The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime

September 23rd, 2022 by Jenin Younes

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One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.

The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.

Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardian still like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.

Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that:

“Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.”

Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a video depicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.

Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”

Federal district courts have recently dismissed similar cases on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove state action. According to those judges, public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so, still did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs were censored on social media due to government action. Put another way, the judges declined to take the government at its word. But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage.

The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Correspondence publicized in Missouri further corroborates the theory that the companies dramatically increased censorship under duress from the government, strengthening the First Amendment claim. For example, shortly after President Biden asserted in July of 2021 that Facebook (Meta) was “killing people” by permitting “misinformation” about COVID vaccines to percolate, an executive from the company contacted the surgeon general to appease the White House. In a text message to Murthy, the executive acknowledged that the “FB team” was “feeling a little aggrieved” as “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” while he sought to “de-escalate and work together collaboratively.” These are not the words of a person who is acting freely; to the contrary, they denote the mindset of someone who considers himself subordinate to, and subject to punishment by, a superior. Another text, exchanged between Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and another CISA employee who now works at Microsoft, reads: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This is another incontrovertible piece of evidence that social media companies are censoring content under duress from the government, and not due to their directors’ own ideas of the corporate or common good.

Further, emails expressly establish that the social media companies intensified censorship efforts and removed particular individuals from their platforms in response to the government’s demands. Just a week after President Biden accused social media companies of “killing people,” the Meta executive mentioned above wrote the surgeon general an email telling him, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken further to address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to [them].” About a month later, the same executive informed Murthy that Meta intended to expand its COVID policies to “further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content” and that the company was “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content.”

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and a prominent critic of government-imposed COVID restrictions, has publicized internal Twitter communications he obtained through discovery in his own lawsuit showing that high-ranking members of the Biden administration, including White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor Andrew Slavitt, had pushed Twitter to permanently suspend him from the platform. In messages from April 2021, a Twitter employee noted that a meeting with the White House had gone relatively well, though the company’s representatives had fielded “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” to which “mercifully we had answers” (emphasis added).

About two months later, days after Dr. Fauci publicly deemed Berenson a danger, and immediately following the president’s statement that social media companies were “killing people,” and despite assurances from high-ups at the company that his account was in no danger, Twitter permanently suspended Berenson’s account. If this does not qualify as government censorship of an individual based on official disapproval of his viewpoints, it would be difficult to say what might. Berenson was reinstated on Twitter in July 2022 as part of the settlement in his lawsuit.

In 1963, the Supreme Court, deciding Bantam Books v. Sullivan, held that “public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against” booksellers who carried materials containing obscenity could constitute a First Amendment violation. The same reasoning should apply to the Biden administration campaign to pressure tech companies into enforcing its preferred viewpoints.

The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. Just like the booksellers in Bantam, social media platforms undoubtedly “do not lightly disregard” such possible consequences, as Twitter’s use of the term “mercifully” indicates.

It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and Kulldorff will be able to show that Fauci and Collins explicitly ordered tech companies to censor them and their Great Barrington Declaration. More discovery lies ahead, from top White House officials including Dr. Fauci, that may yield evidence of even more direct involvement by the government in preventing Americans from hearing their views. But Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and countless social media users have had their First Amendment rights violated nonetheless.

The government’s involvement in censorship of specific perspectives, and direct role in escalating such censorship, has what is known in First Amendment law as a chilling effect: Fearing the repercussions of articulating certain views, people self-censor by avoiding controversial topics. Countless Americans, including the Missouri plaintiffs, have attested that they do exactly that for fear of losing influential and sometimes lucrative social media accounts, which can contain and convey significant social and intellectual capital.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognizes that a corollary of the First Amendment right to speak is the right to receive information because “the right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender’s First Amendment right to send them.” All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, and myriad additional people, like the reporters who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post and found themselves denounced as agents of Russian disinformation, who have been censored by social media platforms at the urging of the U.S. government. That deprivation strangled public debate on multiple issues of undeniably public importance. It allowed Fauci, Collins, and various other government actors and agencies, to mislead the public into believing there was ever a scientific consensus on lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. It also arguably influenced the 2020 election.

The administration has achieved public acquiescence to its censorship activities by convincing many Americans that the dissemination of “misinformation” and “disinformation” on social media presents a grave threat to public safety and even national security. Over half a century ago, in his notorious concurrence in New York Times v. United States (in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent the newspaper from printing the Pentagon Papers) Justice Hugo Black rejected the view that the government may invoke such concepts to override the First Amendment: “[t]he word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment,” he wrote. Justice Black cited a 1937 opinion by Justice Charles Hughes explaining that this approach was woefully misguided: “The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly … that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government.”

The Founders of our country understood that line-drawing becomes virtually impossible once censorship begins and that the personal views and biases of those doing the censoring will inevitably come into play. Moreover, they recognized that sunlight is the best disinfectant: The cure for bad speech is good speech. The cure for lies, truth. Silencing people does not mean problematic ideas disappear; it only drives their adherents into echo chambers. People who are booted off Twitter, for example, often turn to Gab and Gettr, where they are less likely to encounter challenges to patently false posts claiming, for example, that COVID vaccines are toxic.

Indeed, this case could not illustrate more clearly the First Amendment’s chief purpose, and why the framers of the Constitution did not create an exception for “misinformation.” Government actors are just as prone to bias, hubris, and error as the rest of us. Drs. Fauci and Collins, enamored of newfound fame and basking in self-righteousness, took it upon themselves to suppress debate about the most important subject of the day. Had Americans learned of the Great Barrington Declaration and been given the opportunity to contemplate its ideas, and had scientists like Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff been permitted to speak freely, the history of the pandemic era may have unfolded with far less tragedy—and with far less damage to the institutions that are supposed to protect public health.

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Jenin Younes is litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Featured image: Francis Collins, at right, and Anthony FauciTOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL

The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

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US Urges Top UN Court to Dismiss Iran’s Frozen Assets Claim

September 23rd, 2022 by Middle East Eye

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The United States has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to dismiss a case by Iran which claims that Washington breached a treaty and allowed courts to freeze assets of Iranian companies.

“Iran’s case should be dismissed in its entirety because of the principle of ‘unclean hands’,” Richard Visek, acting legal adviser at the US State Department, said on Wednesday, as the US set out its opening arguments in the case at The Hague.

In using the legal term “unclean hands”, Visek argued that Tehran cannot complain about US courts confiscating assets because the actions that led to the asset freeze were the result of Iran’s own illegal conduct.

Iran first brought the case against Washington in 2016, accusing it of breaching a 1955 friendship treaty by allowing American courts to freeze assets of Iranian companies, including $1.75bn from Iran’s central bank which is now held in a Citibank account in New York.

The friendship treaty was signed decades before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which toppled US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The revolution led to the severing of US-Iranian relations and Washington eventually withdrew from the treaty in 2018.

In October 1983, a suicide bomber in a truck loaded with military-grade explosives attacked US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American troops and 58 French soldiers. Iran has long denied being involved. However, in 2003 a US judge found Tehran responsible and a 2012 US law ordered Iran’s central bank to hand over the frozen Iranian assets to the families of those killed in the Beirut bombing.

In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled it had jurisdiction to hear the case, rejecting an argument from the US that its national security interests superseded the 1955 treaty.

“The freedom of navigation and commerce guaranteed by the treaty have been gravely breached,” Tavakol Habibzadeh, head of international legal affairs for Iran, told the ICJ on Monday, as reported by the Associated Press.

Iran’s case against the UK

The ICJ, also known as the World Court, is the UN’s highest court dealing with disputes between countries.

While its rulings are binding, the court has no power to enforce them, and Washington and Tehran are among a number of countries to have disregarded its decisions in the past.

Iran had previously brought up another case with the ICJ when it called on the United Kingdom to pay more than $500m in debt to Tehran from before the Iranian revolution.

Shortly before the 1979 overthrow of the shah, the British government struck an arms deal to sell more than 1,500 Chieftain tanks and 250 repair vehicles to Iran.

Iran paid £600m ($795m) for the tanks in advance, but having delivered only 185 tanks, Britain refused to deliver the remaining equipment when the shah was deposed.

The international court of arbitration in The Hague ordered Britain to pay the debt in 2001, a ruling upheld in 2009. However, the two countries have been locked in a prolonged legal battle in the British courts over the exact sum owed, and whether or not the UK should pay interest on it.

In 2017, Iran also filed a lawsuit at the ICJ demanding the court order the suspension of renewed US sanctions, which it says are devastating its economy.

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Featured image is by Velvet, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Pegasus and Other Spyware Threatens UN Human Rights Work, Guterres Warns

September 23rd, 2022 by Dania Akkad

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Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, has warned of the serious threat spyware programmes like Pegasus pose to the UN’s work on human rights in a damning report set to be debated next week.

Expanding digital surveillance by states and non-state actors has impacted the ability of civil society actors to submit information to the UN and has made them more vulnerable to intimidation and reprisal, Guterres cautions.

“United Nations actors have pointed to growing and concerning evidence of online surveillance, privacy intrusion, and cyberattacks by state and non-state actors of victims and civil society communications and activities,” the UN chief writes.

“The lack of trust in the digital sphere among those sharing information and testimony with the United Nations on sensitive issues can discourage future cooperation.”

His findings are part of an annual report that monitors the challenges faced by those seeking to cooperate with the organisation and focuses on April 2021 to May 2022.

During this period, much of the UN’s work was conducted digitally in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, making threats of surveillance and spyware especially concerning.

In particular, he singles out the potential repercussions that Pegasus, the military-grade spyware made by the Israel-based NSO Group, has had for Palestinian, Bahraini, and Moroccan organisations and human rights defenders who have cooperated with the UN.

He notes that staff at three prominent Palestinian NGOs – Addameer, Al-Haq, and Bisan Center for Research and Development – were surveilled and had their phones hacked with Pegasus in 2021. The hacking came two weeks after the Israeli government had designated the organisations and three others as “terrorist associations”.

Israel did not respond to the allegations highlighted in the report.

Repercussions for cooperating with UN

In Bahrain, the report highlights two human rights defenders, Ebtisam al-Saegh and Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, in relation to spyware.

This January, investigators found that al-Saegh’s mobile phone had been hacked at least eight times between August and November 2019 with Pegasus. Alwadaei’s mobile number was discovered on a leaked list of numbers identified as targets by NSO Group’s government clients between 2017 and 2019.

Both have allegedly experienced earlier repercussions for their cooperation with the UN, Guterres notes.

As Middle East Eye has previously reported, al-Saegh, who is based in Bahrain, was detained in March 2017 for seven hours at Bahrain International Airport on her return from the UN Human Rights Council, where she spoke out about violations in the kingdom.

She was interrogated for five hours and had her passport and mobile phone confiscated.

A couple of months later, interrogators from Bahrain’s National Security Agency abused her physically and verbally, and sexually assaulted her at Muharraq police station. She was told that if she did not cease her activism she would be raped.

“As someone who has been unable to heal from the torture and sexual assault experienced by Bahraini security due to the culture of impunity that allows my abusers to walk free, I feel deep pain in knowing that malicious spyware has now been used against me,” al-Saegh told MEE.

Alwadaei, director of advocacy for the UK-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), who lives in exile in London, and several of his relatives have faced reprisal, including arbitrary arrest and removal of citizenship, as a result of his continuous engagement with the UN, Guterres notes.

The Bahraini government, in response to the report, said that neither al-Saegh, nor Alwadaei and his family had been targeted because of their human rights activity or cooperation with the UN, but did not respond to the spyware allegations.

In Morocco, Guterres reports on the case of veteran Sahrawi human rights defender Aminatou Haidar, who has allegedly faced threats, physical attacks, constant police monitoring, legal action, and online surveillance for her ongoing cooperation with the UN.

In March 2022, forensic evidence from an investigation reportedly showed that Haidar’s mobile phones were targeted and intercepted by Pegasus in October and November 2021.

“I also blame the NSO Group, which I consider to be a company that profits from human rights violations with espionage technology provided to authoritarian countries such as Morocco,” Haidar told MEE in March.

Guterres also writes that the UN received information that Claude Mangin-Asfari, the wife of imprisoned Sahrawi human rights defender Ennaama Asfari, and her husband’s lawyer were targeted with Pegasus in 2021.

‘The price human rights defenders pay’

In a response to the report’s allegations, Moroccan authorities categorically denied that Haidar, Mangin-Asfari, or her husband’s lawyer were hacked with Pegasus, and also said that they categorically rejected that Haidar had been subject to constant police surveillance or physical violence during the reporting period.

Alwadaei said the report reveals “the price human rights defenders pay for cooperating with the UN” and the extent to which repressive goverments will go to intimidate activists.

“This important recognition by the UN secretary-general on governments’ misuse of Pegasus spyware is an important step. The UN should follow up by calling for greater scrutiny of surveillance technology and its misuse by states, coupled with improved regulation,” he said.

“As someone named in this report who has been targeted by the Bahraini government, the state’s response fails to even acknowledge their use of surveillance technology against human rights activists. This should not go unchallenged by the UN.”

The report is scheduled to be debated on 29 September at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

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What in the Hell Was Washington Thinking?

September 23rd, 2022 by David Stockman

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What in the hell were those bloody-minded Washington/NATO neocons thinking? At any time in the last nine months they could have had a diplomatic settlement with Russia that would have:

  • Avoided/ended the war in Ukraine, thereby saving tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and hundreds of billion of economic cost and destruction;
  • Allowed the Russian speaking population of the Donbas a substantial degree of self-governance and autonomy from the hostile government in Kiev;
  • Permitted the historic Russian territory of Crimea to remain under Russian control per the wishes of the overwhelming share of its Russian-speaking population;
  • Kept NATO out of Ukraine and its missiles away from Russia’s doorstep;
  • Removed NATO missile bases from the the old Warsaw Pact countries, where NATO had expanded in breach of Washington’s solemn promise made at the time of the German reunification to not extend NATO “one inch to the east” .

Would this have furthered the national security of the US and Europe, permitted Europe’s then flourishing peaceful commerce with Russia to continue and avoided the current global plague of soaring energy and food prices caused by the Sanctions War?

Yes, it would have. In spades!

So the question recurs. What alternative path did Washington/NATO envision and how could the likely consequences have improved upon either the above summarized settlement, which has been possible all along or, far worse still, the disastrous end game which is now unfolding?

The fact is, after Putin’s speech of yesterday the phrase “disastrous end game” is barely adequate to describe the scenario ahead. That’s because it signaled that the relative restraint of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” (SMO) is now over, and what lies ahead is full scale political and military warfare that can only end in calamity for Ukraine, NATO and indeed the world:

The heart of the matter is that Putin is now :

  • Mobilizing Russia’s entire GDP, which is at least 15X greater than what’s left of Ukraine’s;
  • Mustering 300,000 fresh reserves or double the number of Russian forces now deployed in the SMO;
  • Abandoning the policy of not attacking Ukraine’s civilian electric power grid and railroad system, which has been crucial to Ukraine’s survival to date and the West’s massive supply of weapons across the western border and through the interior rail network;
  • Preparing to annex the two breakaway Donbas republics in the east and the Kherson and  Zaporizhzhia regions in the south after hurriedly called referendums, which will transform the war into an explicit NATO-enabled attack on Russia proper.

To be sure, Kiev and Washington are screaming loudly that these referendums are “shams”, and it’s probably the case that the ballot counting will be no better than what occurred in the state of Georgia in 2020.

But the fact is, these regions are populated by Russian-speakers who have no love for or loyalty to the anti-Russian government in Kiev; who have already lined-up for Russian citizenship in large numbers; and who, in any case, fear the retribution of the Ukrainian military and secret service far more than they fear the Russians.

Stated differently, the populations of the Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR) and those of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are not begging to be “liberated” by Ukrainian armies, which are every bit as brutal and vindictive as the Russian military has been alleged to be, and surely don’t give a whit about Washington/NATO’s hypocritical malarkey about the rule of law and the sanctity of borders.

In fact, the overwhelming share of the populations (75-90%) of these regions have voted for the pro-Russian candidate in every presidential election held in the Ukraine since the Soviet Union’s mailed fist was lifted from their governance in 1991.

That is to say, they have implicitly voted for partition of a country that never existed until it was nailed together by the tyrannical rule of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev after 1922. So doing, they effected an arbitrary rearrangement of borders that plopped what had been “New Russia” for upwards of 200 years into the commie designed Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine for no better reason than it suited their whims and convenience of rule.

But now, within a matter of weeks, Ukraine’s borders will be restored to the pre-WWI status quo ante. Whether fair and square or not, the vote will be overwhelmingly in favor of separation and upon the request of the peoples of “Novorussiya”, Putin has indicated that these regions will once again become formal Russian territories.

What that means, in turn, of course, is that NATO’s war in support of the Kiev regime will become an explicit war on the territory of Russia. And that surely portends a bloody and disastrous end game because the only way it does not end up in an armistice after untold more deaths and destruction, followed by secession of the new “Russian” territories , anyway, is if Ukraine wins the war.

That’s not going to happen. Not in a blue moon.

Once Moscow takes the gloves off and savages Ukraine’s electric power grid and railway system it will be all over except the shouting. The massive flow of western armaments, which has kept Kiev in the game to date, will be drastically curtailed; and the civilian population in the Kiev-controlled areas will be left high and dry, preparing to shiver in the dark as the severe Ukrainian winter approaches.

Nor does the alleged surprise victory of Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv area in recent weeks change the scenario. What that actually accomplished was the sacrifice of thousands of Ukrainian troops in the apparent faint attack on Kherson in the south in order to regain a few thousand square miles of lightly populated open steppe around Kharkiv.

Even then, the alleged hastily retreating Russian army was not that at all. The area had been mostly occupied and defended by the lightly trained volunteers of the Republic of Luhansk, not the trained professionals of the Russian armed forces.

Now that the Ukrainian army has driven out the Luhansk volunteers and occupied the open steppe lands, it remains for Russian dominance of the air and artillery war to encircle the alleged victors and pulverize them from the air and via long-range artillery that is even now being brought into position.

That is to say, in a few weeks the Ukrainian “victory “will disappear from the MSM, just as have so many other alleged setbacks to the Russian cause.

Instead, the news will be about the brutality of the Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure; the roadblocks it will put in front of what has been the demolition derby of US/NATO supplied weaponry to the battle front; and the fact that without massive new aid from Washington beyond the $50 billion already authorized, civilian life in the Kiev-controlled portions of the country will be on the verge of collapse and the regime in Kiev will be on virtual life-support from Washington.

In short, the end game in lieu of the diplomatic settlement which could have been had long ago will be either a more unfavorable partition of Ukraine, leaving Kiev and the western regions as a bankrupt landlocked rump state and ward of the west, or an escalation that involves direct military engagement by NATO and leaves the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war.

So much for using Ukraine as cannon fodder to drastically “weaken Russia” and to force the demonized Vlad Putin from power. To the contrary, by the time Europe’s cold and dark winter is underway, it will be European governments, which slavishly did Washington’s bidding, that will be falling like dominoes.

More importantly, it will also be the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill asking our opening question of Biden’s infinitely foolish national security team: Indeed, what in the hell were you thinking?!

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David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

Plan A: US-Russia Nuclear War Simulation

September 23rd, 2022 by Princeton Science and Global Security

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SGS developed a new simulation for a plausible escalating war between the United States and Russia using realistic nuclear force postures, targets and fatality estimates. It is estimated that there would be more than 90 million people dead and injured within the first few hours of the conflict.

This project is motivated by the need to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans. The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years as the United States and Russia have abandoned long-standing nuclear arms control treaties, started to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons and expanded the circumstances in which they might use nuclear weapons.

This four-minute audio-visual piece is based on independent assessments of current U.S. and Russian force postures, nuclear war plans, and nuclear weapons targets. It uses extensive data sets of the nuclear weapons currently deployed, weapon yields, and possible targets for particular weapons, as well as the order of battle estimating which weapons go to which targets in which order in which phase of the war to show the evolution of the nuclear conflict from tactical, to strategic to city-targeting phases.

The resulting immediate fatalities and casualties that would occur in each phase of the conflict are determined using data from NUKEMAP. All fatality estimates are limited to acute deaths from nuclear explosions and would be significantly increased by deaths occurring from nuclear fallout and other long-term effects. The simulation was developed by Alex Wellerstein, Tamara Patton, Moritz Kütt, and Alex Glaser with assistance from Bruce Blair, Sharon Weiner, and Zia Mian. The sound is by Jeff Snyder.

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Featured image is from Princeton Science and Global Security

“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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From ‘Special Military Operation’ to Open War

September 23rd, 2022 by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow

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The televised speech yesterday morning by Vladimir Putin and the follow-up remarks by his Minister of Defense Shoigu announcing the partial mobilization of Russia’s army reserves to add a total of 300,000 men to the military campaign in Ukraine have been widely reported in the Western press.  Plans to hold referendums on accession to the Russian Federation in the Donbas republics this weekend and also in the Kherson and Zaporozhie oblasts in the very near future also were reported by the Western press.  However, as is very commonly the case, the interrelationship of these two developments has not been seen, or, if seen, has not been shared with the general public. Since precisely this interrelationship has been highlighted on Russian state television talk shows these past two days, I use this opportunity to bring to my readership the key facts on what turn the ongoing conflict in Ukraine will now take and an updated view of when it will end and with what results.

The very idea of referendums in the Donbas has been ridiculed by mainstream media in the United States and Europe. They are denounced as ‘sham’ and we are told that the results will not be recognized.  In fact, the Kremlin does not at all care whether the results are recognized as valid in the West.  Their logic lies elsewhere. As for the Russian public, the only critical remark about the referendums has been about the timing, with even some patriotic folks saying openly that it is too early to hold the vote given that the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhie and Kherson oblasts have not yet been fully ‘liberated.’ Here too, the logic of these votes lies elsewhere.

It is a foregone conclusion that the Donbas republics and other territories of Ukraine now under Russian occupation will vote to join the Russian Federation. In the case of Donetsk and Lugansk, it was only under pressure from Moscow that their 2014 referendums were about declaring sovereignty and not about becoming part of Russia. Such annexation or merger was not welcomed by the Kremlin back then because Russia was not ready to face the expected massive economic, political and military attack from the West which would have followed.  Today, Moscow is more than ready: indeed it has survived very well all the economic sanctions imposed by the West from even before 24 February as well as the ever growing supply to Ukraine of military materiel and ‘advisers’ from the NATO countries.

The vote over joining Russia will likely hit 90% or more in favor.  What will immediately follow on the Russian side is also perfectly clear:  within hours of the declaration of referendum results, the Russian State Duma will pass a bill on ‘reunification’ of these territories with Russia and within a day or so, it will be approved by the upper chamber of parliament and immediately thereafter the bill will be signed into law by President Putin.

Looking past his service as a KGB intelligence operative, which is all that Western “Russia specialists” go on about endlessly in their articles and books, let us also remember Vladimir Putin’s law degree. As President, he has systematically stayed within domestic and international law. He will do so now.  Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin has not ruled by presidential decree; he has ruled by laws promulgated by a bicameral parliament constituted from several parties.  He has ruled in keeping with international law promulgated by the United Nations. UN law speaks for the sanctity of territorial integrity of Member States; but UN law also speaks of the sanctity of self-determination of peoples.

What follows from the formal merger of these territories with Russia?  That is also perfectly clear. As integral parts of Russia, any attack on them, and there certainly will be such attacks coming from the Ukrainian armed forces, is a casus belli. But even before that, the referendums have been preceded by the announcement of mobilization, which points directly to what Russia will do further if developments on the field of battle so requires. Progressive phases of mobilization will be justified to the Russian public as necessary to defend the borders of the Russian Federation from attack by NATO.

The merger of the Russia-occupied Ukrainian territories with the Russian Federation will mark the end of the ‘special military operation.’ An SMO is not something you conduct on your own territory, as panelists on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show remarked a couple of days ago.  It marks the beginning of open war on Ukraine with the objective of the enemy’s unconditional capitulation. This will likely entail the removal of the civil and military leadership and, very likely, the dismemberment of Ukraine.  After all, the Kremlin warned more than a year ago that the US-dictated course of NATO membership for Ukraine will result in its loss of statehood. However, these particular objectives were not declared up to now; the SMO was about defending the Donbas against genocide and about de-nazification of Ukraine, itself a rather vague concept.

Adding another 300,000 men at arms to the force deployed by Russia in Ukraine represents a near doubling and surely will address the shortages of infantry numbers that has limited Russia’s ability to ‘conquer’ Ukraine. It was precisely lack of boots on the ground that explains Russia’s painful and embarrassing withdrawal from the Kharkov region in the past two weeks. They could not resist the massive concentration of Ukrainian forces against their own thinly guarded hold on the region. The strategic value of the Ukrainian win is questionable, but it greatly enhanced their morale, which is a major factor in the outcome of any war. The Kremlin could not ignore this.

At the press conference in Samarkand last week following the end of the annual gathering of heads of state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Vladimir Putin was asked why he has shown so much restraint in the face of the Ukrainian counter offensive. He replied that the Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity generating plants which followed the loss of the Kharkov territory were just ‘warning shots’ and there would be much more ‘impactful’ action to come.  Accordingly, as Russia moves from SMO to open war, we may expect massive destruction of Ukrainian civil as well as military infrastructure to fully block all movement of Western supplied arms from points of delivery in the Lvov region and other borders to the front lines. We may eventually expect bombing and destruction of Ukraine’s centers of decision-making in Kiev.

As for further Western intervention, Western media have picked up on President Putin’s thinly veiled nuclear threat to potential co-belligerents. Russia has explicitly stated that any aggression against its own security and territorial integrity, such as has been raised by generals in retirement in the USA speaking to national television in the past several weeks about Russia’s break-up, will be met by a nuclear response. When Russia’s nuclear threat is directed at Washington, as is now the case, rather than at Kiev or Brussels, the supposition till now, it is unlikely that policy makers on Capitol Hill will long remain cavalier about Russian military capabilities and pursue further escalation.

In light of all these developments, I am compelled to revise my appreciation of what transpired at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.  Western media have focused full attention on only one issue: the supposed friction between Russia and its main global friends, India and China, over its war in Ukraine.  That seemed to me to be grossly exaggerated. Now it appears to be utter nonsense. It is inconceivable that Putin did not discuss with Xi and Modi what he is about to do in Ukraine. If Russia indeed now supplies to its war effort a far greater part of its military potential, then it is entirely reasonable to expect the war to end with Russian victory by 31 December of this year as the Kremlin appears to have pledged to its loyal supporters.

Looking beyond Ukraine’s possible loss of statehood, a Russian victory will mean more than an Afghanistan-like bloody nose for Washington. It will expose the low value of the U.S. military umbrella for EU member states and will necessarily lead to re-evaluation of Europe’s security architecture, which is what the Russians were demanding before their incursion into Ukraine was launched in February.

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Stop the Escalatory Ladder in Ukraine, We Want to Get Off

September 23rd, 2022 by James Carden

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***

Three months after the Russian invasion, Ukraine is no longer talking specifically about NATO, but rather a series of “binding” security guarantees now being sought from its Western partners. 

Last week, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak, the co-chairs of the Working Group On International Security Guarantees for Ukraine, published the Kyiv Security Compact. The elaborate document includes a “multi-decade effort of sustained investment in Ukraine’s defence industrial base, scalable weapons transfers and intelligence support from allies” through “binding” bilateral agreements between Ukraine and a “core group of allied countries” including the U.S., UK, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, and Turkey, as well as Nordic, Baltic, Central and Eastern European countries.

So far the response in the West to the proposed compact has been muted, but it triggered a belligerent retort from Leonid Slutsky, the chair of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs of the Russian Federation. He charged that “this is not a security guarantee, it is a draft pact on the involvement of NATO countries and their allies in the conflict. The proposal is against Russia, against a nuclear state. I hope that all of Kyiv’s Western partners are well aware of what they are being asked to sign up for.”

The laundry list of security guarantees envisioned by Rasmussen and Yermak comes at a time when support for the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy of sending arms, financing, and intelligence sharing has found strong support in both houses in Congress, in the U.S. media, and among the public at large.

Yet worryingly, the relation between unanimity of opinion and sound judgment tends toward the inverse. The Rasmussen-Yermak report would require a boost in U.S. resources beyond the billions that it is already sending to the Ukraine war effort, as well as a commitment that falls just short of the kind of NATO guarantees that played into Russia’s break up with the West in the first place.

While not taking on the proposal for new security guarantees directly, a new report from Brown University’s Cost of War project, published on September 15, takes aim at the current escalation dynamics, and makes the critical  case for a far more cautious approach than envisioned by either the Rasmussen-Yermak report or the U.S. bipartisan foreign policy consensus (aka ‘the Blob’).

The report,

“Threat Inflation, Russian Military Weakness, and the Resulting Nuclear Paradox: Implications of the War in Ukraine for U.S. Military Spending,” counsels against an increase in U.S. and NATO defense spending as a response to Vladimir Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine.

“It is important that the U.S. not succumb to threat inflation in regards to public and official perceptions of Russia,” because “historically, threat inflation has led to disastrous and unnecessarily costly U.S. foreign policy decisions,” writes the report’s author, Lyle Goldstein, visiting professor of International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Goldstein ably and succinctly takes the reader through the long history of threat inflation by the U.S. foreign policy establishment with regard to Russia, including the fictitious “missile gap” coined by then-Sen. John F. Kennedy during the late Eisenhower years.

The reason Goldstein, who for 20 years served on the faculty at the U.S. Naval War College, counsels restraint is due to what he calls the “nuclear paradox.” Namely, “if the U.S. and NATO increase their military spending and conventional forces in Europe, the weakness of Russian conventional military forces could prompt Moscow to rely more heavily on its nuclear forces.” After all, on the conventional weapons front, the Russians are far outspent by their rivals in the West. As he points out:

…the Russian defense budget amounts to less than 1/10 of the U.S. defense budget, just 1/5 of NATO (non-US) spending and a measly 6% of the NATO defense spending on aggregate.

Given Russia’s poor performance on the battlefield and its clear inability to militarily threaten NATO territory, Goldstein says “the Russian invasion of Ukraine, however tragic from a humanitarian point of view, does not justify the massive increase in U.S. defense spending that is currently being contemplated.”

Indeed, the report shows how Russia’s inferiority in conventional weapons has incentivized it to focus on its nuclear deterrent. And here Goldstein cites an unclassified report from the Naval War College on “nuclear use”:

“Moscow is unlikely to use nuclear weapons … unless the Putin regime judged that an impending defeat during conflict would undercut the government’s legitimacy and create an existential threat via domestic upheaval (through loss of territorial integrity or other pivotal wartime event).”

“Thus,” writes Goldstein, “the paradox of Russia’s conventional weakness is fully revealed in the above prediction.”

To get off the current escalatory ladder on which the Biden administration has set us (and which the Rasmussen-Yermak report wants to institutionalize as a decades-long project), Goldstein sensibly recommends “direct talks, reviving the arms control agenda, and pursuing military confidence building measures between NATO countries and Russia.”

Senators, members of Congress, their staffs, and policymakers at the highest levels of the Biden administration ought to treat the new Cost of War report with the seriousness it deserves.

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Featured image: Photobank.kiev.ua/shutterstock

Serbian President Warns of “Great World Conflict” Within Two Months

September 23rd, 2022 by Paul Joseph Watson

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***

The President of Serbia has warned that the planet is entering into a “great world conflict” that could take place within the next two months.

Aleksandar Vucic made the alarming comments during the first day of the UN General Assembly session in New York.

“You see a crisis in every part of the world,” Vucic told the Serbian state broadcaster RTS.

“I think realistic predictions ought to be even darker,” he added. “Our position is even worse, since the UN has been weakened and the great powers have taken over and practically destroyed the UN order over the past several decades.”

The Serbian leader cautioned that the war between Russia and Ukraine had moved on to a far deadlier phase.

“I assume that we’re leaving the phase of the special military operation and approaching a major armed conflict, and now the question becomes where is the line, and whether after a certain time – maybe a month or two, even – we will enter a great world conflict not seen since the Second World War,” he said.

Vucic’s remarks were made on the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an immediate “partial mobilization” of troops amounting to 300,000 soldiers.

In a public address to the nation, Putin warned that he wasn’t bluffing and that he was prepared to use “all the means at our disposal” to protect Moscow’s territorial integrity.

“Now they (the West) are talking about nuclear blackmail,” said Putin.

“The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was shelled and also some high positions – representatives of NATO states – who are saying there might be possibility and permissibility to use nuclear weapons against Russia,” he added.

Putin ominously asserted that western powers should “be reminded that our country also has various weapons of destruction, and with regard to certain components they’re even more modern than NATO ones.”

As we highlighted last month, a study conducted by Rutgers University found that nuclear war between the United States and Russia would cause two-thirds of the planet to starve to death within two years.

5 billion people would perish, primarily as a result of nuclear detonations causing huge infernos that inject soot into the atmosphere which blocks out the sun and devastates crops.

One wonders how a generation that thinks words are “violence” and misgendering someone is stochastic terrorism will react to an intercontinental nuclear war.

The mind truly boggles.

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This Week’s Most Popular Articles

September 23rd, 2022 by Global Research News

Vaccine Narrative Collapses as Harvard Study Shows Jab More Dangerous than COVID

Jonas Vesterberg, September 16, 2022

1350 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, Serious Issues, 919 of Them Dead, Since COVID Injection

Real Science, September 21, 2022

History: Hitler was Financed by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England

Yuri Rubtsov, September 18, 2022

Biden Signs Executive Order Designed to Unleash “Transhumanist Hell” on America and the World

Leo Hohmann, September 19, 2022

Dr. Paul Offit, One of the World’s Most Respected Vaccine Experts, Is Now Officially an Anti-vaxxer!

Steve Kirsch, September 20, 2022

PfizerGate: Official Government Reports prove Hundreds of Thousands of People Are Dying Every Single Week Due to COVID-19 Vaccination

The Expose, September 17, 2022

Climate Instability Worldwide: Does the US Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare?

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 17, 2022

The COVID-19 Power Grab: “Our Governments are Working to Harm Us”

Prof. Anthony J. Hall, September 16, 2022

Corona Sleepwalkers Swallow Whatever the Authorities Tell Them

Dr. Emanuel Garcia, September 19, 2022

COVID as a “Political Gift”? Stillborn from COVID-injected Mothers, Heart Attacks in Children…

Prof. Anthony J. Hall, September 17, 2022

Trilogy of Disaster – The Global Reset on Display

Peter Koenig, September 16, 2022

COVID Measures: Biggest “Social Conformity Event” in History. Corona Policy Was Aimed at “Changing Behavior”, Not at Improving Health.

Elze van Hamelen, September 21, 2022

Video: A Final Warning to Humanity from Former Pfizer Chief Scientist Michael Yeadon

Dr. Mike Yeadon, September 17, 2022

Ukraine: US Launches a Fascist Government, and World War Three?

Felicity Arbuthnot, September 18, 2022

Europe’s Energy Armageddon from Berlin and Brussels, Not Moscow

F. William Engdahl, September 21, 2022

An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued U.S. Dominance

Colin Todhunter, September 17, 2022

Dutch Farmers Resisting the Toxic Transition

Colin Todhunter, September 20, 2022

Global Planned Financial Tsunami Has Just Begun

F. William Engdahl, September 10, 2022

The Money Economy Is Not the Real Economy: “The Global Banking and Financial System is Fatally Flawed”

Thomas H. Greco, Jr., September 19, 2022

Ukraine, It Was All Written in the Rand Corp Plan. “the U.S. Plan against Russia was Formulated 3 Years Ago”

Manlio Dinucci, September 18, 2022

Selected Articles: What Would a Nuclear War Look Like?

September 23rd, 2022 by Global Research News

What Would a Nuclear War Look Like?

By Jeff Thomas, September 22, 2022

For eight years, NATO has backed puppet rulers in Ukraine, funded attacks on Donbass, repeatedly violated the Minsk Treaties, outlawed the speaking of Russian in the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics, and has destroyed democratic opposition and free media in Ukraine, leaving it a one-party government, essentially owned and financed by the US and administrated by US operatives.

Will the United States and NATO Wake Up to What Happened at the Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

By Larry Johnson, September 22, 2022

The speeches by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are especially noteworthy. Both countries put the United States on notice that the United States and NATO will be treated as a sponsor of terrorism because they supply weapons to Ukraine that are being used to attack civilian targets.

Could Forthcoming Donbass Referenda be Russia’s “Defense-Oriented” Response to Kharkov?

By Andrew Korybko, September 22, 2022

There are arguments for and against each of the primary participants in the conflict agreeing to the scenario of Donbass referenda ending the military phase of the conflict before the coming winter.

Greek Coast Guard Drowns Entire Syrian Family

By Steven Sahiounie, September 22, 2022

Mohammed Burgess of Latakia, Syria is the sole survivor of the deliberate murder of his entire family by the Greek Coast Guard on Tuesday, September 13.  Burgess and his wife and two children boarded a migrant ship in Lebanon and were headed toward Italy when the ship began having problems and finally ran out of diesel fuel.

Masters of Deceit: The U.S. Government’s Propaganda of Fear, Mind Control and Brain Warfare

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, September 22, 2022

Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

The Real US Agenda in Africa Is Hegemony

By Pepe Escobar, September 22, 2022

Africa has 54 nations as UN members. Any truly representative UNGA meeting should place Africa’s problems at the forefront. Once again, that’s not the case. So it is left to African leaders to offer that much-needed context outside of the UN building in New York.

