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Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is demanding answers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), after he says the agency “has repeatedly disregarded its responsibilities under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and the American people’s right to agency records,” according to a Wednesday letter from Paul to NIH Acting Director Lawrence A. Tabak.
“For almost two years, public interest groups and media organizations have been forced to engage in protracted litigation to obtain documents related to NIH’s involvement in COVID-19,” adding “The records NIH has produced have been heavily redacted.”
“This suggests NIH is censoring the information it releases to the public about the origins of the pandemic.“
Paul cites an article by journalist and former Chuck Grassley investigator Paul D. Thacker, which notes an egregious admission by the NIH in Court that the agency “is withholding portions of emails between employees because they “could be used out of context and serve to amplify the already prevalent misinformation regarding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.””
In an 18-page declaration to the court, NIH FOIA Officer Gorka Garcia-Malene detailed how the NIH redacts documents in compliance with the law. In the case of Exempt 6 privacy concerns, Garcia-Malene declared:
Exemption 6 mandates the withholding of information that if disclosed “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(6). Exemption 6 was applied here due to the heightened public scrutiny with anything remotely related to COVID-19.
Mr. Garcia-Malene also claimed that information had be redacted “because of the amount of misinformation surrounding the pandemic and its origins.” Seriously, the NIH is now arguing in court that because there is so much misinformation about how the pandemic began, they can’t release facts that might clear up misinformation about how the pandemic began.
The NIH was responding to a case brought by US nonprofit Right to Know, after the NIH deleted coronavirus sequences that Chinese researchers added to the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. As Thacker notes, “These datasets involved key studies that virologists were using at the time to promote the now discredited theory that the COVID-19 virus may have passed from pangolins to humans.”
In the case at hand, the NIH attempted (and succeeded) at sealing the name of a Chinese researcher which had already been made public.
Last week, the NIH filed a motion in a Virginia court to seal portions of documents that reference the Chinese researcher and an NIH official in a lawsuit filed against the agency for redacting and covering up records that might explain how the pandemic began.
“[T]he individuals have a substantial privacy interest in avoiding harassment or media scrutiny that would likely follow disclosure,” wrote a lawyer for the NIH to the judge. “Sealing is therefore necessary to protect this information from any further public dissemination.”
But what is actually being protected? The American public’s right to access public information that may reveal what kicked off the pandemic, or the purported privacy rights of a scientist who lives thousands of miles away in China? This legal ploy further highlights the NIH’s aggressive, haphazard approach to redacting documents and hiding information that might explain how the pandemic started.
Last summer Buzzfeed released an investigation of the NIH’s Anthony Fauci and reported that the documents the agency released were “just a portion of what was requested, and they are filled with redactions, making them an incomplete record of the time period and Fauci’s correspondence.” Meanwhile, the Intercept reported in February that the NIH continues to withhold critical documents that could shed light on how the epidemic began, noting that the agency sent them 292 pages of fully redacted records.
A week after The Intercept story, The Chief Records Officer for the U.S. Government sent the NIH a letter asking them to investigate allegations that agency personnel are shredding documents related to grant-making decisions and funding for research in China.
Kangpeng Xiao’s name became public in December 2020, when the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know published a report on revisions to coronavirus sequences that Chinese researchers had added to the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. These datasets involved key studies that virologists were using at the time to promote the now discredited theory that the COVID-19 virus may have passed from pangolins to humans.
“These revisions are odd because they occurred after publication, and without any rationale, explanation or validation,” wrote Sainath Suryanarayanan, in the December 2020 report for U.S. Right to Know. The nonprofit based their report on NIH documents they received from a FOIA request.
According to these documents, several Chinese scientists asked the NIH to alter coronavirus sequences stored on the NIH database, with many of these requests coming from Kangpeng Xiao with the South China Agricultural University. In one case, Xiao asked NIH official Rick Lapoint in March 2020 to delete some coronavirus sequences.
A few months later, Xiao published a prominent paper on May 7, 2020, in the journal Nature that argued a coronavirus discovered in pangolins was closely related to COVID-19. But as U.S. Right to Know discovered, Xiao’s request to delete coronavirus sequences from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) was just one of many changes.
Xiao et al. made numerous changes to their SRA data, including the deletion of two datasets on March 10, the addition of a new dataset on June 19, a November 8 replacement of data first released on October 30, and a further data change on November 13 — two days after Nature added an Editor’s “note of concern” about the study.
Eventually, Nature’s “note of concern” attached to Xiao’s 2020 study changed to a very lengthy correction in late 2021 that explained that data “were mislabelled and attributed incorrectly.” That correction also thanked Alina Chan of Harvard and the Broad Institute “for bringing the errors to our attention.” Chan later tweeted that Nature refused to publish her analysis of the viruses and merely folded her study into their correction.
The next time a mysterious outbreak occurs, will we see a repeat performance of inaccurately written papers published in top journals and the dismissal of independent analyses demonstrating that these studies are not reproducible/accurate based on the available data?
This U.S. Right to Know report was largely ignored, but last summer, coronavirus sequences at the NIH SRA became national news when Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, published a preprint on NIH sequences that Chinese researchers had deleted. As Bloom explained in an email to NIH leadership at the time, “[T]his can be a good opportunity for the NIH to take the lead by using its remarkable data archives to make progress in resolving some of the important questions about the virus’s origins.”
The NIH would not disclose to reporters the names of Chinese researchers who requested sequence deletions, but the New York Times later identified one of the scientists as Ben Hu at Wuhan University.
Empower Oversight referenced Kangpeng Xiao’s identity in federal court recently on July 11, when the nonprofit charged that the NIH was improperly redacting documents when responding to their FOIA requests. In one case, the NIH had provided Empower Oversight with an October 12, 2021, email from Jesse Bloom to the NIH discussing a scientist’s request to delete NIH SRA sequences. Citing Exemption 6, which covers privacy concerns, the NIH redacted both the names of the requestor and the NIH official that Bloom cited in his email
Paul has demanded the NIH answer the following questions:
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The language is far from reassuring. Despite being caught red handed using facial recognition technology unbeknownst to customers, a number of Australia’s large retail companies have given a meek assurance that they will “pause” their use. The naughty will only show contrition in the most qualified of ways.
It all began with an investigation by CHOICE which found that the department store chain Kmart, and household warehouse chain Bunnings, were using FRT to ostensibly protect customers and staff while reducing theft in select stores. The group also found a third retailer, The Good Guys, had not lived up to its distinctly smug name, using technology that stores the unique biometric information of its customers.
According to the investigation, 25 major Australian companies were asked whether they used FRT and how their privacy policies stacked up. Based upon the findings, the three big culprits were identified.
FRT navigates some rather treacherous terrain. There is the broader question of privacy and issues of consent. CHOICE consumer data advocate Kate Bower put her finger on the issue by noting that the privacy policies of such companies were usually buried in vast online undergrowth and “often not easy to find.” Given the operating nature of such stores – being in person and retail – it was also unlikely that anyone was “reading a privacy policy” before entering.
At some of their outlets, Kmart and Bunnings did sport signs at entrances informing customers that such technology was being used. There are also prevailing problems with bias and racial discrimination. The evident concern here was that the signs themselves were barely noticeable to patrons, placed in strategically innocuous spots. For any toiling student seeking to understand the law of contract and the incorporation of contractual terms, such signs are virtually worthless in drawing attention to any individual entering the store.
In a survey of over 1,000 Australians between March and April this year, CHOICE found a general lack of awareness about the nature of the technology being used. Three out of four (76%) claimed with less than blissful ignorance they did not know retailers were using facial recognition. Those who did smell a rat identified the wrong parties – namely supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths.
The percentage of those surveyed claiming that retail stores should disclose to customers about the use of FRT before entering the store was 83% while 78% expressed concern about the security of any faceprint data secured by the companies.
Bunnings has, unsurprisingly, accused CHOICE of misrepresenting their case. In the carefully chosen words of chief operating officer Simon McDowell, such “technology is used solely to keep team and customers safe and prevent unlawful activity in our stores, which is consistent with the Privacy Act.”
Through the annals of history, when laws are breached and principles are violated, the principle of necessity gets saddled up and ridden into debates. In this case, its staff who might be endangered by reprobates (“repeat abuse and threatening behaviour,” McDowell calls it), or customers who need protection when going about their shopping. And even when used, there are “strict controls around the use of the technology which can only be accessed by [a] specially trained team.”
Bunnings managing director, Mike Schneider, reiterates the security element of the enterprise. FRT aided in identifying banned customers and undesirables. “We don’t use it for marketing or customer behaviour tracking, and we certainly don’t use it to identify regular customers who enter our stores as CHOICE has suggested.”
On July 12, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) announced that it was opening investigations into the way personal information is handled by Kmart and Bunnings, with specific reference to the use of FRT. The body’s director of strategic communications, Andrew Stokes, explains that biometric information, as collected by FRT, “is sensitive personal information under the Privacy Act.”
Any organisation that falls within the operation of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) is not entitled to collect sensitive information in the absence of consent from the individual. Any information gathered must also be reasonably necessary for the organisation’s functions or activities.
Consent and the law have not always been on the best of terms. Often strangers, they sometimes converge, or miss each other altogether. In terms of Australian privacy law, hardly impressive and often disappointing in its lack of bite, the OAIC will note the following elements to determine whether genuine consent was given to the use of FRT: whether the individual was adequately informed before granting consent; whether it was done voluntarily; whether it was current and specific; and whether the individual had the capacity to comprehend and communicate that consent.
The reaction from the three retail outlets has, for the most part, been tactical, and more likely a case of waiting for the OAIC’s verdict. According to Bower, “customers will welcome the news that Bunnings and Kmart are joining The Good Guys in pausing the use of facial recognition technology in their stores, but we know that what customers really want is for them to stop using it altogether.” To do so would be very much against the ill-spirited nature of Australian corporate culture, as privateering as any that can be found on this warming planet. They may have been bruised and slightly embarrassed, but they are unlikely to be compliant.
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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]
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In prescribing cures for inflation, economists rely on the diagnosis of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon—too much money chasing too few goods. But that equation has three variables: too much money (“demand”) chasing (the “velocity” of spending) too few goods (“supply”). And “orthodox” economists, from Lawrence Summers to the Federal Reserve, seem to be focusing only on the “demand” variable.
M2 money supply surged [in 2020] as the Fed pumped out liquidity to replace businesses’ lost sales and households’ lost paychecks. But bank reserves account for nearly half of the cumulative increase since 2020 began, and the vast majority seem to be excess reserves sitting on deposit at Federal Reserve banks and not backing loans. Excluding bank reserves, M2 money supply is now growing more slowly than it did for most of 2015 – 2019, when inflation was mostly below the Fed’s 2% y/y target, much to policymakers’ chagrin. Weak lending also suggests money isn’t doing much “chasing,” a notion underscored by the historically low velocity of money. US personal consumption expenditures—the broadest measure of household spending—have already slowed from a reopening resurgence to rates more akin to the pre-pandemic norm and surveys show many households used stimulus money to repay debt or build savings they may not spend at all. It doesn’t look like there is a mountain of household liquidity waiting to do more chasing from here. [Emphasis added.]
In March 2022, the Federal Reserve tackled inflation with its traditional tools – raising interest rates and tightening the money supply by selling bonds, pulling dollars out of the economy. But not only have prices not gone down since then, they are going up. As observed in a July 15 article on Seeking Alpha titled “Fed-Induced Recession Looms As Rate Fears Roil All Markets”:
On Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index came in at a 9.1% annual rate. The higher-than-expected reading puts the CPI at a new 41-year high.
The biggest contributors to rising consumer prices are the basic necessities of food, fuel, and shelter. As households struggle to make ends meet, they are trimming discretionary spending, burning through savings, and running up credit card balances.
Businesses are also getting squeezed. On Thursday, the Producer Price Index showed wholesale costs rising at a massive 11.3% year-over-year.
When their own costs go up, producers must raise the prices of their products to cover those costs, regardless of demand. Less money competing for their products won’t bring producer costs down. It will just drive the companies out of business, as happened in the Great Depression. The Seeking Alpha article concludes:
… As both businesses and consumers are forced to tighten their belts, a slowdown looms.
And if the Federal Reserve makes another major policy misstep, then a severe recession and financial crisis may also be coming.
Recession is already evident. The stock market has lost a cumulative $7 trillion in value this year, while the crypto market has lost $2 trillion since last November. Emerging markets are in even worse straits. According to a July 14 article by Larry McDonald on ZeroHedge, “Emerging and frontier market countries currently owe the IMF over $100 billion. US central banking policy plus a strong USD is vaporizing this capital as we speak.… A quarter-trillion dollars of distressed debt is threatening to drag the developing world into a historic cascade of defaults.”
Every time the Fed raises rates, borrowing becomes more expensive. That means higher interest costs not only for governments but for borrowers with mortgages, home equity lines of credit, credit cards, student debt and car loans. For both large and small businesses, loans also get pricier.
To be clear, this is not the same sort of inflation that Paul Volcker was taming in 1980 when he raised the Fed funds rate to 20%. McDonald observes, “In 2021, global debt reached a record $303T, according to the Institute of International Finance .… Volcker was jacking rates into a planet with about $200T LESS debt.” [Emphasis added]
Volcker was also not dealing with the supply shortages we have today, generated by lockdowns that put more than 100,000 U.S. companies out of business; sanctions and war that cut off global supplies of fuel, food and resources; and farming crises such as that in the Netherlands, generated by overly stringent regulations.
Higher interest rates don’t alleviate cost/push inflation caused by supply crises; they make it worse. Rather than making money harder to get, the government needs to focus on the supply side of the equation, stimulating local production to bring supply levels up. Rather than Volcker’s solution, what we need is that pioneered by Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pulled us out of similar crises with public banking institutions designed to stimulate infrastructure and development.
For foreign models, we can look to the infrastructure-funding central banks of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the first half of the 20th century; and to China, which salvaged the global economy following the 2008 banking crisis with massive infrastructure and development funded through its state-owned development banks.
China Did It
In the last 40 years, China has exploded from one of the world’s poorest countries to a global economic powerhouse. Among other notable achievements, from 2008 to 2022 it built 23,500 miles of high-speed rail, at a time when U.S. infrastructure projects were stalled for lack of funding. How did China pull this off? Rather than relying on taxpayer funds or foreign debt, it borrowed from its own banks.
China has three massive state-owned infrastructure and development banks – the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Agricultural Development Bank of China. Called “policy banks,” they get their liquidity either (a) directly from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) in the form of “Pledged Supplementary Lending,” or (b) by issuing bonds, which have higher credit ratings than commercial bank bonds and are in demand because they can be used as collateral to borrow from the central bank. China’s policy banks are limited to funding certain specific government policies; and these policies are all productive and public-purpose-driven, unlike the short-term private profit-maximization driving Wall Street banks.
Besides its big state-owned banks, China has an extensive network of local banks, which know their local markets. The PBOC website lists seven tools it can use for adjusting monetary policy, including not just a short-term lending facility like the U.S. Fed’s discount window, but a facility to inject liquidity into banks for medium-term loans, as well as the “pledged supplementary lending” to fund long-term loans from the three policy lenders for specific sectors, including agriculture, small businesses, and shanty town re-development.
Yet all this stimulus has not driven up Chinese prices. In fact consumer prices initially fell in 2008 and have hovered around 2% ever since. [See chart below.]
Prices are creeping up now, as is happening everywhere; but they have reached only 2.5%—far below the 9.7% seen in the U.S. in July.
Our Forebears Did It Too
State-owned infrastructure banks are not unique to China. In the United States, a similar model was initiated by Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary. The “American System” of government-issued money and credit was key both to winning the American Revolutionary War and to transforming the nation from a collection of agrarian colonies to an industrial powerhouse. But after the War, the federal government was $70 million in debt, including $44 million from the colonies-turned-states.
Hamilton solved the debt problem with debt-for-equity swaps. Debt instruments were accepted in partial payment for stock in the First U.S. Bank. This capital was then leveraged into credit, issued as the first U.S. currency. Loans were based on the fractional reserve model. Hamilton wrote, “It is a well established fact, that Banks in good credit can circulate a far greater sum than the actual quantum of their capital in Gold & Silver.”
The BOE was chartered to fund a national war and was capitalized exclusively by public debt. The government would pay private lenders, who controlled what policies could be funded. Hamilton’s BUS, by contrast, was to be a commercial bank, funding itself by generating credit for infrastructure and development.
Under Hamilton’s system of “Public Credit,” the primary function of the BUS would be to issue credit to the government and private interests for internal improvements and other economic development. Hamilton said a bank’s function was to generate active capital for agriculture and manufactures, increasing the quantity and quality of labor and industry. The BUS would establish a sovereign currency, a banking system, and a source of credit to build the nation, creating productive wealth, not just financial profit.
The BUS was chartered for only 20 years, after which it lapsed. When economic hardships and monetary pressures followed, the Second Bank of the United States was founded in 1816 under President John Quincy Adams, basically on the Hamiltonian model. It funded one of the most intense periods of economic progress in history, investing directly in canals, railroads, roads, and coal and iron enterprises; lending money to states and cities engaged in such projects; and managing credit so that it continually flowed into needed productive activities.
After the Second BUS was shut down, Abraham Lincoln’s government issued Greenbacks (U.S. Notes) directly, funding both the Civil War and extensive infrastructure and development. The National Banking System was also established, under which national banks would be partially capitalized with federal securities.
An International Movement Is Born
The American System and its leaders not only allowed the American colonists to break free of British control but inspired an international movement. Other British colonies revolted, including Australia, New Zealand and Canada; and other countries rebelled against the British imperial free-trade doctrines and developed their own infrastructure and manufacturing, including Germany, Ireland, Russia, Japan, India, Mexico, and South America.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), founded in 1911, followed the Hamiltonian model. It was masterminded by an American named King O’Malley, who called Hamilton “the greatest financial man who ever walked the earth.” The CBA funded major national development and Australia’s participation in World War I, simply with national credit issued by the bank.
In Canada from 1939-74, the government borrowed from its own Bank of Canada, effectively interest-free. Major government projects were funded without increasing the national debt, including aircraft production during and after World War II, education benefits for returning soldiers, family allowances, old age pensions, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway project, and universal health care for all Canadians.
