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In 2004, Fidel Castro and Pres. Hugo Chávez founded what is now the Bolivarian Alliance of the peoples of our America, ALBA which now includes Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the Caribbean island nations of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, St Kitss and Nevis, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda and Santa Lucía. A year earlier, in 2003, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was formally constituted, which now includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan and Iran. Both organizations share practically the same principles of solidarity, equality among their members and mutual respect for different ideologies. This suggests that, at that same time, in different poles of the majority world, a common decision arose to build a world free of the economic strangulation and neocolonial aggression of the United States and its allies.

Since its inception, the leaders of the ALBA countries have denounced North American and European imperialism’s brutal exploitation and domination and its gangster diplomacy of “Do what we want or else…”. In May of this year, President Daniel Ortega declared at the 21st ALBA-TCP Summit:

“They have not stopped practicing the Monroe Doctrine, they have not renounced the Monroe Doctrine. In the name of democracy, they impose a tyrannical, imperialist, terrorist, international policy… imperialism has not changed, the essence of Imperialism is there, a totally criminal essence.”

At that same meeting, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressed,

“Enough is enough of the centuries of plunder, of invasions, of threats, of imperial hegemonism, this is our century! The 21st century… and our path is that of Latin America and the Caribbean, of ALBA, of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, this is our path, the path of equals, the path of respect, the path of inclusion, the path of unitary convocation, that is our path.”

At the same summit, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz Canel also expressed the commitment of the ALBA countries to unity among diversity

“In the face of attempts at exclusion and selectivity, it is urgent to strengthen the authentic mechanisms of Latin American and Caribbean to integrate and act in concert. Together we will be able to effectively defend our sovereignty and self-determination without interference or external pressures….We call to unite, not to divide; to contribute, not to subtract; to dialogue, not to confront; to respect, not to impose.”

After decades of increasingly aggressive provocations on the part of the United States and the European Union, in February of this year the Russian Federation finally acted to defend itself. And in his historic speech on September 30, President Vladimir Putin elaborated the vision of a multipolar world, based on the same principles of ALBA and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, genuine cooperation, respect between equals, unity in diversity, a commitment to dialogue and international law. The similarity between the ALBA country leaders’ vision and the vision expressed by President Putin in his speech is very striking.

He spoke of the faith of the majority world’s peoples in a multipolar world in order to “strengthen their sovereignty and, therefore, to acquire true freedom, historical perspective, the right to independent, creative, authentic development, to a harmonious process.” President Putin made clear that it is also about faith in the human capacity to overcome differences, collaborate for the common good and create a world of solidarity. He stated explicitly, “Our values are love for neighbor, mercy and compassion.”

The contrast of these common visions of the ALBA countries, of Russia, China and their allies, with the practice of the West could not be stronger. As President Putin puts it,

“Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Everything is just the opposite: democracy becomes repression and exploitation; freedom, slavery and violence. The entire unipolar world order is inherently undemocratic and devoid of freedom. It is mendacious and hypocritical to the core.”

The truth of this categorical condemnation of the United States and its allies is self-evident in the colonial history of imperialism from its origins to its evolution over the last century to neo-colonialism. In the United States and Europe, since the introduction of universal suffrage last century enabled the Western elites to pass off their nations as democracies, in practice essentially, in exchange for guaranteeing their populations’ socio-economic development, those elites have been able to count on their countries’ peoples to collaborate in the looting of the majority world. This ensured that the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America paid the costs of the prosperity and development of Western nations as, one way or another, they continue to do.

However, the scope of geopolitical power and control of majority world resources by Western elites is now more limited. In part, this setback for the West results from the growing cooperation and commercial and financial power of the nations of the Eurasian space. In turn, the increasing economic and diplomatic activity of China, Russia and their allies has promoted the development of their relations with the nations in Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially with the countries and peoples committed to the defense of their sovereignty.

The desperate response to the relative decline of their global power on the part of the American and European oligarchies takes three main forms. First, in their own countries, the exploitation of the labor force and the repression of dissent are increasing. Secondly, they act with greater aggression of all kinds against Russia and China and their regional allies such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua or Syria, Iran and the Democratic Republic of Korea. And the third form of the Western reaction to their decline is to apply greater intimidation and harassment against countries vulnerable to economic pressure to ensure that they remain obedient.

In North America and Europe, neoliberal policies implemented since the 1980s have normalized repression and economic exploitation. In the United States there is a permanent political offensive against the social security system and investment in public services generally. In Europe, public services are being cut or privatized. In the United States and the European Union there have been huge transfers of wealth to corporate elites both during the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and as part of the financial measures in response to the economic collapse caused by measures addressing Covid-19. At the same time, even the IMF recognizes that labor remuneration in the West has fallen in real terms. Likewise, the terms and conditions of work for people throughout the West are becoming increasingly precarious. Only 10% of the workforce in the United States is organized into unions. In European countries the average is 23% and generally much lower.

It is impossible to summarize concisely all the nuances of this reality. But among the main effects associated with increased domestic economic repression in Western countries and increased aggression overseas, have been censorship on social networks and suppression of information in the media, especially on international events. These practices reinforce the West’s extensive and intense psychological warfare against the majority world and facilitate the economic and military aggression and terrorism of the United States and its allies against any nation that tries to defend its sovereignty and independence.

This marks a deep and irreparable collapse of moral and intellectual integrity on the part of Western elites and their peoples, signaling a comprehensive, insidious spiritual defeat. On the other hand, a growing number of the majority world’s governments and peoples insist on their sovereign right to manage their international relations at the international so as to open up and promote new possibilities for national, regional and international development. Perhaps the most important expression of this faith in the future is the broad support for the so-called BRICS+ group of countries,  originally organized by China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, from countries around the world, including Iran, Algeria, Turkey, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand and even Nicaragua.

 A great many majority world nations clearly agree with the views of Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines who observed this year on July 19th in the Plaza de la Revolución in Managua, at the 43rd Anniversary of the Sandinista Revloution,

“I come from a small country in our hemisphere, but this small country believes and subscribes to large principles: The defense of sovereignty and independence, non-interference and non-intervention in our own affairs; so as to able to lead ourselves and our civilizations onward, and to be able to walk together with all the peoples around the world, in friendship but not in subordination. In that sense, we are friends with everyone and aspire for a Better World.”

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

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

Featured image is from TCS

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

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Abstract

The current report presents the case of a 76-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who died three weeks after receiving his third COVID-19 vaccination. The patient was first vaccinated in May 2021 with the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 vector vaccine, followed by two doses of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine in July and December 2021. The family of the deceased requested an autopsy due to ambiguous clinical signs before death. PD was confirmed by post-mortem examinations. Furthermore, signs of aspiration pneumonia and systemic arteriosclerosis were evident.

However, histopathological analyses of the brain uncovered previously unsuspected findings, including acute vasculitis (predominantly lymphocytic) as well as multifocal necrotizing encephalitis of unknown etiology with pronounced inflammation including glial and lymphocytic reaction. In the heart, signs of chronic cardiomyopathy as well as mild acute lympho-histiocytic myocarditis and vasculitis were present. Although there was no history of COVID-19 for this patient, immunohistochemistry for SARS-CoV-2 antigens (spike and nucleocapsid proteins) was performed. Surprisingly, only spike protein but no nucleocapsid protein could be detected within the foci of inflammation in both the brain and the heart, particularly in the endothelial cells of small blood vessels. Since no nucleocapsid protein could be detected, the presence of spike protein must be ascribed to vaccination rather than to viral infection. The findings corroborate previous reports of encephalitis and myocarditis caused by gene-based COVID-19 vaccines.

Introduction

The emergence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in 2019 with the subsequent worldwide spread of COVID-19 gave rise to a perceived need for halting the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic through the rapid development and deployment of vaccines. Recent advances in genomics facilitated gene-based strategies for creating these novel vaccines, including DNA-based nonreplicating viral vectors, and mRNA-based vaccines, which were furthermore developed on an aggressively shortened timeline [1,2,3,4].

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Why do Americans hate Putin?

Tucker Carlson thinks he knows. Here’s what he said:

“… Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason.

Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe.

Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl?” (Tucker Carlson,”Americans have been trained to hate Putin, and will suffer because of it“, Fox News)

Is Carlson right, do Americans hate Putin because the media and the political class in Washington have told them to do so?

Yes and no. Yes, the media and the politicians have played a big role in the demonization of Putin. But, no, they’re not the main drivers of this smear campaign. That designation belongs to the plutocrats behind-the-scenes who use the media to attack Putin in order to promote their own globalist agenda. That’s what’s really going on; the news is being shaped to advance the interests of elites.

After all, what do the American people really know about Putin? Have they ever listened his speeches or read his statements following meetings with other world leaders? Have they ever tuned-in to his marathon 4-hour “ask-anything” Q&A sessions? Have they ever read transcripts of his interviews where he speaks candidly on critical policy issues, culture or religion?

No, of course, not. Everything Americans know about Putin they read in the media. And that’s the problem, because media despises Putin. And they despise him for the same reason they despise Trump, because the media’s wealthy owners see him as a threat to their political agenda. That’s the whole deal in a nutshell. Putin is not hated because he is a “KGB thug” or a “new Hitler”; that’s just public relations gibberish. He’s hated because he is an obstacle to the globalists achieving their geopolitical objectives. That’s the motive that drives this smear campaign. Putin has blocked them in Chechnya, South Ossetia, Syria and now Ukraine. He has derailed their grand plan to “pivot to Asia” and to encircle China with US military bases. He has been a thorn in their side for the better part of two decades and he has thrown a wrench in their loony plan to crush emerging centers of power and rule the world for the next century. That’s why they hate him, and that’s why they use their media to make you hate him, too. Check out this chart from a recent report at Pew Research:

A line graph showing that a record high share of Americans say they have no confidence in Putin

Pew Research: “Russian President Vladimir Putin receives dismal ratings, with only 6% of U.S. adults expressing confidence in him following his decision to invade Ukraine – an all-time low in surveys going back nearly two decades. The vast majority of Americans (92%) have little or no confidence in Putin’s handling of world affairs, including 77% who have none at all.” (“Zelenskyy inspires widespread confidence from U.S. public as views of Putin hit new low”, Pew Research Center)

Are you surprised?

Probably not, after all, the Pew survey just confirms what we already know, that Putin is widely reviled in the US and across the west. But what the report fails to mention is the extent to which Putin is admired in Russia and the rest of the world. Check it out:

“According to Statista Putin holds a very favorable approval rating among Russians averaging between 84% in August, 2022, to 79% approval by Russian citizens and Dual Nationals holding both Russian and United States Passports despite the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.” (Wikipedia)

84% is in the nose-bleed section! No other leader in the world today can claim 84% public approval. And what’s more incredible, is that — after 20 years in office– the overwhelming majority of Russians still support him. How does that happen? How does a modest, self-effacing bureaucrat become the most widely-admired and popular Russian leader of all time?

Here’s more from the same article:

Observers see Putin’s high approval ratings as a consequence of the significant improvements in living standards and Russia’s reassertion of itself on the world scene that has occurred during his period of office….

A joint poll by World Public Opinion in the US and Levada Center in Russia around June–July 2006 stated that “neither the Russian nor the American publics are convinced Russia is headed in an anti-democratic direction” and “Russians generally support Putin’s concentration of political power and strongly support the re-nationalization of Russia’s oil and gas industry.” Russians generally support the political course of Putin and his team. A 2005 survey showed that three times as many Russians felt the country was “more democratic” under Putin than it was during the Yeltsin or Gorbachev years, and the same proportion thought human rights were better under Putin than Yeltsin.” (Wikipedia)

So, according to the Russian people, Putin is largely responsible for Russia’s economic prosperity, the higher living standards, the sharing of oil revenues, the better human rights record and the stronger democracy.They also overwhelmingly support Putin’s military operation in Ukraine. (87%) So, how do we explain the huge disparity between the Russian peoples’ opinion of Putin (over 80% approval) and that of the American people? (92% have little or no confidence in him) Either the Russians are extremely dim-witted and gullible or the Americans are the most weak-minded, brainwashed sheeple on earth? Which is it?

For roughly 17 years, the media has been spewing the same slanderous claptrap (aimed at Putin) they settled on in 2005 and 2006. Did you know that? Did you know that– at one time– western elites and their lapdog media actually liked Putin and thought he was a leader “they could work with”? In other words, they figured Putin would be another compliant stooge like the perennially-inebriated Yeltsin who thrust the country into “shock therapy” and allowed western economists to raffle-off the nation’s most valuable assets, industries and resources to bloodsucking oligarchs who bought them for pennies-on-the-dollar. That’s what they were hoping for, another spineless toady that was willing to sell-out his country to ingratiate himself with Uncle Sam. Instead, they got Putin; a devout Christian, an unwavering conservative and a ferocious Russian patriot.

Can you see why they hated him?

And because they hated him, they ordered their media to make you hate him, too; just like they did with Saddam, and Qaddafi, and Kim Yong Un, and anyone who gets in their way. We all know the drill by now, and it always begins with character assassination; the requisite smear campaign that is designed to persuade the public to hate the enemies of the elites.

But here’s something you probably didn’t know. You probably didn’t know that the demonizing of Putin can be traced back to a precise time and place.

It’s true. Years ago, I looked into it and here’s what I found.

Former senator John Edwards and Congressman Jack Kemp were appointed to lead a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) task force to determine whether a “strategic partnership” with Russia was still possible in light of policies Putin had enacted that conflicted with Washington’s broader geopolitical aims. When Kemp and Edwards returned from Moscow they published an article titled “Russia’s Wrong Direction” (March 2006)

The authors decided that a “strategic partnership” with Russia was no longer possible because the government under Putin had become increasingly “authoritarian” and Russian society was growing less “open and pluralistic”. The irony of these observations was not lost on analysts who realized that the US has no problem jumping-into-bed with the most authoritarian countries in the world including Saudi Arabia that conducted the mass execution of 81 men in one weekend alone (in 2022) That is an impressive achievement even by Saudi standards. And we should also note that all 81 men were beheaded which further underscores the barbarity of the leaders that Washington regards as their best friends.

The point we are making is that ‘Putin hatred’ and character assassination can be traced back to a particular time and place when US foreign policy elites decided that Putin was not going to be the “responsible stakeholder” they had hoped for. He was not going to click his heels and fall in line like many of the other allies. In fact, Putin had shown his willingness to commit –what the globalists regard as the one unforgivable crime– that is, he put his own country’s national interests above those of the international banking cabal. That, of course, is the biggest “No-No” of all. Here’s a short clip from “Russia’s Wrong Direction”:

Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “U.S.-Russia relations are clearly headed in the wrong direction,” finds an Independent Task Force on U.S. policy toward Russia sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Contention is crowding out consensus. The very idea of a ‘strategic partnership’ no longer seems realistic,” it concludes…

…when President Bush has made democracy a goal of American foreign policy, Russia’s political system is becoming steadily more authoritarian, the Task Force charges. “The political balance sheet of the past five years is extremely negative……

“U.S.-Russia cooperation can help the United States handle some of the most difficult issues we face,” said Edwards. “Yet regrettably, cooperation is becoming the exception, not the norm. This report is a wake-up call that we need to get U.S.-Russia relations back on track to meet the challenges that face both of our countries.”

Consistent with this, the report argues, “Although President Putin is presiding over the rollback of Russian democracy, the United States should work with him to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to keep terrorists from attacking either his country or ours.”..

“Since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have sought to create a relationship with Russia that they called a ‘partnership.’ This is the right long-term goal, but it is unfortunately not a realistic prospect for U.S.-Russia relations over the next several years,” says the report.

In the short run, the United States needs to see Russia for what it is now. “The real question that the United States faces in this period is not how to make a partnership with Russia work, it is how to make selective cooperation—and in some cases selective opposition—serve important international goals,” concludes the report.” (“Russia’s Wrong Direction”, Council on Foreign Relations)

The report indicates the precise time that western elites gave up on Putin and, (basically) threw him under the bus. And the reason they gave up on him, is because they could see that he was a true Russian patriot. Patriotism is the mortal enemy of globalism, because patriots can’t be “flipped” and the elites know it. They know that you cannot fundamentally change a man who loves his country. These men are not ‘for sale’ and they are incorruptible. Anyone who puts country above the globalist agenda– including MAGA Americans– is the mortal enemy of the globalists. And that is why elites always enlist foppish girlie-men like Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron to do their bidding, because the job requires weak, unprincipled men who are willing to debase themselves in order to serve their masters.

But what was it in particular that convinced the elites that Putin was a lost cause who would always be a threat to their agenda?

Fortunately, we know the answer to that question because the authors listed their objections under four main headings. Here’s they are:

1. De-democratization: The report finds that Russian political institutions are becoming “corrupt and brittle.” As a result, “Russia’s capacity to address security concerns of fundamental importance to the United States and its allies is reduced. And many kinds of cooperation—from securing nuclear materials to intelligence sharing—are undermined.” (My comment– In other words, Putin was unwilling to impose additional sanctions on Iran, would not support Kosovo independence (which never gained UN approval) and refused to support the Iraq War. Bottom line: He refused to go along with Washington’s genocidal wars and arbitrary redivision of the Middle East. That’s why he was he was dubbed an “unreliable ally.”)
2. Energy supplies: “Russia has used energy exports as a foreign policy weapon: intervening in Ukraine’s politics, putting pressure on its foreign policy choices, and curtailing supplies to the rest of Europe. The reassertion of government control over the Russian energy sector increases the risk this weapon will be used again.” (My comment– This is true, Putin seized control of Russia’s greatest public asset –oil– and used it to raise standards of living across the board. Privatization is the Holy Grail of western capitalism so, naturally, Putin was condemned for errant behavior. He was also blasted for “curtailing supplies to the rest of Europe” which is also true. He cut off Ukraine’s gas supplies after Ukraine repeatedly siphoned gas from the pipelines and refused to pay for the gas it had already consumed. The authors seem to think that Russia should give away its gas for free but that’s not how capitalist economies work.)
3. The war on terror: The Task Force finds “a seeming Russian effort to curtail U.S. and NATO military access to Central Asian bases,” a sign that Russia is retreating from the idea that “success in Afghanistan serves a common interest.” (My comment– Putin was extremely accommodating in allowing US troops and weaponry to pass through Russia on their way to Afghanistan. What he opposed was the CIA-backed color revolutionsthat Washington supported across Central Asia in order to install their own puppet governments that were openly hostile towards Russia. He also opposed Washington’s covert support for Chechen terrorists. Was that unreasonable?
4. Russia hosting the G8: “A country that has in the space of a single year supported massive fraud in the elections of its largest European neighbor and then punished it for voting wrong by turning off its gas supply has to be at least on informal probation at a meeting of the world’s industrial democracies.” (My comment– Russia follows a strict policy of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries. None of the allegations of electoral interference have ever been proven. Quite the contrary, in the 3 year-long investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Robert Mueller was unable to find a scintilla of evidence to support the bogus claims. In contrast, Washington’s clandestine interventions, coup d’etats, targeted assassinations and full-scale military invasions have been widely documented and substantiated. No country in the world has ever interfered in the affairs of other sovereign governments more than the United States.

These are largely the issues upon which the authors decided that Putin was headed in “the wrong direction.” He wouldn’t support their reckless military interventions, he wouldn’t hand Russia’s oil over to rapacious oligarchs, he wouldn’t look the other way while governments in his neighborhood were toppled by Washington one-by-one, and he wouldn’t snap a salute and click his heels when he got his marching orders from Washington. These are the reasons he is viciously attacked in the media and regarded as Washington’s blood enemy. He simply refused to be their lackey, which is why they’ve spent the last 17 years trying to destroy him.

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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).

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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Whimsicality of the European Council’s European Court for Human Rights. Petition for Craig Murray

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Craig Murray is a progressive Scottish blogger who had been reporting daily from the London Court on the UK Government’s case against Alex Salmond, the leader of Scotland’s independence movement, whom the UK Government had framed on charges of “sexual harassment” that were based on witnesses the UK Government had induced to accuse him, but this was a jury trial (not a judge trial), and the jury’s verdict was “not guilty” on all counts.

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To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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El Consejo de Ministros de Italia aprobó este martes el presupuesto para el 2023 por 35.800 millones de dólares, de los que la mayoría estaría destinado a ayudar a familias y empresas ante el aumento de los precios de la energía. 

El proyecto aprobado prevé destinar más de 21.000 millones de dólares a medidas para ayudar a las empresas y familias a hacer frente a las facturas de electricidad y gas el próximo año, explicó el Gabinete en un comunicado.

La primera ministra de Italia, la derechista, Giorgia Meloni, develó en la víspera las principales líneas de su primer proyecto de presupuestos.

✅️ Approvato disegno di #leggedibilancio: manovra da quasi 35 miliardi, prudente e realista.
Sosteniamo famiglie e imprese contrastando caro energia e inflazione.

Stanziate risorse per taglio cuneo fiscale, assegno unico, assunzioni, flat tax e pensioni. pic.twitter.com/FufnsM5CKb

— MEF (@MEF_GOV) November 22, 2022

El primer presupuesto de la derechista se presentará como un proyecto de ley para su análisis, eventual enmienda y aprobación en el Parlamento antes del 31 de diciembre, tal y como pide la Unión Europea.

Según el proyecto se destinarán 4.315 millones de dólares para reducir la diferencia entre el salario que paga un empleador y lo que un trabajador se lleva a casa, beneficiando a los trabajadores de bajos ingresos.

È on line la #GiornataParlamentare del #22novembre. Tra i temi:
➡️Il #GovernoMeloni vara la #leggedibilancio da 35 miliardi;
➡️In vista del Congresso, giovedì parte la costituente del @pdnetwork ;

➡️https://t.co/JA9bYuRZwG pic.twitter.com/qa7h14fqkB

— NOMOS Centro Studi Parlamentari (@NomosCSP) November 22, 2022

También contempla un fondo de 513 millones de dólares para personas de bajos ingresos gestionado por los municipios y destinado a la compra de productos de primera necesidad.

Otro punto del proyecto es permitir la jubilación a los 62 años a condición de tener 41 cotizados.

El presupuesto extiende un esquema de impuesto sobre la renta del 15 por ciento para los trabajadores por cuenta propia a ingresos anuales de hasta 87.202 dólares, en comparación con el tope actual de 66.684 dólares, indicó el Gabinete.

Questa sera in Cdm importanti provvedimenti che presenteremo in #leggedibilancio.

Domattina in conferenza stampa illustrerò nello specifico un’importante e coraggiosa manovra economica a sostegno dei cittadini, con particolare attenzione a redditi bassi e categorie in difficoltà pic.twitter.com/AHZmUTj2eY

— Giorgia Meloni (@GiorgiaMeloni) November 21, 2022

El plan fiscal de Giorgia Meloni tendrá que ser aprobado por ambas cámaras del Parlamento italiano antes de ser enviado a las autoridades de la UE en Bruselas.

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Featured image: El proyecto prevé destinar más de 21.000 millones de dólares a medidas para ayudar a las empresas y familias frente al aumento de costo de la electricidad. | Foto: @Palazzo_Chigi

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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. –George Orwell, 1984

The plan is to keep the Covid Con going forever.

Perhaps we now need to think of Covid as the new Al Qaeda and the array of variants and subvariants as the ever elusive viral terrorists.

There’s no way to tangibly identify either the murky sleeper cells or the virii, which makes it all the easier to keep the ersatz narrative rolling along amidst an incurious public who blindly accept these spurious explanations as to why they are continuously getting sick.

Just last week I came across a mom who was lamenting that her kid was super sick. A few days later I asked how the ailing child was doing. She stated the following:

“Much better! Thanks! It has been a rough start to the school year- lots of strange viruses going around and my darn kids are catching them all.”

Turns out the unfortunate child is double vaxxed with the mRNA injections and more recently received the quadrivalent “flu vaccine.” Yet this parent can’t even posit any other possible cause other than “strange viruses.”

Her profession? Doctor.

Anyone who thinks that the Covid scam is going away is in for a rude awakening. When psychotic billionaires successfully pull off record setting profiteering schemes the odds of them pulling back are nil.

Just last week “Doctor Doom” Fauci was priming the public for ‘Endless Covid’ in an article published in the aptly-named Yahoo! news site titled: Fauci says U.S. is at a ‘crossroads’ as COVID kills 2,600 a week and new Omicron variants bloom with winter coming soon.

A few quotes from the article provide insight into what’s in store for the coming winter season- more media hysteria and the continued stoking of public fear:

While the situation is certainly different from last winter when Omicron dominated all other variants, a new “variant soup” of Omicron sublineages like XBB, BQ.1, and BQ.1.1 are gaining ground across the country, wiping out key tools used to protect immune-compromised people.

“We’re really at a point that may be a crossroads here. As we’re entering into the cooler months, we are starting to see the emergence of sublineage variants of Omicron,” Fauci said on the Conversations on Health Care radio show on Thursday.

….

Fauci also stressed in Thursday’s interview that the pandemic was far from over. The number of deaths from COVID, which still averages around 2,600 a week, remains far too high, Fauci emphasized, adding “we’re still in the middle of this—it is not over. Four hundred deaths per day is not an acceptable level.”

A week earlier the science journal Nature was pushing the same story.  From that article:

COVID ‘variant soup’ is making winter surges hard to predict

Descendants of Omicron are proliferating worldwide — and the same mutations are coming up again and again.

Some call it a swarm of variants — others refer to it as variant soup. Whatever it’s called, the current crop of immunity-dodging offshoots of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is unprecedented in its diversity. This complexity makes it harder to predict coming waves of infection. It might even lead to a ‘double wave’ in some places, as first one variant and then another overtakes a population.

Reading through the Nature article and such pronouncements from the “official” covid spokesman Mr. Fauci it is painfully evident that the powers that be plan to keep the Covid merry-go-round spinning into eternity if left to their own devices.

And why wouldn’t they? As an endless revenue stream, a convenient cover-up for vaporized immune systems and a rationale for continued “health security measures,” it’s the perfect justification.

How much longer will the public be willing to play along with this ‘Endless Covid’ story?

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Fifty organizations dedicated to food sovereignty and food justice issues are calling out Bill Gates over his latest claim that technology is the solution to world hunger and food sovereignty.

In an “open letter” published earlier this month, the groups addressed comments Gates made, during interviews with The New York Times and The Associated Press, about The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2022 Report.

The letter’s lead authors, Community Alliance for Global Justice/AGRA Watch and the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, wrote:

“In both articles, you make a number of claims that are inaccurate and need to be challenged. Both pieces admit that the world currently produces enough food to adequately feed all the earth’s inhabitants, yet you continue to fundamentally misdiagnose the problem as relating to low productivity; we do not need to increase production as much as to assure more equitable access to food.”

The authors also criticized Gates’ claims that we’ve “underinvested in agricultural innovation” and that the Green Revolution was “one of the greatest things that ever happened.”

Gates told The New York Times:

“Helping farmers has got to be the very top of the climate adaptation agenda. And within that, you have a lot of things like credit for fertilizer, cheap fertilizer, better seeds that we should be very intent on –– funding those things and setting ambitious goals for.”

But the authors of the open letter disagreed:

“There are already many tangible, ongoing proposals and projects that work to boost productivity and food security –– from biofertilizer and biopesticide manufacturing facilities, to agroecological farmer training programs, to experimentation with new water and soil management techniques, low-input farming systems, and pest-deterring plant species.”

They also disagreed with Gates’ claim that the Green Revolution was a “resounding success”:

“While [the Green Revolution] did play some role in increasing the yields of cereal crops in Mexico, India, and elsewhere from the 1940s to the 1960s, it did very little to reduce the number of hungry people in the world or to ensure equitable and sufficient access to food.”

The authors reminded Gates that with the Green Revolution came “a host of other problems, from ecological issues like long-term soil degradation to socio-economic ones like increased inequality and indebtedness (which has been a major contributor to the epidemic of farmer suicides in India).”

They also criticized Gates’ push for genetically modified seeds, stating that “climate-resilient seeds are already in existence and being developed by farmers and traded through informal seed markets.”

“You are part of creating the very problem you name,” the groups wrote. “The AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) initiative, which your foundation continues to fund, has also pushed restrictive seed legislation that limits and restricts crop innovation to well-resourced labs and companies.”

These initiatives don’t increase widespread innovation, but rather contribute to the privatization and consolidation of corporate monopolies over seed development and seed markets, they said.

The groups challenged Gates to “step back and learn from those on the ground,” and called on the media to consider how they cover Gates and his vision for the future of food.

They wrote, “we invite high profile news outlets to be more cautious about lending credibility to one wealthy white man’s flawed assumptions, hubris, and ignorance, at the expense of people and communities who are living and adapting to these realities as we speak.”

Russell Brand: It’s a ‘beautiful letter’

Russell Brand sided against Gates and with the authors of the letter, telling viewers:

“It’s a beautiful letter. It’s brilliantly articulate and the reason we want to present it to you today is because it demonstrates that criticizing Bill Gates doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist and it demonstrates too that Bill Gates’ actions and influence are nefarious and harmful.”

Brand mocked Gates, splicing his YouTube podcast with snippets of the billionaire at his foundation’s recent Goalkeepers 2030 Conference:

“Ah, Bill Gates, he’s the answer to all the world’s problems and anyone who criticizes him is a conspiracy theorist or a considered academic concerned about him colonizing and monopolizing the world’s resources.”

But this “is not a conspiracy theory,” Brand said. “These are harmful policies designed to centralize power and control food, and people are answering back from a position of authority, integrity and expertise.”

He added:

“What you are doing is gaslighting –– presenting practical, ongoing, farmer-led solutions as somehow fanciful or ridiculous, while presenting your own preferred approaches as pragmatic.”

Brand echoed the food sovereignty group’s argument that there are “already measures in place that can be controlled and implemented by the communities themselves and don’t require the centralization of power, the patenting of seeds and crops, the technologicalization of the process of agriculture –– all, by the way –– by a fellow who seems to be buying up farmland at the moment –– by coincidence!”

Brand added:

“Gates likes to look at the world as simple data. What I offer you is this question: Is Bill Gates trying to help? Or is Bill Gates simply suggesting that the solution to all of these problems is to give Bill Gates more power?”

Watch the Brand segment here:

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Ron Friedman lives in the greater Chicago area and writes on various political, public health and human interest topics, especially those affecting Americans’ constitutional rights.

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The European Union is stockpiling Russian diesel fuel before the ban on Russian oil begins. The oil-products embargo begins in less than three months and the EU lacks alternative sources of fuel.

Russian diesel shipments headed to the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) storage region surged to 215,000 barrels per day from November 1 to November 12. It is a 126% increase from October, according to Pamela Munger, Vortexa senior market analyst.  This means, that in order to prepare themselves for the ban they instituted, they are stockpiling the very thing they insisted on banning.

European traders are boosting purchases of Russian diesel ahead of the EU embargo on the country’s oil products, which comes into force in February, Reuters reported on Monday, citing cargo tracker Vortexa.

According to Refinitiv data, and as reported by RT, so far in November Russian diesel made up 44% of the bloc’s imports of the fuel, against 39% last month. This means that Russia remains the region’s largest diesel supplier, despite the fact that overall imports of Russian fuels to the EU dropped significantly over the past months due to Ukraine-related sanctions.

The EU embargo on Russian oil comes into force next month, while the ban on petroleum products will take effect on February 5. Analysts warn it will be difficult for the region to find alternative sources for diesel once this happens, as they are scarce and more costly, while Europe’s domestic diesel production falls short of the region’s consumption. –RT

“The EU will have to secure around 500,000 to 600,000 barrels per day of diesel to replace the Russian volumes; replacements will come from the US as well as east of Suez, primarily the Middle East and India,” Eugene Lindell, market analyst at energy consultancy FGE, told Reuters.

The EU is facing a major diesel fuel crisis thanks to themselves. They insisted on banning a product from a region that they need and are unable to supply themselves with enough of. One could think the “leaders” and ruling class masters are simply ignorant, however, this is looking more like a well-thought-out plan, one that most slaves are still too comfortable with their statism to admit.

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First published on February 3, 2022

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Millions of lives affected within the next ten years – according to Mike Adams. See this video.

The video talks about UN Agenda 2030, without ever mentioning it. It covers a ten-year period, starting in 2022, when it is expected that most of the vaxx-drive around the world, especially in the Global North, will be completed or is expected to be completed soon.

The report – an extrapolation of data – expanded mostly linearly, explains in essence what a large proportion – not all – of mRNA vaxxes are, and what they are intended to do to humanity. 

.

The mRNA injections, many are graphene oxide concoctions (see “The Fifth Column”) responding to electromagnetic waves, i.e. to 5G, making from humans “transhumans”, as per Klaus Schwab, WEF. (see first section of video below)

Video: Towards Digital Tyranny with Peter Koenig

Click here to link to bitchute version

The mRNA injections result  in mortality through a number of ways:

• lowered immune system; according to Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, every shot lowers the immune system by about 30% and the booster by another 20%. Thus, a person who had all three jabs, will have a drastically reduced immune system and is vulnerable to all kinds of diseases that otherwise would have been brushed off by natural immunity;
• overproduction of spike proteins; they then literally penetrate every cell in the human body and destroy it;
• the creation of tiny blood clots that are hardly visible by microscope. They settle primarily in the lungs, but can move to the heart and brain and cause heart attacks and brain strokes. They may also stay in the lungs and impair breathing;
• in the longer run, mRNA jabs may cause often very aggressive cancers, that do not react to any therapy. They are predominantly cancers affecting humans’ reproductive system;
• and more….

Even if vaccines were stopped immediately, which they are not, hundreds of thousands of people or more might be killed in the next 10 years – and if the vaxx drive continues and eventually 70% to 80% of the world population is vaxxed, the impacts on world population of about 7.9 billion would be potentially devastating. See this.

It is unlikely that such depopulation goals would be reached. But the fact that they are put up as targets means that the effort to reach the plan is relentless, unless we the People through an international legal movement such as that put forth by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich brings the worst perpetrators and their puppets to justice – in a case that may be called Nuremberg 2.0.

 

Nuremberg  Trial 1946

Covid Exit: The Freedom Convoy 2022

We, the People, also have the possibility to wake up to the truth, and to collectively in unison in solidarity fight this crime of humanity by massive civil disobedience. One such effort, perhaps the largest ever worldwide, is currently taking place in Canada. The Freedom Convoy 2022 – tens of thousands of truck drivers from all over Canada and even cross-border from the US — have driven to Ottawa, to ask Justin Trudeau to resign, go into permanent political quarantine, and/or lift ALL Covid restrictions for Canadians.

This movement alone is already extraordinary. It is an element of dynamics that was not foreseen in Mike Adams futuristic documentary “Ghost World – 2022 – 2032”. See this.

Economic Chaos, Poverty and Famine

Economic and financial implications are going to be simply put – gigantic. The economic and financial implication are simply going to be unimaginable for world citizens from 2022 through 2032.

Already today, after the first two years of “Covid” and an intense vaxx drive, bankruptcies in the Global North, as well as the resulting economic collapse in the Global South, the so-called developing world, has increased poverty and famine six-fold between mid-2019 and mid-2021 – see Oxfam. Oxfam enhances this statement by predicting that this “hunger plandemic” threatens to push millions into starvation; see this. according to Oxfam, millions of people are expected to die from poverty, famine, despair and disease – let alone from the poisonous vaxx “side effects”.

Double Digit Inflation

In addition, we are faced with an extraordinary (intentional) drive toward double-digit inflation – a real price bubble, not heard of in the last 30 years. What when it bursts, and burst it will? More transfer of resources from the bottom and the center to the top. A planned shift of wealth – an enormous shift. It’s sheer theft.  That alone will cause more poverty, despair and death.

Lawlessness knows no limits. To the contrary, the rich countries make their laws so that what otherwise would have been called “corruption” are now white-collar “regulations”.

The Great Reset

And make no mistake, this is the plan.

The Great Reset describes it quite well, except that the authors of the Great Reset paint the new era as a period of Great Happiness, “you will own nothing, but you will be happy”. Literally. People’s minds will be robotized or transhumanized to feel good.

The jabs, falsely called vaccines, contain a highly toxic and electromagnetic substance called Graphene Oxide which will receive the deadly ultra-shortwaves 5G with which the human brain will be manipulated, according to the masters’ wishes. See findings of the Spanish researchers the “Fifth Column”, see reference above.  It is suspected that mind manipulation trials are ongoing today through DARPA.

The lives of many of the world’s producers, factory workers, administrators, planners, will be affected by the mRNA vaccines, as they were asked to be vaxxed to maintain their jobs – to sustain their families. Little do they know that the so-called vaccine is a carefully planned poison concoction.

In many countries you are not allowed to shop even for food, unless you can demonstrate a vaxx certificate. This enormous blackmail, applied all over the western world is an unspeakable crime against humanity. It speaks for total lawlessness. In this ambiance, we must expect anything and everything – but we definitely must stop trusting our governments.

The results of these planned disasters may be euphemistically called supply chain disruptions – empty shelves – and famine even in so-called developed or First World countries. In the Global South, misery will be catastrophic beyond words – see above what Oxfam has to say. And if not stopped by massive people’s protests, people’s disobedience events like the Canadian Freedom Convoy 2022, the world may indeed face unfathomable misery.

Are we going to end up in a Ghost World? With a reduced population, a huge unmanned production apparatus that doesn’t produce anything, but slowly rots away – as labor and raw materials are missing, and artificial intelligence (AI) is unable to fill all the gaps?

Restoring Democracy

We the People, in a massive movement of solidarity, will have to bring those responsible to justice. We will not accept the Great Reset nor the Green Agenda nor the Global Warming agenda nor digitization of body, mind and money, nor a QR-coded life – we will thrive towards a new model society, one that may have to start from scratch, from a level of consuming (and wasting) less than Mother Earth produces.

When people depend on electronics, on digital money, on digital anything – with their most intimate data registered, digitally on QR-codes, we are enslaved. We must avoid it today because once we are there, in the digitized QR-world, it’s too late. We are enslaved.

Not too long ago, some 60-70 years ago, post-WWII, we lived a relatively peaceful life – none or hardly any electronics and life was possible.

The Covid narrative, with all its fears, coercion, blackmails and threats, has caused major damage in society, in most of the people who have faithfully trusted their governments which in turn have betrayed them into death.

It will not be easy to pull everybody out of this indoctrinated lie, from this cognitive dissonance, which is a well-planned psychological phenomenon, that has – according to Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, German Corona Investigative Committee — worked for about a third of the western population, meaning they are literally hypnotized. Awaking them will be extremely difficult.

A medical doctor told me the other day, if tomorrow the government would lift all Covid restrictions – people would still walk around with masks for quite a while. He talked about a Global South country, but it would not be much different in the Global North. That’s the hypnosis effect. They are still living under the fear syndrome.

Dr. Fuellmich goes on – one-third is awake, and the remaining third – there may be a willingness to see the truth.

A lot of damage has been done already, and a lot more will follow. But we are living in a dynamic world, and, we the People, have the power to turn the ship around. In fact, the tide is already turning, maybe slower than what we wish for but turning it is.

Quoting Bob Dylan, “The times are a Changing”.

Definitely.

“Venceremos!”

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. Peter is also 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)

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

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In one of the best known and most beautiful fragments of  The German Ideology of 1846, Marx and Engels summarized:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

So far so good, but the most interesting aspect is not that which concerns the sphere of so-called “conformism,” but that of dissenting reactions, generated by what is just as Marx used to call contradictions.  Another 20th-century Marxist, Ernesto Laclau, in his reflections on hegemony, populism and socialist strategy, liked to speak of “unsatisfied questions.”

We can experimentally note how in recent years of Italian politics, the so-called contradictions or unsatisfied questions have been managed by a particular kind of “populism.”

The crisis of traditional parties, after the 1980s, have been managed with populist concepts such as “the cancer of corruption,” the “corrupt parasitism of the south” concepts from time to time used by parties such as Lega Nord and  Movimento Cinque Stelle (almost for the first argument).

Alongside these, almost all formations that have made use of “populism” have never failed to reserve a place for the immigration issue: not only Lega Nord, from its beginnings to recent times, but also Movimento Cinque Stelle.  Let us not forget that the agitation of this  issue was a fundamental theme in the first Government of Mr. Conte, where the “exploits” of Interior Minister Salvini were somehow endorsed by Transport Minister Toninelli. It comes good in this regard to recall an ancient speech of Luigi Di Maio, former Labour and then Foreign Minister, who discussed NGO’s finding their own stage to “challenge Italy.” Video aged badly. (1)

However, our reflection is not so much about the merits of this issue, which would deserve wider and more debated spaces, but about the use of concepts considered populist to manage  the dissatisfied sphere of citizens by the ruling power.

We can test this hypothesis experimentally, by analyzing what happened regarding the Italy/France querelle over the landing of the Ship Ocean Viking, with its migrants, in France.

Taking advantage of an unspecified French openness, regarding the willingness to accept a quota of refugees bound for Italian ports, it was arranged that the rescue ship Ocean Viking, with the migrants still on board, was sent to the port of Marseille. There, “under the supervision of the competent Italian Prefecture,” the migrants were to disembark directly in transalpine territory, and then registered as asylum seekers.

In the evening, there came from the government, also published via twitter, a note of appreciation to the French government. “We express our heartfelt appreciation for France’s decision to share responsibility for the migration emergency, which until now has remained on the shoulders of Italy and a few other Mediterranean states, by opening its ports to the ship Ocean Viking.” The alleged French opening reportedly followed a conversation between President Meloni and President Macron. (2)

Mrs Giorgia Meloni thus tried to cash in, on a “populist” media blow, going so far as to claim “the first time an NGO ship was forced to disembark migrants picked up in the port of its flag.

In fact, the NGO that owns the ship – SOS Mediterranee – clarified that

“In the face of Italy’s silence and due to the exceptional nature of the situation, the Ocean Viking is forced to request a safe port from France.”