With Mounting Evidence of Israeli Responsibility, Canada Must Support an ICC Investigation Into the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh

By Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, September 23, 2022

In May, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly had called for a “thorough investigation” into the incident, but Israel’s recent military probe has failed to find any responsibility, despite admitting that Israeli forces most likely killed her. CJPME argues that Canadian support for an ICC investigation is necessary due to the inability and unwillingness of Israel to hold itself accountable.

Twilight of the Tigris: Iraq’s Mighty River Drying Up

By Aymen Henna, September 22, 2022

It was the river that is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself. But today the Tigris is dying. Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where—with its twin river the Euphrates—it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago.

Lebanon Not ‘Normal’ Since Second Civil War Ended

By Michael Jansen, September 22, 2022

This week’s Lebanese bank strike can only deepen the country’s multiple crises, causing the currency to hit an all time low in value against the US dollar as the state-owned electricity company shut down its plants and fuel subsidies were cancelled.

Western Sanctions Against Russia Spark Mayhem in Shipping as New Threat Emerges

By Zero Hedge, September 21, 2022

Bloomberg reported that Europe is importing liquefied natural gas, diesel, and crude from far away regions that keep tankers in transit for extended periods and delay return to service for other critical shipping lanes. Shipping experts warn this is sparking the latest surge in global tanker freight rates.

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With Mounting Evidence of Israeli Responsibility, Canada Must Support an ICC Investigation Into the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh

September 23rd, 2022 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

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***

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is reiterating its call for Canada to support an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into the killing of veteran Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, amid growing and overwhelming evidence of Israeli responsibility. In May, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly had called for a “thorough investigation” into the incident, but Israel’s recent military probe has failed to find any responsibility, despite admitting that Israeli forces most likely killed her. CJPME argues that Canadian support for an ICC investigation is necessary due to the inability and unwillingness of Israel to hold itself accountable.

“The evidence that Shireen Abu Akleh was deliberately killed by Israeli forces is overwhelming and undeniable. This was an assassination,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME.

“If Canada’s words are to mean anything, it must give its full support to the efforts by Abu Akleh’s family and others to seek justice at the ICC,” added Bueckert.

Earlier this month, an Israeli military probe admitted that there was a “high probability” that Israeli soldiers killed Abu Akleh, but declined to open a criminal investigation. In response, Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid reaffirmed that he would “not allow” any soldier to be prosecuted. Meanwhile this week, Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq published the results of a forensic investigation which concluded that Israeli soldiers had targeted Abu Akleh “deliberately and explicitly,” and found that there were no Palestinian gunmen or crossfire in the area – completely debunking Israel’s claims that the incident could have been an accident. These findings reinforce the conclusions of previous investigations by Bellingcat, CNN, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press, which indicated that Abu Akleh was targeted by Israeli forces on purpose.

In another development this week, an official complaint over Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing was submitted to the International Criminal Court by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), and Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), on behalf of Abu Akleh’s family. Similar initiatives have previously been announced by the Palestinian foreign ministry and Al Jazeera. CJPME notes that while Canada has formerly opposed the ICC investigation into alleged war crimes in Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), it has offered enthusiastic support to the ICC’s investigation in Ukraine, including by sending a team of RCMP officers. CJPME urges Canada to drop this double standard and accept the jurisdiction of the ICC over the OPT, and to give its full support to an ICC investigation into Abu Akleh’s death.

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Featured image: Shireen Abu Akleh was an icon in Palestine and throughout much of the Arabic speaking world for her reporting from the occupied territories (Illustration/MEE)

Citizen’s Brain Is the Battlefield in 21st-century Warfare

September 22nd, 2022 by Elze van Hamelen

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***

Read Part I, II and III:

The Netherlands: Government Sponsored Behavioral Control and Social Engineering Experiments

By Elze van Hamelen, September 20, 2022

Mindspace – A Guide to Behavioral Manipulation

By Elze van Hamelen, September 19, 2022

COVID Measures: Biggest “Social Conformity Event” in History. Corona Policy Was Aimed at “Changing Behavior”, Not at Improving Health.

By Elze van Hamelen, September 21, 2022

NATO has added to the traditional domains of warfare – land, sea, air, space and cyberspace – a new one: “the cognitive domain.” This is not just about imposing certain ideas or behaviors, as in traditional propaganda and psy-ops, but about modifying cognition – influencing the process by which we ourselves arrive at ideas, insights, beliefs, choices and behaviors. The target is not primarily an enemy army, but the citizen. Winning the war is no longer determined by moving a border on a map, but by ideological conversion of the target.

“Cognitive warfare is one of the most debated topics within Nato,” researcher François du Cluzel told a panel discussion on Oct. 5, 2021. He wrote a foundational paper “Cognitive Warfare” for the Nato-affiliated think tank Innovation Hub in 2020. Although cognitive warfare overlaps with information warfare, classical propaganda and psychological operations, du Cluzel points out that cognitive warfare goes much further. In information warfare, one “only” tries to control the supply of information. Psychological operations involve influencing perceptions, beliefs and behavior. The goal of cognitive warfare is “to turn everyone into a weapon,” and “the goal is not to attack what individuals think, but how they think.”  Du Cluzel: “It is a war against our cognition – the way our brains process information and turn it into knowledge. It directly targets the brain”. Cognitive warfare is about “hacking the individual,” allowing the brain to be “programmed.”

To achieve this, almost every domain of knowledge imaginable is applied: psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic, sociology, anthropology, behavioral sciences, “and more.” “Social engineering always begins with an understanding of the environment and the target; the goal is to understand the psychology of the target population,” du Cluzel writes. The basis remains traditional propaganda and disinformation techniques, enhanced by current technology and advances in knowledge. “Behavior, meanwhile, can be predicted and calculated to such an extent,” according to du Cluzel, “that AI-driven behavioral science ‘behavioral economics’ should be classified as a hard science rather than soft science.”

Because almost everyone is active on the Internet and social media, individuals are no longer passive recipients of propaganda; with today’s technology, they actively participate in its creation and dissemination. Knowledge of how to manipulate these processes “is easily turned into a weapon.” Du Cluzel cites the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an example. Through voluntarily submitted personal data to Facebook, detailed individual psychological profiles had been created of a large population. Normally such information is used for personalized advertising, but in the case of Cambridge Analytica it was used to bombard doubting voters with personalized propaganda. Cognitive warfare “exploits the weaknesses of the human brain,” recognizing the importance of the role of emotions in driving cognition. Cyberpsychology, which seeks to understand the interaction between humans, machines and AI (artificial intelligence) will be increasingly important here.

Other promising technologies that could be used are neuroscience and technologies, or “NeuroS/T,” and “NBIC” – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, “including developments in genetic engineering. NeuroS/T can be pharmacological agents, brain-machine couplings, as well as psychologically disturbing information. Influencing the nervous system with knowledge or technology can produce changes in memory, learning ability, sleep cycles, self-control, mood, self-perception, decisiveness, confidence and empathy, and fitness and vigor. Du Cluzel writes, “The potential of NeuroS/T’ to create insight and the capacity to influence cognition, emotions and behavior of individuals is of particular interest to security and intelligence agencies, and military and war initiatives.”

Waging war on individuals’ cognitive processes represents a radical shift from traditional forms of warfare, where one tries, at least in principle, to keep civilians out of harm’s way. In cognitive war, the citizen is the target and his or her brain is the battlefield. It changes the nature of warfare, the players, the duration and how the war is won.

According to du Cluzel, “cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational corporations.”

A conflict is no longer won by occupying a territory, or by adjusting borders on a map, because “the experience of warfare teaches us that although war in the physical realm can weaken an enemy army, it does not result in achieving all the goals of war.” With cognitive war, the end goal shifts: “whatever the nature and purpose of war itself, it ultimately comes down to a clash of between groups that want something different, and therefore victory means the ability to be able to impose desired behavior on a chosen audience.” In effect, then, it is about bringing about an ideological conversion in the target population.

The enemy is not only civilians in occupied or enemy territory – but also their own civilians, who, according to NATO’s estimates, are easy targets for cognitive operations by enemy parties. “Man is the weak link this must be recognized in order to protect the human capital of NATO.”

This “protection” goes a long way: “The goal of cognitive warfare is not merely to harm militaries, but societies. The method of warfare resembles a ‘shadow war,’ and requires the involvement of the entire government in fighting it.”  War can thus be waged with and without the military, and du Cluzel continues: “Cognitive warfare is potentially endless, what for this type of conflict you cannot make a peace treaty, or sign a surrender.”

Dutch citizens are also targeted

According to the Cognitive Warfare report, China, Russia and non-state actors (non-state actors) also value cognitive war. Therefore, NATO sees it as an important task to be able to face this form of warfare. According to correspondence that emerged from FOIA requests, the doctrine of cognitive warfare is allready strongly entrenched in the Dutch military. The independent news site Indepen. nl reports, “The Lieutenant General of the Land Forces Command writes on August 4, 2020 in a memo to then Minister of Defense Ank Bijleveld that ‘information-driven action’ (IGO) takes place in 3 dimensions: the physical, the virtual and the cognitive. Acting in the land domain involves operating within these three dimensions to achieve desired effects achieve within a political-strategic objective. Because country action takes place, by definition, among human actors and groups, effectiveness is in the cognitive dimension is crucial.

At its core is taking away the will to fight at or impose our will to opponents. By the way with this, we are following the NATO doctrine for the land domain’.” This modus operandi, in which the entire government is involved in information and cognitive war, and seeing the citizen as a possible enemy, who must be manipulated toward correct behavior must be manipulated, we see strongly in the corona period. Not for nothing did the Netherlands organize in the spring of 2020 organized a Navo Innovation Challenge, focused on Covid-19. “We are looking for innovative solutions to identify, assess and identify, assess and manage biological threats, so that NATO forces, allies and civilian units are protected are protected,” the announcement reads read. It specifically seeks for “surveillance, inclusive measures to monitor health monitoring” and “collaborative opportunities between military, civilian health and research institutions, officials at the local and national level and surveillance analysts.”

The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported in November 2020 that, without legal basis, the Land Information Maneuver Centre (LIMC) had been established – a department that is under the land forces that surveilled Dutch civilians during the corona period, using Behavioral Dynamics Modeling. BDM is an approach developed by the British SCL group, the parent company of the aforementioned Cambridge Analytica, and with which the military gained experience during missions in Afghanistan, civilians were not only monitored but also actively influenced. FOIA documents released in early 2022 revealed that the LIMC worked closely with police and the NCTV (Unit combatting terrorism, similar to Homeland security).

The invisible war

How is it possible that for some it is very clear that we are facing a coup, revolution or even Third World War, while for others everything is seeming ‘normal’?

“My father prepared me for the previous war,” Sebastian Haffner writes shortly before his escape from Nazi Germany in 1938. In the book ‘Defying Hitler’, he describes how he experienced World War I as a boy of seven, growing up during the interwar period and how he experienced the rise of Nazism. He imagined by war a trench warfare, and was not prepared for terror, mass hysteria and demagoguery.

We imagine war as a demagogue. For example, look at all the unwanted leaders that are demonized- Trump, Putin, Assad, etc. – who are branded “a new Hitler” by the mass media. War is an army invading, soldiers in the streets, cities being bombed.

We are now in the midst of a revolution – in the classic sense – a radical upheaval of the organization of the state system and power relations. Kees van der Pijl clearly explains in his book “States of Emergency” how this revolution, unlike, for example, the French and American revolutions, has not been initiated from below, but from above, by the oligarchy.  They implement policy through co-opted governments and organizations such as the U.S. government, the EU, WHO and WEF, supported by Big Tech companies. The system being worked toward is totalitarian, technocratic and centralized. Relatively few people realize how radical the upheaval we are living through, probably because this war has not been initiated by direct physical force, but by cognitive war, directed at civilians. The doctrine of cognitive warfare shows that modern war is waged primarily as an advanced psyop. It does not conform to the classical image of warfare. That is why it is not visible to most.

Do they remember what freedom is?

None of the documents on cognitive warfare shows any sign of awareness of how far this methodology diverges from the basic values that are the foundations of a free society: centering on the rights and freedoms of the individual to do, think, organize his or her own life, without external interference.

Cognitive warfare is sold as a way to “win war without fighting,” so that there will be fewer (civilian) casualties. This seems positive at first, but, this approach, especially when applied on a large scale AND to its own citizens, does not give any space to the individual to gather information for himself, assess it and act accordingly. The citizen is no longer an independently thinking human being, but a vulnerable subject with “limited rationality.” Behavior that deviates from what the NATO, the LIMC or the government identifies as problematic should be “corrected.” Is the government or the military rational? Is rationality a prerequisite for making choices, decisions or beliefs? Why is a citizen not allowed to have a dissenting opinion without being labeled as “potentially state dangerous”? Wanting to correct “state dangerous” citizens with “wrong” beliefs are reminiscent of the literature on Soviet Russia, Mao-China, Pol-Pot. It has no place in a free society.

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This article was previously published in the reader-funded Dutch newspaper De Andere Krant.

Sources

https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/20210122_CW%20Final.pdf

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/08/nato-cognitive-warfare-brain/

Cognitive Warfare Project – Reference Documents https://www.innovationhub-act.org/cw-documents-0

https://hcss.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Behavior-Oriented-Operations-March-8th.pdf

NRC – Soft maar gevaarlijk wapen https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/06/26/een-soft-maar-gevaarlijk-wapen-moderne-oorlogsvoering-richt-zich-op-beinvloeding-van-de-bevolking-a4004227

NATO Innovation Challenge focuses on COVID-19 crisis (in NL) https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_175199.htm

https://indepen.nl/ontluisterend-de-landmacht-beschouwt-haar-eigen-volk-als-vijand/

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/11/15/hoe-het-leger-zijn-eigen-bevolking-in-de-gaten-houdt-a4020169

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/books/chapters/defying-hitler.html

https://vanhamelen.eu/uncategorized/pandemie-van-de-angst-als-reactie-op-een-wereldwijde-revolutionaire-crisis/

Featured image is from Graphene Flagship

Will the United States and NATO Wake Up to What Happened at the Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

September 22nd, 2022 by Larry Johnson

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I am certain that most Americans do not have a clue what transpired this week at the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (aka SCO). It is a clarion call, a defiant declaration, that the countries, which account for over half of the world’s population, are no longer going to defer to the United States. The attendees included Russia, China, India, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The speeches by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are especially noteworthy. Both countries put the United States on notice that the United States and NATO will be treated as a sponsor of terrorism because they supply weapons to Ukraine that are being used to attack civilian targets. You may accuse me of exaggerating because neither Putin nor Xi mention the United States or NATO by name. But the actions of the NATO allies in Ukraine are seen by both Russia and China as acts of terrorism. I am reprinting the salient portions of each speech below.

Russia and China also put the west on notice that Iran is no longer going to be treated as a pariah state. Iran is welcomed emphatically by both Putin and Xi as a member of the SCO. Going forward, this means that Iran will do business with all members of the SCO under the rubric of a new financial order being organized by Russia, China, India and Brazil.

I am sure this is jarring news to the western allies. They have enjoyed the luxury of the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the international reserve currency. It was the Golden Rule at work–those with the gold make the rules. The United States faces a dilemma because it insists on levying international sanctions on any nation or leader who refuses to toe Washington’s line, but the blow back effects of those sanctions are savaging the European economies and will hurt America as well.

China and Russia now realize and affirm that the United States is no longer a reliable, trustworthy partner. They see the United States as a petulant child that, in the past, coerced others by throwing temper tantrums and launching ill-conceived, foolish foreign military operations.

Most important, but not said, the leaders of the SCO realize that Washington is leaderless. Biden is a demented buffoon. Putin demonstrated this in his press conference. He did not have a podium to lean on. He did not have a cheat sheet of journalists that instructed him who to call on. And he spoke intelligently off the cuff. Pay attention to what he says:

President Xi’s speech lays out in detail the future of the SCO:

Under these new conditions, the SCO, as an important constructive force in international and regional affairs, should keep itself well-positioned in the face of changing international dynamics, ride on the trend of the times, strengthen solidarity and cooperation and build a closer SCO community with a shared future.

First, we need to enhance mutual support. We should strengthen high-level exchanges and strategic communication, deepen mutual understanding and political trust, and support each other in our efforts to uphold security and development interests. We should guard against attempts by external forces to instigate “color revolution,” jointly oppose interference in other countries’ internal affairs under any pretext, and hold our future firmly in our own hands.

Second, we need to expand security cooperation. A proverb in Uzbekistan goes to the effect that “With peace, a country enjoys prosperity, just as with rain, the land can flourish.” The Global Security Initiative put forward by China is to address the peace deficit and global security challenges. It calls on all countries to stay true to the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security and build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture. We welcome all stakeholders to get involved in implementing this initiative.

We should continue to carry out joint anti-terrorism exercises, crack down hard on terrorism, separatism and extremism, drug trafficking as well as cyber and transnational organized crimes; and we should effectively meet the challenges in data security, biosecurity, outer space security and other non-traditional security domains. China is ready to train 2,000 law enforcement personnel for SCO member states in the next five years, and establish a China-SCO base for training counter-terrorism personnel, so as to enhance capacity-building for law enforcement of SCO member states.

Third, we need to deepen practical cooperation. To deliver a better life for people of all countries in the region is our shared goal. The Global Development Initiative launched by China aims to focus global attention on development, foster global development partnership, and achieve more robust, greener and more balanced global development. China is ready to work with all other stakeholders to pursue this initiative in our region to support the sustainable development of regional countries.

Fourth, we need to enhance people-to-people and cultural exchanges. Exchanges promote integration among civilizations, which, in turn, enables civilizations to advance. We should deepen cooperation in such areas as education, science and technology, culture, health, media, radio and television, ensure the continued success of signature programs such as the youth exchange camp, the women’s forum, the forum on people-to-people friendship and the forum on traditional medicine, and support the SCO Committee on Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation and other non-official organizations in playing their due roles. China will build a China-SCO ice and snow sports demonstration zone and host the SCO forums on poverty reduction and sustainable development and on sister cities next year. In the next three years, China will carry out 2,000 free cataract operations for SCO member states and provide 5,000 human resources training opportunities for them.

Fifth, we need to uphold multilateralism. Obsession with forming a small circle can only push the world toward division and confrontation. We should remain firm in safeguarding the UN-centered international system and the international order based on international law, practice the common values of humanity and reject zero-sum game and bloc politics. We should expand SCO’s exchanges with other international and regional organizations such as the UN, so as to jointly uphold true multilateralism, improve global governance, and ensure that the international order is more just and equitable. . . .

China supports advancing SCO expansion in an active yet prudent manner, and this includes going through the procedure to admit Iran as a member state, launching the procedure for Belarus’ accession, admitting Bahrain, the Maldives, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Myanmar as dialogue partners, and granting the relevant applying countries the legal status due to them. We need to seize the opportunity to build consensus, deepen cooperation and jointly create a bright future for the Eurasian continent.

Here I wish to express China’s congratulations to India on assuming the next SCO presidency. We will, together with other member states, support India during its presidency.

Putin’s speech is short and to the point:

I fully share the statements made by my colleagues and their positive assessments of the work of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and its growing prestige in international affairs. Indeed, the SCO has become the largest regional organisation in the world.

However, I would like to repeat that global politics and economy are about to undergo fundamental and irreversible changes. The growing role of new centres of power is coming into sharp focus, and interaction among these new centres is not based on some rules, which are being forced on them by external forces and which nobody has seen, but on the universally recognised principles of the rule of international law and the UN Charter, namely, equal and indivisible security and respect for each other’s sovereignty, national values and interests.

It is on these principles, which are devoid of all elements of egoism, that the joint efforts of SCO member states are based in politics and the economy. This opens up broad prospects for continued mutually beneficial cooperation in politics, the economy, culture, humanitarian and other spheres.

Fighting terrorism and extremism, drug trafficking, organised crime and illegal armed formations remains a priority of our cooperation. Other key areas include providing assistance in the political and diplomatic settlement of conflicts along our external borders, including in Afghanistan. . . .

In this context, Russia, no doubt, favours the earliest possible accession of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the SCO, which is what the documents and the memorandum that will be signed today are designed to accomplish. We are convinced that Iran’s full-fledged participation will be beneficial for the association, as that country plays an important role in the Eurasian region and the world at large.

We also fully stand behind the decision submitted for approval by the Heads of State Council to start the process of admitting the Republic of Belarus as an SCO member. Let me be clear that we have always advocated that Belarus, which is Russia’s strategic partner and closest ally, should participate fully in the SCO. This will undoubtedly improve our ability to advance unity in politics, the economy, security and humanitarian matters.

In the past, the United States controlled the ball and set the rules for the game. The countries of the SCO are no longer going to let the United States dictate where, when and how the game is played. They are bringing their own ball and setting up their own rules. I apologize for the poor metaphor in advance, but this is bit like the PGA Tour being shocked and outraged by the emergence of an alternative professional golf tour, LIV. There is a new and potentially more powerful player on the world stage and the United States may be relegated to the peanut gallery and forced to watch.

*

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Twilight of the Tigris: Iraq’s Mighty River Drying Up

September 22nd, 2022 by Aymen Henna

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It was the river that is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself.

But today the Tigris is dying.

Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where—with its twin river the Euphrates—it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago.

Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.

Battered by one natural disaster after another, it is one of the five countries most exposed to climate change, according to the UN.

From April on, temperatures exceed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and intense sandstorms often turn the sky orange, covering the country in a film of dust.

Hellish summers see the mercury top a blistering 50 degrees Celsius—near the limit of human endurance—with frequent power cuts shutting down air-conditioning for millions.

The Tigris, the lifeline connecting the storied cities of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, has been choked by dams, most of them upstream in Turkey, and falling rainfall.

An AFP video journalist travelled along the river’s 1,500-kilometre (900-mile) course through Iraq, from the rugged Kurdish north to the Gulf in the south, to document the ecological disaster that is forcing people to change their ancient way of life.

Kurdish north: ‘Less water every day’

The Tigris’ journey through Iraq begins in the mountains of autonomous Kurdistan, near the borders of Turkey and Syria, where local people raise sheep and grow potatoes.

“Our life depends on the Tigris,” said farmer Pibo Hassan Dolmassa, 41, wearing a dusty coat, in the town of Faysh Khabur. “All our work, our agriculture, depends on it.

“Before, the water was pouring in torrents,” he said, but over the last two or three years “there is less water every day”.

Iraq’s government and Kurdish farmers accuse Turkey, where the Tigris has its source, of withholding water in its dams, dramatically reducing the flow into Iraq.

According to Iraqi official statistics, the level of the Tigris entering Iraq has dropped to just 35 percent of its average over the past century.

Baghdad regularly asks Ankara to release more water.

But Turkey’s ambassador to Iraq, Ali Riza Guney, urged Iraq to “use the available water more efficiently”, tweeting in July that “water is largely wasted in Iraq”.

He may have a point, say experts. Iraqi farmers tend to flood their fields, as they have done since ancient Sumerian times, rather than irrigate them, resulting in huge water losses.

Central plains: ‘We sold everything’

All that is left of the River Diyala, a tributary that meets the Tigris near the capital Baghdad in the central plains, are puddles of stagnant water dotting its parched bed.

Drought has dried up the watercourse that is crucial to the region’s agriculture.

This year authorities have been forced to reduce Iraq’s cultivated areas by half, meaning no crops will be grown in the badly-hit Diyala Governorate.

“We will be forced to give up farming and sell our animals,” said Abu Mehdi, 42, who wears a white djellaba robe.

“We were displaced by the war” against Iran in the 1980s, he said, “and now we are going to be displaced because of water. Without water, we can’t live in these areas at all.”

The farmer went into debt to dig a 30-metre (100-foot) well to try to get water. “We sold everything,” Abu Mehdi said, but “it was a failure”.

The World Bank warned last year that much of Iraq is likely to face a similar fate.

“By 2050 a temperature increase of one degree Celsius and a precipitation decrease of 10 percent would cause a 20 percent reduction of available freshwater,” it said.

“Under these circumstances, nearly one third of the irrigated land in Iraq will have no water.”

Water scarcity hitting farming and food security are already among the “main drivers of rural-to-urban migration” in Iraq, the UN and several non-government groups said in June.

The Tigris River in Iraq

Map of Iraq showing the Tigris River and density of population. (By AFP via phys.org)

And the International Organization for Migration said last month that “climate factors” had displaced more than 3,300 families in Iraq’s central and southern areas in the first three months of this year.

“Climate migration is already a reality in Iraq,” the IOM said.

Baghdad: sandbanks and pollution

This summer in Baghdad, the level of the Tigris dropped so low that people played volleyball in the middle of the river, splashing barely waist-deep through its waters.

Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources blame silt because of the river’s reduced flow, with sand and soil once washed downstream now settling to form sandbanks.

Until recently the Baghdad authorities used heavy machinery to dredge the silt, but with cash tight, work has slowed.

Years of war have destroyed much of Iraq’s water infrastructure, with many cities, factories, farms and even hospitals left to dump their waste straight into the river.

As sewage and rubbish from Greater Baghdad pour into the shrinking Tigris, the pollution creates a concentrated toxic soup that threatens marine life and human health.

Environmental policies have not been a high priority for Iraqi governments struggling with political, security and economic crises.

Ecological awareness also remains low among the general public, said activist Hajer Hadi of the Green Climate group, even if “every Iraqi feels climate change through rising temperatures, lower rainfall, falling water levels and dust storms,” she said.

South: salt water, dead palms

“You see these palm trees? They are thirsty,” said Molla al-Rached, a 65-year-old farmer, pointing to the brown skeletons of what was once a verdant palm grove.

“They need water! Should I try to irrigate them with a glass of water?” he asked bitterly. “Or with a bottle?”

“There is no fresh water, there is no more life,” said the farmer, a beige keffiyeh scarf wrapped around his head.

He lives at Ras al-Bisha where the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates river, the Shatt al-Arab, empties into the Gulf, near the borders with Iran and Kuwait.

In nearby Basra—once dubbed the Venice of the Middle East—many of the depleted waterways are choked with rubbish.

To the north, much of the once famed Mesopotamian Marshes—the vast wetland home to the “Marsh Arabs” and their unique culture—have been reduced to desert since Saddam Hussein drained them in the 1980s to punish its population.

But another threat is impacting the Shatt al-Arab: salt water from the Gulf is pushing ever further upstream as the river flow declines.

The UN and local farmers say rising salination is already hitting farm yields, in a trend set to worsen as global warming raises sea levels.

Al-Rached said he has to buy water from tankers for his livestock, and wildlife is now encroaching into settled areas in search of water.

“My government doesn’t provide me with water,” he said. “I want water, I want to live. I want to plant, like my ancestors.”

River delta: a fisherman’s plight

Standing barefoot in his boat like a Venetian gondolier, fisherman Naim Haddad steers it home as the sun sets on the waters of the Shatt al-Arab.

“From father to son, we have dedicated our lives to fishing,” said the 40-year-old holding up the day’s catch.

In a country where grilled carp is the national dish, the father-of-eight is proud that he receives “no government salary, no allowances”.

But salination is taking its toll as it pushes out the most prized freshwater species which are replaced by ocean fish.

“In the summer, we have salt water,” said Haddad. “The sea water rises and comes here.”

Last month local authorities reported that salt levels in the river north of Basra reached 6,800 parts per million—nearly seven times that of fresh water.

Haddad can’t switch to fishing at sea because his small boat is unsuitable for the choppier Gulf waters, where he would also risk run-ins with the Iranian and Kuwaiti coastguards.

And so the fisherman is left at the mercy of Iraq’s shrinking rivers, his fate tied to theirs.

“If the water goes,” he said, “the fishing goes. And so does our livelihood.”

*

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Featured image: Sun setting on the Tigris: Iraqi fisherman Naim Haddad plys the Shatt al-Arab near Basra. (Source: phys.org)

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Lebanon Not ‘Normal’ Since Second Civil War Ended

September 22nd, 2022 by Michael Jansen

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***

This week’s Lebanese bank strike can only deepen the country’s multiple crises, causing the currency to hit an all time low in value against the US dollar as the state-owned electricity company shut down its plants and fuel subsidies were cancelled.

Meanwhile, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, in business-as-usual mode, attended the funeral of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in London before heading to New York for the opening of the UN General Assembly. He excused his absence by promising to return home immediately if there was any chance of forming a cabinet. As French and Saudi diplomats met in Paris to discuss Lebanon,  Army chief General Joseph Aoun was said to be the leading candidate to replace President Michel Aoun (no relation) who is set to step down at the end of next month. He has vowed to stay on in the presidential palace if the situation is not “normal” when his term ends. No one knows what he means by “normal”. Lebanon has not been “normal” since the second civil war (1975-1990) ended.

The banks are certain to compound the misery of the population by imposing fresh security measures when entering premises.  Bankers have been alarmed by of last week’s raids by depositors demanding dollars from their accounts.  The raids began mid-week with black-clad Sali Hafez, armed with a toy gun, who held up a Beirut bank to secure $13,000 for cancer treatment for her seriously ill sister. Hafez became an instant hero when video of the raid was broadcast on social media by accompanying activists from Depositors Outcry. The group also helped organise a second nearly simultaneous raid by a man armed with an unloaded shotgun on a bank in the mountain town of Aley. Depositors Outcry spokesman Ibrahim Abdullah warned that these heists are part of a “revolution is against all banks”. Lebanese blame both the Central Bank and private banks for the financial collapse of the country which has precipitated total economic melt-down.

On Friday, there were five raids on banks in Beirut, the south, and Mount Lebanon. The first man extracted $19,000 from his savings before being detained. The second, an indebted businessman was arrested before accessing accounts containing $300,000. Holding another toy gun, a third raider recovered a combined total of $70,000 from two Beirut banks before surrendering to police. The final heist involved an army lieutenant whose attempt was foiled when shots were fired. What is significant about these raids is that they were mounted by depositors from different backgrounds and with different motives two days after Sali Hafez was celebrated for her daring action.

The latest raids were “copy cat” operations modelled on the first heist in January mounted by a man, armed with a gun and a jerry can of petrol to burn down the bank.  He withdrew $50,000. This incident was followed in August, as the financial collapse deepened, when a food delivery truck driver held staff hostage for seven hours before getting $35,000 from his deposit of $210,000 to pay for his father’s medical treatment. He was cheered by anti-bank protesters who assembled outside the bank while the raid went on. Both these men were arrested and released without being charged due to popular outrage over their detention.

In the wake of last week’s raids, the Bankers Association has demanded both protection and accountability for raiders and their enablers and cheerleaders. Protests erupted outside the Justice Ministry after members of Depositors Outcry were detained.

Lebanon’s 2019 financial crash compelled banks to block $100 billion in deposits and impose impossible limits on withdrawals in both dollars and Lebanese pounds. Unfortunately, Lebanese are reminded every time they want to pay for anything, including fruit and vegetables, as prices are fixed in dollars and payment in Lebanese pounds fluctuates with latest exchange rates. Before the crisis, the dollar was valued at 1,500 Lebanese pounds. The black dollar rate has now hit an unprecedented 39.500 to the dollar and 40.000 is predicted.

Due to Lebanon’s lack of foreign currency to pay for fuel, the country’s thermal power plants have shut down. Therefore, there is no electricity from the state-run company which awaits a late delivery from Iraq under a barter arrangement. A US-endorsed deal to import electricity from Egypt and Jordan via Syria has not been implemented for more than a year. The power cut coincides with the end of fuel subsidies although consumers are dependent on generators compelled buy fuel priced at the black-market rate. Since 80 per cent of Lebanese are living below the poverty line, many if not most will not be able to pay for electricity even if Electricite du Liban resumes supplies.

The financial/economic/power/fuel crisis has ballooned since Mikati’s government resigned in March before securing reforms needed to secure international aid amounting to $21 billion from foreign sources and the International Monetary Fund. Although he has been designated to form a new technocratic Cabinet since June, president Aoun has refused to accept prospective ministers.

He has recently put forward a demand for the appointment of six political ministers whose presence would prevent the injection of foreign funds which depends on the appointment of expert ministers charged with effecting reform, combatting corruption, and fixing broken services. Parliament is meant to choose a candidate to replace President Aoun when his term ends on October 31. Although Gen. Joseph Aoun is mentioned as a replacement, no one can predict anything with any certainty in chaotic Lebanon.

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Could Forthcoming Donbass Referenda be Russia’s “Defense-Oriented” Response to Kharkov?

September 22nd, 2022 by Andrew Korybko

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***

There are arguments for and against each of the primary participants in the conflict agreeing to the scenario of Donbass referenda ending the military phase of the conflict before the coming winter.

The two Donbass Republics’ Civic Chambers announced on Monday that they’d like to hold referenda on joining Russia as soon as possible. Margarita Simonyan, who exerts massive influence over the formation of public opinion in her country as well as among Russian-friendly folks abroad through her well-known media roles, reacted to this scenario by predicting the following on Telegram:

“Today it’s referendum, tomorrow – it’s recognition of LPR as a part of Russia. The day after that, the strikes on the Russian territory become an all-out war of Ukraine and NATO with Russia, which will untie Moscow’s hands in so many aspects.”

The larger context within which those announcements were made is Russia’s unexpected setback in Kharkov Region, which was followed by Kiev building upon that momentum to seize control of a village in Lugansk and thus symbolically reverse that Republic’s full liberation that was achieved over the summer. Turkish President Erdogan also just told CBS that President Putin allegedly informed him during their meeting on the sidelines of last week’s SCO Summit in Samarkand “that he’s willing to end this as soon as possible. The way things are going right now are quite problematic. I think a significant step will be taken forward.”

It’s therefore possible that the scenario of those two Donbass Republics’ democratically driven accession to the Russian Federation, which could even perhaps coincide with the Kherson and/or Zaporozhye Regions’, could be the asymmetrical response that observers are bracing themselves to expect from President Putin after his side’s unexpected setback in Kharkov Region. To explain, Moscow would then regard attacks against them as attacks against itself exactly as Simonyan predicted, which would thus establish very clear red lines that might promptly end the military phase of the Ukrainian Conflict. NATO-backed Kiev would either voluntarily cease hostilities or be forced by Moscow into finally doing so.

This sequence of events isn’t guaranteed to unfold, but it nevertheless can’t be discounted either, especially after Simonyan shared her thoughts about what might happen. It could therefore very well be the case that she and the Donbass Republics’ Civic Chambers are testing domestic and foreign reactions to that scenario prior to the Kremlin making a decision about this in the near future. After all, the latest dynamics of the Ukrainian Conflict appear to have reached the point where time works for and against each side’s favor.

Kiev’s tactical momentum continues to grow with time, but the conflict’s perpetuation works against the strategic interests of its European NATO patrons by spiking the risks of profound socio-political consequences connected to the unprecedented economic crisis catalyzed by the anti-Russian sanctions. Likewise, the perspective is the inverse for Moscow: the conflict’s perpetuation advances its strategic interests related to EU unity over Ukraine and Western unity more broadly but at the expense of its tactical interests since it’s struggling to stop Kiev’s on-the-ground NATO-backed momentum.

Accordingly, a swift end to the military phase of the conflict would avert the worst-case strategic scenarios from Kiev and its Western patrons’ perspective but at the expense of their political-territorial interests of recapturing control of Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye. Viewed from Moscow, this could avert the worst-case tactical scenario of losing control over those liberated regions and the major soft power consequences connected with that but at the expense of its earlier described strategic interests. Thus, there are arguments for and against each of the primary participants in the conflict agreeing to the scenario of Donbass referenda ending the military phase of the conflict before the coming winter.

The very fact that this is even being credibly suggested as based upon a reasonable interpretation of Simonyan’s reaction to the Donbass Civic Chambers’ announcements hints that President Putin is seriously flirting with a defensive-oriented response to his side’s recent setback in Kharkov Region instead of exclusively prioritizing an offensive-oriented one like many observers expected. Once again, that’s not to say that he’ll definitely opt for the scenario that was described in the present analysis, but that it can’t confidently be ruled out after what President Erdogan just said about his Russian counterpart’s alleged desire “to end this as soon as possible.”

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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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Greek Coast Guard Drowns Entire Syrian Family

September 22nd, 2022 by Steven Sahiounie

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***

Mohammed Burgess of Latakia, Syria is the sole survivor of the deliberate murder of his entire family by the Greek Coast Guard on Tuesday, September 13.  Burgess and his wife and two children boarded a migrant ship in Lebanon and were headed toward Italy when the ship began having problems and finally ran out of diesel fuel.  As they were drifting on the Mediterranean Sea, the Greek Coast Guard approached the ship, came alongside, and tied their ship to the Greek ship.  The Greek sailors ordered the passengers to disembark and board the Greek ship.  After coming on board, the Greek sailors took all the passengers’ cell phones, money, gold jewelry the women were wearing, and luggage.  They also beat several of the men without cause.

The Greek ship then began sailing for about five hours, but Burgess did not know the exact direction they were headed because the Greeks refused to have any communication with the passengers.  During the five hours, no water was offered to any passenger, including children.

When they finally stopped sailing, the Greek soldiers began taking out and blowing up small plastic dinghies, the type used by vacationers, not military grade.  They threw the dinghies into the sea and then pushed four to five passengers into the sea after each dinghy. The passengers were to climb into the dinghy from the sea after leaving everything they had with the Greeks.

Burgess was on the last dinghy, and as he jumped off the Greek ship they accelerated at high speed, which immediately sent up a huge wave in the wake of the Coast Guard vessel, which engulfed the last dinghy which held all of Burgess’ family.

