People Are Dying All Over the World. It’s A Criminal Undertaking
The US Meat Supply May Soon be Widely Contaminated with mRNA Proteins From Biotech “Vaccines”
Video: The Key to Ending COVID-19 Is Buried in the WTC Wreckage
Are Athletes Dropping Dead from the COVID Jab?
After COVID Vaccine Roll Out, the FAA Tacitly Admitted that Pilots Electrocardiogram (EKG) Are No Longer Normal.
Beyond Vietnam to Ukraine
2023 Outlook for Ukraine. Scott Ritter
FDA Advisers Are Angry at Moderna for Hiding Data
Video: Canada Persecution of Ethical Doctors
![South Africa (Mandela) stands with Palestine - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/m6-4-2019-e1554717464121.jpg?resize=933.5%2C580&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
And Into The Fire