Meanwhile in the U.S., we got the Federal Reserve – and the worst banking crisis and economic depression ever in 1929-33. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt then rebuilt the U.S. economy financed through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, again funded on the Hamiltonian model. Initially capitalized with $500 million, from 1932 to 1957 it lent or invested over $40 billion for infrastructure and development of all kinds; funded the New Deal and World War II; and turned a net profit to the government of $690 million.
Solving Today’s Price Inflation
That could be done again, assuming the political will. Some pundits predict that the Fed will back off its aggressive interest rate hikes when the carnage from that approach becomes painfully evident, but it seems to be a phase we have to go through to convince policymakers that the Fed’s current tools are not able to curb the price inflation we have today. We need to stimulate local development with a national infrastructure and development bank like China’s; and for that, Congress needs to pass an infrastructure bank bill.
Four such bills are currently before Congress. Only one, however, is capable of generating the nearly $6 trillion that the American Society of Civil Engineers says is needed over the next decade for U.S. infrastructure investment. This is HR 3339: The National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2021, which would effectively be self-funded on the American System model – a critical feature given that the federal debt is at record levels. The bank would be capitalized with federal debt acquired in debt-for-equity swaps – federal securities for non-voting bank shares paying a 2% dividend. This capital would then be leveraged at 10 to 1 into low-interest loans, essentially at cost. The bank would be anti-inflationary, by bringing supply up to meet demand; would not require new taxes but would rather increase the tax base, by increasing GDP; and would require only a small Congressional outlay for startup costs, which would quickly be repaid. For more information on HR 3339, see the National Infrastructure Bank Coalition website.
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Thomas Malthus predicted that famine was the inevitable byproduct of agriculturally successful populations: A well-fed population would breed faster than the agricultural sector could grow. For him, that was an unavoidable tragedy. Modern leftist governments, though, have a new approach to this: They are forcing Malthusian famines by mandating fertilizer reductions and seizing farmers’ lands. It’s all part of the Great Reset that the New World Order of Klaus Schwab et al have planned for us: You’ll have nothing, including no food, while they live in their castles on the hill, insulated from the Hobbesian terrors they’ve created.
First, we heard about the complete collapse of the Sri Lankan government. That occurred because the government, anxious for the approval of the World Economic Fund and other green activists, decided to mandate organic farming practices. The world had entirely organic farming in the pre-modern era and there was a name for it: subsistence farming. That meant that farmers subsisted on the margin of famine, with a single bad growing season or blighted crop sufficient to destroy a society.
Next, we learned that farmers in the Netherlands were striking because the government announced that they must reduce their nitrogen output by 30%-70%, something that will destroy farms—and that the government is seizing farmland to ensure this reduction goes forward.
Up until now, Holland has been one of the preeminent food-producing countries in the world but the farmers’ own government seeks to end that. To add insult to injury, Geert Wilders published a letter showing that the government intends to use the expropriated land to house “asylum seekers.”
Two more countries are joining the list of countries with governments that are deliberately embracing famine. Despite the disruption in the world food supply because of the two years of COVID lockdowns, Justin Trudeau’s government is planning to implement a plan from 2020 that will see the country reduce its nitrous oxide emissions by 30% over the next ten years—and, preferably, to reduce them by 40-45%. The ministers in both Alberta and Saskatchewan have complained, noting that this will substantially reduce food production.
However, when it comes to food production, Canada has a plan: Bugs. The government has invested in a plan to produce 9000 metric tons annually of crickets for animal and human consumption. If it’s any consolation, the solons of the New World Order will also be eating bugs. After all, lobster really is kind of like the grasshopper of the sea, right?
What we’re witnessing is a form of madness, as various world governments enter into a race to return the world to a time of cold, dark, and famine. It’s no wonder, then, that Ireland just hopped on board the “let’s create a famine” bandwagon. Ireland too is demanding that its farmers cut their emissions by 28%:
According to a report by The Times, Ireland’s Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, has already agreed to force a cut of either 27 or 28 per cent on the country’s farming sector, a move that will cause significant disruptions to local businesses.
However, the publication also claims that there is still significant pressure on McConalogue to implement a curb of 30 per cent, a measure the head of one of the country’s largest farming organisations has said would result in a massive cut in cattle numbers in the country.
By the way, if you think it can’t happen here, in America, you’re wrong. One of the byproducts of Biden’s war in Ukraine is that American farmers are no longer receiving the fertilizer that Russia and Belarus have provided for the world. What fertilizer there is has become much more expensive. Limited, expensive fertilizer means limited, expensive food supplies. In a time of modern farming that should see unlimited amounts of food, famine will soon be haunting America too.
This is all to “save the planet,” of course. The current world population is around 8 billion. And while the Georgia Guidestones may be nothing but dust now, it’s reasonable to believe that it states a target world population that sits very well with the World Economic Fund and its acolytes around the world: Fewer than 500 million people. The rest of us are extraneous and would be better as natural fertilizer than as living, breathing CO2 polluters.
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Increasingly, public opinion shows dissatisfaction with Volodymyr Zelensky‘s attitudes. This time, the reason for the popular indignation is the fact that the Ukrainian president participated with his wife in a photo shoot for Vogue magazine. The production of the images in the midst of a scenario of real devastation in Ukraine has not been well received by the readers, who claim that the Ukrainian leader romanticizes the conflict to take advantages.
Vogue Magazine recently released a collection of photos of Volodymyr Zlensky and Olena Zelenska in a failed attempt to make war propaganda for the Ukrainian regime. In the image, Zelensky appears holding hands and next to the First Lady. Olena poses next to some soldiers, near sand barricades at the official residence of the Ukrainian government, next to a destroyed plane.
The story was made in early July in Kiev by journalist Rachel Donadio, with the photos being taken by American photographer Annie Leibovitz. The official issue will be released in October, but the images have already been published. The magazine’s objective was to show the “emotional side” of the couple and the Ukrainian leader’s “bravery” in these difficult times. The result, however, was in a totally adverse direction.
The complex production of the photo essay generated discontent among the magazine’s readers, who apparently did not like to see the leader of a country at war reserving his time to dedicate himself to work as a photographic model. Throughout this last week of July, Zelensky has been severely criticized, certainly losing many of his Western supporters. In practice, the fact that he posed for the magazine with his wife in the midst of the war has been seen as an expression of disdain for the Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield and for the civilian population, which suffers every day as the conflict continues.
In fact, it seems difficult to imagine how the president of a country in a situation of conflict as serious as Ukraine can find time in his “busy” schedule to pose for a foreign magazine. Obviously, these meetings with journalists serve as an important instrument of war propaganda and have a strong diplomatic effect, helping to garner support and funds abroad. But that does not justify making a mega-production, with special sets, elegant clothes and sophisticated makeup while on the battlefield Ukrainian citizens are bleeding to obey the government’s orders.
Particularly in the US, the topic has grown among Republicans, who are taking advantage of popular outrage to further criticize Biden’s policy of financing the conflict. Several messages circulate on the internet containing words of discontent with the fact that billions of American dollars are being sent to support a president who, instead of helping his people, poses smiling hand in hand with his wife for a major magazine. As a result, the US government’s popularity is expected to decline further in the coming months.
Also, there is another point being discussed, which is the magazine’s opportunism in taking advantage of the Ukrainian tragedy to make a profit. The act of “glamorizing” war is, although controversial, relatively common among popular magazines, but now Vogue seems to have crossed the most elementary ethical limits. The conflict in Ukraine is serious and fully active. Thousands of lives have already been lost and millions of people have lost their homes. In addition, there is also the risk of internationalization of the confrontation, considering the constant foreign influences in Kiev. But the American magazine simply ignored all this and produced an issue that literally romanticizes the conflict, despite the suffering of the local people.
The project appears to have failed in every way. The magazine will certainly profit from the issue, but the criticism will be immense. The US government will become even more unpopular than it already is. And Zelensky will lose even more allies in the Western world. Indeed, if there was any objective to foster public diplomacy and international cooperation through unofficial means, the failure was absolute. All Vogue has done was to worsen the image of the Kiev Junta in the West and further raise awareness of American public opinion about the kind of government they are helping to finance with their taxes.
Zelensky should apologize to the Ukrainian people for the disdain he has shown. And the best way to apologize is to use his power as president to fulfill the role of peacemaker and end the conflict once and for all – which, as we know, will only be possible with the surrender and the accepting of the peace conditions imposed by Moscow.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.
Featured image: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife Olena Zelenska on Vogue cover. Photograph: Instagram via WION
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The announcement by Russian Defence Ministry on Tuesday on Vostok-22 strategic command post exercises during August 30-September 5 gives a big message to the West in political and military terms.
The announcement said,
“In addition to the troops (forces) of the Eastern Military District, units of the Airborne Troops, Long Range Aviation and Military Transport Aviation, as well as military contingents from other states, will be involved in these manoeuvres.”
If there is going to be participation by China, it will be highly significant in the present context of global politics, especially in the Far East.
Vostok 2018, held exactly four years ago, was the first time such a massive military exercise was held after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (At the height of the Cold War in 1981 under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union held its last Vostok exercise). In the event, Vostok 2018 turned into a Russia-China gun show.
The Russian Federation put more than 300,000 troops in the field—alongside tens of thousands of tanks, helicopters, and weapons of every sort—for a huge war game in Russia’s far-eastern reaches, and invited the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to play along, which it did.
And a whole new groove in international affairs began appearing, signifying that the interests of Russia and China have once again begun to align — this time around, in response to US military power under a pugnacious president, Donald Trump.
On the sidelines of the exercise, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping had a breakfast of blinis together in Vladivostok. It was a powerful signal that Russia no longer saw China as an adversary but as a potential military ally. It was widely noted internationally as heralding a major shift in the co-relation of forces in world politics.
To be sure, any Chinese participation in Vostok 2022 will be similarly subjected to close analysis by Washington and its allies at a time of heightened tension in US-China relations, with Beijing warning last week to take “resolute and strong measures” should the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi proceed with reported plans to visit Taiwan.
China has vowed to annex Taiwan by force if necessary, and has advertised that threat by flying warplanes near Taiwanese airspace and holding military exercises based on invasion scenarios. At a meeting in Singapore early July with Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of the Joint Staff Department of China’s Central Military Commission Gen. Li Zuocheng had warned that Chinese military would “resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. If anyone creates a wanton provocation, they will be met with the firm counterattack from the Chinese people.”
However, at the end of the day, Chinese participation in Vostok 2022 will be seen as an expression of solidarity with Russia in the best spirit of the February 4 joint statement by the two leaderships, which states that “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
No matter the usual mantra that the Vostok 2022 is not directed against any third party, its optics will be as a counter to the US pressure on Russia and China. Both Russia and China face new security challenges in the Far East in the recent period — especially, the revival of “militarism” in Japan, NATO’s growing Asia-Pacific posturing, and the belligerence in the US’ provocations over Taiwan.
Tass news agency has reported that Russian Defence Ministry has proposed certain amendments to Russia’s Federal Law “On territorial waters, territorial sea and the contiguous zone of the Russian Federation”, putting restrictions on the passage of foreign military ships through the Northern Sea Route connecting Europe and East Asia.
The proposed amendment will require foreign military and state ships to sail through the Northern Sea Route without entering ports or naval bases, and, furthermore, seek permission from the Russian authorities at least 90 days in advance. The amendment will be effectively restricting the use of the shortest sea route to Asia for the western navies operating in the Asia-Pacific region.
Significantly, this Russian move comes in the wake of the NATO’s plans to forge stronger security links between the North Atlantic area and Asia-Pacific countries (Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand) in a coordinated strategy to counter China’s rise.
Equally, the staging of Vostok 2022 comes at a juncture when Russia’s military operations in Ukraine are entering a crucial phase. In a major speech in Moscow on July 7 at a meeting with leaders of the parliament, Putin warned that everyone should understand that Russia “by and large hasn’t started anything seriously yet” in Ukraine.
To be sure, Vostok 2022 flies in the face of western propaganda that Russian military capabilities are steadily weakening due to the conflict in Ukraine. The MOD announcement on Vostok 2022 made it a point to touch on it indirectly.
The MOD statement said,
“A number of foreign media are spreading inaccurate information about alleged mobilisation activities. Please note that only a part of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is involved in the special military operation, the number of which is sufficient to fulfil all the tasks set by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.
“Moreover, none of the planned operational and combat training and military-technical and international cooperation activities of the Russian Ministry of Defence have been cancelled and will be provided with the necessary personnel, weapons, military equipment and materials.”
This is only logical, since, following the massive haemorrhage suffered by the Ukrainian military in the past 5-month period, the military balance is now working favourably for the Russian forces. Equally, the Russian military strategy to grind the Ukrainian forces with heavy artillery and missile strikes and the slow pace of the conflict also meant that the operations are sustainable over a prolonged period.
At any rate, given the hostile posturing of the NATO forces all along Russia’s western borders, it is inconceivable that Moscow would have risked by heavily committing its forces to the Ukraine operations.Interestingly, Germany’s army chief Lieutenant General Alfons Mais told Handelsblatt newspaper recently in an interview that Russia has “almost inexhaustible” resources.
In the general’s estimation,
“With its artillery superiority, the Russian army is apparently working its way forward kilometre by kilometre. This is a war of attrition that will raise the question of how long Ukraine can hold out… The Russian army is getting stronger, and Russia has resources that are almost inexhaustible.”
The focus of Vostok 2022 will be “on the use of groupings of troops (forces) to ensure military security.” It will be staged in 12 different locations spread across the Eastern Military District, one of Russia’s five military districts, with a vast geographical spread of 7 million sq. kilometres, headquartered in Khabarovsk on the Amur river in the Russian Far East near the Russia-China border, and comprises the regions up to Sakhalin Oblast, which includes Kuril Islands.
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***
In reading Nuremberg, The Belmont Report, and now the Helsinki Declaration, I can say that up to 2020, US had far lower ethical standards for human subjects research than WMA. Now? None.
Both WHO and the US HHS suffer from a form of ethical blindness when it comes to vaccine research. Foregoing long-term vaccine safety studies in favor of retrospective analysis of real-world data, these agencies fail to recognize that post-marketing (and post-EUA) studies are de facto uncontrolled, non-randomized prospective clinical trials conducted without proper consenting procedures.
If you’ve read the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and the Declaration of Helsinki, you’d know that protections are supposed to be in place not for some people undergoing some clinical studies, but instead are considered to be required to be in place for all people undergoing any clinical studies.
Right now, in our Medical Ethics, Informed Consent, and Human Rights course @ IPAK-EDU, having completed our readings and discussions of The Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report, we’re reading and discussing The Declaration of Helsinki.
Nuremberg focused primarily on the rights of patients’ protection from harm by doctors performing “human experiments”. Helsinki changed the langued to “clinical research”, but the intention was the same. The Belmont Report was an early draft of a guidance-type document in the US meant to inform professionals of the general expectations of normative standards; it is now only considered a “historic” document.
Nuremberg, Helsinki and Belmont carry no legally enforceable language in the US. Instead, Nuremberg and Helsinki were meant to provide international standards by which individual countries could gauge their governance and regulation of clinical, human subjects research. It takes a while, but comparing the Helsinki Code to the US policies in play prior to 2020 (before COVID) shows that US researchers (meaning US-based pharmaceutical companies) wanted to weaken the concept of beneficence – the principle that all involved in a trial should benefit from being part of a clinical trial.
Where the US had departed (prior to 2020) from the rest of the countries that backed Helsinki (WMA) and participated in its updates included, according to Kimmelman et al. (2009) included:
Disclosure of conflict of interest;
Public disclosure of study design;
Benefit for populations in which research is conducted (beneficence);
Reporting of accurate results and publication of negative findings;
Access to treatment after research has been conducted, and
Restriction of use of placebo in a control group where effective alternative treatment is available.
The departure formally came when issues related to HIV clinical trials run in less wealthy countries seemed to depart from Helsinki standards. Rather than work to reconcile differences with Helsinki, US companies, and the US government came up with a different international standard called “Good clinical practice” – standards in place in the EU (codified as Directive 2001/20/EC), and the US (enforced as policy by NIH), all backed by Pharma.
The most well-known sticking point seems to have been the insistence by countries within which US-based pharmaceutical companies were testing their drugs that, at the end of any clinical trial, patients be given access to the best available standard of care for the condition being studied.
But that’s just the topic that people feel comfortable talking about.
Each week, my co-instructor, Bernadette Pajer and I discuss and debate the significance and relevance of each of the historic documents – noting of course the temporal relevance. The departure of the US and the EU from the countries that continue to abide by Helsinki serves to empower those running clinical trials at the expense of those individuals taking on the risk of new drugs and vaccines – both in the risk of poor efficacy and in the risk of potential safety issues.
It’s time to revisit why and how it came about that the pharmaceutical companies are able to write the rules by which they conduct clinical research.
If you’ve read my past substack articles, you’ll note that I (and others) have called out the FDA for lowering the regulatory bar so low for COVID-19 vaccine “approvals” or “EUA”s that no standard can actually be found.
And of course, you could not help but notice that Fauci was the person pronouncing standards of ethics and dictating his version of reality.
Well, it turns out that Fauci was at the forefront of the war on ethical research, arguing against the requirement of the use of placebos in HIV drug trials in Africa:
“At a recent meeting on AIDS care in Africa, held in Kampala, Uganda, several doctors expressed their concerns about the changes to the declaration. Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, Maryland, warned the conference of “ethical police” who might not understand the complexities of the situation in Africa.” Source
Fauci’s insistence on no placebo arm in HIV drug trials in Africa is an example of bluster and posturing on morality to hide the negative consequences (harm) of the drug AZT. We’ve seen this bluster and posturing all along with COVID-19 vaccines, and Fauci’s denial of the efficacy of early treatment. He rolls over so many of the principles of medical research ethics – and ethics of care – those that were meant to be sacrosanct to protect the interests and well-being of individuals, as outlined in Nuremberg, Helsinki, and the Belmont Report.
From Helsinki:
”Risks, Burdens and Benefits
16. In medical practice and in medical research, most interventions involve risks and burdens.
Medical research involving human subjects may only be conducted if the importance of the objective outweighs the risks and burdens to the research subjects.
17. All medical research involving human subjects must be preceded by careful assessment of predictable risks and burdens to the individuals and groups involved in the research in comparison with foreseeable benefits to them and to other individuals or groups affected by the condition under investigation.
Measures to minimise the risks must be implemented. The risks must be continuously monitored, assessed and documented by the researcher.