The French government just as vibrantly denied this opening almost immediately, declaring that the emergency situation had been irresponsibly created by the Italian government and that the French authorities had decided to accept the ship in the port of Toulon only so as not to endanger the lives of the 234 migrants housed aboard the ship. (3)

What had happened in France? Following the news of the impending “landing,” almost all right-wing political contenders, led by Marine Le Pen, had hurled accusations at Macron, complaining about his lax attitude in allowing Italy to humiliate France by making it swallow its illegal handling of immigration. (4)

It should be mentioned, moreover, that while waiting for the ship’s arrival in Toulon, a large group of French people called a demonstration to express solidarity with all 234 migrants on board (5).

However, the reaction of the transalpine government was harsh. This leads one to wonder why every capitalist government reserves central attention to the landing of a few migrants, where the period would counsel to allow for heavy and explosive social contradictions, such as the high cost of living and lack of employment futures.

However, a small rational exercise would help expose the mystifications.

Starting with Italy: is it really corresponding to the truth that “the responsibility for the migration emergency falls on Italy’s shoulders?

The phenomena agitated obviously always have a real basis: migration, caused by the impoverishment of vast areas of the world due to the exploitation of dominant capitalist economies, is capable of generating very large contradictions in the states where migrants enter. One need only think of the phenomenon of the French Banlieues or the Swedish neighborhoods filled with immigrants, which have now become the scenes of films and well-known television series. Contact and confrontation with the native underprivileged groups generates explosive phenomena. The poorer areas of Germany are a profitable electoral pool for parties that agitate the issue of immigration in a securitarian manner.

However, the contradictions generated by immigration, if properly understood, should spur those who suffer them to mobilize against the root cause-the barbarism of the capitalist economy-which is as responsible for the hardship of natives as for the suffering of migrants.

Why does this not happen? The answer lies in the remarks contained in the quoted passage from the German Ideology: “the class which disposes of the means of material production disposes with this, at the same time, of the means of intellectual production.”

The issue of immigration is often agitated in the first instance by the media, including – and perhaps especially – generalists. Populist parties often jump on board seeing an opportunity for hegemony. Every day the migrant is presented as a social danger, a criminal event, a phenomenon to be fought with the “force” of the state. In contrast, the opposing visions that the mainstream media allows us to see polarize into pseudo-religious pauperism, which is dedicated to describing the phenomenon of migration as only suffering, forgetting that suffering often does not create angels, but thorns that cut into the living flesh of other sufferers. Since contradictions do exist, however, the native suffering strata perceive the humanitarian vision as lying and upper-class, while validating the securitarian propaganda of the immigration “hawks” as adhering to reality.

The populist tool thus allows the consequences of social contradictions to be skillfully deflected to a constructed enemy, and one that is in fact as innocent as the native sufferers. The main culprit is hidden with satisfaction, and with other benefits that we will describe below:

• the social marginalization of migrants allows for profitable exploitation by all sectors of capital, from the illegal black labor sector, to the poor labor sector, acting as a further impetus to wage deflation.
• the faith of the disenfranchised strata of the population in the securitarian anti-immigrant narrative reinforces the role and legitimacy of the state to use repression, also discouraging the mobilization of antagonistic struggles.

Unmet demands are thus skillfully deflected by the ruling class to an innocuous target, avoiding political and social responsibility. Dissent is thus “constructed” and organized in favor of maintaining the dominant power.

The mechanism is similar to that of religious faith. In the famous example of the teapot, Bertrand Russell amiably recalled that

“if I asserted that between the Earth and Mars there was a porcelain teapot revolving around the Sun on an elliptical orbit, no one could contradict my hypothesis as long as I took care to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed by even the most powerful of our telescopes. But if, since my assertion cannot be disproved, I claimed that doubting it was an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason, one would rightly think that I was talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught every Sunday as the sacred truth, and instilled in the minds of children at school, hesitation in believing in its existence would become a sign of eccentricity and bring the doubter to the attention of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or the Inquisitor in an antecedent age.” (5)

The agitation of migratory danger as a phenomenon to be kept across borders has been perpetrated in the media considered most respectable for a good thirty years now, with enormous frequency. The difficulty then becomes to propagate a different view based on the real contradictions between classes and the real perpetrator of these inequalities.

A little rational exercise, however, could unmask the mystifications.

Starting with Italy: does it really correspond to the truth that “the responsibility for the migration emergency falls on the shoulders of the Boot? A recent article in Il Fatto Quotidiano (6) highlighted well-known statistics, from which it is inferred that, in relation to population, Italy is in the last positions for receiving refugees and immigrants, while in the first positions are France Sweden and Germany, which Italian politicians often accuse of relegating the migration problem onto the shoulders of our country.

Although statistics do not determine the presence of irregulars, migrants arriving in the southern shores of the Mediterranean are often headed to richer countries with more opportunities, as also shown by the harshness with which countries such as France adopt strict border controls with Italy.

Then according to ISPI data, the number of irregular migrants in Italy is now stable and not increasing since 2014. Moreover, numbers proportional to Italy’s are also there in other European countries.

Returning to France: is it so true that the direct landing in France of the two hundred and more poor devils aboard the Ocean Viking is a serious problem? Even more migrants would have arrived after relocation anyway, once they landed in Italy and obtained refuge. Except that the relocated arrive by plane, away from the cameras, and no one sees them, while the landings take place in front of a media stage hungry for furry sensationalism.

The harm lies there: sooner or later someone would realize that, despite these landings, the problem is otherwise manageable, and perhaps clues would begin to emerge as to the real culprit behind all the tragedies: from those at sea to those in the suburbs, caravans, and labor. It would turn out that no teapot orbits the skies, but, on the backs of poor people, capitalism sucks blood and life.

*

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Enzo Pellegrin was born in Ivrea (Italy) on 10.2.1969. He has a degree in Law and works as a criminal lawyer in Turin, Italy. Democratic and socialist activist. He writes and translates from English, French, German and Croatian currently on the Italian periodical on line: resistenze.org. His articles have also been published by the Italian magazines: “contropiano.org“, “sinistrainrete.info“, “laboratorio-21.it” (laboratory for the socialism of the XXI century), and also on “Il Fatto Quotidiano” on line. Currently he is also an active volunteer for the association for the treatment of war victims, peace and disarmament “Emergency”. 

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT2DQlk37dI

2 – https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/rise-above-arrivata-porto-reggio-calabria-AEJcP9EC

3 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnc4fSUJom8

4 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ed1g6w_PNM

5 – Bertrand RUSSELL, Is There a God? 1952 article commissioned but never published by Illustrated magazine.

6 – https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2022/11/10/migranti-lemergenza-sulle-spalle-dellitalia-abbandonata-dalleuropa-la-verita-in-quattro-grafici-e-linutilita-dello-sbarco-in-francia/6868424/

Featured image: Platform supply vessel Ocean Viking (1983). (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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***

Kazakhstan, one of the Russian neighbours and former Soviet republics, opens its doors for a broader external expansion. Given its geographical location and combined with current political reforms aim at transforming the its economic from the Soviet system to a more modernized system infused with western culture of life, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has chosen multi-vector policies.

Reforms have begun to be implemented after the election of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in June 2019. Tokayev has consistently advocated for more openness and improving necessary conditions for attracting foreign business and investors to participate in the various economics sectors and including the cultural and educational sectors.

“I believe that given our geopolitical situation, given the fact that we have over $500 billion involved in our economy, given that there are global companies operating in our market, we simply have to pursue a multi-vector, as they say now, foreign policy,” Tokayev said in the context of growing confrontations, contractions and emerging new world order.

The 69-year-old Tokayev took office in 2019 after Kazakhstan’s previous president resigned amid protests. After surviving unrest in January triggered by fuel price rises, Tokayev unveiled reforms – including constitutional amendments and a hike in the minimum wage – and called snap elections.

Amid popular demand for sweeping change, he has recently accelerated plans to increase the amount of Kazakh oil exported west across the Caspian Sea, avoiding Russia to the north. It currently relies heavily on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), one of the world’s largest pipelines that crosses Russia to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. Out of total exports of 68 million tonnes a year, 53 million tonnes of Kazakh oil move through it.

In addition, late October, Tokayev said that in the coming years the authorities of the republic plan to launch a network of border trade and economic centers with Russia, China, and Central Asian countries. In September, Tokayev emphasized that Kazakhstan would make every effort to further develop allied relations with Russia, an eternal strategic partnership with China, and comprehensive cooperation with brotherly Central Asian states.

Declaring that the creation of a fair Kazakhstan as its main goal, Tokayev has emphasized that the foreign policy course must also aim at protection of national interests, strengthening of mutually beneficial cooperation with all interested states, international peace and security.

In pursuit of sharing fresh experience of nation building, the president noted the importance of better quality education and the implementation of best global practices in domestic higher educational establishments at a meeting with Almaty students and young researchers, according to the presidential press service.

“Academic cooperation with the leading foreign universities is increasing on my orders. Branches of higher educational establishments from the UK, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, South Korea and the United States will open in Kazakhstan shortly. The integration into the global education space will bolster the competitiveness of our higher educational establishments and will raise the appeal of Kazakh higher education,” the press service quoted Tokayev as saying.

Interestingly, English language is gaining popularity among younger generation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It however projected that the people of Kazakhstan in the future will speak three languages (Kazakh, Russian and English). As part of promoting multi-cultural and friendly society, Kazakhstan has seriously made in-bound tourism as one of its priority spheres, so it has established a visa-free regime for citizens of 54 countries, including the European Union and OECD member states, the United States, Japan, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.

Even long before the war, Kazakhstan had resisted significant leverages, including a push by Moscow in 2020 for a single currency and joint parliament within the post-Soviet Eurasian Economic Union, as part of a five-year strategic plan.

Noteworthy to reiterate here that during the discussions in St. Petersburg Economic Forum held in June where Tokayev shared the stage with Putin, he explicitly said his government did not and would not recognize Russian-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine and that Kazakhstan upheld the inviolability of internationally recognized borders.

Kazakhstan government has noticeably pushed back publicly against territorial claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, souring relations between the former Soviet republic and Moscow. Russia and Kazakhstan share the world’s longest continuous land border, prompting concern among some Kazakhs about the security of a country with the second-biggest ethnic Russian population among ex-Soviet republics after Ukraine.

Kazakhstan has a GDP of $179.332 billion and an annual growth rate of 4.5%. Per capita, Kazakhstan’s GDP stands at $9,686. It’s increased role in global trade and central positioning on the new Silk Road gave the country the potential to open its markets to billions of people. Further to this, it joined the World Trade Organization in 2015.

According to some reports, Kazakhstan has an abundant supply of accessible mineral and fossil fuel resources. Development of petroleum, natural gas, and mineral extractions has attracted most of the over $40 billion in foreign investment in Kazakhstan since 1993 and accounts for some 57% of the nation’s industrial output (or approximately 13% of gross domestic product).

On 6 March 2020, the Concept of the Foreign Policy of Kazakhstan for 2020–2030 was announced. The document outlines the following main points:

• An open, predictable and consistent foreign policy of the country, which is progressive in nature and maintains its endurance by continuing the course of the First President – the country at a new stage of development;
• Protection of human rights, development of humanitarian diplomacy and environmental protection;
• Promotion of the country’s economic interests in the international arena, including the implementation of state policy to attract investment;
• Maintaining international peace and security;
• Development of regional and multilateral diplomacy, which primarily involves strengthening mutually beneficial ties with key partners – Russia, China, the United States, Central Asian states and the EU countries, as well as through multilateral structures
• the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and a few others.

Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country, located in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It declared independence on 16 December 1991, thus becoming the last Soviet republic to declare political independence. Nursultan Nazarbayev became the country’s first President. Records show that he was replaced by Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

It was the last Soviet republic to declare independence after Soviet’s collapse in 1991. With approximately 20 million population, Kazakhstan strictly recognizes its political freedom, national interest and territorial sovereignty, and is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

*

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***

Craig Murray is a progressive Scottish blogger who had been reporting daily from the London Court on the UK Government’s case against Alex Salmond, the leader of Scotland’s independence movement, whom the UK Government had framed on charges of “sexual harassment” that were based on witnesses the UK Government had induced to accuse him, but this was a jury trial (not a judge trial), and the jury’s verdict was “not guilty” on all counts.

The UK Government was outraged, and then imprisoned the best reporter from that courtroom, the blogger Craig Murray, alleging that his reports had revealed too much, and sentenced him to 8 months in prison but released him after 4 months. Craig Murray appealed his conviction to the Council of Europe’s European Court for Human Rights. On 20 November 2022, he headlined “Strasbourg Cul de Sac” and reported that his application for his case to be heard by that body was turned down.

Here are highlights:

“Strasbourg Cul de Sac”

20 November 2022

Here is the detailed argument we submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg:

IN THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS: CRAIG MURRAY, Applicant, v. THE UNITED KINGDOM, Respondent Government

Application no. 36703/22 … 19 July 2022

[Key statements from the petition for Craig Murray:]

3. …Section 11 gives the courts the power to prohibit the publication of information that has been withheld from the public in court proceedings. …

40. … In preventing the applicant from reporting even the relatively oblique details referred to above, the High Court rendered it effectively impossible to report on this matter in a manner which would be intelligible to the general public. …

43. Accordingly, the s. 11 order, as excessively broadly applied in this case, violated the substance of Article 10. …

45. … Case-law makes clear that just as internet bloggers and other popular users of social media have the same duties that the established press has, they also enjoy the same protections under Article 10. …

46. Notwithstanding this clear jurisprudence, the High Court of Justiciary [against which Murray was petitioning] held that the applicant was not entitled to the same protections as “mainstream” journalists (whatever that may mean in the contemporary media landscape). … The petitioner attempts to portray himself as a journalist “in new media”, thereby securing what may be thought to be the added protections afforded to the press where a contempt of court has occurred. This is unconvincing. A journalist is a person who writes for or edits a newspaper or periodical; whether in hard copy or on-line. The petitioner is not such a person[according to the UK]. …

47. … As citizen journalists are by nature more isolated, they are more vulnerable to attack than professional journalists. However, citizen journalists enjoy less protection than their counterparts in traditional media, as they do not have the support of media organizations and networks, in particular the organizational resources, including lawyers and financial resources, which can help shield them from harassment. …

55. … (ii) The second additional marker of the disproportionality of the sentence is that the applicant is in poor physical health. The medical report obtained in the course of the domestic proceedings from Professor Kopelman is included with this application. It sets out the applicant’s various medical conditions and that the applicant suffers from recurrent pulmonary hypertension, an ultimately fatal condition which gives rise to sudden losses of consciousness. He also suffers from bipolar disorder and depression. The effect of imprisonment on this particular applicant was thus greater than it would have been for another journalist in sound physical health. …

“Application no. 36703/22 Murray v. the United Kingdom”

10/11/2022

The European Court of Human Rights, sitting in a single-judge formation, decided to declare the application referred to above inadmissible.

Please find enclosed the decision reached by the Court.

This decision is final and is not subject to appeal, whether this be to a Committee, a Chamber or the Grand Chamber. Consequently, no further correspondence will be sent by the Court in connection with this case. In accordance with the Court’s archiving practice, the file will be kept no longer than one year after the date of the decision.

[The ruling, by that one judge, fell under the European Court of Human Rights, its Convention ARTICLE 27: Competence of single judges:

1. A single judge may declare inadmissible or strike out of the Court’s list of cases an application submitted under Article 34, where such a decision can be taken without further examination.

2. The decision shall be final. 

3. If the single judge does not declare an application inadmissible or strike it out, that judge shall forward it to a committee or to a Chamber for further examination:]

The ruling by that judge was:

“In the light of all the material … the Court declares the application inadmissable.” No reason was given.

Murray concluded that

“It is now set in law that ‘journalists’ are only those who work for the state and corporate media (there are resonances to the Assange case here), and that those in new media cannot expect the protection from long jail sentences.”

His imprisonment by the UK, and the European Court for Human Right’s’s refusal to review it, is now a legal precedent within the European Union, irrespective of UK’s no longer being in the EU. However: one reason, for this judge’s refusal to allow Murray’s case to be considered, might be in order to enable his court to retain its applicability within the UK despite Brexit.

After Brexit, UK’s continued membership in that court relies upon continuing the UK Government’s wish to continue that Court’s ‘jurisdiction’ within the UK — which the UK might cancel at any time. Brexit did not itself remove UK from the Council of Europe, which predated the EU itself; and, so, UK’s relationship to the Council of Europe is now merely a political ball that’s still in the air, notwithstanding Brexit.

The Council of Europe was established by Winston Churchill working in collaboration with America’s CIA — like the later EU, it was/is a Rhodesist operation to keep Europe under UK/U.S. control: U.S. and UK on top, Europe down, and the Soviet Union out. The European Court for Human Rights functions under that — the Council of Europe. Craig Murray’s case was being presented to this political body that has only a tenuous — if any — actual legal mandate, but only a very messy political one, which is always a political ball that’s in the air and controlled by the billionaires of U.S. and UK (the people who control America’s and UK’s international corporations). The money controls the politics; and this controls the laws and their enforcement (or not). They don’t like Craig Murray.

*

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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

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***

While United States  infrastructure has been rotting away and entire cities^[1] don’t even have access to clean drinking water, the Biden Administration and the entire Democratic Party elite have given over $54 billion in military aid^[2] to Ukraine from February, 2022 to the present.

Reading mainstream news, we’re led to believe that this invasion was unprovoked^[3]; unpredictable; and a story of a rogue^[4] authoritarian^[5] state preying on a weaker, open, democratic society, fighting for the future of democracy in the Western world^[6].

We’re led to believe that this war started in February with Russia’s invasion. In reality, this war has been going on for 8 years, fueled by American support. This support has largely been funneled to neo-Nazis and ultranationalist elements fundamentally opposed to democracy.

So, what’s the real story? Could this crisis have been predicted, and if so, avoided?

In 1989, during negotiations with the Soviet Union on the reunification of Germany, an informal agreement was made that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not expand eastward — “Not one inch”.^[7] This was acknowledged by both the US and NATO, which now assert that because they never put this agreement in writing, it is not binding.^[8] Therefore, they claim NATO has done nothing wrong and nothing to provoke a war with Russia. But the Russian perspective is very different.

To truly understand Russia’s motivations and have any hope of achieving peace, we must  grapple with the Russian perspective on its own terms. It does no good to dismiss history and context while  claiming Russian irrationality. We must understand the historical and geopolitical context to  know which forces are at play so we can chart a realistic pathway to peace.

Michail Gorbachev discussing German unification with Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Helmut Kohl in Russia, July 15, 1990. (Photo: Bundesbildstelle / Presseund Informationsamt der Bundesregierung)

When the USSR dissolved in 1991, NATO reaffirmed its commitment against eastward expansion into former Soviet republics. Newly independent Ukraine made an agreement with Russia that they could maintain their military base in Crimea^[9] where their Black Sea Fleet is stationed. Ukraine also pledged that they would maintain their neutral stance and never join the Western bloc. Three years later in 1994, Georgia would become a founding member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Crimea’s parliament declared independence^[10] from Ukraine, and ratified a new Constitution which was subsequently rejected by Kiev. Eventually, a consensus was reached in which the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was taken back under Kiev’s jurisdiction, while still granting autonomy to Crimea and recognizing the Crimean Constitution drafted in 1992.

A woman with a banner saying “Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and Crimea are a unified whole”, 1992 (Photo: Sputnik)

In 1997, Russia and NATO signed^[11] the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security. For a brief moment, it seemed that NATO was interested in working together on a mutual security arrangement in Europe including and cooperating with Russia.

These hopes were dashed in 1999, when NATO invaded and bombed the former Yugoslavia, targeting pro-Russian forces and ethnic Serbs resulting in the deaths of thousands of civilians^[12] in the space of weeks—even bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade^[13]. Russia condemned these actions at the UN in the strongest possible terms. This marked the end of potentially meaningful cooperation between NATO and the Russian Federation for the foreseeable future.

NATO took this opportunity to antagonize Russia further, aggressively working to expand into Eastern Europe. Between 1999 and 2004, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO^[14].

In 2004, a week after Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych was elected, the West organized^[15] a “color revolution” appropriately known as the “Orange Revolution” which removed him from power and installed Victor Yuschchenko; an opposition leader who almost immediately pushed for EU and NATO membership, and applied for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Four years later in 2008, NATO extended a “Membership Action Plan” to both Georgia and Ukraine, officially setting them on the course to eventual NATO membership. As Putin made it clear at the time, extending NATO membership to these two countries on Russia’s borders “would be taken in Russia as a direct threat to the security of our country.”^[16]

Later in 2008, John McCain and other US politicians traveled to Georgia to incite the right-wing government to violence against the majority-Russian breakaway state of South Ossetia. Thousands of refugees began fleeing over the border into Russia, creating a humanitarian crisis.^[17]

After repeated warnings^[18] Russia responded with military force, as US policy makers predicted. This is characterized in mainstream Western media as a Russian “invasion” of Georgia^[19], setting the precedent for how the West’s propaganda narrative would play out a few years later in Crimea.

In 2009,  Albania and Croatia joined NATO. Then in 2010, Ukraine conducted war games with NATO in the Black Sea, turning a new page for overt military cooperation between Ukraine and the West, and outraging the Russians, to whom Ukraine had promised to remain neutral.

Later that year, Victor Yanukovych once again won the presidency in Ukraine. Shortly afterwards he reached out to the IMF for the loan requested by the previous administration, which had failed to come to an agreement with the IMF over the conditions of the loan. At the same time, Yanukovych asked for Ukraine to be considered for membership in the EU.

Over the subsequent three years, President Yanukovych became increasingly  frustrated as the EU rejected his application and the IMF wouldn’t budge on its conditions. The conditions included:

• Selling off state-owned businesses and assets
• Ending pension payments
• Cutting Social Security
• Lowering the minimum wage
• Raising the retirement age
• Cutting education and healthcare funding and benefits
• Eliminating collective bargaining
• Allowing Western firms to exploit Ukraine’s resources and labor

While these terms are not unique (the IMF generally insists on these conditions when providing loans to developing countries^[20]), Yanukovych  viewed them as a total abdication of Ukrainian national sovereignty, which would have doomed the average Ukrainian to a life of misery and poverty for the benefit of multinational corporations.^[21] Previous IMF loans had also wreaked havoc on the national economy.^[22] After years of negotiations, Yanukovych ultimately refused the IMF “structural adjustment package”, once again setting the stage for Western-led regime change in Ukraine.

Over the coming months, US money began pouring into Ukraine through NGOs^[23] like the National Endowment for Democracy^{[24] [25] [26]}. These funds financed opposition groups and worked to destabilize the country. Over $5 billion^[27] was funneled into these regime-change efforts by the State Department and USAID alone.

In early 2014, a US-led coalition of western countries began an operation meant to depose Yanukovych by any means necessary. Working from the same playbook they used in Ukraine in 2004, they organized^[28] a “color revolution” by capitalizing on preexisting grievances, utilizing nationalist extremist forces to destabilize the country.

As Yanukovych’s brutal overreaction to the Euromaidan protests escalated, far-right groups funded, armed, and promoted^[29] by the West began fighting back. They seized government buildings, police stations, and even military bases. These forces drove tanks through Kiev emblazoned with Nazi symbols, and forced Yanukovych to flee via helicopter.^{[30] [31]}

As the Maidan protests in Kiev sent the President into exile, anti-Maidan protests began to escalate around the country^[32], especially in majority-Russian speaking areas^[33]. In May, 40 anti-Maidan protesters — mostly ethnic Russians — were burned alive^[34] in a trade union hall in Odessa by neo-Nazis. Nazis shot people as they were jumping from windows to escape the flames, and survivors were beaten to death in the streets.

Then Vice-President Joe Biden shaking hands with Oleh Tyahnybok

As the new coup government was being installed, Joe Biden, John McCain, Victoria Nuland and others traveled to Kiev and shook hands with neo-Nazis who led the movement to overthrow the democratically elected president. These leaders included the likes of Oleh Tyahnybok^[35], head of the antisemitic neo-Nazi political party Svoboda (formerly the Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine), who was awarded the Hero of Ukraine medal for his exemplary role in overthrowing the government, and the founder of the Azov Battalion,  Andriy Biletsky, who said in 2010 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenshen [inferior races].” Weeks later, Victoria Nuland (now Biden’s Under Secretary of State) was exposed in a leaked phone call^[36] as having approved appointments to the new coup government.

John McCain on stage in Kiev with neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok

After the coup, the new government immediately accepted the IMF loan^[37] which Yanukovych had vetoed, and began massive auctions of state assets.^{[38] [39]} Dozens of openly neo-Nazi and ultranationalist paramilitary organizations were subsequently inducted into the Ukrainian Armed Forces with official recognition, state funding, and arms^{[40] [41]}. The most notorious of these include Azov, Aidar, Svoboda, Right Sector, Misanthropic Division, National Corps, C14, Ethnic National Union, and Patriots of Ukraine.

Over the coming months, civil unrest intensified as protests^{[42] [43]} against the Maidan coup and the new Kiev government in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine continued. Neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias began shelling civilian areas of the Donbass region, which is majority Russian-speaking.

Aftermath of the shelling of the central Donetsk bus station, 2015 (Photo: Euromaidan)

In conjunction with the protests against the coup in Kiev led by a people’s front of socialists, communists, and other civil society groups, citizens militias which were formed to defend the Donbass region after the coup in Kiev seized government buildings, and declared independence from Ukraine. Referendums were held shortly afterwards with nearly 90% voting to secede from Ukraine.

Following these referendums, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were officially founded. Their stated aims included the right of self-determination and public ownership of the means of production. In the coming years, many key industries and properties which had been privatized by corrupt oligarchs after the Soviet era were nationalized without compensation.^{[44] [45] [46] [47] [48]}

Representatives of the newly declared DPR & LPR asked Russia to recognize them as independent republics and intervene to protect them from Kiev. Despite support from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Russia declined this request,while recognizing their referendums to leave Ukraine as legitimate.^[49]

Kiev then moved to terminate pension and social security payments to all those living in the Donbass region.^[50] In response, the DPR used property seized from corrupt billionaires to pay people’s pensions and Social Security payments in both the DPR & LPR.

After the coup d’etat in Kiev, the people of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea dug in to defend themselves from the ultranationalists who took power in Kiev.^[51] Citizens militias and—allegedly—a few dozen Russian troops who were stationed at their existing military base in Crimea, seized government buildings and occupied military bases across Crimea without firing a single shot.

Shortly after this, a referendum was held in Crimea in which 89.5% of citizens on voting lists cast their votes, with 97% voting to rejoin Russia.^[52] As with the previous referendums in the DPR and LPR, this referendum was condemned by the Western powers, who refused to send international observers to oversee the referendum.^[53]

The new government in Kiev was busy. They banned books by Russian and Soviet authors, and outlawed Russian music in the media.^[54] The new government developed a curriculum for public schools which demonized their shared Soviet history, erased the history of resistance to fascism and glorified figures like Stepan Bandera and groups like his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukraininan Insurgent Army (UAP) while white-washing, minimizing, or omitting their crimes—both of these explicitly antisemitic organizations collaborated with the Nazis while they were occupying Ukraine, and actively participated in carrying out some of the most egregious crimes of the Holocaust.^[55]

In May of 2015 Ukraine banned socialist symbols of any kind, with a corresponding 5-year prison sentence for sharing a socialist image or even singing the Internationale (with a 10-year mandatory sentence for members of any socialist organization doing the same).^[56] While this law also officially banned Nazi symbols, a corresponding law passed the same day glorified Nazi-collaborating antisemitic organizations like the OUN and UAP as “independence fighters”, and criminalized any criticism of their past misdeeds. Although the law also banned “Nazi symbols” like the Swastika, this aspect of the law has gone basically unenforced. Neo-Nazi symbols such as the Wolfsangel—used by the SS—and the Black Sun—created by SS leader Heinrich Himmler—remain the official symbols for groups such as Azov. Any positive reference to the Soviet period was made illegal, and dozens of Soviet monuments honoring the heroic sacrifices endured by the Red Army in fighting the scourge of fascism in Ukraine were vandalized, dismantled, and destroyed.^[57] Street names were even renamed if they were deemed to be too Russian-sounding.^[58]

Statue of Lenin dismantled and destroyed, Odessa region, 2021

As if this wasn’t overtly fascistic enough, the new government outlawed celebration of the Day of Victory Against Fascism^[59] and eventually criminalized the Communist Party of Ukraine^[60], forcing it underground and seizing its assets.^[61] It also removed Russian as the second official language of Ukraine, ended instruction in schools in the Russian language, eliminated Russian language courses, and began mandating that all workers in the public sector speak Ukrainian, even in majority-Russian speaking regions.

Ukraine declared a national holiday to celebrate the UAP^[62], the organization responsible for the brutal massacre of as many as 300,000 Poles^[63] in eastern Ukraine during WWII. The annual celebrations include parades featuring torchlit Nazi demonstrations and shouts of “Return Ukraine to Ukrainians!” — a UAP slogan.^[64]

Ukraine moved to ban dozens of opposition political parties, and arrested the heads of the Youth Communist League and the Anti-Fascist Union, who may both face the death penalty for “spreading propaganda”.^[65]

In addition to this, the Azov Battalion opened a summer camp for children in 2014 which includes military training in combat scenarios, while indoctrinating them in anti-Russian ultranationalism and neo-Nazi ideology. The camp operates at state expense.^[66]

Azov stands out among many of the most extreme ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups folded into Ukraine’s armed forces after 2014. After the invaluable role they played in overthrowing the government in hand-to-hand combat with Yanukovych’s security forces, many Azov leaders were given high honors by the new government they helped install. Some were featured on national TV and even traveled around the world on speaking tours. Azov would grow into an international “movement”, spreading its ideology overseas^[67] and recruiting white-supremacists from all over the world to support the Azov “movement” in Ukraine and abroad.^{[68] [69] [70]} This group’s brutal human rights record^[71] led the US Congress to finally vote to cease funding to Azov in June of 2015, only to quietly resume funding and arming them just months later.^[72]

While daily shelling of the Donbass region continued, diplomats from Ukraine, the DPR, the LPR, and Russia were meeting behind the scenes to negotiate a ceasefire. When the Ukrainian government advanced a “special law” in August of that year to facilitate implementation of the ceasefire agreement being drafted in Minsk, Svoboda and other far-right groups led violent clashes which left three Ukrainian soldiers dead and dozens wounded.^[73]

Despite the efforts of the far-right to sabotage peace talks, the Minsk Agreement was finally signed by both parties in September, 2015. It called for a ceasefire in the Donbass and Ukrainian recognition of the DPR & LPR as autonomous regions within Ukraine. Less than 48 hours later, top officials in the Obama Administration issued provocative threats and accusations against Russia and Ukraine to evade implementation and violate the ceasefire.^[74]  At the same time, the CIA began covertly training an armed insurgency on the Donbass front in eastern Ukraine after Russia annexed Crimea.^[75] Meanwhile, Kiev continued its intense bombing campaign of the Donbass region. Refugees began fleeing to Russia by the tens of thousands.^[76]

Donetsk Airport after shelling by neo-Nazi militants, January 21, 2015 (Photo: Sputnik)

In 2017, Montenegro joined NATO. Two years later, in 2019, Volodimir Zelensky was elected  President of Ukraine on a platform of peace and reconciliation.^[77] He spoke Russian on the campaign trail and spoke of the brotherhood and affinity between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. However, these dreams were short-lived, as the reality of the political situation forced Zelensky into increasing concessions to the far-right.^{[78] [79]}

In May of 2021, Ukraine recklessly hosted the biggest NATO war games in years^[80] in eastern Ukraine near the front of the ongoing war in the Donbass. 20 Western countries joined in these war games. This was just a month after Kiev petitioned NATO to accelerate its “Membership Action Plan”.^[81]

In August of 2021,  Zelensky began engaging in peace talks with Russia over the war in the Donbass. Neo-Nazis staged an armed riot in Kiev, trashing the Presidential office building.^[82] Luckily, Zelensky wasn’t there that day, but the message was received all the same: No negotiations. No compromise.

A month later, in September, Ukraine again hosted NATO war games^[83] near the front in the Donbass. Again, 20 countries took part in these war games, in a wildly provocative escalation.

Zelensky’s administration continued peace talks with Russia through January 2022. At a meeting with Russian counterparts, Ukraine’s representative declared that “the fulfillment of the Minsk Agreement means the country’s destruction”.^[84]

Shortly after that, Kiev massively increased its shelling^[85] of the Donbass and began massing troops, signaling an upcoming military offensive. On February 24th, The DPR & LPR again appealed to Russia asking for military assistance to repel the coming offensive by Kiev.^[86] This time, with a groundswell of support for the Communist Party, Russia recognized the DPR & LPR as independent republics, and began the “special operation” to neutralize neo-Nazi forces, officially siding with the Donbass in Ukraine’s ongoing civil war. As in Syria, Russia was now embroiled in a full-blown proxy war with the USA and its NATO lackeys.

Over the next two months, Zelensky began earnest negotiations to end the war. He wanted collective security guarantees not just from the West, but from Russia. In exchange, he promised to stop seeking membership in NATO.^[87]

These talks were cut short by threats by far-right groups in Ukraine — threats which were echoed by outlets like the New York Times, who said that Zelensky “would be taking extreme political risks even to entertain a peace deal” with Russia, as his government “could be rocked and overthrown” by far-right groups if he “agrees to a peace deal that in their minds gives too much to Moscow.”^[88] Just days after Zelensky attended peace talks in Belarus in early April, Boris Johnson visited Kiev and “urged” Zelensky not to negotiate with Putin.^[89]

Russia claims that it is “demilitarizing and denazifying” Ukraine.^[90] Western media calls this “absurd Russian propaganda.” Our TV and print media refer to Nazi units like the Azov Battalion as “freedom fighters.” We are told they are fighting for democracy and the future of the Western world. Our media insists that Russia is invading Ukraine because it’s an expansionist, imperialist power led by an autocrat — having nothing to do with the US, NATO, or Kiev’s prior actions. We’re told that Putin is simply unreasonable and deranged. Our media has absolutely failed us (while performing its intended function—namely, manufacturing consent for war—admirably).

So what does all this mean for the anti-war left?

First, let’s get the facts straight: This war has been going on for 8 years. 14,000 were killed and as many as 39,000 wounded before 2022 according to the UN^[91], one-third of which were civilians. After the coup in Kiev in 2014, Ukraine has become a puppet state of U.S. influence in the region. The US has been funneling them arms, training their armies, and influencing the privatization of their industry and resources for 8 years^{[92] [93]}. Far-right ultranationalist and neo-Nazi ideology has become alarmingly mainstream in Ukraine, and the state has tolerated and supported these groups and tendencies.^[94]

Russia does have legitimate grievances in Ukraine which we would do well to consider. Their actions have been logical and predictable. In fact, the CIA predicted all of it. In 2008, CIA director William Burns said, in a classified document released by Wikileaks^[95]:

“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.

…A radical new expansion of NATO may bring about a serious political-military shift that will inevitably affect the security interests of Russia.

…Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.

…While Russia might believe statements from the West that NATO was not directed against Russia, when one looked at recent military activities in NATO countries (establishment of forward operating locations, etc.) they had to be evaluated not by stated intentions but by potential.

…In Ukraine, these [strategic policy considerations] include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether or not to intervene.”

So far, more than $54 billion has gone to support the proxy war in Ukraine. Adjusted for inflation, this is roughly one-third of the total amount of support given to the USSR during WWII while the USA and the Soviet Union were allied in opposing Nazism.

This aid includes military equipment, ammunition, logistical support, and battlefield intelligence (including Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system). Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) troops, including many of the most infamous ultranationalist and neo-Nazi battalions, are also being trained by US and NATO military personnel in neighboring countries. The United States, which once heroically allied with the Soviet Union to fight Nazis, is now ironically aligning itself with the grandchildren of the Nazis to fight the grandchildren of the Soviets.

US politicians have repeatedly made it clear in interviews and press conferences that their stated purpose for dragging this war on indefinitely is that they are determined to weaken Russia by any means necessary^[96]; they are willing to let Ukraine fight to the very last Ukrainian, and for the country be totally devastated like Syria^[97], if it means weakening one of its biggest geopolitical adversaries.

This war isn’t between Russia and the people of Ukraine. It’s a conflict which began as a war between Ukrainians — those who supported the coup government in Kiev, and those who supported the separatist movements  and who wanted nothing to do with the coup government they hadn’t cast any votes for— and has escalated into a proxy war between Russia and the US and NATO, with NATO forces supplying Ukraine with 100% of its weaponry at the time of writing. The US military has actually given Ukraine so many weapons that its reserve stocks are nearly depleted.^[98]

The Biden Administration is willing to subject Ukraine to utter devastation to secure a dubious strategic geopolitical advantage, disregarding the countless Ukrainians that have and likely will continue to die in the process. Even in the rest of Europe not directly affected by the war, the cost of living is skyrocketing. Millions will suffer as they cannot afford to heat their homes this winter. And as with every escalation of conflict involving nuclear powers, the extinction-level horrors of thermonuclear war become increasingly likely.

We cannot allow this war to escalate any further. We need peace and we need it now! A negotiated peace settlement and an ending of US military support for Ukraine in this proxy war is an urgent necessity. It is urgent not just for the people of Ukraine, but for  Europeans who are suffering through economic fallout, and Americans who are funding this war with our tax dollars—tax dollars which could be fixing our dilapidated infrastructure, providing housing, healthcare, and education to those most in need. This war is immoral, and the goals of the US and NATO are indefensible. We stand at the brink of nuclear war, and for what? So a few Western capitalists can count their blood-stained lucre by the firelight of Ukrainian misery? So they can get filthy rich by looting Ukraine?

We say, enough!

NO WAR WITH RUSSIA!

NO WAR WITH CHINA!

NO WAR, PERIOD!

*

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Bryan Davies is a member of CPUSA.