As he jumped toward his family, he saw his wife, their two small children, his wife’s sister, her child, Burgess’ cousin, his wife, and their child floundering in the dinghy as the air valve was not shut properly by the Greeks, and in moments the dinghy was deflating and his family was in the sea.

Burgess began a frantic struggle in the sea trying to hold up his son, while his wife’s heroic actions were to try to keep their other child above water.  In her desperate attempt to get her child above the waves, her head was pushed under water and she began to drown.  Once she was lost to the sea, her child was helpless and disappeared beneath the waves. Burgess was torn between trying to keep his son alive or trying to turn toward diving beneath the waves to try and rescue his wife or child.  He was in an impossible position of not being able to do anything other than concentrate on survival.

He remained swimming until the next morning, but in the night very high waves pulled his son away from him.  Burgess had then lost his entire family because of the deliberate and planned actions of the Greek Coast Guard.  The Turkish Coast Guard rescued him from the sea later in the morning, and they also retrieved bodies from the sea. The Italian Coast Guard also retrieved some bodies from the sea.

Burgess gave his eyewitness testimony in a video interview to online media.  Further details were given by the mother-in-law of Burgess, who had lost two of her daughters and three grandchildren in the tragedy. In other YouTube videos dating from 2020 and 2021, the Greek Coast Guard is documented leaving migrants adrift in the sea without help, and also one video shows the Greek sailors beating the migrants and shooting at them.

The Greek Coast Guard has a long history of human rights abuses and breaking international maritime laws. On July 7, the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling against Greece’s illegal and deadly practice of pushing back boasts of asylum seekers.

Eleven women and children, including infants, died off the Greek island of Farmakonisi on January 20, 2014, in what survivors describe as a pushback operation after the Greek Coast Guard was towing their boat, which resulted in death.

At least 32 more cases of alleged pushbacks by Greece are pending before the Court, and the charges include violating the right to life of the applicants and their relatives and subjecting survivors to degrading treatment when they strip-searched them in public.

Human Rights Watch and other groups have repeatedly documented how the Greek Coast Guard has abandoned migrants at sea by violently transferring individuals from Greek islands, or from the dinghy upon which they were traveling, to motor-less inflatable rafts, and leaving them adrift near Turkish territorial waters. They have also intercepted and disabled boats carrying migrants by damaging or removing the engines or fuel and towing them back to Turkey, or puncturing inflatable boats.

The Turkish Defense Minister stated on July 17, that the Greek Coast Guard is confirmed to have pushed two dinghies with migrants to Turkish waters on the western side of the Aegean Sea.

“One of our drones has recorded LS-930, a Greek Coast Guard vessel, pushing back irregular migrants’ boats to Turkish waters,” it said.

The migrants were saved by the Turkish Coast Guard responding to the information sent back by the drones.  The ministry stressed that the practice of pushing migrants in dinghies was a violation of territorial waters.

The report “Pushbacks and Drowning Human Rights in the Aegean Sea,” exposes the violation of international immigration law by Greece, documenting that Greek forces pushed back a total of 41,523 asylum seekers between 2020 and May 31, 2022, according to Turkey’s Ombudsman Institution.

“Some 98 percent of the pushbacks involved torture and ill-treatment, and 88 percent of the 8,000 asylum seekers who came to the Greek border were beaten,” the report said.

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Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Global Research Referral Campaign

September 22nd, 2022 by The Global Research Team

For over 21 years of operation as an independent media organization, we’ve never felt the effects of censorship as detrimental as in the last three years. Apart from the ban on social media, our website has also been excluded in external search engine results — all equally affecting our readership and worldwide reach.

Amid all the struggles we’ve encountered, it remains our objective to maintain our independence, accepting neither corporate nor government funding. Yet the clock is ticking.

Is Global Research helpful in your understanding of world events and politics? Do you believe that we are a valuable source of information? Do we connect you to other useful independent media outlets and journalists?

If so, we need your help to keep us afloat. In this referral campaign, our ask is for you to do any of the following:

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The Real US Agenda in Africa Is Hegemony

September 22nd, 2022 by Pepe Escobar

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***

In a rational environment, the 77th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) would discuss alleviating the trials and tribulations of the Global South, especially Africa.

That won’t be the case. Like a deer caught in the geopolitical headlights, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued platitudes about a gloomy “winter of global discontent,” even as the proverbial imperial doomsayers criticized the UN’s “crisis of faith” and blasted the “unprovoked war” started by Russia.

Of course the slow-motion genocide of Donbass russophone residents for eight years would never be recognized as a provocation.

Guterres spoke of Afghanistan, “where the economy is in ruins and human rights are being trampled” – but he did not dare to offer context. In Libya, “divisions continue to jeopardize the country” – once again, no context. Not to mention Iraq, where “ongoing tensions threaten ongoing stability.”

Africa has 54 nations as UN members. Any truly representative UNGA meeting should place Africa’s problems at the forefront. Once again, that’s not the case. So it is left to African leaders to offer that much-needed context outside of the UN building in New York.

As the only African member of the G20, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently urged the US not to “punish” the whole continent by forcing nations to demonize or sanction Russia. Washington’s introduction of legislation dubbed the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, he says, “will harm Africa and marginalize the continent.”

South Africa is a BRICS member – a concept that is anathema in the Beltway – and embraces a policy of non-alignment among world powers. An emerging 21st century version of the 1960s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is strengthening across the Global South – and especially Africa – much to the revulsion of the US and its minions.

Back at the UNGA, Guterres invoked the global fertilizer crisis – again, with no context. Russian diplomacy has repeatedly stressed that Moscow is ready to export 30 million tons of grain and over 20 million tons of fertilizer by the end of 2022. What is left unsaid in the west, is that only the importation of fertilizers to the EU is “allowed,” while transit to Africa is not.

Guterres said he was trying to persuade EU leaders to lift sanctions on Russian fertilizer exports, which directly affect cargo payments and shipping insurance. Russia’s Uralchem, for instance, even offered to supply fertilizers to Africa for free.

Yet from the point of view of the US and its EU vassals, the only thing that matters is to counter Russia and China in Africa. Senegal’s President Macky Sall has remarked how this policy is leaving “a bitter taste.”

‘We forbid you to build your pipeline’

It gets worse. The largely ineffectual EU Parliament now wants to stop the construction of the 1,445 km-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, invoking hazy human rights violations, environmental threats, and “advising” member countries to simply drop out of the project.

Uganda is counting on more than 6 billion barrels of oil to sustain an employment boom and finally move the nation to middle-income status. It was up to Ugandan Parliament Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa to offer much-needed context:

“It is imprudent to say that Uganda’s oil projects will exacerbate climate change, yet it is a fact that the EU block with only 10 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 25 percent of global emissions, and Africa with 20 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 3 percent of emissions. The EU and other western countries are historically responsible for climate change. Who then should stop or slow down the development of natural resources? Certainly not Africa or Uganda.”

The EU Parliament, moreover, is a staunch puppet of the biofuel lobby. It has refused to amend a law that would have stopped the use of food crops for fuel production, actually contributing to what the UN Food Program has described as “a global emergency of unprecedented magnitude.” No less than 350 million people are on the brink of starvation across Africa.

Instead, the G7’s notion of “helping” Africa is crystallized in the US-led Build Back Better World (B3W) – Washington’s anaemic attempt to counter Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – which focuses on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality,” according to the White House. Practical issues of infrastructure and sustainable development, which are at the heart of China’s plan, are simply ignored by the B3W.

Initially, a few “promising” projects were identified by a traveling US delegation in Senegal and Ghana. Senegalese diplomatic sources have since confirmed that these projects have nothing whatsoever to do with building infrastructure.

B3W, predictably, fizzled out. After all, the US-led project was little more than a public relations gimmick to undermine the Chinese, with negligible effect on narrowing the $40-plus trillion worth of infrastructure needed to be built across the Global South by 2035.

Have YALI, will travel

Imperial initiatives in Africa – apart from the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which amounts to raw militarization of the continent – brings us to the curious case of YALI (Young African Leaders Initiative), widely touted in the Washington-New York axis as “the most innovative” policy of the Obama years.

Launched in 2010, YALI was framed as “empowering the new generation of Africa leadership” – a euphemism for educating (or brainwashing) them the American way. The mechanism is simple: investing in and bringing hundreds of young African potential leaders to US universities for a short, six-week “training” on “business, civil leadership, entrepreneurship, and public management.” Then, four days in Washington to meet “leaders in the administration,” and a photo op with Obama.

The project was coordinated by US embassies in Africa, and targeted young men and women from sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 nations – including those under US sanctions, like Sudan, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe – proficient in English, with a “commitment” to return to Africa. Roughly 80 percent during the initial years had never been to the US, and more than 50 percent grew up outside of big cities.

Then, in a speech in 2013 in South Africa, Obama announced the establishment of the Washington Fellowship, later renamed the Mandela-Washington Fellowship (MWF).

That’s still ongoing. In 2022, MWF should be granted to 700 “outstanding young leaders from sub-Saharan Africa,” who follow “Leadership Institutes” at nearly 40 US universities, before their short stint in Washington. After which, they are ready for “long-term engagement between the United States and Africa.”

And all that for literally peanuts, as MWF was enthusiastically billed by the Democrat establishment as cost-efficient: $24,000 per fellow, paid by participant US universities as well as Coca-Cola, IBM, MasterCard Foundation, Microsoft, Intel, McKinsey, GE, and Procter & Gamble.

And that didn’t stop with MWF. USAID went a step further, and invested over $38 million – plus $10 million from the MasterCard Foundation – to set up four Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs) in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Senegal. These were training, long distance and in-class, at least 3,500 ‘future leaders’ a year.

It’s no wonder the Brookings Institution was drooling over so much “cost-efficiency” when it comes to investing “in Africa’s future” and for the US to “stay competitive” in Africa. YALI certainly looks prettier than AFRICOM.

A few success stories though don’t seem to rival the steady stream of African footballers making a splash in Europe – and then reinvesting most of their profits back home. The Trump years did see a reduction of YALI’s funding – from $19 million in 2017 to roughly $5 million.

So many leaders to ‘train’

Predictably, the Joe Biden White House YALI-ed all over again with a vengeance. Take this US press attache in Nigeria neatly outlining the current emphasis on “media and information literacy,” badly needed to tackle the “spreading of disinformation” including “in the months leading up to the national presidential election.”

So the US, under YALI, “trained 1,000 young Nigerians to recognize the signs of online and media misinformation and disinformation.” And now the follow-up is “Train the Trainer” workshops, “teaching 40 journalists, content creators, and activists (half of whom will be women) from Yobe, Borno, Adamawa, Zamfara, and Katsina how to identify, investigate, and report misinformation.” Facebook, being ordered by the FBI to censor “inconvenient,” potentially election-altering facts, is not part of the curriculum.

YALI is the soft, Instagrammed face of AFRICOM. The US has participated in the overthrow of several African governments over the past two decades, with troops trained under secrecy-obsessed AFRICOM. There has been no serious Pentagon audit on the weaponizing of AFRICOM’s local “partners.” For all we know – as in Syria and Libya – the US military could be arming even more terrorists.

And predictably, it’s all bipartisan. Rabid neo-con and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, in December 2018, at the Heritage Foundation, made it crystal clear: the US in Africa has nothing to do with supporting democracy and sustainable development. It’s all about countering Russia and China.

When it learned that Beijing was considering building a naval base in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, the Biden White House sent power envoys to the capital Malabo to convince the government to cease and desist. To no avail.

In contrast, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was received like a superstar in his recent extensive tour of Africa, where it’s widely perceived that global food prices and the fertilizer drama are a direct consequence of western sanctions on Russia. Uganda leader Yoweri Museveni went straight to the point when he said, “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us?”

On 13-15 December, the White House plans a major US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington to discuss mostly food security and climate change – alongside the perennial lectures on democracy and human rights. Most leaders won’t be exactly impressed with this new showing of “the United States’ enduring commitment to Africa.” Well, there’s always YALI. So many young leaders to indoctrinate, so little time.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

Selected Articles: COVID Measures: Biggest “Social Conformity Event” in History. Corona Policy Was Aimed at “Changing Behavior”, Not at Improving Health.

September 22nd, 2022 by Global Research News

COVID Measures: Biggest “Social Conformity Event” in History. Corona Policy Was Aimed at “Changing Behavior”, Not at Improving Health.

By Elze van Hamelen, September 21, 2022

Corona policy was primarily focused on directing citizen behavior such as wearing mouth masks, keeping a distance, staying home, and test and vaccination readiness – experimental measures with no scientific basis. This is evidenced by the large-scale use of behavioral scientists in implementation and communication of corona policy.

Offence by Another Name: Suppressing Anti-Royal Protest in Britain

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, September 22, 2022

The right to protest, fragile and meekly protected by the judiciary in Britain’s common law tradition, did not really hold much force till European law confirmed it.  In the UK, condemning other countries for suppressing rights to protest is standard fare.

Staking Out Strands of the Web. “Who Is Offering the Bribes and Enforcing the Threats?”

By Nowick Gray, September 21, 2022

It’s distressing to find, in the cause of championing human freedom, infighting among the freedom fighters. Naturally this conflict sabotages the common cause. Factions and prominent advocates accuse each other of being “controlled opposition,” agents provocateurs, dupes, or self-serving egotists advancing platforms of personal gain.

Our Final Stand Against the Globalist Powerbrokers

By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, September 21, 2022

In a recent essay on the nature of Power, I posited that the most pressing philosophical and practical question of the day – and, as I now further reflect upon it, the most moral – is what might transpire if no further scientific advances could be made.  If, in fact, humankind would have to make do with only the currently available technology, what would happen? What would happen if we put a halt to the never-ending quest for material control of the natural world?

How Billionaires Become Billionaires

By Prof. James Petras, September 21, 2022

America has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist country. In this essay we will discuss the socio-economic roots of inequalities and the relation between the concentration of wealth and the downward mobility of the working and salaried classes.

Could Armenia Really Ditch the CSTO Sometime Soon?

By Andrew Korybko, September 21, 2022

US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Armenia and the very warm welcome that she received while in that country prompted speculation among some that America is attempting to “poach” this Russian ally from the CSTO mutual defense pact.

Europe’s Energy Armageddon from Berlin and Brussels, Not Moscow

By F. William Engdahl, September 21, 2022

On August 22 the exchange-traded market price for natural gas in the German THE (Trading Hub Europe) gas hub was trading more than 1000% higher than a year ago. Most citizens are told by the Scholz regime that the reason is Putin and Russia’s war in Ukraine. The truth is quite otherwise.

Video: The Corona Crisis and the Criminalization of Justice. Reiner Fuellmich and Michael Swinwood

By Reiner Fuellmich, Michael Swinwood, and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 18, 2022

Two outstanding guests on GRTV: Dr. Reiner Fuellmich and Dr. Michael Swinwood on the Corona Crisis and the Criminalization of Justice, interviewed by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky.

Beware of the QR Code, Remember Agenda ID2020?

By Peter Koenig, September 18, 2022

What we are confronted with now is much worse. It’s Agenda ID2020 on steroids. It’s the worldwide invasion of the QR code – QR coding of everything, including Agenda ID2020 – and all of your most intimate data, health, personal behaviors, habits – track records of where we have been and even where we may be planning to go. Nothing will escape the QR code.

Ukraine, It Was All Written in the Rand Corp Plan. “The U.S. Plan Against Russia Was Formulated Three Years Ago”

By Manlio Dinucci, September 18, 2022

The strategic plan of the United States against Russia was elaborated three years ago by the Rand Corporation (the manifesto, Rand Corp: how to bring down Russia, May 21, 2019). The Rand Corporation, headquartered in Washington, DC, is “a global research organization developing solutions to policy challenges”: it has an army of 1,800 researchers and other specialists recruited from 50 countries, speaking 75 languages, spread across offices and other locations in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Persian Gulf. Rand’s U.S. personnel live and work in more than 25 countries.

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Offence by Another Name: Suppressing Anti-Royal Protest in Britain

September 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

The right to protest, fragile and meekly protected by the judiciary in Britain’s common law tradition, did not really hold much force till European law confirmed it.  In the UK, condemning other countries for suppressing rights to protest is standard fare.  So it was with some discomforting surprise – at least to a number of talking heads – that people were arrested for protesting against the monarchy after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

Such surprise is misplaced.  In the UK, protestors can be marched away before the operation of vast, and vague discretionary powers wielded by the police.  An old, ancient favourite is the breaching of the peace, something many a blue-clad officer is bound to see in any gathering of human beings.

In addition to that general power available to the police, the Public Order Act 1986 UK also covers public order offences.  Section 5 enumerates instances where a person is guilty of such offences: where “they use threatening or abusive words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour or disorderly behaviour” or display “any writing, sign or visible representation which is threatening or abusive.”

An additional, emotive ingredient is also added to the legislation.  Such conduct should take place “within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.” During times of government declared mourning, the abuse of such wording is nigh boundless, despite the imprecise defence of “reasonable accuse” available to the accused party.

It is precisely in such wording that suppression of protest can take place with relative ease.  The conditions of grieving were so utterly total in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death as to be sinisterly oppressive.  The slightest show of disagreement with the grievers was treated as abnormal and offensive.  It was, as Jonathan Freedland wrote, “our collective moment of madness, a week when somehow we lost our grip.”

The police can count upon another weapon in their already vast armoury of quelling protest.  The latest Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act of 2022 is yet another tool, adding “noise-related” provisions.  It grants police powers to limit public processions, public assemblies and one-person protests “where it is reasonably believed that the noise they generated may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation carried on in the vicinity or have a significant impact on people in the vicinity of the protest.”

The public nuisance element in the legislation is also troubling.  Police powers are granted to enable arrest and charging of individuals responsible for knowingly or recklessly doing something that risks or causes serious harm to the public.  This also covers obstructions to the public “in the exercise or enjoyment of a right that may be exercised or enjoyed by the public at large”.  The legislation defines serious harm as death, personal injury or disease; loss of, or damage to, property, or; serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or loss of amenity.”

While the degree of mourning for the Queen’s passing has lacked the intense and grotesque mawkishness shown at Diana’s death, those wishing to sport a different view have also been singled out for their dissent.  There are a good number who see little merit in the monarchy continuing and have expressed disagreement with the new occupant.  One anti-Royal protester, holding the sign “Not My King” in a peaceful and dignified manner, was removed by police in an incident that caused a flutter of concern.

A protestor in Edinburgh was also arrested for holding up the somewhat spicier “Fuck imperialism, abolish monarchy” placard in front of St. Giles Cathedral.  According to a police spokeswoman, the arrest was made “in connection with a breach of the peace”.  Conservative commentator Brendan O’Neill saw it rather differently, calling it “an alarming, almost medieval act of censorship” and “an intolerable assault on freedom of speech.”

Despite initiating a number of arrests the Metropolitan Police insist, as they tend to, that, “The public absolutely have a right to protest and we have been making this clear to all officers involved in the extraordinary operation currently taking place.”

For those believers in Britannic exceptionalism, this was disturbing.   It troubled University of East Anglia academic David Mead, who found it difficult to identify “what criminal offences protesters might have committed by shouting ‘not my king’ or ‘abolish the monarchy’ as the royal procession of the casket made its way along the streets”.

Mead poses a few questions.  Was there threatening or abusive language likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress within the meaning of the Public Order Act?  Seemingly not.  Were the chants or placards in question threatening or abusive?  Again, the case did not stack up.  Even the public nuisance charge would fail to stick.

Perhaps the only ground left was that unclear power of taking proportionate action to prevent breaches of the peace.  Even in an absence of violence, the police might still decide that violence to a person or property might imminently arise.  Best step in before it’s too late.

This is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs, showing, yet again, that the Sceptred Isle can hardly be counted as an impregnable bastion of free speech and public dissent.  “If people are not allowed to quietly, if offensively, protest against the proclamation of a king,” reflects O’Neill, “then clearly our country is not as free as we thought.”

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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: Police officers on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Police confirmed the arrest. (Source: The Scotsman)

Climate Crisis and the Age of the Super-Typhoon: Storms Batter, Flood Puerto Rico, Pakistan, Japan and Shanghai

September 21st, 2022 by Prof. Juan Cole

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China Ready to Make Efforts for ‘Peaceful Reunification’ with Taiwan

September 21st, 2022 by TRT World

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Staking Out Strands of the Web. “Who is Offering the Bribes and Enforcing the Threats?”

September 21st, 2022 by Nowick Gray

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It’s distressing to find, in the cause of championing human freedom, infighting among the freedom fighters. Naturally this conflict sabotages the common cause. Factions and prominent advocates accuse each other of being “controlled opposition,” agents provocateurs, dupes, or self-serving egotists advancing platforms of personal gain. Or, as in Charles Eisenstein’s latest screed (There’s No One Driving the Bus), lacking philosophical depth and moral nuance.

In Eisenstein’s view the impulse to lay blame and identify conspiracy is misguided and distracting from the more diffuse cause of our enslavement, our own inability to exercise personal and communal power in our lives. The resulting void, he urges, is more chaos than conspiracy, more abdication than control. But in the conclusion of the essay he betrays the premise by writing,

“It takes commitment to renounce the bribes, ignore the threats, and change the habits.” The obvious rebuttal asks, “Then who is offering the bribes and enforcing the threats?”

It is not my intention to join the infighting by slandering Eisenstein, but to challenge his anti-fundamentalism as yet another version of divisive labeling. He opposes the black-and-white dualism of good guys versus bad guys, in the interest of witnessing the whole field of our collective responsibility. Fair enough, as far as that goes. But the firmness of that denial distracts—if I may use the same term in reverse—from the known planning and perpetration of crimes against humanity by those proud to exercise such control at every level of the machinery of power. That the hierarchy is deep and widespread and staffed by human actors who genuinely believe in the goodness of their technocratic cause does not excuse them from blame and responsibility for its deadly and yes, evil consequences.

The Overton window of acceptable discourse has painted “conspiracy theory” in such dark colors that it seems obligatory to refrain from assigning blame to malign actors on the world stage. Professor Mattias Desmet of “Mass Formation” fame is another case in point, taking pains to avoid targeting “evil globalists” and instead looking to more existential causes of our oppression, such as the “free-floating anxiety” that characterizes modern society and makes us vulnerable. Again it’s important, however, to bring focus also to the forces that exploit and capitalize on that vulnerability.

Why does it have to be either/or? Why can’t we assign responsibility both to victims and perpetrators in the injustice being carried out day by day? Maybe it’s because it’s too uncomfortable then to see oneself as a bit of both, victim and perpetrator.

While I agree that it’s too simplistic to blame the CIA, or China, or Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab for all our woes, why bend over backward to absolve them of their well-documented schemes? True, it may be futile to tie the whole black web to a single super Spider; but how can we deny the gorging of global predators at our expense?

I would prefer to take value from the larger perspectives of Eisenstein and Desmet, as complementary to “conspiracy theory,” rather than attack them as dangerous “controlled opposition.” It’s distressing meanwhile to witness such turf warfare being carried out among the rival champions of human freedom. Lately we see venomous attacks on Desmet by erstwhile champions of COVID dissent Jon Rappoport, CJ Hopkins, and Peter and Ginger Breggin. Hopkins in a recent column even vents his ire on his own commenters who dare to defend the thesis that a collective malaise has given rise to the new medical totalitarianism.

To these vocal critics it’s a simple game of power, and if you don’t agree you are at best stupid or worse, part of the problem. Dr. Robert Malone has suffered similar abuse for his advocacy of Desmet’s premise of our collective hypnosis. If you avoid pointing fingers and laying blame at the feet of any chosen autocrats or puppetmasters, it’s a crime of omission and in effect you are playing for the wrong team.

I appeal here to the notion of giving credit to both sides. Yes, we are responsible as a collective and as individuals for our own powerlessness. And yes, certain powerful individuals and elite “powers that be” are milking the global population of every ounce of gold and blood possible. Why can’t both these premises be true, valid, and hold weight in our conversations?

Just as there is no settled “Science” to follow in guiding public policy, there is no magic formula to reversing our oppression, held only by the high priests and coaches of “our team.” It’s about Us, and it’s about Them. It behooves us not to stake our tent in one exclusive camp or another, but to seek how we can join forces to improve our precarious human condition, trembling on the web.

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Nowick Gray is a writer, editor, and researcher from British Columbia, Canada. This article first appeared on his Substack channel, New World Dreaming. Nowick is the author of a new book of essays, Covid Narrative Freedom: Two Years of Dissent. Visit his website at NowickGray.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Pesticides Plague Californians Farm Workers, New Study Shows

September 21st, 2022 by Shannon Kelleher

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Carmen Obeso was pulling weeds at a strawberry field in Ventura County, California when she smelled something strange. Nearby she spotted a machine spraying pesticides; soon, her eyes were watering and she felt sick to her stomach. Obeso, a Latina farmworker, reported the incident to her crew leader and was evaluated at an on-site health care clinic. A doctor there reassured her that she had not been exposed to anything harmful, and the company expected her back at work the following Monday.

But Obeso didn’t feel better by the next week, nor in the weeks that followed. Her eyes continued to water and felt gritty, and her vision was changing. She knew something was wrong, but the on-site physician still insisted she was fine. Finally, Obeso went to see a different doctor, who confirmed that her eyes had been affected.

It has been two years since the spray incident, and Obeso said in a recent interview that her vision continues to worsen. She is almost blind in sunny conditions unless she wears shaded glasses, she said.

Image: Carmen Obeso stands in a strawberry field in Ventura County. Photo by Teresa Gomez.

Now, instead of working in the fields, she volunteers with farmworker advocacy groups, and is one of a growing number of Hispanic/Latino farmworkers pushing for improved working conditions, including protections for pesticides.

“I feel there are other farmworkers in similar situations and they’re not able to voice it,” she said in Spanish during an interview aided by a translator. “When [the company] sprays the fields, they don’t put up postings. People go in and work and accumulate whatever was sprayed there. They might not always have acute reactions, but in the long run that’s when the consequences can be seen.”

Ventura County is known for its year-round production of roughly $2 billion worth of fruits and vegetables that feed people throughout the US and more than 70 other countries. Strawberries are the top crop, but workers also produce peppers, tomatoes, blueberries, avocados, and more.

But while these farms produce foods many consider staples of a healthy diet, the profusion of pesticides used on the fields pose significant risks to already vulnerable populations living and working in the area, according to research published this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment. These include thousands of mostly Latino farmworkers, many of which live below the poverty line and lack health insurance.

The study found that 17.1 million pounds of pesticides, or an average of 5.7 million pounds per year, were sprayed in Ventura County from 2016 to 2018. The pesticides used included more than 60 types known to be carcinogenic and 74 types linked to endocrine disruption. Another 85 pesticides used in the county were linked to developmental and reproductive toxicity.

In terms of volume, pesticides linked to cancer accounted for nearly a quarter of the total pounds of pesticides applied in the county, the researchers documented.

Notably, the study found that township sections where people of color were the majority had not just the most pesticide use, but also the most toxic pesticide use. More than half of the population in these areas was Latino or Hispanic. In contrast, areas that were relatively free of pesticides were overwhelmingly white communities.

The work adds to a growing body of research underscoring how communities of color face disproportionate exposure to pesticides and bear the brunt of adverse health impacts.

“Pesticide use is a known environmental justice issue,” said Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) who helped lead the research. “But this study really adds a lot more data to show more specific impacts, potentially, on individual communities and individual areas.”

Monitoring the air 

The researchers used sociodemographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, layering over pesticide use data from 2016-2018 for Ventura County and then grouping together the most harmful types of pesticides.

The researchers highlighted two fumigants – metam potassium and sodium and 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D) – as examples of chemicals sprayed in the county that are both highly used and highly toxic.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classified 1,3-D as “likely carcinogenic to humans” from 1985 to 2018, but in 2019 downgraded the classification to a “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential,” a decision that essentially allowed for expanded use and greater human exposure to the chemical often referred to by the trade name Telone. The EPA’s Office of Inspector General castigated the regulator for failing to properly consider cancer risks. But the EPA has not changed its position.

Anne Katten, pesticide safety specialist at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation (CRLAF), said the foundation has been calling on state officials to tighten restrictions on use of soil fumigants such as Telone. But the opposite has happened: while there used to be a cap on Telone use at 90,250 lbs per 36-square-mile area, the cap is now at 136,000 lbs.

DPR says it plans to propose Telone regulations later this fall and adds that it is developing a statewide pesticide notification system that will give the public advance notice about pesticide applications.

Air monitoring stations in Ventura County have detected high levels of Telone as well as a fumigant called chloropicrin, commonly used in producing strawberries, according to Katten. “Quite high levels” of chloropicrin were detected last year at an air monitoring station at a high school in the county, exceeding levels deemed safe by the California DPR, she said.

“It’s a problem for people working in the application of fumigants, but also people in nearby fields and people who live in the area are exposed to the drift,” she said.

The new study builds on work published in April in the journal BMC Public Health that examined how disparities in exposures and harms from pesticides impact disadvantaged communities in both rural and urban settings and how those disparities are perpetuated by a range of factors, including inadequate worker protections.

Concerns for children

As many as 500,000 children work as farmworkers in U.S. fields and orchards, according to the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. But even children not in the fields still face significant risk from the agricultural chemicals, according to Bob Gunier, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gunier has spent more than a decade working on a birth cohort study of mostly Latino children born in the Salinas Valley, another coastal farmworker community.

“The strongest association we have seen between pesticide exposure during pregnancy and effects on children’s brains are with cognition, so like IQ and attention, ADHD,” said Gunier. “We have also looked at respiratory health, like asthma and lung function. For that, we actually see stronger associations [with exposure] during their childhood.”

California DPR adopted a regulation in 2018 creating a quarter-mile buffer zone for schools and daycares near fields that use pesticides, saying they are “working to improve grower field-level pesticide use reporting to more accurately track compliance with the school regulations.”  But Gunier questions whether the measure is enough to protect communities, saying that pregnant women might be more sensitive and susceptible to pesticide exposure problems than other adults.

“If we really want to protect children’s health, we need to start there,” Gunier said.

Image: A farmworker picks strawberries in Ventura County. Photo by Amadeo Sumano

Rosario Castañeda, a former Ventura County farmworker who has long suffered from a skin condition she developed while working in the fields, says she has seen many farmworker women suffer miscarriages. She believes they were caused by pesticide exposure.

“We see miscarriages happen a lot with women working in the field,” said Castañeda, who now works with a women’s farmworker advocacy organization called Lideres Campesinas. “Women who maybe don’t know they are pregnant and are exposed to dangerous pesticides end up having miscarriages.”

Avital Harari, an endocrine surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, is concerned about the role pesticide exposure might play in hormone function and cancer.

“We believe [pesticide exposure] can be both an endocrine disruptor, which can basically alter the hormone function of the thyroid, and potentially cause an increase in neoplasm, leading to thyroid cancer,” said Harari.

As Harari began researching risk factors for advanced thyroid cancer at UCLA, she noticed that a lot of her referrals were coming from Bakersfield in Kern County– one of the top agricultural counties in the U.S. In a recent case-control study using thyroid cancer cases from the California Cancer Registry, Harari and colleagues found that 10 of the 29 pesticides they analyzed were associated with thyroid cancer.

No voice, no vote

Despite scientific evidence for pesticide links to diseases and other health problems, many farmworkers are not aware of the extent of the risk they face, worker advocates say.

“On a daily basis, there are still immigrants coming to the U.S. that have no idea,” said Mily Trevino-Sauceda,executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, which translates to the National Alliance of Farmworker Women.

However, those who have learned about pesticide health risks firsthand and managed to leave agricultural work behind are speaking out. And last month, hundreds of farmworkers made a 24-day, 335-mile march from Delano to Sacramento to urge California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would help enable farmworkers to unionize – an ability that would help empower them to fight back against pesticide exposure and other injustices.

Image: Pesticides are sprayed in a field near farmworkers. Photo by Amadeo Sumano.

“It’s more important for them to preserve the fruit than the wellbeing of the workers,” said Claudia Quezada, a former farmworker who now coordinates Lideres Campesinas’ projects in Oxnard. Quezada recalled that the company she used to work for would spray pesticides without regard for the weather. On humid mornings, when the chemicals would linger on the plants, the workers would sometimes develop rashes, she said.

Teresa Gomez, the Ventura County Community Organizer for Californians for Pesticide Reform, echoed the complaints, saying rashes and headaches are common among those working fields where pesticides are sprayed.

“We couldn’t complain… they would just tell us that we were being problematic and that we were just looking for a lawsuit,” said Gomez. “And so, we would just have to keep on working. Farmworkers don’t have a voice nor a vote and if they do speak up, they are threatened with being laid off or fired.”

Amadeo Sumano said he was fired from his job on a Ventura County farm after sharing a photo and a video on social media that showed pesticides being sprayed close to several farmworkers. He said his efforts to share the video have made it difficult for him to find other farm work in the area.

Nathan Donley, a researcher with the Center for Biological Diversity who was a co-author on the April study published in BMC Public Health, said the EPA needs to take several steps to better protect farmworkers, including establishing a national monitoring system to analyze the scope of harm they face just doing their jobs.

“I think it would be relatively easy for EPA under this administration to make some significant gains,” said Donley. “It would be nice to see this agency put the values of people over those of the pesticide industry.”

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Featured image is by Amadeo Sudano via The New Lede

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COVID Measures: Biggest “Social Conformity Event” in History. Corona Policy Was Aimed at “Changing Behavior”, Not at Improving Health.

September 21st, 2022 by Elze van Hamelen

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***

Read Part I and II:

The Netherlands: Government Sponsored Behavioral Control and Social Engineering Experiments

By Elze van Hamelen, September 20, 2022

Mindspace – A Guide to Behavioral Manipulation

By Elze van Hamelen, September 19, 2022

Corona policy was primarily focused on directing citizen behavior such as wearing mouth masks, keeping a distance, staying home, and test and vaccination readiness – experimental measures with no scientific basis. This is evidenced by the large-scale use of behavioral scientists in implementation and communication of corona policy. The government and media are supported in this behavioral management by the RIVM (the Dutch CDC) Corona Behavior Unit and the government-wide Corona Behavior Team.

The application of behavioral insights is taking off during corona, and various government departments are working together to develop “interventions” that make citizens more compliant with corona rules. “This is the first policy topic on which the government has deployed relatively large amounts of behavioral expertise,” BIN NL writes in report “Rich in Behavioral Insights” (2021). This behavioral expertise focuses on fueling autonomous and unconscious behavior by acting on emotions such as fear, shame, guilt, wanting to maintain a positive self-image, or wanting to belong to the group. Or, by presenting information or possibilities in such a way that the ‘right’ choice is automatically made.

At the beginning of the crisis, in March 2020, the RIVM Corona Behavior Unit will be established. The behavioral unit aims to “promote the physical, mental and social health of the population,” and is supported in this by an advisory board and several expert teams including 40 professors and 19 doctors. They conduct research with which they support government communication and policy. The unit reports to, among others, the National Coordinator for Terrorism and Security (NCTV, the Dutch version of ‘Homeland Security’) and the National Crisis Communication Core Team (NKC). In addition to BIN-NL, the RIVM Corona Behavior Unit, the government-wide Corona Behavior Team is was established. They cooperate on developing interventions to promote compliance. The NKC coordinates press and public communications, drawing on the behavioral recommendations of the RIVM Corona Behavior Unit and the Corona Behavior Team.

The commitment to behavioral guidance is very explicit in a memo released under a FOIA request from the Ministry of Health dated May 12, 2020: “It takes more to guide behavior. But it also takes more than nudging. It’s about thinking about the whole journey that people make in certain situations, contexts, moments in the day, and so on. And what choices they make in the process. What is difficult or easy to do? What can we do to help people exhibit the right behavior? You want people not to have to think. How do actions and choices come about? Key questions then are:

  • How can we properly engage the unconscious part of people with cues and prompts (e.g., washing hands, how does a new ritual arise?)?
  • How do people stay intrinsically motivated?
  • How can people themselves become experts in making good judgments?”

The RIVM Corona behavior unit is asked in the memo for advice and support: “In what way can we, in the very short term, give nudging a better place in the communication of the national government when it comes to monitoring measures?” The NKC applies these insights, by “rewarding exemplary behavior or speaking from ‘we’.” They are asked, “what need is there at the local and regional level, for example, a toolkit, or an overview of principles of nudging?”

The report “Rich in Behavioral Insights Edition 2021” that was published by BIN-NL, shows how efforts were made to manipulate citizen behavior, and that the focus was not on health outcomes. The research and interventions focused on whether citizens stay home after a positive pcr test, on willingness to test regularly, and on stimulating large-scale testing even when there are no symptoms. The behavioral scientists overlook the fact that the tests have no diagnostic value, and that asymptomatic transmission has not been scientifically proven – and that staying home when you have no symptoms but a positive test is of no medical benefit. Meanwhile, without context, the “infections” resulting from large-scale testing are presented day in and day out in the media as a measure of the pandemic, thus creating lingering fear.

Additionally, investigations documents that were released under FOIA, show even more explicitly that government interventions were focused behavior change. For example, in the summer of 2020, experiments were be conducted in Amsterdam and Rotterdam investigating the effect of wearing masks on distancing, a measure that the RIVM notes has “modest scientific support.” It was already known that wearing masks would not prevent the spread of the virus. The experiments measure do not measure any health indicators. One behavioral expert substantiates masking as follows: “Masks have become the most visible evidence of Covid”.  Seeing the masks causes anxiety, in addition they signal the “social norm,” who follows the rules, and who does not. They are very effective for continued obedience.