18. Physicians may not be involved in a research study involving human subjects unless they are confident that the risks have been adequately assessed and can be satisfactorily managed.
When the risks are found to outweigh the potential benefits or when there is conclusive proof of definitive outcomes, physicians must assess whether to continue, modify or immediately stop the study.”
Fast-forward to 2021, from Wikipedia:
“Early long-term higher-dose therapy with AZT was initially associated with side effects that sometimes limited therapy, including anemia, neutropenia, hepatotoxicity, cardiomyopathy, and myopathy. All of these conditions were generally found to be reversible upon reduction of AZT dosages. They have been attributed to several possible causes, including transient depletion of mitochondrial DNA, sensitivity of the γ-DNA polymerase in some cell mitochondria,[27] the depletion of thymidine triphosphate, oxidative stress, reduction of intracellular L-carnitine or apoptosis of the muscle cells.[28] Anemia due to AZT was successfully treated using erythropoetin to stimulate red blood cell production.[29][30] Drugs that inhibit hepaticglucuronidation, such as indomethacin, nordazepam, acetylsalicylic acid(aspirin) and trimethoprim decreased the elimination rate and increased the therapeutic strength of the medication.[31] Today, side-effects are much less common with the use of lower doses of AZT.[32] According to IARC, there is sufficient evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of zidovudine; it is possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B).[33]”
The mere existence of some treatment does not prove it to be safer – or more effective – than a placebo, yet Fauci acted as though his favorite drug was fait accompli. Obviously, his lack of concern over the well-being of people in countries like Africa and India was also racist. No wonder why those in Pharma who want to do research on the cheap & dirty look at Fauci in awe… he’s the singular best worst example of an ethical researcher seen in a long, long time.
Medical hubris has been the modus operandi of Fauci well before COVID-19.
I found a reference from 1986 in which Christine Grady and Anthony Fauci argued that having an ethical physician in charge of decision-making was more important than informed consent, reversing 70 years of ethical standards first set forth for the Post-WWII era world by the Nuremberg Code. Christine Grady, Chief of the Department of Bioethics, is Fauci’s wife. (See this)
Their position is that the world can trust people in white coats conducting human experimentation to be “virtuous” while, at the same time, they write their own rules and set their own standards for “virtue”.
We are now, in 2022, in a very bad way as a direct result of Fauci and Grady degrading the standards of ethics for clinical research in the US and for dragging much of the rest of the West with them.
Many people are asking: Who do these people think they are?
It’s way past time to stop Fauci & Grady’s pattern of using disadvantaged populations, treating those with no voice like lab rats. It’s not enough to hold them accountable. It’s time we revisit and undo the damage done by Fauci & Grady and map a path for US medical research policies to be brought into alignment with the Helsinki Declaration. It has its own demerits; it’s not perfect, but it should serve as a model for reform for biomedical research conducted using US dollars.
Full enrollment for our medical ethics course has closed. But I’m re-opening enrollment today for one week for Video Access Only option so you can watch the past three weeks discussions as Bernadette and I review these historic documents in each class. You’ll also receive an email when each new class video is ready. We are discussing Helsinki today at 11:00 AM ET; the video will come out later today.
Click on this image to sign up to receive via email links to our discussions:
Even if this course is not for you, considering joining us in September @ IPAK-EDU for courses that will set your mind ablaze with knowledge, insight & perspective. Explore our courses here.
You can find more about Fauci & those who helped him destroy medical research ethics in the US in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s blockbuster book, The Real Anthony Fauci and learn more about how US policies have involved experimentation in CHD’s documentary, “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid.”
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Kimmelman, Jonathan; Weijer, Charles; Meslin, Eric M (2009). “Helsinki discords: FDA, ethics, and international drug trials”. The Lancet. 373 (9657): 13–14. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61936-4. PMID19121708.
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***
On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian stressed the following:
“There is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.”
“The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the sole legal government representing the whole of China.”
“The one-China principle is a fundamental principle affirmed in UNGA Resolution 2758.”
“It is the premise on which the PRC established diplomatic relations with 181 countries.”
“It is an established international consensus and a widely recognized basic norm in international relations.”
Yet “certain” regimes defiantly challenge the legality of the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation.
They vowed to respect China’s “red line” on Taiwan, then breached their commitment.
They’re “trampling on…the international order and undermining international rule of law.”
“This is an (unacceptable) affront (Beijing) will not tolerate.”
“The one-China principle is what underpins peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” and the Asia/Pacific more broadly.
Zhao also stressed the following, saying:
“(T)here is no so-called ‘president’ in Taiwan.’ ”
“(T)he path of ‘Taiwan independence’ will lead to a dead end.”
“If Taiwan (or its paymaster USA) wants to confront the mainland militarily, it will only find it futile and doomed to fail.”
Separately, China’s Defense Ministry warned that if hostile to peace and stability Pelosi visits Taiwan, Beijing will respond strongly to her flagrant one-China principle breach.
China’s official People’s Daily quoted Beijing’s Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Tan Kefei, saying:
If Pelosi visits Taiwan, “it would seriously violate the one-China principle and stipulations in the three China-US joint communiques, seriously harm(ing) China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and seriously damag(ing) the political foundation of China-US relations.
According to China’s Global Times commentator, Hu Xijin, PLA aircraft may accompany Pelosi’s military aircraft into Taiwan’s airspace.
And relations with hegemon USA may undergo major changes.
And this from Fudan University’s Center for American Studies deputy director, Xin Qiang, saying:
“Pelosi doesn’t care that she might make a big mess of US-China relations, because the executive branch and the military will be the ones forced to take the consequences and deal with the aftermath.”
Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences senior fellow, Yuan Zheng, called for sanctioning Pelosi and her family members, banning them from entering the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao if she visits Taiwan as planned.
And this from Institute for International Affairs President Zheng Yongnian:
The Biden regime and Congress are “semi-paralyzed and divided.”
Pelosi didn’t coordinate her planned visit with the White House.
And the fake Biden’s domestic approval rating keeps declining.
With the US already in recession, Dems want the subject changed to bashing its invented enemies.
If Pelosi visits Taiwan, it’ll risk possible Sino/US confrontation, Zheng believes.
“Cooperation, competition and confrontation coexist in the US’ China policy.”
In response to a Pelosi Taiwan visit, “China…should take real actions.”
Along with accompanying her aircraft into Taiwan airspace, “military exercises (should be) conduct(ed) at the same time.”
“(M)aximum pressure” should be exerted against the US because “Taiwan is at the heart of China’s core interests.”
“(R)eunification is inevitable.”
If the empire of lies intends to turn Taiwan into an Asia/Pacific Ukraine against China, it’ll be “a dead-end policy.”
At the same time, don’t “underestimate US irrationality.”
China must prepare for the worst, knowing how hegemon USA operates.
US regimes failed in trying various ways to undermine, sabotage and isolate China.
Playing the Taiwan card at this time explains Pelosi’s planned visit.
Hegemon USA “will continue…trial and error” China policies.
What hasn’t worked so far won’t likely work ahead with new tactics.
A South China Morning Post editorial on Pelosi said the following:
If she follows through on her planned visit, she’ll risk a “ ‘resolute and forceful’ response from Beijing that may have dire regional consequences,” adding:
Her arrival in Taipei will heighten military tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
The unacceptable provocation will trigger a strong Beijing response.
China, Russia and other independent nations are gaining in prominence on the world stage.
Decadent, depraved US Western states are declining because of their self-destructive policies and refusal to change their wicked ways.
A Final Comment
Ahead of Pelosi’s planned visit, Taiwan conducted air, sea and ground military exercises.
Rehearsing how to counter a potential Chinese invasion, Pentagon and CIA elements are likely involved covertly.
And if dominant Biden regime hardliners think Beijing is bluffing about a tough response to Pelosi’s unacceptable trip, proving otherwise should be its option of choice to show that US arrogance won’t be tolerated in a part of the world where it doesn’t belong.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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***
While natural medicine is often viewed with suspicion as something “novel” and “unproven,” it’s actually allopathic medicine that is the new kid on the block. Before John D. Rockefeller seized control over the medical industry 112 years ago, naturopathic-based herbal medicine, sun exposure and homeopathy were standard
Today, the Rockefeller Foundation is part of The Great Reset cast, which seeks to gain total control over every person in the world — financially, medically, physically and psychologically
Several crises are now converging, and all of them are life threatening to some degree, starting with the bioweapon they call the COVID “vaccine.” We also face supply chain issues, and shortages of food and energy. Maintaining good health will become a primary concern moving forward, as we’ll face many added stressors
Simple and free strategies that will improve and protect your health include getting regular sun exposure — the benefits of which include vitamin D production, vitamin A activation and, most importantly, subcellular melatonin production — and optimizing your circadian rhythm
Eliminating seed oils from your diet and implementing time-restricted eating are two simple ways to improve your metabolic health, reverse insulin resistance and reduce excess body fat
In the video above, I’m interviewed by Maria Zeee of “The Shift.” As some of you know, I went through conventional medical training and started out as an allopathic osteopath, prescribing both drugs and vaccines.
Basically, medical school works as an indoctrination program where you learn how to diagnose disease based on certain sets of symptoms. Any given diagnosis is then treated with a prespecified suite of drugs.
After about five years into private practice, I realized I was on the wrong path — that these therapies did nothing to address the root cause of any disease — and I started educating myself about nutrition and foundational health practices, which have been my focus ever since.
After I realized that, I sent letters to all my patients and let them know that if they weren’t committed to getting off drugs they needed to find a new physician. I lost about 70% of my patients when I sent that letter, but those who remained and agreed to be treated with natural strategies such as nutrition and exercise fared well, and my reputation grew as a result.
Natural Medicine Is Not Unproven
I am in the process of writing my new book and the first chapter will be all about how Rockefeller captured the U.S. medical system over a century ago through a very clever campaign to clean up many problems it had in the 19th century.
He did this through the Flexner report and subsequent strategic investments which essentially gave him control over the entire medical system which would serve as tool for him to sell petrochemical-based pharmaceuticals to further increase his wealth. Most are not aware that even today Rockefeller owns 50% of the drug companies.
While today natural medicine is viewed with suspicion as something “novel” and “unproven,” it’s actually allopathic or “conventional” medicine that is the new kid on the block. Before John D. Rockefeller seized control over the medical industry 112 years ago, naturopathic-based herbal medicine, sun exposure and homeopathy were the standard of care.
Such treatments only became “quackery” after Rockefeller’s successful infiltration. Understanding how Rockefeller corrupted medicine can be helpful in understanding current-day events a bit better as well.
How Medicine Was Corrupted
John’s father was William Avery Rockefeller, an authentic “snake oil salesman” who conned people into buying his useless “Rock Oil” tonic for cancer — a mixture of laxative and petroleum. Avery once admitted he would cheat his children every chance he got, in order to “make ‘em sharp.”1
John D. learned the lessons of duplicity and fraud well, and by the time he was 40, he controlled 90% of the global oil refineries. Within another few years (early 1880s), he also controlled 90% of the marketing of oil, and one-third of all oil wells.
Together with General Motors, Rockefeller secretly bought up and dismantled the public transportation system in the U.S., to promote the need for a family car. They also replaced electric streetcars with gas-guzzling busses to expand their petroleum business.
In 1902, Rockefeller funded the establishment of the General Education Board, through which he intended to control public education. Other oil-backed schemes to mold and reshape the American education system followed, including a scheme to alter the teaching of American history to promote a view of collectivism, as well as a program culminating in the transformation of the practice of medicine.
As mentioned, naturopathic-based herbal medicine was the norm at that time, and Rockefeller set out to shift the medical industry toward using oil-derived pharmaceuticals instead. To that end, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was established in 1901, headed up by Dr. Simon Flexner who, at the time, was a professor of experimental pathology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Flexner’s brother, Abraham, was contracted to write a report on the state of the American medical education system, and his study, The Flexner Report,2 published in 1910, paved the way for Rockefeller to completely overhaul the American medical system.
The result of this report is that virtually every natural medical therapy was criminalized and all practitioners were put out of business and replaced with “scientific” doctors. This was the very beginning of “trust the science”. Natural remedies and ancient effective cures were dismissed as quackery. The only medicines deemed reputable were patentable synthetic drugs, invented in the oil cartel’s own research centers.
Rockefeller’s Plan to Monopolize Medicine, Banking and Food
Around that same time, the oil cartel also found a way to take over and control the U.S. financial system, through the creation of the Federal Reserve, established in 1913. The Rockefellers have been powerbrokers in the banking industry ever since.
They also sought to consolidate control over the global food supply, using philanthropy as their cover for the takeover. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Green Revolution that led to the introduction of petroleum-based agricultural chemicals, which quickly transformed agriculture, both in the U.S. and abroad.
President Johnson’s “Food for Peace” program actually mandated the use of petroleum-dependent technologies and chemicals by aid recipients, and countries that could not afford it were granted loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The Rockefeller Foundation also funded the “gene revolution” that brought us patentable genetically modified seeds. Today, The Rockefeller Foundation is part of The Great Reset cast, which seeks to gain total control over every person in the world — financially, medically, physically and psychologically.
Unfortunately, a majority of people are still unaware of The Great Reset and what it actually entails. According to Mattias Desmet, Ph.D., who popularized the concept of “mass formation hypnosis” as an explanation for the insanity we saw during the first two years of the pandemic, an estimated 30% of the population are completely hypnotized and unable to see or accept the truth.
About 10% never fell for the hypnotic propaganda, while the remainder are basically “fence sitters” who go along to get along. To prevent The Great Reset, it’s crucial to educate these fence sitters so they realize the danger in going along with the official narrative.
Now’s the Time to Get Healthy
As I note in this interview, several crises are now converging, and all of them are life threatening to some degree, starting with the bioweapon they call the COVID “vaccine.” The COVID shot has already killed hundreds of thousands of people, and more likely millions, and will continue to cause premature death and disability over the next several years.
We also face supply chain issues, and shortages of food and energy. Maintaining good health will become a primary concern moving forward, as there will be so many added stressors. On top of that, hospitals are also more dangerous than ever.
The good news is that getting and staying healthy is fairly simple. Your body is designed to heal itself, given the chance. If you’re new to this, be sure to sign up for my online newsletter and start reading. You can also find my articles archived on Substack.
In the interview, I explain why I had to create a fee-based Censored Library on Substack. For clarity, you can read all of my newsletter articles for free for 48 hours. If you want unlimited access, you’d need to join my Censored Library, which is $5 per month.
Health Tip No. 1: Sun Exposure
So, what are some of the strategies that can help keep you healthy that don’t cost a fortune (or anything at all)? One of the most basic ones is to get regular sun exposure, as its benefits include vitamin D production, vitamin A activation and, most importantly, subcellular melatonin production.
Ninety-five percent of the melatonin in your body is actually produced in your mitochondria in response to near-infrared light. Mitochondria are responsible for cellular energy production, and mitochondrial dysfunction is a root cause of most chronic disease.
Melatonin, meanwhile, is a very powerful antioxidant that reduces oxidative stress. By mopping up free radicals, melatonin reduces damage to the mitochondria and helps them work optimally.
Melatonin also helps increase glutathione, which is a major detoxification agent. Importantly, virtually none of the melatonin created in your mitochondria will ever make its way into your blood. Oral melatonin can also help your chronobiology and regulate sleep, when taken at the appropriate time (in the evening, shortly before bed).
Health Tip No. 2: Cut Seed Oils From Your Diet
If you’re worried about getting sunburn from all this sun exposure, this next talking point will offer relief, because the No. 1 cause of sunburn is excessive intake of seed oils and other foods high in linoleic acid (LA). This includes oils like canola, safflower, corn oil and many others.
The LA actually gets incorporated into your cellular membranes, and if you have high levels of LA in your cells, you’re going to be more prone to both sunburn and skin cancer. While LA has a half-life of about two years, and can take up to seven years to get rid of completely, many will notice a difference in the amount of sun they can tolerate fairly rapidly once they cut this fat from their diet.
That said, sunburn may be the least of your problems if you’re consuming high amounts of LA, as it acts as an overall metabolic poison.3 This will be one of the major subjects of my next book. I am actually hoping to give it to you for free in celebration of our 25th anniversary.
Seed oils, courtesy of the LA, are incredibly proinflammatory4 and drive oxidation in your body. This oxidation, in turn, triggers mitochondrial dysfunction that then drives the disease process.5,6,7,8,9,10,11Anything over 10 to 15 grams a day is likely to cause problems in the long run, and the average American is eating 80 grams a day.
Your body also breaks down LA into harmful subcomponents called advanced lipid oxidation end products (ALEs) and oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMs), which can cause significant damage at the cellular level.
For example, an ALE called 4HNE is a mutagen known to cause DNA damage, and OXLAMs are cytotoxic, genotoxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, thrombogenic, atherogenic and obesogenic.12 In fact, one of the primary reasons for the obesity epidemic in the U.S. is the overwhelming amount of LA being consumed on a daily basis.
In addition to all of that, most seed oils are made from genetically engineered crops, making them a significant source of toxic glyphosate. Aside from cooking oils, the primary sources of LA are processed foods (any food containing or cooked in seed oil) and conventionally raised chicken and pork (as they’re fed a lot of corn).
Health Tip No. 3: Time-Restricted Eating
A third strategy that won’t cost you a dime, and may actually save you money, is time-restricted eating (TRE), a form of intermittent fasting where you eat all your meals and snacks within a six- to eight-hour window, and your last meal at least three hours before bedtime. This means that for 16 to 18 hours a day, you’re fasting.
This schedule will give you virtually all the same benefits as calorie restriction with respect to longevity benefits, but without any of the downsides, the primary one being compliance.
In the U.S., 90% eat across 12 hours. Some will even wake up in the middle of the night to eat, and this is a surefire recipe for metabolic disaster and chronic ill health. One of the primary benefits of TRE is that it will make you metabolically flexible, so that you can burn both fat and carbs for energy.
If you’re constantly hungry, chances are you’re metabolically inflexible and cannot efficiently burn fat. Your body is basically just screaming for another quick energy fix, because carbs burn fast and when they’re gone, you need more. Once your body can efficiently burn fat, hunger usually disappears.
Without hunger pangs driving your search for food, you’ll also be able to simply not eat if you’re in a situation where you can’t find healthy food. This way, you’re not “forced” to eat junk that will deteriorate your health.