Notes

^[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/01/jackson-mississippi-clean-drinking-water-flooding-problems

^[2] Four Ways to Understand the $54 Billion in U.S. Spending on Ukraine – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

^[3] Calling Russia’s Attack ‘Unprovoked’ Lets US Off the Hook – FAIR

^[4] Russia is a rogue state. Time to say so. – POLITICO

^[5] Putin’s War Has Moved Russia From Authoritarianism to Hybrid Totalitarianism – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

^[6] A Fight for Democracy: Why Ukraine Matters – NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY (ned.org)

^[7] https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/nato-osterweiterung-aktenfund-stuetzt-russische-version-a-1613d467-bd72-4f02-8e16-2cd6d3285295

^[8] PolitiFact | Fact-checking claims that NATO, US broke agreement against alliance expanding eastward

^[9] Ukraine crisis: why Russia sees Crimea as its naval stronghold | Crimea | The Guardian

^[10] SOVIET TURMOIL; Crimea Declares Independence – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

^[11] Microsoft Word – 1997 NATO RUSSIA FOUNDING ACT.docx

^[12] NATO’s war against Yugoslavia: the ghost that still haunts Europe | MR Online

^[13] The 23rd anniversary of NATO bombings: China and Serbia never forget – CGTN

^[14] The History of NATO’s Expansion in a Nutshell | News | teleSUR English

^[15] US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev | World news | The Guardian

^[16] https://web.archive.org/web/20080724150537/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article3681609.ece

^[17] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/10/georgia.russia5

^[18] Putin criticizes Georgia and promises Russia’s retaliation (pravda.ru)

^[19] https://editorials.voa.gov/a/ten-years-ago-russia-invaded-georgia/4516130.html

^[20] IMF Loans Forcing Austerity on Crisis-Ravaged Nations (consortiumnews.com)

^[21] The IMF connection with the Ukraine crisis | MR Online

^[22] IMF Assistance to Ukraine ‘Little More Than Mass Robbery of Its Population’ – 15.09.2016, Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

^[23] Open Society Launches Fund for a Free and Democratic Ukraine | Philanthropy New York

^[24] Ukraine’s Success after 25 years – NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY (ned.org)

^[25] Washington rushes to hide its ‘octopus’ NED funding in Ukraine | Al Mayadeen English

^[26] National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine | CovertAction Magazine

^[27] PolitiFact | The United States spent $5 billion on Ukraine anti-government riots

^[28] A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War (jacobin.com)

^[29] Congressman Max Rose Accidentally Boosted Ukraine’s Far-Right Azov Movement (foreignpolicy.com)

^[30] The Far Right, the Euromaidan, and the Maidan Massacre in Ukraine by Ivan Katchanovski :: SSRN

^[31] Profile: Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Right Sector – BBC

^[32] Ukraine: The Anti-Maidan Begins | New Eastern Outlook (journal-neo.org)

^[33] Maidan or anti-Maidan? The Ukraine situation requires more nuance | The Guardian

^[34] Burned alive: How the 2014 Odessa massacre became a turning point for Ukraine — RT

^[35] Joe Biden Rails against Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville after Supporting Them in Ukraine (mintpressnews.com)

^[36] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

^[37] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/04/03/na040417-ukraine-receives-imf-support-but-must-accelerate-reforms

^[38] Ukraine moves closer to large-scale privatization breakthrough – Atlantic Council

^[39] https://www.usubc.org/site/recent-news/ukraine-rsquo-s-state-property-fund-pitches-large-scale-sale-of-state-owned-assets

^[40] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idUKKBN1GV2TY

^[41] hate-speech.org – Ukraine’s Far-Right Forces

^[42] Donetsk crowds protest Ukrainian elections, besiege richest oligarch’s mansion — RT World News

^[43] Pro-Russian activists attack oligarch’s bank in Donetsk | The Times of Israel

^[44] https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/pro-russian-authorities-in-donetsk-nationalize-mobile-operators-equipment-and-facilities/ar-AA11UD1M

^[45] https://en.vestikavkaza.ru/news/society/55434.html

^[46] https://en.topwar.ru/202630-v-dnr-konfiskovali-v-polzu-gosudarstva-vse-imuschestvo-prinadlezhaschie-ukrainskim-oligarham.html

^[47] IntelliNews – Ukraine rebels seize billionaire Akhmetov’s enterprises in Donbas

^[48] Russia’s Mechel Seeks Compensation over Seized Donetsk Steel Plant – The Moscow Times

^[49] https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/2400998-russian-foreign-minister-lavrov-russia-does-not-recognize-dpr-lpr.html

^[50] https://tass.com/world/758130

^[51] Crimea vows to resist Ukraine’s ‘anti-Russian’ revolution – The Irish Times

^[52] official website of the Legislative Assembly of Sevastopol – The results of the all-Crimean referendum on March 16, 2014 were approved at the session of the City Council (archive.org)

^[53] Why the Crimean Referendum Is Illegitimate | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)

^[54] Ukraine moves to restrict Russian culture by banning certain books, music | Fox News

^[55] The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths | Rudling | The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (pitt.edu)

^[56] Ukraine bans Soviet symbols and criminalises sympathy for communism | Ukraine | The Guardian

^[57] Ukraine Purges Symbols of Its Communist Past (newsweek.com)

^[58] Kyiv moves to dismantle monuments and rename streets with links to Russia : NPR

^[59] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/20/ukraine-decommunisation-law-soviet

^[60] https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/zelensky-government-bans-communist-party-of-ukraine-seizes-assets/

^[61] https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/zelensky-government-bans-communist-party-of-ukraine-seizes-assets/

^[62] Ukraine celebrates Defender Day | UNIAN

^[63] (Crimes Perpetrated Against the Polish Population of Volhynia by the Ukrainian Nationalists, 1939–1945, published by Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland – Institute of National Remembrance with Association of Soldiers of the 27th Volhynian Division of the AK), Warsaw, 1990

^[64] UPA Day: Ukrainian nationalists began the march in Kiev (topwar.ru)

^[65] Ukrainian Communist youth leaders arrested by government, reportedly targeted for death – People’s World (peoplesworld.org)

^[66] Ukraine’s Azov Regiment Opens Boot Camp For Kids (rferl.org)

^[67] Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights On U.S., Europe (rferl.org)

^[68] The Nexus Between Far-Right Extremists in the United States and Ukraine – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

^[69] US backed fascist azov battalion in ukraine is training white supremacists – Workers Today

^[70] US-Funded Neo-Nazis In Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists – PopularResistance.Org

^[71] The West Is Arming Serial Human Rights Violators in Ukraine (substack.com)

^[72] US Congress quietly enables funding for Ukrainian neo-Nazi-led Azov Regiment – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

^[73] https://www.iswresearch.org/2015/09/far-right-riot-at-ukraines-parliament.htmlhttps://www.iswresearch.org/2015/09/far-right-riot-at-ukraines-parliament.html

^[74] US and Ukrainian officials seek to torpedo Minsk cease-fire agreement – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

^[75] Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion (yahoo.com)

^[76] UN – Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine (ohchr.org)

^[77] https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/28/zelensky-celebrity-populist-pinochet-neoliberal/

^[78] Siding With Ukraine’s Far-Right, US Sabotaged Zelensky’s Peace Mandate – PopularResistance.Org

^[79] https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/74294/

^[80] NATO conducts massive war games as Russia tensions simmer – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

^[81] Ukraine Urges NATO To Speed Up Membership In ‘Signal’ To Moscow (ibtimes.com)

^[82] Police clash with protesters near Ukrainian president’s office | Reuters

^[83] Ukraine holds military drills with U.S. forces, NATO allies | Reuters

^[84] Ukraine security chief: Minsk peace deal may create chaos | AP News

^[85] Ukraine sees worst shelling in years as Russian buildup grows (nypost.com)

^[86] DPR, LPR Ask Putin’s Assistance to Repel ‘Aggression of Ukrainian Forces’ – Kremlin – 23.02.2022, Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

^[87] https://nypost.com/2022/03/22/zelensky-we-wont-join-nato-if-that-brings-peace/

^[88] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/world/europe/ukraine-nationalism-russia-invasion.html

^[89] Report: Russia, Ukraine Tentatively Agreed on Peace Deal in April – News From Antiwar.com

^[90] https://sputniknews.com/20220225/what-did-putin-mean-by-denazification-of-ukraine-and-why-is-it-so-important-1093375330.html

^[91] Conflict-related civilian casualties as of 31 December 2021 (rev 27 January 2022) corr EN_0.pdf (un.org)

^[92] Ukraine to Sell 800 State-Owned Enterprises – Global Economic Report

^[93] Ukraine’s new privatization faces array of old obstacles – Atlantic Council

^[94] Ukrainian President Zelensky deepens alliance with far right – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

^[95] US gov’t knew NATO expansion to Ukraine would force Russia to intervene – Multipolarista

^[96] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/04/yes-the-united-states-should-weaken-russia/

^[97] https://sputniknews.com/20220328/biden-administration-will-fight-russia-to-the-last-ukrainian-ex-senior-us-diplomat-says-1094260792.html

^[98] The U.S. and Europe are running out of weapons to send to Ukraine (cnbc.com)

Featured image: NATO soldiers during a parade to mark Independence Day in Kiev © Sputnik / Mykhailo Markiv

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Earlier this month, America’s top General Mark Milley stated: 

You want to negotiate from a position of strength. Russia right now is on its back. The probability of Russia achieving its strategic objectives of conquering Ukraine…is close to zero… Ukraine has had great success, but Kherson and Kharkiv are relatively small. So in terms of probability, the probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine, to include what they claim is Crimea…is not high, militarily… President Biden and President Zelenskyy himself has said that at the end of the day it will be a political solution. If there’s a slowdown in the actual tactical fighting, if that happens, then that may become a window possibly, it may not, for a political solution, or at least the beginnings of talks to initiate a political solution.

General Milley knows Ukraine and the West are running out of time. The impending bloodbath in Ukraine is coming any day as soon as Kiev’s “devil’s playground hell” freezes over – literally. According to an October 16 Washington Post headline, Zelensky in total desperation, is “grabbing [boys and old] men off the street,” frantic conscription by force to put cannon foddered bodies on frontline battlefields soon to be slaughtered by Moscow’s far superior Russian military, now deployed, freshly armed, fully trained, mobilized 300,000 troops. With well over 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers already dead, and an 8 or 9 dead Ukrainians for every one Russian killed, Putin’s winter offensives about to be kicked off in a few days will make mincemeat out of the hapless, untrained Ukrainian conscripts.

In response to Milley’s overture for talks, Ukraine claims that Russia asked Ukraine if it’s interested in a short truce to test the waters. But hardliner Zelensky immediately seized the grandstanding opportunity to turn down the alleged offer. It’s obvious his orders from above are to keep fighting till the very last Ukrainian drops dead, amounting to diabolical Luciferian blood sacrifice. But of course, all year long Zelensky’s been following orders from US/NATO puppet commanders who in turn only follow orders from their bloodline controlling masters that only follow orders from Lucifer himself. This is the West’s secret demonic chain of command in Ukraine that’s been in place long prior to Putin’s February 24^th Special Military Operation.

It didn’t take long for General Milley’s recommendation to negotiate with Russia to fall on the deaf ears of both Zelensky and the DC neocons in charge, doggedly in pursuit of inciting the wider West versus East World War III.

With zero bargaining chips at this point, Volodymyr Zelensky insists that Ukraine will never give up fighting the Russian invader until full victory is achieved, which includes winning back not just Donbas but Crimea too. Realistically, he has absolutely no chance in hell of winning, but because he takes orders from heartless Western puppets, his non-negotiable hardline is merely the psychopathic actor reading his script in the dramatic role of his lifetime that billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky hired him to do.

On November 14^th, right after Milley’s dose of reality urging negotiation with Russia, all the neocon senior officials in the Biden regime contacted their Western counterparts in damage control mode assuring Zelensky that America and the West are once again standing by Ukraine in its resolve and refusal to both open talks and adjust any expectation less than complete victory, which realistically is delusional fantasyland to think Russia will ever give back historical Russia filled with ethnic Russians in Crimea and Donbas. Nor will Russia allow Kiev to ever permanently take back either Zaporozhe or Kherson (despite recent Russian withdrawal).

With Milley speaking out of turn, the Biden regime has become paranoid that the West is fracturing, unable to maintain an illusion of a unified front against Russia, enforcing all the sanctions that spell suicide for the West. The crumbling West is increasingly splintered, especially as breakaway European nations struggle this winter with their growing energy, inflation and cost of living crises. Additionally, the West’s emptied stockpile arsenals and January’s GOP controlled US House less willing to give away the kitchen sink in dollars and arms to Kiev. As citizens grow more desperate in revolt, starving and freezing to death, support for Ukraine will evaporate.

Meanwhile, this week’s Ukraine missile detonated on Polish soil killing two civilians was instantly blamed on the Russians by both Zelensky and virtually the entire Western mainstream press, all set to declare Putin violated NATO’s Article 5 that would expand the war to engulf all of Europe and America. Two days later on November 17^th, 2022, Rothschild owned and controlled Associated Press was forced to admit the cardinal journalistic sin of taking the false word of an anonymous news source at face value and “mistakenly” printing it as gospel truth: 

The Associated Press reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people.

Despite after evidence is now irrefutable that it was a Ukrainian air defense missile gone awry, reading from the same narrative script, all the Western leaders are still ultimately holding out all the blame for Russia due to its incessant rocket, missile, drone, artillery arracks in recent weeks neutralizing Ukraine’s energy and power infrastructure. The first casualty in war is the truth, and lies typically start wars spread by the criminally complicit media that functions to justify and shield the bloodline-controlled crime cabal’s never-ending wars. Recall the made-up lie about infamous WMDs in Iraq that Biden’s current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan earlier this year openly admitted among past other intel insiders that it was used as the calculated CIA deception to justify the Bush-Cheney preplanned War on Terror and specific Iraq invasion, that in turn led directly to decades’ long wars in a total of 20 nations primarily in the Middle East and North Africa, resulting in an astounding death toll of 32 million, 27 million Muslims, about half being children, all just since 9/11 as US wars for the Greater Israel Project.

Or  daddy Bush senior’s 1991 Gulf War based on the 1990 lie told by the Kuwait ambassador’s 15-year old daughter “Niayirah“ as yet another convincing acting performance, this time describing Saddam Hussein’s soldiers “throwing babies out of incubators.” Or another notorious Big Lie decades earlier that North Vietnamese gunboats opened fire on a US Navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, falsely used to ignite another decade long US war lost in Vietnam, killing at least 3 million Vietnamese. All of these news stories – past and present – are deceitful retreads of the exact same “problem-reaction-solution” dialectical M.O. that Luciferians in charge never fail to utilize to drive home both their endless manufactured wars and growing draconian tyranny toward their one world governance endgame.

Meanwhile, still in desperado damage control right up to Monday November 21^st, the freshman cadet I supervised at West Point a half century ago who now sits as the current US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, is doing his best to pretend his top General Milley didn’t let the cat out of the bag, that essentially the US will go down with Ukraine:

I think you know that to this point we’ve provided over $20 billion worth of assistance to Ukraine. We’ll continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.

Lloyd is saying the US will continue doing everything in its power to bully all other Western nations to follow suit, to win the war against Russia and not stop its support until Ukraine takes back all Russian territory that belonged to Ukraine prior to the US illegal coup in 2014… full speed ahead to WWIII. On Saturday November 19^th, Lloyd Austin stated:

You know, the Russians have a massive military and impressive weapons, [but this] hasn’t helped them prevail in a campaign of conquest and cruelty… The outcome of the war in Ukraine will help determine the course of global security in this young century… Ever since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, countries from around the world have rallied behind some clear first principles, and those first principles are that countries don’t get to invade their peaceful neighbors. Autocrats don’t get to redraw borders by force. And the imperial ambition of bullies doesn’t outweigh the sovereign rights of UN member states.

Talk about calling the kettle black, this first black DoD gatekeeper is so full of hubris and hypocrisy that his unoriginal rhetoric is totally laughable if this schmuck wasn’t so damn dangerous.

No nation on earth – bar none – has invaded more sovereign nations than the US – 68 and counting, or killed more fellow humans with its war machine just since WWII – up to 30 million.

With US exceptionalism “supreme” unipolar hegemon, America always takes for granted its “non-right” to violate international rule of law. The ruling elites have misused Washington DC for over a century as their Anglo-American-Zio Empire bully, invading and destroying any and all nations and peoples resisting its blatant exploitation and abuse. Under Rothschild central banking cartel control, the US refers to its latest installment of unipolar hegemony, refusing to adjust to today’s multipolar world, as its “rules-based international order,” the euphemistic double speak that US puppets relish using to define today’s “liberal world order” in order to hold on to status quo – its fake brand of democracy based on “rules for thee, but not for me.” In September, Putin called it out:

The West is insisting on a ‘rules-based order.’ Where did that come from anyway? Who has ever seen these rules? Who agreed or approved them? Russia is a great thousand-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules.

Falsely pretending that Putin is all about brutal conquest bent on restoring a new expanded version of another Soviet Empire, US policy toward post-Soviet Russia has always been to create a Cold War strategy of tension, encircling Moscow with hostile NATO countries, installing US nuclear missiles aimed at Russia. Last Saturday, Austin addressed this false notion above with the following scripted statement:

Stability and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic are at stake, [insisting Russia] tears at the ‘rules-based international order’ that keeps us all secure… Free people always refuse to replace an open order of rules and rights with one dictated by force and fear… because rules matter, and sovereignty matters, and freedom matters… a world where might makes right, where disputes are resolved by force and where autocrats can stamp out the flame of freedom.

Gee, tell that to your masters, pulling your puppet strings Lloyd. Such hifalutin, pull-it-out-your-ass hyperbole has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that this elitist order-following pawn on the grand chessboard game of global dominance and dystopian control is carrying out their evil agenda at all cost to not only “weaken” a sovereign Russia in Ukraine but foment a Moscow regime change, replacing its nationalist leader. So much for sovereign nations’ rights, right Lloyd? Meanwhile, demonized Putin has never shown actual interest in expanding its borders beyond the regions that have for centuries always remained Russian. For centuries Crimea and the Donbas, whose residents are ethnic Russian, belonged to Russia but mistakenly given to Ukraine from 1991 to 2014. In 2014 the US illegally installed its Maidan neo-Nazi regime and despite signing a Minsk Agreement agreeing to stop military aggression in Donbas, Kiev proceeded killing 14,000 ethnic Russians living in the Donbas region in an ethnic purge, banning their Russian language. Are you paying attention Lloyd?

Perhaps the biggest Pinocchio lie Lloyd Austin said recently is this:

NATO is a defensive alliance. It does not seek confrontation with Russia. It poses no threat to Russia. Make no mistake: We will not be dragged into Putin’s war of choice. But we will stand by Ukraine as it fights to defend itself, and we will defend every inch of NATO territory, and we will continue to strengthen NATO’s collective defense and deterrence.

NATO has participated in alliance with the US military Austin’s in charge of, in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. And if NATO was truly a defensive force, when the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the US promised NATO would move “not one inch eastward” agreeing to respect mutual national security, which was a Cuban missile crisis lesson that has only been honored by Russia. With virtually every nation along Russia’s border either a NATO country with US missiles aimed at targets inside Russia, or a nation aggressively courted to become a NATO member, NATO by actions alone has repeatedly proven it is not defensive in nature. If it was, in 1991 it would have been disbanded. Moreover, NATO is also notorious for drug smuggling and child sex trafficking.

Then, since 2015, as a four-star general, you had to have known, if not signed off on, the CIA, NATO and Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince all freely operating inside Ukraine, busily training 50 to 100,000 neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine troops preparing for a Donbas invasion to commit yet more genocide against ethnic Russians. As Secretary of Defense having signed off on this invasion, where is your “flame of freedom” in all that nasty business?

At Donbas’ urgent request, Putin beat Kiev and you to the punch, launching his Special Military Operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine. In April, Russia offered to negotiate, calling for Ukraine neutrality and acceptance of Donbas and Crimea as Russia. Just as Zelensky made overtures ready to negotiate a peace settlement, did you send the warmongering Rothschild puppet Boris Johnson in a rush to Kiev putting the kibosh on any chance of peace?

The Western puppets self-imposed suicidal sanctions against Moscow are following bloodline orders intended to destroy Europe and North America.

The West’s constant provocations have left Russia with no other choice but to have to militarily take down the Ukraine government, initiating multi-axes offensives as soon as conditions freeze during the next couple weeks. Right up till its February incursion in Ukraine, Russia attempted to work with NATO to accept proposals establishing a mutually acceptable European security arrangement, but the bloodline-controlled West had no interest in preserving peace. With the elites’ objective to depopulate the planet sooner than later, between the kill shot, mass starvation, freezing, and a potential world war with Eastern powers Russia, China and Iran, genocide of the human race looms as Luciferians’ priority #1.

Meanwhile, on Sunday November 13^th during his nightly video address, Zelensky alleged:

Investigators have already documented more than 400 Russian war crimes. Bodies of dead civilians and servicemen have been found.

So, we’re supposed to believe that in a region populated by a Russian majority that recently voted to be annexed by Russia, Russian soldiers committed war crimes against their own Kherson civilians. While leaders from Ukraine and the West with zero credibility continue making groundless claims of Russian war crime atrocities without so much as an iota of evidence or proof, the latest after Russia’s Kherson retreat, an authentic video confirmed by the pro-Kiev New York Times has surfaced of Russian prisoners of war in Lugansk appearing to have been shot in the head at close range, clear violation of international armed conflict laws.

A screenshot from a video purportedly showing Russian soldiers surrendering to the Ukrainian forces. ©  Telegram

For nine straight months Ukraine has periodically been shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in all of Europe. The latest shelling took place over this last weekend with two projectiles striking and damaging radioactive waste storage containment while another jeopardized functioning of a nuclear cooling reactor. This is insane as the nuclear fallout from major destruction could potentially kill millions downwind extending far beyond Ukraine. Why the Russians have failed to properly secure the outlying area to prevent Ukraine’s offensive reach to commit such catastrophic risk to the vulnerable plant all these months later, begs yet to be answered.

With the NWO’s hub of Ukraine latest scandal serving as the FTX Sam Bankman-Fried crypto money laundering scheme fully unraveling, demonstrating how Biden and the US uniparty typically use Ukraine for their go-to dirtiest Khazarian mafia operations, the Pandora’s box is opened like never before. The Biden owned child trafficking compound with underground tunnels near the Mariupol port linked to Ukraine’s organized crime trafficking cartel of East-West gateway drugs, now arms galore, along with the booming human organs and child and baby sex trafficking, it really is the planet’s devil’s playground. I’ve written extensively exposing how the Rothschild et al international crime cabal for many decades has generated trillions in cash. With the dozens of US Defense Department funded biolabs and now the epicenter of global organized crime operations revenue all currently being upended, there’s reason why the bloodline controllers are willing to blow up the world first rather than have the depths of their evil made public for the masses’ consumption learning how this Luciferian world has been operating. The Khazarian mafia overlords are all hiding out in their luxurious underground bugout locations believing they can survive a nuclear holocaust.

Back in August even MSM mainstay CBS News admitted that 70% of all the arms that the West is sending to Ukraine are ending up on the black market-dark web bottomless pit. But now news is just breaking to show that it’s far worse, that US inspectors cannot account for 90% of the billions’ worth of shipped weaponry because Kiev’s dirty playground operations are so endlessly filthy.

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Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.

The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for nearly a decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!)

Featured image: A Ukrainian soldier carries a Javelin anti-tank missile through a trench in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Photo courtesy the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/Facebook.

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Pfizer’s annual revenue is expected to reach $101.3 billion in 2022, thanks to its COVID jab, which doesn’t prevent infection or spread, and Paxlovid, an ineffective and dangerous COVID antiviral that causes rebound.

Pfizer got plenty of free help from the federal government, which bullied and harassed people into getting the shots, and implemented rules that ensure hospitals and pharmacies will only prescribe certain COVID drugs, Paxlovid being one of them.

The key to getting away with a really big lie is making it so divorced from reality that the listener will assume their own perception is flawed, and then repeating it over and over again. This strategy has been used to great effect over the past three years, resulting in a massive shift from fact-based public health orthodoxy to irrational fantasy-based dogma.

Centralized top-down health care is far more attractive to Big Pharma investors than patient-centered care. The primary obstacle to the corporatization and monetization of public health has been truth, and this obstacle was finally overcome during the COVID pandemic

The Big Lies told during the pandemic work because they veer so sharply from the truth. This break from factual reality is what makes it so difficult to question them, because if you do, you’re now questioning the entire hierarchy of public health.

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The manufactured COVID pandemic has been a proverbial golden egg-laying goose for Pfizer. Its annual revenue is expected to reach $101.3 billion in 2022,¹ thanks to its COVID jab, which doesn’t prevent infection or spread, and Paxlovid, an ineffective and dangerous COVID antiviral that causes rebound. It would be comical if it weren’t so egregious.

And, Pfizer’s coffers are more or less guaranteed to continue being filled to the brim as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has now added COVID-19 shots to the U.S. childhood, adolescent and adult vaccine schedules.²

With this action, the CDC has secured Pfizer’s (and Moderna’s) permanent liability shield so that no one can sue them for damages for injuries and deaths occurring as a result of the shots. It also opens the door for states to mandate the jab for school children, which guarantees a continuous revenue stream.

That revenue stream may even exceed previous profits, as Pfizer raised the price on its COVID jab by about 400%,³ from $30⁴ per jab to somewhere between $110 and $130, on the same day ACIP voted to add the shot to the vaccine schedule. That price hike will take effect once the current U.S. purchase program expires.

Pfizer Hunts for the Next Blockbuster

As reported by Kaiser Health News (KHN),⁵ “a fortune amassed in the COVID pandemic is now paving the path to pharma nirvana: a weight loss pill likely worth hundreds of billions.” Pfizer is also hoping to develop blockbuster drugs for diabetes, migraines, ulcerative colitis, prostate cancer and sickle cell disease, and is gobbling up smaller drug companies with promising product portfolios.

A blockbuster drug may rake in billions, but that doesn’t mean it’s a blockbuster in the sense that it’s effective, as we’ve seen with Paxlovid and the mRNA COVID shot. Pfizer gets around this in large part by being a “remarkable marketing machine,” to quote Timothy Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.⁶

Not only is Pfizer spending big bucks on splashy advertising, they also work with contract research firms like ICON, which run medical research trials for drug companies and federal agencies alike, thereby giving the drug companies the inside track on drug approvals.^7,8

Pfizer also gets plenty of free help from the federal government which, in the case of COVID, coerced millions with job loss threats into getting the shots, and implemented rules that ensure hospitals and pharmacies will only prescribe certain COVID drugs, Paxlovid being one of them.

The Art of Really Big Lies

In a November 4, 2022, article,⁹ clinical and public health physician Dr. David Bell discusses the art — and price — of lying, noting that the more divorced a lie is from reality, the more likely it is to succeed, thanks to the quirks of human nature and normal psychology:

“In a former role I had a boss who lied a lot. The lies were pure fantasy, but massive in scope and delivered with sincerity. They were very successful.

This success was based on the reluctance of most people to consider that someone in a position of authority in a humanitarian organization would completely ignore all semblance of reality. People assumed the claims must be true as fabricating information to that extent in those circumstances seemed to defy logic.

The principle of Really Big Lies is based on the lies being so divorced from reality that the listener will assume their own perception must be flawed, rather than doubt the claims of the person telling the lies. Only an insane or ridiculous person would make such outlandish claims, and a credible institution would not employ such a person.

Therefore, given that the institution is apparently credible, the statements must also be credible, and the listener’s prior perception of reality was therefore flawed. Lesser lies, by contrast, are likely to be perceived as sufficiently close to known reality to be demonstrably wrong. Inventing truth can be more effective than bending it.”

I believe this is precisely the strategy employed by Big Pharma, health agencies, government officials and the deep state propaganda arm over the past three years. Their claims have been so far from any semblance of reality, anyone aware of the facts has been left feeling more than a little crazy.

Unfortunately, while most humans have a moral and ethical compass, few end up following it when confronted by psychopaths in authority and the peer pressure to conform. As noted by Bell, good team players almost always end up supporting false narratives, and those who refuse to go along with what are clearly lies tend to be but a tiny minority.

Profit Through Deception

For decades, patient-centered health care has been the norm, and patients not only had the right, but the duty, to participate in the planning and implementation of their care. This was enshrined in the 1978 Declaration of Alma Ata¹⁰ — a declaration adopted by the World Health Organization “as the key to achieving an acceptable level of health throughout the world.”

However, as noted by Bell, centralized top-down health care is far more attractive to Big Pharma investors. The primary obstacle to the corporatization and monetization of public health was truth, and this obstacle was finally (and formidably) overcome during the COVID pandemic. Bell explains:¹¹

“COVID-19 proved that even this impediment to progress can be expunged through consistent lying and the vilification of truth-tellers, backed by a well-managed behavioral psychology campaign.

This pandemic response provided a template not only for vastly-increased corporate income, but for job certainty and expansion of opportunity for the army of mostly-Western bureaucrats and health professionals filling the offices, meeting rooms and business-class seats of its implementing organizations. COVID-19 made corporate colonialism respectable again.

Superficially, COVID-19 appears a poor disease choice to facilitate a fundamental societal reset.

Death is heavily concentrated in old age … Severe cases are generally confined to those with life expectancies already shortened by metabolic diseases … Countries that failed to implement measures to restrict and impoverish their people … had COVID-19 outcomes similar to those that opted for lockdowns and other trappings of medical fascism.

Average hospital admissions in the UK and USA declined during the pandemic, not what the public expects when a pathogen wreaks havoc. Lockdowns devastated economies … COVID vaccines have also been unhelpful as high vaccination rates failed to noticeably impact infection and transmission …

Thus, COVID-19 provided a hard bucket of facts to deal with, but this is just the situation in which Really Big Lies can work. These were needed both to fool the public, and to provide a structure within which health professionals could implement the policy.

Largely by playing on fear, divorcing data from context, and disseminating false information widely and incessantly, a whole new belief system has been constructed in public health to replace the evidence-based orthodoxy of former years.

Reality has been replaced with dogma so divorced from any basis in fact that it is easier to go with the propaganda than deal with the dissonance that would otherwise result.”

The New Fantasy-Based Dogmas

The new fantasy-based beliefs that health care workers, patients, researchers, academics and public health employees are now forced to embrace include the following, quoted from Bell’s article:¹²

Refusing the False Narratives Has Real Consequences

As Bell correctly points out, these new public health positions are not just slightly incorrect. They’re all “either unethical or clear nonsense, contradicted by prior public health orthodoxy.” Indeed, most are classical Orwellian doublespeak and 180 degrees from the truth.

But it’s the sharp break from factual reality that makes it impossible to question them because, if you do, you’re now questioning “the entire current hierarchy of public health,” Bell says.

To quote Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re not attacking him when you question his irrational flip-flopping, you’re questioning science itself. If you question any of these fantasy-based beliefs, you’re now a science-denier, and you’re putting your employment and reputation at risk. Unfortunately, those risks are not imaginary.

The punishment for refusing these false narratives is very real and very severe. Many doctors and scientists whose reputations and contributions to public health have been beyond reproach for decades have been stripped of their medical licenses and lost their jobs for speaking out against these COVID fallacies.

So, where do we go from here? How do we end the madness and return to reality-based public health?

“Whilst growing their industry’s finances, public health professionals are degrading themselves and betraying society,” Bell writes.¹³ “The betrayal, based on incessant lying, is something for which they will inevitably face consequences …

Eventually, even the most dedicated followers will begin to question the sense of putting on a mask at a restaurant door only to remove it 10 steps later, or vaccinating vast populations against a disease to which they are already immune whilst they die of other readily preventable diseases.

The way out of this is simply to refuse to lie, or cover for the lies of others … [The] truth will catch up, one day, with those who don’t … It is far better to leave early and live with dignity.”

Evil Genius: Creating the Market

If you’re paying attention, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that many drug companies, Pfizer in particular, are in the business of creating their own markets. Pfizer released a COVID jab that neither protects against infection nor prevents spread, thereby necessitating multiple boosters. Its antiviral COVID drug Paxlovid causes rebound, necessitating multiple doses.

Now we find that the COVID jabs are also associated with increased rates of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection in children, and like clockwork, Pfizer and Moderna start working on RSV jabs. The CDC also aids by recommending kids get additional COVID shots. Is this a racket or what!?

The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) is now demanding answers from the CDC about the off-season spike in RSV rates,¹⁴ which mysteriously arose in the wake of childhood injections against COVID.

Moderna’s pediatric COVID jab trial showed those who got the jab had higher rates of RSV than the placebo group. RSV was also one of the primary serious side effects in Pfizer’s pediatric trial. Now, all of a sudden, we’re seeing out-of-season RSV spikes in children. Coincidence? Make them prove it. In a legal update, ICAN reports:

“The issue is so serious that even the FDA’s vaccine committee, VRBPAC, which normally cheerleads even the most dangerous vaccine, noted the correlation and ‘stressed the importance of continued post-authorization safety surveillance, in particular for … certain respiratory infections (RSV and pneumonia) in the youngest age group …’¹⁵

Despite the noted importance of surveilling RSV post-authorization, no one at CDC or FDA seems to be drawing a connection between the increase in RSV and the COVID-19 vaccines being administered to children.

Incredibly, the CDC just issued an ‘Official Health Advisory’¹⁶ about the increase RSV and respiratory virus cases and, in it, the CDC recommends all individuals 6 months and up receive an influenza vaccine and a COVID-19 vaccine!

Not surprisingly, the press has missed the mark, too. While there are numerous articles detailing the troubling increase in sick children, none reference COVID-19 vaccination despite the data from the manufacturers’ trials.

To get to the bottom of this, on October 26, 2022, ICAN’s attorneys sent a letter¹⁷ to the CDC observing the clinical trial data showing a correlation between increased RSV cases and receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine. ICAN’s letter demanded to know the percentage of children who tested positive for RSV and who had received a COVID-19 vaccine prior to their RSV diagnosis.”

Study Calls for Reevaluation of Jab Campaigns

In related news, we also have a November 2022 study¹⁸ in Nature Communications, which questions the rationale of current booster campaigns. According to the authors:

“An important aspect of vaccine effectiveness is its impact on pathogen transmissibility, harboring major implications for public health policies. As viral load is a prominent factor affecting infectivity, its laboratory surrogate, qRT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct), can be used to investigate the infectivity-related component of vaccine effectiveness …

By analyzing results of more than 460,000 individuals, we show that while recent vaccination reduces Omicron viral load, its effect wanes rapidly. In contrast, a significantly slower waning rate is demonstrated for recovered COVID-19 individuals.

Thus, while the vaccine is effective in decreasing morbidity and mortality, its relatively small effect on transmissibility of Omicron (as measured here by Ct) and its rapid waning call for reassessment of future booster campaigns.”

Considering the theoretical protection of these shots last for just 70 days (according to this study), are the risks associated with the shots really worth it? So far, several risk-benefit analyses have all come to the conclusion that the risks far outweigh any potential benefit.

Unfortunately, it seems we have to rely on scientists outside the U.S. to do this kind of bench science, as all we seem get from American research institutions are analyses of how to get “anti-vaxxers” to buy the false narrative and roll up their sleeves.

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Notes

¹ Fierce Pharma November 21, 2021

² Rumble October 20, 2022

³ Daily Wire October 21, 2022

⁴ Reuters October 20, 2022

^5, 6 KHN November 8, 2022

⁷ Disinformation Chronicle November 1, 2022

⁸ Twitter Paul Thacker November 4, 2022

^{9, 11, 12, 13} Propaganda in Focus November 4, 2022

¹⁰ WHO, Declaration of Alma Ata

¹⁴ ICAN November 7, 2022

¹⁵ FDA, Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine EUA Amendments for Use in Individuals 6 Months Through 17 Years of Age, VRBPAC Meeting Summary P.180

¹⁶ CDC Health Advisory November 4, 2022

¹⁷ ICAN Letter to CDC October 26, 2022

¹⁸ Nature Communications November 7, 2022; 13, article number 6706

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Read Part I:

Haiti: An Inconvenient History, an Uncomfortable Truth. “Until Haiti spoke, no Christian nation had abolished slavery”

By Cameron Brohman, October 31, 2022

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‘The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers’. The New York Times ran this story in May 2022. The question is why did the paper wait until now, to publish news that happened 75 years ago. Did the newspaper just learn about this? Or, is there another reason for delaying or preventing the publication of this information?

‘God’s justice comes on a donkey.‘ The Haitian proverb declares the donkey as the noble beast of peasant culture. The donkey is slow but, like God’s justice, you know it will arrive sooner or later. Haitians are historically patient people. The slow donkey pace of God’s justice is God’s way of giving sinners ample time to repent. What! France, repent?

France, believe it or not, sent Haiti a bill for freeing herself from slavery. France claimed to suffer business losses due to the end of the free labor provided by African slaves. The richest colony in history, Haiti was given an ultimatum, ‘pay billions of dollars to the slave owners for the loss of their slaves and plantations or face total isolation’. The young Haitian nation was unable to pay this in one lump sum. Haiti then entered its second age of slavery. Having fought a bloody war of liberation with France, Haiti now became a debt slave to French and American Banks. The French Government calculated the losses to French slave owners at around $20b, in today’s dollars. The 20 billion in debt payments were collected by French warships. Haiti, was blockaded and prevented from trading with other nations. Forced to drain its treasury every year to pay France, Haiti was preordained to poverty. The final payment of this odious debt was made in 1947 ending some 150 years of debt slavery.

Until now, this information is never included in the Haiti story. ‘The Debt’, as it was called by five generations of Haitian families, was the cause of deep deprivation from education to healthcare. Haiti is an impoverished nation because of this financial slavery. Every Haitian knows this. But, wait, we in the G-20 rich nations are just now, being told? The strategic withholding of information is also known as lies of omission; omitting to tell someone the whole truth of any situation. Reparations are usually demanded by the actual victims of slavery, like the Jews in German labor camps or the African-Americans for the forced labor of their enslaved ancestors. That former slaves were forced to pay reparations to slave owners is a French version of right and wrong. Had we known of this injustice over the past 75 years our opinion of both Haiti and France would be very different. We learn from this that Haiti pays its debts, on time, has great integrity and is morally superior to France. The Western media mantra is that Haiti’s hopeless poverty is due to its own over reproducing, devil worshipping black citizens. After all this time is the Haitian narrative being altered from failed Voodoo nation to a victim of the racist Mammonite debt system? Why now? What else has been kept secret? Who benefits from these secrets?

‘Oil in Haiti.’ by Dr. Georges Michel in 2004, documents the history of the deliberate concealment of enormous reserves of oil and gas in Haiti. Then in January 2010, at the time of the Haitian earthquake, Global Research published two definitive articles, ‘Oil in Haiti’ by Marguerite Laurent and F. William Engdahl’s, ‘The Fateful Geologic Prize Called Haiti’. Numerous sources confirm that the American Government has known about Haiti’s oil for most of the 20^th century. The oil deposits were then declared as strategic reserves under U.S. control and to be left in the ground until the 21^st century when global oil would be in decline. What other secrets does Haiti hold?

Iridium, the second rarest mineral on earth is three times the price of gold. Haiti has huge deposits of Iridium. It’s been estimated that Haiti could be a top global supplier of iridium to the exploding demand from hi-tech industries for this rare earth mineral. Haiti has gold, bauxite, uranium and other resources that could have, by now, transformed the lives of generations of Haitians. In 2002, President Aristide published a report of Haiti’s mineral wealth. The report declared the minerals to be the sovereign wealth of the state of Haiti and would be invested in Haiti for the benefit of her citizens. The Aristide Government had also served the Government of France notice of a case being brought into international court for repayment of the ‘odious debt’ paid to France for the liberation of Haitian slaves. Aristide was removed from office a few months after the report was made public and the court case brought against France. The truth of Haitian history and wealth had, at last, escaped Washington’s strategic secrecy. Now Haitians know that Haiti is a rich country full of poor people. They know they’ve been lied to, who the liars are and now Haitians know what has to be done.

‘God’s pencil has no eraser.’ This popular Haitian proverb expresses the longevity of truth. History is being rewritten to reveal that when America had the information and know-how to raise Haiti up Uncle Sam chose to say nothing. Strategic secrecy trumps suffering humanity. Haiti fights yet another battle in a long war with an Empire of Lies. But lies are eventually exposed by truth. This is happening. Now what?

“We don’t need Canada, France and the U.S. who have already stolen from Haiti. All we need is Russia and China to help us exploit our wealth.” The young Haitian man who says this is one of tens of thousands of protesters in front of the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. He is waving a large Russian flag, one of many in the massive protest. Three men have their shirtless torsos painted in the tricolor flag of the Russian Federation. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin in a speech last week referred to the Russian flag being waved in some Latin America nations. The news reports coming out of Haiti show political violence escalating. This is blamed on gangs. One individual gang leader nicknamed ‘Barbecue’ has been named by western media as the psychopathic mass killer who must be brought to justice. At the Francophone Summit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada will lead a military intervention in Haiti to stabilize the country.

Are events in Haiti exactly as described by Western media reports. Who is the real ‘Barbecue’? Is he just another poor thug who will be hunted down and dispatched by the morally superior foreign troops. Will the script play out as planned? Does the information have gaps?

‘Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising’ is looking into these questions. This ongoing series of videos from Haiti Liberte shows another side to the story. The figure known as Barbecue was a former officer in the Haitian National Police for fourteen years before being fired. He reinvented himself as a security guard for hire and became involved in the bloody gang wars of Port au Prince slums. Kill or be killed. But the story changes dramatically. Barbecue’s real name is Jimmy Cherizier and in these three hours of videos a very different man emerges than the murderous thug in Western media. Cherizier is a charismatic, articulate political leader who has had a genuine epiphany. Haitian oligarchs own the gangs. They arm and pay them to kill, kidnap for money, destroy rivals and above all, maintain a situation of Haitians killing each other. But Cherizier has blown the whistle on this cancerous evil and created an alliance of gangs called Revolutionary Force G-9 who have united to bring an end to this ‘system’ that holds Haiti hostage. G-9 has the support of Haiti’s impoverished millions and is heavily armed.

Is this why he is the target of the Canadian/American/French military solution to ‘stabilise’ Haiti? Are we eliminating yet another legitimate actor in a complex paradigm. Aristide was removed from office and exiled to Africa for daring to declare that the Divinely ordained mineral wealth on Haitian territory would be invested in the Haitian people for the benefit of future generations.

Is Jimmy Cherizier’s ‘Another Vision’ of Haiti, a new Aristide, this time around, with heavy weapons?

‘Even in hell you can find a good friend.’  Haitian proverb.

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Cameron Brohman has managed economic development projects in Haiti and other developing countries for forty years. His decades living and working in Haiti encompass the fall of the Duvalier regime through the 2010 earthquake and recovery.

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

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***

One week ago, the Ukrainian government may have deliberately attacked neighbor Poland in an attempt to draw the NATO alliance into its war with Russia. The incident involved a missile that hit a grain processing site inside Poland and killed two farmers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately blamed Russia for the incident even though he surely must have known that the missile had been fired from Ukraine, meaning that he may have been using a so-called “false flag” to create a false narrative of what had occurred. He also immediately called upon NATO to intervene, citing Article 5 of the NATO treaty which requires all members of the alliance to come to the aid of any individual member that is attacked. An attack on one is an attack on all. Poland is a NATO member and it currently hosts a permanent US military base.

The US mainstream media, most particularly the Associated Press and NBC News, immediately repeated the tale being told by Zelensky, but the “blame the Russians” narrative began to unravel. The remains of the missile revealed that it was of a type used for air defense that is in the Ukrainian arsenal, but not currently used by the Russians, and both Moscow and Washington surely had access to satellite imagery that would demonstrate the actual flight path of the missile that struck Poland.

Those in government and the media who wanted to be supportive of Zelensky began to suggest that the Ukrainian missile must have somehow malfunctioned to land in Poland, making it an unfortunate accident. But others more familiar with the performance characteristics of the weapon were skeptical, seeing something possibly more sinister in the tale.

By last Thursday the story had effectively disappeared in much of the mainstream media as it no longer conformed to the acceptable narrative that it was a Russian-launched missile, which Zelensky has since continued to insist to be the case. President Joe Biden, who was at the G-20 Summit conference in Indonesia at the time, to his credit, responded to the news by stating that there was no intelligence to confirm that the missile had come from Russia and that its apparent trajectory did not support that view. Ironically, Biden had authorized an additional $37 billion in aid for Ukraine the day before the incident in Poland took place.

Biden’s message seeking to deescalate the potential crisis was repeated by Pentagon and intelligence personnel during the day, though Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized that the US would continue to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” He also added that even though the missile was Ukrainian, the incident was Russia’s fault. He did not explain why that was so. NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg also promoted the same line as Austin, commenting that the incident was “likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory… This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears responsibility for what happened in Poland yesterday because this is a direct result of the ongoing war.”

Given the fact that Zelensky has been saying and doing everything possible to draw the US and NATO into fighting Russia on his behalf, I believe that the missile strike was quite plausibly a deliberate “false flag” attempt to start a much broader war. That such a war could easily turn nuclear reveals just how reckless Zelensky can be. One NATO country foreign diplomat based in Kiev told the Financial Times that “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

To be sure, Zelensky is capable of anything and no lie is too mendacious for the former comedy actor who is now basking in the glow of his celebrity. Hollywood personalities like Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are increasingly making the pilgrimage to Kiev to shake hands, embrace and do photo ops. And Zelensky’s calendar is also featuring some trips to the United States. On November 30^th, he will reportedly be in New York City at a “live event” hosted by the New York Times with Sam Bankman-Fried, Larry Fink (CEO of Blackrock), and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as the main speakers.