Fear

Similar to the Netherlands, the British government has several departments that advise on the application of behavioral knowledge. One such department is “SPI-B,” the “Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior,” was concerned in March 2020 because a large number of citizens see did not feel sufficiently threatened by the virus because they knew it posed no risk to their age group. Therefore, the behavioral unit recommended that ” The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard‐hitting emotional messaging based on accurate information about risk.” The British government followed with a campaign featuring images of elderly people on respirators with the messaging “Look her in the eyes. And tell you never bend the rules”. In Germany, a similar recommendation leaked out from the Interior Ministry. This recommendation to increase fear in became known as the ‘panic paper’. It is known that manipulating fear is one of the most effective ways to instell obedience.

Although no “panic paper” came out in the Netherlands, communication campaigns surrounding corona played on fear, for example by presenting images of mass graves and headlines and through headlines or advertisements such as:

  • “Nearly 170,000 new infections a day as British variant engulfs Netherlands” (AD, January 2021)
  • “British variant more than 60 percent deadlier” (NRC, March 2021)
  • “1.5 meters can save your mom’s life” (Amsterdam, 2020)
  • “Keep your grandmother out of the ICU” (Amsterdam, 2020)
  • “A corona test is free. Your grandma priceless” (Do What Must Campaign, The Hague).

Behavioral guidance for vaccination readiness

“What kinds of messages are most persuasive for increasing vaccination willingness?”, this question was investigated by five scientists affiliated with the prestigious American University of Yale. They developed and tested messages aimed at self-interest, guilt and shame, anger, courage, trust in science, regaining personal freedom and economic freedom, and published their findings in the article “Persuasive messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions,” in the scientific journal Vaccine. The scientists write, “Persuasive messages evoke a sense that vaccinating is social, address concerns about how others see you, and also help convince others to get vaccinated, and condemn those who don’t.” The first part of the study was be conducted between May and July 2020, well before the first corona vaccine is developed, let alone temporarily authorized. The scientists do not address whether concerns about vaccine safety or effectiveness may be justified. The assumption is that vaccinating is the solution to the crisis, and the use of behavioral knowledge is desirable to increase vaccination willingness – an assumption that we also find among behavioral units and government in the Netherlands.

Examples of recommended messages include:

  • “Stopping covid is important because you can get sick, and die from it. It is dangerous for people of all ages. Getting vaccinated is the most effective way not to get sick.”
  • “By getting vaccinated you can protect everyone around you, it reduces the risk of your family or people around you getting sick.
  • “Imagine how guilty you feel when you make someone else sick…”
  • “Imagine how embarrassed you feel when you make someone else sick…”
  • “Those who do not take a vaccine are not brave, but reckless… they are putting their family’s health at risk.”
  • “The only way to defeat covid is to follow scientific approaches… the people who refuse a vaccine are not aware of the science”
  • “Every person who gets vaccinated reduces the likelihood that we will have to go back into lockdown.”

The messages are echoed almost one-to-one in the Dutch campaign to encourage vaccination readiness:

Hugo de Jonge: “Either you get vaccinated, or you get sick” (July 2021)

  • “Corona vaccination: ‘we roll up our sleeves. To protect yourself and those around you, vaccination is the most important step” (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport)
  • “Do you want to embrace the other again? Will you get vaccinated against corona?” (Poster in retirement home).
  • “Slow vaccination suspected cause of high excess mortality in the Netherlands” (2022, Trouw)
  • “An unvaccinated person in the ICU costs four to ten people their operation” (Trouw, October 2021)
  • “Mayor of Amsterdam Femke Halsema: vaccine refusers often ill-informed” (AT5, December 2021)
  • “Unvaccinated people are egoists. Thanks to them society remains locked. (Noordhollands Dagblad).

In the Netherlands, there is a particularly strong commitment to regaining (!) freedom:

  • “Vaccination makes more and more possible” (Tv spot, Ministry of VWS)
  • “OMT: end of January room for relaxations, provided enough booster shots are taken” (January, 2022).
  • “Camping with my grandfather again, that’s what I do it for. Daan, 22 years old”. (Campaign Only Together)
  • “I want to be able to just go to school again. That’s why I got the shot. Get your vaccinations without an appointment” (Girl year at 14, advertising GGD Amsterdam)
  • “I feel like going to a festival again. Just give me the jab!” (GGD Amsterdam)
  • “This weekend DJs at vaccination location NDSM to win over young people” (AT5, July 2021)
  • “Heineken: the night belongs to the vaccinated” (Advertisement)

Later, pressure to get “vaccinated” has been greatly increased by stepping up pressure, coercion, threats of exclusion and intimidation:

  • “Non-vaccinated are often poorly educated, ‘right-wing Christian’ or immigrant” Trouw, November 2021)
  • “Majority vaccinated think people without vaccinations can be refused entry to public places” (EenVandaag July 2021)
  • Minister of Health Hugo de Jonge: “We continue to vaccinate, neighborhood by neighborhood, door by door, arm by arm” (Press conference, 2021)
  • Minister of Health Hugo de Jonge: “I do not resign myself to the right to say no to vaccine” (Press conference, December 2021)

The slogans and messages play purposefully on automatic, unconscious processes. As a result, an image forms, under the radar, that if you get vaccinated you care about your family, are fulfilling your social duty, are helping society come out of lockdown, you are smart – because you understand the science, and that those who don’t participate are particularly antisocial, evil and stupid. None of the slogans provide real information that helps you make an informed, educated choice, worse, the unconscious image that is created causes a resistance to do go look at that information.

Replacing political debate with social engineering

The behavioral influence campaigns rest on the assumption that we are dealing with a potentially apocalyptic virus that justifies the extreme measures. But it was clear very early on in the crisis, in part because of the research of Stanford’s top virologist John P. A. Ioannidis, that we are dealing with a disease similar to severe influenza, which is primarily a risk to the elderly. Nor are the measures — such as 1.5-meter distance, wearing masks, mass testing, lockdowns, or achieving maximum ‘vaccination’ coverage — to prevent the spread of the virus that for most gives a 99 percent survival rate, had a good scientific foundation. What we now know, based on the investigation of documents that have been released under FOIA, is that this was also known to the government.

This shows the real problem with behavioral influencing: rational exchange based on scientific, factual information was not possible within the public domain. Indeed, it is actively censored, suppressed, blackballed and excluded. At the same time, the social engineers assume a consensus therefore behavioral control would be justified. Politics is replaced by social engineering.

Had real open discussion of alternatives been possible, the money spent on behavioral control, communication and surveillance could have gone instead to expanding care and supporting caregivers. Where the justification for manipulation starts with the assumption that citizens have “limited rationality,” and that the government must therefore ‘guide’ them in their choices, it morphes into the desire that those citizens should rather stop thinking for themselves altogether.

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This article was previously published in the reader-funded Dutch newspaper De Andere Krant.

Sources

Stappenplan overheidscommunicatie en interventies

RIVM Corona Gedragsunit https://www.rivm.nl/documenten/stappenplan-overheidscommunicatie-interventies

https://danielvdtuin.substack.com/p/wob-documenten-mondkapjesplicht

https://deanderekrant.nl/nieuws/alles-wat-je-over-covid-zou-moeten-weten–en-je-nooit-wordt-verteld-2021-12-27

Jullie gedragsexperiment was in opdracht van het rijksbrede Corona Gedragsteam. https://www.binnl.nl/community/in+gesprek+met/in+gesprek+met+maureen+turina-tumewu+en+freek+smit/default.aspx

State of Fear. Laura Dodsworth. (staat ook de Biderman coercion chart in) https://www.amazon.com/State-Fear-government-weaponised-Covid-19-ebook/dp/B08ZSYN14J

Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K.

SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from COVID-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’

Then, the so-called “Panic Paper” was leaked, which was written by the German Department of the Interior. Its classified content shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in fact, the population was deliberately driven to panic by politicians and mainstream media. https://foreignaffairsintelligencecouncil.wordpress.com/tag/panic-paper/

Crowdsourced verzameling van nudge boodschappen: https://twitter.com/ElzevH/status/1549652827466874880

We blijven vaccineren, wijk voor wijk, deur voor deur, arm voor arm

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/manipulation-guilt-shame-vaccine-compliance/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X21013682?via%3Dihub

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-covid-19/documenten/rapporten/2021/08/31/rapportage-campagne-effectmonitor-coronavaccinatie-augustus-2021

Featured image is from The Dossier

The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

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Could Armenia Really Ditch the CSTO Sometime Soon?

September 21st, 2022 by Andrew Korybko

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There are four possible scenarios for how everything could unfold:

1) Armenia remains in the CSTO and doesn’t receive US military equipment;

2) Armenian remains in the bloc but ends up receiving such aid;

3) Armenia announces its withdrawal from the bloc;

4) Armenia unilaterally hosts US forces and is kicked out of the CSTO.

US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Armenia and the very warm welcome that she received while in that country prompted speculation among some that America is attempting to “poach” this Russian ally from the CSTO mutual defense pact. Secretary of the Security Council Armen Grigoryan expressed dissatisfaction with the bloc’s response to Azerbaijan’s undeclared “special military operation” from earlier this month, declaring that his country’s expectations weren’t met despite having thought that an intervention similar to the one carried out in Kazakhstan in January could be in the cards.

Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan, meanwhile, compared the CSTO to a gun that doesn’t fire and said that Azerbaijan therefore isn’t deterred by it.

He ominously noted that Armenia has drawn conclusions from the latest events, but just like Grigoryan, Simonyan also downplayed the possibility of withdrawing from the bloc. In response to Pelosi’s quip in the Armenian capital that her hosts “were disappointed they got fact-finders and not protection”, mission chief Col. Gen. Anatoly Sidorov stated that the organization “prioritizes political-diplomatic methods” and is “not in a rush to draw the saber.”

It’s against this contentious backdrop of newly reinvigorated Great Power competition between Russia and the US over Armenia’s military loyalty that observers have begun to once again speculate about the future of that South Caucasus country’s membership in the CSTO. There are four possible scenarios for how everything could unfold:

1) Armenia remains in the CSTO and doesn’t receive US military equipment;

2) Armenian remains in the bloc but ends up receiving such aid;

3) Armenia announces its withdrawal from the bloc;

4) and Armenia unilaterally hosts US forces and is kicked out of the CSTO.

The first and second are the most likely of these four, with everything leaning closer to the latter. Regarding the first, Armenia’s top officials have already signaled that they’re planning to gradually diversify from their military-security dependence on Russia. To not go through with that to some extent would be akin to pulling a gun that doesn’t fire, which is exactly how Simonyan criticized the CSTO. This leads to the second scenario of receiving US military aid, which is possible in spite of its continued membership in the CSTO as proven by the Turkish precedent with Russia’s Central Asian allies.

That West Asian NATO member, which boasts the bloc’s second-largest military, is rapidly becoming a strategically significant security partner for CSTO members Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as documented in this detailed piece from May. It therefore wouldn’t be the first time that a NATO country makes military-security inroads in a CSTO one upon the latter’s request in the event that the US begins sending equipment to Armenia. That, however, would worsen Washington’s already fraught relations with Ankara and contribute to its sense of encirclement considering recent US inroads in Cyprus and Greece.

Moving along to the third scenario of Armenia announcing its withdrawal from the CSTO just like Uzbekistan did a while back, this is unrealistic to expect since it would create a dangerous window for Azerbaijan and/or Turkey to unilaterally employ military means against it. After all, Russia wouldn’t care in that case what happens to Armenia afterwards and would thus be unlikely to protect it after being ditched for the US. Plus, Azerbaijan and/or Turkey could attack in the time before US troops arrive, which would doom Armenia since there’s no way that it could defend itself without a Great Power ally.

The fourth scenario is the most dramatic and is probably the path that Armenia would take in the very unlikely event that it decides to leave the CSTO. This would see it unilaterally hosting US forces in contravention of the CSTO’s 2011 agreement that the deployment of military infrastructure on their territory must be consensually approved by all the bloc’s members. By dropping such an unpleasant surprise on everyone, Armenia can immediately replace Russian troops with American ones without the dangerous window that the third scenario could create for enticing an Azerbaijani and/or Turkish attack.

Seeing as how the second scenario of receiving US military aid while remaining in the CSTO per the Central Asian-Turkish precedent is the most likely, especially since Armenia might rightly be reluctant to place full trust in America by unilaterally hosting its troops and thus being kicked out of the Russian bloc that it presently participates in, Russia must urgently correct their growing differences of perception. It’s incumbent on its officials and influencers to explain to their counterparts and their society that there’s no comparison between their earlier Kazakh mission and their current Armenian one.

The first was a hybrid anti-terrorist and peacekeeping mission while the second is a fact-finding mission that’s implemented at the gradual pace that it presently is in order to avoid a major regional war by miscalculation. It would be unwise for the CSTO to immediately enter into conflict with Azerbaijan, which is NATO-member Turkey’s de facto mutual defense ally after June 2021’s Susha Agreement, hence the need for calmly and carefully gathering all the facts about what just took place. Of course, they’d promptly defend themselves if attacked by Azerbaijan while doing so, but Baku is unlikely to do that.

Over the years, Armenian leaders took advantage of the public’s lack of understanding about what exactly the CSTO is and how it operates to manipulate their perceptions in such a way as to get them to oversimplify its purpose by imagining that the bloc is a so-called “geopolitical fire brigade”. What’s meant by this is that people wrongly assumed that it’ll rush to their rescue if Azerbaijan attacked them even a single time regardless if their side was the one that provoked it, which would lead to a Russian-Azerbaijani war that they expected Moscow to soundly win.

The reality is altogether different since the Kremlin never had any such intentions of the CSTO functioning in such a way, but it can nevertheless be constructively critiqued for failing to compellingly articulate this to Armenian society over the years, which regrettably resulted in wishful thinking and the false expectations associated with them proliferating through that population. The inevitable outcome of such wishful thinking is that those who held such unrealistic views ended up sorely disappointed and thus became very emotionally susceptible to weaponized infowar narratives from hostile third parties.

America immediately realized that it could maximally exploit Armenians’ wishful thinking, false expectations, and subsequently deep disappointment with the CSTO by dispatching Pelosi to that country to explore the possibility of US arms shipments to this Russian ally. There wouldn’t have been any fertile ground for this latest Hybrid War plot to take root had Russia preemptively and compellingly clarified its military-strategic calculations vis a vis Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the CSTO. This politically tough takeaway should therefore hopefully incentivize it to make up for lost time as soon as possible.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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 OneWorld

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Western Sanctions Against Russia Spark Mayhem in Shipping as New Threat Emerges

September 21st, 2022 by Zero Hedge

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The unilateral sanctions that Western countries unleashed on Russia have caused energy supply disruptions and energy hyperinflation across the world. Europe is rejiggering its energy supply chain away from Russia as it sources energy products elsewhere. EU countries are scrambling for tankers to import energy products from abroad, which has led to a surge in global tanker shipping rates.

Since slapping Russia with sanctions, the West has realized that global supply chains are fragile. Even before the Ukraine war, supply chains struggled due to uneven Covid economic recovery, trade war conflicts, and increasing geopolitical risks.

As such, the decision to rejigger Europe’s entire energy supply chain away from Russia amid all the chaos in the world has created a shortage of vessels to carry essential fuels to energy-stricken regions this winter.

Bloomberg reported that Europe is importing liquefied natural gas, diesel, and crude from far away regions that keep tankers in transit for extended periods and delay return to service for other critical shipping lanes. Shipping experts warn this is sparking the latest surge in global tanker freight rates.

LNG freight rates are at elevated levels for this time of year and threaten to surpass last year’s winter peak. The cost of shipping a US oil cargo to China is at the highest since 2020, while transporting a cargo of naphtha petrochemical feedstock from the Middle East to Japan costs more than twice as much as it did in March, according to data from the Baltic Exchange.

The ship shortage threatens to impact Asian economies that import oil and gas from the US, as they may find it difficult to get spare cargoes at short notice if the weather turns extremely cold this winter, said traders and shipowners. Even petrochemical feedstock shipments are becoming more expensive to transport, further burdening buyers grappling with sluggish demand for chemicals as the pace of manufacturing slows.

Concerns are growing that the limited availability of LNG vessels this winter may cause cargo disruptions.

Shipowners are demanding LNG carriers back to the Freeport facility in Texas ahead of restarting operations in November after a fire shuttered the plant in early June.

“What we’ve seen in shipping this year has been remarkable as a result of the war in Ukraine,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta, a freight market analytics platform.

Western sanctions on Russia is the culprit behind energy chaos worldwide and soaring tanker rates, and risks increase of limited ship availability to hire this winter. What a mess this has become. 

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Our Final Stand Against the Globalist Powerbrokers

September 21st, 2022 by Dr. Emanuel Garcia

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In a recent essay on the nature of Power, I posited that the most pressing philosophical and practical question of the day – and, as I now further reflect upon it, the most moral – is what might transpire if no further scientific advances could be made.  If, in fact, humankind would have to make do with only the currently available technology, what would happen? What would happen if we put a halt to the never-ending quest for material control of the natural world?

I personally believe that given the scientific and technological ability we currently possess, which is quite considerable, problems of resource distribution, infrastructure, poverty and malnutrition are perfectly soluble, with determination and work. In short, the resolution of such global problems is contingent only upon human will, not human technological capacity.  After all, we have thousands of sophisticated satellites encircling the globe, all manner of machinery, sources of energy and computing power, and both robotic and human labor. What cannot humankind achieve with such an armamentarium if obstacles inherent in human psychology, group and individual, can be overcome – obstacles such as greed, selfishness and the sadistic use of Power?

In the past, when the world was not so globally united, and when our technological capabilities were much less, the march towards further control via scientific discovery appeared to be essential, and human morality and psychology were weighted perhaps less prominently in this equation.

In the context of pondering these issues I happened to revisit a psychoanalytic classic, a paper which I regard as one of the most significant contributions to psychoanalytic thought after Freud’s own work: “The Fall of Man,” by K. R. Eissler.  Eissler’s essay, published in 1975, ranges from the origins of life to the development and potentialities of the human psyche, and concludes in essence that the twin pillars of aggression and narcissism would overcome the restraint needed to prevent the large-scale deployment of nuclear weapons, making human extinction ultimately unavoidable.

Enveloped as we are within the Corona War in the Age of Covid, nuclear annihilation has been relegated to the shadows while another lethal agenda plays out. Yes, we now find ourselves in the midst of a concerted attempt at genocide at the hands of a cabal – planned purposeful murder – accomplished via a many-pronged and highly sophisticated operation that has kept the global population in thrall, eviscerated individual rights, and that has imposed a lethal and unnecessary injection in violation of body and soul, as part of an even more ambitious plan to control us all with further restrictions, surveillance and social credit systems in an ostensibly ‘new world order’ whose chief characteristic will be depopulation and slavery on a scale never imagined.

Every advance in understanding the natural world has been accompanied by an appropriation of knowledge in the service of Power.  We speak of ‘grasping’ or ‘comprehending’ something, and our very language betrays the aggressive drive inherent in the pursuit of science. The word ‘science’ itself is derived from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut, to split’, the psychological implication being that we must take apart the object we study in order to possess it. And for every pacific use of technology, there is a corresponding martial one, inevitably.  Knowledge is pursued, psychically speaking, for purposes of control and possession, even if such possession and control appear to result in no immediately apparent practical benefit other than satisfaction at having solved a riddle.

The penetration of the atom and the exploitation of nuclear forces constituted a watershed moment in the history of the species. The manipulation of the human genome constitutes another. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed a glimpse of the devastating potential of the former, and the Covid so-called vaccines are showing us, in real time, the destructive capabilities of the latter.

I suspect our world would have been the better if such barriers had never been crossed.

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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.

Featured image: Neurotechnology could help people with disabilities use their thoughts to control devices in the physical world. It may also be useful in weapons systems. Private companies, militaries, and other organizations are funding neurotechnology research. Credit: US Army.

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German Bakery Owner Devastated as His Gas Bill Soars by 1,200%

September 21st, 2022 by Anadolu Agency

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The gas bill of a bakery in Germany increased by more than 1,200% amid a worsening energy crisis in the country.

The managing director of the Vatter bakery told local media that he was shocked when he received the new gas bill, showing that his monthly bill has risen to €75,000 ($75,000).

“A year ago, it was €5,856 a month for our large ovens and heating. We had a contract with a price guarantee until the end of 2023, but it was suddenly terminated,” Eckehard Vatter, the owner of the family-run business, told Bild daily.

The supplier is now demanding €75,000 a month, and it is an increase of 1,200%, he noted.

The last gas bill for the company amounts to €330,000 for four-and-a-half months, payable in the next 14 days.

The Vatter bakery chain has 35 stores and 430 employees in the northern state of Lower Saxony.

Eckehard Vatter said the family business has weathered every crisis since 1955, but things have never been as bad as they are now.

He also criticized the government for failing to protect them.

As the bakery has several branches, it is considered a craft enterprise, and unlike industrial bakeries that produce cheap bread, it does not receive any subsidies. Yet the company has paid €19.9 million in taxes over the past 10 years, according to its owner.

Skyrocketing energy prices, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, are fueling panic among many German small- and medium-sized enterprises.

On Wednesday, hundreds of bakery owners and employees protested in downtown Hanover to draw attention to their worsening situation.

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German Domestic Intelligence Is Running Hundreds of Fake Right-wing Extremist Social Media Accounts

September 21st, 2022 by John Cody

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Hundreds of the radical Nazis and right-wing extremists online are actually German domestic intelligence agents, and many of them may be responsible for “inciting hatred” and even violence. These agents, who once needed to drink and directly socialize with members of the extreme right to gain information on their targets, are now running right-wing extremist accounts online in Germany.

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) argues that these accounts are needed to effectively monitor the extreme right, but critics say that they may also be promoting and actively encouraging radicalism, according to a report from German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“This is the future of information gathering,” an unnamed head of a relevant state office told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

According to research by the newspaper, the authority has invested heavily in “virtual agents” since 2019, which it finances with taxpayers’ money. Both the federal office and the federal states employ spies, who besides right-wing extremists, are also tasked with keeping an eye on left-wing extremists, Islamists, and the “conspiracy-ideological” scene.

However, the activities of the BfV running hundreds of right-wing extremist accounts have come to light at the same time that Germany’s left-wing government has labeled right-wing extremism the biggest threat to the country, despite data showing that left-wing extremists and radical Islam pose bigger threats. The country’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, has launched a 10-point plan to fight “right-wing extremism,” and much like the Biden administration in the United States, has turned the domestic security state against political opponents as well as labeling them terrorism threats and a danger to democracy. In Germany’s case, the opposition conservative Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is actively surveilled in certain federal states, with membership in the party the only prerequisite for agents being able to read emails and listen in on telephone calls of these private citizens.

With the BfV operating hundreds of right-wing extremist accounts, the agency argues that it is about “playing a little right-wing radical yourself” in order to gain the trust of other users. The employees of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution are likely to conduct “propaganda” for this and sometimes also commit crimes such as “incitement to hatred.”

However, what exactly these extremist accounts are posting that involve “incitement to hatred” is unclear, as there is little to no public oversight regarding these activities.

“In order to be really credible, it is not enough to share or like what others say, you also have to make statements yourself. That means that the agents also bully and agitate,” says the report of an agent who claims to have joined the agency to “do something against right-wing extremists.” This involves actively encouraging people in their worldview, but she says it is her job to “feed” the scene.

In fact, there are now so many accounts operated by different German authorities that a nationwide agreement has become necessary. Otherwise, these different agents would be targeting each other with surveillance and monitoring.

Germany’s new government has taken an aggressive stance against anonymity on the web and free speech, and has targeted apps like Telegram, which is one of the few tech companies openly supporting free speech. Under a new regime, the German government is expected to open thousands of hate speech cases against the public every year.

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State Department Stops Publishing Military Expenditures, Arms Transfer Report

September 21st, 2022 by Dave DeCamp

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The State Department announced in August that it will no longer publish World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (WMEAT) reports, which have been released by the US government since the 1960s.

The WMEATs detail US global military spending, arms transfers, and related data for each country in the world. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) included an amendment that repealed a 1994 provision requiring the State Department to publish a WMEAT each year.

“Section 5114(b)(4) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 repealed the 1994 statutory provision that required the Department of State to publish an edition of WMEAT every year. Consistent with this repeal, the Department of State will cease to produce and publish WMEAT,” the State Department said on its website.

The State Department said that the report it published in 2021 was the “final edition” of the WMEAT. The 2021 WMEAT covered an 11-year period from 2009 through 2019 and found that the US was by far the world’s largest arms dealer. During that period, about “79 percent of world arms trade by value appears to have been supplied by the United States.”

The discontinuation of the WMEAT reports, which reduces the US government’s transparency, comes as the US is shipping billions of dollars worth of arms into Ukraine with virtually no oversight. Since Russia invaded on February 24, the US has pledged $15.1 billion in weapons for Kyiv.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

India’s Gaffe at Samarkand

September 21st, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Samarkand on September 16 after the SCO Summit turned into a media scandal. The Western media zeroed in on six words culled out of context in the PM’s opening remarks — “today’s era is not of war” —  to triumphantly proclaim that India is finally distancing itself from Russia on Ukraine issue, as the US and European leaders have been incessantly demanding.

Of course, this motivated interpretation lacks empirical evidence and is, therefore, malicious. Besides, Modi also spoke with a rare interplay of emotions by underscoring the quintessence of the Indian-Russian relationship, as well as his two decade-long association with Putin. 

The steamy part cooked up by the US media shows the desperation on the part of the “Collective West” to isolate Russia at a time when even western leaders have candidly admitted that the bulk of the non-western world does not identify with the western narrative on Ukraine and refuses to roll back their relationship with Russia. 

Many countries are, in fact, stepping up their cooperation with Russia —Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, for example. Curiously, even western companies are loathe to leave the highly attractive Russian market where business returns are high. A report in the Atlantic Council magazine on September 18 highlights that although something like 1,000 multinational corporations had announced that they would be leaving Russia in the wake of the western sanctions, “the unfortunate reality is that… three-quarters of the most profitable foreign multinationals remain in Russia.” Thus, statistically, while 106 western companies exited the Russian market, over 1,149 internationals still remain and simply keep silent about it. 

The giant Sakhalin-2 oil-and-natural-gas project in the Russian Far East is a celebrated case where two big Japanese energy investors Mitsui and Mitsublishi, with government support, simply refused to quit, as the Russian project supplies 9 percent of Japan’s energy needs. The G7 has no option but to exempt Japan from the purview of sanctions when it comes to Sakhalin-2! 

Again, the West continues to import fertiliser from Russia and to that end, lifts the restrictions on shipping, insurance, etc. But the restrictions continue against Russia’s exports of food grain and fertiliser to the non-Western world. Russia has now offered to distribute the fertiliser held up in European ports free of charge to the poorest countries in Africa if only the restrictions for exports are waived, but Europe would rather use it for own needs. 

It has recently been exposed that the brouhaha about a “global food crisis” (which India too mouthed) was basically a cheap hoax perpetrated by the Biden Administration to get Russia to allow the sale of wheat held up in Ukrainian silos to the European market by American companies, who have apparently bought up Ukraine’s farm lands and control that country’s grain trade! Only a fraction of the grain shipments from Ukraine went to poor countries threatened by famine. Suffice to say, the US and the European Union pressure on India’s purchase of Russian oil was nothing but bullying.

That said, India should know that in a situation where Russia faces an existential threat to its security, it will not be deterred while firmly, decisively responding, no matter what anybody says. Will India be deterred if any foreign country gets agitated over state repression in Kashmir? Violence and bloodshed are abhorrent features of the contemporary world situation and is a painful reality all over the world. 

That is why, PM Modi’s awkward reference to war and peace in his initial remarks to Putin at Samarkand was way out of place in what turned to be a “wonderful” meeting otherwise. There was simply no need to have characterised, at PM’s level, the Ukraine conflict as a “war”. It betrayed ignorance, since the whole world knows that what is going on is a proxy war between the US and Russia in the Ukrainian arena that had been incubating through the past quarter century ever since NATO began its eastward enlargement with an agenda to encircle Russia. Moscow seriously erred by tolerating the US interference in Ukraine for so very long until NATO appeared on its doorstep. It is doubtful if India would have shown such strategic patience if an adversarial power advances a project to encircle and weaken it. 

Against such a complex backdrop, the litmus test of India’s “neutrality” will, perhaps, lie in EAM Jaishankar at least speaking up on the NATO’s eastward expansion, about the US stoking the fire of conflict by pumping tens of billions of dollars worth weaponry into Ukraine, and with reference to the Biden Administration’s diabolical role in undermining nascent peace moves between Moscow and Kiev. 

If Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban can speak up, although NATO leaders, why can’t India’s EAM? But, never mind, there is no question of Jaishankar even remotely embarrassing  Biden. 

The big question, nonetheless, remains: Why is it that a country like India has lost its voice? Does it prefer the unipolar world order that the West tries to foist on the world community? Has it forgotten the colonial past? Does it accept that the “rules-based order” means acting the John Wayne way — appropriating other countries’ financial assets entrusted with the Western banks in trust? Does it condone, for whatever reasons, the US’ stated intention to destroy Russia’s economy? If Modi Govt has thought through these issues by now, six months after the sanctions from hell against Russia, does it have any views at all? When India was much weaker, it still had a mind of its own? What happened to India? 

From the Kremlin readout, Putin actually acknowledged right at the outset of the conversation with Modi that Russia and India are not on the same page on Ukraine. To be sure, Putin must be knowing that India’s behaviour is guided by its narrowly defined self-interests and conditioned by an itch to do cherrypicking. He is immensely experienced in diplomacy to know how countries behave in self-interests and how it is necessary to cooperate with such countries.

But Moscow has never been and will never be a demanding partner. Mutual interest and mutual respect are the hall marks of Russian diplomacy toward India. Despite its own reservations over what India was attempting to do by splitting Pakistan into two halves, an unprecedented act by international law, when the crunch time came in 1971, Moscow not only stood by India but even despatched its warships and submarines to guard Indian waters from a potential US military attack against India — and this, while on the diplomatic front, Moscow bought time for India to conclude its military operations to cut  Pakistan down to size. It is, therefore, all the more reason for us to be discreet at the very least. 

India must be one of the few countries that benefits out of the Ukraine conflict. Aside oil, coal and what not at low prices from Russia, paradoxically, even the rupee has commenced its indeterminate journey towards becoming a “world currency.” No patriotic Indian will criticise the Modi government for such sophistry. However, confusion arises when morality is needlessly injected into all this with a tedious attitude of preachiness. 

The meeting in Samarkand took place in the context of the SCO’s annual summit. The summit was not about Ukraine but about the profound issues that have surfaced in its wake that will shape the contours of the world order. This SCO summit was special, as it took place amid large-scale geopolitical changes, triggering a rapid and irrevocable transformation of the entire complex of international ties, relations, policies, economy, when a new model based on the real multi-polarity and dialogue is being built. 

Everyone understands that the SCO, which represents half the world’s population, will help forge the new world order. Unlike the case with NATO, where all decisions are made in Washington and imposed on America’s  “allies”, there is no Pied Piper in the SCO tent. Modi could easily have played a meaningful role at the summit instead of meandering his way aimlessly through the pandemic, supply chains, et al, at a juncture when such profound issues were being discussed by his peer group in Samarkand. 

The word “multipolarity,” which was on everyone’s mind in Samarkand, did not even figure in Modi’s speech at Samarkand. Whoever drafted that speech must have done it with an eye on Washington. Therefore, don’t blame the US media. They happened to notice all these aberrations and decided to cull out those six sharply-etched words to put India on the mat, mocking it for doublespeak and rank opportunism. All that hand-wringing subsequently by the apologists of our government cannot wash away the stain. 

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Featured image: Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Samarkand, Uzbekistan, September 16, 2022 (Source: Indian Punchline)

The Global ‘Green Energy’ Push Is Causing Fertilizer Shortages and Threatening the Human Food Supply

September 21st, 2022 by Natalie Winters

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First published on September 16, 2022

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The push for “green” energy alternatives is causing a shortage of sulfuric acid, a resource critical for the production of food and lithium-ion batteries, according to a new report from the University College London.

The paper, published in Geographical Journal, explains how over 80 percent of the global sulfur supply currently comes from the desulfurisation of fossil fuels. Pushes for decarbonization, however, which seek to ban the use of fossil fuels, will create a “shortfall” in the annual supply of sulfuric acid between 100 and 320 million tonnes by 2040, researchers estimate.

This dramatic decrease would occur, however, amidst a rising demand for sulfuric acid, which could reach up to 400 million tons by 2040.

“With increased farming and the world moving away from fossil fuels, geographers estimate global demand for sulfuric acid will rise to 246 to 400 million tons by 2040. However, depending on how quickly decarbonization happens, there may only be 100 to 320 million tons available for use,” explains the paper.

Shortages of sulfuric acid would have far-reaching ramifications, as it is an essential resource for producing phosphorus fertilizers that help maintain the global food supply.

“Additionally, phosphorus fertilizers are used for extracting rare metals, such as cobalt and nickel. Those metals are used in lithium-ion batteries that power up numerous electronic devices from cell phones to laptops,” explains the paper.

“Our concern is that the dwindling supply could lead to a transition period when green tech outbids the fertilizer industry for the limited more expensive sulfur supply, creating an issue with food production,” adds Simon Day, a researcher at the University College London’s Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction and study coauthor.

In the study, researchers project three different sulfuric acid demand scenarios occurring from 2021 to 2040. Using data from historic and forecast demand with an annual growth rate ranging from 1.8 percent to 2.4 percent, researchers constructed the graph below, demonstrating how demand for the resource is consistently above the available supply of sulfuric acid.

The findings come amidst concern over groups like the World Economic Forum (WEF) attempting to exploit issues like COVID-19 and climate change to advance their own social and political agenda. Their allies, such as Bill Gates, have also purchased massive amounts of farmland in the U.S. amidst ongoing food shortages.

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Natalie Winters is the Lead Investigative Reporter at the National Pulse and co-host of The National Pulse podcast.

How Billionaires Become Billionaires

September 21st, 2022 by Prof. James Petras

Incisive analysis by James Petras first published by Global Research on October 5, 2017

America has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist country.

In this essay we will discuss the socio-economic roots of inequalities and the relation between the concentration of wealth and the downward mobility of the working and salaried classes.

How the Billionaires become Billionaires

Contrary to the propaganda pushed by the business press, between 67% and 72% percent of corporations had zero tax liabilities after credits and exemptions … while their workers and employees paid between 25 – 30% in taxes. The rate for the minority of corporations, which paid any tax, was 14%.

According to the US Internal Revenue Service, billionaire tax evasion amounts to $458 billion dollars in lost public revenues every year – almost a trillion dollars every two years by this conservative estimate.

The largest US corporations sheltered over $2.5 trillion dollars in overseas tax havens where they paid no taxes or single digit tax rates.

Meanwhile US corporations in crisis received over $14.4 trillion dollars (Bloomberg claimed 12.8 trillion) in public bailout money, split between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve, mostly from US tax payers, who are overwhelmingly workers, employees and pensioners.

The recipient bankers invested their interest-free or low interest US bailout funds and earned billions in profits, most resulting from mortgage foreclosures of working class households.

Through favorable legal rulings and illegal foreclosures, the bankers evicted 9.3 million families. Over 20 million individuals lost their properties, often due to illegal or fraudulent debts.

A small number of the financial swindlers, including executives from Wall Street’s leading banks (Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan etc), paid fines – but no one went to prison for the gargantuan fraud that drove millions of Americans into misery.

There are other swindler bankers, like the current Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin, who enriched themselves by illegally foreclosing on thousands of homeowners in California. Some were tried; all were exonerated, thanks to the influence of Democratic political leaders during the Obama years.

Silicon Valley and its innovative billionaires have found novel way to avoid taxes using overseas tax havens and domestic tax write-offs. They increase their wealth and corporate profits by paying their local manual and service workers poverty level wages. Silicon Valley executives ‘earn’ a thousand times more than their production workers..

Class inequalities are further reinforced by ethnic divisions. White, Chinese and Indian multi-millionaires exploit Afro-American, Latin American, Vietnamese and Filipino workers.

Billionaires in the commercial conglomerates, like Walmart, exploit workers by paying poverty wages and providing few, if any, benefits. Walmart earns $16 billion dollar a year in profits by paying its workers between $10 and $13 an hour and relying on state and federal assistance to provide services to the families of its impoverished workers through Medicaid and food stamps. Amazon plutocrat Jeff Bezos exploits workers by paying $12.50 an hour while he has accumulated over $80 billion dollars in profits. UPS CEO David Albany takes $11 million a year by exploiting workers at $11 an hour. Federal Express CEO, Fred Smith gets $16 million and pays workers $11 an hour.

Inequality is not a result of ‘technology’ and ‘education’- contemporary euphemisms for the ruling class cult of superiority – as liberals and conservative economists and journalists like to claim. Inequalities are a result of low wages, based on big profits, financial swindles, multi-trillion dollar public handouts and multi-billion-dollar tax evasion. The ruling class has mastered the ‘technology’ of exploiting the state, through its pillage of the treasury, and the working class. Capitalist exploitation of low paid production workers provides additional billions for the ‘philanthropic’ billionaire family foundations to polish their public image – using another tax avoidance gimmick – self-glorifying ‘donations’.