TRE will also help prevent excessive activation of the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR). mTOR is found in every tissue and responds to different nutrients and stimuli, including dietary protein, insulin, carbohydrates and exercise, and is best activated twice a day in a pulsatile fashion. When you activate it continuously as most people do when they graze throughout the day, it can lead to an increase in risk in diseases like cancer.
Tip No. 4: Optimize Your Circadian Rhythm
Circadian rhythm optimization is another frequently overlooked strategy that can have a tremendously beneficial impact on your health. Your body is designed to fall asleep a couple of hours or so after the sun has gone down, and to wake up more or less with the sun.
Most adults need right around eight hours of solid sleep per night for everything to function optimally. In the evening, avoid blue light from your TV and electronic screens. If you need lighting, you could use red LED bulbs, low-wattage filament bulbs or salt lamps. Alternatively, you could wear blue-blocking glasses. There are also various apps that will alter the color temperature of your screen at night.
These are but four simple strategies that cost you nothing and can make a huge difference in your health and well-being. There are dozens more, many of which I’ll cover in a free e-book that’s being published later this year. The truth is, your body is biased toward health and can heal from most anything as long as you give it what it needs and eliminate pernicious toxins that are jamming up your mitochondria and cellular machinery.
Become a Perpetual Student and Continue Your Learning
Last but not least, I mention in the interview that one of the most important traits you can develop if you want to be healthy is the mindset of a perpetual student. Pre-internet, learning was a laborious challenge that required physical trips to libraries and book stores, making photocopies and storing reams of paper.
As the internet took off, researching became incredibly easy. For about 20 years, you had the literature of the world at your fingertips. Today, censorship has stifled much of this intellectual freedom, and accessing information about health in particular is again a challenge.
Google, for example, is shadow banning and hiding valuable sites that contradict the official narrative so, unless you know where to look, you may not find them. Fortunately, I’ve been around for 25 years and have a large following that do know where to find my site. Newcomers, however, are at a distinct disadvantage.
So, at this point, it’s very important to identify trusted sources, and to follow them regularly, as doing a Google search is not going to lead you in the right direction anymore.
Virtually all search results are directed toward Big Pharma-approved and “fact checked” sites that regurgitate the talking points put forth by the globalist cabal that seek to force us into The Great Reset. One of my personal favorites that I follow regularly is Dr. Robert Malone’s GETTR account.
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You may think that you have seen it all but here is a great idea. Take some insects, infect them with a genetically modified virus designed to genetically edit mature plants in real time, and release them. Release them into wild and repeat, “it’s safe and effective.”
According to Russian Duma’s Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy, the Russian Government is evaluating the possibility to withdraw from a number of UN agencies, most visibly WHO and WTO which they consider do Russia more harm than good. This may be particularly the case with WTO which Russia only joined in 2012 after 8 years of negotiations, because WTO allows countries under the western sanctions program to increase tariffs on Russian goods way above the WTO guidelines.
Compared the great initiatives taken on behalf of freedom and anti-colonialism throughout the past 250 years, today’s USA appears to be a strange and foolish creature running roughshod over the dignity of people and nations in a race for mass nuclear extermination.
“The WHO Review and Why it Matters to You?” was written by Abir Ballan and published by PANDA. It is a must read by anyone who is interested in public health, the global COVID-19 WHO policies – that almost all nations followed, and the full extent of the corruption by WHO/global leaders and governments. The review also lists out what should have been done instead.
On July 12, the UN Security Council extended the authorization for humanitarian aid to cross through Bab al Hawa on the Turkey-Syria border for another six months. The US and allies had wanted a one-year extension, but Russia vetoed it. The US, UK and France abstained on the six-month approval, while all others supported it.
How many times have I seen an American expert pointing to a satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula at night and remarking that the striking difference between the darkness that envelops North Korea and the bright lights that illuminate South Korea, as well as Japan, symbolizes the insularity, the oppressiveness and the pathetically backward economic state of the North. The obvious point is that the brightly lit South is a model of progress, of technology, of democracy and of free markets.
The prevailing narrative has hitherto been that Western unity on Ukraine is an unprecedented display of solidarity with so-called “democratic principles”, yet now none other than a leading American official just discredited that interpretation of events.
Could Boris Johnson be tagged as the next Secretary General of NATO? That’s what a somewhat surprising new report in The Telegraph suggests, indicating that “Ukrainian and Tory MPs support idea of PM being a possible candidate, though sceptics suggest he would likely be greeted with a French veto.”
In late March, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its second month, U.N. agencies began to issue dire warnings regarding the world’s food supply. The war, they said, was pushing food-insecure countries to the brink of a “devastating” hunger crisis, with the combination of brutal fighting in Ukraine and unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia threatening to disrupt as much as a third of the world’s wheat exports.
In a speech in the European Parliament earlier this month, German MP Christine Anderson described the coercion of people into taking COVID vaccines as the “biggest crime ever committed on humanity.”
There are similarities today with the US and NATO pouring tens of BILLIONS of dollars in weapons into Ukraine to counter the Russian military intervention. The US and western allies are providing additional support in intelligence and military advice. While there are not yet official US troops (as there were not in Vietnam for the first years), there are special operations and much other military support.
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Compared the great initiatives taken on behalf of freedom and anti-colonialism throughout the past 250 years, today’s USA appears to be a strange and foolish creature running roughshod over the dignity of people and nations in a race for mass nuclear extermination.
Such is the image projected by Mark Milley’s ranting anti-China attacks or the relentless demonization of Russia sweeping across mainstream media ever day- both nations who have repeatedly called for cooperation and friendship with the USA. If it were simply belligerent words then we could brush off these childish attacks as mere foolish rhetoric, but sadly these words are backed by extraordinarily dangerous action. From escalating military maneuvers on Russia’s border, to belligerent military expansion in China’s backyard, everywhere one looks, we find the same lemming-like commitment to playing a nuclear game of chicken in the hopes of psychologically breaking the Multipolar Alliance.
However, as China’s former Ambassador Cui Tiankai recently stated,
“China and the USA need to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII and join hands to confront our common enemies in the new era.”
I couldn’t agree more.
As the Ambassador invoked the spirit of Lincoln citing the martyred President’s beautiful insight: “the best way to predict the future is to create it”, I think it’s wise to revisit the two opposing global policy options the USA had available to it at the turn of the last century while the Civil War hero William McKinley still presided in the office of the presidency in 1901.
At this crucial moment in world history, it was still undetermined whether America would hold on to its anti-imperial traditions or slip into the trap of a new imperial identity.
Monroe Doctrine or Empire?
As Martin Sieff eloquently laid out in his recent article, President McKinley himself was a peacemaker, anti-imperialist of a higher order than most people realize. McKinley was also a strong supporter of two complementary policies: 1) Internally, he was a defender of Lincoln’s “American system” of protectionism, internal improvements and black suffrage and 2) Externally, he was a defender of the Monroe Doctrine that defined America’s anti-imperial foreign policy since 1823.
“After fifty years the United States has, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own.
That the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
That by involving itself in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States would destroy its own reason of existence; the fundamental maxims of her policy would become, then, no different than the empire America’s revolution defeated. It would be, then, no longer the ruler of itself, but the dictator of the world.”
America’s march is the march of mind, not of conquest.
Colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them”.
It was an aging John Quincy Adams whom a young Abraham Lincoln collaborated with in ending the imperial Mexican-American war under Wall Street stooge James Polk in 1846. When Adams died in 1848, Lincoln picked up the torch he left behind as the London-directed “proto deep state” of the 19th century worked to dissolve the republic from within. The foreign policy conception laid out by Adams ensured that America’s only concern was “staying out of foreign imperial entanglements” as Washington had earlier warned and keeping foreign imperial interests out of the Americas. The idea of projecting power onto the weak or subduing other cultures was anathema to this genuinely American principle.
A major battle which has been intentionally obscured from history books took place in the wake of Lincoln’s murder and the re-ascension of the City of London-backed slave power during the decades after the Union victory of 1865.
On the one hand America’s role in the emerging global family of nations was being shaped by followers of Lincoln who wished to usher in an age of win-win cooperation. Such an anti-Darwinian system which Adams called “a community of principle” asserted that each nation had the right to sovereign banking controls over private finance, productive credit emissions tied to internal improvements with a focus on continental (rail/road) development, industrial progress and full spectrum economies. Adherants of this program included Russia’s Sergei Witte and Alexander II, Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, France’s Sadi Carnot, and leading figures within Japan’s Meiji Restoration.
On the other hand, “eastern establishment families” of the USA more loyal to the gods of money, hereditary institutions and the vast international empire of Britain saw America’s destiny tied to an imperial global partnership with the Mother country. These two opposing paradigms within America have defined two opposing views of “progress”, “value”, “self-interest” and “law” which have continued to shape the world over 150 years later.
William Gilpin vs Alfred Mahan: Two Paradigms Clash
A champion of the former traditionally American outlook who rose to the international scene was William Gilpin (1813-1894).
Gilpin hailed from a patriotic family of nation builders whose patriarch Thomas Gilpin was a close ally of Benjamin Franklin and leading member of Franklin’s Philosophical Society. William Gilpin was famous for his advocacy of America’s trans continental railway whose construction he proselytized as early as 1845 (it was finally begun by Lincoln during the Civil War and completed in 1869 as I outlined in How to Save a Dying Republic.
In his thousands of speeches and writings, Gilpin made it known that he understood America’s destiny to be inextricably tied to the ancient civilization of China- not to impose opium as the British and their American lackies were want to do, but to learn from and even emulate!
In 1852, Gilpin stated:
“Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the “Chinese constitution” viz. the “patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire”. The political life of the United States is through European influences, in a state of complete demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about the United States”.
With Lincoln’s 1861 presidential victory, Gilpin became Lincoln’s bodyguard and ensured the president survived his first assassination attempt en route to Washington from Illinois. During the Civil War, Gilpin was made Colorado’s first Governor where he successfully stopped the southern power from opening up a western front during the war of secession (applying Lincoln’s greenback system to finance his army on a state level) and winning the “Battle of Glorieta Pass”, thus saving the union.
After the war Gilpin became a leading advocate of the internationalization of the “American system of political economy” which Lincoln applied vigorously during his short-lived presidency. Citing the success of Lincoln’s system, Gilpin said:
“No amount of argument will make America adopt old world theories… To rely upon herself, to develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within her territory- this is and has been the policy of the USA from the time of Alexander Hamilton to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days”.
Throughout his speeches Gilpin emphasizes the role of a U.S.-Russia alliance:
“It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2 or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence”
And seeing in China’s potential the means to re-enliven the world- including the decadent and corrupt culture of Europe:
“In Asia a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause, but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life and European culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.”
In opposition to the outdated British controls of “choke points” on the seas which kept the world under the clutches of the might of London, Gilpin advocated loudly for a system of internal improvements, rail development, and growth of the innate goodness of all cultures and people through scientific and technological progress. Once a global system of mutual development of rail were established, Gilpin stated “in the shipment of many kinds of raw and manufactured goods, it will largely supersede the ocean traffic of Great Britain, in whose hands is now carrying the trade of the world.”
Gilpin’s vision was most clearly laid out in his 1890 magnum opus “The Cosmopolitan Railway” which featured designs for development corridors across all continents united by a “community of principle”.
Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road today, Gilpin stated:
“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”
Mahan Derails America’s Anti-Imperial Identity
Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) represented an opposing paradigm which true American statesmen like Lincoln, Secretary of State James Blaine, William Seward, President Grant, William Garfield, and McKinley detested. Sadly, with McKinley’s murder (run by an anarchist ring with ties to British Intelligence) and the rise of Teddy Roosevelt in 1901, it was not Gilpin’s but rather Mahan’s worldview which became the dominant foreign policy doctrine for the next 120 years (despite a few brief respites under FDR and JFK).
Mahan is commonly credited for being a co-founder of modern geopolitics and an inspiration for British imperial grand strategist Halford Mackinder.
Having graduated from West Point’s naval academy in 1859, Mahan soon became renowned as a total failure in actual combat having crashed warships repeatedly into moving and stationary objects during the Civil War. Since reality was not his forte, Mahan focused his post-war career on Ivory tower theorizing gushing over maps of the world and fawning over Britain’s power as a force of world history.
His “Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 published in the same year that Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan Railway (1890) was a total break from the spirit of win-win cooperation that defined America’s foreign policy. According to the Diplomat, this book soon “became the bible for many navies around the world” with the Kaiser of Germany (now released from the influence of the great rail-loving statesman Otto von Bismarck whom he fired in 1890) demanding all of his offers read. Later Teddy Roosevelt ordered copies for every member of Congress. In Mahan’s book, the geopolitician continuously asserts his belief that it is America’s destiny to succeed the British Empire.
Taking the British imperial definition of “commerce” which uses free trade as a cover for the military dominance of weak nations (open borders and turning off protectionism simply makes a people easier to rob), Mahan attempts to argue that America need not continue to adhere to “outdated” habits like the Monroe doctrine since the new order of world empires demands America stay relevant in a world of sea power and empire. Mahan writes: “The advance of Russia in Asia, in the division of Africa, in the colonial ambitions of France and in the British idea of Imperial Federation, now fast assuming concrete shape in practical combined action in South Africa” demands that the USA act accordingly.
Attempting to refute the “outdated habits” of rail development which consume so many foolish statesmen around the globe, Mahan states: “a railway competes in vain with a river… because more facile and copious, water traffic is for equal distances much cheaper and because cheaper, more useful”. Like those attacking today’s Belt and Road Initiative, the power of railways is that their returns are not measurable by simple monetary terms, but are rather QUALITATIVE. The long-term construction of rail systems not only unite divided people, increase manufacturing and industrial corridors but also induce closer powers of association and interchange between agriculture and urban producers. These processes uplift national productive powers building full spectrum economies and also a culture’s capacity for creative thought.
The attempt made to justify sea traffic merely because “larger amounts of goods can be shipped” is purely quantitative and monetary sophistry devoid of any science of real value.
While Gilpin celebrates the successful awakening of China and other great nations of the world, in the Problem of Asia (1901) Mahan says:
“It is scarcely desirable that so vast a proportion of mankind as the Chinese constitute should be animated by but one spirit”. Should China “burst her barriers eastward, it would be impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependant upon a firm hold of the Hawaiian islands by a great civilized maritime power.”
Mahan’s adherence to social Darwinism is present throughout his works as he defines the political differences of the 3 primary branches of humanity (Teutonic, Slavic and Asiatic) as purely rooted in the intrinsic inferiority or superiority of their race saying:
“There are well recognized racial divergencies which find concrete expression in differences equally marked of political institution, of social progress and of individual development. These differences are… deep seated in the racial constitution and partly the result of the environment”.
Mahan goes onto restate his belief that unlike the superior Teutonics “the Oriental, whether national or individual does not change” and “the East does not progress”.
Calling China a carcass to be devoured by an American eagle, Mahan writes:
“If life departs, a carcass can be utilized only by dissection or for food; the gathering to it of the eagles is a natural law, of which it is bootless to complain… the onward movement of the world has to be accepted as a fact.”
Championing an Anglo American alliance needed to subdue and “civilize” China as part of the post-Boxer Rebellion, Mahan says
“of all the nations we shall meet in the East, Great Britain is the one with which we have by far the most in common in the nature of our interests there and in our standards of law and justice”.
In case there was any doubt in the minds of Mahan’s readers as to the MEANS which America should assert its dominance onto China, Mahan makes clear his belief that progress is caused by 1) force and 2) war:
“That such a process should be underlain by force… on the part of outside influences, force of opposition among the latter themselves [speaking of the colonial European monarchies racing to carve up China in 1901 -ed] may be regrettable, but it is only a repetition of all history… Every step forward in the march that has opened in China to trade has been gained by pressure; the most important have been the result of actual war.”
A Last Anti-Imperial Push
The chaos induced by the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion of 1899 which spread quickly across China resulted a heated battle between imperial and anti-imperial forces in both Russia and the USA. Where Transport Minister Sergei Witte who spearheaded the development of the Trans Siberian rail line (1890-1905) tried to avoid military entanglement, McKinley was busy doing the same.
The boxers soon attacked the Manchurian rail connecting Russia to China by land and Witte succumbed to pressure to finally send in troops. The reformers of China who attempted to modernize with American and Russian assistance under Emperor Kuang Hsu and Li Hung Chang fell from power as total anarchy reigned. The outcome of the Boxer chaos involved the imperial powers of France, Germany and England demanding immense financial reparations, ownership of Chinese territory and mass executions of the Boxers.
While McKinley is often blamed for America’s imperial turn, the reality is just the opposite.
The Spanish-American war begun in 1898 was actually launched unilaterally by Anglophilic racist Theodore Roosevelt who used the 4 hour window he had while Undersecretary of the Navy (while the actual Secretary was out of Washington) to send orders to Captain Dewey of the Pacific fleet to engage in a fight with the Spanish over their Philippine territories. McKinley had resisted the war hawks until that point but found himself finally bending to the momentum. In China, McKinley, like Russia’s Sergei Witte worked desperately to reject taking territory resulting in great fears from the British oligarchy that a U.S.-Russia alliance led by McKinley and Witte was imminent.
The assassination of McKinley on September 18, 1901 catapulted Mahan-loving Vice President Teddy Roosevelt into high office, who enmeshed America into a new epoch of Anglo-American imperialism abroad, a growth of eugenics and segregation at home and the creation of an independent police state agency called the FBI.
“Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations.”
In Russia, the 1902 Anglo-Japan Treaty led to the disastrous Japan-Russia war of 1905 which devastated the Russian navy, ended the political career of Sergei Witte and threw Russia into chaos leading to the fall of the Romanovs (Czar Nicholas II was the last statesman occupying high office that this author is aware of to have actively promoted the Bering Strait Tunnel rail connection in 1906. It wasn’t until FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace met with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 that the idea resurfaced once more).
While the “open door” rape of China was attempted by the Anglo-Americans, a fortunate rear guard maneuver orchestrated by another follower of Abraham Lincoln named Sun Yat-sen resulted in a surprise overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the institution of the Republic of China with Sun Yat-sen as the acting President.
While Sun Yat-sen sided with Gilpin and Lincoln in opposition to the Mahanists on the issue of rail and industrial development (illustrated in his extraordinary 1920 International Development of China program), the intrigues that sank the world into World War I made any hopes of this early development of China impossible in Sun Yat-sen’s lifetime.