Yes, Zelensky will be side-by-side with THAT Sam Bankman-Fried, if he shows up, who has also been much in the news lately for his having pulled off the largest currency fraud in history, creating losses for investors totaling multi-billions of dollars as a consequence of the collapse of his exchange-trading company FTX! And it just might be that Zelensky and Bankman-Fried already know each other. Bankman-Fried has been a major financial supporter of Democratic Party politicians, having donated $40 million for “get out the vote” projects in the recently completed election cycle. He is second only to George Soros as a Democratic Party funder, and also has separated donated to causes like unconditionally supporting Ukraine that the Democrats overwhelmingly favor. In April he hosted a conference at his $40 million home in the Bahamas which featured appearances by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and he has also been a generous supporter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

There has been considerable speculation that the unregulated and unmonitored flow of billions of dollars of US taxpayer provided money through Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government provided a perfect mechanism for large scale money laundering. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has been following the FTX-Ukraine story closely and observes that “The financial collapse of FTX… is exposing evidence that the Democrats, some Republicans, the Ukrainians and FTX organized an elaborate financial kickback scheme. The scheme involved promising members of Congress who sent money to Ukraine a hefty contribution from a Democrat benefactor. In this case, the owner of FTX [Sam Bankman-Fried]. Once the US dollars were credited to Ukraine’s account, President Zelensky and his partners diverted some of the proceeds to purchase crypto currency from FTX. FTX, in turn, sent some of those funds back to the cooperating members of Congress and the Democrat National Committee.”

Other reporting reveals that Bankman-Fried had established a crypto donation “partnership” with the Ukrainian government which provided an estimated $60 million in “assistance” to Zelensky. The Ukrainian government website that reported some details of the arrangement mysteriously was “disappeared” two days before the FTX disaster was made public. The FTX tale, if it turns out to be largely verifiable, underlines just how corrupt a “money pit” called Ukraine is. Hunter Biden gets a well-paid sinecure place on a company board to get to his father and now Ukraine may be directly involved in a massive financial fraud. And Joe Biden obligingly is sending billions of dollars more to that crook Zelensky.

But the real issue is the war. Even assuming that the Ukrainian missile strike on Poland was due to some malfunction, Zelensky comes out of the process smelling really bad as he has worked assiduously at blaming Russia, which clearly is not true. He is using his contrived narrative to dramatically expand the war by creating a situation which would bring NATO directly into the conflict and which could easily go nuclear. Indeed, he is attempting to compel NATO participation. But potentially far worse, if it was a deliberate “false flag” provocation to bring about that end, his tactics should be harshly condemned by all the parties that are currently supporting Ukraine. Beyond that, the US and NATO, burdened with such an “ally,” should take immediate steps to disengage from supporting the fighting and call for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Joe Biden, if he has any integrity left, and whoever is pulling his strings should not hesitate to take that step.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Supratim Barman

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from 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

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***

Almost every minute of every day I see overwhelming evidence of America’s collapse as a free country.  Elon Musk conducted a poll on whether Twitter should allow President Trump to use the social media platform. Fifteen million people responded.  51.8% of the respondents said “yes,” but almost an equal number 48.2% said “no.”  In other words, almost half of the 15 million social media users who responded to the poll oppose free speech for a former president of the United States. See this.

No doubt, being as indoctrinated as they are, they see Trump as a “pussy-grabber,” a Russian agent, and an insurrectionist and regard cancelling his First Amendment right as punishment.

In the case of Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ founder who published the leaked information documenting US war crimes and lies to allies, my headline doesn’t go far enough. A large majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans in practically equal percentages, desire Assange to be prosecuted for doing what journalists are supposed to do. President Trump and his Secretary of State Pompeo denounced Assange with the same intensity as Nancy Pelosi. See this.

Members of both political parties believe that free speech that challenges official narratives should be suppressed. Even more stunning, almost 100% of American print and TV reporters want Assange prosecuted.  Here we have the entirety of the US print and TV media renouncing their own profession.

Those who oppose free speech for President Trump probably think of themselves as virtuous, the salt of the earth.  In fact, they are stupid, brainwashed people easily indoctrinated who are so badly educated that they do not understand that free speech is essential to the preservation of liberty.  They are so utterly stupid that they do not understand the meaning for their own  lives of the fact that the governing elite are doing everything possible to censor everyone, no matter how distinguished and expert, who dissents from the lies that comprise the official narratives.

Throughout the Western World truth is being rapidly closed down. Honest journalists, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are evicted from print and TV media.  Medical doctors who saved lives by treating Covid patients with Ivermectin and HCQ instead of following the murderous imposed protocol that let them die rather than to admit that there were cures, which would have threatened vaccine profits, are having their medical licenses confiscated as if they had committed a medical crime by saving lives.  Scientists who don’t accept the Woke ideology that gender is self-declared, not biologically determined, are disciplined and fired as “transgender deniers.”  Anthropologists  and sociologists who understand that a diverse, multicultural Tower of Babel is not a country are demonized.  Historians who understand that the United States is not based in “white racism” are branded “white supremacists” and “threats to democracy.”  Elections can be stolen in plain view, and no one is permitted to say so. The incidences of suppressions are not merely a few isolated cases that can be dismissed as anomalies.  They are across the board.

The so-called media speaks with one voice and it is all lies.

Russian and Iranian news sources that do not adhere to the official Western explanations are either banned in the Western World or forced to register as “foreign agents.”

In other words, the Western World has it fixed so that everything that is not propaganda and a lie in service to official narratives is defined as “misinformation.”  The ruling establishment has set up “fact checkers” whose function is to represent official narratives as the only correct explanations.  Many Americans are so utterly stupid that they believe that someone who calls himself a “fact checker” is one.  The point has been reached where any American who favors free speech, such as Elon Musk, is a prospect for investigation as a foreign agent. See this.

The suppression of truth is the road to tyranny, and 48.2% of Twitter users are all in favor of it.

Americans today live in a matrix of lies. Their beliefs result from osmosis in constantly repeated lies.  Truthful information is difficult to find and is being closed down where it exists. The Western World is living in George Orwell’s 1984, the only difference being that the ruling elite today has far more powerful spying and punishment mechanisms.

And they grow stronger every day.

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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. 

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***

Listening to Klaus Schwab, eternal CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), speak at the G20 / B20 conference in Bali, Indonesia (15-16 November 2022), you can’t avoid the impression listening to an Avatar – a self-designed deity.

In many ways, Klaus Schwab comes across as an extra-terrestrial being, no longer human, perhaps close to the transhuman he professes will be humanity’s destiny, when his wet dream, The 4^th Industrial Revolution, becomes true.

He is very proud for having written the Great Reset, where at the end probably in or around 2030, to coincide with the UN Agenda 2030 – which was approved by the WEF and vice-versa, you own nothing but are happy.

By the same token and if Klaus Schwab has his ways, by 2030, when you are happy with naught, your brain may have already merged with artificial intelligence (AI) to convert you into a super-robot, who doesn’t need anything to be happy, not even food.

The Graphene Oxide with which you may have been vaxxed – and if you are lucky, have survived — will receive the 5G ultra-shortwaves that transform you from a human into a transhuman, a term Mr. Schwab already used in am interview in 2016 with the Swiss French TV. The 2-min youtube video has since been eliminated – of course, “fact-checked” away.

When robotizing humans into transhumans – they may also cease to be “useless eaters”, not even insect-eaters (take note Bill Gates!), thus, fulfilling super Professor Yuval Noah Harari’s dream – doing away with the useless eaters. The Israeli Hariri is a close adviser of Klaus Schwab’s.

In his speech, Schwab is not only praising Indonesia for being an exemplary host, but also for having the potential to leading the world into a new era of “mergers”. For example, the G20 – standing for the “Group of 20” – mind you, an association that has no legal standing, not even that of an NGO, similar to the G7 – has merged with B20, with the “B” standing for Business. Does it mean the “Business Group of 20”?

It’s not clear. But Mr. WEF refers to “G” and “B” as if they could not live without each other in a future world. As said before, a world ever more dystopian; a world nobody wants, literally no one on this planet, safe for a few elite-Avatar brothers of Klaus Schwab’s, wants to merge his or her freethinking, sovereign humanity with a robot.

Yet, at the end of his speech, Mr. Schwab “earned” a big applause. Was it sheer hypocrisy? Or perhaps minds are already so dystopianized that it came as a natural gesture, applauding a self-styled dystopian god, who predicts a new dystopian world?
If we are lucky, the disjointed and incoherent G20 / B20 2022-meeting will not yet collapse, but may next time merge into a three-faceted conference: G20 / B20 / and D20 – “D” standing for Dystopian.

See and listen to Klaus Schwab’s speech for yourself.

At the end of the video, you may find some 200-plus comments, none of them positive. But one of them hilarious enough to quote here,

“I wish Klaus Schwab will get everything that people in the world wish him… “

*

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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.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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***

Political activist Joshua Jadwin and former US independent presidential candidate Emanuel Pastreich discuss the current state of the United States in this critical interview.

Topics include:

• An objective consideration of the current political situation in China that avoids the reductive racist terms used in the US to create a “yellow peril” image of the Chinese people as the source of totalitarianism when, in fact, the Chinese are just as much victims of a larger agenda, partially originating in China, but largely directed from United States and Israel.
• Getting a handle on what parts of “climate change” are bogus scare tactics marketed by the corporate technocrats and which parts are deadly real. Why might the billionaires want to confuse us about what is really going on using fake science?
• Consideration of why the second amendment is critical to our future, while approaching the issue without getting sucked into the sick gun culture promoted by the entertainment media complex and weapons manufacturers.
• An objective assessment of socialism and capitalism. Could it be that in spite of all the flaws of Marx, Lenin, and Mao that they offer some real insights into how to battle global finance, organize a successful revolution, and transform the economy? Or are we just being taught by the controlled opposition to ignore socialism and Marxism so that we never learn how to fight? How can we cherry-pick socialism for what it offers us?
• Why “science” is different from “technology.” How did the ideology of technocracy, “sciencism,” bury real science in a shallow grave?
• Are all those posts about a global depopulation agenda a hoax? Or are there signs that this project is already well underway?
• How do we move beyond cardboard messiahs, pay-to-play political parties, and controlled opposition “radical critics” who just teach us to complain and do nothing? How do we organize, take action, and create an effective provisional government that can actually represent the people, not private military contractors and Israeli intelligence firms?

Click here to listen to the audio interview.

Excerpt from the interview.

Joshua Jadwin: How oppressive China really is now?

Emanuel Pastreich: China and the United States have signed a death pact between the two countries. And I think the Wuhan incident and the COVID-19 Operation seems likely that it was a co-conspiracy between corrupt, rogue private intelligence firms in China and the US. And the new cold war is basically a scam to keep citizens in both China and the US from understanding what’s actually going on.

China has a population that is a little bit more excited about new technologies, a little bit more obedient which goes back to thousands of years of Confucian tradition here. China, to a certain degree, has been a testing ground to push the envelope on what can be done to citizens.

The use of QR codes and the way in which public spaces, even restrooms are now being blocked, you have to use a code… It’s very invasive.

This geo-fencing … is basically being run by Israeli firms … using the model of the West Bank in China, and that the Chinese government is being partially occupied by Israeli, maybe Chinese, maybe Japanese and American firms who are pursuing this agenda.

So the whole new cold war is basically a front to keep us from understanding the way in which the ordinary people in the US and China are being eliminated and destroyed economically. And China is basically testing new approaches which they tend to use elsewhere.

*

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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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The media bombardment with weapons of mass distraction intensifies. A few days ago, Poland announced that it had been hit by two Russian missiles, the big media spread the news, the alarm went off, and Moscow announced that it was a fake but nobody listened to it. Finally, NATO admits that the accident was caused by a Ukrainian missile, but that’s it.

Another weapon of mass distraction is the news given by the British newspaper Mirror: Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin asked to overthrow and kill President Putin. The big media spread the news on a global scale, then Dugin’s denial arrived but was essentially ignored.

Our mainstream stands out in the media war which, while spreading this colossal fake news and others of the same kind, hides important news from official sources, such as the number of weapons and ammunition that NATO and the EU supply to Ukraine is such as to make it necessary to reconstitute stocks at a huge cost in public money.

The same technique is used in reports of international events, such as the G20 meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi. We limit ourselves to reporting Biden’s words that the meeting with Xi was “open and sincere“, but we hide the fact that in the 2022 National Defense Strategy the United States declared it was “ready to prevail in a conflict, prioritizing the challenge of China in the Indo-Pacific region, then the challenge of Russia in Europe”.

From the greatest US strategic document emerges the picture of a world that is approaching the abyss of nuclear war, driven by an increasingly minority West, willing to do anything in order not to lose the dominant role it has exercised for centuries. All this, however, is hidden under the cloak of media silence.

*

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This article was originally published on byoblu.

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

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First published on July 27, 2022

***

JFK: Destiny Betrayed presents convincing evidence confirming that U.S. intelligence orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Directed by Oliver Stone and written by Jim DiEugenio, the documentary series builds on Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film JFK.

It illuminates JFK’s opposition to the imperialist machinations of American oligarchs, who enlisted U.S. intelligence and the Mafia to orchestrate his assassination and then cover it up for decades.

The Shocking Presidential Assassination and Cover-up in a Nutshell

Debuting in May, JFK: Destiny Betrayed is now available on Amazon Prime and Vudu. Stone edited down the four-hour film to just under two hours for film festivals, titling the shorter version, JFK: Through the Looking Glass (previously reviewed in CAM by this writer).^[1]

Destiny Betrayed gives more history regarding John F. Kennedy’s political career leading to his election as president in November 1960. The film also presents a bit more on Robert F. Kennedy in relation to his brother in the White House.

The four-part series begins with shocking and tragic footage of the multiple shots hitting JFK in the throat and head as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.^[2]

Stone then shows Robert Kennedy, Jr., speaking about his father’s reaction: “My father’s first call [after the assassination] was to the CIA desk officer, asking ‘Did your people conduct this horror?!’”

Robert Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy, Sr., listen to John’s presidential victory speech in November 1960. [Source: pinterest.ca]

Two aides to the president who had served in World War II drove in the car behind JFK’s car and said there was a crossfire of gunshots at the president.^[3]

Slate founding publisher David Talbot wrote the book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. He reported talking to Robert F. Kennedy’s aides who all thought the Warren Commission organized by Lyndon Johnson, JFK’s successor, produced a “fairy tale” report.

The Warren Commission. Pictured are members Gerald Ford, Hale Boggs, Richard Russell, Jr., Earl Warren, John Sherman Cooper, John J. McCloy, Allen Welsh Dulles and General Counsel J. Lee Rankin. [Source: archives.gov]

Two days after President Kennedy’s assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest, Jack Ruby approached Oswald as he was being escorted in front of police and journalists in the police station garage, and fatally shot him.

JFK Evolved into a Civil Rights-Supporting Anti-Imperialist Leaving Vietnam’s Opium

All four chapters of JFK: Destiny Betrayed present little-known aspects of JFK’s evolution toward positive work for the rights of the oppressed at home and abroad.

The first chapters discuss JFK’s opposition to CIA machinations.

JFK and RFK were arguably the most powerful people, outside of the Civil Rights movement itself, to lead the passage of the most comprehensive Civil Rights legislation since the Emancipation Proclamation, with their 1963-crafted Civil Rights Act.^[4]

Chapter 3 presents Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stating his belief in the sincerity of the President and Attorney General as friends and advocates for Civil Rights.^[5]

Regarding JFK’s political evolution, the series started with John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert’s visit to Vietnam in 1951 when he was a U.S. congressman and Robert was his campaign manager. JFK and RFK ended up finding that France’s war to continue colonizing Vietnam was futile and Vietnam deserved independence.

After becoming a senator in 1953, JFK opposed the advice of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to help the French in Vietnam by using nuclear weapons.

JFK, when a congressman, during tour of Vietnam in 1951. [Source: kennedysandking.com]

JFK also ended up giving a famous speech in the Senate in 1957 entitled “Imperialism: The Enemy of Freedom,” in which he called for supporting anti-colonialism in Africa and Asia.^[6] This brought the wrath of both Democrats and Republicans on him.

Once in the White House, while President Kennedy and his brother waged war on the Cuban Revolution, they ultimately did not back a full-fledged military invasion of Cuba and forced CIA Director Allen Dulles’s resignation over the Bay of Pigs.

Allen and John Foster Dulles were lawyers representing various oligarchs’ interests. JFK further planned to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

While this documentary failed to mention it, President Kennedy also closed down Dulles’s CIA Project MK-Ultra twice, as people under Dulles kept it running behind JFK’s back.

As President Kennedy evolved toward wanting peace with the Soviet Union, Cuba and other leftist countries, he started back-channel correspondences with those countries’ leaders. Top JFK researchers such as James Douglas and Slate’s publisher, Talbot, published on the secret correspondence JFK and Khrushchev had behind their war-hawk generals’ backs.

JFK reportedly said to Norman Cousins that he was 100% committed to disabling all nuclear arms and he was ready to talk to the Soviet Khrushchev about that.

JFK and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]

President Kennedy’s final blow against the war-mongering oligarchs came when he decided against sending American ground troops into Vietnam, and ordered an eventual complete pull-out of American involvement there.

RFK and Senate’s Church Committee Unveil CIA and Mafia Work in JFK’s Assassination

The Warren Commission Report concluded that only Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Author David Talbot referenced RFK’s aides saying Bobby Kennedy was determined to start an official inquiry into his brother’s assassination as soon as he entered the White House in 1969. RFK’s California 1968 presidential primary nearly assured that until gunmen assassinated RFK that primary night.^[7]

Source: bl.uk

Regarding the Warren Commission, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., summed up the fact that “commissions in this country anoint orthodoxies.”

Church Committee Senator Richard Schweiker (R-PA) stated that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had confirmed to him in a letter that Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby worked as an FBI informant.^[8]

In April 1964, CIA-contracted Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who had regular correspondence with CIA Project MK-Ultra Director Sidney Gottlieb, interviewed Jack Ruby for 48 hours. Ruby reportedly had a sudden “acute psychotic break” during those interview hours. This barred any testimony from Ruby.^[9]

Chapter 2 of JFK: Destiny Betrayed also linked Jack Ruby to the Mafia working with the CIA on removing President Fidel Castro in Cuba. The Church Committee exposed Johnny Roselli’s function as a liaison between the CIA and Mafia, which RFK Jr. claimed his father had been unaware of.^[10]

The end of Chapter 1 presented several witnesses who confirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald was not on the 6^th floor of the building from where the Warren Report said he fired fatal shots.

More government documents around JFK’s assassination could have aided this conclusion but the FBI and CIA successfully appealed to President Trump to not release the remaining documents.^[11]

The Autopsy Supports Gunmen Shooting in Front of JFK

Chapter 2 of JFK: Destiny Betrayed focuses more on JFK’s autopsy. Numerous doctors’ reports contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots at JFK from behind him, out of the book depository’s 6^th floor window.

For example, at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry and Dr. Kent Clark examined JFK and stated there was a bullet exit wound in the right rear of the head, as well as an entrance would in the front of the throat.

Nurse Audrey Bell said powerful people forced Dr. Malcolm Perry to change his description the following day. Dr. Donald Miller, a colleague of Dr. Perry, also said Perry told him there was a bullet wound that was undeniably an entrance wound in the front of the throat.^[12]

Assistant White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff’s statement on the day of the assassination included showing a bullet coming right through the right front of the head.

Dr. Charles Crenshaw also saw JFK at Parkland Hospital and saw that JFK was shot in the front of the head.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, who had offered to aid the autopsy at the time, but only could offer advice later upon reviewing the autopsy report, weighed in on the findings. He said the Warren Report would have us believe the absurdity that Oswald’s second gunshot (the so-called “magic bullet”) caused seven wounds in two different people—JFK in the backseat of the car and Texas Governor John Connally in the front seat.^[13]

Source: eyemagazine.com

JFK: Destiny Betrayed also presents oncologist David Mantik, M.D. Ph.D., who reported that the x-rays of JFK’s head showed a fragment trail from the front to the back of his skull, which offered incontrovertible evidence that he was shot from the front.^[14]

Other key physical evidence around the assassination included attorney Mark Lane reporting that the Dallas District Attorney’s office had a paraffin test done on purported assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. That test showed that Oswald had not fired a rifle.^[15]

More of Intelligence’s Fingerprints on JFK’s Assassination

British magazine editor Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, detailed how the wealthiest families started the CIA with their own family members or attorneys at the top of its leadership.^[16]

The CIA’s highest-ranking whistleblower, Assistant Director Victor Marchetti, wrote The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, also documenting how the wealthiest white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families had members at the top of the CIA hierarchy. He was the sole Catholic close to the top tier of the CIA.

The CIA proceeded to do the oligarchical families’ bidding. Many of these families were involved in the opium trade. President Kennedy’s decision to pull out 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 went against their interests regarding that trade next to the Golden Triangle for poppy fields in Laos, Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand (this JFK series only mentions the war industry’s lost profits).^[17]

Regarding JFK’s assassination, Church Committee member Schweiker said: “Everywhere you looked… there were fingerprints of intelligence.”^[18]

Otto Otepka, U.S. Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Security, tried to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald on his own when Oswald was listed as a Soviet defector. CIA Associate Deputy Director James Angleton refused to respond to Otepka and tried to get him fired.

Oswald had worked for the government on the U-2 plane project, according to a CIA file on Oswald numbered #351164. Before that, Oswald was in the Marine Corps.^[19]

Oswald had further worked with David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, while also working with Nazi Party member Guy Bannister there.^[20] Ferrie, in turn, worked with Cuban exiles who consistently plotted with the CIA to overthrow Fidel Castro.

The first Black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden, was handpicked by President Kennedy and present at the assassination.^[21] He was visited by his superior, Elmer Moore, just after the assassination and Moore put a gun down in front of him intimidating him into silence.

Bolden tried to talk to the Warren Commission but was railroaded into a phony crime and jailed. Senate Church Committee witness James Gochenaur said he tried to ask Secret Service supervisor Elmer Moore about Agent Bolden. Moore responded, “Who are you working for? That goddamned lying nigger! We finally got him.”^[22]

Assassination Aftermath and Legacy

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took over and reversed most of JFK’s foreign policies. JFK had stated that he wanted to recognize Indonesian leftist leader Sukarno, signing an $11 million aid bill. Johnson supported his opponent, Suharto, who killed between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians “identified as communists” after a CIA backed coup in 1965.

Kennedy, Sukarno and Johnson. [Source: jfklibrary.org]

LBJ also started increasing the U.S. intervention in Vietnam on November 29, 1963, well before the fake “Gulf of Tonkin incident” led to the Johnson administration fully engaging in what would be a losing war with North Vietnam.^[23] American involvement in Vietnam would lead to at least 60,000 American deaths and countless more injuries, as well as a reported two million Vietnamese deaths.^[24]

LBJ pins medal on U.S. soldier at Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, in 1967. [Source: lbjlibrary.org]

The Vietnam War provided further cover for the CIA to import opium from the Golden Triangle that wound up addicting U.S. troops and countless other Americans. Within five to ten years of ending the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s, the CIA transferred this kind of operation to Afghanistan, the site of the Golden Crescent for opium-producing poppy fields.^[25]

The CIA’s Project MK-Ultra, continued as MK-Search at least until the Church Committee investigated it in the mid-1970s, used drugs on activists, deleteriously drugging many.^[26]

After JFK’s death, Robert F. Kennedy sent a message to Nikita Khrushchev, stating they knew the Soviets were not involved in his brother’s assassination, and that it was right-wingers.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro said: “This is bad news. Now everything is going to change.” Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser reportedly went into a great state of depression after JFK’s death. Nigeria declared a state of mourning.

*

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Notes

1. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/12/17/oliver-stones-new-jfk-revisited-disproves-official-story-reveals-u-s-intelligence-involvement-in-assassination/ 

2. “Goodnight America” hosted by Geraldo Rivera, with Robert Groden and Dick Gregory, March 6, 1975, the first public showing of the Zapruder footage of President Kennedy’s assassination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNrgzkjCNCE montycombs 1/30/2010 
3. https://www.usnews.com/debate-club/was-jfks-assassination-a-conspiracy/multiple-shots-prove-jfk-assassination-was-a-conspiracy Michael Vollbach and Ronald Burda, “Multiple Shots from Many Directions Killed JFK,” U.S. News and World Report, November 18, 2013. 
4. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/civil-rights-movement 
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_4hEfeBIAU MLK reported meeting with JFK five times in 1963, stating JFK was a friend of Civil Rights. 
6. Bruce Reidel, “JFK’s Argument Against Imperialism,” Lawfare, June 14, 2022. https://www.lawfareblog.com/jfks-argument-against-imperialism?fbclid=IwAR1vHbiaNRhb4FNrZAe12JLf_mWOezEfDRHQ1LVQ_9Tp79Cq-sZ-JjGmRn8# 
7. Here, RFK Jr. discussed how multiple gunmen killed his father and his interviewer describes the incredible multi-ethnic coalition behind RFK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR6BiqrSYq8 
8. “Senator Richard Schweiker—co-chairman of the Sub-committee on the John F. Kennedy Assassination.” HelmerReenberg October 17, 2013. 
9. Tom O’Neill, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties(New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2019), pp. 376-81. YouTube interview from Joe Rogan Experience, Interview with Tom O’Neill, “Jack Ruby’s Court Assigned Shrink was an MKUltra Doc,” April 16, 2020. 
10. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32423624.pdf 
11. Associated Press, “Trump keeps some JFK files secret over CIA, FBI concerns,” Canadian Broadcasting Company, October 26, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/jfk-assassination-documents-1.4372822 
12. Rick Anderson, “The JFK assassination files lead back to Seattle,” Crosscut, November 19, 2017. https://crosscut.com/2017/11/john-f-kennedy-assassination-files-seattle-trump-release-shooters 
13. “Dr. Cyril Wecht on JFK’s Assassination & the Magic Bullet Theory,” CrimeCon 2022, May 1, 2022. 
14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUri6DWOAVk 
15. http://22november1963.org.uk/oswald-rifle-and-paraffin-tests 
16. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001). Frances Stonor Saunders speech at the National Archives, covered by Book TV on C-SPAN 2, posted on YouTube by Adam Fitzgerald, June 26, 2021. 
17. https://news.un.org/en/story/2014/12/485662-opium-poppy-cultivation-golden-triangle-hits-new-high-2014-un-report 
18. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/16/archives/schweiker-predicts-collapse-of-warren-report-on-kennedy.html 
19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2210646 Phillip H. Melanson, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990). 
20. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1968/07/13/garrison 
21. https://whowhatwhy.org/justice/black-secret-service-agent-jailed-for-jfk-plot-warning-cleared-the-full-story/ 
22. Bolden was convicted in 1964 for soliciting a bribe, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. He was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, ultimately serving 39 months. At age 87, he received a Presidential pardon from Biden on April 26, 2022. 
23. https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHP/1961/Month%2004/Day%2024/JFKWHP-1961-04-24-C 
24. https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-people-died-in-the-Vietnam-War 
25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MamdDXe5fs Trailer for the film Drugs as Weapons Against Us (Progressive Left Productions, 2019) written, directed and produced by this author, John Potash. Includes Judy Woodruff quoting CIA documents on PBS admitting their heroin trafficking from Vietnam to the U.S. 

26. See, for example, the article and quote by former Students for a Democratic Society President Carl Oglesby: “If U.S. Intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it, and de-politicize it.” This was from his article “The Acid Test and How It Failed,” The National Reporter, Fall 1988. Quoted in Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above (Menlo Park, CA: Arktose Media, 2021) p. 130. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Revolution_from_Above/FWc3eMiO-4QC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Carl+Oglesby+the+Great+acid+on+acid+and+his+generation&pg=PA130&printsec=frontcover 

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Human duplicity is a marvel to contemplate.  This riveting documentary is an excellent example of such cunning in action, not on the part of the filmmaker who is eminently fair, perhaps overly so, but on the part of some of those who appear in the film.  It demands that viewers use every skill in their possession to determine who is lying and who is telling the truth about the involvement of a woman named Ruth Paine (and her husband Michael) in the assassination of President Kennedy.  In many ways, it is akin to sitting in a jury box, listening to trial testimony from witnesses for the defense and prosecution and from a few whose slippery words seem meant to create uncertainty and never-ending debate about Paine’s innocence or guilt in the president’s murder.

The film will be an eye-opener for anyone unfamiliar with Mrs. Ruth Paine’s fundamental role at the heart of the president’s murder; and for those knowledgeable about her, it will be greeted as an important contribution to the case.  I believe it is not just a must watch for those interested in JFK’s assassination, which is the key to all subsequent American history, but for anyone trying to unravel today’s tapestry of lies and propaganda spewing out from the mainstream media (MSM) that go by different names – CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, etc. – but all of whom speak for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The basic equation is: CIA = MSM.

Since many people are adept at lying, they think they are good at sniffing out lies in others.  This is highly questionable.  We live in a country of lies, from the top down and the bottom up; propaganda and the everyday lies that grease the skids of social intercourse. Deceptions that deceive no one. Lying is the leading cause of spiritual death in the United States, even as devotion to truth is embraced as a national platitude.  Even when such fealty to truthfulness isn’t professed or implied and the lying is admitted, as with ex-CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s 2019 remark about the CIA at Texas A&M university – “We lied, we cheated, we stole” – such treachery is uttered proudly and with a chuckle. It’s what everybody knows and pretends they don’t.

There are some intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky, who like to say that many who lie believe their own stories because of their institutional affiliations – e.g. journalists for the BBC, The New York Times, CBS, etc. (but not the Defense Department-funded MIT where he spent his career) – because such institutions require that the employees they hire have internalized the script in advance.  But they don’t call it lying, for it is built into the socialization process that leads to positions within such institutions. So they are only doing their jobs and lack awareness of any duplicity. They are innocent of their own complicity in censorship and propaganda in stories they report.  They have no knowledge of the fact that their mainstream employers have long been proven to be mouthpieces for the CIA, M-16, etc.

Focused exclusively on institutional analyses, Chomsky denies these people a place for individual freedom and consciousness, as he does with his long-held absurd assertion that JFK’s assassination is of little importance and his denial of the clearly documented facts about how Kennedy took a radical turn toward peacemaking in the last year of his life, a metanoia that led directly to his death.

He is correct, however, that such MSM people don’t need to self-censor, for their jobs require them to play the game according to the censorship rules under which they were hired, but he is very wrong to claim they therefore believe what they say. That assumes these people are very ignorant, which they are not; that they just obliviously do their jobs and collect their pay.  He fails to distinguish between playing dumb and being dumb.

It would be more accurate to say that they live in what Jean Paul Sartre calls “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), for “the essence of a lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding …. The ideal description of a liar would be a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and denying the negation as such.”

You can’t lie to yourself, for that would mean you were two people.  But you can lie to others.  And you can play dumb.  It’s called acting.  And of course many journalists and academics hold dual positions, since they secretly work as assets for the intelligence services.

I begin with these thoughts about lying because a good number of the people who appear in The Assassination and Mrs. Paine have no ostensible institutional affiliation but may be working in some capacity for an invisible institutional paymaster who calls their tunes.  No names required.  They implicitly present themselves as disinterested pursuers of truth, yet viewers are forced to assess the veracity of their claims, including those of Ruth Paine who appears throughout, answering Max Good’s interview questions.

Much has been written and filmed about the JFK assassination.  Most take a broad perspective.  This film is quite different because it approaches it through a personal focus on a woman named Ruth Paine who, for those who may not have heard of her, was the key witness against Lee Harvey Oswald at the Warren Commission (WC) hearings where she was asked more than five-thousand questions (her husband Michel was asked 1,000 or so).  She is the woman who invited Marina Oswald to live with her in her home in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas, where Lee Harvey Oswald also spent weekends from late September 1963 up until the morning of the Assassination on November 22, 1963.  Her testimony led to the WC’s conclusion that Oswald, and Oswald alone shot, the president.

The Assassination and Mrs. Paine is Max Good’s second full-length documentary.  He came to the subject after reading a section (pp.168-172) on Ruth and Michael Paine in James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, a book considered by many to be the best on the JFK assassination.  He felt the Paines’ story shouted out for a documentary, and when he discovered that Ruth Paine was still alive, in her late eighties, lucid, and living near him in a Quaker retirement home in California, he contacted her and she agreed to be interviewed, something she has done for 59 years, always protesting her innocence, even though over the decades researchers have uncovered much evidence to the contrary.

Her ex-husband, Michael, also lived at the home but has since died.  There’s a brief interview of little consequence with him in the film since his memory was going, but I should note that he too is a crucial figure in the assassination story.  Both he and Ruth have always denied involvement in the plot and coverup, yet much evidence connects them to it.  Michael Paine’s involvement is artfully suggested by the film’s title – “Mrs. Paine” and not simply Ruth Paine, a woman acting alone.  The Paines, who have claimed they are pacifists, might best be superficially described as unassuming, liberal Quaker/Unitarian do-gooders, whose wealth and astounding family and intelligence connections would make heads spin, if they were known.  The film exposes many of those connections.

The fundamental undisputed facts are as follows. In February 1963, Ruth, who spoke and taught Russian, was invited to a party by George de Mohrenschildt, a White Russian CIA asset who was ‘babysitting” Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of the CIA.  There she met Oswald.  Soon de Mohrenschildt would go to Haiti and Ruth would establish a relationship with Lee and Marina Oswald.  In September, Ruth Hyde Paine visited family in eastern Massachusetts on Naushon Island, owned by the Forbes family. Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth’s mother-in-law, was Ruth Forbes Paine Young, from the blue-blood Forbes family of Boston.  She was friends with the CIA’s Allen Dulles since her best friend was Mary Bancroft who was Dulles’s mistress.  They had stayed on the island.

From Massachusetts, Ruth drove to New Orleans to pick up the Russian speaking Marina Oswald and the Oswald’s belongings to bring her back to Dallas to live with her. It’s a small, unassuming house, but there was room for Marina and her children because Michael Paine had conveniently moved out in the spring, allegedly because of marital problems, but would move back in the winter after the assassination and Marina’s departure. Ruth says she did this to help a woman in need.

On her long road trip south, she made numerous stops, including at her sister Sylvia Hyde Hoke’s house in Falls Church, Virginia.  Sylvia worked for the CIA, as documents have confirmed, and her husband worked for the agency’s front, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), yet to this day – and in Good’s interview in the film – she claims not to know where her sister worked.  Ruth’s father, William Avery Hyde, also worked for U.S. AID in Latin America and his reports went to the CIA. From her sister’s house, Ruth proceeded to New Orleans where she picked up Marina and took her to her house in Irving.  In mid-October, again out of alleged kindness, she got Lee a job in the Texas School Book Depository, despite calls to her house from an employment agency offering him a much higher paying job.  When asked about this by the Warren Commission, Ruth gave an evasive answer.  Then when JFK was killed, an empty blanket roll that allegedly held Oswald’s rifle was found in the Paines’ garage.  And Ruth claimed to have found a note – the ”Walker Note” that was used to show his propensity for violence – and a letter also allegedly written by Oswald to the Russian Embassy that was used as evidence of his guilt.  There is much more of a strange and suspicious nature involving Ruth and the Oswalds.

The Paines have always said that Oswald killed Kennedy to make a name for himself – the little man kills the big one syndrome.  They repeat this in the documentary.  Ruth says of Oswald, “He realized he had the opportunity to no longer be a little guy but someone extraordinary.”  But as Jim DiEugenio (one of the finest and most informed commentators in the film) says, if that were so, then why did Oswald always claim he was innocent, a patsy who didn’t shoot anyone.  Those who wish to kill to make a name for themselves obviously claim credit, but the Paines seem not to get this.  Their claim makes no sense, yet they both repeat it in the film.

And although the film’s focus is on Ruth, not Michael, there are other undisputed facts about him worth noting.  As previously mentioned, his mother was Ruth Forbes Paine Young.  After divorcing Michael’s father, Lyman Paine, his mother married a man named Arthur Young.  Among other strange facts about Young, he was the inventor of the Bell helicopter, which was the prototype for the infamous Huey helicopter used in Vietnam.  Those helicopters were produced at the defense contractor Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, Texas where Michael, the pacifist, worked through his connection to Arthur Young.  He had a security clearance; when the Warren Commission asked him what type of clearance, he said he didn’t know.  One of his cousins, Thomas Dudley Cabot (the Boston Cabots), was a former president of the United Fruit Company, and another, John Cabot, worked for the State Department where he exchanged information about the CIA-United Fruit coup d’état against Jacobo Arbenz. Later, he was president of the CIA front company Gibraltar Steamship Corporation that leased Swan Island in the Caribbean for the CIA, where the agency set up Radio Swan that was used during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, among other things (see pp.193-208 in James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, second edition, for important information on the Paines).

All this factual background on the Paines doesn’t definitively prove anything about them, but it is essential to assess their credibility, and watching The Assassination and Mrs.Paine is all about doing that.

The question about Ruth that the film asks is whether she is a truthful, naïve, Quaker do-gooder or a CIA asset, a pawn, or someone in deep denial (whatever that is).

She has her defenders and they appear in the film along with well-known supporters of her and the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald did the deed alone:  Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Jack Valenti, Michael Beschloss, and Peter Jennings.

From the so-called prosecution side we hear from: Jim DiEugenio, Dr. Gary Aquilar, Dr. Martin Schotz, Vince Salandria, and Sue Wheaton.

Paine’s defenders make sure to bash Oliver Stone and his film, JFK, and Ruth claims Stone never contacted her about her portrayal in the film.  Stone denies this and says she would not talk to him.  But she makes it clear that she is a big fan of various Network TV specials that support the WC, especially the London mock trial with Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi, and a Peter Jennings ABC special.

Ruth Paine is given a lot of screen time between her defenders and accusers.  As I said, Max Good is more than fair, perhaps too fair.  Paine is a cool character who only rarely gets a bit flustered.  She’s been doing these interviews for a long time, and is either a good actor or an innocent bystander, as she says, “I’m kind of naïve …. But I think it’s a blessing.”

After giving both sides their say – and a few others, whom I won’t mention, who make lawyerly-like slippery statements – Bill Simpich interjects that there is “something about the Ruth Paine story that simply doesn’t jell.”  Good then proceeds to ask Ruth a series of hard questions that viewers will find very interesting.  But he never lets the audience know what he has concluded about her guilt or innocence.  He is impartial to the end.

I am not.  For before watching the film, I knew a great deal about the Paines and their roles in the assassination and its cover-up.  I completely agree with the Philadelphia lawyer Vince Salandria, one of the earliest and most brilliant critics of the official story, when he says “You can’t close the circle without the Paines.  There is no way they can be innocent.  No way.”

And he added the film’s penultimate statement about the assassination:

There is no mystery here.  It’s all self-evident.  It was a coup.  It was designed to be a false mystery and the debate would be eternal and why it [killing JFK] was done – forgotten. In order to commit yourself to truth here, you’re changing your real identity from a citizen of a democracy to a subject of a military empire.  A big step.

Ruth Paine, however, gets the final word.  Regarding all the claims about her involvement with the CIA and the Oswalds: “Nonsense. Absolute nonsense …. I am interested in truth …. I’m a very independent person.  Nobody tells me what to do.”

I highly recommend that people watch this important film and reach a verdict based on the evidence it provides, and if they need more, to read the works of Douglass and DiEugenio mentioned earlier, among others.  As good as a film can be, it is only as good as the sources it relies upon.

Human duplicity is a marvel to contemplate.  The Assassination and Mrs. Painewill force you to do that.  Don’t miss it.

Watch the trailer below.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image is from maxgoodfilm.com

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He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book, click the cover page.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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It’ll remain to be seen whether a New Détente is even clinched at all, to say nothing of its modalities in that event (including speculatively secret clauses), but the scenario is credible enough to discuss considering China’s public signals of interest in seriously exploring its parameters. A lot can still happen to derail that trajectory, and it’s even possible that it wouldn’t perpetuate the bi-multipolar system in which they both have a stake contrary to their expectations, but it’s still worth thinking deeply about.

China pulled out of military dialogue with the US in August as part of its response to Pelosi’s provocative trip to Taiwan, yet Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Tan Kefei just said on Sunday that Defense Minister Wei Fenghe is ready to hold talks with his American counterpart. The proposed meeting, which the spokesman disclosed is already being discussed by “the relevant agencies of the two sides”, would prospectively take place during the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting-Plus in Cambodia this week.

This development signals China’s interest in further exploring the parameters of a possible New Détente with the US, which former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger presciently predicted in early October. That globally renowned China expert’s foresight came several days after I asked whether “The Ukrainian Conflict Might Have Already Derailed China’s Superpower Trajectory”, in which case it would naturally follow that China would seriously countenance such a rapprochement.

I argued that the prior bi-multipolar intermediary phase of the global systemic transition to multipolarity could have remained in effect indefinitely whereby the American and (speculatively aspiring) Chinese superpowers would jointly manage world affairs, but India decisively intervened to offset this. It unexpectedly became Russia’s irreplaceable alternative valve from Western pressure and thus preemptively averted the scenario of its partner becoming disproportionately dependent on China.

Had Prime Minister Modi and his team capitulated to the unprecedented American pressure upon them to unilaterally concede on their objective national interests by abandoning Russia, then the latter would have become China’s “junior partner”, after which India would be pressured to become the US’. The New Cold War would thus likely have resulted in the formation of two rigid blocs across Eurasia respectively led by the American and Chinese superpowers, thus eroding all others’ strategic autonomy.

Instead, India’s policy of principled neutrality resulted in it carefully balancingbetween the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the jointly BRICS– & SCO-led Global South of which it’s now the voice, thus overcoming the prior bi-multipolar impasse in the global systemic transition. This moved International Relations in the direction of tripolarity, pioneered by the Russian-Indian Axis (which closely cooperates with their shared Iranian partner), prior to its final form of more complex multipolarity (“multiplexity”).