Workers pay disproportional taxes for education, health, social and public services and subsidies for billionaires.

Billionaires in the arms industry and security/mercenary conglomerates receive over $700 billion dollars from the federal budget, while over 100 million US workers lack adequate health care and their children are warehoused in deteriorating schools.

Workers and Bosses: Mortality Rates

Billionaires and multi-millionaires and their families enjoy longer and healthier lives than their workers. They have no need for health insurance policies or public hospitals. CEO’s live on average ten years longer than a worker and enjoy twenty years more of healthy and pain-free lives.

Private, exclusive clinics and top medical care include the most advanced treatment and safe and proven medication which allow billionaires and their family members to live longer and healthier lives. The quality of their medical care and the qualifications of their medical providers present a stark contrast to the health care apartheid that characterizes the rest of the United States.

Workers are treated and mistreated by the health system: They have inadequate and often incompetent medical treatment, cursory examinations by inexperienced medical assistants and end up victims of the widespread over-prescription of highly addictive narcotics and other medications. Over-prescription of narcotics by incompetent ‘providers’ has significantly contributed to the rise in premature deaths among workers, spiraling cases of opiate overdose, disability due to addiction and descent into poverty and homelessness. These irresponsible practices have made additional billions of dollars in profits for the insurance corporate elite, who can cut their pensions and health care liabilities as injured, disabled and addicted workers drop out of the system or die.

The shortened life expectancy for workers and their family members is celebrated on Wall Street and in the financial press. Over 560,000 workers were killed by opioids between 1999-2015 contributing to the decline in life expectancy for working age wage and salary earners and reduced pension liabilities for Wall Street and the Social Security Administration.

Inequalities are cumulative, inter-generational and multi-sectorial.

Billionaire families, their children and grandchildren, inherit and invest billions. They have privileged access to the most prestigious schools and medical facilities, and conveniently fall in love to equally privileged, well-connected mates to join their fortunes and form even greater financial empires. Their wealth buys favorable, even fawning, mass media coverage and the services of the most influential lawyers and accountants to cover their swindles and tax evasion.

Billionaires hire innovators and sweat shop MBA managers to devise more ways to slash wages, increase productivity and ensure that inequalities widen even further. Billionaires do not have to be the brightest or most innovative people: Such individuals can simply be bought or imported on the ‘free market’ and discarded at will.

Billionaires have bought out or formed joint ventures with each other, creating interlocking directorates. Banks, IT, factories, warehouses, food and appliance, pharmaceuticals and hospitals are linked directly to political elites who slither through doors of rotating appointments within the IMF, the World Bank, Treasury, Wall Street banks and prestigious law firms.

Consequences of Inequalities

First and foremost, billionaires and their political, legal and corporate associates dominate the political parties. They designate the leaders and key appointees, thus ensuring that budgets and policies will increase their profits, erode social benefits for the masses and weaken the political power of popular organizations.

Secondly, the burden of the economic crisis is shifted on to the workers who are fired and later re-hired as part-time, contingent labor. Public bailouts, provided by the taxpayer, are channeled to the billionaires under the doctrine that Wall Street banks are too big to fail and workers are too weak to defend their wages, jobs and living standards.

Billionaires buy political elites, who appoint the World Bank and IMF officials tasked with instituting policies to freeze or reduce wages, slash corporate and public health care obligations and increase profits by privatizing public enterprises and facilitating corporate relocation to low wage, low tax countries.

As a result, wage and salary workers are less organized and less influential; they work longer and for less pay, suffer greater workplace insecurity and injuries – physical and mental – fall into decline and disability, drop out of the system, die earlier and poorer, and, in the process, provide unimaginable profits for the billionaire class. Even their addiction and deaths provide opportunities for huge profit – as the Sackler Family, manufacturers of Oxycontin, can attest.

The billionaires and their political acolytes argue that deeper regressive taxation would increase investments and jobs. The data speaks otherwise. The bulk of repatriated profits are directed to buy back stock to increase dividends for investors; they are not invested in the productive economy. Lower taxes and greater profits for conglomerates means more buy-outs and greater outflows to low wage countries. In real terms taxes are already less than half the headline rate and are a major factor heightening the concentration of income and power – both cause and effect.

Corporate elites, the billionaires in the Silicon Valley-Wall Street global complex are relatively satisfied that their cherished inequalities are guaranteed and expanding under the Demo-Republican Presidents- as the ‘good times’ roll on.

Away from the ‘billionaire elite’, the ‘outsiders’ – domestic capitalists – clamor for greater public investment in infrastructure to expand the domestic economy, lower taxes to increase profits, and state subsidies to increase the training of the labor force while reducing funds for health care and public education. They are oblivious to the contradiction.

In other words, the capitalist class as a whole, globalist and domestic alike, pursues the same regressive policies, promoting inequalities while struggling over shares of the profits.

One hundred and fifty million wage and salaried taxpayers are excluded from the political and social decisions that directly affect their income, employment, rates of taxation, and political representation.

They understand, or at least experience, how the class system works. Most workers know about the injustice of the fake ‘free trade’ agreements and regressive tax regime, which weighs heavy on the majority of wage and salary earners.

However, worker hostility and despair is directed against ‘immigrants’ and against the ‘liberals’ who have backed the import of cheap skilled and semi-skilled labor under the guise of ‘freedom’. This ‘politically correct’ image of imported labor covers up a policy, which has served to lower wages, benefits and living standards for American workers, whether they are in technology, construction or production. Rich conservatives, on the other hand, oppose immigration under the guise of ‘law and order’ and to lower social expenditures – despite that fact that they all use imported nannies, tutors, nurses, doctors and gardeners to service their families. Their servants can always be deported when convenient.

The pro and anti-immigrant issue avoids the root cause for the economic exploitation and social degradation of the working class – the billionaire owners operating in alliance with the political elite.

In order to reverse the regressive tax practices and tax evasion, the low wage cycle and the spiraling death rates resulting from narcotics and other preventable causes, which profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical billionaires, class alliances need to be forged linking workers, consumers, pensioners, students, the disabled, the foreclosed homeowners, evicted tenants, debtors, the under-employed and immigrants as a unified political force.

Sooner said than done, but never tried! Everything and everyone is at stake: life, health and happiness.

Featured image is from Common Dreams.

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Selected Articles: United Nations, Democracy and Terrorism

September 21st, 2022 by Global Research News

United Nations, Democracy and Terrorism

By Stephen Sefton, September 20, 2022

This week sees the opening of the 77th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization in the most conflict ridden international environment since World War II. In effect, NATO is attacking the Russian Federation in Ukraine and the United States is provoking China over Taiwan.

Jackson Water Crisis Reflective of National Pattern in Urban Racism

By Abayomi Azikiwe, September 21, 2022

Water systems throughout the United States are in serious disrepair and decline while corporate interests continue to dominate the political priorities of municipal and state governments.

More Disinformation From Israel. Biden Caves to Jewish Pressure, As Usual.

By Philip Giraldi, September 21, 2022

To be sure, weakening Iran and possibly even replacing its government is the most compelling issue for Israel and its powerful US domestic lobby, but the Israeli plan is much broader than that, to make the United States the junior partner providing the money and weapons in an effort to militarily dominate the Middle East.

Law of Neutrality: Just When Is a State a Belligerent in a War?

By Michael Doliner, September 20, 2022

The laws of war are to some extent a farce. When states come to the point of war the niceties of codified law will likely influence them very little. Nevertheless, there are such laws and lawyers specializing in such niceties, and this very little might turn out to be a whole lot.

The Netherlands: Government Sponsored Behavioral Control and Social Engineering Experiments

By Elze van Hamelen, September 20, 2022

A government-wide network of behavioral experts – the Behavioral Insights Network Netherlands (BIN NL) – has been supporting all departments in conducting behavioral experiments since 2014. The experiments aim to use behavioral knowledge from the social sciences to steer citizens toward “right” solutions and choices.

1350 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, Serious Issues, 919 of Them Dead, Since COVID Injection

By Real Science, September 21, 2022

t is definitely not normal for so many mainly young athletes to suffer from cardiac arrests or to die while playing their sport, but this year it is happening. Many of these heart issues and deaths come shortly after they got a COVID vaccine. While it is possible this can happen to people who did not get a COVID vaccine, the sheer numbers clearly point to the only obvious cause.

Pakistan High Court Drops ‘Terrorism’ Charges Against Ex-PM Imran Khan

By The Cradle, September 21, 2022

On 21 August, on top of the highly controversial charges under section 7 of Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) banned the transmission of Khan’s speeches for being “prejudicial to the maintenance of law and order and likely to disturb public peace and tranquility.”

Haiti’s January 12, 2020 Earthquake: Disaster Relief Scenario Tested by US Military One Day Before the Earthquake

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 21, 2022

While Environmental modification (ENMOD) techniques have been available to the US military for more than half a century, there is no concrete evidence that these techniques have been used to trigger extreme weather conditions.

The Shelling of Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP): International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Takes Ukraine Side, Making UN Secretary-General Guterres Either a Liar or a Fool

By John Helmer, September 20, 2022

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decided this week to take the side of Ukraine in the current war; blame Russia for the shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP); and issue a demand for Russia to surrender the plant to the Kiev regime “to regain full control over all nuclear facilities within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”

Dr. Paul Offit, One of the World’s Most Respected Vaccine Experts, Is Now Officially an Anti-vaxxer!

By Steve Kirsch, September 20, 2022

I learned about Paul’s conversion to anti-vaxxer status from reading Brucha Weisberger’s substack article. First, watch this TV news clip paying very close attention starting 50 seconds into the clip.

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Jackson Water Crisis Reflective of National Pattern in Urban Racism

September 21st, 2022 by Abayomi Azikiwe

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Water systems throughout the United States are in serious disrepair and decline while corporate interests continue to dominate the political priorities of municipal and state governments.

Jackson, Mississippi, the capital and the largest municipality in the state which is 83% African American, has been under siege for many years as the water system continues to deteriorate endangering public health and the economic future of the entire region.

Extreme weather events throughout the southern U.S. have adversely impacted many communities as the administration of President Joe Biden has failed to address the infrastructural upgrades needed to both prevent the disastrous impacts and to also rebuild after the damage is done. An infrastructure bill passed by the Congress and signed by the president earlier this year seemed to be designed to provide cash infusions into the private construction industry along with local and state treasuries.

Nonetheless, there needs to be a comprehensive plan to rebuild essential infrastructure in the urban and rural areas of the U.S. as a matter of urgency. The impact of climate change is compounded by the debilitating political divisions within local and national governmental administrative and legislative structures. These circumstances portend much for the capacity of the country to solve its burgeoning problems.

The capital of the state of Mississippi has an estimated population of more than 150,000 people representing a decline over the last several decades. The phenomenon of “white flight” to the suburbs has taken place in various regions of the U.S.

Large amounts of rainfall during August which resulted in flooding from the Pearl River worsened the already existing problems at the water treatment facility. Pressure was lowered to the extent that the composition of the water for public consumption was altered. There was a boil water alert for several weeks while the National Guard was deployed to hand out bottles to the population.

Jackson water treatment plant installs new pump (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Residents in Jackson and its environs served by the treatment plant do not trust the safety of the water for drinking, washing and cooking. Any medium and long-term solutions to the water crisis in Jackson will require billions of dollars in investments to construct a new system and hire technical personnel.

Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba has said that the problems are decades in the making. The state government in Mississippi is almost exclusively white and does not express much sympathy to the residents of Jackson.

After assessing the situation involving strained relations between the state government and Jackson, Lumumba held separate meetings with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss the situation in the city. The mayor says that he was assured by the White House that recently allocated infrastructure funding would be sent to assist in the repair of the water treatment system.

Lumumba noted in a recent statement to the press that:

“Both (Biden and Harris) assured me that the eyes of Washington are watching the city of Jackson. They wanted us to know that we should expect the full arm of support from the federal government in every way that they possibly can. And they assured me their support was going to be demonstrated through long-range and long-term efforts through the EPA. I was delighted to hear that call, it was very encouraging.”

Several civil rights and environmental groups in Mississippi are considering alternative strategies designed to place the federal government as the direct supervisor over the water systems in Jackson and throughout the state. Funding from the infrastructure legislation will undoubtedly be allocated to the state government. Many in Jackson and other majority African American communities feel they have been systematically disenfranchised in regard to the allocation of state and federal funds.

According to an official of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Abre Conner, who is director of environmental and climate justice:

“The state is in a place, it’s got a lot of power to either make things easier for Black communities or to make things harder, and what we feel like has happened in Mississippi is that the state has used its power to make things harder for Black folks. This is why there needs to be more effort in order to have funding flow straight into Jackson and for the state to not have complete control over the decisions about federal funding.”

An article in Politico reports that $75 million in funding from the infrastructure bill will be sent to the state of Mississippi. This will be added to another $450 million from previous COVID-19 relief funding from the federal government. However, under the current political situation many African Americans have expressed distrust of the intentions of the Republican-controlled state government.

Class Action Lawsuit Targets City Officials

On September 20, media reports indicated that four residents on behalf of the people of Jackson have filed a class action lawsuit against the current and former city administrations along with the water treatment facility. The legal action appears to disregard the role of the state government in Mississippi in creating the existing crisis.

The private engineering firm Siemens Corporation, which signed a $90 million contract with the City of Jackson to improve its water system and Trilogy Engineering Services LLC, who in 2016 was hired to study the city’s O.B. Curtis treatment facility, are also targets of the litigation.

Jackson water treatment plant (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

The lawsuit claims that the City of Jackson has the responsibility of providing clean and consistent water resources to its residents. The plaintiffs cite damages related to public health, child welfare and economic distress.

An ABC News dispatch on the recent legal developments says:

“Mississippi ended its boil water notice for all of Jackson’s residents on Sept. 15, nearly two weeks after water pressure returned to the state capital’s residents after days of a water shortage crisis that impacted thousands of Jacksonians. The complaint names the City of Jackson; Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba; former mayor Tony Yarber; former public works directors Kishia Powell, Robert Miller and Jerriot Smash; Siemens Corporation, Siemens Industry and Trilogy Engineering Services as defendants. Spokespersons for Lumumba, Powell, Miller, and Siemens declined to comment when reached by ABC News. Yarber, Smash, and Trilogy Engineering did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.”

A scandal involving Southern Mississippi University (SMU) alumni and professional football player Brett Favre indicates the level of corruption related to federal funding in the state. Favre, in cooperation with well-connected state officials redirected millions in what was described as “welfare money” to build a volleyball stadium at his alma mater as well as direct cash payments to the sports personality of more than $1 million to make speeches which were never delivered. Although this incident occurred under a previous state administration, many believe that such schemes are commonplace in the state.

The only real solution to the crisis is what local social justice organizations are advocating and that is for a federal government intervention to ensure the rehabilitation of the water system in Jackson. State officials have demonstrated for decades an indifference and hostility towards majority African American municipalities.

National Water Crisis Worsening in the U.S.

What has taken place in Jackson during the last several years is representative of a national problem related to providing clean and affordable water resources for the people. There was much attention focused on the massive water shutoffs in Detroit during the contrived illegal bankruptcy of 2013-2014. During the summer of 2014, the Republican right-wing governor’s appointed emergency manager ordered the termination of water services to tens of thousands of residents in the 80% African American populated municipality over alleged arrears in bill payments.

Flint, Michigan, which had received its water supply from the Detroit Water & Sewage Department (DWSD) for decades, was suddenly disconnected in 2014 under the same emergency management regime. The city’s water supply was then taken from the abandoned industrially contaminated Flint River. What resulted was the poisoning of an entire majority African American municipality where thousands were sickened resulting in numerous deaths.

Several years ago, the Berkey water filter company pointed out that it will require substantial investments by the U.S. to address the national crisis. Already two years behind, Berkey emphasized:

“The American Society of Civil Engineers or the ASCE stated that the government needs to invest around $3.6 trillion in the infrastructure alone by 2020. With such an investment, it can increase the support system of America at the standard levels. This investment can also repair the nation’s stormwater and wastewater systems over the next 20 years. In some parts of America, unmanaged stormwater systems affect the streams and the rivers and cause health problems. Furthermore, the majority of the drinking infrastructure is aging and is almost falling apart. According to studies, there are about 240,000 water main breaks annually in America. For every pipe that needs to be replaced, the cost in the coming years to come can reach up to $1 trillion, according to the American Water Works Association (AWWA).”

The necessity of bringing into existence these infrastructural improvements are a matter of life and death. Such a monumental set of priorities can only be realized through a mass movement which confronts local, state and federal entities in a concerted organized campaign to save and improve the water systems throughout the U.S.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

More Disinformation From Israel. Biden Caves to Jewish Pressure, As Usual.

September 21st, 2022 by Philip Giraldi

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Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 with a pledge to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, which Donald Trump had withdrawn from in May 2018 under pressure from Republican Party Jewish donors, most notably underwritten by an estimated $100 million coming from now deceased Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas casino fortune. The JCPOA might plausibly be regarded as the only major diplomatic success for the Barack Obama Administration, which featured Biden as Vice President, and it was good for the US due to its curb on proliferation, as well as being a benefit for the entire Middle East region as it made less likely a “weapons of mass destruction” arms race involving the Egyptians and Saudis.

Predictably, however, the pledge did not please the state of Israel. For three decades, Israel has been urging the United States to use force to eliminate what it refers to as the Iranian nuclear weapons program, a program that does not exist and might never have existed. The nuclear weapons threat raised by Israel might be seen as a disinformational wedge issue to bring about the complete destruction of the Iranian military capability by the United States. Israel seeks to exploit its influence over the US government and media to bring that about.

To be sure, weakening Iran and possibly even replacing its government is the most compelling issue for Israel and its powerful US domestic lobby, but the Israeli plan is much broader than that, to make the United States the junior partner providing the money and weapons in an effort to militarily dominate the Middle East. Knowing that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden were willing to concede actual US national interests in response to Israeli pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his replacement Yair Lapid have sent waves of top-level officials to cajole both Congress and the White House into giving Jerusalem whatever it wants.

This flow of “experts” arriving with their maps and charts in hand has increased as the realization that a politically weak and clueless Joe Biden will cave under even the slightest pressure has grown. Biden has demonstrated particular gutlessness in his recent failure to seek a full investigation and consequences for the Israeli Army murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, deferring to Israel’s complete unwillingness to establish some form of accountability and Prime Minister Lapid’s declaration that the current level of his army’s use of force against the Palestinians will continue. Biden has also backed down on rejoining the JCPOA, declaring that the issue is now “off the table.” Secretary of State Tony Blinken has confirmed that decision, declaring that any new arrangement with Iran is “unlikely.”

Preceding the Administration’s decision to ignore American interests in deference to Israeli concerns, there were frequent visits to Washington by Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz and also by other senior officials who arrived in DC to sell a product. The latest pitch involves the Iranian threat and the continuation of a free hand to attack neighboring Syria but there also has been a bizarre drive to have the US State Department declare that the Palestinian civic and human rights organizations that Israel has been shutting down are “terrorist organizations.” Even though a US intelligence and law enforcement agency review has declared that not to be the case, the Biden team is predictably waffling under Israeli pressure. This is how State Department spokesman Ned “Pencil Neck” Price responded to a question regarding the Israeli claims:

“Our Israeli partners have in recent days provided us with additional information. They provided this information not only to the department but also to a range of our interagency partners. We are continuing to review this and that process is ongoing.”

Price added that he didn’t want to “prejudge” the information. Pretty gutless Ned, huh? Even for you, who also excused the killing of Abu Akleh, saying “it was a horrific tragedy, but not one that should be prosecuted. This was not an intentional, targeted killing. This was the tragic result of a gunfight in the context of an Israeli raid in the West Bank.” Interestingly, Ned surely knew that there was no gunfight anywhere near where she was killed, which makes him a liar as well as a man bereft of any morality. And I love the fact that Ned declares we Americans are “partners” with Israel. Junior partners, clearly.

Israel has never provided any actual hard intelligence to back up its claims, though it has several times been caught fabricating evidence. Senator Bernie Sanders’ Foreign Policy Advisor Matt Duss tweeted after the latest round of pressure to call the Palestinians “terrorists” that

“This isn’t about intel sharing or security. It’s political pressure to justify political repression. The admin knows, as our allies do, that the designations are false. The question is whether [the Biden Administration is] willing to do anything about it.”

One should consider that what for Israel, the United States, Russia, Ukraine and nearly everyone else what is passed off as intelligence is anything but. It is instead more often than not a tightly woven argument to convince other countries, the public and the media that something that is supportive of one’s policies is true and should be considered corroborative. This is how we the people have now come to see global events through the prism of an official lie factory. Another recent ploy by Israel to enable its continued bombardment of neighboring Syria is a tale of how Israeli intelligence has developed information that Iran is using Syria to construct technically sophisticated weapons that will be used against the Israelis. Defense Minister Benny Gantz, speaking in New York City last Monday, claimed that Iran has used “10 military facilities in Syria to produce advanced missiles and weapons for its proxies.”

One might observe that Gantz’s use of a map to show where the alleged facilities are located was convincing of nothing as it was a graphic produced by the Israeli government, somewhat like the dreck that is flowing out of Ukraine at the moment. And there is a bit of logical inconsistency in the tale in that Iran has its own arms industry and does not need to build weapons in Syria. There is also the question of why is Gantz speaking in New York? The answer is obvious. Israel is speaking to a gullible American audience about the alleged Iranian threat and Syrian culpability. Predictably, nothing was said about Israel’s recent war crime bombing of the international airport in Aleppo.

And there’s more, as there always is with Israel. The Israeli government is also running full speed with brand new claims about an alleged secret Iranian nuclear weapons program. The information was presented to the US and German governments by Prime Minister Yair Lapid with the claim that it “proves the Iranians are cheating as we speak.” Lapid told the Germans that the Biden Administration had hardened its stance against Iran vis-à-vis the JCPOA negotiations in response to the new information. What the new intelligence consists of might lead to some speculation, but Israel’s claims along those lines have been frequent for the past twenty years and also regularly found to be both malicious and fabricated.

Finally, who says that the Israelis and their rabid Jewish supporters in the United States don’t have a sense of humor? A story making the rounds in the Jewish media in the US and featured in the Jewish News Syndicate asks the question “[Why] 21 years later, [the] US still doesn’t recognize Iran’s role in 9/11.?” The discussion features Caroline Glick and David Wurmser, two noted neocons and Israel-firsters. Wurmser is of course described as “an expert on Middle East affairs” rather than as a Zionist extremist while Glick, who lives in Israel, is among the most rabid journalists calling for “deterrence and containment” of Iran, with the US military doing the heavy lifting. Glick also recalls 9/11, stating that “America’s willful blindness to Iran’s role in global terrorism, including in the September 11 attacks, is part of the collective amnesia about the events of September 11.” When I stopped laughing, I continued reading to see if the two honorable Zionists would also mention the Israeli art students who were all over the place spying on the US and the five Israeli dancing Shlomo “movers” who clearly had prior knowledge of what was about to take place and were seen celebrating the sight of the burning twin towers. And then there was the quote by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concerning 9/11 that “We [Israelis] are benefitting from one thing, and that is the attack on the twin towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” So, Israel actually had a motive. Makes you wonder… Who really did 9/11?

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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].

Philip is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Pakistan High Court Drops ‘Terrorism’ Charges Against Ex-PM Imran Khan

September 21st, 2022 by The Cradle

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The Islamabad High Court (IHC) dropped the “terrorism” charges against former Prime Minister Imran Khan on Monday 19 September. 

“It only proves that these are trumped-up charges and just a tool for political victimization,” said Babar Awan, one of Imran Khan‘s lawyers.

Awan added that the decision of the IHC is “actually an order to quash the charges.”

Khan was charged with terrorism on 22 August, after he allegedly made threats against police and judicial officers during a rally in Islamabad. 

“We will not spare you … We will sue you,” Khan said during his rally in support of Dr. Shahbaz Gill, a close ally and communications advisor of the 69-year-old head of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party. The rally occurred after Gill was arrested without a warrant and allegedly tortured and sexually assaulted.

On 21 August, on top of the highly controversial charges under section 7 of Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) banned the transmission of Khan’s speeches for being “prejudicial to the maintenance of law and order and likely to disturb public peace and tranquility.”

“There is no law. They are trying to arrest the leader of the biggest party in the country. They are scared of the popularity of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf,” Khan responded to the charges. 

Imran Khan is the head of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party, and was removed from his office as prime minister in April following a no-confidence motion. The motion passed with a majority of 174 votes out of 342, in what his supporters described as a “parliamentary coup”.

Since his removal from office, Khan gathered his supporters in massive rallies to call for early elections, which are originally scheduled for October 2023.

The former prime minister has described running government authorities as “fascist”, who plotted with “foreign powers” to oust him from his position.

Despite the political persecution, Khan’s PTI party swept local elections in Karachi, causing further concern for his political opponents. 

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Cleaning Up Our Own Backyard: Racism, Speciesism and the Environmental Crises

September 21st, 2022 by Fanny Olsthoorn

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While environmental crises are predominantly caused by the West and industrialized countries, vulnerable groups across the whole world are carrying a disproportionately large burden while they lack the power over decisions that affect their lives. This has been coined environmental racism.

Entangled with racism is the problem of speciesism, as there’s a clear classification of animals. Exotic and charismatic wild animals are given a higher precedence, and both humans and other animals make way for their conservation.

The speciesist and racist tendencies get intertwined and become apparent in our dealing with environmental issues. These have been influencing policies, laws, conservation efforts, and funds.

This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

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The EU and Northern countries tend to push for market-based mechanisms to solve environmental crises while Southern countries emphasize the environmental and social risks of these mechanisms (Global Forest Coallition 2010). We need to emphasize the climate debt of industrialized countries who are responsible for climate change.

I reflected on the unease I felt and came to think that what bothered me about our reactions to the crises we face, is that some of our responses tend to be overarchingly racist and speciesist. The COVID-pandemic is the perfect example. When the news came out about COVID-19 potentially having started in a wet market in China, from a person who ate a bat, there was an international push for an enforcement of the ban on wildlife trade (Gorman 2020; Reuters 2020). There were judgments, because eating bats “is cruel,” and there was disgust, because wild animals were being handled in “unhygienic conditions” at some “shady market.” The reason we felt these things is because we have a belief that we – the “civilized white people” – would never have done such a thing, because eating wild bats is “cruel and disgusting.” I am not suggesting that hunting an animal species that has a superior ability to host a myriad of diseases and selling it at a market with poor hygiene is a great idea, but would we have reacted the same way if the pandemic started at a chicken farm in Switzerland? Would we have judged it so harshly? Would we have advocated for a blanket ban on chicken farming?

Whiteness is the ownership of the Earth (Du Bois 1920). The dominant discourses that drive policies are white. We need to be reflective about understanding which culture is respected above others, and, without romanticizing cultures of the global South as purely ecological, create a diversity-friendly justice.

Entangled with racism is the problem of speciesism, as we surpass our distinction between animals and humans to our distinction between different groups of animals. This explains why some of us will find it intuitively crueler to eat a bat than a chicken. We have a clear classification of animals in the West. Exotic wild animals on top, local wild animals next, farmed animals last.

Exotic wild animals are valued highly. We believe they should have space to live in dignity. We create documentaries on them. Most people have an ambiguous feeling seeing a lion in a small cage. We are uncomfortable with the idea that wild exotic animals are hunted. We try to reintroduce wild animals and enhance their populations by creating national parks and minimizing contact between exotic wild animals and the people who live in or near their habitats. We also try to put laws in place that ban the hunting and trading of these animals, to protect them and to prevent disease transmission between humans and animals. One example of this that I have been exposed to is a gorilla conservation project in Uganda, where a national park was created with complete access restriction for local people to the park so as to protect disease transmission from humans to the endangered gorillas. However, paying tourists, mostly from Europe and North America, were allowed to enter for a 600-dollar fee, to go see the gorillas at close proximity.

Gorilla and tourist.

A gorilla conservation project in Uganda, where a national park was created with complete access restriction for local people so as to protect disease transmission from humans to the endangered gorillas, allows paying tourists, mostly from Europe and North America to enter and see the gorillas at close proximity. Image by futureatlas.com via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Local wild animals are also valued, but not as much as exotic wild animals. They are hunted locally, but under certain restrictions. In some cases, disease risks arise from either the facilitation of the hunting and eating the hunted animals itself. Most European predators are extinct because of intensive hunting in the past, but we are hesitant to reintroduce predators, as we need to consider the shepherds and farmers who would experience economic losses if we were to do so. We occasionally farm these wild animals (i.e., deer) for consumption. We try to create wildlife corridors, bridges and tunnels so that wild animals do not get killed on the road. Here, we carefully balance the interest of people with the interest of the animals. My PhD research serves as an example. In the Scottish Highlands, a large portion of the land is owned by individuals who run trophy hunting estates. The managers of these estates feed deer in order to keep their populations artificially high, so that paying customers can shoot deer at a higher success rate. The high deer populations cause tick populations to rocket, and as a result, Lyme disease (which is transferred through ticks to humans) cases have gone up 10-fold in the last decade. There are no predators to keep the deer populations at bay (Yalden 1999), and the reintroduction of the wolf, once part of the landscape but now hunted to extinction, is being debated since the 1960s. That has not happened though, as the few hunting the deer are against it.

Farmed animals are valued for their products. We make regulations for their humane rearing and killing. We understand fully which environmental and disease risks arise from rearing and transporting billions of animals, and we are preventing disease outbreaks by administering high amounts of antibiotics to animals. We are also aware of the environmental hazards of animal consumption, including the water usage, the space needed for their rearing and for their feed and the direct pollution of cows through methane. We are also conscious of the suffering of these animals, but here we also consider our taste buds and nutritional needs. I have not done any personal research in this field, but I have lived through some outbreaks of avian influenza that resulted in the slaughtering of entire farms of chickens. Yet, no bans on chicken farming were introduced as a consequence. Another example is the issue of antimicrobial resistance we are fighting against, which is a direct result of intensive animal farming.

Speciesism is a form of discrimination based on species (Ryder 1970). First it was formulated to show that we as humans find ourselves superior to other animals, but then speciesism also took on board the differences that people attribute to different species (Sueur 2019). Peter Singer, among others, questions the premise that one species should be prioritized above another, stating that all animals are equal meaning that they should have equal rights (Singer 1995).

A deer in the Scottish Highlands

A deer in the Scottish Highlands, where their populations are kept artificially high for trophy hunting. Image via Max Pixel (Public domain).

The speciesist and racist tendencies get intertwined and become apparent in our dealing with environmental issues. We are very comfortable donating money to charities that provide opportunities or money to local people to stop their unsustainable hunting/agricultural practices that threaten wild animals. We think lions should be protected even on the lands of people who live as nomadic shepherds, because wildlife needs space. We do this in the name of conservation and to prevent disease transmission between wildlife and humans. We are less comfortable putting such policies in place locally. There is plenty of evidence of the negative environmental consequences of keeping grazer populations high or breeding and releasing animals to be hunted. We are also fully aware that we hardly have any predators left in Europe and that ecosystem management is compromised. However, here, we value local wildlife less and local people more. We, therefore, give more consideration to local people. In terms of eating animals, we think it is fine for us to eat wild and domestic animals, but not so for people across the globe. We think that just because we breed an animal, it is fine to cause it suffering. However, next to the unjustified suffering, we create environmental problems and potential epidemiological risks due to large-scale animal agriculture.

Our way of thinking is infused by speciesism and racism, which are both a product of our current categorization of the world, our current paradigm. We need to unlearn the concept that there are different cultures that are separate from nature (Kohn 2015; Viveiros de Castro 2014) and the very existence of the culture-nature divide and relearn to see the world as simply a product of many kinds of human and non-human agencies, none of which is necessarily more important than the other (Bryant 2011).

This is a plea to start with ourselves. To use our privileges for something more meaningful than buying a sweater from a company that will plant a tree for us. To push for stricter climate change and conservation policies in our own countries, cities, neighborhoods, families and friend groups. To hold each other and ourselves accountable for the way we think about conservation and climate change. To value all beings on this planet equally and respect their agency, will to live and right to take up space and have a dignified life, including all humans, animals and plants. And to question every point in this article, so you can make up your own mind.

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Featured image: Earlier this year in northern Tanzania, more than 70,000 Indigenous Maasai residents were evicted from their ancestral lands to make way for trophy hunting and elite tourism. Image by Anita Ritenour via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Climate Change Skepticism Categorized as a Mental Disorder: Australian Study

September 20th, 2022 by James Murphy

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A team of psychological researchers from Australia is delving into the mindset of those who refuse to buy the notion that man-made climate change is quickly creating an unlivable, barren wasteland on Earth. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast looked to explain why such “cranks” continue to deny what they call “the reality of climate change, its causes, impacts and the need for mitigatory action.”

The study’s authors — Breanna Fraser, Patrick Nunn, and Rachael Sharman — set out to discover why climate change skeptics think the way they do, beyond what they call “sociodemographic and value factors.” Instead, the study proposed to look at psychological factors involved in climate change skepticism. The study asked 390 Australian participants why they refused to buy the climate change narrative.

“This mixed-methods study investigated whether more malleable psychological factors: locus of control; information processing style; and anti-reflexivity, predicted climate change scepticism above and beyond socio-demographic and value factors,” the study’s abstract declares.

According to the researchers, climate change skeptics were guilty of using “mental gymnastics” in order to deny what they called “the near-universal agreement among scientists on the reality and impact of climate change.”

Near universal? Really? What about the 1,100 scientists — including a Nobel laureate — who recently signed a declaration proclaiming “there is no climate emergency?” Among those scientists were 134 signatories from Australia, the same nation the participants in the survey were from.

The researchers found one very interesting result: Those who actually study an issue instead of blindly relying on government propaganda were actually more likely to be skeptical of so-called climate change.

“Contrary to our predictions, people with high analytical abilities were even more likely to be sceptical about this,” stated study authors Nunn and Sharman in a piece for The Conversation.

Imagine that — people who take the time and effort to study the issue of climate change have a tendency toward skepticism.

Also, in the study’s view, people who value individual liberty are less inclined to buy into the notion of a full-blown climate crisis.

“Those with stronger individualistic worldviews — their priority is individual autonomy as opposed to a more collectivist worldview — were more sceptical about humans causing climate change,” the authors stated.

Or, put in other words, people who are less inclined toward communism and globalism are also less likely to swallow the climate emergency narrative.

Among the study’s other findings:

Older people were more likely to be sceptical of the reality of climate change.

So, older people, set in their ways and unable to change their minds, are a large part of the reason why so-called climate action is taking so long to begin.

Conservatives were more likely to be sceptical of the reality, causes and impacts of climate change.

So, conservatives, in the view of the researchers, are simply unable to see the “reality” of climate change.

Lower environmental values were strongly linked to all types of scepticism.

So, the elderly and the conservatives just care less about the environment, according to the study.

In other words, according to the researchers, a certain amount of naivete among the citizenry is useful when selling the climate crisis narrative.

The study’s authors correctly point out that climate hysterics themselves may bear some of the blame for skepticism. For instance, the climate change community’s practice of making predictions which are observably false leads to skepticism.

The researchers note that skeptics are aware of “predictions not becoming reality [and give] explanations such as ‘seeing climate change alarmists’ predictions being completely false.’” Naturally, this lends credence to skepticism.

The authors believe that such doubts have arisen because skeptics have a “basic misunderstanding” of model-based climate predictions. Is that “misunderstanding” due to the fact that such climate models were never meant to be a predictive tool?

Sky News’ Andrew Bolt made the point that the study was an attempt to classify climate change skepticism as a mental condition. He addressed the study in a very tongue-in-cheek way:

But I do wonder, I have to confess, why people with high analytical abilities, people who are great at analyzing things, are more skeptical of global warming preachers. I’m just sorry that Sharman didn’t actually analyze that bit because I reckon the answer would be fascinating.

And Bolt is correct. While the study doesn’t come right out and say that skeptics of a “climate emergency” have some sort of mental condition, the very existence of the study and its dubious conclusions are meant to plant the seed that, perhaps, people who would drag their feet on destroying the world’s economy and power systems to combat this so-called climate crisis might simply suffer from delusional thinking of some sort.

So, despite the study’s own finding that people with “high analytical abilities were even more likely to be sceptical about” climate change, the study’s authors would have us believe such people are a threat to the Earth.

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James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected]

Featured image: People hold signs during the March for Science in Melbourne, Australia on April 22, 2017. (Photo: Takver/flickr/ccc)

The Shelling of Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP): International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Takes Ukraine Side, Making UN Secretary-General Guterres Either a Liar or a Fool

September 20th, 2022 by John Helmer

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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decided this week to take the side of Ukraine in the current war; blame Russia for the shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP); and issue a demand for Russia to surrender the plant to the Kiev regime “to regain full control over all nuclear facilities within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”      

This is the most dramatic shift by the United Nations (UN) nuclear power regulator in the 65-year history of the organisation based in Vienna.

The terms of the IAEA Resolution Number 58, which were proposed early this week by the Polish and Canadian governors on the agency board, were known in advance by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he spoke by telephone with President Vladimir Putin in the late afternoon of September 14, before the vote was taken. Guterres did not reveal what he already knew would be the IAEA action the next day.