Today’s Belt and Road Initiative, and strategic alliance established between Russia, China and Iran has re-awoken the forgotten vision of William Gilpin for a world of cooperating sovereign nation states. Do western nations still have anything moral enough within their citizens or nationalist leaders capable of reversing their own plunge into chaos long enough to accept a Russia-China-US alliance needed to revive McKinley’s American System or will we slip ever further into a new World War?
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All images in this article are from TCP unless otherwise stated
The Clash of the Two Americas
Vol. 1 & 2
by Matthew Ehret
In his new two volume series The Clash of the Two Americas, Matthew Ehret introduces a new analysis of American history from the vantage point that the globally-extended supranational shadow government that managed the British Empire was never fully defeated and has acted within the USA itself since 1776 as a continuous multi-generational fifth column managing every significant event and assassination of American presidents for the next 250 years.
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“The WHO Review and Why it Matters to You?” was written by Abir Ballan and published by PANDA. It is a must read by anyone who is interested in public health, the global COVID-19 WHO policies – that almost all nations followed, and the full extent of the corruption by WHO/global leaders and governments. The review also lists out what should have been done instead. The full document can be accessed by the link below:
This review empowers you with key information to help you assess the WHO’s candidacy as an authoritative global public health organization. It provides background information on public health and pandemic management principles as previously agreed upon by this branch of the United Nations. The PANDA analysis will allow you to evaluate the soundness of the WHO-recommended response to Covid-19 and MonkeyPox, and to determine how faithfully the WHO followed its own previously developed recommendations. It goes on to summarize the assumptions underlying their Covid-19 recommendations, followed by a summary of the final recommendations.
Finally, it discusses possible influences on the WHO’s decisions and direction, and suggests actions you may take to safeguard your own personal and national health sovereignty from the power which this international organization has developed and has been exerting on all of us.
My brief synopsis/compilation is below:
The WHO was founded in 1946 and had some basic core principles, that were completely ignored during the COVID outbreak. This image is a compilation of the constitution of the WHO:
The next image (below) is are from the planning documents for influenza and related pandemic diseases in 2019.
These recommendations were based on an analysis of the scientific literature. What actions the WHO chose to recommended during COVID were almost a complete deviation from the previous pandemic development plans which it had developed and endorsed. Of course, the questions which come to the mind of any who confront the almost complete reversal of previously recommended policies are “Why?” and “Who was behind this remarkable reversal?”
Obviously, the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) deployed during the Covid-19 pandemic are not in line with earlier the 2019 WHO pandemic management recommendations.
This review then goes through all the “new” data that shows that lock-downs, masks, universal vaccination, school closures, etc. are all based on either fabricated, poor quality studies or non-existent research. These sections are detailed and nicely summarized.
The issue of lethality of the virus and how WHO has falsely made it appear as if the virus is more deadly than it actually was, even with the original strain – is also discussed in detail.
Using images and tweets from the WHO website – the review makes the case that the WHO has been corrupted, but does so without making a single specific accusation. The images let the WHO’s own words and deeds speak. The impact factor of these images is significant. One such example is below:
The conclusion of the document lists out what might have been done differently.
The document is comprehensive, well referenced and worth reading. Consider doing so and sharing with friends, colleagues and even politicians.
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Template letter to politicians or government representatives
Dear [insert name],
As a [representative of the people in government/ member of parliament], you are committed to serve the people and ensure that their best interests are at the heart of all public policy.
The WHO-recommended response to Covid-19 was largely followed by most countries. This highlights how far-reaching the WHO’s influence is on local governance and, as a consequence, the impact of its recommendations on people’s lives and livelihoods.
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“We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in world history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.
Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the COVID-19 “pandemic”.
The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.
More than 7 billion people worldwide are directly or indirectly affected by the corona crisis.
The COVID-19 public health “emergency” under WHO auspices was presented to public opinion as a means (“solution”) to containing the “killer virus”.
If the public had been informed and reassured that COVID is (according to the WHO definition) “similar to seasonal influenza”, the fear campaign would have fallen flat. The lockdown and closure of the national economy would have been rejected outright.”
Prof. Ivaylo Grouev: It is my great pleasure to have professor Chossudovsky, who agreed to meet at his wonderful home and to discuss something which we describe as global order or rather “global disorder” or as I put it a few months in one of my publications – hysteria before multipolarity. So, I would like to start if you don’t mind with one of your best-selling books “Globalization of poverty” which became sort of bible for my course in globalization. Essentially you are responsible for 10,000 to 12,000 students to read your book and write you a book review. I remember vividly one chapter from your book “Policing States Through Loan Conditionalities”. In this context I would like to ask if you believe that this event which we had two years ago (Covid 19) is a continuation of the same policy of structurally adjustable programs?”.
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky: Well, let me say I am delighted to have the opportunity of this dialogue on the important subject, namely the crisis, which is affecting the world, in fact, this Corona crisis but I think the question you asked is that in many regards what is happening today, is part of a historical process and I wrote that book about more than 10 years ago.
Iv.Grouev: 2001 actually.
Chossudovsky: Well, actually the first edition came out in 1997 the first and there was a second edition in 2001, but the thing is you mentioned the issue of conditionality now the ad hoc conditionalities which were imposed on countries as part of a neoliberal agenda that meant IMF missions would go into the countries negotiate, come up with an agreement and they would impose what was called strong economic medicine and what we are witnessing is a crisis which mistakenly identified as a public health crisis. It is not a public health crisis, the crisis creates a public health crisis, but if we look at the logic and these economists have failed to understand it. Is that on March 11, 2020, there were instructions via the World Health Organization to 193 member states of the United Nations to literally” close” their economy. Now of course it did not happen exactly in one way, it was applied in different ways in different countries, but the main principle of that was one the confinement of the labor force on health grounds, in other words to set so-called to save lives which it did not save lives you can find the labor force and you instruct the various entities of various national economies to deal. Well, in some cases it is close down but with limitations but when you apply these measures at a global level inevitably what you have engineered is the most serious economic, social, and political and world history.
Iv.Grouev: Okay in this context I would like to add something, you mentioned 193 countries, I think it were actually 192 countries, there was one country which did not follow that instruction. It was a relatively small European country, called Belarus. Now my question, I want to reiterate my previous points: “Do you believe that with the IMF and World Bank (you’ve been quite amazingly describing in your book in the 1980’s and 1990’s these supra national agencies like IMF and World Bank) in this case, in fact are bypassing the elected national governments therefore, we are entering to unshattered territory of the post Westphalia nation-state system.
Chossudovsky: Well, I mean the procedure at the decision-making level is very complex for an entity such as WHO which incidentally is controlled by financial interests, and it is in large part private, it is not strictly an intergovernmental organization, but the instructions came from the financial establishment and they used the Covid 19 as a pretext. There were 44,000 so-called positives cases worldwide out of China, for population of 6.4 billion people outside China. There were several stages: there was the freezing of air travel which came immediately on January 31st, 2020, when President Trump froze travel with China but that led to subsequent stages where air travel was destabilized and transport was destabilized and then you had in the month of February 2020 a major financial crisis which was justified with something of the other of 1,076 Covid positive cases, and that was when the director general of WHO, announced the pandemic and he says situation is very, very serious, we have to control it. The windows are closing and so on and of course that same day the stock markets collapsed. Now he has 1,076 cases out of China!
Iv. Grouev: To reiterate my point Michel, now we are in a kind of really very unshattered territory because essentially national governments are becoming much less powerful in terms of being able to maintain social cohesion, they are no longer responsible for public health strategies Do you believe that just like at the beginning of this conversation regarding your book “Globalization of Poverty”, are these structural adjustment programs affecting the capacity of national governments to actually maintain political order?
Chossudovsky: Well, what I think is unfolding, is that this decision to close down more than 190 countries, of course with some exceptions, was a decision which was bypassing the nation-state was taken at the upper echelons of the financial establishment. It meant that, they had to have control over decision-makers, in other words, politicians, health officials at different levels in these 190 countries. It’s a very complex decision-making process but essentially, you’re right that the leaders of the nation-states have been bypassed and the shots are being called by very powerful interests under the guise of the World Health Organization. Now it is very clear that there was absolutely no justification with a view to saving lives when those measures were implemented and unfortunately there is not a single economist that I know which has analyzed the relationship between the Covid 19 crisis and economic variables and economic financial variables. The consensus among economists as well as social scientists is to say that it is the virus that contributed to economies chaos and financial meltdown when in fact was a very carefully engineered process. The virus does not affect economic variables and there is no invisible hand but economists have a tendency to look at market mechanisms, they do not understand necessarily that those markets are manipulated, and this was a means to manipulate market worldwide.
Iv.Grouev:This is exactly what happened in 2008 – without any “invisible hand” of the market that was a very “visible hand” coming from Wall Street with the creations of these exotic CDOS which created an incredible economic chaos in 2008. I believe 22 trillion dollars of savings disappeared and we had a financial crash. Close to 40 million people lost their jobs, so that was the manipulation of the financial markets, but the solution of the problem, if you remember, was to pump money into the largest financial institutions – the largest banks. The public debt that exploded back in 2008 is nothing comparable to what happened in 2020. Now public debt of the United States is 30 trillion dollars! When I started teaching many years ago, I was concerned about the (US) public debt and back then it was something like 5 or 6 trillion dollars. According to the US debt clock and IMF forecast in less than 7 years the public debt of the United States is going to be 89 trillion dollars which is an astonishing number and the debt/GDP ratio is going to be close to 300 percent. I am not an economist but if I recall correctly if you get 130 -140 percent debt to GDP then basically you have a failed state, you are bankrupt….
Chossudovsky: Well, I think you are right if we compare this situation to 2008 or if we compare it to previous economic crisis going back to 1929, this is by far the most serious economic crisis because it’s also hitting the real sector of the economy and it is worldwide. In one fell swoop on one day instructions are given and it is a form of interference and it’s an act of economic warfare. Now we can analyze who are the architects behind it and we can see the process of enrichment which has occurred because essentially you raise the issue of the debt. Well, the debt is also the consequence of these measures because in a national economy where there is literally a paralysis of basic economies activities, trade, agriculture industry, what happened to the fiscal structure of the states, the government are not getting any tax revenues. There is paralysis and they’re dependent on particularly developing countries, they are dependent on external foreign creditors who come in and also finance the handouts; now I think as far as the airlines are concerned the airlines are bankrupt.
Iv.Grouev: But the problem is that if you don’t have the revenues and obviously because of the latest crisis the middle class not only the United States (because essentially this is the discussion about the global hegemon here), but in European Union, in all OECD’s countries, the middle class has been decimated. So how these national governments continue to provide financing to their social security and Medicare …I don’t know. I don’t want to sound alarmist but there are some discussions about legalizing Euthanasia that was in France, and also here in Canada. If you cannot afford (your) medical bills and if you don’t have, if I quote correctly Trudeau’s government if you can’t have a” decent lifestyle”, I don’t know what he exactly means by ”decent lifestyle”, then you may consider actually euthanasia. How you going to respond to it.
Chossudovsky: Listen, well first when I started looking at these impacts of these policies, right from the outset and I can say that first, there has been a massive concentration of wealth, there’s been creation of mass unemployment and marginalization of the labor force. Of course, this has had an impact on mental health, in some countries we have seen the emergence of famines they are well documented even beyond famines because the confinement of the labor force in some countries let’s take the case of India where a large sector of the urban population is homeless, they come in from the villages they work and …
Iv.Grouev: If I am not mistaken according to the United nations, 2.5 billion people are living in bidonvilles.
Chossudovsky: Precisely the (bidonvilles) are still in some cases their homes. There was a segment in India, there’s a segment of the population and the seasonal workers, what did the Indian government order them to do – he said to go back to their villages. Now they never reached their villages which were several thousand kilometers away and they died, on the road for they had no money. Now these are the kind of realities which people, which journalists do not want to talk about. We had reports from the FAO that famine hit many countries again from official UN sources, and I can say from my own analysis of cases studies that the impacts of this crisis are absolutely devastating and as you mentioned it is not only impoverishment of poor countries which means beyond poverty certainly beyond what I studied in my book of “Globalization of poverty.” There you have a situation of total despair, it’s beyond, it’s poverty and despair, marginalization and morbidity and mortality that’s where the health crisis come in, as well.
Iv.Grouev: You’re right about despair and social collapse, especially in the poor south but if we look from another angle, this crisis was exceptionally lucrative business for some. Every 30 hours we have a new billionaire because of this pandemic. Forbes before pandemic wrote in 2021 reported 4 billion increase in (Bill) Gates worth, obviously involved in this kind of saga. Gates net worth across 2017 and 2018 increased to 4 billion dollars, so, working off a yearly wage 4 billion means Gates would earn $10,959,000 per day that’s $456,000 an hour or 7$,000 a minute $127 per second. So, we are going to live in a different environment as the result of this crisis of 2020. What are going to be the long-term repercussions from a political and economic point of view?
Chossudovsky: Well, I have documented these changes in the process of enrichment which occurred right from the beginning of this crisis, in fact starting in February 2020, and what this means first this process of enrichment which seems without bounds is a means for the financial establishment to literally control the nation state. They are also the creditors of the nation-state and immediately after March 11 lockdown which created, in fact destabilized economic activity but not only economic activity, the whole structures of civil society, as we understand — schools, universities, hospitals, sport events, cultures that was totally destabilized — and the creditors were in fact financing the safety nets, because for the government to endorse, to have the support of the broader population which is affected by this crisis, they had to have payments to unemployed workers to small and medium sizes enterprises that are on the verge of bankruptcy, to airlines which are inevitably bankrupt where they paid off the CEO’s of the airlines and so on. There’s a payment of which goes through the state and the nation-state and its whole fiscal structure now is controlled by creditors and these creditors are also, it is not strictly the IMF and the World Bank and so on. These are instruments of much more complex financial entities. There’s the Blackrock portfolio investment fund or Vanguard, they have a leverage in financial terms of the entire global economy, and what is suggested are the following. First of all the state what we used to call the welfare state is going to be wiped out totally, no more welfare state! That was a project, at least in the Western countries, let’s say developed countries, it was a post-world war to project the development of the welfare state. Based on Keynesians premises initially but with this crisis the welfare state is going to disappear and the whole state apparatus will be privatized. And then, of course what the financial establishment is pushing for, particularly the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum is a visible entity, the actual power structures are in the shadows, but what they are proposing essentially is the structure of global governance, and now global governance is essentially a construct of the financial elites. It was coined by the late David Rockefeller who said global governance is far more effective than the elected government that we have.
Iv.Grouev: Absolutely, this is really a fascinating prospect to see in reality how this “”Brave New World “is going to look like.
Chossudovsky: Well, it’s a totalitarian project.
Iv.Grouev: Of course, and I think again coming from the Canadian perspective, I think you remember this famous statement coming from our current prime minister who mentioned that an ideal manifestation of social order is coming from Asia, namely China, and if we look at it how the Chinese society is functioning these days this is probably not very consistent with the premises of the traditional liberal democracy in the West.
Chossudovsky: Well, I am not entirely, that was a statement made by Trudeau which I think was misleading and mistaken because he was saying that the Chinese have already a system of digital control over their citizens.
Iv.Grouev: Social credit?
Chossudovsky: Yeah, but the social credit in fact, what is unfolding is the contours of a global governance whereby the financial elites would be controlling but they will probably control it via their proxies, but to get back to the quotation of David Rockefeller, he said that global governance as he defined is the alliance between bankers and intellectuals, selected intellectuals of course! Because those intellectuals are there to give some justification to a process which is essentially that is impoverishing the whole population and enriching the smaller….…
Iv.Grouev: This is actually happening right now in Europe in the European Unions as a result of the military operation / war in Ukraine, correct?
Chossudovsky: Absolutely.
Iv.Grouev: I would like to add to our discussion, you’re absolutely right when you mentioned about selected intellectuals and selected media. I don’t know what selected media is these days… It’s essentially a censorship. What it does this “selected media”, to be quite honest, is a very distorted interpretation of what is happening in Ukraine. The narrative goes like that: everything started in February 2022 with the military operation, but in fact, this is not correct. We had a coup in 2014 and after this coup we had 14 000 Ukrainians citizens who have been slaughtered in Donetsk , Kramatorsk, Mariupol, in all these cities and the collective West was not very interested in discussing why the central government in Kiev (after the coup) was using air force, heavy artillery, tanks against the civilian population in Eastern Ukraine, very sizable, actually population – 6.8 million comparable to all Baltic states,(Latvia, Lithuania Estonia) and they were using their army against civilians for 8 years! How are we going to use this example, this current war in Ukraine when we talk about this “Brave New World” presented by selected intellectuals, selected media and selected narratives?
Chossudovsky: Well, I think that we must understand the Covid 19 agenda which as led to economic and social chaos at the world level is intimately related to the geopolitics of warfare in different regions of the world. And I am saying that the areas, the hot spot areas, of course, is the Eastern Europe and Ukraine at the moment on Russia’s border and that has been ongoing even before 2014. it’s NATO and the U.S NATO expansionism to the Russian border that’s one, the second hot spot in the South China sea in the Taiwan straits, it’s the continuous threat against China. The logic is very different to what’s happening of course in Eastern Europe, and then you have, of course, other areas of confrontation which are in the Middle East and specifically Iran is a target and North Korea is a target. The United States has been simulating their military actions in this various region of the world, and so in a sense the war in Ukraine has arrived in the wake of 2 years period of economics and social destabilization and it has also weakened every single country of the planet and it has indebted every single national economy in the planet and its government. What they are now seeking is a consensus which is directed against so called enemies of America which are: Russia and some of its allies but and of course also China, I recall the earlier war games in which were revealed that was several years ago where they had 4 countries which were: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran and they had war games of World War 3 addressed to those 4 countries. Now it’s a bit more complex in the real world, but the thing is that we are now in a situation where all means I said that the Covid mandates is a form of economic warfare, and that is part of the process of warfare since the down of mankind, except it is now taken on a different modality which we did not had in previous wars.