I recently explained in detail that the emerging dynamics are such that the American and Chinese superpowers have a self-interested stake in de-escalating their tensions at least temporarily in an attempt to jointly delay bi-multipolarity’s evolution to tripolarity and then multiplexity. This contrasts with Russia and India’s self-interested stake in accelerating the aforesaid evolution, especially through the joint assembling of a new Non-Aligned Movement (“Neo-NAM”) for entrenching their progress.

The US finally acknowledged that India will informally lead this emerging multilateral network-centric platform, ergo the White House Press Secretary’s recent praise of Prime Minister Modi’s indispensable role in facilitating the wording of last week’s G20 leaders’ statement. China also acknowledges the inevitability of these emerging trends as evidenced by its prior proposal to jointly pioneer the Asian Century with India, but it too shares the US’ interest in upholding bi-multipolarity as long as possible.

To that end, it’s seriously exploring the parameters of a New Détente with its superpower peer despite the latter having not tangibly reversed any of its hybrid (economic, military, political, tech) pressure on the People’s Republic, at least not yet. To the contrary, the US’ Hybrid War pressure on China has only intensified since August, yet Beijing is still sending olive branches to its rival regardless. This very strongly suggests that its leadership is keenly aware of their strategically disadvantageous position.

That’s not to imply that it’ll unilaterally concede on its objective national interests, at least not in any meaningful sense beyond potentially doing so superficially to facilitate the US “saving face” in the scenario of a New Détente after all its recent tough talk, but just that it’s cognizant of its limits. The fact of the matter is that it’s in the American and Chinese superpowers’ interests to temporarily put aside their differences in order to jointly delay the end of bi-multipolarity and emergence of multiplexity.

It’s impossible to reverse the global systemic transition, but the longer that its next phases are postponed, the greater the chance that those two (by then former) superpowers can become the so-called “first among equals” in the emerging Multipolar World Order. They’ll always exert outsized influence over International Affairs by virtue of their economic, military, and technological power, but going with the flow instead of “gently” pushing back a bit could lead to them having a little less.

After all, the further acceleration of tripolarity-multiplexity trends would result in Great Powers like Russia, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye catching up with them a lot quicker than expected, not to mention the Neo-NAM taking shape sooner than many thought. Those five-mentioned key players’ enhanced strategic autonomy – brought about through complex bilateral and multilateral balancing acts, the latter also unfolding within the Neo-NAM network – would reduce US and Chinese influence.

Moreover, the rest of the Global South across Afro-Eurasia, Latin America, and Oceania would have multiple options available to them for balancing between the two former superpowers and the newly risen Great Powers shaping the Multipolar World Order. Altogether, these dynamics could greatly erode US and Chinese influence, thus further complicating their respective grand strategies that were already largely thrown into disarray as a result of the global systemic consequences of the Ukrainian Conflict.

Despite these shared interests in indefinitely perpetuating the bi-multipolar intermediary phase of this irreversible transition, the American and Chinese superpowers still don’t trust one another, nor will they ever do so completely regardless of whatever the terms of their potential New Détente might be. Each feels uncomfortable making any meaningful concessions on their objective national interests, even in coordination with complementary compromises by their rival, ergo the present dilemma between them.

The US’ Hybrid War pressure on China was imposed a lot sooner than the People’s Republic expected since its leadership seemed to have thought that it wouldn’t occur until sometime next year at the earliest given its superpower peer’s ongoing proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. By setting events in motion through Pelosi’s provocative trip to Taiwan and the CHIPS Act that entered into force around the same time, the US caught China off guard at its most vulnerable grand strategic moment in decades.

The People’s Republic is scrambling to recalibrate its long-term objectives in the face of the unexpected global systemic disruption brought about by the special operationthat the US provoked Russia into commencing in late February. The double whammy of Pelosi’s provocative trip to Taiwan and the CHIPS Act therefore occurred at the worst time possible, ergo why its new leadership from last month’s 20th National Congress is seriously exploring the parameters of a New Détente with the US.

This doesn’t mean that they’ll clinch one, let alone right away and especially not at the expense of being coerced into making meaningful concessions on their objective national interests (not to mention unilaterally), but just that they’ve indisputably sent signals about their willingness to discuss this. That explains why President Xi engaged with his Western counterparts during the G20, including the new Australian leader despite prior well-known bilateral tensions, and this week’s possible military meeting.

The optics are intended to soften the Western public’s propaganda-influenced dislike of the People’s Republic while simultaneously facilitating the efforts of its rival’s perception managers to gradually reshape their views in a more positive direction upon progress being achieved on the New Détente. The end result of this process could be that the US and China responsibly regulate their rivalry for the time being by reaching a pragmatic balance of influence between them aimed at upholding bi-multipolarity.

In practice, this could take the form of China tacitly acknowledging that there’s no returning to the so-called “good ‘ole days” of its ties with the Golden Billion, meaning that it’ll accept AUKUS (despite likely continuing to criticize it), US-led “freedom of navigation” patrols in the South China Sea, and some continued bilateral trade and investment restrictions. Nevertheless, both sides could agree to restore limited cooperation on the climate, COVID, military, and trade files as a necessary trust-building step.

It’ll remain to be seen whether a New Détente is even clinched at all, to say nothing of its modalities in that event (including speculatively secret clauses), but the scenario is credible enough to discuss considering China’s public signals of interest in seriously exploring its parameters. A lot can still happen to derail that trajectory, and it’s even possible that it wouldn’t perpetuate the bi-multipolar system in which they both have a stake contrary to their expectations, but it’s still worth thinking deeply about.

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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 regular contributor to Global Research. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met for more than three hours at the G20 conference November 14 and 15 in Indonesia. They needed to discuss each other’s “red lines,” Biden said.

The meeting wasn’t just about Taiwan, where U.S. war ships cross China’s “red lines” constantly. China “is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and… the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective,” Biden wrote in the new U.S. Defense Strategy document issued in October. That document focused on China and Russia as key “threats” to U.S. hegemony.

Xi warned at the 20^th CPC congress last month that China is “confronted with drastic changes in the international landscape, especially external attempts to blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China.” But China is committed to deepening and expanding global partnerships, safeguarding the international system with the United Nations at its core and the international order underpinned by international law, and building a human community with a shared future, Xi said.

Chinese and U.S. Presidents Xi and Biden met at the G20 conference in Indonesia, November 14, each accompanied by senior advisers. [Source: english.news.cn]

During the meeting, Biden spoke of what China calls the “Five Noes,” which he committed to at last year’s summit:

• not to seek a new Cold War;
• not to try to change China’s system;
• not to forge alliances against China;
• not to support “Taiwan independence;”
• and not to look for conflict with China.

Biden added that the U.S. does not seek to halt China’s economic development, or to contain China.

“We hope the U.S. can implement President Biden’s commitment instead of always saying one thing and doing another,” commented the influential Chinese newspaper Global Times.

In a November 13 leadup to the G20 conference, Global Times editorialized that “the G20 was established due to global financial crises… When the U.S. was hit by a financial crisis, even with the G7, it couldn’t handle it, so there was a real need for it to strengthen coordination and dialogue with emerging countries.”

Global Times adds that

“the G20 is also a symbol of the transformation from the West having the only say to common governance across the globe… G20 is not an expanded G7… While the latter is just a coterie of rich countries, the former is a sign of multipolarity. The G20 consists of the world’s major developed economies and emerging markets, which together account for about 85 percent of the global economy…”

It concludes that “the whole world is pinning their hope on G20 to be a catalyst of global economic recovery, especially for developing countries.”

The International Monetary Fund’s research department director said last month that “a wave of debt crises” are coming in the Global South, and “the global economy is headed for stormy waters.”

The world faces a “geopolitical realignment” that will be “permanent.” He warned “the worst is yet to come,” as the depreciation of most currencies against the dollar and rising interest rates make it hard for both governments and companies to service their dollar-denominated debt. The director, Pierre‑Olivier Gourinchas, made these comments in a press briefing in October, reported November 14 by Ben Norton of Multipolarista.

The members of the G20 are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. Several are also members of BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, hence BRICS. Argentina, Iran and Saudi Arabia are also candidates for BRICS membership.

Together the BRICS countries comprise well over half the global population, and their combined GDP of $25 Trillion is greater than that of the U.S. at $23 trillion. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Argentina’s combined GDPs would add about $2.3 trillion. (If Saudi Arabia follows through with joining BRICS, and welcomes Xi in an upcoming visit, it could be a game changer.) Other prospective BRICS candidates include Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, adding their combined GDP of nearly $4 trillion. (The EU, Japan and South Korea have a combined GDP equal to that of the U.S.)

Stops along the way

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited India November 11, enroute to Indonesia for G20. She made it clear the U.S. goal with G20 was to try to reshape the global economic order so “allies depend on one another for the goods and services that power their economies.” USAID is providing half a billion dollars to finance a U.S. solar manufacturer’s new facility in southern India, specifically to “move away from China,” which leads the world in solar technology. Yellen used the canard of “forced labor” in Xinjiang—an evidence-free claim—to smear China.

India “shows little interest in U.S. overtures,” the Times report says. India refused to join the U.S. campaign against Russia over Ukraine. Its imports from Russia rose 430% since February, mainly due to oil and gas imports from Russia. “There is a layer of apprehension if not outright mistrust in Delhi,” said Eswar Prasad, a former IMF official and professor of trade policy at Cornell University, according to the Times article.

Source: qz.com

Biden stopped in Cambodia enroute to Indonesia, to attend the East Asia Summit (EAS) there. EAS includes the 10 members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) plus China, Russia, USA, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov represented Russia. He said the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy ignores “inclusive structures” of regional cooperation and would lead to “the militarization of this region with an obvious focus on containing China, and containing Russian interests in the Asia-Pacific.”

The “U.S. better give up attempts to contain China by utilizing Southeast Asian countries,” was the headline of a Global Times November 3 report by top opinion writer Hu Xijin. It said: “The U.S. has always wished to build an anti-China united front in the South China Sea with Japan, Australia, and Southeast Asian countries.

Among them, Vietnam is a key U.S. target to rope in. However, Vietnam is clearly aware that the U.S. wants to use it as a pawn, so Hanoi is vigilant while developing relations with the U.S.” Hu wrote that during Vietnamese leader Nguyen Phu Trong’s visit following the 20^th CPC Congress, “Trong reiterated that Vietnam will not allow any country to establish a military base in Vietnam, or join any military alliance, or use force against any country, or work with one country to oppose another.”

Xi Jinping greets Vietnamese Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong Oct. 31, 2022. Trong was Xi’s first guest following the CPC’s 20^th party Congress. [Source: globaltimes.cn]

A New York Times report November 13 said “ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] leaders at the EAS conference reiterated their strong ties with Beijing and issued a joint statement with China supporting the One China Policy, opposing independence for Taiwan.”

“China and ASEAN are each other’s largest trading partner,” a Global Times November 12 report said. Indonesia’s Jakarta-Bandung high speed railway approached 90 percent completion in October. It is “a flagship project of China-Indonesia cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative,” Global Times says. “When fully completed, it will be the first high speed railway in Indonesia and the entire Southeast Asia. This month, the total quantity of freight transported by the China-Laos Railway had exceeded 10 million tons, with the cross-border cargo transportation value hitting $1.7 billion.”

“Security issues”

Biden met in Cambodia with Japanese and South Korean leaders, focusing on “security issues,” a week after the U.S. and South Korea launched their largest ever combined military drills, with hundreds of warplanes from both sides staging mock attacks 24 hours a day for most of a week, involving “about 240 warplanes conducting about 1,600 sorties,” according to a U.S. Air Force statement.

The exercises included the USS Ronald Reagan carrier group in the first U.S.-South Korea joint military training involving a US aircraft carrier since 2017.

The U.S. has nearly 30,000 troops stationed in South Korea, with another 50,000 in Japan, mainly in Okinawa, with nuclear missiles ready to launch. Anti-base protests are constant. The U.S. is in a “state of permanent war in Asia and the Pacific today,” with 375,000 Indo-Pacific Command personnel scattered across hundreds of military bases in the west Pacific, according to Mark Tseng-Putterman, writing in Monthly Review.

He refutes the concept of an “inter-imperial rivalry” between the U.S. and China, which gives false justification of the U.S. militarized posture as “’defensive’ in the face of ostensible Chinese belligerence.” He says this “lazy condemnation of ‘inter-capitalist competition’… obscures the centuries-long project of U.S. Pacific hegemony” that is now being “reconsolidated, operationalized, and expanded” in a hostile Cold War posture aimed at China.

Germany and France seek to boost economic ties with China

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz led a high-level business delegation to China November 4, seeking to boost economic ties, in the midst of major economic difficulties caused by the loss of cheap energy from Russia. Xi told Scholz that as large nations with influence, China and Germany should work together during “times of change and turmoil” for the sake of world peace, according China Central TV (CCTV).

Xi also met French President Macron at the G20. Macron said both France and China are committed to peace, development and economic prosperity in the world, Xinhua reported. The French president added that amid a volatile international landscape, France hopes to continue working with China in the spirit of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit, increase high-level exchanges and dialogue, and deepen cooperation in areas such as trade, economy, aviation and civilian nuclear energy.

Scholz heard heavy criticism from German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who threatened to break up Germany’s governing coalition over the Scholz visit. Germany’s further right CDU party representative, Norbert Roettgen, said “the chancellor is pursuing a foreign policy which will lead to a loss of trust in Germany among our closest partners.” (Which partners might those be?)

Unforgettable Indonesia

The G20’s location in Indonesia recalls the 1955 Conference of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Bandung, Indonesia. The Bandung conference drew 29 non-aligned countries, led by Indonesia, India, Egypt and Yugoslavia. Today a majority of the world’s countries are members of the UN’s Non-Aligned Movement—essentially all of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They’re the ones who abstained or voted against the NATO countries’ vote to condemn Russia this year.

China’s then-Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai was an invited observer to the Non-Aligned conference. He narrowly missed an assassination attempt enroute to Bandung. The Taiwanese assassin was flown out of Hong Kong to Taiwan on a CIA-sponsored aircraft. The attempt took place in the wake of the first Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954-55. This was just after the July 1953 armistice in Korea ended open warfare, but left tens of thousands of U.S. troops there. China recently celebrated its decisive role in stopping the U.S. assault in The Battle at Lake Changjin, the most expensive film ever produced in China. China remembers all this very well.

In 1965, Ten years after the Bandung conference, the CIA engineered a coup d’etat in Indonesia, known as the “Indonesian genocide.” An estimated one million people were killed in an effort to destroy the left and popular movements in the country. Indonesia’s President Sukarno, who convened the Bandung Conference, was overthrown; replaced by anticomunist General Suharto who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist until the mid 1990s.

The incident is documented in The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins. The book goes on to describe subsequent replications of the strategy of mass murder, against left-wing and reform movements in Latin America and elsewhere.

Biden at COP27 Climate Change Conference in Egypt

President Biden touched down in Egypt to speak at the COP27 UN climate talks, on the weekend before continuing to Cambodia and Indonesia. A New York Times report November 12 said “he exhorted other nations to follow America’s lead and increase their efforts to make swift and deep cuts to the pollution that is driving climate change.” He highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act, passed earlier this year, which would impose fines of $1500 per ton of methane gas released into the atmosphere.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that “traps about 80 times as much heat as CO₂” (NYT 11/12/22). A proposed EPA regulation would cut emissions by 30% by 2030 and eliminate 36 million tons of methane emissions by 2035, Biden said. It raises a question: how much methane escaped from the North Sea when the Nordstream pipelines were destroyed?

A Danish official said Nord Stream gas leaks could emit a CO₂ equivalent of 14.6 million tonnes (32 billion pounds), similar to a third of Denmark’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps the EU should impose a $1500 per ton fine of $22 billion on the perpetrator–widely assumed to be the US. That would be about a third of the $66 billion the U.S. has so far approved in war aid to Ukraine.

Source: youtube.com

The U.S. and its allies are blocking calls at COP27 for “loss and damage” funding for countries in the Global South. Rich countries are concerned that it would lead to “unlimited liability,” and that determine how much it would cost is difficult. Estimates of financial costs of weather events in low- and lower middle-income countries, just for damages between 1998 and 2017, are over half a trillion dollars. Assessing only the immediate damage, these figures do not include long term economic impacts, such as food insecurity or health disorders. It raises another question: how much is due for a century and a half of western industrialization, and six centuries of colonialism and slavery?

There’s a trust problem for the U.S. at all these global conferences. Power Shift Africa’s founder Mohamed Adow said at the climate conference in Egypt that “Joe Biden comes to COP27 and makes new promises. He’s like a salesman selling goods with endless small print.” In India, Treasury Secretary Yellen found “a layer of apprehension if not outright mistrust.”

In Cambodia, “ASEAN leaders at the EAS conference reiterated their strong ties with Beijing and issued a joint statement with China supporting the One China Policy, opposing independence for Taiwan.” And in Indonesia, the U.S. finds the G20 to be “a symbol of the transformation from the West having the only say to common governance across the globe… G20 is not an expanded G7.” Joe Biden and his team are finding a whole new world out there.

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Dee Knight is a member of the DSA International Committee’s Anti-War Subcommittee. He is the author of My Whirlwind Lives: Navigating Decades of Storms, soon to be published by Guernica World Editions. Dee can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image: Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022. [Source: english.news.cn]

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***

The contours of Russia’s geo-economic grand strategy in the present decade’s “Age of Complexity” are now apparent. Beyond the former Soviet core of the Union State, EAEU, and the CIS (all three of which are envisaged as the basis upon which the aforesaid strategy will be built), the Kremlin considers China, India, and the majority-Muslim countries of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye (the three pillars of its Ummah Pivot) to be equally important partners.

Russia successfully survived the West’s unprecedented sanctions blitz over the past nine months and is now ready to take tangible steps in the direction of radically reforming its international economic priorities. This newly restored world power’s dozens of regions have been encouraged by the authorities to lead these efforts, which was the focus of Foreign Minister Lavrov’s meeting on Friday with the Council of Heads of Russian Regions in Moscow where he outlined their priorities.

According to him, the most pressing task is to comprehensively expand mutually beneficial economic engagement with the Union State’s Belarusian half, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Related cooperation with the SCO, BRICS, and BRICS+ countries then follows, which he envisages being simultaneously advanced at the international, regional, and municipal levels, the last of which should concern smart cities when dealing with ASEAN, he said.

Border and transport infrastructure with China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia should be modernized, Lavrov suggested, and regional cooperation subsequently expanded with China, India, Turkiye, and Iran as well. The Gulf Kingdoms and Syria must also continue playing a growing role in Russia’s regional driven economic strategy under the current conditions, too. Not to be forgotten, the Foreign Minister added that Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America should also remain on the regional heads’ minds.

Reviewing these suggestions, it’s clear that post-Soviet integration mechanisms take first place among Russia’s priorities, which is sensible considering existing ties, geographic proximity, and reduced logistical costs. Moving beyond this Eurasian core, the next concentric circle predictably includes China/Mongolia, Iran, and Turkiye, after which come the Gulf, India, and Syria. The rest of the Global South then rounds out the remainder of this strategy.

It’s important at this point to emphasize the growing significance of India in Russia’s regional driven geo-economic grand strategy. Lavrov declared that “The relevance of region-to-region cooperation with India has increased by orders of magnitude. Our partners are interested not only in increasing the supply of energy, agricultural products, fertilisers and precious metals from Russia, but also in setting up joint ventures in various fields.”

Over the past nine months, Russia jumped from being India’s 25th largest trade partner to its fifth, mostly due to the export of oil exploding by over 50 times. Despite the energy-centric impetus behind this trend, these mutually complementary multipolar Great Powers realize that their interests are best served by building upon this newfound basis to further diversify their economic ties in accordance with their leaders’ previously stated vision to take yearly trade to a whopping $30 billion a year.

Getting there once is possible by further scaling up their energy relations, but that level can only be confidently sustained by taking advantage of this year’s unexpected economic opportunity to comprehensively diversity their trade ties exactly as Lavrov suggested. This is by no means an easy feat, but it also isn’t impossible either since the political will is present and the economic incentives are self-evident, especially since Prime Minister Modi continues practicing a truly independent foreign policy.

Had he and his team capitulated in the face of unprecedented American pressure upon them to unilaterally concede on their objective national interests by dumping Russia in order to please their new strategic partners on the other side of the planet, then none of this would be possible. Russia would have become disproportionately dependent on China as its only valve from Western sanctions pressure, which would have upset the careful balance of influence between India and the People’s Republic.

In response, that South Asian state would have been coerced into becoming the US’ “junior partner” in a desperate bid to restore a semblance of that selfsame balance, which in turn would have weakened its strategic autonomy and likely resulted in the creation of rigid New Cold War blocs in Asia. Instead, by bravely defying this unfriendly pressure from its new partner, India managed to help break through the prior bi-multipolar intermediary phase of the global systemic transition to multipolarity.

That outcome unlocked the myriad economic opportunities that are now more easily available to Russia and which Lavrov explained in his speech to the Council of Heads of Russian Regions on Friday. There’s now little chance that Russia will ever become disproportionately dependent on any given partner, especially since India will always act as a friendly, gentle, and non-hostile counterweight to China in this respect, the role of which will be complemented by the Gulf, Iran, and Turkiye, too.

Those last three couldn’t on their own, nor collectively, function in any effective sense as a friendly, gentle, and non-hostile counterweight to China in preemptively averting Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on the People’s Republic during the early months of the West’s sanctions blitz. India was the only country capable of playing such a role, which thereafter made it possible for those three to collectively function as complementary counterweights with time.

Considering this, the contours of Russia’s geo-economic grand strategy in the present decade’s “Age of Complexity” are now apparent. Beyond the former Soviet core of the Union State, EAEU, and the CIS (all three of which are envisaged as the basis upon which the aforesaid strategy will be built), the Kremlin considers China, India, and the majority-Muslim countries of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye (the three pillars of its Ummah Pivot) to be equally important partners.

Pakistan could have played a pivotal role in the last-mentioned category had its multipolar former Prime Minister not been overthrown in early April by a US-orchestrated post-modern coup that knocked that strategically positioned country out of the geo-economic game at its most important moment. Be that as it was, that development didn’t adversely affect Russia’s related grand strategy all that much even though it would have been in Eurasia’s best interests had that regime change not happened.

In any case and returning to the regional driven focus of Russia’s economic engagement with its Global South partners, it’s incumbent on this newly restored world power’s constituent parts to take the lead in continuing to pioneer mutually beneficial trade and investment ties with the examined countries. It’ll still take a few years for everything to bear more fruit, but the progress that’s been achieved thus far – especially with respect to China, India, and the top three countries of the Ummah Pivot – is impressive.

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Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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

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***

Last month, the United Nations voted on a resolution calling for Israel to end its not-so-secret nuclear weapons program.  The results were conclusive with more than 152 countries voted in favor of Israel ending its nuclear weapons program and joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its nuclear facilities.  There were only five countries who voted against the resolution and that included the United States, Canada, Israel, Palau, and Micronesia.  In the case of Palau and Micronesia, I would be willing to bet that they were most likely either bribed or blackmailed in some way or another to vote in favor of Israel.

Granted, the world in concerned about the Russia-Ukraine conflict and should be, but President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation is a rational actor because their nuclear weapons posture clarifies that they are for defensive purposes. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation released a statement on the Prevention of Nuclear War which does say that “In implementing its policy in the field of nuclear deterrence, Russia is strictly and consistently guided by the postulate of the inadmissibility of a nuclear war in which there can be no winners and which must never be unleashed. Russian doctrinal guidelines in this area are very clearly outlined, they are purely defensive in nature and do not allow for broad interpretation.”  According to The Jerusalem Post, even US President Joe Biden admitted in a CNN interview that “Putin is a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly,” and was asked if Putin would use a tactical nuclear weapon, and Biden’s response was “Well, I don’t think he will.”

However, most of the world knows that Israel and its leadership is full of radical idealists and religious fanatics that have nuclear weapons at their disposal and that could lead the world into an Armageddon-type scenario in the Middle East.  In the King James Version of the bible, Armageddon is mentioned in Revelation 16:16 and says “And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”  Armageddon is where the final battle takes place during the end times between the forces of good and evil, it is where ‘God comes and wages war against the kings of the earth.’  The location of where Armageddon takes place is at the ‘Hill of Megiddo’ which is an important town of ancient Palestine that overlooks the Plain of Esdraelon (Valley of Jezreel) and southeast of Haifa in northern Israel.  For humanity, Armageddon means the last days of our existence, if of course, the US and its NATO allies allow Israel to use its nuclear weapons arsenal to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.  But who is good and who is evil in this coming war to end humanity depends upon your perception of historical events that have taken place more than 2000 years ago in the Holy Land, or you can go to recent events that took place in 1948 when Palestine became Zionist-occupied land now called Israel, but that is up to you.    

The idea of nuclear weapons is something that I wish we could eliminate from the face of the earth, but the reality is that several countries have nuclear weapons, and they are not going anywhere, anytime soon.  Those who have nuclear weapons include the United States, France, the UK, Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan and of course, Israel who has not publicly declared that they have nuclear weapons.  However, I am concerned about two countries who would no doubt, use nuclear weapons to further their agendas and that is the United States, and the other is Israel who I believe is radical enough to use a nuclear weapon on their adversaries.  As we all know, the United States was the first country in the world to use Atomic Bombs on Japan during World War II, the first bomb was used on Hiroshima and was made of uranium and the other bomb that was used on Nagasaki was made from plutonium.  On August 6^th, 1945, the US dropped its first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima killing more than 140,000 people with many more who died from radiation-related illnesses months later.  The second bomb was dropped on August 9^th, 1945, on the city of Nagasaki where an estimated 74,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more suffered from the aftermath.

The US was the first country in the world to use weapons of mass destruction, now we have Israel who has a doctrine that should be a concern to all of us who know about it, and it’s called the Samson Option which refers to when the Philistines who captured and then tortured Samson who was involved in the massacre of the Philistines in a battle.  Samson was a biblical figure who pushed the pillars of the Philistine temple causing it to collapse, thus killing thousands of Philistines and killing himself in the process.  Journalist and author Seymour Hersch published an eye-opening account on the danger of Israel’s foreign policy in ‘The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy’ which explains what Samson represents for Israel:

In Israel’s history, a reference to the decision of more than nine hundred Jewish defenders — known as the Zealots — to commit suicide in a.d. 73 rather than endure defeat at the hands of the Romans.

In its place, argued the nuclear advocates, would be the Samson Option. Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured by the Philistines after a bloody fight and put on display, with his eyes torn out, for public entertainment in Dagon’s Temple in Gaza. He asked God to give him back his strength for the last time and cried out, “Let my soul die with the Philistines.” With that, he pushed apart the temple pillars, bringing down the roof and killing himself and his enemies. For Israel’s nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying “Never again”*

The Yum Kipper War: How the Middle East almost became Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Not too many books mention that Israel almost used nuclear weapons in the Yum Kipper war of 1973.  However, Hersch mentioned in his book about the early outcomes of the Yum Kipper war when Israel considered using its nuclear weapons against Egypt and Syria which would have turned the Middle East into a nuclear wasteland.  With that said, the state of Israel would have never lived in peace with its Arab neighbors as a consequence because if the Arabs were attacked with nuclear weapons, their only mission in life then, and well into the future would be solely to fight and destroy Israel at all costs:

The first days were a stunning rout. Israeli soldiers were being killed as never before; some units simply fled in disarray from battle. Five hundred tanks and forty-nine aircraft, including fourteen F-4 Phantoms, were lost in the first three days. In the Sinai, Egyptian forces, equipped with missiles and electronic defenses, blasted through the Bar-Lev defense line along the eastern bank of the canal and soon had two large armies on the eastern bank. The initial Israeli counterattacks by three tank divisions were beaten off”. On the Golan Heights, Syrian forces, bolstered by fourteen hundred tanks, rolled through Israeli defenses and moved to the edge of Galilee. Only a few Israeli tanks stood between the Syrians and the heavily populated Hulla Valley. Haifa was just hours away

Hersch went on to explain how Golda Meir’s ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ decided to call for a nuclear alert, in other words, they were ready to launch nuclear strikes against Egyptian and Syrian forces:

Many Israelis thought it was all over — that, as Moshe Dayan said, “this is the end of the Third Temple.” The extent of Dayan’s panic on Monday, October 8, has never been fully reported, but it is widely known among Israelis. One of Dayan’s functions as defense minister was to provide the censored media and their editors-in-chief with a daily briefing on the war — in essence, to control what they wrote. One journalist, a retired army general, who attended the Monday session, recalled Dayan’s assessment: “The situation is desperate. Everything is lost. We must withdraw.” There was talk in a later meeting of appeals to world Jewry, distribution of antitank weapons to every citizen, and last-ditch resistance in the civilian population centers. It was Israel’s darkest hour, but no withdrawal was ordered.

Instead, Israel called its first nuclear alert and began arming its nuclear arsenal. And it used that alert to blackmail Washington into a major policy change.  Moshe Dayan’s fears and Israel’s gloom were turned around during a dramatic meeting on Monday, October 8, at Golda Meir’s office in Tel Aviv, just a few hundred feet from “the Bor,” the military’s huge underground war complex.  Meir’s closest aides, the so-called kitchen cabinet, assembled for what turned out to be an all-night session. Among those in attendance, besides Dayan and Meir, were General David (Dado) Elazar, the army chief of staff; Yigal Allon, the deputy prime minister; Brigadier General Yisrael (Gingy) Leor, the prime minister’s military aide; and Israel Galili, the influential minister without portfolio and longtime confidant of Meir

The first targets included both Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters:

The kitchen cabinet agreed that the nuclear missile launchers at Hirbat Zachariah, as many as were ready, would be made operational, along with eight specially marked F-4S that were on twenty-four-hour alert at Tel Nof, the air force base near Rehovot. The initial target list included the Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus. It could not be learned how many weapons were armed, although Dimona was known to have manufactured more than twenty warheads by 1973

Fortunately, nuclear strikes in the Middle East never took place.  On October 3^rd, 2013. The Times of Israelpublished an interview by nuclear historian Avner Cohen ‘Dayan pushed PM Meir to consider using nuclear weapons in 1973 war’ explained why the idea of striking Egyptian and Syrian forces with nuclear missile launchers was dismissed by Golda Meir and her advisors:

The interview, which was conducted several years ago by nuclear historian Avner Cohen, was formally made public late Thursday on the website of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It is emerging 40 years after the Yom Kippur War — and precisely as the world focuses attention on Iran’s rogue nuclear program, which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly this week is aimed at developing nuclear weapons

According to Cohen, the discussion between Golda Meir and members of her kitchen cabinet were as follows:

Galili and Allon, Meir’s closest advisers, determinedly batted the nuclear idea away, Azaryahu says, shouting that, “We shouldn’t panic…”

And Meir, indeed told Dayan — who “kept his hand on the door handle the entire time, as though this were a sort of conversation between friends” — to forget about the idea.

Dayan replied, “OK, if that’s what you say, I accept [it]. I’m going”

The world was spared from a nuclear disaster in the Middle East, but will the world be spared again from another threat of Israel possibly using its nuclear weapons against Iran?

The Return of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Far-Right Extremists of Israel

If you thought Benjamin Netanyahu’s career in Israeli politics was finished, you were wrong.  As extreme as Benjamin Netanyahu is, the Israeli people see him as a warrior willing to fight those evil Muslims who just want to kill the Jewish people and eventually destroy Israel.  In a recent article published by The Times of Israel ‘Netanyahu ally: I believe he’ll strike in Iran if nuclear talks fail, US doesn’t act’ claims that Netanyahu will act on Iran if the US fails to get a nuclear deal based on terms that will only benefit Israel and its Western allies.  According to Tzachi Hanegbi, a far-right Likud MP and a former minister who made a claim that Netanyahu will order a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities if a new Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement is not on favorable terms in relation to Israel’s security interests:

Speaking to Channel 12 news on Friday, Tzachi Hanegbi said that in such a situation, Netanyahu “will act, in my assessment, to destroy the nuclear facilities in Iran.”

Hanegbi, a longtime Likud MK and former minister who is not expected to make it into the next Knesset (after placing 46 on the party’s slate in primaries), has made threats of a potential Israeli strike in the past to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon

What Hanegbi said next is what will happen if no nuclear deal under Israel’s terms is in place and that will leave Netanyahu with no choice, “It’s my assessment, based on my over 35 years of knowing Netanyahu… When there is no choice, someone needs to take command — it will be Netanyahu.” 

Here is something to consider regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program that Israel is very concerned about. Although its a hyperbole, but if Iran were to strike Israel with a nuclear bomb, won’t it kill Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and the Lebanese people as well? I mean let’s face it, if Iran were to be that reckless in launching a nuclear weapon within the Middle East, of course they would be killing its enemies in Israel but at the same time, they will be killing their allies that surround Israel and that will not benefit Iran at all. The Iranian government and its people are not irrational people who would do something that crazy. It would have irreversible consequences for all Arabs worldwide.

One other Israeli extremist worth mentioning is Itamar Ben-Gvir who is the leader of the far-right Jewish Power Party and is expected to be in Netanyahu’s new government coalition after winning recent elections. Al Jazeera’s article ‘World is worried about far-right Ben-Gvir: Israeli President’ focuses on Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s comments on Ben-Gvir which is striking “You have a partner who the entire world around us is worried about. I have also said this to him,” Herzog continued “You are going to have a problem with the Temple Mount. That is a critical issue” meaning that under Ben-Gvir, far-right Israelis will be allowed to create more  tensions at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.  Last May, hundreds of Israelis entered Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque during a nationalist flag march that increased tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.  In other words, the return of Benjamin Netanyahu, along with the new Israeli government coalition that includes the Jewish Power Party with its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir who is an extremist fanatic sets a dangerous precedent in Middle East politics.

There is one other problem for Iran and that is the pro-war establishment who serve Israel and the Military-Industrial Complex in Washington.  Whoever wins the 2024 US Presidential elections, whether it is a Republican such as Donald Trump who was the most pro-Israel president in modern times, or a Ron DeSantis who is a neoconservative or basically any Democrat, including the possible return of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden being re-elected by some miracle, the point is, whoever becomes US President, it is guaranteed that there will be a US-Israel coalition that will be willing to green-light an attack on Iran because both Democrats and Republicans are pro-Israel and are absolutely controlled by one of the most powerful lobbies’ in Washington, D.C. and that is AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee).

Since Trump is running for re-election, it is important to understand who he represents.  Here is what Trump said in 2021 in a radio interview with conservative talk show host Ari Hoffman, “The biggest change I’ve seen in Congress is Israel literally owned Congress — you understand that — 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And it was so powerful. It was so powerful. And today it’s almost the opposite,” continued “you have between AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and [Rep. Ilhan] Omar — and these people that hate Israel. They hate it with a passion — they’re controlling Congress, and Israel is not a force in Congress anymore. I mean, it’s just amazing. I’ve never seen such a change.” Trump concluded “and we’re not talking about over a very long period of time, but I think you know exactly what I’m saying. They had such power, Israel had such power — and rightfully — over Congress, and now it doesn’t. It’s incredible, actually” There is irony in Trump’s statement and that’s because it is true that Israel owns the US congress, but what Trump said about Israel’s “rightful” power over congress should be enough to consider who he actually works for.

Peace Activist, Whistleblower, and Traitor to Israel:  The Plight of Mordechai Vanunu 

Mordechai Vanunu is a Moroccan-born Israeli citizen who was a former nuclear technician and peace activist who exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program in detail to The Sunday Times of Londonin 1986.  Vanunu was the whistleblower who was drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents and treated like a terrorist in an Israeli prison cell where he spent more than 11 years out of 18-year prison sentence in solitary confinement. To this day, Vanunu is seen as a traitor to Israel.  On April 21^st, 2004, The New York Times published an article about Vanunu’s release from prison ‘Israeli Who Revealed Nuclear Secrets is Freed’ and said that “Mr. Vanunu, 49, is returning to a society where he appears to be as widely reviled today as in 1986, when he was kidnapped by Israel’s intelligence service in Rome after granting a detailed interview on Israel’s clandestine nuclear program to The Sunday Times of London.”Upon his release, Vanunu declared to the press “to all those calling me a traitor, I’m proud and happy to do what I did.”  As much as I hate to say it, but what I call “the toilet paper of record”, the New York Times was somewhat honest about Israel’s nuclear weapons program:

Before Mr. Vanunu spoke out, it was widely assumed that Israel had nuclear arms. But to this day, Israel refuses to confirm or deny possessing such weapons under its policy of “nuclear ambiguity.”  Based on Mr. Vanunu’s information, nuclear experts estimated Israel possessed between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons. More recent estimates are in a similar range.

Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has adamantly rejected international inspections. Israel argues that it needs a plausible deterrent threat in a region where its says several countries, including Iraq, Libya and Iran, have tried, or are still trying to develop nuclear arms.  But critics say that Israel, with the tacit backing of the United States, has been allowed to develop a large nuclear arsenal in secret, while the Americans have insisted that other Middle East countries be prevented from building weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Vanunu said Israel did not “need the nuclear arms, especially now when all the Middle East is free from nuclear weapons”

In 1979, Vanunu enrolled at Ben-Gurion University and was considered a radical student-activist because he was critical of the Israeli government’s internal and external policies.  Vanunu opposed the 1982 Lebanon War but was drafted as a reservist in the Engineering Corps but he refused any participation on the field and opted for kitchen duty.  As a peace activist, he fought for the equal rights for Arab Israelis.  He had aligned himself with Arab students who were also pro-PLO activists and that was something of a taboo for Israeli society.  What was interesting about Vanunu was that he had resented the dominance of Ashkenazi Jews and the Jews of European origin in Israeli society as he witnessed discrimination against the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa.  Vanunu also felt that he was a victim of discrimination in the Dimona facility because he was born in Morocco.

Regardless of what the Israelis or the Americans think of Mordechai Vanunu, he is truly a hero who sacrificed himself to expose Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities.  Now that a new far-right extremist government coalition is about to take place in Tel Aviv, the danger of a nuclear strike against Iran is a real possibility in the future since Israel is the ‘loose cannon’ in the region. The New York Times also published what Vanunu said about his secrets regarding Israel’s nuclear program to the media:  

But Mr. Vanunu said he had divulged all his secrets in the interview with The Sunday Times, where he provided photos and described his nine years at Israel’s nuclear complex in the southern town of Dimona, in the Negev Desert.

“My secret is dead,” he said in fractured English, refusing to speak Hebrew. “My case is dead. Everything was published.”

And published indeed, here is a video by an Israeli news magazine who created a 3-D version of the Dimona Nuclear Weapon’s factory.  Just in case the video is removed, here is another platform to download the video:

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from SCN

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There are fears that Scotland will become a nanny state if Nicola Sturgeon’s government rolls out its own digital identity platform next year.

SNP announced earlier this week they’ll run a pilot with Disclosure Scotland in 2023 to trial their own platform. Using the pilot, users will be able to access multiple Disclosure Scotland services with one set of login information.

According to their website:

“Disclosure Scotland helps employers make safer decisions when they’re recruiting people. It also makes sure unsuitable people do not work with vulnerable groups, including children.”

So this is about screening users and denying services if you don’t conform to the government’s rules. Just as in the Covid era, no vaccine no access.

The English and Welsh are also planning to run their own platforms, but it’s thought Scotland will be the first.

Eventually, digital IDs will be rolled out for other services in the country like Social Security Scotland and health care. In hospitals and GPs, using digital IDs could cause confusion and more work for staff, and people could get turned away if they don’t have one.

It’s going to cost up to £83.5 million for the SNP Government’s Digital Identity Service.

The Scottish government has been working on a digital identity platform for five years. A short alpha phase of the government’s online identity assurance program was launched in 2018. Scott Logic was awarded the contract in 2021, and they started working on it in April. The first pilot should be ready in 2023.

And according to Scott Logic:

“Our vision is to introduce a digital identity service for users, that provides a safe and easy way for people to prove that they are eligible for a public service or benefit online.”

It’ll soon be mandatory to have a digital identity to get public services.

There’s also a partnership between Scotland’s digital identity service team and Experian, a credit scoring company. This part of the service is supported by a two-year contract. It’ll check for evidence that the user exists in the real world. It’ll identify potentially fraudulent activity, check the validity of documents, and match a user’s photo against an official document.

Currently, photo IDs like driving licenses and passports are used to verify your identity, but the government plans to include EU biometric residency cards as well. Also, they’re looking to expand it to include knowledge-based verification, like government data.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland openly admitting they’ll link #digitalidentity to digital wallets.

Lest we forget that in February, @ICOnews blasted @scotgov for allowing sensitive data be shared with third party developers training algos without warning or consent. pic.twitter.com/iZa7KauR1F

— STOPCOMMONPASS ❌ (@org_scp) November 19, 2022

The digital identity system will also be linked to a broader digital wallet or a digital locker.

Those attributes will be stored so users can use them for other services that aren’t part of the pilot but will be available in the future.

A Scottish government policy lead for digital identity, Gavin Ross, is leading this project and he has said:

“There are new benefits and upcoming products being rolled out by Social Security Scotland all the time, and we are also in discussions with our colleagues in health about how we can support the services they provide.

“We’re looking outside of Scotland, interested to see how we can support people coming from abroad, and also looking at what’s happening with the EU system quite closely.”

“And we’re really interested in the possibility of giving people the option to share verified identity information between platforms.”

The Scottish government is also working closely with colleagues in the UK government on One Login.

Digital ID will be used for surveillance.

Digital identity schemes like the one in Scotland are being pushed by the World Economic Forum. A blueprint document called Advancing Digital Agencies: The Power of Data Intermediaries was released in February.

In the section on Government intermediaries: – It wrote:

“A public body or government agency could take on the role of an intermediary, especially as it relates to data coming from public bodies. Therefore, it can also act as an aggregator or gateway for such information. Such an intermediary could play an even broader role in making the data more easily accessible, identifiable, searchable and usable, including coordinating interoperable systems, especially across the public sector at least.”