According to the official IAEA text, the agency

“1. expresses grave concern that the Russian Federation has not heeded the call of the Board to immediately cease all actions against and at nuclear facilities in Ukraine”[and]

2. Deplores the Russian Federation’s persistent violent actions against nuclear facilities in Ukraine, including forcefully seizing of control of nuclear facilities and other violent actions in connection with a number of nuclear facilities and other radioactive materials and the ongoing presence of Russian forces and Rosatom personnel at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, which continue to pose serious and direct threats to the safety and security of these facilities and their civilian personnel, thereby significantly raising the risk of a nuclear accident or incident, which endangers the population of Ukraine, neighbouring States and the international community.”

The IAEA makes no reference to its investigation of the artillery shelling of the ZNPP, or to the evidence presented by Russian and other sources that these attacks, and a attempted commando assault on the plant on September 1, were ordered and carried out by the government in Kiev.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi speaks to the German, French and US media  at ZNPP on September 1.  The Bloomberg report indicated that Grossi’s visit was “the first time in the IAEA’s 65-year history that monitors crossed an active battlefront in order to carry out an inspection.” Grossi did not make accusations against either Russia or Ukraine, and subsequently proposed instead a no-fire zone around the plant. According to Bloomberg, “Ukraine and Russia have blamed each other for continued fighting in the area, with no way to independently verify their claims.”

The board of governors voted to demand Russia surrender, not only ZNPP, but all nuclear facilities “within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders.”

Map of Ukraine Nuclear Facilities

Photo by Yakiv Gluck, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The IAEA resolution calls “upon the Russian Federation to immediately cease all actions against, and at, the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant and any other nuclear facility in Ukraine, in order for the competent Ukrainian authorities to regain full control over all nuclear facilities within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, to ensure their safe and secure operation, and in order for the Agency to fully and safely conduct its safeguards verification activities, in accordance with Ukraine’s Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement entered into pursuant to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Statute.”

The agency’s board of governors has 35 members. This year they represent:  Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America and Viet Nam.

In an opening statement to the board, the IAEA Secretary General Rafaelo Grossi described his inspection visit to Zapoorzhye at the beginning of this month.

“A nuclear safety and security protection zone,” he said, “is urgently needed and I have begun initial consultations with the relevant Parties. The protection zone is essential to end the repeated shelling of the Plant and of the off-site power infrastructure crucial for reactor cooling and systems needed to maintain safety now that all reactors at Zaporizhzhya NPP are in shutdown.”

Grossi stopped short of identifying the source of the artillery attacks on the plant. The only demand he issued to the Russian side was to “recommend that the military vehicles currently present inside the buildings and around the buildings be removed so they do not interfere with the operation of the safety and security systems.”

The vote for the surrender resolution followed three days after Grossi’s speech. The voting rules for the governors can be followed here.  Rules 36 and 37 provide for simple majority and super-majority votes when or if the board decides to apply them. Grossi was asked this morning through his spokesman, Fredrik Dahl, to say what voting rules were adopted for the resolution. Dahl (right) is an Austrian with a long career as a Reuters correspondent working on the NATO side during the war against Serbia and the US and Israeli campaigns against Iran. Dahl refused to answer the telephone or email questions.

Grossi’s press office was also asked to report the roll call on the resolution vote, identifying the countries voting for the resolution, and those voting against or abstaining. Dahl and his associates refused to reply. The IAEA website is not disclosing the vote.

Instead, the Russian representative on the IAEA board and the Embassy in Vienna published a report on Telegram.  This reveals  the 35-member board voted 26 in favour; Russia and China voted against;  Burundi, Vietnam, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Senegal and South Africa voted to abstain. Twenty-six votes amount to 74% of the board;  Rules 36 and 37 require a super majority of two thirds — that’s 23 votes.

In English: “Western countries have voted through an anti-Russian resolution on the Ukrainian issue in the IAEA Board of Governors. The Achilles heel of this resolution is that it does not say a word about the systematic shelling of the Zaporozhye NPP, which is the main problem from the point of view of ensuring nuclear safety and nuclear safety in the world. The reason is simple – the shelling is carried out by Ukraine, which Western countries strongly support and protect. Russia and China voted against this document. Abstaining were Burundi, Vietnam, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Senegal and South Africa. Thus, most of humanity refused to support this project.” Source

In April, during a meeting in Moscow between President Putin and UN Secretary-General  Guterres, he was warned against lying publicly about the sides in the conflict.

At the time and subsequently, Guterres’s spokesman refused to answer questions about what he knew of Ukrainian military use of civilians as shields in the fighting at the Azov steel plant and other war crimes. Russian doubt about Guterres’s neutrality and independence grew with his conduct of the negotiations over release of Ukrainian and Russian grain cargoes and Russian fertilizers for export.

On September 14 the Kremlin has recorded that Putin telephoned Guterres in the late afternoon, Moscow time.

“The primary focus”, according to the Russian communiqué, “was on the implementation of the Istanbul package agreements on Ukrainian grain exports from Black Sea ports and exports of Russian foods and fertilisers. Both leaders emphasised the importance of prioritising the food needs of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.”

Putin then raised the issue of the IAEA and ZNPP.

“The situation around the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) was discussed, including the visit by the IAEA delegation on September 1. Vladimir Putin gave a positive assessment to the constructive cooperation with the agency and told the UN Secretary-General about the measures taken by Russia to ensure the security and physical protection of ZNPP facilities.”

There is no record of what Guterres told Putin in reply. However, in a press conference Guterres held soon after the call in New York, he acknowledged that

“the last time I spoke with President Putin was this morning. That is the reason why I came late to the press conference. And we had the opportunity to discuss the Black Sea Grain Initiative and its extension and expansion, possible expansion.”

He added:

“We discussed Zaporizhzhia, and we discussed all the other aspects that are relevant in the present situation. And I usually do not say what I say in phone calls. My positions are known.”

He was asked what he knew of the situation at Zaporozhye.

“According to the informations I have,” Guterres replied, “electricity is being provided to the reactors for guaranteeing the cooling of those reactors, and other areas that also need the electricity supply are having it. And we hope that it will be able to maintain it, both with generators and through the grid.  The IAEA remains on the site, and the information we have are also that, until now, there was no radiation measured that is worrying. I believe that we have been now three days without bombing. I hope that these kinds of attacks will cease, and I hope that the security of the nuclear power plant will be maintained entirely at all costs and fully respected by the parties.”

A reporter then asked:

“We heard that there are some talks going on between the IAEA chief, Mr. Grossi, and the Ukrainians and the Russians. Is that what you believe has led to the end of shelling for the past three days? Are these talks something the UN is encouraging, involved in, in other ways?”

Guterres replied:

“Those talks are taking place, and I hope they will contribute to quiet things down. I cannot establish a cause-and-effect, but I believe that the IAEA presence is a very important deterrent and that their contacts are a very important deterrent in relation to any kind of attack against the power plant.”

Screenshot from the UN

Later in the press conference Guterres was asked a question about the IAEA’s role in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. He replied:

“I think the IAEA is a very important pillar, and I believe that its independence that exists and must be preserved is essential. The IAEA cannot be the instrument of parties against other parties. And I do believe the IAEA is doing its role based on the technical aspects in which the IAEA is supposed to have the knowledge and the capacity to do.”

Russian sources express scepticism that when Guterres said this, he did not already know that  IAEA resolution Number  58 would become “the instrument of parties against other parties” — exactly what Guterres told the press the IAEA should not do.

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Dr. Paul Offit, One of the World’s Most Respected Vaccine Experts, Is Now Officially an Anti-vaxxer!

September 20th, 2022 by Steve Kirsch

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I learned about Paul’s conversion to anti-vaxxer status from reading Brucha Weisberger’s substack article.

First, watch this TV news clip paying very close attention starting 50 seconds into the clip:

Here’s the definition of an anti-vaxxer:

He also said he’s not getting any more COVID shots until he sees more data…

Image

And more vaccine hesitancy…

The question for your blue pilled friends

“So, if Dr. Paul Offit isn’t getting any more shots, why are you? Do you know something he doesn’t?”

How you can help

Ask Paul on his Twitter account if he wants to see the Israeli safety data that they are hiding. You can refer to my article.

I’d do it myself, but I’m banned for life from Twitter as you all know for tweeting that the COVID vaccines cause prion diseases. They do. There is absolutely no doubt about that. But truth isn’t protected speech on Twitter and I don’t think anyone who works at Twitter believes that “true speech” should be protected.

Do you know anyone who works at Twitter in upper management who thinks it’s wrong to ban people for saying things that are true? I haven’t found one…

Summary

We now have one more anti-vaxxer in the world.

I just emailed Paul asking him if he wants to join Martin Kulldorff and see the Israeli safety data that the Israeli Ministry of Health does not want anyone to see. Let’s see how red pilled Paul really is. I’ll update this article if he responds. Don’t hold your breath. Apparently, being open to seeing safety data that is counter-narrative is a career limiting move.

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store

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Latest COVID Shots Sold as Genetic Software Update. “Recharge Your Immunity”

September 20th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is now advertising the new COVID booster as an “antibody update” to “recharge your immunity” — as if your immune system were a battery that needs recharging, or your immunity a software system that requires gene therapy “updates.” This is transhumanist lingo that has no bearing on real-world biology or physiology, and proves the FDA is onboard with the transhumanist ideas of technocracy pushed by the globalist cabal

According to a risk-benefit analysis looking at the impact of booster mandates for university students, between 22,000 and 30,000 previously uninfected adults (aged 18 to 29) must be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent one COVID-19 hospitalization

For each hospitalization prevented, the jab will cause 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to three booster-associated myocarditis cases in males.

A small observational study led by neurology researchers at the National Institutes of Health found “a variety of neuropathic symptoms” occurring within three to four weeks of COVID injection.

Naturopath Henry Ealy and two Oregon state senators, Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum, are trying to compel the state court in Oregon to order the impaneling of a special grand jury to investigate criminal data fraud by the CDC

*

Just when you thought the U.S. Food and Drug Administration couldn’t possibly get any worse, they prove you wrong. Here are two recent COVID booster campaign messages tweeted out by the FDA:

recharge your immunity

“It’s time to install that update! #UpdateYourAntibodies with a new #COVID19 booster.”1“Don’t be shocked! You can now #RechargeYourImmunity with an updated #COVID19 booster.”2

FDA Now Pushes Transhumanist Pipe-Dream

That’s right. The FDA now wants you to believe that your immune system is something that needs to be “recharged,” as if it were a battery, or “updated” with mRNA injections like a piece of software.

This is transhumanist lingo that has no bearing on real-world biology or physiology, and proves beyond doubt that the FDA is fully onboard with the transhumanist ideas of technocracy pushed by the globalist cabal. The human body is basically viewed as nothing more than a biological platform equipped with genetic software that can be altered and updated at will.

The problem, of course, is that your body doesn’t work that way. You cannot turn your body into a “bioreactor”3 or an internal “vaccine-production facility”4 and expect it to work as intended. The massive increase in disability and sudden death among COVID jab recipients is a testament to the fact that allowing Big Pharma to play God is a bad idea.

Transhumanism as a whole is a pipe-dream, as it fails to take into account just about everything that actually makes us human, including the nonlocality of consciousness, which they irrationally believe can be uploaded to a cloud-based system and merged with AI, or downloaded into an artificial body construct, such as a synthetic body.

False Advertising

The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for addressing fraudulent advertising. According to law, an ad must be “truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.”5The FDA itself also requires drug ads to be “truthful, balanced and accurately communicated.”6

“Balanced” refers to promotional materials that include efficacy and benefit claims, which must include a balance between benefit information and information about risks. In my view, the FDA’s most recent COVID booster ads are clear examples of false advertising, because:

  • They’re not truthful and accurate, as there’s no basis for the claim that your antibodies need to be updated with a drug, or the claim that immunity must be recharged at regular intervals
  • They’re not backed by scientific evidence, as the FDA is a) ignoring massive evidence of harm from the original shots, and b) the bivalent boosters are being released based on data from a few mice alone. The FDA is advertising the boosters for the prevention of disease, even though it has zero data to prove it prevents anything
  • They’re not balanced, as the FDA fails to warn people about any of the many side effects reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)7

Was No-Test Drug Approval the Plan All Along?

While I cannot prove it, I suspect Operation Warp Speed (OWS) — devised in the spring of 2020 by a dozen top officials from then-President Trump’s health and defense departments to expedite the development of a COVID-19 vaccine8 — may have been intended to normalize the approval of drugs without proper testing.

Even if the normalization of expedited drug approval wasn’t originally intended, it certainly has been used and abused to that aim since. In June 2022, the FDA quietly implemented a “Future Framework” scheme9 to speed up the delivery of COVID boosters. This is what allows for the authorization of reformulated COVID shots without human trials.10,11,12

The FDA basically rewrote the rules on the fly, deciding that mRNA gene therapies are equivalent to conventional influenza vaccines and can be updated and released without testing.

The idea here is that the safety of the mRNA COVID shots has already been proven by the original shots, which they claim have harmed or killed no one. Hence, safety is a given, and the effectiveness of reformulated boosters can be assessed simply by checking the antibody levels in a few mice, which is what Pfizer and Moderna did.

In reality, however, millions of people around the world have been harmed and killed by the original shots, the human trials for those shots were riddled with fraud, antibody levels tell us nothing about the jab’s ability to protect against infection, and the two technologies (conventional flu vaccines and mRNA gene therapy) have no common ground.

I have no doubt this “Future Framework” will also, over time, be widened to include other vaccines and drugs that drug makers may want to tinker with. It may even lower standards for drug trials in general, which historically have required at least 10 years of multiphase testing.13 The dangers of this trend really cannot be overstated.

Analysis of US Booster Policy

In a September 12, 2022, article, Kaiser Health News raised several questions about the FDA’s authorization of the new bivalent COVID boosters:14

“… in the real world, are the omicron-specific vaccines significantly more protective — and in what ways — than the original COVID vaccines so many have already taken? If so, who would benefit most from the new shots? Since the federal government is purchasing these new vaccines … is the $3.2 billion price tag worth the unclear benefit? …

The FDA could have requested more clinical vaccine effectiveness data from Pfizer and Moderna before authorizing their updated omicron BA.5 boosters. Yet the FDA cannot weigh in on important follow-up questions: How much more effective are the updated boosters than vaccines already on the market? In which populations?

And what increase in effectiveness is enough to merit an increase in price (a so-called cost-benefit analysis)? Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, perform such an analysis before allowing new medicines onto the market, to negotiate a fair national price …

As population immunity builds up through vaccination and infection, it’s unclear whether additional vaccine boosters, updated or not, would benefit all ages equally … The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices considered limiting the updated boosters to people 50 and up, but eventually decided that doing so would be too complicated.”

Shocking Jab Study Decimates Safety Claims

In related news, a shocking risk-benefit analysis15 looking at the impact of booster mandates for university students concluded that:

  • Between 22,000 and 30,000 previously uninfected adults (aged 18 to 29) must be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent one COVID-19 hospitalization
  • For each hospitalization prevented, the jab will cause 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3 “booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities”

That means mandating a third COVID shot for university students will result in “a net expected harm.” The authors also stress that “Given the high prevalence of post-infection immunity, this risk-benefit profile is even less favorable.” The authors go on to state that “University booster mandates are unethical because:”16

“1) no formal risk-benefit assessment exists for this age group;

2) vaccine mandates may result in a net expected harm to individual young people;

3) mandates are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given the modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission;

4) U.S. mandates violate the reciprocity principle because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes; and

5) mandates create wider social harms. We consider counter-arguments such as a desire for socialization and safety and show that such arguments lack scientific and/or ethical support.”

Government Study Reveals COVID Jab Problems

A small observational study17,18 led by neurology researchers at the National Institutes of Health also brings bad news, as they found “a variety of neuropathic symptoms” occurring within three to four weeks of COVID injection:

“We studied 23 patients (92% female; median age 40 years) reporting new neuropathic symptoms beginning within 1 month after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. 100% reported sensory symptoms comprising severe face and/or limb paresthesias, and 61% had orthostasis, heat intolerance and palpitations …

Biopsies from randomly selected five patients that were evaluated for immune complexes showed deposition of complement C4d in endothelial cells. Electrodiagnostic test results were normal in 94% (16/17). Together, 52% (12/23) of patients had objective evidence of small-fiber peripheral neuropathy …

This observational study suggests that a variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process.”

FDA Refuses to Release Key COVID Jab Safety Analyses

In July 2022, The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release “all analyses performed by the agency for the COVID-19 vaccines using … Empirical Bayesian data mining, which involves comparing the adverse events recorded after a specific COVID-19 vaccine with those recorded after vaccination with non-COVID-19 vaccines.”19

The FDA has so far refused, claiming the data is tied to “internal discussions protected by law.” September 10, 2022, The Epoch Times reported:20

“According to operating procedures laid out by the agency and its partner in January 202121and February 2022,22 the FDA would perform data mining ‘at least biweekly’ to identify adverse events ‘reported more frequently than expected following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines.’ The agency would perform the mining on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

In a recent response, the FDA records office told The Epoch Times that it would not provide any of the analyses, even in redacted form. The agency cited an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act that lets the government withhold inter-agency and intra-agency memorandums and letters ‘that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.’

The agency also pointed to the Code of Federal Regulations, which says that ‘all communications within the Executive Branch of the Federal government which are in written form or which are subsequently reduced to writing may be withheld from public disclosure except that factual information which is reasonably segregable in accordance with the rule established in § 20.22 is available for public disclosure.’

It’s not clear why the FDA could not produce copies of the analyses with non-factual information redacted. The Epoch Times has appealed the determination by the records office.”

CDC Also Refuses to Release Its Safety Analyses

According to the VAERS standard operating procedures cited above, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also required to perform data mining analyses, using Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining. PRR23 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

When The Epoch Times asked the CDC to release its results, it too refused. According to The Epoch Times, the CDC “has also twice provided false information when responding to questions”:24

“The agency initially said that no PRR analyses were done and that data mining is ‘outside of th[e] agency’s purview.’ The agency then said that it did perform PRRs, starting in February 2021. Later, the agency acknowledged that wasn’t true.

The agency did not begin performing PRRs until March 2022, a spokesperson told The Epoch Times. Roger Andoh, a records officer, gave the initial response, citing the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office. Dr. John Su, a CDC official, gave the second response.

It remains unclear with whom the information originated. The Epoch Times has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for internal emails that may provide answers.”

So far, the FDA has insisted the data show no evidence of serious adverse effects from the COVID jab. The only possible signal they’d found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature. In the article, The Epoch Times cites several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claim their data mining efforts have come up empty handed.

But if that’s true, why the reluctance to release the data? Don’t they want us to be reassured that these shots are as safe as they claim them to be? Why sit on exculpatory evidence? Unless, of course, the data proves the FDA and CDC have been lying all along.

Senators Calling for Special Grand Jury

In other related news, naturopath Henry Ealy and two Oregon state senators, Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum, have been trying since March 2022 to compel the impaneling of a special grand jury to investigate decisions by federal officials that “significantly compromise[d] the accuracy and integrity of COVID-related data.”25

According to the March 7, 2022, petition,26,27 filed in Portland, Oregon, the 30 defendants manipulated statistics to create “a significant hyperinflation of COVID-19 case, hospitalization and death counts,” which in turn resulted in $3.5 trillion in fraudulent taxpayer expenditures.

Defendants specifically named28 are former CDC director Robert Redfield and current CDC director Rochelle Walensky, former Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar, HHS director Xavier Becerra, and National Center for Health Statistics director Brian Moyer.

As explained by Ealy in the video update above, the defendants were given 60 days to reply to the March 7 petition. As it happened, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon, Scott Asphaug, was assigned by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to be the defending attorney — an interesting choice, considering Ealy, Thatcher and Linthicum had in 2021 asked Asphaug to investigate the listed defendants, which he refused to do.

Asphaug immediately filed for an extension, which gave them another 60 days. The defendants now had until August 26, 2022, to respond. Suddenly, July 13, the DOJ reassigned Asphaug to Nairobi, Kenya. Asphaug resigned from his post as U.S. attorney, effective July 17, at which point U.S. Attorneys Natalie Wight and Dianne Schweiner took over the CDC’s defense.

When the defendants missed the August 26 deadline, Ealy, Thatcher and Linthicum filed for default judgment.29 Two days later, August 29, Wight and Schweiner opposed default judgment.30

Schweiner’s excuse for missing the deadline was that she’d been busy caring for her acutely sick dog. As noted by Linthicum in his newsletter,31 “no self-respecting sci-fi editor would allow something this outlandish past his desk when trying to make a story about integrity and transparency sound believable.”

Ealy is now convinced the CDC is feeling the heat, and urges Americans to sign Stand for Health Freedom’s petition to convene a special grand jury to investigate the CDC’s conduct during COVID-19.

The more signatures there are on this petition, the stronger the argument that the court must order a grand jury investigation, as it demonstrates that this investigation is important to the American public, and isn’t just some pet grievance by Ealy, Thatcher and Linthicum.

As noted by Ealy, the CDC has committed criminal data fraud. There are laws prohibiting data manipulation by federal agencies, and laws meant to prevent it from happening in the first place.

The CDC violated those laws, not just once, but repeatedly, and those in charge must be held accountable. We cannot have a public health agency flouting data laws in order to justify harming the public. So, please, add your name to the grand jury petition.

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Notes

1 Twitter FDA September 7, 2022

2 Twitter FDA September 9, 2022

3 MIT Technology Review February 5, 2021

4 Nature Biotechnology 2022; 40: 840-854

5 FTC Truth in Advertising

6 Compliance Online Drug Ads

7 OpenVAERS

8 Politico January 17, 2021

9 FDA Briefing Document June 28, 2022

10 The Defender June 27, 2022

11 The Epoch Times June 28, 2022 (Archived)

12 New York Times June 27, 2022 (Archived)

13 Phrma.org Biopharmaceutical research and Development

14 KHN September 22, 2022

15, 16 SSRN September 12, 2022

17 medRxiv May 17, 2022

18 Trial Site News September 1, 2022

19, 20, 24 Epoch Times September 10, 2022

21 VAERS Standard Operating Procedures January 2021

22 VAERS Standard Operating Procedures February 2022

23 All About Pharmacovigilance PRR

25, 26, 28 Petition to impanel special grand jury March 7, 2022

27 Stand For Health Freedom

29 Application for entry of default August 27, 2022

30 Opposition to entry of default August 29, 2022

31 Dennis Linthicum Newsletter

Featured image is from Mercola

The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store

You may also purchase directly at DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page! (NOTE: User-friendly)

School Shutdowns Leave Children Behind

September 20th, 2022 by Rep. Ron Paul

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***

A new report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a program of the US Department of Education, confirms what most parents already knew: shutting down the schools because of the panic over covid was a disaster for American schoolchildren. According to the NAEP, since the 2020 school shutdowns the average nine-year-old suffered a decline in reading skills and math skills. The reading skills decline is the largest since 1990. The math skills decline is the first ever reported by NAEP.

What makes this especially tragic is that there was no medical justification for closing the schools. Children are unlikely to either contract or spread covid, so the idea that schools had to close to prevent children from infecting their families may be the most absurd of all the absurd claims made by covid authoritarians like Dr. Anthony “I represent science” Fauci.

It was clear to anyone truly following the science that school shutdowns were unnecessary and harmful. Yet, because of the combined clout of the teachers unions and the cult of Fauci, in many communities schools were among the last institutions to reopen. When the schools did reopen, children were forbidden to sit together at lunch or play together during recess. Children were also forced to wear masks the whole school day, which made many children sick.

The teachers unions’ pernicious role in closing the schools shows a sad disconnection among teachers union bosses (and the politicians that do their bidding) from the promoting of children’s education.

The one positive development from the school closures is that many parents discovered how concepts like critical race theory had been snuck into the government school curriculum. This has led to a parental uprising and a renewed focus on electing individuals to school boards who are committed to stopping government schools from indoctrinating children with political and social beliefs or undermining parents’ values.

Many parents moved their children to homeschooling in reaction to the school closures and the revelations on what was really being taught in government schools. After the school shutdowns, there was a huge increase in the number in homeschooling families. As dissatisfaction with government schools grows, more parents will begin homeschooling.

For almost a decade I have been involved with homeschooling through my Ron Paul Curriculum. Students using my homeschooling curriculum can attain a superior education in comparison to standards set by politicians or bureaucrats. Instead of indoctrinating students with instruction in subjects including critical race theory, the Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a solid education in history, literature, mathematics, and the sciences. It also gives students the opportunity to create their own websites and internet-based businesses. The curriculum is designed to be self-taught, with students helping and learning from each other via online forums.

Starting in the fourth grade, students are required to write at least one essay a week. Students are required to post their essays on their blogs. Students also take a course in public speaking.

The curriculum does emphasize the history, philosophy, and economics of liberty, but it never substitutes indoctrination for education. The goal is to produce students with superior critical thinking skills who can thrive with their individuality.

If you think my curriculum may meet the needs of your child, please visit www.RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information.

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store

You may also purchase directly at DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page! (NOTE: User-friendly)

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Many Reasons Why Price Cap on Russian Oil Exports Cannot Work

September 20th, 2022 by Prof. Shirin Akhter

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In their ongoing economic war on Russia, the United States and its allies propose a price cap on Russian oil exports. The oil price cap idea promoted by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen suggests that oil-consuming nations organize into a buyer’s cartel to limit Russia’s revenues from oil exports. This proposal follows previous measures against Russia, which have not dented its economy to the extent that it would be induced to change its posture (as the US and its allies desire) concerning the conflict in Ukraine.

Instead, the direct restrictions placed on Russian exports, principally of primary commodities such as oil and natural gas, have increased their world prices. They are so high that Russia’s export earnings have increased even if the volumes of some export have declined.

Russia currently accounts for about 10% of global oil, producing approximately 10 million barrels daily. Of these, Russia exports about 7 million barrels per day. If its exports decline, the resulting demand-supply mismatch will have speculators (principally international finance) bidding oil prices up to astronomical levels. Consequently, the proposed price cap, going by the intentions of the US and its allies, is meant to work by reducing Russian oil export earnings without reducing their magnitude.

Let us examine the US’ plan and that of its “allies” in detail. First, the ceiling price on Russian oil exports will be at a level that exceeds the cost of production of oil but below world oil prices. Second, the cap is meant to be enforced principally through controls over shipping insurance dominated by firms based in the US or its allies. It would be with the hope that if the price cap is successful, world oil prices and traded oil volumes will remain relatively stable, but Russia’s oil export earnings will decline.

If this decline is sufficiently large, the US and its allies can expect Russia to change its posture in the conflict in a way they find acceptable. However, these hopes are unlikely to be realized for several reasons.

The US has failed to convince OPEC to increase oil production, partly because of capacity constraints in coming years. Further, the US currently lacks strategic wherewithal (the “unipolar moment” has passed) to “persuade” OPEC members such as Saudi Arabia to activate their limited spare oil production capacity. Now, Iranian oil exports are part of world trade but outside the framework of the so-called rules-based international order due to unilateral US sanctions. Venezuelan oil production is also constrained by years of unilateral US sanctions. In both countries, markedly increasing production capacity will require years of investment. Moreover, their oil exports will be more expensive for European buyers than Russian oil due to higher transportation costs.

This is why Russian oil exports are irreplaceable in world trade for years to come.

Let us also examine the likely consequences of attempts by the US and its allies to enforce a price cap on Russian oil exports. Firstly, it will require a cartel of most actual and potential importers of Russian oil. China and India have effectively ruled out participating in any such exercise, using different idioms to articulate their reasoning. China is unlikely to accept a negotiation that strategically weakens Russia (the possible result if a price cap is effective) since this would be detrimental to China’s strategic standing vis-a-vis the US.

If India agrees to join this proposed buyer’s cartel, there could be at least two adverse consequences even if the price cap is effective. One, it could undermine India’s defense capacity, which disproportionately depends on Russian imports. Two, it could enhance the strategic proximity between China and Russia. This closeness could become antagonistic to India’s interests. Strategic proximity to the US may not counterbalance it in the future.

Secondly, Russia could respond to attempts to enforce a price cap by partially withholding its oil exports, leading to a rise in world oil prices. If Russian oil prices are below world market prices but above the proposed cap, some countries would find it worthwhile to import Russian oil. It has been argued that stopping oil production may require repairs when production restarts. These expenses may deter Russia from partially curtailing oil production.

However, this would be true only if the difference between Russia’s earnings from oil exports (when selling at an intermediate price between the world and capped prices) and the cost of restarting temporarily unused oil wells is lower than the earnings from oil sold at the capped price. If world oil prices rise adequately because of partial halts in oil production, it would be worthwhile for Russia to refuse to export oil at the capped price.

Thirdly, other countries that export oil or related commodities will rightly apprehend the success of the price cap as a strategy the US and its allies can use against them should they stray from the “rules-based international order.” Therefore, they are unlikely to want to cooperate with the price cap idea. Further, if Russia exports all its oil at the capped price, as long as it is below the world oil prices, any adjustment of oil supply towards demand will involve only non-Russian oil producers.

The increased volatility in the earnings of non-Russian oil-exporting countries would make them not want to cooperate with the proposed price cap.

Fourth, it is unclear how shipping insurance companies based in the US (and its allies) can monitor the actual price at which Russian oil is being exported. Suppose a country imports fertilizer and oil from Russia. The difference between the actual price of Russian oil and the capped price could be recorded in documents as part of the transaction value of fertilizer exports. Further, insurance companies in Russia or countries that import oil from it can provide insurance. It should not be very complicated since shipping insurance companies in the US or its allies primarily provide “expertise” and are not the source of the premiums. It is also possible that oil traders could “blend” oil from Russian and other sources and label it non-Russian to operate outside the framework of any price cap. Further, they could use mid-ocean ship-to-ship oil transfers to mark Russian oil as having originated in other locations, making the price cap inapplicable to such cargo.

Fifth, it is not militarily feasible for the US armed forces to impound ships carrying Russian oil exports since it would invite massive retaliation by the Russian Federation’s armed forces.

Sixth, Russia could retaliate against attempts to enforce a price cap on its oil exports in many other ways besides reducing production. For instance, contrary to reports in the mainstream media, Russia could escalate militarily in Ukraine without using nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The Russian Federation government may conclude that the negative fallout of defeating Ukraine militarily by using overwhelming conventional force is lesser than if it allows itself to be bound by a price cap.

Resisting attempts to enforce the price cap by dropping the relative restraint of its armed forces would lead to a steep rise in casualties and refugee inflows from Ukraine into Europe and the Russian Federation. The latter may calculate that a swift end to the armed conflict will change the “cost-benefit” calculations of the US and its allies, making the proposed price cap lose its raison d’être.

Seventh, Russia is a leading primary commodity exporter. It could institute selective export restrictions of primary commodities against countries that seek to enforce the price cap. If these restrictions involve grains, fertilizers etc., it could greatly aggravate the world food crisis.

So we have a strong likelihood of Russian retaliation, an unwilling India and China, the impossibility of substituting Russian crude and gas, and unilateral sanctions raising rather than lowering Russia’s earnings. The proposed oil price cap does not seem worthwhile for those who propose it. It will likely be a strategic setback to the US, principally reflecting a fundamental feature of the contemporary international political economy—it is not strategically possible for the US to successfully contend simultaneously with China and Russia.

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Shirin Akhter is associate professor, Department of Economics, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi.

C. Saratchand is professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.

Putin: Terrorists Near Russian Nuclear Power Plants

September 20th, 2022 by Ray McGovern

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Corporate media somehow missed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shocking charge, at his press conference Friday:

“We even see attempts at perpetrating terrorist attacks in the Russian Federation, including – I am not sure if this was made public – attempts to carry out terrorist attacks near our nuclear facilities, nuclear power plants in the Russian Federation. I am not even talking about the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.”

Putin was answering what seemed to be a canned question about Russia’s “restraint” amid, what the questioner called increasing “strikes, raids and acts of terror even on Russian territory. We are hearing all the time very aggressive statements that the final goal of Kiev and the West is Russia’s disintegration. Meanwhile, many think that Russia’s response to all of this is very restrained. Why is that?”

Putin addressed the question frontally:

“With regard to our restrained response, I would not say it was restrained … after all, a special military operation is not just another warning, but a military operation. In the course of this, we are seeing attempts to perpetrate terrorist attacks and damage our civilian infrastructure.

“Indeed, we were quite restrained in our response, but that will not last forever. Recently, Russian Armed Forces delivered a couple of sensitive blows in that area [civilian infrastructure]. Let’s call them warning shots. If the situation continues like that, our response will be more impactful. Terrorist attacks are a serious matter. … We see this in the killing of officials in the liberated territories, we even see attempts at perpetrating terrorist attacks in the Russian Federation.”

This is the context in which Putin pointedly included (as cited above) “attempts to carry out terrorist attacks near our nuclear facilities, nuclear power plants in the Russian Federation.” He added:

“We are monitoring the situation and will do our best to prevent a negative scenario from unfolding. We will respond if they fail to realize that these approaches are unacceptable. They are, in fact, no different than terrorist attacks.”

Putin on Western Goals

Responding to the questioner’s allusion to “very aggressive statements that the final goal of Kiev and the West is Russia’s disintegration, Putin added:

“They have always been seeking the dissolution of our country – this is very true. It is unfortunate that at some point they decided to use Ukraine for these purposes. In effect – I am answering your question now … we launched our special military operation to prevent events from taking this turn. This is what some US-led Western countries have always been seeking – to create an anti-Russia enclave and rock the boat, threaten Russia from this direction. In essence, our main goal is to prevent such developments.”

Putin has long been saying that, while the US professes to be concerned about Ukraine’s security, it is using the ex-Soviet country as a “tool” in its efforts to contain Russia. Actually, Putin finds himself in some good company with this assertion. Would you believe that company includes a former Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency?

Following the US orchestrated coup in Kiev in early 2014, the “December 2015 National Security Strategy” (of DIA) said the following:

“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.” LT Gen Vincent Stewart, Director, DIA

Not Fit to Print?

When the President of Russia claims there are attempts to attack nuclear power facilities in Russia – whether true or false – is that not newsworthy? No, says the NY Times. Its lead front-page story Sunday, written by its first-string team of (WMD in Iraq) David Sanger, Julian Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and Anton Troianovski reports copiously on Putin’s Friday press conference, but chooses to omit his charge regarding terrorist planning to sabotage nuclear power plants in Russia. The article explains how President Joe Biden is trying not to provoke Russia into escalating in Ukraine, despite Zelensky being “flush with success in northeastern Ukraine.”

According to these NYT first-string writers on Ukraine, Washington is concerned that Putin might escalate “to compensate for his humiliating retreat … the Russians, for now, are still in disarray.”

Eating Crow?

The coming weeks will show whether crow will be included in the diet of those NYT first-stringers. As for now they are extolling Crow – that is Rep. Jason Crow (D, Colorado), a former Army Ranger who now serves on both the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees.

Crow’s pedigree may be of interest: he is a “Russian specialist” in the manner of former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who knew the Russians to be “almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.” Crow’s most memorable observation of that kind was: “Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

So Rep. Crow was the Times’s go-to guy for comment on whether Biden is being too fearful of possible Russian retaliation if the US provides Ukraine with still longer-range missiles. Said Crow:

“Sure … we have to be mindful of that threat. But I don’t think providing ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems with a range of up to 190 miles) is substantively escalatory. We need to provide what Ukraine needs to win.”

Moscow: Wider War Rather Than Kiev “Win”

Are Russian TV viewers being readied for wider war? Those watching yesterday’s News of the Week program with host Dmitry Kiselyov saw him offering a show tantamount to war preparation. Kiselyov is the top boss of all Russian state news broadcasting – a Kremlin insider, very close to power.

Kiselyov set out to give Russian viewers a description of what the United States and NATO are now up to, namely a ‘war on Russia.’ Ukraine has pretty much slipped out of the picture.

It is a war led by the United States against Russia which now features daily rocket attacks on more and more border towns on the Russian side, with destruction and death and immense flows of refugees from the Kharkov area into Russia. Kiselyov includes horror stories of Ukrainian retribution being carried out on “collaborationists.” These includes teachers in the Kharkov region who were teaching from the Russian state syllabus, who are now liable to execution.

The program reported that 10,000 people have been rounded up, claiming many of them will be slaughtered. The show featured retired US General Ben Hodges, who talks about the coming breakup of Russia, planned “Balkanization” – the US objective – which Russia now needs to plan against. It showed Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warning that if the US gives Ukraine 300-km range missiles, which, for example, can reach the main Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, if fired from Odessa, then the US becomes a co-belligerent.

The US a “co-belligerent”: in other words Russia becomes officially at war with the USA. We seem to be just a step away.

Putin’s Friday news conference was also shown, including Putin’s comments on terrorist attempts to attack nuclear power plants in Russia. One knowledgeable observer, who watches virtually all Putin’s speeches/press conferences, commented that Putin was twitching this way and that, and seemed very nervous.

President Biden and his sophomore advisers may not be smart enough to be equally nervous. And so catastrophe looms.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Featured image: Russian president Vladimir Putin (Illustration by TPYXA_ILLUSTRATION/Shutterstock)

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Guantanamo: The White House Is Making a Quiet Effort at Closing America’s Infamous Torture Prison

September 20th, 2022 by Kyle Anzalone

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President Joe Biden pushed behind the scenes throughout the first year of his administration to close the Guantanamo Bay torture prison, the Wall Street Journal reports. Established in US-occupied Cuba under the George W. Bush presidency, Gitmo has a cruel legacy of America carrying out barbaric interrogation methods on mostly innocent people. 