Iv.Grouev: Yeah, but you mentioned quite correctly Russia and China but keep in mind the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Charles Krauthammer quite famously coined (the term) unipolarity , I think he added – ”unipolarity” and then ”moment”, moment is an instant, it is not going to last very long so this unipolarity obviously is an issue for the global hegemon simply because the competitors coming from obviously China and Russia are going to create a very different type of axis of power and the ”tension:” in Ukraine is par excellence (an effort) actually to postpone the creation of this multipolarity especially in the context of much more reassuring (as they call it regional power) Russia, and especially after the creation the BRICS and the Shanghai cooperation agreement.. I want to just add to this discussion a statement coming from a quite ”famous” scholar who predicted the ”End of the History” Fukuyama. Last year in the “Economist” (our viewers are perhaps familiar with this name who famously declared “End of history” and essentially (unipolarity) the only model based on the US interpretation of what liberal democracy is supposed to be!. So, in 2021 Francis Fukuyama said something very different, he said: ”United States it’s not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status nor should it aspire to what it can hope is to sustain with like-minded countries world order friendly to democratic values, whether it can do this will depend on recovering(and then that’s interesting elaboration) sense of national identity and purpose at home.” Isn’t that the (same) language which the previous administration, the Trump administration, proclaimed being the main discourse, going back to the principle of sovereignty and not of the ”benevolent hegemony”. Do you think that this is what we are going to see perhaps in the very near future?
Chossudovsky: Well, listen, I think again Fukuyama is an instrument of propaganda because there’s very little and now that is individual..
Iv.Grouev: Selected individuals.
Chossudovsky: This is absolute nonsense what he says, because he is not doing any kind of analysis of the past configuration of the militarization of Western society and so on, so forth and of the contradictions okay. The contradictions are very important, but we are certainly at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in the world history, but we have to understand the nature of the that crisis. We also have to understand that the possibility that this could lead to nuclear warfare, and I spent many years investigating the issue of nuclear warfare and I know that if you look at recent statements, the US government is saying that the nuclear war is winnable. And they also say that we now have nuclear weapons which are low yield and usable. Now, all this rhetoric because there is no such thing as a low yield. Well, a low yield nuclear weaponis three times Hiroshima as opposed to maybe a hundred times Hiroshima for the strategic nuclear weapons even the use of the low yield nuclear weapon is the avenue to World War 3 and it is the end of humanity. But the thing is that you have to analyze how this new nuclear doctrine of preemptive warfare was initiated in 2001. It was 2001, 2002 with a nuclear posture review and essentially, they started building a new doctrine which went against the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which describe what a nuclear confrontation would result in, and then they said preemptive now, preemptive signifies defensive, it means self-defense. We are using nuclear weapons to defend ourselves and will say, well, you have this mini nuke up to 12 times the Hiroshima bomb and we change the label safe for civilians because explosion is underground quote, unquote. It is a bit like cigarettes, is good for your health you change the label and the dangers are that these concepts then enter into the military manuals they become tenants of US foreign policy and then you have a person like Hilary Clinton says: “Nuclear weapons are on the table” and then you will have somebody else now. The thing is that, very few of US politicians really understand the dangers of nuclear war and they are actually prepared to use nuclear weapons against Russia which has similar capacities, in fact in some cases even more sophisticated. Then, what they have and this is the end of humanity now Fukuyama is a load of bull…. from my standpoint and he is there to sustain some kind of ideological perspective of what is really happening but he does not analyze what is really happening, he does not look at and how policy errors could lead..
Iv.Grouev: He is just an organic intellectual as Antonio Gramsci famously said in his “Prison Notebooks”. He supposes to sell certain concepts…. But you are absolutely right about this new discussion about preemption, and I think it was in 2002 in the National Strategy in the United States when they put it as one of the 4 cardinal principles: The first one is a unilateral approach. The second one is preemption, and this is what they have done in Iraq, if you remember in 2003 before finding any weapons of mass destruction. We have to preemptively attack him (Saddam Hussein) but going forward 20 years in 2022. We have a major crisis in Europe, and it involves one the superpowers, namely the Russian federation and yesterday we had a meeting in Madrid by the NATO member states and I am going to just read, they have 22 points of their kind of declaration at the very end of this meeting, but number 4 is particularly interesting and I would like to have you take on this point. This is what they say: ”We warmly welcome president Zelenski participation in this summit, we stand in fully solidarity with the government and the people of Ukraine meaning one position in this kind of conflict in the heroic defense of their country, we reiterate our unwavering support for Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders extending to, its territorial waters, (what does it mean Crimea is going to be an open question for NATO) we fully support Ukraine’s inherent right to self-defense and to choose it own security arrangement, we welcome effort to all allies engaged in providing support to Ukraine, we will assist them adequately , recognizing their specific situation. This language suggests, in my humble opinion, the firm position of NATO to be actually participant in this conflict, what does it mean?
Chossudovsky: Well, it is not entirely clear as to what decisions were taken but they certainly have opened the door for the participation of members NATO inside, within this war, which was not previously, with support through weapons deliveries and advisory functions and so the fourth facto NATO is already in the war theater but if they start to, if they enter formerly as a part of a NATO operation. Well, the logic then becomes entirely different because in that case they would be directly targeting the Russian federation.
Iv.Grouev: But, according to the National Security Strategy of the Russian federation they also have the same principle of preemption, and this preemption is when we are entitled to use nuclear weapons in case the survival of the Russian state is in danger. So here, the key point coming from the declaration of NATO meeting is when they say :”Allied leaders agree on fundamental shift in NATO’s deterrence and defense with strengthening towards defenses enhanced battle groups in eastern part of the alliance and an increase of the number of higher readiness forces to well over 300 000” . So we are going to see escalation, or we are going to see de-escalation of this crisis, according to you…
Chossudovsky: I think that what the logic of NATO which is ultimately controlled by Washington by the Pentagon is to incite NATO member states to mobilize their conventional war abilities in other words, I don’t think that at this stage they are talking about nuclear war but they have said they are expanding their military capabilities and they also announced in fact even before the Madrid’s meeting that Britain was going to become involved with the deployment of British armed forces within the European space. Now, I think it’s too early to reach any kind of conclusion as to what is going to happen, but this statement obviously is very far reaching, the question is also not so much, the debate which might occur within the European Union but the debate which might occur within the US Congress as to whether they will go along with this. But bear in mind that the history of US sponsored wars has always consisted in promoting their allies to do the dirty work for them, and they have dome systematically to keep a sort of to not necessarily…
Iv.Grouev: During the First World War and the Second World War….
Chossudovsky: Well, second world war, that’s very complex but the US was behind Nazi, Germany. The economic support, the fact that without the United States they would never be able to conduct operation Barbarossa because they needed oil and the oil came from Standard Oil of New Jersey, primarily there was some oil in Romania etc… But it was essentially delivery of oil which enabled the armed forces.
Iv.Grouev: There is a famous quote by Harry Truman when you mentioned operation Barbarossa, he said: “Look if we see Germany winning, then we have to support Russia. if we see Russia, winning then we have to support Germany.” So, this is (their) strategic point of view. Obviously United States is very much keen in keeping its position.
Chossudovsky: But, Harry Truman did not actually understand what was actually ongoing because on the 15th of September 1945, the war department f the United states issued a secret plan which had already been worked on years before under the Manhattan project which is consisted bombing 66 urban areas of the Soviet Union with more than 200 atomic bombs, so that happened less than two weeks after the end of World War II, when both countries United States and Russia were at that stage of the Soviet Union were allies that they already had a plan to destroy the Soviet Union in the immediate wake of the World War II.
Iv.Grouev: Yeah, you are absolutely correct, I would like to add to your statement that actually Churchill was also very keen in expanding the list to, if I am not mistaken, to 220 sites to be (precise), but they did not have the capacity ….
Chossudovsky: Well Winston Churchill was proposing, I think it was in April 1945 he has a proposal to go after the Soviet troops in Germany, and that plan was immediately abandoned because it was unfeasible but it was discussed at the highest levels. What Winston Churchill did not comprehend is that the Second World war was also a war against the British Empire, and it was the British empire completely very ….
Iv.Grouev: I am very happy that you mentioned that because it was just months after that when Harry Truman declared the so-called Truman doctrine, he mentioned the issue of Greece and Turkey. Well, he said to the world – you know the Brits are bankrupt they don’t have money, and you know they have to say goodbye to their British Empire and by the way, we, the United States we are the only country capable of providing intelligence, financial support and capital to these regimes in Turkey and in Greece. And number 3, – security of Turkey, Greece and everywhere in the world is going to be linked directly to the security of the United States. Therefore, just months after the end of the war, he just declared publicly the ”Dead Sentence” of the British empire which was the purpose of the…
Chossudovsky: Absolutely, and I mean there was another element it was the whole dynamics of the Marshall plan and the Bretton Woods institutions and in fact the whole Marshall plan was precisely to create a credit better relationship with the countries which were the object of World War II, including of course Germany, Italy and so on, and it was called reconstruction but in effect was ultimately to instate the dollar, the nominated economy and the mechanism of debt which were imposed in the wake of World War II. So, I think in a sense, World War II was a means to destroy what was previously called the Prussian empire but it was also a means to destroy the British Empire and all the other empires. The Italians, well, all the European countries and, of course Japan, which had an imperial project and that was the avenue to this unipolar world. It was the destabilization of the Spanish empire which came much earlier, of course, to a third Reich and the only remaining power which confronted the United States or at least was the Soviet Union ultimately. The whole post war years were built around destabilizing this and then ultimately then taking control of various parts of its zone of influence not strictly in Eastern Europe but also within what was the Soviet Union I mean the various republics many of which of course are now allies of the West and several are member of NATO. So I think what its unfolding it is being implemented by installing worldwide proxy regimes and you will have proxy regimes in countries like, Japan which are big. US orders European union but let’s say, let’s take the powerful countries of the world okay, but certainly Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Brazil, all of these countries are actually controlled through a very, it’s not a straightforward process but they have either been the victims of regime change or they have installed proxy regimes and so on, and the irony is that, in many cases the US will use so-called leftist groups.
Iv.Grouev: To go back to the British empire and its former prime Minister Churchill. I think I actually like his quote, I think it was in 1946 or something like when he said : “Future empires are going to be the empires of the mind”,the “empires of the mind”? so essentially if you control the superstructure if you control the realm of ideas, you know that it will be very easy to manipulate, to control societies these days (unfortunately for someone like myself when I was very young, I was a journalist). The media failed civil societies and in general, journalists are supposed to be the “healers” of society, they have to identify the problems, they have to offer solutions if they find the right source of expertise, of course. But the media these days is heavily censored, I don’t know what the solutions to this climate of 24/7 propaganda might be, which essentially is making particularly young minds very reluctant to use their independent and critical thinking. What might be your take about that?
Chossudovsky: It’s very clear that the so-called mainstream media are dominated by a handful of large corporations worldwide they’re very much related to the financial establishment to the military-industrial complex. And it is clear they have now become an instrument of propaganda and that’s instrument of propaganda is there to enforce the lies of the government and also the lies of the pharmaceutical companies and so on, so forth. They are very powerful structures but it’s clear that without the mainstream media’s propaganda apparatus their agenda would collapse like a deck of cards. In other words we have statements which are made by the governments to justify their mandates, their covid vaccine mandate for instance knowing that the vaccine is resulting in mortality and morbidity worldwide and we have official data to support that statement but the media will always present something else. And I think of course, the main issues is to dispel the lie where in a sense we are in a inquisitorial environment it not quite the Spanish inquisition, which lasted 300 years of the French inquisition but it is a society where lies become the truth and once the lies becomes the truth it is very difficult to move backwards. So that essentially, we have to block this media propaganda and I can say that is no easy task because independent media is not necessarily what you’re doing with global research.
Iv.Grouev: Some of my students would like to be little bit more well informed and to have a balanced understanding about whatever, we may call or frame, as reality, what you may suggest to these young minds?
Chossudovsky: Well, I think that we have to build a grassroots movement, it’s not simply a question of pundits and authors and scientists making statements, we have to build a consensus which confronts the media and governmental lies, and we have to have an understanding of the workings of this crisis, we have to understand how the establishment controls the institutions of civil society how they manipulate. It said that the truth is a powerful weapon or instrument in its own right but to undertake the formation of a vast social movement at the grassroots level we have to break down the divisions within respective societies and we are not dealing with a left-right, we are not dealing with political parties there, we have to build a movement which encompasses all sectors of society and we are not necessarily looking at labor rights, we are there also to establish links between small and medium-sized enterprises member of the military at the grassroots level public sector employees, decision makers, scientists intellectuals, air pilots and university professors and students
Iv.Grouev: So essentially nothing new – it should be organic, and it should be bottom-up social….
Chossudovsky: Well, but the problem is that if you look at social movements and the landscape of social movements today, most of them are funded by Rockefellers and Soros and out.
Iv.Grouev: They have been co-opted obviously…
Chossudovsky: And then we have prominent leftist intellectuals which will say, which will make statements to the fact that NATO is making the right decision, I won’t get into the details, but we have to build cohesive movement which integrates different areas of civil society and it’s across the land.
Iv.Grouev: But again, it comes with the understanding, you have to identify the problem, you have to have the right sources of information and obviously mainstream media is not the right choice, so what might be the solution?
Chossudovsky: Well, this is a very difficult question because you have an anti-war movement which endorses the Covid narrative, you have political scientist which an economist that do not understand the logic of the lockdown and other words , if we are to reveal the truth as a means of establishing a grassroots resistance , I would say to simplify matters we have, to first of all repeal the covid narrative it’s a lie and it’s the most serious lie in world history and we have all the documents to prove that it’s a lie.
There is no pandemic! I have spent 2 years working on that, and there is no pandemic and the reason there is no pandemic is that they use the PCR test and the PCR test does not identify the virus and it does not distinguish between Covid 19 and other infections. So, there is no pandemic and the definition of the Covid 19 as an infection is not a threatening disease, we have to, I don’t want to get into the complexities of that but that’s very important.
Secondly, the vaccine is a biological weapon, it is a crime against humanity and we have ample evidence that this vaccine has resulted in an upward movement of mortality and morbidity right from the inception, we have confidential documents of Pfizer which corroborate the fact their data is resulting in injuries and mortality, and when it’s applied worldwide, we are talking about genocide being refuted, but they havebe carefully documented. And if I have to say that Covid mandates, including the lockdowns, the confinements as well as the vaccine are invalid totally invalid, there is proof of that and there is proof that the decision makers are applying something which contrary to the welfare state is in in fact resulting in a process which some people call genocide, and I think that is a correct statement we have to look at the various facets of that lockdown triggers the collapse of the global economy. and ultimately diversified in the state system. And the vaccine is another instrument, which is presented as a solution to the crisis when in fact, it is not a solution at all, it simply leads to a wave of mortality and morbidity and then the 3rd element is, understanding war warfare and the fact that what is happening in Ukraine is leading us to the possibility of a World War III scenario, despite the fact that at the very early period of this crisis in the month of April there were preliminary peace negotiations which were held in Istanbul under the auspices of the Turkish government and there was an agreement and then there was sabotage of those peace negotiations, so that is very important to build a consensus regarding the need for peace negotiations particularly in view of the fact that militarily the Russians have won this war and all the analysts accept that . But what we have now seen following the NATO summit in Madrid is a situation where they want to go one step further in the process of escalation and then as you pointed out, it is also the collapse of international diplomacy of interchange between nation states are literally controlled by powerful financial interests either through bribes and payoff’s and so on but ultimately also the grassroots in these individuals countries must take control of their governments and reinstate a workable system of democracy, which is based on sovereignty and that also means taking very drastic measures. I think the debt must be dismissed as a criminal undertaking, those debts have to be wiped out..
Iv.Grouev: I think probably the most valuable concluding remark is to have regain sovereignty, absolutely. Thank you so much for this wonderful discussion and thank you for your time and your hospitality.
Chossudovsky: Thank you.
***
For comprehensive reading on the worldwide corona crisis and the engineered economic depression, below is link to Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s e-Book:
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***
On July 12, the UN Security Council extended the authorization for humanitarian aid to cross through Bab al Hawa on the Turkey-Syria border for another six months. The US and allies had wanted a one-year extension, but Russia vetoed it. The US, UK and France abstained on the six-month approval, while all others supported it.
There is much misinformation and deceit about the Bab al Hawa crossing in Idlib province, Syria. First, Western media rarely mention that after the aid crosses the border, it is effectively controlled by Syria’s version of Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS).
Second, they fail to explain that HTS hoards much of the aid for its fighters. When Aleppo was liberated by the Syrian Army, reporters found large stashes of medicines and food in their headquarters that were set aside for the use of the militia. Third, HTS makes millions of dollars by taxing the aid that it distributes to the rest of the population under its control.
Source: Dissident Voice
In May 2018, HTS was added to the US State Department’s list as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). HTS’s 15000 fighters are able to manipulate the numbers by including their names and the names of their accompanying families as civilians, thus receiving huge amounts of aid from UN agencies such as the World Food Program. It is rarely mentioned that thousands of these civilians are not Syrian. They are Uyghurs and Turkmen supporters of Al Qaeda, from Turkey, China and elsewhere.
The Bab al Hawa crossing is also an entry point for weapons and sectarian fighterssmuggled in with the copious aid. This is not new. In 2014, legendary journalist Serena Shim reported how she witnessed fighters and weapons entering Syria using World Food Organization trucks at Bab al Hawa. She was killed in Turkey two days after her report.
It is claimed over 4 million persons are in Idlib. That is a huge exaggeration. Before the conflict began in 2011 there were 1.5 million. When sectarian militants seized control, many civilians fled for Aleppo or Latakia. Even including fighters coming from other areas, the population is much LESS than before the conflict. The number of civilians in Idlib is grossly inflated for political and economic reasons.
The media also fail to mention that the aid across Bab al Hawa serves only the Al Qaeda-controlled area (the northern green section of the map) and not the rest of Syria. While western states send massive amounts of aid to this minority, the vast majority of Syrians suffer with little aid. Moreover, they are under the extreme US “Caesar” sanctions designed by the US to crush the economy by outlawing the Syrian Central Bank, make it impossible for Syrians to rebuild infrastructure, and punish Syrians and anyone who would trade or assist them.
Russian, Chinese and other representatives on the UN Security Council have pointed out that aid to Syria should be going through the UN recognized government in Damascus. Aid to civilians in Idlib should be distributed via the Syrian Red Crescent or a comparable neutral organization.
Providing aid through Bab al Hawa via hostile Turkey to an officially designated terrorist organization should be prohibited. It is a clear violation of Syrian sovereignty. In December 2022, when the authorization again comes to a UN Security Council vote, the crossing may finally be shut down. At that point, the legitimate aid to civilians in Idlib province can be delivered from within Syria as it should be.