The WEF document also stated that:

“The Government of the United Kingdom also recently commissioned a report on data intermediaries that has determined they can empower both people and businesses in data sharing activity. As governments seek to regulate data sharing, agile, innovative and positive solutions will be needed.”

In a separate independent report titled “Unlocking the value of data: Exploring the role of data intermediaries,” published on 22 July 2021. The UK Government wrote:

“The government’s National Data Strategy sets out to unlock the vast potential of public- and privately-held data in the United Kingdom to drive innovation, boost productivity, create new businesses and jobs, and improve public services.”

As data aggregators with gateways to personal information, these governments and their agencies are taking on the role of intermediaries as defined by the WEF.

Data is the upcoming oil. We will be judged by every attribute, every human characteristic, in a kind of global hunger game.

We all need to realize that our ‘governments’ aren’t representing their people or country anymore, they’re selling us off to tech parasites. No one of them should be in power, none of them are fit for purpose and as we saw with the NHS patient data and Palantir, it could turn into a global data fire sale.

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The writer and editor of TruthTalk.UK, Sikh for Truth, is a well-known freedom fighter who studies surveillance technology such as Vaccine Passports, Digital Identity, and Central Bank Digital Currencies. You can email me on [email protected].

Featured image is from Truth Talk UK

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What Italian President Georgia Meloni has to say in a powerful brief statement about France’s continued abuse of the 14 West and Central African former French colonies, is the truth and nothing but the truth – see this 1-minute video.

BAM! https://t.co/zQk2a0LAjV

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) November 19, 2022

But it falls far short of the full extent of French post-colonial exploitation.

The so-called Central Banks of the West African Francophone former colonies – Mauritania, Senegal, Mali (formerly French Sudan), Guinea (formerly French Guinea), Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) , Benin (formerly Dahomey) and Niger – and of the former Central African colonies – Central African Republic –  CAR (former Oubangui-Chari); Chad; Gabon; and the Republic of Congo (former Middle Congo) – are just shadow institutions.

Their real Central Bank is the Bank of France, respectively the French Treasury. Up to this date, the French Central Bank, imposes on these former colonies a way over-valued currency. The Franc CFA – Communauté Financière d’Afrique (“Financial Community of Africa”), is “guaranteed” (a better term would be “hijacked”) up to 50% by the French Treasury – which means, the West and Central African Central Banks have to deposit 50% of their reserves with the French Treasury, plus another 20% for “financial liabilities”.

The GDP of France (2022 est.) is 2.82 trillion US$ equivalent; that of the 14 CFA countries is about 282 billion US$ equivalent, about a tenth of that of France. The CFA-zone reserves must consequently be of tens of billions of dollars equivalent; a nice nest egg for the French Treasury.

The Harvard International Review (HIR) of 18 March 2022 has this to say,

“One of the founding principles of the system was that colonies had to keep 50 percent of their foreign currency reserves in the French Treasury, plus an additional 20 percent for financial liabilities. Thus, member states only retained 30 percent of reserves within their borders. The long-term direct economic trade-offs of the CFA monetary zone have included both diminished per capita growth and mitigated progress in fighting poverty.”

See this.

The respective West and Central African Central Banks may only withdraw some of their deposited reserves with the permission of the French Treasury. In turn, the French Treasury may use these foreign funds freely, the same way a private commercial bank may use their clients’ deposits for their own collateral or investment purposes.

You may wonder about the fate of the French economy without these basically stolen reserve resources.

This France imposed currency system has since the colonies “independence” in the late 1950s / early 1960s been criticized, since it makes economic planning for the 14 francophone “former” French colonies almost impossible, plus, the CFA franc is largely overvalued, making their countries’ trade dependent (import and export) on the good-will of France.

Despite repeated pressure of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and leaders of West and Central African countries themselves, currency exchange adjustments have only taken place with the permission of France.

Today the CFA’s value is pegged to the Euro, currently fluctuating at about FCFA 655 = one Euro. The CFA’s monetary policy is officially set by the European Central Bank (ECB), of course, heavily, if not exclusively, influenced by the Banque de France.

You may also want to watch this video (6 minutes) on how France is currently forcing 14 African countries to pay for being colonized.

France deprives their former colonies completely of their political, financial and economic sovereignty.

France further benefits from the franc CFA, in as much as the overvalued currency stimulates large capital outflows from the 14 former colonies, mostly towards Europe, primarily France. Thereby syphoning further resources from the poverty-stricken francophone countries, resources which would be bitterly needed for West and Central African internal development – infrastructure, education, manufacturing, processing of locally produced resources for local and export markets – and more.

In other words, France does everything to keep their former colonies down and as under-developed and poor, thus dependent, as possible. Eleven out of the 14 CFA-states are deemed “least developed” by the United Nation, and Sub-Saharan member countries fall at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index.

Since 2019, at the initiation of President Patrice Talon of Benin, ECOWAS has attempted to liberate West Africa from the fangs of France and other western powers, by introducing an independent currency, “Eco”, and transferring the reserve deposits from the French Treasury to the West African Central Bank in Senegal. 

“We all agree on this, unanimously, to end this model,” Benin’s President Patrice Talon told French media on 15 November 2019, referring to the French-controlled CFA-model.

President Macron has simply ignored, Patrice Talon’s announcement -and nothing has happened so far, not the transfer of West African reserves out of the French Treasury, nor the creation of an independent ECOWAS currency.

While a common currency for countries that are not politically, or economically aligned is usually not a good idea – see the Euro fiasco for 27 politically independent countries – it is highly desirable that West and Central Africa’s former French colonies become truly independent and politically and financially, as well as economically sovereign nations.

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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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“There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah”

– Leonard Cohen. Hallelujah

The last time I was in Montreal, Leonard Cohen, who had been dead two years, was on my mind.  How could it be otherwise for one who has admired his songs since his first album.  My daughter is named after perhaps his greatest song –Suzanne – (a heresy to some in light of this article about “Hallelujah”), and all his work has enchanted not just me but millions of other music lovers who desire depth in song.

“You want it darker/We kill the flame,” he sings, as he goes very deep indeed.  He is the king of darkness, perhaps matched only by Bob Dylan, who once wrote a seriously whimsical fantasy for the liner notes to John Wesley Harding:

‘And just how far would you like to go in?’ he [Frank] asked and the three kings all looked at each other. ‘Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there,’ said the first chief.

Who wants to go deep?  Who wants to go into the darkness?  Who will go all the way in?

Who prefers to say “we’ve been there” when they only took a walk in the park?

It’s easier to appreciate these singing poets at a superficial level without going where their art demands.  I say “their art” to distinguish the fallible men from their best creations.  Not entirely, of course, but to note that the artist often pales in comparison to his creations, which often come through him as much as he shapes them.

Both Cohen and Dylan, prophets of song, have been so popular because in their darkest visions they also offer a glimmer of hope, not much, but a bit of light presented in enigmatic lyrics.  In Cohen’s words: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”  A crack that runs through everyone in a story that can only be told by transcendent visionaries.  Cohen:

Thеre’s a lover in the story
But thе story’s still the same
There’s a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it’s written in the scriptures
And it’s not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker

And the light they offer is spiritual.  It is only available to those willing to follow them into hell, like Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante who went far down into the underworld to bring back messages of hope.  They are what another master in words, the English author John Berger, calls “enclaves of the beyond,” windows in walls of words where faith pops out to overcome despair and fuels resistance to evil.  Little apertures onto hallelujahs despite life’s struggles and confusions.

Both Cohen and Dylan came to prominence in the 1960s when darkness and doom dominated the news. Both knew then and later that only a spiritual revolution offered hope, for spirit, secular or sacred, even when incognito, sustained the resistance to the political nihilism that was then rising to a crescendo.  Where it was absent, resistance collapsed.

Now we are undergoing the culmination of those years of mass slaughter in Vietnam, CIA assassinations of our anti-war and civil rights leaders, and a youth rebellion sadly coopted with drugs and other propaganda by the same CIA.  Cohen and Dylan sensed then what would come to pass.  Drug addictions, suicides, despair, loss of meaning, resignation, and a growing complacency as the population settled into a long sleep in the bed of consumer and war culture and the warfare state built its propaganda apparatus to the demonic digital level it is at today.

Perhaps they read Nietzsche.

Perhaps they were very frightened.

Perhaps they were just poetic geniuses who never lost touch with God.

Cohen was a haunted man and his art was an effort to find relief from his conflicts; he called his writing a “harbor” where he could give form to and find shelter from the combat in his soul.  So being in his birthplace with his massive painted face staring from the side of a tall building, I naturally wrote an article about him, and much more.  In The Cell Phone and the Virgin: A Montreal Odyssey, I wrote the following from one of Cohen’s haunts, Old Montreal down by the riverside:

I stood in front of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel (Our Lady of Good Help), looking up at the Virgin glimmering in the afternoon sun. The old port. The sailor’s church. Like Henry Adams, I thought of the powerful force of the Virgin throughout history.  Her protection across life’s tempestuous seas. And Leonard Cohen, the Montrealer, who as a young man would come to this chapel and sit in meditation and write his beautiful song, “Suzanne,” invoking “our lady of the harbor.” Leonard, who would stand in awe of the woman as protectress, mother, lover, killer, and muse:  As in the beautifully tuneful and complex song “Night Comes On”:

I went down to the place where I knew she lay waiting
Under the marble and the snow
I said, Mother I’m frightened
The thunder and the lightning
I’ll never come through this alone
She said, “I’ll be with you
My shawl wrapped around you
My hand on your head when you go”

And the night came on
It was very calm
I wanted the night to go on and on
But she said, “Go back, go back to the
world”

We were fighting in Egypt
When they signed this agreement
That nobody else had to die
There was this terrible sound
My father went down
With a terrible wound in his side
He said, Try to go on
Take my books, take my gun
Remember, my son, how they lied

And the night comes on
It’s very calm
I’d like to pretend that my father was wrong
But you don’t want to lie, not to the young

For one who knows something about his relationship with his mother, and his father who died when Cohen was nine-years-old, such words may seem a bit mawkish, a sentimentalizing of their actual relationship, a distortion of reality with a cryptic political message. This would be a misunderstanding of the artist at work; it would be to simplify a complex man, one who, like other conflicted artists (a redundancy?), takes personal relationships and transmogrifies them to find a temporary harbor in which to rest from a reality that roils them to their depths.  They sense, if do not explicitly say, that the personal can only be understood within the social.  Isn’t this what Homer and Virgil did?

Who is not roiled these days?

Was Odysseus roiled when he went to the underworld to consult Tiresias the seer about how to get home and met his mother’s ghost who, when he tried to embrace her, fluttered through his fingers, “sifting away like a shadow/dissolving like a dream”?

Was Aeneas roiled when he too went to the underworld and met his father’s shade whom he tried to embrace but felt “nothing, the phantom sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight”?

Cohen was a roiled and literate man, one who drew on the best in traditional literature.  He may have been from Montreal, but he was always a sailor lost at sea, a drowning man with no direction home who always quested after guidance to free him from his life-long depression.  He admitted that drink, drugs, religion, sex, or psychotherapy couldn’t free him.  But prayer as a toiling over words made into song granted him a temporary safe harbor from going under.

In the recent documentary about him – Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song – we get to see the artist at work on this process.  The film chronicles the history of one of Cohen’s songs – “Hallelujah” – that became an obsession with him. We learn that he wrote 150 verses over the years and that the original song took five years to complete.  It was included on his 1984 album Various Positions, but Columbia Records refused to release the album, thinking it of inferior quality.  The album is actually great, with many wonderful songs.  It was later released on a smaller label and Cohen sang different versions of it at his concerts.  Bob Dylan covered it in the late 1980s, which no doubt attests to Dylan’s great musical insight and his affinity for Cohen, brothers in song. Then in 1991 it was covered by John Cale and in 1994 by Jeff Buckley, who did a most passionate version.

The song was on its way, but to where was the question.  It gained in popularity over the years and in 2001 it was featured in the movie, Shrek, a most unlikely place for it to be heard.  Kitsch met depth.  The passionately conflicted and highly sexualized Cohen’s “horny and holy” version had been neutered.

Over the years there have been more than 300 covers of the song and much debate about its meaning.  The mysterious poet/songwriter from Montreal had slipped into mainstream culture to his great amusement.  The song reached the Billboard Charts in 2016, the year of Cohen’s death.

The documentary is interesting in many ways, especially for its use of archival material from the Cohen Trust, including use of his notebooks, writing, performances, and interview footage.

Watching this excellent film, I was struck by how this song encapsulates Cohen’s spiritual journey.  For Hallelujah is a prayer in song, not in a mawkish way, but a prayer for our times when the old distinctions between the sacred and the secular have melded once again and people seek spiritual sustenance outside the traditional categories of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, etc.  One may begin life in one tradition, as Cohen and Dylan did in the Jewish faith, but eventually many cross over to explore other faiths while remaining somehow anchored in their beginnings, whether those beginnings were explicitly religious or not.  For many, the roots of a spiritual journey lie in the examples of their parents and whether or not their lives were lived with unspoken spiritual integrity – acta non verba.

The theologian John Dunne wrote in his brilliant 1972 book, The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion, the following:

Is a religion coming to birth in our time? It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call ‘passing over,’ passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another, from one religion to another. Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call ‘coming back,’ coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion. . . . The course such an adventure follows is that of an odyssey. . . . One’s life is finally the homeland.

This seems to me to sum up Cohen’s odyssey.  He was a man of his turbulent times who “experimented with truth,” in Gandhi’s words. Not that he was in any way another Gandhi, for he was, by his own admission, seriously flawed (who isn’t? Gandhi, too) and “not somebody who’s seen the light” and yet could still praise life with his “cold” and “broken Hallelujah.”  He turned poetry into truth and truth into poetry without sparing himself.  This took guts.  Like many poets, he could sound exalted and dejected simultaneously, morose and ecstatic (especially about sex and love), grating and sweet.  And like any cultural icon who is glorified by the media and whose personal life becomes somewhat of an open book, he is not an exemplar to follow.  But his work is, for it takes us into deep places where the heart’s desires meet and clash in a search for peace and reconciliation.

From his first song, Suzanne, to his last, Treaty, all his work, as he says in the documentary, is one piece.  The words of a man cracked into many pieces but who, from beginning to end, searched for wholeness with his songs.

As my four-year old daughter Susanne once said to me as we walked past a boarded-up church, “Papa, I think that when we die, God will put us all back together again.”  The words of a poet!  Mysterious and dark.

Sing “Hallelujah.”

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book, click here.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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In “Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations: The Role of G-quadruplexes, Exosomes and MicroRNAs,” Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and Drs. Peter McCullough, Greg Nigh and Anthony Kyriakopoulos explain how the COVID shots suppress your innate immune function, and how they may cause neurological diseases

Their landmark paper was the source of major controversy in that the prominent journal in which it was published receive much negative feedback and the editor of the journal was forced to resign although the paper has not been retracted at this time

G4s are genome-wide targets of transcriptional regulation. The “G” stands for guanine. G4 is DNA sequence of four guanines, which plays an important role in diseases such as cancers and neurological disorders. The COVID jab spike protein produces far more G-quadruplexes (G4) than the virus. The G4 causes prion protein to misfold, which can result in prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Alzheimer’s

Two specific microRNA have been found in people who got the jab, and these microRNA’s interfere with Type 1 interferon response, which is a key part of your immune system. When Type 1 interferon is suppressed, you become more prone to infection and chronic disease

The COVID jab produces high levels of immunoglobulin (IgG) antibodies, which are associated with autoimmune disease. It does not produce mucosal antibodies

Antibodies against the spike protein may be responsible for cases in which patients developed highly aggressive prion disease after their second jab

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In this interview, return guest Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT for over five decades,¹ discusses her paper,² “Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations: The Role of G-quadruplexes, Exosomes and MicroRNAs,” published in the June 2022 issue of Food and Chemical Toxicology.

The paper was co-written with Drs. Peter McCullough, Greg Nigh and Anthony Kyriakopoulos. In May 2021, Nigh and Seneff published a paper³ detailing the differences between the spike protein and the COVID jab spike protein.

In the “Innate Immune Suppression” paper, they and their other co-authors delve deep into the mechanisms of the COVID shots, showing how they suppress your innate immune system.

The paper caused quite a stir when it was first posted, prior to publication. A campaign was launched to have it retracted on the premise that it would discourage people from getting these life-saving shots — regardless of whether the mechanisms described were true or not.

Ultimately, the controversy led to the resignation of the editor of the journal. Many have also tried to discredit Seneff, and McCullough has since been stripped of his medical credentials.⁴

Understanding G-Quadruplexes

G-quadruplexes (G4) are genomewide targets of transcriptional regulation, and as such as a novel target for drug design. The “G” in G4 stands for guanine, so G4 is DNA sequence of four guanines. It’s one of the four nucleotides — the basic code — in DNA, and it’s known to play an important role in diseases such as cancers and neurological disorders.⁵

As explained by Seneff, prions, when misfolded, build beta sheets and precipitate out of the cytoplasm, causing plaque to form. This plaque is a hallmark of several neurodegenerative diseases in animals and humans, such as Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, scrapie (which affects sheep) and chronic wasting disease in deer.

“So, there are all these debilitating neurodegenerative diseases that come out of the prion protein, and the prion protein actually binds to its own G4s, which are in its own RNA,”Seneff explains. “In so doing, it promotes [the prion protein] to misfold into the wrong shape … [which] causes prion disease.

The [COVID jabs] produce a version of the messenger RNA (mRNA) that codes for the spike protein. Their version is enriched in guanines — it produces a lot more G4s than the original mRNA that the virus produces — so, it’s a different form.

And there’s lots of mRNA in the [COVID jab]. It’s a big dose of this mRNA that is enriched in G4s … which then … causes the cell to produce the prion protein. So, the cell is producing the prion protein in the context of a situation with lots of G4s lying around from the mRNA from vaccine. That’s a really dangerous situation for causing the prion protein to misfold and causing prion disease.”

How the COVID Jab Can Induce Autoimmune Disease

As explained by Seneff, the mRNA in the jab is taken into your lymph system and spleen, germinal centers where antibodies are produced, and in order to produce the antibodies, these germinal centers release exosomes. This can help explain the phenomenon of “shedding,” but it also helps explain the immune destruction we see occurring. Seneff explains:

“The exosomes are part of the process by which the cells communicate to induce the antibody production, which is the goal of the [COVID jab]. The [jab] does a fantastic job of producing high levels of IgG [immunoglobulin] antibodies, which are the ones that are associated with autoimmune disease.

It doesn’t make the mucosal antibodies. It makes IgG, which is actually much more dangerous if there are too many antibodies. They can cause autoimmune disease through molecular mimicry, and that’s another aspect that I think is going on.

That’s why you’re getting this platelet problem where platelet count goes down to zero, because you get antibodies to the platelets by molecular mimicry, or even because the spike protein is binding to the platelets. They’re getting antibodies to the complex and you’re wiping out the platelets.

Some people are getting thrombocytopenia and VITT [vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia], conditions that can be life-threatening. And there’s a huge signal for thrombosis. The paper talks about thrombosis. We have … seven tables for different aspects of the symptoms of the vaccine.

There’s a table on the liver, there’s a table on thrombosis, there’s a table on cancer, there’s a table on the vagus nerve, and all of the inflammations of the nerves because those exosomes are traveling up the vagus nerve, making their way to the heart, brain and liver.

They’re causing disease in all of those organs, and you see that very clearly in the various databases — 98%, 99% of the [adverse event] reports in 2021 for these conditions were [from the] COVID shots and 1% was all the other vaccines combined.”

Mechanism of Action

Swiss researchers recently reported finding elevated troponin levels in 100% of COVID jabbed individuals, indicating everyone is suffering some degree of heart damage, even if they’re asymptomatic.^6,7 Seneff explains the mechanism by which the COVID shot damages your heart.

“I think the whole issue is the spike protein being released by the immune cells in the germinal centers — the lymph system and the spleen releasing these exosomes that then travel along their fibers and reach all these critical organs.

The spleen has a very good connectivity with the liver, heart, brain and gut via the nerve system, starting with the splanchnic nerve and then hooking up to the vagus nerve … So, these exosomes are migrating along the vagus nerve and they’re arriving at these organs and are getting taken up by cells there. And everywhere they go, they cause inflammation.

The spike protein is very good at causing inflammation. That’s been shown in multiple studies … It causes the immune cells to migrate to the heart, and that’s how you get myocarditis, this inflammation in the heart.

You also get inflammation in the muscles. I was looking at myositis, which is muscle inflammation, and that’s another issue. I’ve been in contact with multiple people who suffered severe muscle damage from the spike protein, even to the point of being debilitated because of [inflammation in the] muscles.

So, not just the heart, but the skeletal muscles are also affected in a really bad way. Inflammation in the brain also causes neurons to be damaged and that’s causing cognitive disorders.

So, I think the long COVID is caused by the spike protein reaching the brain. Many papers have talked about long COVID, and they think it’s the spike protein, not the virus, but the spike protein itself [that is causing it].”

The Role of MicroRNAs

Another piece of the puzzle is related to the role of microRNAs, which are embedded in the exosomes that travel to the tissues. MicroRNAs should not be confused with mRNA. They’re two different things. The microRNAs are short pieces of RNA, about 22 nucleotides long. Unlike mRNA, microRNA do not code for protein.

The mRNA in the jabs are designed to be extremely resilient. Normally, mRNA lasts a few hours, but the mRNA in the jabs stick around producing protein in cells for several months, at minimum primarily because of the substitution of the nucleotide uridine with pseudouridine.

Because the mRNA is so resilient, spleen cells have to try to cope with all the spike protein that they cannot stop making, and one way they do that is by pushing the spike protein out in the form of exosomes. Those exosomes also contain microRNAs. Indian researchers found two specific microRNAs in people who got the jab, and these microRNAs interfere with Type 1 interferon response.

“This is a big topic of our paper,” Seneff says. “We talk about innate immune suppression … due to the effect of these microRNAs that are packaged up with the spike protein.

Everywhere [the exosomes] go, they deliver these microRNAs, which disrupt the immune cell’s ability to respond to Type 1 interferon. These microRNAs actually have a very high-level controlling role in the regulatory process of biology. They control which genes are expressed.”

Hypothesis to Explain Post-Jab Sudden Death

Seneff goes on to cite animal research from 2005, in which mice were exposed to a virus that causes myocarditis. They wanted to see what would happen if the mice were suffering from myocarditis and then got a shot of adrenaline. So, the mice were infected with the myocarditis-inducing virus, and then, 120 days later, they injected them with adrenaline.

The dose given killed 70% of them. Meanwhile, control mice that did not have myocarditis suffered no ill effect when injected with the same dose of adrenaline. The mice that died, died of heart failure. Basically, their hearts were too damaged to withstand the adrenaline rush. Today, we’re seeing a similar effect in athletes, who are dropping dead while exerting themselves.

Digging for other papers, Seneff found one that detailed the Type 1 interferon response in chromaffin cells, the cells that make adrenaline. Type 1 interferon inhibits and reduces their production of adrenaline.

Seneff’s theory is that the COVID jabs interferes with your body’s ability to respond to Type 1 interferon, thereby allowing too much adrenaline to be released. If your heart has been damaged by the spike protein, the outcome could be lethal, as we’ve seen.

“I think that could be what’s going on with the sudden death problem, because we certainly are seeing lots of young people suddenly dying of heart issues,” she says.

At the same time, microthrombi (micro blood clots) are activated by the spike protein, which could have lethal effects, and endothelial cells (the cells lining your blood vessels) are also inflamed. So, there’s not just one mechanism by which the jabs could kill you.

Spike Protein Creates Incredibly Tough Blood Clots

According to Seneff, blood clots are also connected to the prion aspect. Many different proteins are amyloidogenic and can misfold, causing them to precipitate out, including proteins in your blood. Blood clots are tough to break down, and when you add spike protein into them, they become even tougher.

Seneff suspects the spike protein binds to fibrin, causing it then to misfold in a way that makes it very resistant to breaking down. The same thing happens with prion proteins. When they misfold, they create a gel that becomes denser over time, eventually becoming completely inaccessible to the water base.

“It just precipitates out as this thing that just sits there for the rest of your life,” Seneff says. “Nothing can get at it. The immune cells can’t break it down. It just stays there. It can’t be cleared.”

This is why I recommend taking fibrinolytic enzymes like lumbrokinase (which is the most effective), serrapeptase and nattokinase, several times a day one hour before or two hours after a meal, if you’re struggling with long COVID, as they help break down the fibrin. To work, you have to take them between meals, on an empty stomach, or else they’ll just act as a digestive enzyme to break down food.

Another technique is to use a near-infrared sauna, which will help address the misfolding of proteins by encouraging autophagy, your body’s natural clean-out process.

The Role of Antibodies in Prion Disease

Antibodies may also play a role in the devastating side effects from the COVID jab. We know that prion protein is upregulated in cells that produce it under stress, and the COVID jab spike protein has been shown to cause cells to make more prion protein. One possibility is that antibodies to a particular part of the spike protein end up binding to the prion protein through molecular mimicry.

As explained by Seneff, researchers have discovered that if you produce antibodies to the C-terminal end of the prion protein, it can cause disease that looks a lot like prion disease but develops much faster.

As it turns out, the antibodies to the C-terminal end of the prion protein prevent the prion protein from going into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), where it needs to go in order to do its job. Instead, the antibodies keep the prion in the cytoplasm.

Subsequently, the cell gets sick because of these antibodies. The late Luc Montagnier posted a case study with 26 people who developed symptoms of prion disease within the first month after their second vaccine. All died, many within three months of their diagnosis. All were dead within a year, from what was basically an extremely aggressive form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human Mad Cow disease equivalent).

Seneff believes antibodies against the spike protein are to blame, because it didn’t happen until they got their second dose. Antibodies developed after that first dose, which primed the cells. Then, after the second dose the cells started making loads of spike protein again, which the antibodies bound to.

This exosome package then traveled up the vagus nerve to the brain, where neurons took them up. Seneff suspects this explains the disease process on those 26 patients.

“It would be explained completely by this model of spike protein antibodies binding to the C-terminal domain and preventing the prion protein from going into the ER,” she says, “and then, it causes [the prion protein] to break down.

It gets broken down by the proteasome and disappears. So, it’s causing a loss of function problem for the prion protein in the neuron at a very accelerated rate, much faster than what goes on with the normal prion disease …

Montagnier and his team identified a segment of the spike protein that they thought had characteristic prion-like features. Within that segment is a piece that has five amino acids, YQRGS.

The prion protein has [the same] piece … Except for the middle one, the other four [amino acids] are all identical with this piece near the C-terminal end of the prion protein. So, it’s really perfect. It’s a place where, if you get antibodies to that, it’s basically a death sentence.”

COVID Jabs Impair Your Immune Function

To circle back to where we began, it seems the reason so many jabbed individuals are now contracting COVID and other infections, and are dying from them, is because Type 1 interferon is suppressed. That suppresses your immune function, making you more prone to contracting infections.

In the interview, Seneff also reviews how chronic exposure to glyphosate is a predisposing condition for bad COVID-19 outcomes, as glyphosate disrupts the immune system. For more details on that, please listen to the interview in its entirety. We also review how glycine supplementation can help displace glyphosate in your body, thereby limiting its damaging influence.

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Notes

¹ MIT Stephanie Seneff Bio

^2, 9 Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022; 164: 113008

³ IJVTPR May 10, 2021: 2(1)

⁴ Rumble October 31, 2022

⁵ Cell Mol Life Science October 2021; 78(19-20): 6557-6583

^6, 7 Daily Skeptic October 27, 2022

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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A bank in Canada has become the first in the country to launch a credit card that tracks a customer’s carbon emissions, amid concerns that such a scheme could one day be used to restrict purchases.

In an effort by the credit union to display its commitment to ‘climate action’, Vancity will offer a credit card that links purchases to carbon emissions, allowing customers to compare their monthly carbon footprint to the national average.

The bank will also advise customers on how to limit their carbon footprint.

“We know many Vancity members are looking for ways to reduce the impact they have on the environment, particularly when it comes to the emissions that cause climate change,” said Jonathan Fowlie, Vancity’s Chief External Relations Officer.

“As a member-owned financial cooperative, we believe it is our job to do everything we can to help, especially when it comes to the decisions people make with their money. This tool will equip Vancity Visa credit cardholders with valuable information on their purchases and enable them to connect their daily spending decisions to the change they want to see in the world.”

According to research carried out by Visa, more than 50% of Canadians are interested in monitoring their carbon footprint.

As we previously highlighted, back in October, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank (CBA) also announced a similar scheme, giving the customer the option to “pay a fee” to offset their carbon footprint, with the average listed as 1,280 kilograms, a long way from the ‘sustainable’ figure of 200 kilograms.

Allied with climate lockdowns, technocrats want to exploit hysteria over climate change to increase financial control over individuals.

Such a proposal was presented in the science journal Nature by four environmental “experts” as a means of reducing global carbon emissions.

Everyone would be issued with a ‘carbon allowance card’ “that would entail all adults receiving an equal tradable carbon allowance that reduces over time in line with national [carbon] targets.”

The authors make it clear that the program would be a “national mandatory policy.”

Carbon units would be “deducted from the personal budget with every payment of transport fuel, home-heating fuels and electricity bills,” and anyone going over the limit would be forced to purchase additional units in the personal carbon market from those with excess to sell.”

This would naturally only negatively impact poorer people, with the rich able to buy carbon credits in abundance and still enjoy their lavish, environmentally unfriendly opulent lifestyles.

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November 15th, 2021 was a defining point for many New Zealanders as the mandates and the no-jab, no-job policy kicked in and irretrievably changed our lives and the country itself. Many were injured, many died. Many lost jobs, family and friends. Gatherings occurred all over the country this year to commemorate the heinous anniversary. This talk was given in Civic Square, Wellington.

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Good afternoon, I’m Manny Garcia, a member of New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out for Science, but I’m going to say a few words really on my own behalf today, not for the organization.

I want to remember a person, it was a friend of mine, a health practitioner who under the mandates got the first inoculation. He developed a very severe myocarditis. In fact, it was so severe, two or three days later he could barely walk up his stairs in his home or cross his lounge. Using his wits he used his own personal funds to go to a cardiologist who supported his application for an exemption. Well, the application went before the then-Director General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, who acted with the — either it was the speed of science or the speed of Fauci, I can’t figure out which, how fast it was, but he declined that exemption.

So, knowing that one little anecdote, we have to conclude that if this were truly about health and the concern for our, our welfare, a decision like that would never have been made.

 

 

Secondly, I want to go back and remember something that was very very important in my mind, and for all of us, and this harks back to that wonderful time at Parliament, when people from every walk of life came together — people who believed in the ideas of human liberty, human autonomy, and all that stuff, congregated there and made a very important point. And I believe that demonstration was a big victory for us. But with respect to the actions of the police, who invaded the grounds on that February morning, I want to tell some of you something that you may not know.

The afternoon before, the police were supposed to have been in a group of lawyers and doctors, myself being one of them, who were going to negotiate a peaceful dispersal or settlement — we were going to start the process of resolving what had become a difficult issue. At the very last moment the police did not show up. That was an ominous sign.

On that same afternoon, the Human Rights Commission hosted a gathering, which I attended as an observer in a Zoom session, and it included Rodney Hide and other notable people who spoke very eloquently about the mandates and freedoms and whatnot. I understand that people in the Commissioner’s own office begged him, knowing that there was going to be an invasion the next morning, to go out and bear witness and to make sure that our human liberties and rights — as the responsibilities of his office demanded — would be protected. Well, Paul Hunt declined.

So, knowing these several facts, I think it’s not a stretch to conclude that these people in institutions, who are running on the power that we’ve entrusted them with, have abused that power. And I think that the inoculation is only one part of a very large program that all of us have to become aware of and have to spread the word about.

The unfortunate fact is that these people in power are acting and have acted lawlessly. They will continue to act lawlessly. Their institutions are corrupted. And we have got to fight smart and tough.

And I’m afraid that I’ve concluded that the battle we’re in is not a battle that’s going to be over in a few years. I think we’re in for a very long haul, but we have no choice, if we want to remain human and want to have any semblance of liberty, to continue to fight that battle.

But we have to fight this battle knowing the kind of enemy we are up against.

And one final note. Their psyops campaigns, their propaganda, their stoolies — they have been very very effective as mesmerising the many people we know who live and work around us who think now that everything is back to normal.

So we have — it’s incumbent upon us to talk to people— clearly, rationally and in a dignified way — about what’s actually happening. But also to be aware of the fact that if your only source of news is the ‘single source of truth’ aka the mainstream media, you’re not going to know anything else.

Thank you Matt, and thank you Sarah, for eloquent speeches, talks today.

And I commend everyone who has had the courage to stand up — at the risk of their livelihoods, their jobs, their friendships and everything else — and to use their own critical faculties in making decisions about their lives which no one, no State, no authority has the right to make [for them].

Good afternoon.

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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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The full interview with Vladimir Kozin, a Russian expert at the Political-Military Studies Center, was made by Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti at the Russia Today headquarters in Moscow.

Vladimir Kozin denounces the fact that the United States after tearing up the INF Treaty is deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe close to Russia, in addition to the new B61-12 nuclear bombs. Regarding these bombs, he declares:

“The B61-12s are already being sent to Europe, contrary to what was announced by Politico that they will arrive in December. We have information that the bombs already arrived because a specific aircraft such as the US F-35A fighter has already been delivered to NATO member countries. Even to Finland, which has not yet become a full member of NATO but is awaiting ratification. Finland has requested 65 F-35s capable of using nuclear weapons. And recently rumors have come from Helsinki that they would like to have US nuclear weapons on Finnish soil, as Germany has them, Belgium has them like Holland has them, and also Italy and Turkey. So, Europe is becoming a nuclear powder keg”.

Vladimir Kozin calls the current situation “much worse than it was during the Cold War, much deadlier and more dangerous”.

He, therefore, warns that

“if our territory is attacked with nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical or biological, bacteriological and toxic weapons, as well as nuclear, we will respond“.

When asked whether Russia will strike US nuclear bases in Europe, he replies:

“Yes, that’s for sure. If we are attacked.” Kozin calls all this “madness”.

He warns that, if it comes to a nuclear war, “there will be no winners or losers, everyone will lose“.

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Featured image: Photos from the first second of the Trinity test shot, the first nuclear explosion on Earth. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

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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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A cashless society would be the nail in the coffin for liberty and freedom, offering centralization, the likes of which Marx could only dream. The existence of a government backdoor or spyware becomes a real possibility, and given the State’s track record, a real likelihood. Then, of course, the ability to track, freeze, and even set expiry dates on money, will be marketed as “features” to protect the public.

As for the 5.9 million Americans considered “unbanked,” i.e., those who have no checking or savings accounts, (the poor, weak, and vulnerable) they can expect life to get more difficult. This is the price we pay for free market intervention.

Earlier in the week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York made the announcement:

Members of the U.S. Banking Community Launch Proof of Concept For A Regulated Digital Asset Settlement Platform

The explanation may only make sense for those well versed in crypto technology:

Members of the U.S. banking community today announced the launch of a proof of concept (PoC) project that will explore the feasibility of an interoperable digital money platform known as the regulated liability network (RLN). Using distributed ledger technology, the proposed platform would create innovation opportunities to improve financial settlements and would include participation from central banks, commercial banks of various sizes and regulated non-banks.

Basically, Fedcoin is advancing and is now in the testing stage:

The 12-week PoC will test a version of the RLN design that operates exclusively in U.S. dollars where commercial banks issue simulated digital money or “tokens” – representing the deposits of their own customers – and settle through simulated central bank reserves on a shared multi-entity distributed ledger.

Some of the largest financial institutions are involved in this 12-week program:

BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

Plus:

The technology is being provided by SETL with Digital Asset, powered by Amazon Web Services. Swift, the global financial messaging service provider, is also participating in the initiative to support interoperability across the international financial ecosystem.

From Bitcoin to Dogecoin, there seems little long term hope for those who love privacy and autonomy when the largest corporations and fintech firms work with the Federal Reserve to roll out a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

Would you like to know who else is was working with the Feds? Courtesy Coindesk:

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was, until last week, a major political donor – he gave $5.2 million to U.S. President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and spent another $40 million supporting mainly Democratic candidates ahead of the November midterm elections – and an influential figure in Washington.

Bankman-Fried regularly met with regulators and lawmakers, weighing in on how the crypto industry should be regulated. He was a vocal supporter of one bill, in particular: the bipartisan Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), a still-in-progress bill…

We know for certain CBDCs are coming, as well as more regulation. And given the trajectory of both, a cashless society is too. What is less certain is whether or not Sam Bankman-Fried, for his culpability in what may amount to one of the largest thefts of all time, will ever see jail time.

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On Tuesday (Nov. 15), the New York Federal Reserve announced a 12-week pilot program in partnership with several large commercial banks to test the feasibility of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The “proof of concept” program will test an “interoperable digital money platform” on a regulated liability network (RLN) for “technical feasibility, legal viability, and business applicability of distributed ledger technology,” according to a press release.

The pilot program will use digital “tokens” that represent bank deposits. Institutions involved in the program will engage in simulated transactions to test the viability of the system. According to Reuters, “The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.”

Banks involved in the pilot program include BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, US Bank and Wells Fargo. The global financial messaging service provider SWIFT is also participating “to support interoperability across the international financial ecosystem.”

Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve released a “discussion paper” examining the pros and cons of a potential US central bank digital dollar. According to the central bank’s website, there has been no decision on implementing a digital currency, but this pilot program reveals the idea is further along than most people realized.

Digital dollars would be similar to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They would exist as virtual banknotes or coins held in a digital wallet on your computer or smartphone. The difference between a government digital currency and bitcoin is the value of the digital currency is backed and controlled by the state, just like traditional fiat currency.

The digital dollar could ultimately replace physical cash. Proponents tout its convenience and security. A Business Insider article gushed over the idea.

A Fed-backed digital dollar would then provide many of the benefits touted by cryptocurrencies without their wild price swings and usage fees. In theory, a CBDC would meld the best aspects of physical and digital currencies for the average American.”

Government-issued digital currencies are sold on the promise of providing a safe, convenient, and more secure alternative to physical cash. We’re also told it will help stop dangerous criminals who like the intractability of cash. But there is a darker side – the promise of control.

At the root of the move toward government digital currency is “the war on cash.” The elimination of cash creates the potential for the government to track and even control consumer spending, and it would make it even easier for central banks to engage in manipulative monetary policies such as negative interest rates.

Imagine if there was no cash. It would be impossible to hide even the smallest transaction from government eyes. Something as simple as your morning trip to Starbucks wouldn’t be a secret from government officials. As Bloomberg put it in an article published when China launched its digital yuan pilot program, digital currency “offers China’s authorities a degree of control never possible with physical money.”

The government could even “turn off” an individual’s ability to make purchases. Bloomberg described just how much control a digital currency could give Chinese officials.

The PBOC has also indicated that it could put limits on the sizes of some transactions, or even require an appointment to make large ones. Some observers wonder whether payments could be linked to the emerging social-credit system, wherein citizens with exemplary behavior are ‘whitelisted’ for privileges, while those with criminal and other infractions find themselves left out. ‘China’s goal is not to make payments more convenient but to replace cash, so it can keep closer tabs on people than it already does,’ argues Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion.”

China launched its digital yuan pilot program last year. The Chinese government-backed digital currency got a boost when the country’s biggest online retailer announced the first virtual platform to accept the Chinese digital currency.

China isn’t the only government exploring the possibility of digital money. Sweden has developed a digital currency of its own. The European Central Bank is pushing for a digital euro. And Russian central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina told CNBC that digital currency is “the future of our financial system.”

Ultimately, it would take a congressional act to establish a digital dollar as legal tender.

US officials toyed with the possibility of a digital dollar at the height of the pandemic. A Democratic proposal for stimulus payments in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic featured digital currency deposited into digital wallets.

Economist Thorsten Polleit outlined the potential for Big Brother-like government control with the advent of a digital euro in an article published by the Mises Wire. As he put it, “the path to becoming a surveillance state regime will accelerate considerably” if and when a digital currency is issued.

Governments around the world have quietly waged a war on cash for years. Back in 2017, the IMF published a creepy paper offering governments suggestions on how to move toward a cashless society even in the face of strong public opposition.

As with most things the government does, you should be wary of the digital dollar. It has a dark side that you can be sure the mainstream will mostly ignore.

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***

AP’s source claimed Russian missiles hit Poland. This seemed calculated to set off a frenzy and trigger NATO articles to create a wider war. Why won’t the AP tell us who the falsifying source is?

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a “senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people.”

This story ripped through big media outlets which blared “BREAKING NEWS” — see from CBS:

It tore through Twitter.

There would be a series of followups, see how the story morphed on archive.today. The story featured a host of bylines including John Leicester, James LaPorta, Vanessa Gera, Zeke Miller (White House correspondent) and Michael Balsamo.

One version featured the headline: “AP Source: Russian missiles cross into Poland during strike.”

One story AP ran was not bylined and just one sentence: “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people.” This violated AP’s already minimal rules: “Stories that use anonymous sources must carry a reporter’s byline.”

AP rules say reporters can only grant anonymity to a source if “the source is reliable”. But if they prove themselves to not be reliable, shouldn’t the anonymity be rescinded?

Kyle Griffin, executive producer of both MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin and Mehdi Hasan shows, ran with the worst form of the AP report to thousands of more retweets:

World War III was trending on Twitter.

Reuters would report by late afternoon “Poland Likely to Invoke NATO’s Article 4, Will Raise Missile Blast With UN – Officials.”

The Hill reported: “Biden convenes emergency meeting with G-7 allies after missile kills two in Poland.”

By Tuesday evening, the Washington Post would use the frenzy to queue up an extreme distillation of the NATO Charter: “Poland is a member of NATO. A strike on the country could thus invoke NATO’s Article 5, which states ‘an armed attack against one or more of [the members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’ and force may be used.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would claim: “I have no doubt that it was not our rocket.”