Set up in January 2002, the prison population is down to 36 from over 800. Each detainee costs American taxpayers about $15 million each year. However, many of the detainees have the US government in legal limbo. If taken to court, the methods used by the CIA’s torture program could become more public. Both Biden and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, pledged to close the gulag.

Attempts to close the prison and transfer detainees have been met with persistent hawkish criticisms. Under pressure, Obama ultimately buckled and expanded the prison. To avoid meeting the same fate as his former boss, Biden is attempting a more covert route. However, it is unclear if the current administration will make closing Gitmo enough of a priority to get it done. Biden’s Pentagon is already moving forward with a plan from the Donald Trump administration to build a $4 million courtroom.

The WSJ reports Biden’s covert approach has relegated the official dedicated to closing the facility to a lower office in the State Department. The sources who spoke with WSJ  say the office was more influential during the Obama administration.

Some analysts believe Biden is also concerned about looking soft. According to Harvey Rishikof, a former head of the military-commissions apparatus who helped draft a recent report on closing the facility from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, “[t]he administration doesn’t want to look like it’s soft on terrorism and is awaiting a political consensus.”

While Biden may find some support for closing the prison, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused the president of trying to release terrorists.

“The Biden administration wants to free more terrorists, and we know, to an absolute, metaphysical certainty, the results of that will be more Americans murdered,” Cruz said in December.

It is unclear what the additional court facilities will be used for as the White House says most of the men will never face trial. Of the 36 detainees, 20 have been cleared for release. An additional four will remain indefinitely detained at Gitmo, as the US government has no plans to prosecute but also believes the men are too much of a security threat to release.

Three prisoners at Gitmo have already been found guilty, two by plea agreements. Majid Khan’s plea agreement has his release date set for March. Nine remaining men are awaiting trial, including five accused of involvement in the September 11th attacks.

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Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, assistant editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter.

Law of Neutrality: Just When Is a State a Belligerent in a War?

September 20th, 2022 by Michael Doliner

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***

 

The laws of war are to some extent a farce. When states come to the point of war the niceties of codified law will likely influence them very little. Nevertheless, there are such laws and lawyers specializing in such niceties, and this very little might turn out to be a whole lot.

One of these laws is the law of neutrality. Just when is a state a belligerent in a war? What can neutral states do and yet remain neutral? This question has not been decided all at once but, through history, a number of attempts have been made culminating in the Hague convention of 1907. On October 18, 1907 a number of states whose representatives met in the Hague, signed the “Hague Convention (V) respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land.”

Article 2 states: Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.

Article 4 states: Corps of combatants cannot be formed nor recruiting agencies opened on the territory of a neutral Power to assist the belligerents.

Article 5 states: A neutral Power must not allow any of the acts referred to in Articles 2 to 4 to occur on its territory.

It is not called upon to punish acts in violation of its neutrality unless the said acts have been committed on its own territory. The United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and many other states in Europe and elsewhere signed this Convention.

Since then the United States has claimed that the situation has changed, and neutral states can engage in the above activities without losing their neutral status. It has declared the doctrine of “qualified neutrality.”

15.2.2 Qualified Neutrality. The United States has taken the position that certain duties of neutral States may be inapplicable under the doctrine of qualified neutrality. The law of neutrality has traditionally required neutral States to observe a strict impartiality between parties to a conflict, regardless of which State was viewed as the aggressor in the armed conflict.36 However, after treaties outlawed war as a matter of national policy, it was argued that neutral States could discriminate in favor of States that were victims of wars of aggression. 37 Thus, before its entry into World War II, the United States adopted a position of “qualified neutrality” in which neutral States had the right to support belligerent States that had been the victim of flagrant and illegal wars of aggression.38 This position was controversial.

This new doctrine was not established through any international convention, but simply declared by Attorney General Jackson in 1941 to much disagreement among lawyers. Since just who is the aggressor and who the victim is almost always a matter of debate in any war, the doctrine of qualified neutrality is simply a claim that the United States can violate the Hague convention as it chooses.

Now it is undeniable that, if this is war, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and several other states have violated the articles of the Hague Convention. Under it they are belligerents. As Russia has already pointed out to Germany, they have crossed “the Rubicon,” or in other words, have chosen to become belligerents in the war.

The others have done what Germany did. It is unlikely that the doctrine of “qualified neutrality” prevents Russia from attacking them, since it doesn’t recognize this doctrine. Far more likely, in my opinion, is Russia’s reluctance to start World War III in earnest. Until now Russia has been very careful to establish a legal basis for its Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Early on they hoped to end it quickly with a peace treaty that Zelensky seemed ready to sign. The United States prevented him from doing so. Such a treaty would have allowed the operation to end without all out war.

Since Russia is engaged in a Special Military Operation they are not at war with Ukraine and the Hague Convention, which applies to war, is not applicable.

Although the Special Military Operation is now in fact a war between NATO and Russia, the fig leaf of the SMO still allows everybody to treat it as if it isn’t. Legal niceties allow a war to not be a war officially and thus a defeat to not be a defeat. Russia cannot lose this war. It is an existential matter for them. If they must, they will throw everything, including atomic weapons, into it. Putin has ominously asked, “who wants a world without Russia?” NATO, as long as they are not officially at war, could lose without officially losing. To be sure, the effect on NATO would likely be catastrophic, in that it would break up. But the states that comprise it, with their rich cultures, would remain unscathed, and the world, especially Europe, would be better off without NATO. They would have avoided all out, perhaps atomic, war.

The notion that Russia has an eye on invading Europe is, in my opinion, ridiculous. Maintaining control of the Warsaw pact bankrupted the Soviet Union. Russia, like all imperial powers before them, has learned that imperialism is a mug’s game. Arms dealers and others of the elite may profit, but empires are a drain that always destroys the imperial state. The United States has completely exhausted its own natural wealth maintaining its military presence around the world. NATO is a tool for imperial exploitation that the world would be far better off without, and its absence will not result in Russian military invasion of Europe. Russia is far too aware that such a waste of resources together with survival is no longer possible. Why invade when you can trade, China proves. A win for Russia is a win for Europe, though a loss for NATO.

NATO’s participation in Ukraine has made it more and more difficult for Russia to keep up the fig leaf of the Special Military Operation. Biden has declared that the goal is to break up Russia. There is now a suggestion that the United States might provide weapons that can reach far into Russia itself. Ukrainian terrorists attack nuclear facilities within Russia. There are those within Russia who criticize Putin’s restraint, a restraint dictated by the limits of the special operation. The recent Ukrainian counteroffensive was a blatant NATO operation using NATO intelligence, command and control, weapons, and NATO troops thinly disguised as mercenaries. The charade becomes ever more a farce. The war between NATO and Russia is obvious to anyone who wants to look, and remains limited only by the legal fig leaf the Special Military Operation became when it did not end quickly.

If these provocations force Putin to widen the scope of his operations, the legal fig leaf that covers NATO’s participation and justifies legal non-belligerence thus shielding European NATO countries, as well as, should I say it, the United States itself, will fall away, and war will begin in earnest. That is what the United States risks to keep its dying empire on life support by engaging in what can only be called shenanigans.

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Michael Doliner studied with Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago and taught (awhile ago) at Ithaca College and Valparaiso University. He has a degree in Mathematics.

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The Netherlands: Government Sponsored Behavioral Control and Social Engineering Experiments

September 20th, 2022 by Elze van Hamelen

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A government-wide network of behavioral experts – the Behavioral Insights Network Netherlands (BIN NL) – has been supporting all departments in conducting behavioral experiments since 2014. The experiments aim to use behavioral knowledge from the social sciences to steer citizens toward “right” solutions and choices. At their core, they involve large-scale application of manipulation techniques, in policy development, implementation, monitoring and communication. Although much information about this can be found on government websites, most citizens are probably unaware of these social engineering experiments. Nor has there been a public discussion about the desirability of applying this knowledge.

According to BIN NL, “almost all government policy focuses on behavior change.” The network was established in 2014 because the cabinet “would like all ministries to experiment with applying behavioral insights to different policy themes, and a government-wide network to drive this.”

These behavioral insights are based on knowledge from psychology, social science, behavioral science and behavioral economics, and focus on steering people toward desired behavior so that they automatically and unconsciously make the “right” choices. This can be done, for example, through ‘nudge’ in the right direction, without the imposition of coercion or economic incentives. For example, you can encourage healthy eating by presenting the healthy food in the cafeteria first, and the croquettes last. In policy terms, this is called “adjusting the architecture of choice.” There are many methods for directing people’s behavior in this way: by rearranging the environment, by presenting information in a certain way, by playing into feelings of belonging to a group or fear of exclusion, or otherwise by evoking emotions such as fear, shame, pride, guilt, etc. The behavioral sciences specialize in applying these insights.

The interest in applying this knowledge arose in 2004 as a result of experiences of the Dutch army in conducting psychological operations in Afghanistan. The Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), whose task is to advise the government and parliament on social issues, investigates the possibilities for the government to apply behavioral knowledge and issues an opinion in several reports, such as “The human decision maker” (2009), “Making policy with knowledge of behavior” (2014), and “Knowing is not doing” (2017). To this end, she works with government officials, policy makers, politicians, scientists, and the “social field.”

The core idea that emerges in these reports is that citizens have limited rationality and can no longer cope with all the choices and complexity in society. In “Knowing is not yet doing,” the WRR writes: “Today’s society makes high demands on the resilience of citizens, there is quite a difference between what is expected of citizens and what they can actually cope with. The WRR continues: “From the behavioral sciences, it has been shown that people’s ability to weigh information and make rational choices is limited,” namely because of so-called limited “non-cognitive abilities, such as setting a goal and making a plan, taking action, persevering, and being able to deal with temptations and setbacks … these [non-cognitive abilities] are often referred to in everyday life as ‘personality’ or ‘character’.” The non-cognitive abilities or character traits are also referred to as ‘doing abilities’ in policy documents. The government can “help” overcome these “limitations” by guiding behavior. The WRR, in its report “Making policy with knowledge of behavior,” states, “more and more policymakers are exploring how to use choice architecture to compensate for cognitive limitations of citizens.”

The British Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) is cited as an example that is attracting international attention with successes. Author Laura Dodsworth, who wrote the book “State of Fear” about the application of behavioral insights in the UK during the corona crisis, writes of the BIT, “The BIT was established in 2010 by the government of David Cameron. Britain is so good at applying behavioral insights that it has become an export product. The BIT is now a profitable company with a ‘social purpose,’ with offices in London, Manchester, Paris, New York, Singapore, Syndney, Wellington and Toronto. In 2019 alone, they carried out 750 projects in 31 countries worldwide. In total, they trained more than 20,000 public servants in applying behavioral knowledge.” She continues: “Behavioral science and nudges focus on distracting or making certain choices difficult. It is used to avoid discussion and instead manipulate people without them realizing it. It is an attack on people’s ability to decide for themselves what is good for them.”

“Should the Netherlands also have such a team?” the WRR writes, advising the government to respond as a government “to the limited doing abilities of citizens by adapting the choice architecture.” The government followed up on the WRR’s advice, in 2014 by setting up BIN-NL so it can support ministries in conducting behavioral experiments, and in 2018 with integrating behavioral considerations into policy development. In January 2018, then-Minister of Law Sander Dekker and Minister of the Interior Kasja Ollongren wrote in a letter to the House of Representatives that “in principle, the Cabinet sees added value in freedom of choice and that the degree of freedom of choice should be considered on a case-by-case basis.”

The core team of BIN-NL meets monthly and organizes various activities, such as lectures, a training module for government trainees, and the congress Day of Behavior. Every two years, BIN NL issues a report to the Senate and House of Representatives, which reports on the experiments in the areas of health, work, education, finance and more. The idea that behavioral control is necessary to achieve policy goals comes up repeatedly in it, for example for achieving climate goals, the digital transition and the inclusive society.

When developing policy, officials apply the Integral Assessment Framework (IAK), which is a set of questions that must be answered before policy or regulations are submitted to parliament. It provides structure for developing good policy. On June 29, 2018, Minister Dekker wrote to the Senate that in order to “make broader use of behavioral insights,” “the criterion of doability will be included in a number of existing policy instruments,” including the IAK.

How will this work in practice? If there is “reason to correct behavior,” the IAK provides a convenient step-by-step framework for applying behavioral insights. Step one maps out “what current behaviors are perpetuating, exacerbating or improving the undesirable situation. In doing so, also look at what facts and figures are known about the behavior.”

In the next step, the official determines the target group so he knows “which target group you want to change the current behavior.” Step three formulates “the behavior you want to see in your target group”: “Instead of the current behavior, who will exhibit what behavior in the future, where and when?” Step four maps not only the target group, but also the “context, motives and drivers. The next step is to map what process/steps the target group goes through in exhibiting the desired behavior and which parties that person will have to deal with. In what context does the target group find itself? What does someone have to do to exhibit the desired behavior? With which parties does this person come into contact?”.  Based on these steps, an intervention plan (step 5) is developed, with which “people are as it were automatically guided towards a sensible choice”, which is tested in a “pilot or living lab” (step 6). In the last step, effects are evaluated, and there is also a possibility of monitoring for long-term effects. The implication of all these interventions is that a lot of behavior needs to be monitored. Although not referenced, the step-by-step scheme is very similar to the Behavioural Dynamics Methodology (BDM) developed by British SCL group, which is used by defense. The BIN-NL supports civil servants in applying behavioral insights.

Applying behavioral insights

  • Step 1. Map current behavior
  • Step 2. Determine the target group
  • Step 3. Formulate the Desired Behavior
  • Step 4. Context, motives and drivers
  • Step 5. Develop an intervention plan
  • Step 6. Implement the intervention
  • Step 7. Evaluation

In a free society, should governments apply social engineering? 

Most examples of pilots and experiments that BIN-NL reports on every two years seem harmless at first glance: paying off your student debt faster, eating healthier, or setting off fireworks safely. But the underlying assumption is that citizens cannot think for themselves, that the government must then do that for them, and that the government is therefore right in its problem analysis and chosen solution. It ignores the fact that there can be disagreement – discussions for which there is less and less room.

However, other topics are less innocent.  BIN-NL writes: “The Netherlands faces many different transitions. Think of the climate transition and the digitalization transition. They have at least one thing in common: behavioral change is needed to achieve policy goals. This also applies to major policy themes such as health, housing, mobility and an enabling and inclusive society.” Digitalization is strongly related to the prison of air that is being built around us with current technology. Should we allow ourselves to be manipulated in it, or is deliberately choosing analog solutions where possible a way to maintain autonomy and privacy? The government’s ideal image for living seems to be life in a “smart city,” regulated by cameras and sensors, with no room for farmers. The desirability of this is anything but fixed. The “inclusive society” mostly represents a radical “woke” agenda. Should behavioral scientists already be working to get us, through “choice architecture,” to “choose” that dystopia ourselves?

Nor does there seem to be any doubt – is it the government’s job at all to direct the behavior of citizens? In a free society, citizens are allowed to choose how they behave, provided they do not harm others. Is the problem that citizens are “cognitively limited,” or is the problem that we have an out-of-control, opaque, impenetrable byzantine bureaucracy as a government, that tries to micromanage the lives of individuals?  What are the ethical frameworks for large-scale behavioral experiments by government that citizens have not chosen nor been informed about? The BIN-NL website has no information on this. The behavioral experts seem to see mostly the opportunities and benefits.

*

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This article was previously published in the reader-funded Dutch newspaper De Andere Krant.

Sources

Het Behavioural Insights Netwerk Nederland (BIN NL) https://binnl.nl/default.aspx

Met kennis van gedrag beleid maken https://www.wrr.nl/publicaties/rapporten/2014/09/10/met-kennis-van-gedrag-beleid-maken

Kabinetsbeleid Integraal afwegingskader voor beleid en regelgeving (IAK) https://www.kcbr.nl/beleid-en-regelgeving-ontwikkelen/integraal-afwegingskader-voor-beleid-en-regelgeving

Toepassen gedragsinzichten https://www.kcbr.nl/beleid-en-regelgeving-ontwikkelen/integraal-afwegingskader-voor-beleid-en-regelgeving/instrumenten/ondersteunende-instrumenten/toepassen-gedragsinzichten

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Opening Boxes from 2019. Annals of Corruption: Objects from a Vanished World Reveal Rotten Institutions. Naomi Wolf

September 20th, 2022 by Dr. Naomi Wolf

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***

When, in Fall of 2019, I moved out of what had been my home in the West Village, I thought I was simply moving from one place to another. I was excited to build a home again, this time in the South Bronx. 

Brian and I ultimately lived in the South Bronx for only four months — until March 11 2020, when we looked at one another and realized we had to get into his SUV and keep driving North. As I described in my book The Bodies of Others, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that Broadway was closing — just like that, a CCP-style state fiat, not an American-style individuals-dealing-with-an-emergency announcement — we both realized that bad things were coming, though whether natural or political we could not yet tell.

So twenty years of my possessions had stayed for the past two and a half years in a storage unit.

I was opening boxes now that were not just from another place — as is usual when you move; not just from another time; but I was opening boxes that were from literally another world. I don’t know that such a thing has happened in quite this way in history before.

Some items memorialized normal losses and change. Others, though, revealed that long-revered institutions had lost all morality and authority.

Here was a grey sweater that had belonged to my father, who had been a writer. It still had the line of loose threads along the clavicle, the little gaps opening up in the sewn-together pieces, that were characteristic of his distinguished-but-absent-minded-professor look. Dr Leonard Wolf could wear a moth-eaten sweater such as that one, on a street in New York City, and still look like a Byronic poet preoccupied with his latest sonnet. He looked stylish even when he was bedridden — even when advancing Parkinson’s meant he could no longer communicate with words, his treasure. He was charismatic even when gestures failed him; when my husband, an Irish raconteur, sat by his bedside, telling stories to make him laugh. He managed to have elan even when Brian had to ask him to make a sound to let him know if he wanted the stories to continue, and my dad could only groan: yes, more stories.

The stories have ended now for my father; at least the earthly ones. But the sweater still carries that wintry, breezy scent that was his while he was on this earth, telling us stories, more stories.

I folded my father’s sweater for the mending pile.

A small brown dog toy surfaced, chewed so thoroughly in one section that the white lining of the toy remained. The little dog who had enjoyed the toy, of course, the much-mourned Mushroom, is no more. His dog tag is nailed to a tree that leans over the river in the woods, near where we now live.

I put the chewed-up toy on the discards pile.

There was the little white wooden armoire I had hand-painted — amateurishly but with love — for a child’s room. The armoire was not needed any more. Everyone had grown up.

There were boxes and boxes of what had once been exciting, culturally meaningful CDs and DVDs. I sighed — what to do with these now? The technology itself was obsolete.

Then there were the pillows. Floral pillows. Tufted pillows. Even I knew these were tasteless, and I’d known that even at the time I had bought them. When my loved ones were old enough to notice aesthetics, they would chorus, when I brought home a new find: “Mom! Please! No more florals!”

I saw that I had been obsessed then with accumulating not only florals, but warm colors — cranberry and scarlet, terra-cotta and apricot and peach.

With the eyes of the present, and now in a happy marriage, I realized what had been pushing me to acquire all of these redundant soft florals. I had longed for domesticity and warmth, but had been, as a single mother then, dating the wrong kind of man to get domesticity and warmth. So I had unconsciously kept choosing softness and coziness in decor, because I had missed it in my relationship.

The man, a gifted, mercurial charmer, had also, in the past few years, passed away; young; of a wasting cancer.

I sighed again, and put the floral pillows in the “donations” pile.

Other items in the opened boxes, however, did not speak of organic loss and change but rather of worlds of authority that had seemed sparkling and real in 2019, but that have revealed themselves since then to be seething with rot.

Here, for instance, was the brown, pleated, Grecian-style dress, with the bared arms and gathered waist, that I had worn to a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 2000s.

Brown is a color I almost never wear, and I had never worn that Grecian style of formal dress briefly fashionable in the Friends era; so I remembered, as I shook it out into the sunlight of two decades later, that I had felt quite daring that night.

The wedding had been in an event hall nestled in the dunes. Local seafood hors d’oeuvres had been passed on silver trays. The bride had been smoldering and lovely in a white lace Vera Wang (always Vera Wang) dress. All was as it should have been.

The wedding had brought together White House politicos, Washington Post op-ed writers and reporters, brash young New York City political speechwriters and campaign managers, and trendy nonfiction writers who were already making names for themselves chronicling the scene. We were all in our mid- to late 30s — we were fomenting change, approving of ourselves, making a difference; we were kind of like The West Wing, we thought — (one of our friends consulted for it) — idealistic, unintentionally a bit chic, madly hopeful.

We were the scene.

I almost recoiled now with sorrow and anger. I folded up that dress, thinking about those institutions that had undergirded our optimism that warm night, when our confidence and certainty had rung out onto the warm, salty breezes, along with the sounds of the ultra-hip blues band.

The major newspapers? The once-young journalists? The last two and a half years showed them to be shills for what have been revealed to be genocidal imperial powers. They became media versions of sex workers, scheduling time to deliver blow jobs to whomever would write them the biggest checks.

The once-young, West-Wing-style politicos? The last two and a half years showed them willing to become policy wonks for a global march to tyranny that instrumentalized a murderous medical experiment on their fellow humans; on their very constituents.

Where now were those institutions that at that wedding in the early 2000s, filled us with pride and a sense of mission as we took part in building them?

Imploded morally; left without a shred of authority or credibility.

I put the brown dress on the Goodwill pile.

I turned to an old scheduling notebook — it recorded some visits to Oxford. We’d been at a dinner party in North Oxford, hosted by the Warden of Rhodes House, attended by the Vice Chancellor of the University, as I recall, and by many other luminaries. Indeed, the evolutionary biologist Dr Richard Dawkins had been a guest, pestered, as he no doubt often was, by a dinner attendee who had wanted to talk to him about his atheism.

It had been a sparkling evening, elegant and urbane. I’d felt privileged to be at a table where some of the greatest of minds of my time were gathered, and where the very leader of a great university was helping to convene us.

I loved Oxford with a pure love. The university had sustained a vibrant commitment to the principles of reason and to freedom of speech, for over nine hundred years. It had supported the asking of questions when it was dangerous to ask questions; from just after what used to be called the Dark Ages; through the High Middle Ages; through the Reformation; through the Enlightenment. It had tended faithfully, through the darkest of times, the bright, unquenchable flame of the wakeful mind of Europe.

That – the legacy of critical thinking of the West – was Oxford’s legacy.

But —in 2021— it had complied with a requirement that its students endure “online learning”— a demand that had no basis in reason or in the natural world.

This damage done to its trusting young people was a travesty, in my mind, of the great innovation that the University of Oxford had given to the world – the tutorial system, in which being physically present with a couple of other students and with a Don (professor) in his or her study, opens up the dimension of rigorous scholarly discourse in a magical and irreplaceable way.

‘Online learning’? In Oxford? An institution that had survived plagues and epidemics that dwarfed the respiratory disease of 2020-2022, that had survived wars and revolutions, and that had taught students nobly in the face of crises of all kinds?

I did not know if I would ever go back to Oxford; and, if I did, what I would find there or how I would feel. I did not even know if today’s Oxford would welcome me back, being, as I was now in 2022, though I had not been in 2019, a “reputational refugee,” having been cancelled institutionally in most of what had been my traditional intellectual homes.

My heart hurt once more. I put the old notebook in the pile for “storage.”

I unfolded a tablecloth I had bought in India. I’d visited a literary conference in Tamil Nadu in about 2005, and had brought the lovely fabric home as a souvenir.

A flood of memories surged as I looked at the once-familiar pattern.

I’d hosted so many parties in my little West Village apartment, centering on that hand-blocked tablecloth. I’d set a big pot of turkey chili — my go-to option, the only dish I could not ruin — pile cut-up baguettes on platters, and assemble bottles of cheap red wine on that tablecloth. Thus I could, as a broke single mom, affordably entertain — and those parties, as I recall them, were fantastic. Crowded, lively, buzz-y, with a sexy, intellectually engaging vibe. Filmmakers, actors, journalists, artists, novelists, academics, poets; a handful of the less-boring venture capitalists; all crowded together, spilling out into the kitchen, the hallways. At a certain point in the evening the noise would crescendo — (my neighbors were tolerant) — into the happy roar of new ideas clashing or merging; new friendships, new contacts, new lovers connecting and engaging.

In 2019, I had been part of the New York City social scene. My life was full of events, panels, lectures, galas, the watching of rehearsals, theatrical opening nights, film premieres, gallery openings. I thought that my place in the society in which I traveled was unquestioned, and that I was in a world in which this calendar of events, these parties, this community, above all this ethos, would last forever.

Where was that society now? Artists, filmmakers, journalists — all of the people who are supposed to say No to discrimination, No to tyranny — they had scattered, had cowered, had complied. They had groveled.

The same people who had been the avant garde of a great city, had, as I have written elsewhere, gone right along with a society in which a person such as I am, cannot enter a building.

And I had fed those people. I topped up their drinks with my affordable red wines.

I had welcomed them into my home.

I had supported their careers. I had fostered connections on their behalf. I had blurbed their books, had promoted their gallery openings, because — because we were allies, right? We were intellectuals. We were artists. We were even activists.

And yet these people — these same people — had complied — eagerly! With zero resistance! Immediately! With a regime that is appearing day by day to be about as bad in some ways as that of Marshal Philippe Petain’s in Vichy France.

Unthinkable now that I had treated them once as colleagues, as friends.

I had been made into a nonperson, overnight. Now it turns out, as America First Legal found via a recent lawsuit, that the CDC had actively colluded with Twitter officials, in reaction to an accurate tweet of mine calling attention to menstrual problems post-mRNA vaccination, to erase me from the worlds of both legacy media and digital discourse. A smear campaign that was global in its dimensions had been orchestrated with Twitter by the CDC’s Carol Crawford, as the internal emails revealed by America First Legal seemed to show. This past week, another lawsuit, by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, revealed that the White House itself colluded with Big Tech to censor American citizens. My truthful tweet was in that tranche as well.

As if we were characters in a Lewis Carroll book, the world of meritocracy had been inverted.

The highest level of government collusion was directed at me the minute I did just exactly what I have done for 35 years; that is to say, the minute I raised, in the summer of 2021, a grave women’s health concern. Confusingly, my advocating in exactly this way for serious women’s health journalism and for proper medical responses to women’s emerging sexual and reproductive health issues, had made me a media darling for 35 years. Indeed, this practice had made me a media darling among those very people, who had eaten my food and drunk my wine, while sitting around this very tablecloth.

But now, when I did the exact same thing for which they had long applauded me, I was cast immediately into social outer darkness.

Why? Because the times had changed.

And because the scale of the revenue generated for them by supporting flat out lies, had changed.

Did any of those right-on people — many of them famous feminists, male and female – speak up for me? Did any of them publicly say, Wait a minute, whatever the truth may turn out to be (and I was right, right, right) – this is a serious women’s health issue? Let’s explore it?

Not. A. One.

The bold, brave, edgy New York City avant-garde, whom I had hosted for twenty years?

They were scared off by Twitter.

That world surely shunned me, and made me a nonperson, overnight. The power of the Federal government is pretty stunning, especially in collusion with the biggest content companies in the world, when you are on the receiving end of being erased by them.

That world rejected me.

But I rejected it right back.

I live in the woods now. Instead of the glitter and din of galas, the chatter of the literati, Brian and I are surrounded by crowds of tall, solemn trees; the excitement of our days centers on sightings of cranes and hawks; the dramas we face involve living near coyotes and rattlesnakes, and evading while yet marveling at the resident adolescent bear. We are making friends with those who grow food, in anticipation of needing to be self-sufficient. We just picked up from farmer acquaintances, to store in a massive freezer, something that was described with a phrase I had never heard in my previous, DoorDash life: our quarter of a cow.

I was gifted a .22 by Brian. He recently bought me a Ruger as well. The world is falling apart even as a new world is emerging. A peaceful person though I am, I realize that we may someday need to hunt for food or perhaps need, God forbid, to defend our home. I am learning to shoot.

The old world, the pre-2019 world, is a scene of wreckage and carnage to me.

The old world I left behind, and that left me behind, is not a post-COVID world.

It is a post-truth world, a post-institutional world.

The institutions that supported the world that existed when these 2019 boxes were packed, have all collapsed; in a welter of corruption, in an abandonment of public mission and public trust. I look at them now the way Persephone looked backward without regret at Hades.

I am living in a new world already — a world that most people can’t see yet as it is still being envisioned and built up – painfully, daringly, laboriously. Though it exists at this point in history more conceptually and even spiritually than it does materially and politically, this new world is my home.

Who else lives in the new world?

My husband, who was not afraid to fight for America, and who is not afraid to defend me.

A new constellation of friends and allies, that have emerged since these boxes were packed away, and since the worlds that are represented as if sealed inside them, collapsed with rot.

I work and party now with people who love their country and tell the truth. The people with whom I spend time now are this era’s versions of Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Phyllis Wheatley and Ben Franklin. I don’t know how these folks vote. I don’t know that they know how I vote. I don’t care. I know that they are sterling human beings, because they are willing to protect the cherished ideals of this beautiful experiment, our native land.

Life experiences don’t unite these people with whom I hang out now; social status does not unite them — they come from all walks of life, from every “class,” and they pay little or no attention to status or class markers. Politics don’t unite these people. What unites them in my view is the excellence of their characters, and their fierce commitment to liberty; to the ideals of this nation.

Oddly, living now in the purple-to-red rural America that my former “people,” the blue-state elites, are conditioned to view with suspicion and distrust, I also have more personal freedom than I did as a member of the most privileged class. The most privileged class does not have the greatest privilege of all, that of personal liberty: it is a class that is continually anxious and status-insecure, its members often scanning the room for a more important conversation, its collective mind continually exerting subtle control, both socially and professionally, over other members of the “tribe.”

My former elite network paid lip service to “diversity;” but there was a deadening sameness and conformity in our demographics, and that conformity also policed our world views, our voting patterns, even our kids’ schools and our travel destinations.

In contrast, people here in deep purple-red country, the ones whom we know anyway, give each other the assumed permission to differ, to have uncensored opinions, to be free.

Even my social media community is not the world I left behind in 2019; I can’t even get on those platforms any more, as I am extra super duper ultra cancelled.

But I don’t know if I’d even want to be in those conversations now; the discourse of the elite left these days, “my people,” seems fearful and in-lockstep, scolding and rigid, when I hear exchanges of it.

Now, in 2022, my online community is made up of a world of people whom I never knew existed — or rather a world of people I was conditioned ignorantly to stereotype, and to fear; I am in contact now with people who care about America, who believe in God or in a greater meaning in this world, people who put family first, and who turn out — who knew? — to be vastly open-minded, civilized and decent.

I spend time with people who love their communities, speak out for their actual brothers and sisters, meaning humanity; risk themselves to save the lives of strangers; and care about actual fact-based journalism, actual science-based medicine, actual science-based science.

These days I chat online with people who tell me, unfashionably but beautifully, they are praying for me.

In spite of fighting an apocalypse every day, how can I help but be so much happier now?

I no longer want to sit at a table with people who call themselves journalists, but who deny or trivialize injuries to women at a scale that beggars belief; who give Pfizer and the FDA a pass, and ask them no real questions.

These people, “my people,” who were once so erudite, so witty, so confident, so ethical, so privileged – the people of the elite world contained in the 2019-and-before boxes — pretty and well-spoken as they once were, turn out, with the twist of just a couple of years, and just a bucketload or two of bribe money, to be revealed as monsters and barbarians.

I left the rest of the boxes to open another day. There is no rush.

The institutions the boxes memorialize are dead; and maybe they never really existed, as we believed them to be, in the first place.

I put the red, purple and blue tablecloth on the “wash and store to use again” pile. Then I took it home with me.

People who still have their honor intact, will sit around our table.

*

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store

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United Nations, Democracy and Terrorism

September 20th, 2022 by Stephen Sefton

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***

This week sees the opening of the 77th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization in the most conflict ridden international environment since World War II. In effect, NATO is attacking the Russian Federation in Ukraine and the United States is provoking China over Taiwan. Many people are concerned about the potential for nuclear disaster. The root cause of these very high levels of insecurity and conflict is the refusal by the United States and its allies to accommodate themselves to the new reality of a multipolar world.

In fact, the elites who govern these countries reject the fundamental principles of the UN and have never respected them. On the contrary, they have undermined and abused international law on the pretext of promoting democracy and freedom. They have committed repeated assaults against legitimately elected governments through the use of illegal coercive measures and outright terrorism . Their primary interest in the UN is the extent to which it allows them to lend a thin layer of legitimacy to their crimes.

This week’s talks at the UN General Assembly will no doubt be focused on this situation, with the United States and its allies increasingly isolated against the views of the majority world. For example, in his speech at the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China commented

“We must stand firm in defending the international system centered on the United Nations and the international order based on international law, practice the common values of humanity, and reject zero-sum games and the policies of blocs.”

At the same summit, President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation stated,

“The growing role of new centers of power is coming into sharp focus, and interaction among these new centers is not based on some rules, which are being forced on them by external forces and which nobody has seen, but on the universally recognised principles of the rule of international law and the UN Charter, namely, equal and indivisible security and respect for each other’s sovereignty, national values and interests.”

The Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation has been more explicit, when its spokesperson declared On September 17th that

“Russia is determined to emphasize the fight against attempts to undermine the reputation of the UN and submit it to the will of the collective West… We are fighting for a multipolar world, for the right of sovereign states to live and develop, without being subjected to permanent pressure and threats from the US and its Western allies.”

These statements are very forceful on the part of the two perhaps most important powers in the world, whom, for the moment, the United States has not dared to confront militarily directly. However, the process of co-opting the United Nations by the United States and its Western allies is very advanced and possibly irreversible. This is so to such an extent that, at least at this moment, it is very difficult to see how Russia and China can reverse the current situation without being able to promote, together with the majority world, a genuinely democratic re-founding of the UN.

The UN’s mandate is to maintain international peace and security, protect human rights, facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid, promote economic development and guarantee international law. But the United States and its allies have dominated the UN since its founding in 1945. From the very beginning, the United States has sought to undermine international law and the principles of the UN and to use the organization to launder US crimes and those of its allies around the world. In 1947, two years after the founding of the UN, the United States established the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, precisely in order to actively intervene, on a global basis, in the internal affairs of the countries of the world contrary to the objectives of the Charter of the United Nations.

For example, a few years after its founding, the UN was used to legitimize the destruction of Korea between 1950 and 1953. General Curtis Le May, head of the Yankee military aviation, boasted of having completely destroyed all the cities and towns of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with the loss of millions of civilian lives. In another example, from 1946 to 1954, the CIA and its European allied agencies financed and armed the OUN, a genocidal Ukrainian paramilitary force composed of former collaborators with Nazi Germany, to unleash a terrorist war in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, which cost the lives of more than 400,000 people.

From those origins to date, the United States and its allies have routinely employed military and economic terrorism to destabilize legitimate governments that oppose their will. State terror and terrorism have been and continue to be central features of the foreign policy of the United States, from Vietnam to Chile, from Indonesia to Iraq, examples abound. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuba has been the victim for more than sixty years of military aggression, a genocidal economic blockade and persistent terrorist attacks by the United States.

In 1986, the highest judicial instance of the United Nations system, the International Court of Justice, condemned the United States for its terrorism against Nicaragua. However, the United Nations system was incapable of enforcing the sentence. On the contrary, ever since the end of the Cold War, the different offices of the United Nations have been increasingly co-opted to whitewash the terrorist policies of the United States. This process has intensified with the emergence of China and Russia in recent years and what the United States sees as the growing threat of a more equitable and genuinely democratic world.

There are many abuses of the UN system by the Western powers, who do not want to accept that their world domination is over. The missions of the so-called blue helmets, the United Nations peacekeeping forces, have been a very clear example of this. In Haiti they have served as an occupation army to repress the population and impose completely anti-democratic electoral results, to the taste of the United States and its allies.

The same thing happened in Ivory Coast in 2010 when a UN representative, backed by a blue helmets mission composed of French military forces, discarded a ruling by that country’s Supreme Court on an electoral dispute and imposed France’s preferred presidential candidate. The role of the UN military mission in the Congo has also been highly questioned for failing to protect local populations from repeated massacres by aggressor forces from Rwanda and Uganda. Likewise, the UN has been unable to stop the suffering of the Palestinian people and their slow-motion genocide by Israel with the support of the United States and the European Union.

Bad faith and mendacity in favor of the United States characterize not only those overseas missions, but several other important UN organizations. Among many other countries, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been victims of the bad faith reporting by UN offices such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or the  UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Likewise, it has been demonstrated convincingly that the leadership of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons altered the reports of its technical specialists on incidents in Syria in order to falsely blame the government of President Assad for the use of chemical weapons. Another more recent example is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on the Zaparozhye nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which completely omitted that all attacks on the nuclear power plant originated from the Ukrainian armed forces, seeking in that way to cast blame for the situation on the Russian Federation.