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***
How many times have I seen an American expert pointing to a satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula at night and remarking that the striking difference between the darkness that envelops North Korea and the bright lights that illuminate South Korea, as well as Japan, symbolizes the insularity, the oppressiveness and the pathetically backward economic state of the North. The obvious point is that the brightly lit South is a model of progress, of technology, of democracy and of free markets.
This contrast between the light of progress and democracy and the darkness of dictatorship and ignorance has a certain aesthetic perfection that easily feeds the imagination of viewers; the narrative is intellectually predigested and it goes down smooth.
In the political debate in South Korea, this narrative is not seriously questioned in the media, among scholars, or among politicians.
The progressive politicians argue that we should engage with North Korea and invest more in such projects as the Kaesong industrial complex so that North Koreans can find opportunities for employment and South Koreans can make profits from the cheap labor and abundant natural resources that North Korea offers.
The conservatives argue that North Korea is a dictatorship and that it threatens South Korea militarily and cannot be trusted. They say that North Korea must first open itself up completely to the international business, and allow complete inspections of all its nuclear facilities.
But the assumptions made by the progressives and conservatives in South Korea do not differ fundamentally. Both are assuming that South Korea is more advanced and that a future North Korea should look more like South Korea where citizens enjoy a far greater GDP, drive cars, live in spacious houses with televisions and smartphone and produce K Pop hits that sell around the world.
Of course, it would be ludicrous to make an argument that North Korea is a model for others. The closed environment and the repressiveness of the government is no myth.
But as someone who has lived in South Korea for twelve years, I have been forced to admit, despite my hesitancy, that there is something seriously wrong here too. Whether it is the high suicide rates, the polluted air, the ruthless competition in schools, the deep alienation felt by young people, the extraordinary dependence on imported food and imported fuel or the tremendous numbers of the elderly who live in poverty, there are deep, deep shadows that cross all of South Korea.
There are two important points that are often buried in the shadows in the official narrative about North and South Korea. We need to look at North and South Korea from the ground up, not from high up in space.
I have heard from numerous South Koreans who had the opportunity to visit North Korea that they had a strong sense that something vital had been lost in South Korea when they walked through the small vegetable markets in North Korea, observed the modest décor in the clean-scrubbed hotels and encountered the unadorned and unpretentious behavior of the citizens of Pyongyang.
Such South Korean friends noted that women in North Korea, although they may not have the luxuries of the South, are also not under the same pressure to wear makeup and to compete with each other in consumption. There is not the demand for brand clothing.
South Koreans detect decency in the manner in which people treat each other on the street in Pyongyang. Many are reminded of the Korea of the 1960s and 1970s when there were far closer relations in South Korea between family members, and between members of the community. For that matter, the absence of automobiles, of youth addicted to cell phones, of endless advertising that drives people to buy things that they do not need or want for the sake of profit—all these aspects of North Korea evoke an original Korean culture that has been lost.
But there is an even more important issue that has been completely buried in the media of South Korea, and in our discussions about North Korea.
All the discussion by “experts” by journalists, about North Korea is based on issues involving economic growth, GDP, standard of living, production and consumption. According to these standards, North Korea is helplessly far behind advanced nations, and South Korea in particular. That means that South Korea can be the big brother and teach the North Koreans how to be “advanced” and “modern.” But all those terms are subjective and ideological in nature. The assumption made in South Korea is that wasteful consumption of resources is a positive and that it should be actively encouraged. It is assumed that it is progress to live in bigger, overheated homes and to own automobiles and smartphones.
But there is no scientific evidence, whatsoever, that underlies these assumptions. They are as accurate as saying that praying to the moon will bring rain or using leeches to drain blood will cure the diseases.
In fact, research shows that such behavior patterns focused on consumption can have profoundly destructive effects on society as a whole including deep alienation and increased levels of suicide and substance abuse. That is to say that the assumptions about what North Korea should become, and what South Korea has been successful at, are based on ideology, on unfounded assumptions and on a myth of modernity. The result is that South Koreans are convinced that they are successful even as profound stress and frustration sweep through families.
When we approach this image of the Korean Peninsula at night using a scientific approach, this image tells a profoundly different story; the lights and shadows are completely reversed.
The overwhelming opinion among experts based on objective scientific analysis, not based on ideology, or profit, or warm fuzzy feelings, is that humanity faces an unprecedented crisis in the form of global warming (climate change) and that at the current rate we will be lucky if we manage to avoid extinction as a species.
There are numerous reports and books on the catastrophic changes in our climate, and the resulting extinctions taking place already. We can already see in Seoul that mosquitos manage now to survive until December, and often flowers are found blooming into January. That is just the beginning of what will be rapid, life threating changes.
If we let things progress as this rate, the oceans will warm, and grow acidic until fish are extinct, deserts will spread until much of Earth is uninhabitable and South Korea, hopelessly dependent on imported food and on the export of fossil-fuel intensive products, will be devastated
So what should South Korea do if it wants to survive?
The answer is quite clear. It should start looking more like North Korea in terms of energy consumption and frugality.
It should stop wasting energy and be dark at night, the way it has been for tens of thousands of years.
It should get rid of all the useless lights on apartment buildings, end those electrified signs on commercial buildings, reduce dramatically unnecessary internal heating and end the wasteful design of high ceilings and concrete, glass and steel exteriors found in its buildings. It should go back to the traditions of frugality and simplicity that characterize much of its history.
South Korea should be dark at night. Its citizens must be aware of the tremendous cost of keeping its cities illuminated, in terms of the expense of importing fuel, in terms of the terrible pollution generated by subsidized fossil-fuel power plants, in terms of increasing global warming that is destroying the future for our children.
But there is a deeper, hidden secret. We have been fed a myth that Korea must grow, must advance, must consume and consume more to be modern, to be advanced, to be recognized as being special, as opposed to the unwashed masses of “developing countries.”
Becoming modern has been assumed to be the highest priority for generations. But what is modern if consuming fossil fuels and wasting natural resources is destroying our ecosystem and damning our children?
The numerous problems that exist in North Korea are quite serious, but from the perspective of climate change, South Korea should be benchmarking North Korea’s low-consumption, rather than planning to vastly increase consumption and build highways and expensive wasteful apartments.
Many people may find that my words sound odd, even nonsensical. It is so obvious to many that South Korea’s modernity and its high level of consumption is a badge of honor, a sign that it is a member of advanced nations. Consumption considered as a major factor in calculating the state of the economy? If people consume less (and that means consuming less energy) then the growth rate will go down.
But if we are facing extinction because climate change, who cares what stupid things the newspapers tell us about consumption? We must stop subsidizing fossil fuels immediately. Those numerous lights that burn all night in South Korea do not represent cultural advancement, but rather a dark and dangerous game of living for the moment by sacrificing the futures of our children.
There are infinite meaning and depth, spiritual and personal experience, to be derived from talking with family and friends, from reading books, writing letters and essays, walking in the woods or putting on plays and musical performances for each other. It requires almost no and does far more for us than a jungle of smartphones, lit up Starbucks Cafes, or throw-away plastic toys and cups that we are given, whether we want them or not.
As we think about the future of a unified Korean Peninsula, we must first move beyond this dangerous concept that being modern and advanced is a priority. We should ask ourselves rather what does it mean to be human? How do we live a meaningful and fulfilling life and contribute to society?
I do hope that North Koreans can live in a freer way than they do today and that they can eat more nutritious food. Yet they will not find any nutritious food in the convenience stores that have taken over South Korea and destroyed the family-owned stores that once gave citizens economic independence.
But I also hope that South Koreans can be set free also from the invisible chains that bind them to mindless consumption, that force them to consume increasing amounts of coal (heading in the opposite direction of almost every country in the world) and that leave so many feeling deeply alienated from friends and from family because of a brutal culture of endless competition.
The move toward unification must be about freedom for North Koreans and South Koreans. How unfair it would be if we assumed that only North Koreans are entitled to be free.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Seoul, South Korea, as seen from Namsan Mountain. strogoscope / Flickr
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***
Is Russia about to leave the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) – and possibly other UN and international bodies?
This topic has received little or no coverage by the western mainstream media.
According to Russian Duma’s Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy, the Russian Government is evaluating the possibility to withdraw from a number of UN agencies, most visibly WHO and WTO which they consider do Russia more harm than good. This may be particularly the case with WTO which Russia only joined in 2012 after 8 years of negotiations, because WTO allows countries under the western sanctions program to increase tariffs on Russian goods way above the WTO guidelines.
WTO removed Russia’s “most favored nation” status in response to its invasion of Ukraine, which led several countries to suspend Moscow’s trade preferences and impose tariffs in excess of what WTO rules typically allow. WTO, created under the Charter of the UN, is not to take political decisions in favor, or against a member of its 164 member-organization.
Under pressure from the US and European governments, hundreds of western businesses, from Adidas, McDonald’s, and Pepsi to BP, Renault, British American Tobacco, Starbucks and many many more, have pulled out of Russia for fear of direct western sanctioning. McDonald’s said its cost for leaving Russia was equivalent to US$ 1.3 billion. Is the sacrifice worth it?
Never mind, it is contributing to anti-Russian propaganda – which in itself, contributes to the ever-mounting western pressure for “regime change”.
As to WHO – while the agency pretends being non-political, in reality it is just the contrary, only political. WHO, under pressure from Bill Gates and the US, never approved the Russian Sputnik V as an official “vaccine” – like Pfizer, J&J, Moderna and all the western fake vaxxes.
WHO joined the west in condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine, never looking at the reasons that may have prompted the war, and never looking into the health impacts of 8 years bombarding and aggressing the Donbas Region by the Kiev regime with the help by Neo-Nazi Azov Battalions.
While no war is justified, analyzing the reasons that led up to war might help negotiating for peace and preventing other wars.
Nor did WHO evaluate independently the damage on Eastern Ukraine’s health facilities and inhabitants since the beginning of the war on 24 February 2022. Because most, if not all, attacks on Donbas health facilities, as well as outright killing of civilians Kiev claims and the west confirms, were Russian inflicted, when in fact the very Ukraine government carried out “false flags” against their own people.
It would behoove a neutral WHO to analyze causes of mass death, disease and injury reports. Not doing so and instead simply supporting the western version is a serious breach of WHO’s Constitution and role in determining the cause of the deteriorating state of a society’s wellbeing.
No war is justified – including economic wars (sanctions), wars with fear as the chief weapon, and wars destroying food, causing famine and death. The UN Human Rights Commission did not speak out against the WEF’s Great Reset nor did the UN. In fact, on June 13, 2019, the UN signed a Strategic Partnership Framework with the WEF, outlining areas of cooperation, notably the infamous UN Agenda 2030.
By doing so, the 193 member-UN body not only lost its luster (if it still had any), but more importantly its role as Peace Arbiter in the world, and as a defender of justice and human rights. The WEF is an insanely wealthy NGO at the service of Big-Big Finance and individual oligarchs.
The Great Reset which was in the making long before the Partnership Framework Agreement with the UN, is the ultimate control mechanism for the world’s resources and for humanity.
Russia is not only by far the world’s largest country, surface-wise, but arguably also by far the wealthiest in terms of natural resources. Russia is, therefore, in the crosshairs of western empire forces, including and foremost the WEF and its handlers.
Hence, the Russian Foreign Ministry is right when claiming that many of the UN institutions are working against the interests of Russia — which is a good reason to exit them.
Looking back at recent history may bring some insight as to why Russia, and especially President Putin, is so much slandered and outright hated by the west – of course, 24/7 supported by Western-corrupted media propaganda.
The West would have loved Boris Yeltsin (10 July 1991 – 31 December 1999) to stay in power into the 21st century. Yeltsin allowed the West – mainly FED, IMF and World Bank – ravage and privatize Russia’s state-owned economy during his ten-year tenure.
Perhaps out of remorse for his leniency towards Western depredation of his country, Yeltsin was looking out for a strong and intellectually brilliant successor. In August 1999, he appointed the then little-known KGB Officer, Vladimir Putin, as Prime Minister. It was a clear sign that President Yeltsin was preparing Putin for leading the Kremlin.
Nobody in the West suspected Putin to bring Russia up from her knees to a full world power position. And that in less than two decades.
Russia, close ally of China and active member of Eastern integration, will not only survive the pressure but will thrive under the slandering pressure.
Leaving nefarious UN agencies may give other think-alike countries which wanted, but didn’t so far dare, to take such drastic action, a signal that they too may be better off not belonging to this Western-corrupted international network, including the European Union.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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***
Irresponsible use of new and very advanced technologies by the military is life-threatening
Engineered viruses can be used to edit genes in a target species, including in a heritable manner
“Insect Allies” is a DARPA program designed to genetically modify mature plants in a live environment by releasing insects infected with genetically modified viruses
Some scientists, although on board with genetic modification in principle, are questioning DARPA’s motives and raising concerns
Researchers in Singapore, as well as DARPA in the U.S. have developed “remote-controlled insects”
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The craziest crazies have somehow escaped the asylum and installed themselves in high positions of power. Insane, they are coming up with one bad idea after another and barking orders at us, mad shine in their eyes and saliva coming out of their mouths. They are crazy — and in charge of institutions, schools, newspapers and armies.
They are running around with their high-tech pistols filled with high-tech poisons and their little sadistic CRISPR scissors. They are crazy — yes, they are crazy — and they are killing us slowly, and sometimes not so slowly. Welcome to the future where toxicity is health and the old crazy is the new normal. We are not crazy — they are crazy — and they have been from the beginning. And in 2020, they stopped pretending. What now?
Project “Insect Allies”
You may think that you have seen it all but here is a great idea. Take some insects, infect them with a genetically modified virus designed to genetically edit mature plants in real time, and release them. Release them into wild and repeat, “it’s safe and effective.”
Sweet idea, right? Well, DARPA thought so, and so in 2016, they started a project called “Insect Allies” that is designed to do that. (This is a different project from Oxitec’s controversial release of GM mosquitos.) DARPA’s official story is that in the name of national security, a good way to protect the American crops from potential threats is to genetically modify them using GM viruses as genetic modifiers and insects as flying syringes. And that they just need to test it!
In a 2016 release titled, “DARPA Enlists Insects to Protect Agricultural Food Supply,” the agency stated:
“A new DARPA program is poised to provide an alternative to traditional agricultural threat response, using targeted gene therapy to protect mature plants within a single growing season.
DARPA proposes to leverage a natural and very efficient two-step delivery system to transfer modified genes to plants: insect vectors and the plant viruses they transmit. In the process, DARPA aims to transform certain insect pests into ‘Insect Allies,’ the name of the new effort.”
“‘Insect Allies’ three technical areas — trait design, insect vector optimization, and selective gene therapy in mature plants — layer together to support the goal of rapidly transforming mature plants to protect against natural or intentional agricultural disruption without the need for extensive infrastructure. The foundational knowledge and generalizable tools developed under the program could also support future agricultural innovation.”
Some suspicious peasants may foolishly wonder: What will happen in the short term and in the long term to the people who eat those plants, to the people and animals possibly bitten by those insects, to the wild insects who mate with the infected insects, and to all other life in the area and beyond that may get impacted? What ridiculous nonsense. Here is the answer, peasant: No one knows — and importantly, no one cares. Any more questions?
The first Insect Allies funded paper, titled, “Multiplexed heritable gene editing using RNA viruses and mobile single guide RNAs,” was published in 2020. Please note the word “heritable” in the headline. The paper stated:
“Mutant progeny are recovered in the next generation at frequencies ranging from 65 to 100%; up to 30% of progeny derived from plants infected with a virus expressing three sgRNAs have mutations in all three targeted loci.”
DARPA never disclosed if they tested this program outside of greenhouses.
Objections From the Scientific Community and Even the Pre-2020 Media
Actually, it turned out that a few scientists care — and at least during the pre-COVID era, they have objected.
Here is a short 2019 educational animation made by the German Max Planck Society (formerly the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History). Their main objection is the potential weaponization of the technology, they don’t mind the gene editing in principle.
But our standards for health and dignity are so low that this objection is better than no objection, and even this limited kind of objection and questioning DARPA takes some courage (even though it’s unknown if they would have objected in 2020).
And here is what Vice (!!) had to say in 2018 about the outcry from scientists:
“In the editorial, published on Thursday in Science Magazine, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and the University of Freiburg in Germany, and France’s Université de Montpellier, requested more transparency and opportunities for public discussion regarding the project and its implications.
‘Easy simplifications could be used to generate a new class of biological weapons,’ a press release reads, ‘weapons that would be extremely transmissible to susceptible crop species due to insect dispersion as the means of delivery.’”
What did DARPA say?
“In an email to Motherboard, a DARPA spokesperson rebutted the thesis of the Science Magazine piece and denied any intent to deploy technology developed through Insect Allies in an offensive setting.
‘We created Insect Allies specifically to develop technology that can deliver positive, protective traits to plants to help them survive unanticipated and/or fast-moving agricultural threats,’ the spokesperson wrote. ‘We see it as a critical addition to the national security toolkit, part of a layered strategy to preserve the security of the food supply.’”
“The Insect Allies program is a collaboration between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Environmental Protection Agency, US Army, and other agencies. According to a DARPA slide presentation, the goal of Insect Allies is to “stably transform multiple mature crop plants in a complex, multi-species plant and insect community with enhanced trait(s) of agricultural interest” by mid-2021.”
Newsweek covered it, too. In a 2018 article, they said that “the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been accused of trying to create a new class of biological weapons that would be delivered via virus-infected insects.”
“Scientists with DARPA are looking at introducing genetically modified viruses that can edit chromosomes directly in fields — these are known as horizontal environmental genetic alteration agents (HEGAAs). The DARPA program is using the principles of HEGAAs but, unlike traditional methods of dispersal — like spraying fields with them — it wants to spread them through insects.”
The researchers raising the alarm asked specifically why, for agricultural use, it was so important to use insects as gene modification vectors, given that spraying was available. In response to Newsweek at the time, DARPA denied all allegations of military use and reiterated that the project’s aim was to protect American crops. In 2022, another paper was published where researchers expressed their concerns:
“The hazard and exposure potential of an HEGAA approach can vary greatly depending on the viruses, vector insects, target plant species, and genetic modifications selected and their effects. However, at the current stage of development, the most critical aspect is the compromised reliability of the HEGAA approach, owing mainly to its complex design with three different species …
They are a cause for concern because of the numerous effects that can increase the potential for hazard and exposure. Combined with the current inadequacy of corrective measures, it is clear that there is an urgent need for early analysis of whether HEGAA approaches can be inherently contained and controlled by their specific technology design.”