But even as AP was putting out their false stories Tuesday afternoon, others were pointing to evidence that Russia didn’t fire the missiles that hit Poland. And others raised good points — some effectively arguing that AP shouldn’t have run with the story. Responsible Statecraft in “How a lightly-sourced AP story almost set off World War III” the following day gave a breakdown of how some of this played out, especially how local players falsified or tried to leverage the story.

On Wednesday morning, I contacted AP, asking a series of questions beyond the obvious. In particular, would the AP name the false source? Nicole Meir from AP finally replied Wednesday evening, but didn’t answer any of the questions. She simply pointed me to the “Correction: Russia-Ukraine-War story” they had just issued.

But, a central question remains: Why is the AP still protecting a source it now says fed it false information?

In my piece “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?” from 2017, I argued that not exposing falsifying sources is “like having a loaded gun lying around.” When a crisis happens, “a government source wanting to smear a foreign government, or even help provoke war, has the mechanisms to do so without fear of consequence or accountability.” The source can hide behind anonymous quotes, and their media contact hides behind anonymous sources. Both are effectively off the hook.

The solution is for falsifying sources to be unmasked so we get accountable speech.

Part of the bargain of anonymity is truthfulness. Why should a serious media outlet protect the anonymity of a source who just fed it false information? So they can do it again?

As I detail in my article, there have been major precursors to this that ended in disaster. Judith Miller at the New York Times in 2002 cited an anonymous Bush/Cheney administration official who claimed that government scientists thought aluminum tubes Iraq was reportedly attempting to acquire were for a nuclear weapons program. That was false and used to propel the case for war. When I confronted her in 2005 and asked her who the source was, she wouldn’t say.

In contrast, in 1996, the Wall Street Journal turned on a source orchestrating a smear campaign by Big Tobacco targeting whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. This story was told in the film “The Insider.”

So, which world do we want? One where falsifying sources get away with lies — so we get disastrous wars — or do we want a world where they don’t get away with it, so we get some measure of accountability for major wrongdoing?

Thursday morning, the Washington Post ran with “How an anonymous source raised a false alarm of a Russian strike on Poland” by Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi. But, as with past instances, the Post did not raise the prospect of the AP naming the official.

It is possible that AP can offer a compelling reason why the source shouldn’t be unmasked. They would need to spell it out very seriously. We don’t know what the source’s motives were, but on its face, as others have argued, it seems like part of a coordinated attempt to invoke NATO articles 4 and/or 5 and risk triggering a wider war. Even risking a nuclear war. Or perhaps it’s an extreme form of saber rattling toward Russia. The AP should name the source, in part so they can be questioned and scrutinized.

As it is, AP seems intent on sweeping all this under the rug. The URL for the original series of stories now brings up the “correction” — so accessing the actual reporting may be difficult going forward (that’s why I link to the archive pageabove.) That is similar to what CNN did after it retracted an article on Trump’s associate’s alleged ties to Russia, replacing the original story with an editor’s note.

AP’s designation on Twitter is “Official”. If this isn’t seriously addressed, it’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be deemed “U.S. state-affiliated media.”

Correction: A prior version of this article misread one AP tweet. The tweet did not say that three sources were aligned with the Russia bombed Poland narrative, but rather that they told AP that “preliminary assessments indicate the missile that struck Poland had been fired by Ukrainian forces at an incoming Russian missile.”

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***

The world dodged a bullet this week, with some NATO members trying, but failing, to trigger Article 4 as a means of confronting Russia in Ukraine. We may not be so lucky next time.

The recent scandal surrounding what most of the world now agrees was an errant Ukrainian surface-to-air missile landing on Polish soil, killing two Polish citizens in the process, has exposed an ugly reality about the eastern reaches of NATO today: Despite the more reserved stance of the old NATO establishment (the US, UK, France, and Germany), the new upstarts in eastern Europe seem hell-bent on finding a mechanism that will justify NATO intervention in Ukraine.

This predilection for nuclear annihilation (no one should have any misgivings that a NATO-Russia conflict would end any other way) should send alarm bells ringing in the halls of power throughout NATO and the rest of the world, because left to their own devices, the Russophobic officials that dominate the governments of Poland and the three Baltic republics act like lemmings, running toward the Ukrainian cliff, oblivious to their fate as they chase the fantasy of NATO defeating Russia on a European battlefield.

The rush to judgment that accompanied the arrival of the Ukrainian surface-to-air missile on Polish soil serves as a stark reminder about how the supposedly defensive characteristics of the NATO Charter can be used to promote, rather than deter, conflict.

Let there be no doubt – NATO was aware that the missile that impacted near the village of Przewodów in Poland, killing two Polish citizens, was a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile the moment it was launched. The airspace over Ukraine is one of the most highly-monitored locations in the world. Without revealing sources and methods, suffice it to say there isn’t anything that happens over Ukraine that isn’t registered in real time on a NATO display in headquarters throughout Europe – including Poland.

And yet … Poland saw fit to summon the Russian ambassador and lodge a protest.

Moreover, Poland declared that it would increase its military readiness while contemplating the activation of Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, a mechanism which allows the alliance to discuss security threats to member states with an eye on possibly using NATO military force to rectify the situation. Article 4 is behind every combat deployment of NATO since its inception, from Serbia, to Libya, to Afghanistan.

On cue, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, whose country borders Poland, tweeted that “every inch of NATO territory must be defended!”

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala likewise turned to Twitter to exclaim: “If Poland confirms that the missiles also hit its territory, this will be a further escalation by Russia. We stand firmly behind our EU and NATO ally.”

For its part, Estonia called the news “most concerning,” with its foreign minister declaring via Twitter, “We are consulting closely with Poland and other allies. Estonia is ready to defend every inch of NATO territory.” 

While all parties concurred that there was no basis for triggering Article 5 of NATO (i.e., the collective security clause), Article 4 was very much in play. Poland was adamant: The missile “attack” against Poland was clearly a crime, one that could not go unpunished. As such, under Article 4, Poland would be pushing “for NATO members and Poland to agree on the provision of additional anti-aircraft defense, including in part of the territory of Ukraine.”

And there you have it: “Including in part of the territory of Ukraine.”

Enter Germany, stage left: “As an immediate reaction to the incident in Poland, we will offer to strengthen air policing with combat air patrols over its airspace with German Eurofighters,” a German Defense Ministry spokesperson declared.

Cue NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who convened an emergency meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels to discuss the Polish incident. According to the Finnish foreign minister (Finland, although not a NATO member, was invited to the meeting), “Closing the airspace [above Ukraine] will definitely be discussed. Various options of how we can protect Ukraine are on the table.”

While Germany reportedly rejected the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, noting that such an action would pose a threat of direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, one is left pondering how such a discussion came to be in the first place: Ukraine fired a surface-to-air missile, which was tracked by NATO as it impacted on Polish soil. And, as a result, NATO members end up discussing the possibility of invoking Article 4 of the NATO Charter, seeking to extend NATO air defense into Ukrainian air space in concert with the establishment of a no-fly zone enforced by NATO aircraft.

“Even if it was a blue on blue [incident] with a Ukrainian rocket that landed in Poland, I think there is still enough ground for Poland to invoke Article 4,” a former director of policy planning for NATO, Fabrice Pothier, declared.

Just to clarify what Mr. Pothier is saying: Because Ukraine fired a surface-to-air missile that ended up landing on Polish soil, NATO is justified in invoking Article 4, setting the stage for a possible NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine which could lead to global nuclear annihilation.

If there was ever any doubt about the threat NATO posed to the entire world, there is no more.

That this is being promulgated on behalf of a Ukrainian leader who, despite universal consensus that the missile which hit Poland was Ukrainian, denies this possibility, all the while blaming Russia in the hopes that NATO will intervene, only adds to the insanity of this crisis.

While it appears that the world has dodged the potential death sentence triggered by the NATO Article 4 this time, the hair-trigger aspect of NATO’s Pavlovian response mechanism when it comes to seeking causal justification for military intervention in Ukraine should have everyone on high alert.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, served in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998 served as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq. Mr Ritter currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter and on Telegram @ScottRitter

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First published on May 11, 2021

***

“I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.” Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), (in a conversation, on Feb. 9, 1978).

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” Milton Friedman (1912-2006), (in ‘The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory’, 1970).

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner, which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), (in ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’. 1919, Ch. VI, pp. 235-236).

A few years ago, after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, some clever people, whose identity is hidden behind the appellation of ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, devised a decentralized electronic system of payments, which is independent of the existing traditional banking system. It is based on a new form of digital ‘currencies’ or ‘electronic currencies’, the ‘cryptocurrencies‘. Some observers have called the cryptocurrency innovation a sort of a new 21st Century digital gold rush.

The supply of a given electronic cryptocurrency is backed by a mathematically constrained scarcity and by a ledger technology that prevents counterfeiting. The demand is supported by a speculative faith of some buyers that other buyers are going to push the price of that cryptocurrency higher and higher. Cryptocurrencies can only be transacted and used as a means of payment within the narrow framework of an electronic network of decentralized registers, which are supported by powerful computers and the Internet.

There are presently as many as 7,000 such digital or virtual cryptocurrencies on the Web, and they serve as a playground for big and small speculators, besides being used as a convenient conduit to make international money transactions, in total anonymity. Even private companies, such as Facebook, are considering launching their own commercial cryptocurrency.

The Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency using the blockchain technology

The first cryptocurrency surfaced in 2009 with the Bitcoin, a decentralized and international private digital ‘currency’. It is the product of the application of a relatively new computerized technology, the blockchain. In order to limit the supply, the maximum stock of Bitcoins in existence was mathematically and electronically set at 21 million units, so that any increase in demand, once that threshold has been reached, must involve the exchange of existing Bitcoin units or coins. This tends to push prices higher and higher.

The complicated process of creating cryptocurrencies

The blockchain technology is a  computerized technology using chains of blocks containing data that allow information to be stored and transmitted through a large number of computers spread around the world.

Because of the speculative nature of each cryptocurrency market, its price, such as the price of one Bitcoin in dollars or other traditional currencies, is very volatile. It can fluctuate widely within a short span of time. This conveys the risk that big speculators, with access to large amounts of money and sophisticated trading techniques, could game the system and impose big losses on smaller or inexperienced speculators.

To a certain extent, the world of cryptocurrencies can be assimilated to an unregulated online casino for speculators, and this could lead to the creation of a speculative mania. The cryptocurrency craze is somewhat reminiscent of the Tulip mania in Holland in the 17th Century. At one time, for example, a single rare tulip bulb could be worth more than the price of a house!

A serious problem: the process of creating cryptocurrency units requires huge amounts of energy

There is an important technical drawback to the process of creating cryptocurrency units: It requires enormous amounts of energy. As more and more cryptocurrency transactions need to be computerized, the network of computers required to solve the complex blockchain calculations must increase, along with the energy it takes to run them.

For example, a study done at the University of Cambridge, in the U.K., concluded that the network of computers used by operators or ‘miners‘ in the process of generating units of the first cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin, consumes more electrical power, in one year, than that used by the entire country of the Netherlands, a country of over 17 million inhabitants.

As the cryptocurrency phenomenon continues to grow, it will require more and more computers to complete one cryptocurrency transaction, and each transaction will end up consuming more and more energy. For instance, a few years ago, a single Bitcoin transaction required as much electricity as 80,000 Visa card transactions. Nowadays, according to the Digiconomist website, a single Bitcoin transaction uses as much electricity to complete as 735,121 Visa transactions, (or 55,280 hours of viewing time on YouTube). And this is increasing on a daily basis. Such a heavy reliance on energy could severely threaten the long-run economic sustainability of the current process of cryptocurrency production.

Economist Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian principle of privately issued fiat currencies

Beyond the technical jargon, it is worthwhile to  know that the idea of having an international system of private money or monies, free of government interference, is an old libertarian dream, It is based on the belief that the private self-interest of competing private entrepreneurs can lead to a general welfare superior to that of government intervention, even when this involves the creation of money.

Indeed, in 1976, economist Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), of the Austrian school of economics, published a pamphlet entitled The Denationalisation of Money, (with a refined version, published in 1978). Hayek advanced the radical idea that sovereign governments should forgo their central bank’s legal monopoly to issue national currencies and leave the issuance of money to private entrepreneurs.

However, at the time, the idea of having competing private currencies was not well received.

Some saw in it the transfer, to private operators, of the public revenues that governments and their central banks receive in the money creation process, called seigniorage. Others feared that the idea of having multiple private currencies used as means of payments would create confusion and chaos in the economy.

It was also thought that private issuers of money would have an incentive to issue too much of it, and thus create inflation and a loss of purchasing power for the users. Many also anticipated that in times of financial crises, governments could not adequately intervene to stimulate production and employment, through an aggressive monetary policy, etc.

Some of these criticisms were the same arguments invoked in the 1930s to abandon the gold standard, a rigid commodity-based monetary standard, which tied national currencies to gold. It was thought that such a system had contributed in causing the Great Depression (1929-1939).

For some thirty years, after the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the world was placed under a gold-exchange standard, with the U.S. dollar remaining tied to gold, and most of the other national currencies tied to the U.S. dollar, with fixed exchange rates. However, after the first oil shock of 1973, the gold-exchange standard was itself replaced by the current monetary system of fiat money, i.e. a system of flexible government-regulated currencies, issued by a central bank that oversees the banking system. It is usually connected to other national currencies through flexible exchange rates, so as to maintain equilibrium in the external balance of payments.

Governments of major countries could begin competing between themselves in adopting official digital currencies and possibly ban private cryptocurrencies altogether

Some ten countries have already banned trading in private cryptocurrencies. This includes: China, Iran, India, Bangladesh, Morocco, Thailand, Uganda, Zambia and Nigeria. The last country to do so is Turkey. Turkey’s central bank recently announced that it is outlawing the use of private cryptocurrencies, such as the Bitcoin, in payments for goods and services, a ban that took effect last April 30. It warns speculators that cryptocurrencies present “irrevocable risks”, as the market is volatile and there is a lack of oversight. It also cited their use in “illegal actions due to their anonymous structures”. No doubt that other countries will follow their example.

Conversely, the governments of major nations have either announced that they intend to set up their own official digital currency or are studying the possibility to do so. For one, the Chinese government has announced its intention to launch an international digital Yuan, possibly to be in full operation for the Beijing Winter Olympic Games of Feb. 2022. Obviously, the new Chinese digital currency for international use could eventually represent a challenge to the U.S. dollar as the preferred reserve currency, and to counteract the practice of various American administrations to impose economic and financial sanctions on other countries for political purposes.

More generally, the advent of a digital Yuan could force other governments to get involved in creating their own international digital currencies. Already, the U.S. Fed has announced that it is studying the potential costs and benefits of developing a digital dollar. No doubt that other governments in the U.K., Europe and Japan would likely follow suit with digital versions of their own currencies, such as a “Britcoin“, a “Eurocoin”, a “Yencoin”, etc.

A world of legal public digital currencies, traded internationally, could be just around the corner, even if money and capital markets are far from being able to operate with digital currencies. Nevertheless, such a purely monetary development could have profound effects on the existing private digital cryptocurrencies. Over time, it could also upend the international and domestic payment systems.

Conclusion

The future may have in store a growing reliance on digital money, possible public digital currencies issued by a few major central banks. It should be obvious that if governments begin to compete in creating their own digital currencies, this could pose a serious challenge to the current cryptocurrencies in existence, the latter facing a real regulatory threat.

Similarly, in such a futuristic digital context, if it were to materialize, this would raise the issue of how to preserve individual economic freedom, when all financial transactions can be recorded and made available to governments, allowing them to track people’s incomes, spending and investment in real time.

It would be ironic if the libertarian monetary innovation of private cryptocurrencies, designed to free users from government interference, were to lead to a world of public digital currencies. Governments would then have even more power over people than today. A resurgence of barter could ensue.1

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book , in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

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

Notes

[1] A book of fiction that foretells such a political plot is The Patriot Conspiracy, 2012,  (also found here).

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Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the most famous 52-year-old brat of the world football federation, has not been much in the news of late.  Such creatures of authority do their best (and worst) work in the shadows.  But given that the FIFA Men’s World Cup is upon us, he thought it wise to address a few issues that had irked his pure, troubled self.  They were addressed to the naysayers and critics, those critical of Qatar’s human rights record, its approach to sexual minorities, its lamentable labour safety record, its successful bribing efforts to secure the bid in the first place. In short, the joke that is this World Cup.

What followed was almost gruesome in its hilarity and could be summed up with the old biblical injunction against casting the first stone.  Perhaps there was something of US President Woodrow Wilson about it, who claimed in 1915 that no one nation could judge another.  (Fabulous as this was, the president proceeded to judge Imperial Germany and Kaiserism, committing the United States to World War I.)

FIFA has always been of that restricted view of judgment, for good reason.  It hardly counts as a sporting organisation and should be likened to a mafia-styled corporation.  For its officials, corruption has been naturalised to the point of habit, and anyone willing to cast stones at it would need a quarry.

What took place at this press conference in the lead-up to the tournament was an exemplar of sportswashing at its grotesquely finest, a sure sign that Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy had really struck a chord and gotten to the infantile, unhinged Infantino.

In his attempted flaying of critics of Qatar’s record, the tournament and, by implication, his organisation’s credibility and competence, Infantino listed a range of groups who had been disadvantaged and abused, claiming kinship with all of them.

“Today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel [sic] a migrant worker.”

This promised to become a very poor performance in stand-up identity politics, but Infantino qualified his remarks by revealing a psyche troubled in childhood.

“I’m not Qatari, African, gay, disabled and I’m not really a migrant worker but I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied, as a foreign[er] in a foreign country, as a child at school I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles.  I was bullied for that.”

It all came down to being a persecuted ginger.

Throughout his speech, he scolded the criticism as “moral lesson-giving”, one-sided and hypocritical.  “I don’t want to give you any lessons of life, but what is going on here is profoundly, profoundly unjust.”

Europe itself needed to own up to its less than enviable record.  “For what we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years we should apologise for the next 3,000 years before giving moral lessons to people.”  How convenient.

In salesman’s mode, Infantino urged the press and the baffled to engage, help and unite.  “The world is divided enough.  We are organising a FIFA World Cup, we’re not organising a war.  We organise a FIFA World Cup where people who have many problems in his or her life try to come and enjoy.”  The tournament would also “open the eyes of many people from the Western world to the Arab world.”

Much of this delusional address, apart from a plea not to see the obvious, was based on the idea that societies can change with generous dollops of sporting endeavour.  But there is no reason why they should, nor much historical evidence that this has ever happened.  The reverse is true: the regime of the day takes in the kudos of putting on a show and feels rewarded.

It is a false equation to assume that holding the Olympics in, say, Nazi Germany in 1936 could make societies more understanding and tolerant.  It certainly did not, nor did it change the pathway to war and genocide pursued by Hitler and his murderous henchmen.  The odious nonsense stemming from Infantino is the sort spouted by managerial classes from universities to sports administrators.  Police states and sport can exist and thrive side by side without any fuss.

Often, the very sporting endeavour itself is appropriated, advanced as part of the state’s agenda.  Which is precisely why Qatar has been so busy, and profligate, hiring ethically dim footballers and amoral PR specialists to spruce its tattered image.  The authorities also know that no single team promised to boycott the tournament, leaving the players to engage in faux moralising about the country without effecting change.

Infantino’s own role is clearly that of well moneyed servitude, the administrator’s toadying answer to David Beckham’s prostration and those players who happily receive the largesse of the Qatari state.

Infantino best get back into the shadows, where he can grease palms and speculate about his past as a tormented, freckled ginger.  He will also be getting four more years as the head of FIFA.  “Repulsive.  Dangerous.  Damaging,” came the assessment from journalist Melissa Reddy, who was nonetheless there to cover the tournament.  “Yet this is a man being re-elected as head of FIFA unopposed.”  For someone bullied, he has done rather well for himself.

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

Featured image: Gianni Infantino in 2018. (Photo by Kremlin.ru, licensed under CC BY 4.0)

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San Francisco Bay Area researchers sued President Joe Biden and the National Archives on Wednesday over the postponement of the release of records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. 

Two members of the Mary Ferrell Foundation claim in their federal lawsuit that the Biden administration has postponed releasing certain records on Kennedy’s assassination without doing a review of the records or maintaining an accurate index of the redacted content. They say the National Archives and Records Administration violated the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 by preventing them from being fully informed on the history of the assassination.

The foundation, based in Massachusetts, maintains the largest searchable electronic collection of materials on the JFK assassination. Plaintiffs Josiah Thompson, a private investigator and author of books and articles on the JFK assassination, and author Gary Aguilar claim the government’s obstruction has interfered with the foundation’s core mission to educate the public.

According to the plaintiffs, Biden’s postponement of the records release deprives them from their legal right to information on the assassination. They also say the president and National Archives make it impossible to determine the number and identity of redacted and withheld assassination records in the JFK Collection — or records that may be in other government offices.

As a result of pressure to end what was then three decades of government secrecy about Kennedy’s death, Congress unanimously enacted the JFK Records Act in 1992, signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush on Oct. 26, 1992. Congress declared that the “legislation is necessary to create an enforceable, independent, and accountable process for the public disclosure of such [assassination] records.”

Just before the October 2017 statutory deadline to put out the remaining secret assassination records, then-President Donald Trump issued a memorandum instructing National Archives to temporarily postpone the public disclosure of some unidentified records for six months. He later ordered National Archives to postpone the release for another three and a half years beyond the statutory deadline.

In October 2021, Biden issued an executive memorandum ordering the continued postponement of release of an unknown number of unidentified records — without, according to the plaintiffs, conducting a record-by-record review. They claim in doing so, the president breached his duties by not giving reasons with evidence for postponement, or stating how withholding the records outweighs the public interest in having the records.

The plaintiffs also say National Archives acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” and violated the Administrative Procedures Act by implementing Biden’s orders, and failed to perform assigned duties under the JFK Records Act such as maintaining an accurate guidebook and index to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. They also claim National Archives failed to follow up with government offices on outstanding record searches requested in 1998.

The plaintiffs want a judge to declare that Biden’s postponement violates the JFK Records Act and to order the president and National Archives to explain their continued postponement for each withheld record with clear evidence of “identifiable harm posed by the potential disclosure” and how it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

“If the court finds that the proposed grounds for postponement do not meet the statutory criteria. the court should order the release of such assassination records to the American people,” the plaintiffs say in their complaint.

The plaintiffs also want National Archives ordered to complete a search for other records without identification in the department’s directory, remove all unjustified redactions in the central directory and find missing records identified in the complaint. They also want the agency to verify that there are no additional records withheld in full, and to establish a procedure to ensure the public release of all records “at the earliest possible date.”

National Archives did not respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.

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Too Little Too Late? Pfizer, Moderna to Study Long-Term Risk of Myocarditis After COVID Vaccines

By Dr. Suzanne Burdick, November 21, 2022

Pfizer and Moderna are launching clinical trials to track long-term health issues following a diagnosis of vaccine-associated myocarditis and pericarditis in teens and young adults, but some experts said the risks are already clear.

They Will Lock You Down Again

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, November 21, 2022

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.

CBDC: How COVID Became the Path to Global Financial Surveillance

By Joshua Stylman, November 21, 2022

It’s seemed evident for a while that the current fiat monetary system is, at best, unstable. At worst, it’s a Ponzi scheme whose time has expired. If that’s the case, I suspect the central bankers and 0.1% know this and might be prepared to usher in the new system before the old one collapses on itself – even as they loot it on the way down with the most significant wealth transfer in human history.

Were the 9/11 Aircraft Electronically Hijacked and Remotely Controlled?

By Dan Hanley, November 20, 2022

According to the global grassroots organization 9/11 Pilot Whistleblowers website (https://911pilots.org/), there were no Muslim hijackers at the controls of the 9/11 aircraft but that these aircraft were electronically hijacked and remotely controlled through employment of a system called the uninterruptible autopilot that enables a remote source to take complete control of the aircraft autopilot and flight management computer and remotely guide it to its target destination.

“Veritocracy”: Casting a Mould for “Enlightened Governance”?

By Julian Rose, November 20, 2022

Appealing to the baser instincts of the masses while growing rich and powerful by taxing their hard labour has been the bottom line formula for the maintenance of top-down pyramid power for at least the past thousand years in the Western World. 

It Took 64 Years for the U.S. Government to Admit to Its 1953 Coup that Grabbed Iran

By Eric Zuesse, November 20, 2022

World War III is America’s war to capture Russia, and the way to do it is to position its missiles so close to Moscow that it can then declare “Checkmate!” and the missiles would take just 5 minutes to annihilate The Kremlin. Only Ukraine is that close to Moscow — close enough so that from missile-launch to annihilating Moscow would be so fast that Russia’s central command would be dead before they’d be able to confirm the launch and then launch their retaliatory missiles.

Thuggish Ways: Mike Pompeo, Punishing Leakers and Getting Assange

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, November 20, 2022

Poor, silly, protuberant Mike Pompeo.  The stocky, irritated former CIA director and former Secretary of State is rather upset that those who worked under him dared wag their tongues about Julian Assange.  The wagging so happened to relate to contemplated plans of abduction and assassination, something the US executive formally disallows though permits via various devious mechanisms.

Video: Ukraine’s Undeclared War Against NATO

By South Front, November 20, 2022

During the 9 months of the Russian military operations in Ukraine, NATO member countries have repeatedly become victims of the ongoing hostilities. As soon as Brussels was ready to apply Article 5 on NATO’s collective defense and declare war on Russia, it turned out that Ukraine was causing damage to the Alliance members.

Istanbul Terror Attack May Prompt Turkish Invasion and Deportations

By Steven Sahiounie, November 20, 2022

On November 13, a blast ripped through Istiklal street, a busy pedestrian area in the Beyoglu neighborhood of Istanbul.  The explosion killed six people and wounded 81 at about 4:30 pm local time. Among the dead were Arzu Ozsoy and her 15-year-old daughter Yagmur Ucar, a nine-year-old girl and her father, and a married couple. All were Turkish citizens.

Deadly Games: The Labour Casualties of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, November 20, 2022

A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless.  But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality.  The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready, will be out in force, and the hypocrites dressed to the nines.

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Almost three years have passed since COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates upended our world. At first, the virus seemed to be an obscure, distant problem, posing little threat. Today, it’s hard to think of a world event more significant, talked about, and politically controversial than the response to COVID.  

Earlier this month, the peer-reviewed journal Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning, and Policy published an important article on COVID-related censorship and heterodoxy. Founded in 1962, Minerva is a well-established academic journal from Springer, one of the world’s top publishers of science journals. The article is an indication of just how mainstream concerns about censorship during the COVID era have become.

The authors are five researchers from universities and colleges in Israel and Australia. They interviewed a sample of leading medical professionals, doctors, and scientists who questioned the prevailing COVID orthodoxy and were heavily reprimanded, censored, or otherwise harassed and suppressed for their views.

The authors state in their abstract:

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views.

Early Pandemic Controversies 

The researchers began by reviewing some of the early pandemic controversies. As they discovered, and as you may find unsurprising, there was no obvious consensus about how to “handle” COVID. While governments around the world argued for nationwide lockdowns and limited social gatherings, many scientists and other leaders questioned the ethics and efficacy of such mandates. As they authors note, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases, objected to wearing masks in March 2020, only to backtrack a month later.

Meanwhile, social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with the government’s help, censored scientists, doctors, and others for expressing dissent or even questioning the prevailing pandemic dogma. This still goes on. The researchers paid special attention to the way tech companies suppressed COVID heterodoxy under the guise of “fact-checking” and countering “misinformation.” As the pandemic progressed, it became harder and harder for medical professionals to openly express their views.

Defining Orthodoxy on COVID

However, if the doctors and scientists they surveyed are “heterodox,” what is COVID orthodoxy? The researchers give a helpful definition:

Liester (2022) provides a list comparing what he refers to as the dominant versus dissenting views with respect to COVID-19, which includes the origin of SARS CoV-2 (zoonotic vs. laboratory), mask mandates (will prevent spread vs. will not prevent spread), early treatment with drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (ineffective and dangerous vs. effective and safe), the usefulness of lockdown measures and other restrictions (effective and beneficial vs. ineffective and harmful), COVID-19 vaccines (safe and effective vs. unsafe and dangerous), and COVID-19 vaccine mandates and passports (necessary and ethical vs. harmful and unethical). While it may be true that none of these dominant positions have been universally adopted by all governments worldwide to the same degree or down to every last detail, nevertheless a dominant or orthodox position on all of these issues can be identified on a country-by-country basis with strong similarities across national borders.

They also recognize that orthodoxy is prone to change, and that some formerly forbidden viewpoints have gained legitimacy. Just last month, The Atlantic ran a piece by economist Emily Oster asking, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” She wrote this in regard to masking and social distancing:

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

What Amnesty Means

While Oster makes a fair point about the lack of knowledge, this study is asking why governmental and other powers acted so adamantly as if they did know, and others didn’t. Why weren’t they more permissive of dissent and open to other views? “Amnesty” in other contexts implies an admission of fault in return for forgiveness. Yet the government, social media platforms, and a range of media pundits have yet to acknowledge the ways they demonized and intimidated doctors, scientists, and others for making common-sense observations about COVID-19, and perhaps even more so, about the vaccine. According to the researchers, much of the pandemic orthodoxy was formed, not out of scientific conviction, but from economic and political interests.

In another article, I will look at how the researchers conducted their survey and the specific ways their sample group experienced censorship and suppression.

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Peter Biles graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois in 2019 and went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. He is the author of Hillbilly Hymn (Resource Publications, 2022) and Keep and Other Stories (Resource Publications, 2022). He has also written for a variety of publications, including Plough, Dappled Things, The Gospel Coalition, Salvo, andBreaking Ground. Born and raised in Ada, Oklahoma, he currently serves as Content & Communications Fellow for the Chesterton House, a Christian Study Center at Cornell University.

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Pfizer and Moderna are launching clinical trials to track long-term health issues following a diagnosis of vaccine-associated myocarditis and pericarditis in teens and young adults, but some experts said the risks are already clear.

Myocarditis and pericarditis are heart problems that multiple medical studies have shown to be associated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccination, particularly among young men.

Studies also show that the risk of myocarditis — which can cause permanent damage to heart muscle — increases with the number of boosters a person has taken and can in some cases cause death.

Health officials contacted by NBC News did not suggest that official guidance on COVID-19 vaccination will change while the studies of long-term health issues from vaccine-related heart problems are underway.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to comment on Pfizer’s and Moderna’s studies, but an agency official told NBC News the chance of having myocarditis occur following vaccination is “very low.”

Too little, too late?

Commenting on the news, Dr. Peter McCullough — internist, epidemiologist, cardiologist and leading expert on COVID-19 treatment — said in a Nov. 16 Substack post:

“Now two years after public release and mounting cases of fatal myocarditis published in the peer-reviewed literature, both Pfizer and Moderna have announced they will begin studies of cardiac safety that the FDA required in their 2021 Biological Licensing Agreement letters from the FDA.”

“Why did the US government and the vaccine companies wait so long? Do they anticipate their own bad news will kill the failing product line?”

McCullough, who authored “The Courage to Face COVID-19” and developed the McCullough Protocol for early treatment of COVID-19, said only an internal document review from government agencies and vaccine developers will tell the public what was going on during this “biological product safety disaster.”

“As a cardiologist, I can tell you the entire discipline of cardiovascular disease is oriented to preserving heart tissue. Heart muscle is largely terminally differentiated with low rates of turnover; hence, we cannot afford to lose any cardiomyocytes to damage caused by vaccines.”

McCullough listed a number of studies on how the mRNA vaccines affect the heart:

“Aldana-Bitar et al., described the excursion of cardiac troponin as about four days with COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis which is oddly about the same duration as an ischemic myocardial infarction due to blocked coronary arteries. …

“Hence the confusion with the terms ‘myocarditis’ ‘myopericarditis’ and ‘heart attack’ in the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] and the media.

“The first two prospective cohort studies, where blood cardiac troponin level was measured before and after receiving mRNA injections, both demonstrated unacceptably high rates of troponin elevations indicating predictable heart damage.

“Mansanguan et al. found the rate of heart injury was 2.3% on the second injection of Pfizer in children 13-18 years old. … Two children were hospitalized with myocarditis in this 301-person study.

“Le Pessec et al., in a presentation at the European Society of Cardiology, revealed 2.8% of healthcare workers (n=777) had elevated troponin by day 3 after the third mRNA injection. …

“Given the known relationship of coronavirus spike protein and cardiac toxicity from the 1990’s, the vaccine companies should have been measuring troponin during their randomized trials in 2020.

“Baric et al. in 1999 reported: ‘We have shown that infection with RbCV [rabbit coronavirus] results in the development of myocarditis and congestive heart failure and that some survivors of RbCV infection go on to develop dilated cardiomyopathy in the chronic phase.’”

But this prior research was apparently overlooked by COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers and public health officials, McCullough suggested.

“Sadly and ineptly,” McCullough said, “BARDA [Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority], DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], vaccine consultants, and the manufacturers had no measures in place to identify expected cardiac damage in humans.”

‘Do we really need to wait years to be absolutely certain this condition is serious?’

According to ZeroHedge, existing data and the freshly-launched clinical trials blatantly contradict the “safe and effective” narrative that Pfizer and Moderna have defended since they launched their vaccines.

“Why is Big Pharma investigating their own COVID vaccines for myocarditis side effects if the vaccines were already supposedly tested and proven safe and effective?” ZeroHedge asked.

“In all likelihood, Pfizer and Moderna are trying to get out ahead of burgeoning side effects with their own studies as a means to spin or mitigate bad press in the future. The chances of these studies providing honest data-driven assessments are low,” they said.

Pfizer is currently embroiled in a whistleblower lawsuit alleging fraud during its initial COVID-19 vaccine trials.

Comedian and political commentator Russell Brand also took aim at the news, asking viewers, “What kind of reality are we living in now” where pharmaceutical companies … whose products were widely mandated by elected officials who later show up on reality TV, are only now, two years later, beginning to investigate heart problems associated with their products?

Brand was referring to a former U.K. British Health Minister who resigned in June 2021 after he was caught breaking COVID-19 lockdown rules and is now starring in a reality TV show.

Brand also called out the media coverage of Pfizer and Moderna’s announcement, reading NBC News’ byline that said, “Both Pfizer and Moderna are launching clinical trials to track health issues — if any — in the years following a diagnosis of vaccine-associated heart problems in teens and young adults.”

Brand accused NBC News of using the phrase “if any” to suggest there may be no adverse health issues following a diagnosis of vaccine-related myocarditis.

“There are certainly some interesting graphs and data available that seem to suggest that there could be significant findings in those areas,” he said, alluding to research mentioned in the rest of the NBC article.

NBC news also summarized a recent CDC-funded study in The Lancet that examined health outcomes in 519 teens and young adults who reported a diagnosis of myocarditis following an mRNA vaccination concluding, “Most got better at least three months after symptoms.”

“Yes. Most of them got better after three months,” said Dr. Madhava Setty, senior science editor for The Defender. “But 1 in 5 were still not cleared for physical activity. One in 4 required daily medication to treat their condition. Ninety-nine of them required intensive care as a result of their vaccine injury.”

Setty added:

“We are talking about young, healthy people that required ICU admissions, that now cannot exert themselves and may require heart medications indefinitely. Do we really need to wait years to be absolutely certain this condition is serious? It is as serious as a heart attack. Literally.

“If the CDC is admitting that it does not know what the long-term repercussions of vaccine-induced myocarditis are in young people, why are they continuing to recommend that they receive these products when they already know there is little to no benefit for this demographic?

“It is nonsensical for an agency of public health to promote these therapies while waiting years for proof that they are NOT dangerous.”

Moderna: ‘We don’t understand’ why vaccines cause heart damage

The FDA in January told Pfizer and Moderna they must conduct several post-marketing safety studies due to the “known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis” and the “unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis.”

Moderna launched two trials, the most recent in September. Pfizer told NBC News it plans to start at least one of its trials, which will include up to 500 individuals age 20 and younger, over the next few months.

In collaboration with the Pediatric Heart Network, Pfizer will monitor participants for five years, according to Dr. Dongngan Truong, a pediatrician at the University of Utah Health and a co-lead on the Pfizer study.

Participants will include people who were previously hospitalized with vaccine-related myocarditis and those who were more recently diagnosed.

Dr. Paul Burton, Moderna’s chief medical officer, told NBC News scientists still don’t have a clear explanation yet for why the vaccines cause the condition.

He suspects the virus’s spike protein, once produced in the cell after vaccination, may generate a reaction in the body that can cause inflammation in the heart.

“We don’t understand yet and there’s no good mechanism to explain it,” he said.

Burton did not comment on whether or not he was privy to the cardiology studies McCullough cited in his Substack post that showed a clear association between mRNA vaccines and heart damage.

According to Burton, the two myocarditis studies Moderna has started — one of which is being conducted in collaboration with the American College of Cardiology — are examining public and private health data from tens of millions of people who received the company’s vaccine.

He said the study would answer basic questions including: “Did they get myocarditis? When did it occur? How was it treated? How severe was it?”

Moderna also is conducting two more studies with the European Medicines Agency that will span five different countries.

The drugmaker will assess outcomes for a year or more, Burton said, with results expected to be made public in the summer of 2023.

CDC downplays risk of myocarditis as vaccine makers protected from liability claims

According to some experts, when statistically significant levels of myocarditis reports began appearing in VAERS, government health officials were slow to warn the public of the possible risk — and the agency continues to downplay the risk as “rare.”

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E, in October published research on data showing that although a statistically significant vaccine adverse event “signal” for myocarditis in males ages 8-21 was seen on the VAERS database as early as Feb. 19, 2021 — just two months after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S. public — CDC officials buried the connectionbetween COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis until May 27, 2021.

“By this date, over 50% of the eligible U.S. population had received at least one mRNA COVID-19 vaccine,” Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender.

“Withholding this type of information is criminal,” he added.

According to Steve Kirsch, executive director of Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, the CDC continues to downplay and underestimate the likely number of vaccine-related myocarditis cases.

On Thursday, Kirsch wrote:

“Large Canadian hospital: before COVID, they’d see 2 cases per year.

“Now they see 27 in just 6 weeks. That’s a 117X increase.

“But the CDC says it’s only ‘slightly elevated.’”

“You would think this is a problem, but it isn’t,” Kirsch said. “When 2 car owners die, the car manufacturer tells people to stop using the car. The reason for this is simple: liability.”

Kirsch added:

“But with these vaccines, there is no liability, so there is no need to set a stopping condition.

“The US government will happily injure hundreds of thousands or millions of kids and it simply just doesn’t matter because there is no liability. That’s just the way it goes.”

As of Nov. 4, there have been 24,608 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis and 4,878 reports of myocardial infarction (i.e., heart attack) reported to VAERS since mid-December 2020.

VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

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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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The World Health Organization (WHO) is ignoring risks to human health posed by two toxic types of PFAS chemicals, and is failing to propose properly protective measures in draft guidelines for drinking water standards, a group of more than 100 scientists alleged in a letter issued this month.

The 116 scientists – all experts on per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – said in the Nov. 10 letter that the WHO guidelines should either be “significantly revised” or withdrawn. The group cited examples of areas where they said the WHO has omitted or obscured “strong evidence” of the links between adverse health problems and the PFAS compounds known as PFOS and PFOA. The WHO did not respond directly to criticisms expressed by the scientists in their letter.

“WHO has ignored the last 20 years of scientific research, ranging from observational human studies, animal studies, and mechanistic studies, and concluded that there’s not enough information,” said Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and one of the signatories on the letter to WHO.

“I don’t understand how they could have come up with this [draft] using an independent group of scientists,” she added. “My impression is that people who consult largely for industry are the people who are involved in writing this. It’s very, very concerning.”

The WHO may release its final drinking water guidelines for PFOS and PFOA as early as December, and some fear the guidance could undermine proposed regulations expected from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before the end of the year.

PFAS chemicals help products resist heat, oil, stains, and water and are found in everything from nonstick pans to takeout containers to rain coats. PFOS and PFOA, the best-studied PFAS, have been linked to cancers and other serious health problems. PFAS have been increasingly detected in drinking water across the US, and some stateshave proposed or adopted drinking water limits for these toxic chemicals. However, until the EPA issues its final regulations, there are no federally enforceable standards for PFAS in drinking water.

“Much less protective guidelines”

While the EPA issued interim updated drinking water health advisories of 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA and 0.02 ppt for PFOS in June, the WHO draft offered a provisional, technology-based guideline of 100 ppt for individual PFOA and PFOS and 500 ppt for total combined PFAS concentrations in drinking water.

“There have been a number of authoritative bodies that have at least proposed that much lower drinking water levels are needed to be protective of human health,” said Anna Soehl, a science and policy consultant at the Green Science Policy Institute. “WHO completely disregarded this and proposed much less protective guidelines. That can create confusion among nations that might not have the resources to develop their own drinking water standards and sends a message that perhaps higher levels are acceptable.”

The letter specifically accuses WHO of failing to properly account for cancer risks associated with PFOA;  inaccurately concluding there is no evidence of an association between PFAS and liver damage; making “entirely unsupported speculation” downplaying PFAS association to increased cholesterol; issuing “misstatements” regarding immunotoxicity associated with PFOA/PFOS exposure.

“The current science… provide[s] compelling evidence that exposures to PFOS, PFOA and other PFAS have adverse impacts on human and animal health, even at very low levels,” the scientists wrote.

“No technical justification”

Betsy Southerland, an Environmental Protection Network (EPN) member and former director in EPA’s Office of Water, noted that it is common to see two types of assessments – a health-based maximum contaminant level goal and a (usually less stringent) level utilities are required to achieve using available technologies. However, Southerland said it is unclear how the authors of the WHO report developed their technology-based levels.

“There’s no technical justification for how they arrived at that drinking water provisional guideline concentration,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“It looks like they wasted all their time trying to debunk the thousands of health studies, then at the very end grabbed two studies on PFOA and PFOS and two more studies on all the [PFAS] contaminants and based their provisional guidelines on that.”