In effect, these UN organizations are simply extensions of the US State Department, in much the same way as the Organization of American States. Thus, the United States and its allies manipulate, corrupt and deform the UN and its structures in order to achieve their foreign policy objectives and hide the truth of their extensive, multiple crimes around the world. They have done so since the founding of the United Nations Organization. It remains to be seen if it may indeed be possible to rescue the UN and ensure that it fulfills its original objectives, instead of being just one more instrument facilitating dispossession and global terrorism by the Western countries against the majority 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 a UN Photo/Marco Dormino

Selected Articles: COVID as a “Political Gift”? Stillborn from COVID-injected Mothers, Heart Attacks in Children…

September 20th, 2022 by Global Research News

COVID as a “Political Gift”? Stillborn from COVID-injected Mothers, Heart Attacks in Children…

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, September 17, 2022

In the thousands of essays dealing with injection deaths and injuries, there is very little attention devoted to worldwide patterns of harm. For instance in the statistics accompanying the iconic COVID map of the John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, we are shown the number of worldwide deaths attributed to the COVID virus and the 12.5 billion COVID jabs administered so far to about 5.5 billion of the world’s 8 billion inhabitants.

“I Do Not Think I Know”: Scott Morrison’s Submarine Deception

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, September 20, 2022

When it was revealed that former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not only shown contempt for his own government in secretly appointing himself, via the Governor-General’s approval, to five portfolios, the depths of deception seemed to be boundless.   His tenure had already been marked by a spectacular, habitual tendency to conceal matters.  What else would come out?

The Money Economy Is Not the Real Economy: “The Global Banking and Financial System Is Fatally Flawed”

By Thomas H. Greco, Jr., September 19, 2022

The global system of money, banking, and finance is fatally flawed. The symptoms of that, which have long been present in the form of recurrent cycles of price inflation and economic depression, and increasing indebtedness, have now become painfully obvious and acute.

“Nagorno-Karabakh is not the property of the elected elite to be surrendered.” Interview with Abraham Gasparyan

By Dr. Abraham Gasparyan and Steven Sahiounie, September 19, 2022

On September 12, 2022, clashes erupted between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops along the Armenia–Azerbaijan border resulting in almost 300 deaths and dozens injured, with both sides blaming the other.

Queen Elizabeth Declined to Visit Israel Due to Its Violation of Human Rights

By Hans Stehling, September 19, 2022

For all the long years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth II of England refused to visit Israel because of its unacceptable abuse of human rights – during all of which period she visited every other country of the free world, many, many times as an icon of freedom, trust and human dignity.

Colombia’s Quiet Revolution

By Asad Ismi, September 19, 2022

In April 2021, the right-wing government of President Iván Duque announced its intention to increase taxes on food items. This would have affected the poorest Colombians the most—people who were already suffering enormously from the drastic effects of COVID-19 on the economy.

Mindspace – A Guide to Behavioral Manipulation

By Elze van Hamelen, September 19, 2022

The publication of the British report ‘Mindspace. Influencing behavior through public policy’ from 2010 seems to have been the worldwide kickstart of systematic application of knowledge from behavioral science to public policy and implementation. The report summarizes a century of behavioral science research, and provides recommendations on how governments can apply it.

What Roles Do Psychologists and Sociologists Play in the COVID-19 Narrative?

By Prof. Bill Willers, September 19, 2022

Governments have always sought to control their populations, but what makes this an issue of such concern right now is that the power to control mass perception is increasing at ‘warp speed’ right along with advances in technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Biden Signs Executive Order Designed to Unleash “Transhumanist Hell” on America and the World

By Leo Hohmann, September 19, 2022

If anyone needed proof that the powers pushing the levers behind the mindless moron who sits in the Oval Office are fully on board with the World Economic Forum/United Nations agenda of biomedical tyranny and transhumanism, look no further than the executive order that Joe Biden signed on Monday, September 12.

US Launched 251 Military Interventions Since 1991, and 469 Since 1798

By Ben Norton, September 19, 2022

The list of countries targeted by the US military includes the vast majority of the nations on Earth, including almost every single country in Latin America and the Caribbean and most of the African continent.

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“I Do Not Think I Know”: Scott Morrison’s Submarine Deception

September 20th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Dutch Farmers Resisting the Toxic Transition

September 20th, 2022 by Colin Todhunter

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In recent years, governments have been demonstrating their subservience to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, BlackRock and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial-industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term is used to disguise the crisis and current restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.  

In late 2019 and early 2020 (due to collapsing financial markets immediately prior to COVID) and during COVID (via COVID-relief packages), trillions of dollars were handed over to elite interests while lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners were the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers were small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled for.

In August 2020, a report by the International Labour Organization stated that COVID policies had severely disrupted economies across the world with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020.

The restrictions and closure of the global economy impacted the most vulnerable – the 1.6 billion informal (low-income) economy workers, representing half the global workforce.

In India, lockdown pushed around 230 million into poverty. A May 2021 report by Azim Premji University highlights how – to survive lockdown – the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%.

Meanwhile, the rich were well taken care of.

According to Left Voice:

“The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.”

But this approach was not limited to India. Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world grew from by 25% to $10+ trillion.

Due to financial COVID ‘relief packages’, governments are now under the thumb of global creditors and the post-COVID era is seeing massive austerity measures due to strings-attached loans, especially in Africa and the Global South. This was the inevitable consequence of closing down the world economy. Something that was known beforehand and devised to benefit hegemonic interests and their geopolitical goals.

What we are witnessing is an economic reset – which policies carried out under the guise of preventing  COVID helped set in motion. This reset includes energy and food ‘transitions’ and is tied to a ‘green’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda and emerging green bond financial markets that will be highly profitable for banks and investors. Moreover, current sanctions placed on Russia are helping to disrupt food and energy markets thereby accelerating the planned changes.

As part of the ‘food transition’, we hear much talk of ‘precision’ agriculture driven by AI and cloud technology. Farmerless farms and driverless machines are to become the norm. This transition involves commodity crops – patented, genetically engineered seeds doused with chemicals – cultivated for ‘biomatter’, manipulated by biotech companies and constituted in giant vats into something resembling food.

This is part of the brave new world being promoted by the self-labelled ‘visionaries’ associated with the World Economic Forum – an Orwellian future where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course.

To sell this to people, ‘smart’ is key to the sales pitch – smart cities, smart interconnectivity, smart agriculture and so on. A ‘smart’ digital world encompassing almost everything, not least ‘precision’ surveillance of the population – its behaviour, its dissent or conformity, its digital money and its purchasing.

Integral to this is the financialisation of nature and an ESG agenda linked to the ‘green profiling’ of nations, companies and individuals and their carbon footprint. A green imperialism (no doubt forced through on the back of debt-related conditionalities) to ensure countries (and people) comply with sustainability/net-zero goals that are used to facilitate highly profitable technologies and fresh business models.

For instance, how could countries demonstrate their ESG ‘green’ credentials while maintaining their international credit ratings? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the strategically influential GM industry and its lobbyists misleadingly portray as ‘climate friendly’.

Or maybe by displacing indigenous peoples and using their lands and forests under the guise of ‘carbon sinks’ for global corporations to ‘offset’ their pollution and claim ‘net-zero’ status.

With this in mind, let us turn to the current farmer protest in the Netherlands, where there is a plan to remove farmers from the land, using concerns over the environment as justification.

On one hand, there is the official government narrative that this ‘transition’ is needed to reduce animal-based agriculture and the meat industry’s dangerous emissions. This is where the ‘food transition’ comes in: ‘precision’ agriculture, fewer farmers and fake-meat made in a lab – sold as climate-friendly which is anything but, given that it will rely on intensive commodity cropping and long-line supply chains for biomatter.

On the other hand, however, the Dutch government’s official narrative of reducing nitrogen and ammonia emissions by transforming farming can easily be used as cover for a standard ‘land grab’ to line the pockets of property developers and investors as part of the vision for a mega ‘tristate’ city – mentioned in the 2017 article Dutch investors launch new marketing programme for NL: Tristate City.

Dutch campaigner Willem Engel is reported on the Rio Times website as saying that, under the guise of climate protection, the way to get there seems to be through forced expropriation. He claims that the Dutch government is not seeking to eliminate about a third of its farms for environmental reasons. Instead, it is about the construction of Tristate City, a megalopolis with a population of around 45 million extending to areas of Germany and Belgium.

Engel says that the so-called ‘nitrogen crisis’ is fictional, a purely political issue to reshape the country’s landscape. He argues that the largest nitrogen emissions are not caused by agriculture but by industry.

This is not to imply that the Netherlands is to become a country totally buried under concrete. But much farmland is strategically important to industry and housing. The tristate concept is based on a giant unified ‘green’ urban region ‘smart’ enough to compete with the massive metropolises we see in Asia, not least in China.

Of course, the food transition and the tristate concept are not mutually exclusive and can both be regarded as integral to the overall ‘sustainability’ agenda. Either way, the type of corporate environmentalism, economic reset and corporate-led ‘food transition’ currently being promoted globally has little to do with protecting the environment. It is a financially lucrative agenda that has co-opted the terms and concerns of genuine environmentalists.

That much has been made clear by investigative journalist Corey Morningstar who has described the nature of and links between the  corporate-billionaire interests driving this process in her revealing multi-part article ‘The Manufacture of Greta Thunberg’.

In finishing, let’s turn to the official tristate city website where it states:

“Dit model heeft geen enkele relatie met het stikstofbeleid van de Nederlandse overheid!”  

Translation:

“This model has no relation to the nitrogen policy of the Dutch government!”

 And lab-made pigs might one day fly.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

Featured image is from WION

Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

Back Door Proliferation: The IAEA, AUKUS and Nuclear Submarine Technology

September 19th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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In Vienna, China’s permanent mission to the United Nations has been rather exercised of late. Members of the mission have been particularly irate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Rafael Grossi, who addressed the IAEA’s Board of Governors on September 12.

Grossi was building on a confidential report by the IAEA which had been circulated the previous week concerning the role of nuclear propulsion technology for submarines to be supplied to Australia under the AUKUS security pact.

When the AUKUS announcement was made in September last year, its significance shook security establishments in the Indo-Pacific.  It was also no less remarkable, and troubling, for signalling the transfer of otherwise rationed nuclear technology to a third country.  As was rightly observed at the time by Ian Stewart, executive director of the James Martin Center in Washington, such “cooperation may be used by non-nuclear states as more ammunition in support of a narrative that the weapons states lack good faith in their commitments to disarmament.”

Having made that sound point, Stewart, revealing his strategic bias, suggested that, as such cooperation would not involve nuclear weapons by Australia, and would be accompanied by safeguards, few had reason to worry.  This was all merely “a relatively straightforward strategic step.”

James M. Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was far less sanguine.  “[T]he nonproliferation implications of the AUKUS submarine deal are both negative and serious.”  Australia’s operation of nuclear-powered submarines would make it the first non-nuclear weapon state to manipulate a loophole in the inspection system of the IAEA.

In setting this “damaging precedent”, aspirational “proliferators could use naval reactor programs as cover for the development of nuclear weapons – with the reasonable expectation that, because of the Australia precedent, they would not face intolerable costs for doing so.”  It did not matter, in this sense, what the AUKUS members intended; a terrible example that would undermine IAEA safeguards was being set.

A few countries in the region have been quietly riled by the march of this technology sharing triumvirate in the Indo-Pacific.  In a leaked draft of its submission to the United Nations tenth review conference of the Parties to the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT RevCon), Indonesia opined that the transfer of nuclear technology for military purposes was at odds with the spirit and objective of the NPT.

In the sharp words of the draft, “Indonesia views any cooperation involving the transfer of nuclear materials and technology for military purposes from nuclear-weapon states to any non-nuclear weapon states as increasing the associated risks [of] catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences.”

At the nuclear non-proliferation review conference, Indonesian diplomats pushed the line that nuclear material in submarines should be monitored with greater stringency.  The foreign ministry argued that it had achieved some success in proposing for more transparency and tighter scrutiny on the distribution of such technology, claiming to have received support from AUKUS members and China.  “After two weeks of discussion in New York, in the end all parties agreed to look at the proposal as the middle path,” announced Tri Tharyat, director-general for multilateral cooperation in Indonesia’s foreign ministry.

While serving to upend the apple cart of security in the region, AUKUS, in Jakarta’s view, also served to foster a potential, destabilising arms race, placing countries in a position to keep pace with an ever increasingly expensive pursuit of armaments.  (Things were not pretty to start with even before AUKUS was announced, with China and the United States already eyeingeach other’s military build-up in Asia.)

The concern over an increasingly voracious pursuit of arms is a view that Beijing has encouraged, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian having remarked that, “the US, the UK and Australia’s cooperation in nuclear submarines severely damages regional peace and stability [and] intensifies the arms race.”

Wang Qun, China’s Permanent Representative, told Grossi on September 13 that he should avoid drawing “chestnuts from the fire” in endorsing the nuclear proliferation exercise of Australia, the United States and the UK.  Rossi, for his part, told the IAEA Board of Governors that four “technical meetings” had been held with the AUKUS parties, which had pleased the organisation.  “I welcome the AUKUS parties’ engagement with the Agency to date and expect this to continue in order that they deliver their shared commitment to ensuring the highest non-proliferation and safeguard standards are met.”

The IAEA report also gave a nod to Canberra’s claim that proliferation risks posed by the AUKUS deal were minimal given that it would only receive “complete, welded” nuclear power units, making the removal of nuclear material “extremely difficult.”  In any case, such material used in the units, were it to be used for nuclear weapons, needed to be chemically processed using facilities Australia did not have nor would seek.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning was less than impressed.  “This report lopsidedly cited the account given by the US, the UK and Australia to explain away what they have done, but made no mention of the international community’s major concerns over the risk of nuclear proliferation that may arise from the AUKUS nuclear submarine cooperation.” It turned “a blind eye to many countries’ solemn position that the AUKUS cooperation violates the purpose and object of the NPT.”

Beijing’s concerns are hard to dismiss as those of a paranoid, addled mind.  Despite China’s own unhelpful military build-up, attempts by the AUKUS partners to dismiss the transfer of nuclear technology to Australia as technically benign and compliant with the NPT is dangerous nonsense.  Despite strides towards some middle way advocated by Jakarta, the precedent for nuclear proliferation via the backdoor is being set.

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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: Sydney anti-AUKUS protest. Photo: Peter Boyle

The Money Economy Is Not the Real Economy: “The Global Banking and Financial System is Fatally Flawed”

September 19th, 2022 by Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

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Money is the “nothing” that serves only to account for that which is available in the real economy; money is the “hole” that is defined by the “doughnut” of real goods and services. When pseudo-money can be created by fiat, apart from anything of real value, fraud, confusion, and madness ensue. — T. H. Greco, Jr.

The flawed money system

The global system of money, banking, and finance is fatally flawed. The symptoms of that, which have long been present in the form of recurrent cycles of price inflation and economic depression, and increasing indebtedness, have now become painfully obvious and acute.

By the application of various financial and political fixes the system has been propped up in stages to try to manage its ill effects and prevent the worst from happening.

Central bankers and politicians while falsely blamed the problems on labor shortages and workers’ demands for higher wages, have tried to manage the adverse effects by means of interest rate manipulations, restriction or easing of credit, bank bailouts, and government spending on various programs, all of which tend to favor the corporations and wealthy class.

The debt bubble of the early 2000s which culminated in the “bust” of 2007-08 came close to bringing down the entire global financial house of cards. The system has survived only by the application of unprecedented and extreme measures, and it continues to this day on life support.

“Quantitative easing,” bank bailouts, and central bank purchases of securities from the debt and equity markets have been desperate, last gasp measures to try to save this dysfunctional, destructive, and dying system. The inflation that resulted was initially confined to financial assets, particularly corporate stocks, as central banks intervened in the markets on the buying side which drive prices up. Then, with the massive bailouts and government handouts that were doled out during 2020 and 2021, and the accompanying lockdowns and forced closures of small businesses, price inflation shifted over to real estate prices, residential rents, commodities, and consumer goods and services. Central banks are now raising interest rates to try to compensate for that unprecedented inflation of the currency but they know that under this flawed money system they can only choose between inflation and depression. It is only a matter of deciding who will be forced to bear the greatest pain.

The great usury hoax

The world has been suffering for hundreds of years under a grand delusion and has been subjected to what I call “the great usury hoax.” Usury is a word that is not much heard anymore because it calls attention to our greatest problem. When it ismentioned, it is said to mean the charging of “excessive” amounts of interest. But it takes only bit of research to discover the real meaning. When I embarked upon my own study decades ago I discovered a book by Sidney Homer and quoted it in my first book, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis. As Homer described it, the Latin words from which these English words are derived are “usura” and “interisse.” This is how he explained it:

“The Latin noun “usura” means the “use” of anything, in this case, the use of borrowed capital; hence usury was the price paid for the use of money. The Latin verb “intereo” means “to be lost”; a substantive form “interisse” developed into the modern term “interest.” Interest was not profit but loss. It was from exceptions to the canon law against usury that the medieval theory of interest slowly developed. Compensation for loans was not licit if it was a gain to the lender, but became licit if the compensation was not a net gain but reimbursement for loss or expense. The doctrine of intention was overriding.” –A History of Interest Rates, Rutgers University Press, 1963.

Of course, ordinary people who seek to save money in this flawed system do suffer loss from the continual inflation that is caused by the usury that is built into the very foundation of the system when banks charge usury by lending into circulation money that they create money out of nothing. Thus, it appears that all interest may be justified, but banks are not people, and inflation is not a natural phenomenon but a result of the very “interest” that banks impose when they create money by lending it out.

Centralized money power

How did this system come about and why has it become so entrenched?

As I described in my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, and going back at least as far as the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, both private bankers and the political authorities have found great advantage in it.

The bankers get a virtual legalized monopoly on the creation of exchange media (money), which they use to enrich themselves by charging usury when they lend money out; while central governments get to spend amounts of money that far exceed the revenues they receive from taxes and fees. This is clearly evident in the long trend of the massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of politicians, bankers and allied corporations, and the enormous growth of government debt of every country around the world.

As I’ve explained in my various books and presentations, the creation of fiat money by banks lending it at usury causes debts to grow exponentially with the passage of time. When private businesses and individuals are no longer able to take on additional debt, central governments that are not limited by their income from taxes and fees must take on the role of “borrower of last resort.” That is why we see the explosion of government debt like that of the United States shown in the accompanying chart.

The last vestiges of budgetary restraint on federal government spending have been eliminated, along with any concern about what ordinary people really need and want. The results have been the ever-increasing centralization of power at the federal level, central planning of the economy, worsening price inflation, declining purchasing power of fiat money, increasing corporate ownership of real assets (especially residential real estate), zero or negative returns on people’s savings, and increasing disparities of income and wealth. The only way this system can be perpetuated is by the complete elimination of any semblance of democratic government. As E. C. Riegel observed almost 80 years ago:

“Society is in the twilight of a passing day. The state now undertakes to finance the economy, and, since a free economy is manifestly impossible where the state assumes the responsibility of supplying the money circulation, the politician is compelled to choose between fascism and communism.” – Private Enterprise Money, 1944

The great disconnect

This concentration of power and wealth enables banks to allocate money to those sectors of the economy that further favor the interests of politicians, bankers, and corporatists, and emergence of a “super class” that will own and control virtually everything. In the process, sound principles of money creation that would be necessary in competitive markets, have been largely shunted aside and the connections between the money economy and the real economy, which have long been tenuous, have now been almost completely severed. When those who control banks and governments can create quasi-money out of nothing without any real value basis and allocate it selectively to advance their own narrow political and economic agendas, you know that the end is near. The system is doomed and it is just a question of how will it end, how long it will take, and who will suffer the most from its demise? The super class knows this and they are already taking steps to preserve their wealth and power and to leave the rest of us holding an empty bag of financial promises, while they make plans to replace it with a new system that will remain under their control and perpetuate their privilege.

Whether the emerging government is communist or fascist, it will be despotic and totalitarian, and it will be global. The globalization of banking, finance, economics, and politics, and the development of information and communications technologies have emboldened the global elite to make their big move to achieve total control. The “Great Reset” and “New World Order” are being promoted as the answer to the multi-dimensional mega-crisis that now threatens our civilization, but the vast majority of people will have no say about the specifics of these programs.

The great reconnect

Still, I am optimistic and confident that the old system will ultimately give way to new, more sustainable and equitable systems under popular control, a process that must begin with the emergence of parallel systems of exchange and finance that enable us to circumvent, and eventually replace, the centrally-controlled, usury-based money system. Although barely noticeable, that process has been underway for a long time at the micro level of communities and small businesses where community currency experiments have been popping up around the world, along with a surge in commercial trade exchanges that enable businesses to buy and sell from one another without fiat money by offsetting their purchases against their sales.

Unlike political fiat money which is forced on people through “legal tender” laws, the acceptance of private currency in the market is voluntary. “Private money/currency” must therefore be “honest money/currency.”  It must therefore be a credible promise of being redeemable for some real goods and services. In other words, it must be connected to the “real economy.” Salmon P. Chase, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under President Abraham Lincoln, had this to say about forced circulation of currency: “The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.”

Now, the changing geopolitical circumstances are also stimulating major changes at the macro level of national governments and global trade. The connection between the real economy and the money economy must be inherent in any honest and sustainable system of money and finance. The creation of sound exchange media (money) requires that money be spent into circulation by trusted producers of real valuable goods and services that are available in the market and ready to be delivered in the near-term. Money, then, is a mere place-holder for real economic value; as a credible promise it will be widely accepted as a form of payment.

The Banker’s and Politician’s Last Gasp, and the Great Monetary Reset

While the past several decades have seen the emergence of many successful approaches to decentralized control of credit through private currencies and independent commercial credit clearing circles, economic and financial corporatization and globalization have overwhelmed their impact and placed ever tighter control into the hands of the elite class who have used their money power as a weapon of class warfare. The Breton Woods monetary agreement that was established toward the end of World War II made the US dollar the world’s reserve currency and allowed the US and its various allies to dominate and control the machinery of money and finance. But with the breakdown of that agreement and the increasing application of financial and economic sanctions against rivals who challenge the western unipolar world order, we now see that some countries, notably China and Russia, are taking independent action to protect their own currencies, economies, and security interests.

These countries are moving to back their currencies with real commodities as Alasdair Macleod describes in his recent article The Commodity Currency Revolution, and in this YouTube interview Commodity-Backed Currencies to Challenge Dollar Yen & Euro?. This phenomenal shift is further elucidated in other sources, including David Stockman’s Monetary Madness Among the Central Bankers, and Alastair Crooke’s post about the decline of the western financial system and the US dollar as the world reserve currency. The latter makes the point that “… the financial war on Russia gave the West an unmistakable lesson from Moscow that the hardest currencies are not USD or EUR, but rather oil, gas, wheat, and gold. Yes, energy, food and strategic resources are currencies [in the real economy].”

Another sobering thesis is being articulated by Dr. Tim Morgan at his website Surplus Energy Economics, in which he argues that, “the economy is an energy system, not a financial one,” and that, “The concept of limits is replacing the paradigm of ‘infinite growth.’” He rightly points out that, “What lies ahead is a process of adjustment – we might call it realignment – to the new reality of an economy in which the scope for expansion is constrained by limits, both to energy value and to environmental tolerance.”  Morgan’s economic model, which he calls Surplus Energy Economics Data System [SEEDS], is based on the idea that continual economic growth has been possible only through the availability of the surplus energy that comes from fossil fuels. But that surplus, which is the amount of energy obtained minus the amount of energy needed to extract it, is continuing to decline, and that fact suggests that the enormous waste of resources spent on cheap non-durable, non-repairable, and non-recyclable products and weapons of war must be phased out.

This shift toward commodity backed national currencies, while not a total solution to the money problem, is a positive step toward reconnecting the means of payment to real economic value.

This will eventually lead also to the emergence of a new standard of value against which the value of currencies, as well as goods and services, can be measured, not only against one another on foreign exchange markets, but more objectively against the value of real goods and services. That standard will not be gold, as it was in the past, but a wide assortment, or “market basket,” of useful commodities like the commodity standard I’ve been proposing for more than 40 years. History shows that, as exchange systems evolve, credit instruments become the primary payment media because the quantity of credit money is able to expand and contract in step with economic activity and the actual supplies of goods and services. Then, the selected standard commodities serve only as the measure of value and unit of account to quantify credit obligations.

Just as happened in the past with gold, I expect the commodities in a standard “basket” will serve as a new measure of value, but payments will be made using credit instruments and the credit clearing process, with perhaps, occasional settlement of residual account balances by the transfer of actual commodities. As I’ve repeatedly explained in my books and articles, it is crucial that these credit currencies be spent into circulation on the basis of an adequate real value foundation and without interest charges.

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Thomas H. Greco, Jr. is an educator, author, and consultant dedicated to economic equity, social justice, and community empowerment. He specializes in the design and implementation of private and community currencies and mutual credit clearing networks. His latest book is The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. His main website is https://beyondmoney.net/. He can be reached at [email protected].

Video: Medical Journals and Agencies Are Controlled by Big Pharma. Dissenting Opinions Will be Attacked. Corona Investigative Committee with Dr. Pierre Kory

September 19th, 2022 by Dr. Pierre Kory

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Guest is Pierre Kory, pulmonologist, internist & critical care physician. He co-founded an organization called Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a nonprofit organization that dedicated itself to develop the most effective treatment protocols for COVID-19. 

The protocols spread to good portions of the world, were being adopted in some countries, and followed by a minority of doctors. But most people attacked the recommendation.

Watch his interview below.

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 

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“Nagorno-Karabakh is not the property of the elected elite to be surrendered.” Interview with Abraham Gasparyan

September 19th, 2022 by Dr. Abraham Gasparyan

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On September 12, 2022, clashes erupted between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops along the Armenia–Azerbaijan border resulting in almost 300 deaths and dozens injured, with both sides blaming the other.

US Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Armenia yesterday, leading a congressional delegation in a show of support following the deadly clashes in a decades-old dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, where a truce has been in effect since Wednesday.

Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Abraham Gasparyan, PhD in Political Sciences, Associated Professor at Yerevan State University, TV Commentator, and Founder and Director of “Genesis Armenia”, a think tank.

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Steven Sahiounie (SS):  After a period of calm between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which President Putin of Russia was involved in, we now see a flare of tension. In your opinion, what was the cause of this newest tension?

Abraham Gasparyan (AG):  In the Middle East, Eurasia (Ukraine) and Central Asia, Russia is busy maintaining its own influence in strategic, security, military, political and economic spheres. The South Caucasus has become the weakest and most vulnerable link for Moscow, which is trying to maintain its strategic interests from the Mediterranean and Black Seas to Central Asia. The connecting link of these two regions is the South Caucasus, the most important road of which passes through the Syunik region of the Republic of Armenia. That region borders Iran, which has a pronounced anti-Western stance.

Azerbaijan and Turkey (backing from NATO) want to neutralize Iran and remove Russia’s influence from the South Caucasus. Armenia is the only country here with a Russian military base. The Russians already have a military presence in Azerbaijan, in Aghdam. There is one important circumstance here, regardless of the positions and interests of international actors and decision making centers. Before and after the 2020 September war, Azerbaijan continued to build its political and political narratives on clear messages of Armenophobia and illegal claims to Armenia’s sovereign territories. Unbroken and continuous calls for aggression, making the establishment of relations with Armenia conditional on revanchist war…This was the destructive and hostile approach of official Baku.

During the last Artsakh war, Azerbaijan was unable to solve the military and political problem it faced, that is, to occupy all of Artsakh and depopulate that Armenian territory. Even major states like Turkey and Pakistan helped Azerbaijan, provided huge military, logistical and financial support, bombarded the civilian population of Artsakh with cluster and phosphorus bombs, terrorist groups from Syria and Libya fought in Artsakh, but Artsakh and Armenia were able to resist. Baku is not satisfied with that. The political ideology of that state is built on the Nazi approach of exterminating Armenians and occupying Armenia. They continue that approach after the 44-day war and want to establish a land connection with the Armenian Nakhichevan, which was already seized to Soviet Azerbaijan in 1921, through the Syunik corridor. The ultimate goal is to occupy the Syunik Corridor and create a land link for the Turkish world by annexing the sovereign territory of Armenia.

SS:  The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has affected Europe.  In your opinion, how will this Armenian and Azerbaijan conflict further affect the region?

AG:  The region will face a fundamentally unstable situation, if conflict resolution is accompanied by a zero-sum game or a winner-takes-all mindset, we will witness a re-escalation of this conflict. Conflicts should not be settled militarily.

Azerbaijan has taken possession of its coveted territories, which it captured with the help of Turkey during this last war. Moreover, those territories of Artsakh that do not belong to Baku are under the control of Baku, that is, Azerbaijan has occupied many territories of Artsakh through military aggression. Moreover, after the 44-day war, Azerbaijan occupied more than 150 skm of sovereign Armenia and its Armed Forces are in those territories.

Armenia is ruled by an elite that does not want to expel the aggressor for the sake of regional peace, hoping that the aggressor will leave the territory of Armenia on its own. Now imagine: the government changes in Armenia and a new government is formed, which first of all wants to restore the territorial integrity of the state. It means: new war, new destruction, new victims, instability. The most important component of security and stability is the existence of clear mechanisms for non-violent conflict resolution, political and security guarantees of international actors. If the USA, Russia, China and Europe will not be able to provide these guarantees, then the stability and the economic interests of these states will be under serious attack. And we see it. Europe needs to get out of dependence on Russian gas and reach the gas resources of the Caspian Sea and Central Asian countries through Azerbaijan, and the US wants to sell it and limit Iran’s economic and oil export opportunities. That is, the reason for the outbreak of the conflict in the South Caucasus and the change in the status quo is economic interest, the neutralization of the roles of Iran and Russia, the opening of land routes and the increase of the western sphere of influence through the liberalization of communications. Even if they manage to convince the weak government of Armenia in this matter, forcing regional giants like Iran and Russia is an extremely difficult task, which affects the military and security relief of the South Caucasus.

SS:  The US supports Ukraine against Russia both militarily and ideologically.  Do you feel that the US has a role to play in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan?

AG:  In addition to the status of the co-chairing country of the OSCE Minsk Group, the United States, as a world superpower, also has an obligation to maintain the commitment to stability, security and democracy, which is one of the vital constitutional, political and propaganda norms of that state. The US has a powerful diplomatic, security, intelligence, and economic toolkit to influence international law violations committed by any state. American interests in the South Caucasus have always clashed with the national interests of Russia and Iran. In the past, it was possible to settle it with bilateral or Washington-Moscow arrangements. After Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, we see an intensification of American diplomacy and operations in the South Caucasus, where Washington did not have a clear and constant policy, except in Georgia. The American offer to Armenia must not be purely anti-Russian in nature, it will be an adventure and fraught with unforeseen dangers.

Regarding Armenia’s security, energy independence and Artsakh issue, clear mechanisms and guarantees are necessary, otherwise Armenia and the Armenian society will consider the American “intervention” as a deliberate subversion. Washington should have a clear position regarding the sovereignty of Armenia and the political fate of Artsakh, that is, any violation of the borders in the region will be met with harsh opposition. There is a need for an American conceptual and strategic approach towards Artsakh conflict, which is an issue of human rights and self-determination. This natural right cannot be subordinated to the principle of territorial integrity. Of course, American oil and gas interests in Azerbaijan are understandable, but we should not forget that the American political value system will collapse if Washington ignores the dossier of democracy and human rights and freedoms. The US must build its political narratives on inviolable values. The change of borders in Ukraine has been a motivation for attempts to change the political map of the world in different regions. The clear evidence of this is Turkey’s behavior in relations with Greece and Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenia. Washington marvelously knows the formula of success. Political pragmatism and an arbitrary interpretation of international law prevent the US from simultaneously spreading values and avoid violating the norms of international law.

SS:  There are reports of protests in Yerevan because of a statement by Prime Minister Pashinyan, in which he seems to be ready to cede territory.  In your opinion is he ready to give up Nagorno-Karabakh?

AG:  Any document must go through an internal legal process, that is, any statement, agreement, convention, treaty or document, that the political elite deems appropriate, must be checked and go through internal legal and constitutional process. In such a case, the establishment of diplomatic relations with Azerbaijan, the recognition of mutual borders and not having territorial claims against each other should be discussed in the country’s parliament, then the highest judicial body of the country, the Constitutional Court, should check whether this document is in discrepancy with the Constitution. Armenia has no legal obligation or right to decide the political fate of an entire people. Armenia was only the guarantor of the security of Artsakh people in this conflict. And that approach collapsed after the 44-day war, when Russia assumed that “responsibility”. Nagorno-Karabakh is not the property of any person or even “democratically elected elite” to be donated or surrendered with a single signature. Artsakh is an Armenian land for 5000 years and 140 thousand people live there, who legally decided to live independently 31 years ago during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Armenians of Artsakh know what it is like to live under the political rule of hostile Azerbaijan. Shortly it means genocide. Artsakh has never been part of independent Azerbaijan and cannot come under the vertical influence of Azerbaijan in any capacity and any case. They are very well aware of this in Yerevan, Baku and Ankara, as well as in the political capitals of the world. If Artsakh is annexed and becomes part of Azerbaijan, then international law and the concept of self-determination of nations will become meaningless, and the Westphalian system will become an object of ridicule in international relations. The citizens of Armenia voted for this current government not to hand over territory, but to settle the conflict through diplomatic means. Pashinyan’s government failed to do so by collapsing diplomatic channels and ties with potential allies, lead the country to war and exhausted the diplomatic immunity of the conflict settlement. After that, he has no political and moral right to play the role of an actor in the settlement of the conflict.

SS:  If the Armenian people do remove Prime Minister Pashinyan, will this have a positive effect on Armenia economically, politically, and socially?

AG:  Definitely yes. Pashinyan’s coming to power was the result of the ineffectiveness of the government system in Armenia for years and the interference of external factors. The West has always wanted to push Russia out of the South Caucasus and did not take into account the fact that this mechanism cannot work in a drastic way in Armenia. If there is no alternative, then there will be no positive response either. More than 2.5 million Armenians live in Russia and Armenia cannot be in an anti-Russian position. Besides this, we must take into consideration the deep historical, cultural and political ties between Armenia and Russia.

Armenia cannot pursue a similar policy towards its historical neighbor and brotherly Iran, with which the border has a history of several millennia and with which ties date back to ancient times, when dozens of states did not even exist in this region. The basis of Armenia’s foreign policy is the concept of balancing regional and international interests. To say that Pashinyan’s government did not realize this, would be naive. Knowing this much and distorting the map of relations with neighbors and natural allies means deliberate steps to change the geopolitical balance of the region, which will naturally lead to economic collapse and uncontrollable chaos.

Pashinyan’s ideological and geopolitical, economic and security policy weakened Armenia’s position. Armenia was a security factor in the region. Today it is facing serious security problems. Although it must be admitted that the combat capability of the Armenian armed forces is at a high level and the proof of this was the high fighting spirit and the ability to perform a military task during the last aggression by Azerbaijan. There is social polarization in Armenia and the current government also failed the investment and economic policy. The government succeeding Pashinyan will face a very difficult period. Pashinyan fulfilled the geopolitical task entrusted to him, that is, to hand over the territories outside the borders of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region (which was under the control of Artsakh) to Azerbaijan and to liberalize land communications in the region, which was in the interests of the states dealing with the settlement of the Artsakh conflict. Pashinyan must go so that Armenia can restore the economy and ensure its own security. This is the expectation of Armenia and the majority of the Armenian people.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Queen Elizabeth Declined to Visit Israel Due to Its Violation of Human Rights

September 19th, 2022 by Hans Stehling

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 For all the long years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth II of England refused to visit Israel because of its unacceptable abuse of human rights – during all of which period she visited every other country of the free world, many, many times as an icon of freedom, trust and human dignity.

According to the Jerusalem Post:

In her 70 years on the throne, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth traveled widely and visited many countries – nearly all the countries of the Commonwealth – Canada in particular. She visited Canada as many as 27 times, and after turning 50, she visited 43 different countries for the first time.

She visited Jordan, Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa – but never Israel.

Following her visit to Jordan in 1984, the queen raised some alarm among British Jews according to a report in The New York Times. Sympathetic comments she had made about the plight of the Palestinians and her seeming disapproval of Israeli actions caused more than a mere flutter among British Jews. (JP, September 9, 2022)

Six Questions for Israel:

  1. As a now undeclared, nuclear weapon state, after the Holocaust of WW2 in which 6 million Jews were murdered, why do you support a government that has deliberately dispossessed and disenfranchised five million indigenous, mainly Muslim Arabs whose families have lived on and worked the land of Palestine for over a millennium?
  2. How can Israelis drink coffee in the bars of Tel Aviv when just kilometres down the road, the indigenous peoples of Gaza, and of the West Bank, starve under a shocking, inhuman, 16-year blockade of essential goods imposed by your government, together with an illegal government-imposed settlement policy that violates the Geneva Conventions on Human Rights?
  3. How do you manage to brainwash your citizens to join the IDF and to harass, bully, humiliate and kill the indigenous people of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and how do you sleep at night knowing that you have been trained to treat ordinary Palestinians as Untermenschen, to be killed and humiliated, at will?
  4. How do you manage to be a major supplier of arms and espionage systems to regimes around the world then claim to be innocent bystanders who merely want to defend your own state? How many more family homes in the West Bank do you want to demolish so that you can obtain yet more land for your illegal settlements?
  5. How does a Jewish demographic constituting less than 2% of the American people, manage to wield such extraordinary influence in the US Congress and how does your AIPAC lobby succeed in persuading 335 million Americans to send billions of tax dollars every year to the state of Israel in order to continue the illegal occupation of Palestinian land – an occupation condemned by UNSCR 2334?
  6. Do you think any of the above facts contribute to the now frightening increase in antisemitism on university campuses in the US, the U.K. and around the world; in schools, offices, homes and workplaces? Or is it purely coincidental?

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