Southerland, who led EPN’s formal response to the WHO draft, also called the timing of the WHO’s draft “a stunner,” speculating that the WHO was “racing to get this out” because they knew the EPA is expected to propose both health-based and technology-based PFOA and PFOS guidelines in December.

In their letter to the WHO, the PFAS experts urges the organization to issue “science-based guidelines supported by a comprehensive review of the scientific literature and commonly used treatment technologies or otherwise withdraw the proposed guidance.”

The group also requested that the WHO “identify the names, affiliations and potential conflicts-of-interest of those involved in the preparation or peer-review of this draft and any future WHO documents.” The WHO said the contributors to the document would be listed in the final document and posted on the WHO website.

“What is urgently needed is for authorities around the globe to work to prevent exposure and establish mechanisms to hold chemical manufacturers financially responsible for the cost of remediation,” the scientists wrote. “Although PFAS manufacturers’ own research has documented the health harm of PFAS, they continue selling these chemicals contaminating the drinking water and harming the health of numerous communities worldwide.”

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***

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all. 

To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.

Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.

Meanwhile, a few points to consider:

The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.

The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.

Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.

Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.

The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.

More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.

The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.

The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.

Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.

In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.

We cannot allow that to happen.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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***

A few days ago we asked how much longer do we have to wait for the “first-day affidavit” in the FTX bankruptcy, traditionally the most detailed and comprehensive summary of how any given company collapsed into Chapter 11 (and in FTX’s case, Chapter 7 soon, as this will soon become a full-blown liquidation)…

How many years do we have to wait for FTX to file its "first day" affidavit

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 15, 2022

… and this morning we finally got our answer when it hit the docket (22-11068, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware), almost a full week after FTX filed on Nov 11… and boy is it a doozy.

Because how else would one describe it when FTX’s new CEO and liquidator, John Ray III,  who also oversaw the unwinding and liquidation of Enron, admits that “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”

And just in case his shock at FTX’s fraud of epic proportions was not quite clear enough, he adds that “from compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

Courtesy of the affidavit, here is what the company’s org chart looks like as of Nov 17:

Click here to enlarge the image.

According to Ray, he has located “only a fraction” of the digital assets of the FTX Group that they hope recover during the Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They’ve so far secured about $740 million of cryptocurrency in offline cold wallets, a storage method designed to prevent hacks. This is just a fraction of the $10-$50 billion in liabilities the company disclosed in its bankruptcy filing.

How do we know it’s a fraud: as Ray writes on page 24, although the investigation has only begun and must run its course, it is my view based on the information obtained to date, “that many of the employees of the FTX Group, including some of its senior executives, were not aware of the shortfalls or potential commingling of digital assets.” Many maybe not, but some – and certainly SBF himself – did.

It gets better: Ray said that company’s audited financial statements should not be trusted, Ray said, adding that liquidators are working to rebuild balance sheets for FTX entities from the bottom up.

FTX “did not maintain centralized control of its cash” and failed to keep an accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, or pay sufficient attention to the creditworthiness of banking partners, according to Ray. Advisers don’t yet know how much cash FTX Group had when it filed for bankruptcy, but has found about $560 million attributable to various FTX entities so far.

Although restructuring advisers have been in control of FTX for less than a week, they’ve seen enough to depict the crypto company as a deeply flawed enterprise. Lasting records of decision making are hard to come by: Bankman-Fried often communicated through applications that auto-deleted in short order and asked employees to do the same, according to Ray.
Corporate funds of FTX Group were used to buy homes and other personal items for employees, Ray said.

Corporate funds were also used to buy homes and other personal items for employees and advisers, sometimes in their personal names.

“In the Bahamas, I understand that corporate funds of the FTX Group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans, and that certain real estate was recorded in the personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas,” Ray said, who also noted that the company didn’t have appropriate corporate governance and never held board meetings. There was no accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, as well as insufficient attention paid to the creditworthiness of banking partners.

Ray said the company did not have “an accurate list” of its own bank accounts, or even a complete record of the people who worked for FTX (see below). He added that FTX used “an unsecured group email account” to manage the security keys for its digital assets.

The filing sheds light on the sloppy business practices, such as FTX employees asking to be paid through an online “chat” platform “where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.”

Below we excerpt some of the most notable highlights from the affidavit, which we embed at the bottom of the post and which everyone should read to get a sense of just how massive Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud was.

• I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.
• Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
• For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include:
  • (a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses;
  • (b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”);
  • (c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Debtor Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”);
  • (d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.
• Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried.2 Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds  and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the
  equity of any Silo.
• The diagram attached as Exhibit A provides a visual summary of the Silos and the indicative assets in each Silo. Exhibit B contains a preliminary corporate structure chart. These materials were prepared at my direction based on information available at this time and are subject to revision as our investigation into the affairs of the FTX Group continues.

Click here to enlarge the image.

There is much more information on each of these silos in the affidavit at the bottom of this post, but what we are curious about at this stage is what the Alameda balance sheet looks like: after all, that’s what started this whole avalanche in the first place. Here are the details:

The parent company and primary operating company in the Alameda Silo is Alameda Research LLC, which is organized in the State of Delaware. Before the Petition Date (as defined below), the Alameda Silo operated quantitative trading funds specializing in crypto assets. Strategies included arbitrage, market making, yield farming and trading volatility. The Alameda Silo also offered over-the-counter trading services, and made and managed other debt and equity investments. In short, the Alameda Silo was a “crypto hedge fund” with a diversified business trading and speculating in digital assets and related loans and securities for the account of its owners, Messrs. Bankman-Fried (90%) and Wang (10%).

Alameda Research LLC prepared consolidated financial statements on a quarterly basis. To my knowledge, none of these financial statements have been audited. The September 30, 2022 balance sheet for the Alameda Silo shows $13.46 billion in total assets as of its date. However, because this balance sheet was unaudited and produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated.

Remarkably, among the assets listed in the document was $4.1bn of related party loans extended by Alameda, $3.3bn of which was to Bankman-Fried both personally and to an entity he controlled. Bankman-Fried previously said that FTX had “accidentally” given $8bn of FTX customer funds to Alameda.

The highlighted “related party receivable” is notable because as footnote 3 to the table reveals, it consisted of a loan by “Euclid Way Ltd. to Paper Bird Inc. (a Debtor) of $2.3 billion” and three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million.

The liabilities as of September 30, 2022 were manageable. Unfortunately, the reality is that the asset and liability numbers at the consolidated level were flipped resulting in an $8 billion hole.

The problem, as we now know, is that the value of the assets was woefully overrepresented. But we’ll get to that.

First, let’s look at the immediate history that led to the bankruptcy filing:

EVENTS LEADING TO CHAPTER 11 FILING

The Debtors faced a severe liquidity crisis that necessitated the filing of these Chapter 11 Cases on an emergency basis on November 11, 2022, and in the case of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc., on November 14, 2022 (collectively, the “Petition Date”). In the days leading up to the Petition Date, certain of the circumstances described in Part III below became known to a broader set of executives of the FTX Group beyond Mr. Bankman-Fried and members of his inner circle. Questions arose about Mr. Bankman-Fried’s leadership and the handling of the Debtors’ complex array of assets and businesses.

As the situation became increasingly dire, Sullivan & Cromwell and Alvarez & Marsal were engaged to provide restructuring advice and services to the Debtors.

On November 10, 2022, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas (the “SCB”) took action to freeze assets of non-Debtor FTX Digital Markets Ltd., a service provider to FTX Trading Ltd. and the employer of certain current and former executives and staff in the Bahamas. Mr. Brian Simms, K.C. was appointed as provisional liquidator of FTX Digital Markets Ltd. on a sealed record. The provisional liquidator for this Bahamas subsidiary has filed a chapter 15 petition seeking recognition of the provisional liquidation proceeding in the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

In addition, in the first hours of November 11, 2022 EST, the directors of non-Debtors FTX Express Pty Ltd and FTX Australia Pty Ltd., both Australian entities, appointed Messrs. Scott Langdon, John Mouawad and Rahul Goyal of Korda Mentha Restructuring as voluntary administrators.

At the same time, negotiations were being held between certain senior individuals of the FTX Group and Mr. Bankman-Fried concerning the resignation of Mr. Bankman-Fried and the commencement of these Chapter 11 Cases. Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School. A document effecting a relinquishment of control was prepared and comments from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s team incorporated. At approximately 4:30 a.m. EST on Friday, November 11, 2022, after further consultation with his legal counsel, Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately agreed to resign, resulting in my appointment as the Debtors’ CEO. I was delegated all corporate powers and authority under applicable law, including the power to appoint independent directors and commence these Chapter 11 Cases on an emergency basis.

Cash management… or lack thereof:

The FTX Group did not maintain centralized control of its cash. Cash management procedural failures included the absence of an accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, as well as insufficient attention to the creditworthiness of banking partner around the world. Under my direction, the Debtors are establishing a centralized cash management system with proper controls and reporting mechanisms.

During these Chapter 11 Cases, cash that the Debtors are able to locate and transfer to the United States without adverse consequences, including substantially all proceeds of the global reorganization effort, will be deposited into financial institutions in the United States that are approved depository institutions in accordance with the U.S. Trustee Guidelines. Each Silo will have a centralized cash pool, and the Debtors will implement appropriate arrangements for allocating costs across the various Silos and Debtors. The Debtors expect to file promptly a Cash Management Motion that will describe the new cash management system in more detail.

Because of historical cash management failures, the Debtors do not yet know the exact amount of cash that the FTX Group held as of the Petition Date. The Debtors are working with Alvarez & Marsal to verify all cash positions. To date, it has been possible to approximate the following balances as of the Petition Date based on available books and records:

The Debtors have been in contact with banking institutions that they believe hold or may hold Debtor cash. These banking institutions have been instructed to freeze withdrawals and alerted not to accept instructions from Mr. Bankman-Fried or other signatories. Proper signature authority and reporting systems are expected to be arranged shortly.

Effective cash management also requires liquidity forecasting, which I understand was also generally absent from the FTX Group historically. The Debtors are putting in place the systems and processes necessary for Alvarez & Marsal to produce a reliable cash forecast as well as the cash reporting required for Monthly Operating Reports under the Bankruptcy Code.

And now it gets really good: read this section on the company’s “Financial Reporting”

The FTX Group received audit opinions on consolidated financial statements for two of the Silos – the WRS Silo and the Dotcom Silo – for the period ended December 31, 2021. The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform  Decentraland.

 have substantial concerns as to the information presented in these audited financial statements, especially with respect to the Dotcom Silo. As a practical matter, I do not believe it appropriate for stakeholders or the Court to rely on the audited financial statements as a reliable indication of the financial circumstances of these Silos.

The Debtors have not yet been able to locate any audited financial statements with respect to the Alameda Silo or the Ventures Silo.

Next, human resources: even more insanity here.

he FTX Group’s approach to human resources combined employees of various entities and outside contractors, with unclear records and lines of responsibility. At this time, the Debtors have been unable to prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group as of the Petition Date, or the terms of their employment. Repeated attempts to locate certain presumed employees to confirm their status have been unsuccessful to date.

Nevertheless, there is a core team of dedicated employees at the FTX Group who have stayed focused on their jobs during this crisis and with whom I have established appropriate lines of authority and working relationships. The Debtors continue to review personnel issues but I expect, based on my experience and the nature of the Debtors’ business, that a large number of employees of the Debtors will need to continue to work for the Debtors for the foreseeable future in order to establish accountability, preserve value and maximize stakeholder recoveries after the departure of Mr. Bankman-Fried. As Chief Executive Officer, I am thankful for the extraordinary efforts of this group of employees, who despite difficult personal circumstances, have risen to the occasion and demonstrated their critical importance to the Debtors.

… and better: here are FTX’s “Disbursement Controls”

The Debtors did not have the type of disbursement controls that I believe are appropriate for a business enterprise. For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of  supervisors  approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.

Digital Asset Custody… and the “use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds.”

The FTX Group did not keep appropriate books and records, or security controls, with respect to its digital assets. Mr. Bankman-Fried and Mr. Wang controlled access to digital assets of the main businesses in the FTX Group (with the exception of LedgerX, regulated by the CFTC, and certain other regulated and/or licensed subsidiaries). Unacceptable management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds, the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol, and the absence of independent governance as between Alameda (owned 90% by Mr. Bankman-Fried and 10% by Mr. Wang) and the Dotcom Silo (in which third parties had invested.

The Debtors have located and secured only a fraction of the digital assets of the FTX Group that they hope to recover in these Chapter 11 Cases. The Debtors have secured in new cold wallets approximately $740 million of cryptocurrency that the Debtors believe is attributable to either the WRS, Alameda and/or Dotcom Silos. The Debtors have not yet been able to determine how much of this cryptocurrency is allocable to each Silo, or even if such an allocation can be determined. These balances exclude cryptocurrency not currently under the Debtors’ control as a result of (a) at least $372 million of unauthorized transfers initiated on the Petition Date, during which time the Debtors immediately began moving cryptocurrency into cold storage to mitigate the risk to the remaining cryptocurrency that was accessible at the time, (b) the dilutive ‘minting’ of approximately $300 million in FTT tokens by an unauthorized source after the Petition Date and (c) the failure of the co-founders and potentially others to identify additional wallets believed to contain Debtor assets.

In response, the Debtors have engaged forensic analysts to identify potential Debtor assets on the blockchain, cybersecurity professionals to identify the parties responsible for the unauthorized transactions on and after the Petition Date and investigators to begin the process of identifying what may be very substantial transfers of Debtor property in the days, weeks and months prior to the Petition Date. The Debtors’ team includes business, accounting, forensic, technical and legal resources that I believe are among the best in the world at these activities. It is my expectation that the Debtors will require assistance from the Court with respect to these matters as the investigation and these Chapter 11 Cases continue.

Additionally, Ray notes that the fair value of the crypto assets held by the FTX International exchange was just $659,000 as of September 30. As a reminder, SBF made this sound to be as large as $5.5bn just a few days ago. While the filing does not include an estimate of crypto assets owed to customers, but says they are expected to be “significant”.

As the FT notes, amid Ray’s first statements on the collapse of FTX, a jurisdictional fight over the company’s legal proceedings has emerged. Earlier in the week, Bahamian officials filed a Chapter 15 bankruptcy in a New York federal court asking a judge there to respect a liquidation effort that had commenced in the island nation.

At issue is an FTX subsidiary known as “FTX Digital” not involved in the US Chapter 11 case in which the Bahamas says significant customer assets reside. Ray on Thursday wrote in a court filing that the Chapter 15 case should be consolidated in the Delaware bankruptcy court.

The punchline, however, was Ray’s final paragraph, a tangent on corporate communications which hardly needs discussion:

Finally, and critically, the Debtors have made clear to employees and the public that Mr. Bankman-Fried is not employed by the Debtors and does not speak for them. Mr. Bankman-Fried, currently in the Bahamas, continues to make erratic and misleading public statements. Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose connections and financial holdings in the Bahamas remain unclear to me, recently stated to a reporter on Twitter: “F*** regulators they make everything worse” and suggested the next step for him was to “win a jurisdictional battle vs. Delaware”.

To summarize:

• No record of any bank accounts
• No record of any cash accounts
• No record of any signatories
• No record of any employees
• No record of any payables or receivables
• No record of any investments
• No record of any decision-making
• No record of any board meetings
• No record of anything

And, as Bryce Weiner adds, there was also no record of any chats which were set to auto-delete, so there is no record of any internal communications.

Translation: if SBF avoids prison it is only because his tens of millions in (stolen) “donations” to Democrats have bought him a get out of jail for life card.

Dear @TheJusticeDept: is $30 million in stolen donations to Dems enough to get you a lifetime get out of jail card? https://t.co/O5SSNopnXQ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 17, 2022

The full affidavit is here.

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5G warnings and opposition have limited, slowed, and/or stopped deployment worldwide, including near U.S. airports due to dangerous interference issues with aviation equipment (see 1, 2, 3, 4).  Nevertheless, deployment and activation has continued anyway, which may or may not have created some problems at Texas airports last month.  Additionally, last month the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) asked that NO ONE operate 5G in the C-band near airports due to potential interference risks, perhaps because it has been documenting incidents all along.  More recently, the airline industry has asked for more time to address and hopefully resolve these issues.

From Inside Towers:

Airline Industry Asks for Delay Around 5G Retrofit

UPDATE Major U.S. airlines working on retrofitting radio altimeters due to potential interference from 5G C-band wireless services are now asking for an extension, reported Reuters. According to a statement made by the aviation industry on Tuesday, airlines cannot fully meet deadlines to complete upgrades and urged Washington for a grace period through the end of 2023.

Several airlines and their manufacturers, including American, Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, aviation unions, and others, signed a letter backing the FAA’s extension request. According to the letter sent to the White House, global supply chain issues mean “air carriers will likely be unable to fully meet either the December 2022 deadlines for smaller regional aircraft and many large transports or the July 2023 retrofit deadline.”

Reuters reported that the letter noted since January, “the FAA has documented over 100 FAA incidents of potential 5G interference … Unfortunately, the U.S. government agencies do not appear to be on the same page with respect to these safety issues.” The letter continued, “inter-agency government progress appears to be at a stalemate while stakeholders are doing their part to address these issues.” Inside Towers reported earlier this fall that FAA acting Administrator Billy Nolen said the agency wants the FCC to mandate voluntary mitigations both AT&T and Verizon agreed to earlier in 2022, to include 19 smaller telecoms and other spectrum holders.

Of course, 5G interference issues are not isolated to aviation equipment.  In 2020, utility companies and associations filed lawsuits against the FCC for not protecting utility infrastructure from potential electrical interference issues with 5G (see 1, 2).  Telecom provider, SpaceX has stated that Dish’s 5G satellites will cause interference issues affecting Starlink satellite service.  DirecTV and RS Submit have also warned about satellite interference issues.  The Department of Defense (DoD) has also been trying to resolve potential 5G network interference issues with military radar.  In August, a bi-partisan group of senators requested that the FCC reconsider harmful interference risks with associated Ligado’s network before allowing it to be activated.  Fortunately in September, Ligado cancelled trial network plans, perhaps because of a report that also warned about interference.  Then last month, another report revealed that the telecom industry was aware of “known RF challenges” with 5G as well!

Let’s not forget – the FCC has also granted “conditional approval” for testing 6GHz Wi-Fi despite dangerous interference issues with it as well.

But I digress –in regard to 5G, since 2017 doctors and scientists have been asking for moratoriums on Earth and in space due to biological and environmental health risks (see 1, 2, 3, 4).  Since 2018 there have been reports of people and animals experiencing symptoms and illnesses after it was activated (see 1, 2. 3, 4, 5).  In 2019, telecom executives gave congressional testimony that they had NO independent scientific evidence that 5G is safe and the majority of scientists worldwide oppose deployment.  Some researchers have also warned that activation may be contributing to COVID-19 infections as well as hundreds of thousands if not millions of bird deaths.  Of course, research has also revealed biological and environmental harm caused by exposure to 4G and other sources of wireless Wi-Fi radiation and electromagnetic fields (aka “Electrosmog”).  Nevertheless, the FCC (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) – the regulatory agency which lost a lawsuit for NOT updating wireless radiation guidelines (including 5G) since 1996 – and other American government and state agencies and committees (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) have continued to promote and fund 5G deployment anddensification (see 1, 2) as well as that of 4G and public Wi-Fi (which also poses known health and environmental risks).  American businesses – including restaurant chain Panda Express – have committed to expanding 5G deployment and activation too!

Other widely reported issues associated with 5G include poor service (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) and cybersecurity risks (see 1, 2).  This is what’s best for Americans?!

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Plato once used the allegory of a Ship of Fools to push for his vision of a wise philosopher-king as the ideal pilot for a ship of state.

Looking at the most recent numbers from Morning Consult Political Intelligence’s Projections of Country Trajectories, you would be forgiven for thinking that a great many people believe that their ship of state is piloted by fools.

With the impact of the pandemic, rising inflation, and growing geopolitical instability, it’s probably not surprising that most respondents feel their countries are on the wrong track; India and Switzerland were notable exceptions.

Below are some of the stand-out stories that we found digging through the data.

United States

Midterm elections have rarely been kind to the incumbent party in U.S. politics and the cost of living crisis, an unpopular president, and the aftermath of the global pandemic pointed towards an electoral bloodbath. This year’s election was also expected to set a new spending record, with over $9 billion raised.

Even so, despite 72% of respondents thinking that the country is on the wrong track, the governing Democrats have defied expectations and posted a historic performance during the November 8, 2022, midterm elections. To put this into context, in a president’s first term, there have been three previous instances (since 1922) of the incumbent’s party gaining (or not losing) Senate seats and losing fewer than 10 seats in the House.

Also worth noting is the large spike in negative sentiment in January 2021, following the U.S. Capitol attack, followed by the convergence of negative and positive sentiments as the peaceful transition of power became more assured.

Brazil

Horace, in Odes 1.14, describes a ship of state that is flailing at sea that eventually rights itself, claiming towards the end of the poem that “it’s my longing and no light love you carry.”

Something like that may be happening in Brazil following the loss of the often turbulent, COVID-19-denying President Jair Bolsonaro to political rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an Oct. 20, 2022, election runoff.

However, with respondents evenly split on where the country is going and the presidential election results being so close (50.9% vs. 49.1%), Lula will have his hands full governing a divided country.

India

While sentiment was overwhelmingly negative in almost every country tracked in this survey, India stood out as an outlier. India has consistently maintained a positive sentiment of between 60% and 80%, which is something only Switzerland comes close to.

The only blip was a brief period during the spring of 2021. This coincided with a deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections in the country, on top of country-wide protests against the Narendra Modi government’s deeply unpopular farm bill.

United Kingdom

The data here covers the three most recent UK Prime Ministers: Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and now Rishi Sunak, the first South Asian to hold the post.

In January 2020, Johnson had just won a Tory majority and succeeded in “Getting Brexit Done.” Political scandals and the government’s pandemic response pushed the trendline down. It only recovered briefly in the spring of 2021, following Russia’s invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine, which Johnson was widely seen as handling well. A personal visit to Kyiv on April 9, 2022, helped cement this.

Then followed Prime Minister Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget of Sept. 23, 2022, which saw the pound fall to the lowest-ever level against the dollar and the Bank of England intervene in the bond markets. The ascension of Rishi Sunak to No. 10 Downing Street has only just begun to turn around the low of 89% negative sentiment reported on Oct 23-25, 2022.

To quote the BBC comedy series, Yes, Minister, in another context, “the ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top.”

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It’s seemed evident for a while that the current fiat monetary system is, at best, unstable. At worst, it’s a Ponzi scheme whose time has expired. If that’s the case, I suspect the central bankers and 0.1% know this and might be prepared to usher in the new system before the old one collapses on itself – even as they loot it on the way down with the most significant wealth transfer in human history.

To anyone who pays attention to these trends, it seems evident that Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will be that new system.

Every indication is that CBDC’s arrival is imminent. On Tuesday, several global banks announced a partnership with the New York Federal Reserve to pilot digital dollars. 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.

From my vantage point, 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.

So many people on Team Reality have likely felt like dissidents over the last few years simply for challenging anything beyond the herd mentality. Asking questions or speaking against the narrative about topics including the likely origins of the Covid virus, usefulness of PCR, risk to most of the population, benefits of early treatment, advantages of natural immunity, safety and efficacy of vaccines, pros and cons of masks and lockdowns, and the utility of vaccine passports created an environment where people were stigmatised, alienated or outright censored. Imagine a monetary system with features baked-in to socially engineer how we live. For example:

• Health: “You didn’t take your booster… sorry, you’re not allowed in public spaces.”
• Energy: “You used your energy allotment this month… sorry, your electric car won’t start.”
• Food: “You ate too much meat this week… sorry, your money is only good for plants (or bugs).”
• Savings: “If you don’t take your rations soon… sorry, your money will expire at the end of the month.”
• Free Speech: “You shared info that we disagree with… sorry, our algorithm is fining you.” (PayPal has already started doing this.)

If CBDC ultimately becomes the new monetary system, its core features will make it so that world governments will no longer need something like a global health crisis to print money or close society. Lines of code can shape our behaviour and ensure we’re forced to stay home. The entire platform will be designed to expel labour that is no longer deemed necessary. While I initially believed the state-led pharmacological interventions were an isolated, acute threat in this era, it’s become evident they were simply one tentacle in a much larger beast. Whatever forces are insinuating this direction on the world (looking your way, Davos), it’s revealed itself to be unrelenting in its pursuit of perpetuating fear and power.

I’m well aware this must sound insane, especially to anyone that hasn’t paid attention to this trend for a while. A few years ago, I would have thought it was preposterous, but after witnessing the Government’s lies, deception and grab for control, I’ve become fearful that this may be where we’re headed. When you consider that vaccine mandates had no medically justifiable purpose, it’s entirely plausible that they were simply an on-ramp to normalise a ‘papers please’ society. In NYC, where I lived until recently, most people accepted vaxports and loved the Excelsior Pass mobile app because it was convenient. How many will feel the same about digital money, which will undoubtedly come with its share of benefits?

Central Bank Digital Currency will enable governments to impose top-down control, à la Chinese Social Credit Score. Some central bankers are even saying the quiet part out loud. Whether or not this is the programme’s objective, has there ever been a time in history when governments rejected the power they are given? At this stage, this isn’t some tinfoil hat theorising, either. There are many examples of how this type of finance-driven coercion is already underway.

• “Now the Government is asking people to apply for plastic My Number cards equipped with microchips and photos, to be linked to driver’s licences and the public health insurance plans. Health insurance cards now in use, which lack photos, will be discontinued in late 2024. People will be required to use My Number cards instead.”
  Source
• “The new pass will guarantee the allocation of fuel quota on weekly basis. A QR code will be given for each National Identity Card number (NIC), once the vehicle identification number and other details are verified.”
  Source
• “According to a report from 9News Queensland, the department has ruled that unvaccinated teachers who have been allowed to return to their employment this term after being placed on leave without pay, will cop yet another financial blow, with a ‘reduction in remuneration’ for a period of 18 weeks.”
  Source
• “The trial, which is voluntary, will use facial recognition to identify people and how many tickets they have. The technology could be extended to cover automated purchases at concession stands, restaurants and bars.”
  Source
• “As part of plans recently announced by the Government, Uganda will begin harvesting DNA and biometric data from its citizens when their cards expire in 2024 to be used in its redesigned digital identity programme.”
  Source

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s global. As we saw with the lockdowns, China is the model emulated in the west. Like the creep towards health-related authoritarian measures, unelected globalists with financial interests lurk in the background.

I’d love to be wrong about all this. However, until there is evidence, we need to be suspicious of anyone perpetuating this dangerous path, regardless of their motivations.

For a deeper dive into this topic, I highly recommend this essay by Fabio Vighi about Long Covid Monetary Policy. Edward Dowd has also spoken extensively about the relationship between the monetary system and Covid, including at this eye-opening presentation. Next, the excellent Maajid Nawaz has covered the drivers behind CBDC. Others, such as Marty Bent, Saifedean Ammous, and Allen Farrington have been ahead of the curve in identifying these risks. I share their assessment in realising that Bitcoin likely solves this.

If you have yet to notice, a primary theme of the last three-plus years (at least) is ‘freedom vs. control’, so it’s not hyperbole to suggest that the future must be decentralised if we want to ensure our children grow up in a free world.

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Joshua Stylman is a tech entrepreneur and investor who co-founded and ran Threes Brewing, a popular New York brewery until March 2022, when he resigned for reasons related to his public opposition to the New York City vaccine mandates. Find him on Twitter and on Substack, where this post first appeared.

Featured image is from The Daily Sceptic

Si intensifica il bombardamento mediatico con le armi di distrazione di massa. Pochi giorni fa la Polonia annuncia di essere stata colpita da due missili russi, i grandi media diffondono la notizia, scatta l’allarme, Mosca comunica che è un falso ma nessuno l’ascolta. Infine la NATO ammette che l’incidente è stato causato da un missile ucraino, ma il gioco ormai è fatto.

Altra arma di distrazione di massa la notizia data dal quotidiano britannico Mirror: il filosofo russo Alexander Dugin ha chiesto che il presidente Putin venga rovesciato e ucciso. I grandi media diffondono la notizia su scala mondiale, poi arriva la sconferma di Dugin ma viene sostanzialmente ignorata.

Nella guerra mediatica si distingue il nostro mainstream che, mentre diffonde queste ed altre colossali fake news, nasconde importanti notizie provenienti da fonti ufficiali, tipo:  la quantità di armi e munizioni che NATO e UE forniscono all’Ucraina è tale da rendere necessaria la ricostituzione delle scorte con un enorme costo in denaro pubblico.

La stessa tecnica viene usata nei resoconti di eventi internazionali, come l’incontro al G20 tra il presidente Biden e il presidente cinese Xi.  Ci si limita a riportare le parole di Biden che l’incontro con Xi è stato “aperto e sincero”, ma si nasconde il fatto che, nella National  Defense Strategy 2022, gli Stati Uniti dichiarano di essere “pronti a prevalere in un conflitto, dando la priorità alla sfida della Cina nella regione dell’Indo-Pacifico, quindi  alla sfida della Russia in Europa”.

Dal massimo documento strategico statunitense emerge il quadro di un mondo che si avvicina al baratro della guerra nucleare, spinto da un Occidente sempre più minoritario, disposto a tutto pur di non perdere  il ruolo dominante che esercita da secoli. Tutto questo, però, è nascosto sotto la cappa del silenzio mediatico. 

Manlio Dinucci

 

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According to the global grassroots organization 9/11 Pilot Whistleblowers website (https://911pilots.org/), there were no Muslim hijackers at the controls of the 9/11 aircraft but that these aircraft were electronically hijacked and remotely controlled through employment of a system called the uninterruptible autopilot that enables a remote source to take complete control of the aircraft autopilot and flight management computer and remotely guide it to its target destination. Once engaged, the pilots cannot disconnect this system.

According to the 9/11 Commission, the alleged hijackers had never flown the sophisticated B-757 and B-767 aircraft in their lives but were mainly trained in light, single engine Cessna 172s and the like.

This would be akin to only having driven your family automobile and climbing into a huge 18-wheeler semi-tractor trailer that you had never driven before, getting it up to a very high speed, and driving it through a garage without scraping the sides of the truck or hopping into a formula one race car that you hadn’t driven before and keeping it on the track at a very high speed.

Just because one can pilot a Cessna 172 does not qualify one to pilot a large commercial jet aircraft at very high speeds. It just doesn’t work that way.

A comparison of the cockpit layout of these types of aircraft will demonstrate the ludicrousness of the official story. There is no way the hijackers could have climbed into the cockpits of the jet aircraft, interpret the instrumentation and flight navigation systems, and fly the aircraft to their designated targets.

So how did three of four aircraft flies from the point at which they were hijacked to where they flew with cruise missile precision into buildings on the first attempt in New York City and Washington, DC?

One must first review the origin and history of the remote control of large airborne aircraft before we continue.

Over 75-years ago, in 1944, toward the end of World War II, the US Army Air Corp launched Operation Aphrodite in Europe wherein old B-24 bomber aircraft were gutted out to lighten the weight of the aircraft, loaded with 30000 pounds of highly incendiary compound called Torpex, and remotely flown into targets in Europe. Pilots were required to make the takeoff but once airborne, they bailed out of the aircraft.

It should be noted that Joe Kennedy, JFK’s older brother, died on one such top secret missions when the aircraft exploded due to a malfunction before he could bail out of the aircraft.

There are other such examples of remote control of aircraft, but we will jump ahead forty years to 1984 where NASA and the FAA conducted a joint crash test experiment in a remote location using a large four engine B-720 commercial jet aircraft loaded with only crash dummies and video cameras to test crew and passenger survivability in the event of a crash landing. The aircraft was flown by remote control several times around the traffic pattern before being intentionally crash landed.

Jumping ahead yet another ten years or so to the mid-90s, the uninterruptible autopilot system previously described was developed and produced as a device capable of remotely taking control of an airborne hijacked commercial jet and guiding to an auto landing at one of many airports in the world.

(The fact that this technology existed in the mid-90’s years before 9/11 is given by the testimony of an avionics technician who actually worked on this system that was installed on a B-757 aircraft).

Let us now take for example the hijacker of American Airlines flight 77 supposedly flown by 29-year-old Saudi Arabian hijacker Hani Hanjour who was described as a very poor student pilot that could barely speak English, a requirement to obtain a pilot license.

AA77 took off from Washington Dulles airport headed for the west coast. After leveling off at cruise altitude for a while, the aircraft made a U turn heading back towards Washington in a descent. According to the official narrative, at 7000 feet the aircraft commenced a 330-corkscrew turn descended to just a few feet off the surface without skidding it at over 500 mph to strike the Office of Naval Intelligence with military precision on its first attempt!

Digressing, in August 2001, just one month prior to 9/11. Hanjour attempted to rent a small, single-engine Cessna 172 from the Freeway airport in Maryland but was denied rental by the chief flight instructor there, Marcel Bernard, because he could not handle the aircraft! And yet, Hanjour was able to accomplish this amazing aerial feat on his first try.

Given that the alleged hijackers were unqualified to fly the aircraft that day, one must ask how the aircraft were hijacked and flown into buildings as reported by the 9/11 Commission?

The only viable explanation that can be offered is through employment of the uninterruptible autopilot system. How else could this have been accomplished? You be the judge.

In August, 2020, a Federal Aviation Administration whistleblower report was filed via the FAA Hotline by the 9/11 Pilot Whistleblowers members alleging the use of the uninterruptible autopilot on 9/11.

Initially, this federal aviation oversight agency was very receptive to the vast evidence provided and even assigned a Seattle-based FAA aeronautical engineer to handle the case until it was recognized the depth and breadth of the allegations being made.

Communications all but ceased with the exception of a few emails from the FAA that weakly attempted to refute these claims. Freedom of Information Act requests for relevant information indicated that the FAA was being less than truthful in their responses before communications ceased by this agency and the stonewalling began.

Consequently, over the next two years, letters and emails were sent, and phone calls were made to every relevant government office in Washington, including to the FAA Administrator, Secretary of Transportation, Department of Transportation Inspector General, US Attorney General, Director of National Intelligence, FBI Director, the House Government Oversight Committee leadership even President Biden and many others without responses!

Subsequently, appeals have been made to the Pakistani, Chinese, and Russian governments to review evidence and possibly commence an investigation into the lies of 9/11. If the US government is uninterested in investigating our assertions then perhaps a foreign government will.

Hani Hanjour could not fly a Cessna 172, never mind a B-757, a fact that was known by the 9/11 Commission and the FBI but totally ignored. One must ask why the US federal government continues to ignore this case. Again…you be the judge.

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This article was originally published on The Intel Drop.

Captain Dan Hanley had a 35-year combined flying career in US naval aviation/United Airlines as a pilot and currently serves as Director of 9/11 Pilot Whistleblowers. He lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and may be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from The Intel Drop

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Appealing to the baser instincts of the masses while growing rich and powerful by taxing their hard labour has been the bottom line formula for the maintenance of top-down pyramid power for at least the past thousand years in the Western World. 

Various forms of deception concerning ‘people power’ disguised the main objective – to convince the mass of the people that their so-called ‘freedom’ depends upon their masters having the where-with-all to instruct their every move.  The particular version whereby these masters of control are ‘elected’ to run the affairs of state earned the infamous misnomer ‘democracy’.

The common denominator throughout is a form of rule which strips out the natural urge of human beings to live a meaningful life of aspiration towards a higher purpose. A purpose that breaks the superficial allure of self-enrichment and/or of a life of slavery sprinkled each day with just enough sweeteners to convey the sense that there is some compensation for unremitting serfdom.

The top-down control system that has run this planet for a long time now has come under various descriptive headings: plutocracy, autocracy, kleptocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy, meritocracy and of course, aristocracy. The last two perhaps offering a tinge of hope concerning a certain level of ability and responsibility to lead.

But of all these headings – and there are more, none advance or describe a leadership based upon adherence to ‘the path of truth’. To follow the path of truth is a calling which goes beyond the responsible leadership suggested by ‘noblesse oblige’ or the meritocracy of ‘greatest ability’.

It suggests another dimension of commitment altogether. A commitment to justice, honour and particularly the nurturing of the very essence of mankind’s spiritual calling.

As these are the qualities that form the ingredients of a maturing vision of ‘the new society’ that we all long for, then we surely need to invent a new heading to encapsulate the aspirations and goals of a human race intent upon laying the foundations of a dynamic, holistic and unifying concept of governance and leadership.

Governance, based upon the premise that to seek and to implement the truth is the highest and most appropriate goal for a humanity whose origins are of a Divine nature.

So bye bye plutocracy, autocracy, kleptocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy, meritocracy, aristocracy – and democracy.

Hello the pursuit of truth as the fundamental precept of a new society. That new society which must arise-up out of the ashes of today’s burned-out status quo, still posing as a working model of untarnished law and order.

Shall we caste a brand new mould for enlightened governance and call it a ‘Veritocracy’? (Veritas, from the Latin ‘truth’).

A Veritocracy will advocate for a transformation in the way governance is structured and put into practice. It will be beyond ‘politics’ and will not be top-down, but ‘people responsible’. It will reach back into the Common Law definition of true governance, in which a chosen leadership commits to follow the principles of Universal law and order; to honouring a calling upon mankind to forever leave behind the political deceit which dogs the world today and ensure that unselfish wisdom triumphs over self-centred personal ambition.

If the leadership of tomorrow is to be an organic form of evolutionary advancement on the best of the past, then it has nowhere else to go other than onwards and upwards, as our natural vision and impulse gravitates towards the supreme consciousness of our Creator from whence we came.

We humans are, when we allow ourselves to be, the standard bearers of highest truth.

So far history has not produced an era motivated by ‘Veritocracy’, the pursuit of truth. But all that seems about to change. The March Hare has a spring in his step; the air is clearing; the light lucid and bright and the intoxicating cyclic rebirth of Spring is just around the corner.

All seems set to announce a special event in the lives of humankind: the supplanting of a decaying democracy by a commitment to the power of truth. A rising sun burning away the mists of deception to reveal a higher calling in the collective governance of the affairs of man.

So, please raise your glasses in a toast to ‘Veritocracy’!

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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher.  He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and Co-founder of the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology HARE. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is strongly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Footnote: The name ‘Veritocracy’ was conceived by Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology  (HARE) co-founder Justin Walker.

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World War III is America’s war to capture Russia, and the way to do it is to position its missiles so close to Moscow that it can then declare “Checkmate!” and the missiles would take just 5 minutes to annihilate The Kremlin. Only Ukraine is that close to Moscow — close enough so that from missile-launch to annihilating Moscow would be so fast that Russia’s central command would be dead before they’d be able to confirm the launch and then launch their retaliatory missiles.

This is the reality: America’s goal now isn’t to take Iran, nor to take Ukraine; it now is to take Russia itself; and this is the reason why when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, America’s side secretly continued on its Cold War, in order ultimately to conquer Russia itself.

On 30 June 2017,  journalist Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian headlined at the neoconservative Foreign Policy magazine, “64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup: New documents reveal how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy.”

That “insubordinate spy” was Kim Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson and a member of America’s Deep State — the group of perhaps only a thousand extremely wealthy individuals who actually control the post-WW-II (post 1945) U.S. Government. Sometimes, even the U.S. President himself doesn’t know what the Deep State are doing. But President Eisenhower knew very well, and he was among the Deep State’s top agents. His Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and brother Allen Dulles (CIA chief) also knew, and approved.

The following passage from her report summarizes the situation very well, and accurately:

The U.S government long denied involvement in the coup.

The State Department first released coup-related documents in 1989, but edited out any reference to CIA involvement. Public outrage coaxed a government promise to release a more complete edition, and some material came out in 2013. Two years later, the full installment of declassified material was scheduled — but might have interfered with Iran nuclear talks and were delayed again. … They were finally released last week, though numerous original CIA telegrams from that period are known to have disappeared or been destroyed long ago. …

Beyond final proof of CIA involvement, there’s another very interesting takeaway in the documents, said Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University: New details on the true political leanings of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a cleric and leading political figure in the 1950s.

In the Islamic Republic, clerics are always the good guys. Kashani has long been seen as one of the heroes of nationalism during that period. As recently as January of this year, Iran’s supreme leader praised Kashani’s role in the nationalization of oil.

Kashani’s eventual split from Mossadegh is widely known. Religious leaders in the country feared the growing power of the communist Tudeh Party, and believed that Mossadegh was too weak to save the country from the socialist threat.

But the newly released documents show that Kashani wasn’t just opposed to Mossadegh — he was also in close communication with the Americans throughout the period leading up to the coup. …

Actually: the clergy’s antagonism towards Mossadegh for his secularism, non-sectarianism, his being opposed to any theocracy, has always been known, but is too great an embarrassment to Iran’s post-1979 theocratic Government for them to admit that they had actually been in league with the U.S. regime in 1953. The only time when Iran was a democracy was the brief period whem Mossadegh led it. Mossadegh was nobody’s stooge — not America’s, not the Soviet’s, not the clerics’ but an authentic democrat: a progressive, whose top concern was the welfare of the citizenry. That’s why the U.S. regime, which Truman and Eisenhower installed in the U.S. on 25 July 1945, overthrew and replaced him.

President Obama’s chief agent planning and running the coup that took place in Ukraine during February 2014 was the neoconservative Victoria Nuland, of the State Department. She had previously been the chief foreign-policy advisor to the neoconservative V.P. Dick Cheney, and was a close friend of the neoconservative Hillary Clinton.

So: When will the U.S. regime and its ‘news’-media and its academics start to call the overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s Government in February 2014 a “coup” instead of a ‘democratic revolution’ there? Or: will a terminal nuclear phase of the resulting WW III, that now is being waged, prevent it from ever being acknowledged?

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review