What are HEGAAs? According to Wikipedia, the term “genetic alteration agent” first appears in 2016 in relation to this project, in a “work plan by DARPA describing a tender for contracts to develop genetically modified plant viruses for an approach involving their dispersion into the environment. The prefixing of ‘horizontal environmental’ to the former to generate the acronym HEGAA was first used in the [aforementioned] 2018 scientific publication.”
“Agents such as pathogens, symbionts or synthetic protein assemblages that can be acquired through horizontal transmission in the environment can potentially be engineered to become HEGAAs. This would be achieved using biotechnology methods to confer to them the capacity to alter nucleotides in the chromosomes of infected individuals through sequence-specific editing systems like CRISPR, ZFNs or TALENs.
No known infectious agent naturally has the capacity to gene edit eukaryotes in a manner that can be flexibly targeted to specific sequences (distinct from substantially random natural processes like retroviral integration).”
“By definition, HEGAA induced gene editing events are intended to occur outside of contained facilities such as laboratories or hospitals.
While genetically modified viruses with CRISPR editing have been successfully used as research tools in laboratories or for gene therapy in clinical settings, all gene editing events are intended to physically occur within contained facilities. By contrast, HEGAAs for their intended mode of action relies on inducing gene editing events that occur largely or exclusively in the environment.”
There are two types of HEGAAs: somatic and germline. Somatic HEGAAs are not inheritable, while germline ones “impact somatic cells and also cell lineages from which germline cells can be ultimately generated (e.g. sperm, oocytes, pollen, ovules, zygotes or seeds).”
When it comes to the “Insect Allies” project, it’s a gray area. The original assumption was that “Insect Allies” involved somatic HEGAAs but the aforementioned 2020 paper shows that the genetic changes in plants were heritable. Here is more detail:
HEGAAs are viruses which have been genetically modified to gain a capacity to edit the chromosomes of a target species (e.g. plant or animal) when intentionally released into the environment
The word “horizontal” comes from their ability to be transmitted in the environment by infection
The word “environmental” comes from the intention for these genetically modified viruses to be dispersed into the environment
The words “genetic alteration agents” comes from the capacity to alter the chromosomes of a target species. This might be through causing a random mutation or introducing a new DNA sequence
The specificity of HEGAAs is dependent on two things (1) the range of species the genetically modified virus can infect AND (2) the presence of the suitable DNA sequences in the plant chromosomes of cells that become infected
An example of an insect dispersed viral HEGAA which disrupts a specific plant gene is illustrated in this figure below
All in all, this informational Max Planck Society affiliated website, whose purpose is “to contribute towards fostering an informed and public debate about this type of technology,” is one of the best sources of information on HEGAAs and the “Insect Allies” project. Incidentally, this particular website covers self-spreading vaccines as well. Here is a little video promo of the Euroscience Open Forum 2020:
And here it the actual 2020 panel (some of it is already outdated but very educational):
“Project Coast”
One of the panelists above mentions “Project Coast” is South Africa — and while it is not directly related to “Insect Allies,” it kind of is.
“Project Coast” was a toxin and bioweapon development project that took place in South Africa during the apartheid era. As a part of that project, scientists developed covert assassination tools and methods of covert sterilization, intended against the black population of South Africa. A warning? No really, a warning?
Back to DARPA
Here is more from the MPS-affiliated informational website:
“Even as the halfway point of the Insect Allies program approaches, DARPA has chosen not to publicly describe in its response to our Science article what is the basis of their having concluded that a developmental pathway exists that circumvents the early proliferation of biological weapons (described by the black development path in the accompanying image).
This is in addition to explaining in detail why their developmental plan is easier to develop than alternative paths (described by the red paths). As our Science article makes clear, this is central to justifying the wisdom of embarking on the development of HEGAAs, and many other types of GM viruses.
Over the next five years, only a minority of anticipated CRISPR-inspired innovations will involve intentional environmental releases (see recent NAS report). HEGAAs, and some other GM viruses, have the property of an early-stage biological weapons proliferation risk that is not shared with most other proposed techniques (including avant-garde ones like gene drive).
Choosing not to clearly address these obvious issues of global concern, as detailed in the Science article, makes their current model of develop first and explain later an especially unwise path, particularly for this insect-delivered program, that in many ways appears to be designed to get carried away.”
Living Foundries
To provide a backdrop for the “Insect Allies” project, here is a brief look at the DARPA “Living Foundries” bioengineering program, launched in 2010.
DARPA’s Living Foundries program aims to “enable adaptable, scalable, and on-demand production of critical, high-value molecules by programming the fundamental metabolic processes of biological systems to generate a vast number of complex molecules.”
“Programming Biological Systems”
In order to orient ourselves in this attempted new normal, we need to understand the mindset. Please note the use of term “engineer” all throughout this benevolent-sounding presentation:
DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office
DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office was founded in 2014. Here is an informational video on, in their own words, “DARPA’s way of thinking about biological technology to defend the homeland.”
“DARPA has enjoyed a strong relationship with Silicon Valley since the early 1960s, working with innovators to lay the groundwork for new industries built around Agency investments in semiconductors, networking, artificial intelligence, user interfaces, programming, materials, microsystems, and more.
[We knew that!!!] Biotech is now emerging as a breakthrough opportunity space and it represents an area that is ripe for fresh collaboration among DARPA, the nation’s top researchers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs.”
Here are some of the listed topic of interests:
Building with Biology Using Engineered Living Materials, which focused on programming DNA to grow materials to specifications at the sites where they are needed and developing living materials that are responsive to their environments and can heal when damaged;
Staying on Target: Minimizing Off-Target Effects in Gene Editing, which focused on making personalized medicine feasible by conducting rapid, low-cost screens of an individual’s likely responses to tailored gene therapy;
Creating a Pandemic-free World, which focused on DARPA’s vision of distributed healthcare that combines technology to detect pandemic outbreaks, rapidly identify and grow potent antibodies to fight infectious disease, and response tools for creating a pandemic firebreak;
Immunity on Demand [emphasis mine], which focused on rapidly developing and delivering nucleic-acid-based protections against infectious disease;
Failing Faster: De-Risking the Path to FDA Approval, which focused on using organ-on-chip technology to better predict the efficacy of new drugs in the development pipeline;
A Real-time Window into Your Body’s Chemistry, which focused on tissue-integrating in vivo biosensors to continuously monitor physiology over the long term to predict the onset of disease;
Reinventing Psychiatry Using Neurotechnology, which focused on using implanted, closed-loop neural systems to record and stimulate the brain to treat neuropsychiatric illness;
MindFlight: Your Brain Will Be Your Pilot Today, which focused on direct neural control of complex physical systems;
Memory Enhancement in Everyday Life, which focused on non-invasive electrical and auditory stimulation technology to enhance memory by facilitating the neural replay process
Is it me, or is it that the crazies are running the asylum?
Remote-Controlled Insects
If you think that you have now seen it all, well, you haven’t. Here is a video of scientists in Singapore torturing live insects and turning them into cyborgs. Horrifying.
“Through a DARPA-funded program, scientists at the University of California invented a tiny rig that connects to an insect’s brain and flight muscles. Once implanted, the device takes over the insect’s body, turning it into a remote control cyborg capable of receiving flight commands wirelessly from a nearby laptop.”
It’s all good and fun (not really, more like a horror movie), and we could close our eyes — but will it be fun if the emboldened crazies try to remote-control your children?
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***
The prevailing narrative has hitherto been that Western unity on Ukraine is an unprecedented display of solidarity with so-called “democratic principles”, yet now none other than a leading American official just discredited that interpretation of events.
CNN, which cannot realistically be described as so-called “Russian propaganda”, dropped a major bombshell earlier this week when it quoted an American official who said that Europe’s energy crisis will “be a major test of European resilience and unity against Russia.” Amos Hochstein, the presidential coordinator for global energy, reportedly said that during his latest trip to the continent. This statement flies in the face of everything that the US-led Western Mainstream Media’s (MSM) ongoing information warfare campaign against Russia has claimed since the start of the UkrainianConflict.
Screenshot from CNN via OneWorld
The prevailing narrative has hitherto been that Western unity on Ukraine is an unprecedented display of solidarity with so-called “democratic principles”, yet now none other than a leading American official just discredited that interpretation of events.
The reality is now setting in that this so-called “unity” was never anything more than illusion, one that was imposed upon the EU by its American overlord after it ordered its proxies to counterproductively sanction Russia on that basis. No thought was placed into the long-term consequences of that development, which are only now becoming apparent.
Some European countries now realize that they committed economic suicide and might even be forced to confront riots in the coming future. About that scenario, this was officially shared by the Austrian security chief during his latest interview with local media, but other state representatives elsewhere across the EU have echoed similar concerns over the preceding five months. It’s therefore entirely possible that some of their decisionmakers might ease more of the anti-Russian sanctions that the American hegemon coerced them to impose earlier this year.
This is actually already happening to an extent too as evidenced by the EU Council recently allowing Europeans to conclude energy deals with Russia over the transport of such resources to third countries. That just goes to show that Western unity on Ukraine has already noticeably weakened and it therefore can’t be discounted that this trend will continue, hence Hochstein’s panicked trip to Europe this week. America is afraid that even more so-called “progress” on supposedly “isolating” Russia will be reversed across the coming months ahead of what many expect to be an unprecedented energy crisis this winter.
It’s precisely for this reason that Zelensky demanded that his country’s partners help him complete his anti-Russian campaign by that time since he knows very well that he probably can’t depend on them to continue supporting him to the extent that they have thus far after that point. Even former British Prime Minister Johnson and NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg earlier expressed concern about so-called “Western fatigue”, which has since begun to influence the US as proven by CNN’s latest bombshell report.
The average Westerner must be pretty confused after witnessing just how dramatically the official narrative on the conflict has shifted in recent months. This process began around May when it became undeniable that Russia was continuing to make slow but steady progress in the Battle for Donbass, after which the MSM produced a deluge of reports warning about howbadly Kiev was losing there. Still, they insisted that the West was united in supporting that crumbling former Soviet Republic, yet now even that claim has been debunked by none other than CNN after it cited Hochstein to that end.
Nevertheless, nobody should expect that America won’t do something to arrest this trend since it threatens to weaken Washington’s restored hegemony over the EU if it continues unfolding. It’s unclear exactly what it might do, but everyone should brace themselves for something or another in the coming weeks. The lack of Western unity on Ukraine was entirely predictable, which is why it’s so surprising that the US itself seems to be caught completely off guard by it. If it isn’t effectively addressed, it might end up resulting in some major European countries like Germany throwing in the towel and dumping Kiev.
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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 frequent contributor to Global Research.
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***
Could Boris Johnson be tagged as the next Secretary General of NATO? That’s what a somewhat surprising new report in The Telegraph suggests, indicating that “Ukrainian and Tory MPs support idea of PM being a possible candidate, though sceptics suggest he would likely be greeted with a French veto.”
Jens Stoltenberg, who has been NATO chief since 2014, is expected to step down when his current term ends in September 2023. The recently scandal-plagued Johnson, perhaps looking to distract the public and media from the so-called “Partygate” ordeal at home, has already in six months of war visited Ukraine twice – and remains among the most outspoken hawkish Western leaders in frequently voicing condemnation of Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Stoltenberg’s own term was extended reportedly as a result of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Other former UK prime ministers have been courted for the post in the recent past, such as David Cameron and Theresa May.
High-ranking Tories on the powerful defence select committee – Richard Drax and Mark Francois – have publicly backed Johnson for the position after he leaves UK office, with Drax telling the Telegraph, “Any distinguished Brit would be a great choice. If indeed that is what Boris Johnson wants to go and do, of course I would support that.”
And Francois highlighted his unwavering ‘anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine’ position:
“People will probably argue over Boris Johnson’s legacy for years – but one thing which is clearly inarguable is his absolutely staunch support for Ukraine in the face of Russian barbarity,” he was quoted in the report as saying.
This is also why he would likely receive support from the US and (though only with a symbolic voice given it’s not in NATO) from the Zelensky government in Ukraine as well.
Rambo Honorary citizen of Odessa Boris Johnson visited the Ukrainian military training in England pic.twitter.com/EYeJNdDHXq
In such a scenario as Johnson’s candidacy for the top NATO post being advanced, however, France would likely veto it, given Emmanuel Macron has in many ways taken a very different approach of constantly seeking a path forward to get the warring sides to the negotiating table.
Macron has himself come under fire from some corners of Europe for holding over a dozen phone calls with Russia’s Putin since the war began.
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Featured image: Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Ukraine in April, during which he allegedly discouraged Zelensky from pursuing peace talks in Turkey. Photo: Boris Johnson
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***
Beyond the damage in Ukraine, the war also has significant casualties in the rest of Europe as the continent is losing its most competitive energy supplies, compromising the region’s manufacturing edge and accelerating an inflation wave that through higher energy costs will severely affect the wellbeing of its population this coming winter.
Europe has been trying for years to diversify its energy sources but it did not have a comprehensive contingency plan to counteract the impact of abruptly severing access to Russia’s oil and gas since the beginning of the Ukraine war. European politicians have grossly exaggerated the substitution potential of other energy sources (like LNG) and are facing the need to accept alternatives that not too long ago were considered politically unpalatable, like the reopening of coal production in Germany.
How this gross miscalculation took place? Clearly, the European leadership has been unable to foresee the true economic consequences in Europe and beyond of the economic war unleashed against Russia. One explanation for the boldness and self-confidence surrounding the European standing against Russia at the beginning of the war was a strong belief that the combination of anti-Russian sanctions and military support to Ukraine would cause a significant weakening of Russia’s political, social and military standing leading to its defeat. This explains for instance bold statements that the war would only be solved in the field as it was confidently said by the EU’s foreign affairs representative back in March.
It can be argued that the wrong assessment on the war outcome has its roots in faulty US-British intelligence which forecasted Russia’s defeat through economic warfare and, therefore, a limited impact of sanctions on Europe. This not being the case has now made European leadership to scramble for solutions. Meanwhile, the political fallout is already taking place, with Britain and Italy’s prime ministers being the most visible casualties as victims of domestic political events unleashed by their own Russian sanctions. More importantly, it doesn’t seem that the remaining European leadership (led by von der Leyen, Macron and Scholz) is willing to change course without losing significant credibility.
On the other hand, dissenting and unorthodox European political views are sounding louder, as Hungarian prime minister Orban’s recent speech where he boldly mentioned that Russian sanctions and arming Ukraine have failed, Ukraine can’t win the war, the more weapons go to Ukraine the more territory it will lose and that the West should stop arming Ukraine and focus on diplomacy.
At the heart of Europe’s current troubles is its inability to balance its economic and security interests with enough autonomy to be able to look after its own interests. European ambiguity is not new, has its roots on the post-World War II architecture and the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in relation to Ukraine it manifested in its ineptitude to enforce the Minsk agreements that clearly offered a Russo-Ukrainian peace path but were unable to be enforced by France and Germany due to relentless US and Ukrainian pressure.
It seems that only significant political alterations in the European countries that matter -namely France, Germany and Italy- will allow a meaningful change of course from the current path of confrontation with Russia and ultimately economic self-destruction. Otherwise, any political initiative towards solving the war will be left in the hands of Russia and the United States and, if that is the case, any lasting agreement will not have European interests at heart. It would be tragic that a core European problem like the Ukraine war is finally solved through the dealings of an Euro-Asian and an American power.
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Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa. He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting across emerging markets.
Featured image is from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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***
Iran’s revenues from exports of oil and condensate surged by 580% during the first four months of the current Iranian year that begins on March 21, Iranian Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance, Seyyed Ehsan Khandouzi, said on Tuesday.
Between March 21 and July 21, international crude oil prices have largely held above $100 per barrel after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russian oil exports upended global trade flows.
“Due to the increase in oil exports and our new budget’s currency conversion rate, we saw a 580% increase in the treasury’s income from the export of oil and condensate in the first four months of this year,” the Iranian finance minister was quoted as saying by local news agency IRNA.
Overall, Iran’s budget income jumped by 48% in March-July compared to the same period of 2021, while government expenditures rose by 16%, the minister added.
“The government was focused on this issue to be able to earn a more stable income. This means that compensating the budget deficit was on the agenda of the government and it was realized in the first 4 months of this year,” the minister said.
Iran’s 12-month inflation rate hit 40% in July, Iranian statistics showed last week. Prices of goods have soared since the government removed some subsidies earlier this year.
Despite the diplomatic impasse over the nuclear deal, Iran has been preparing to rejoin the global oil market. The country has boosted production, as well as exports to its main market, China. If a new deal is reached between Iran and the world powers, the flow of Iranian oil abroad could increase by between 500,000 bpd and 1 million bpd, according to analysts.
China has been the main outlet for Iranian crude oil exports since the U.S. re-imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s oil industry in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the so-called Iranian nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews.
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In late March, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its second month, U.N. agencies began to issue dire warnings regarding the world’s food supply. The war, they said, was pushing food-insecure countries to the brink of a “devastating” hunger crisis, with the combination of brutal fighting in Ukraine and unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia threatening to disrupt as much as a third of the world’s wheat exports. Just two weeks after the war’s start, spot prices for a bushel of wheat skyrocketed from less than $8 to nearly $13.
The World Food Programme said the soaring prices were placing 345 million people at risk of “acute food insecurity,” with an additional 50 million drifting toward a state of emergency — particularly in North Africa, a region that relies on wheat imports from the two nations. Coming on the heels of a supply chain-disrupting pandemic, the situation was a “perfect storm,” as U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in early June.
Since March, the price of wheat has fallen precipitously. As of July 26, a bushel was trading at $9.37, according to the website Macrotrends — a drop of nearly 30% in just over four months. This whiplash-inducing turnaround hasn’t entirely rescued food-insecure countries; prices are still much higher than before the pandemic. But some of the worst-case projections now look far less likely to occur than they appeared in March.
However, the wild fluctuations in wheat prices during the unfolding war have exposed the fragility of the global food system, laying bare the vulnerability of a delicate international trade network and supply chain that can be near-instantaneously upended by conflict and other unforeseen events — including the intensifying impacts of climate change.
And with geopolitical conflict and climate change threatening to disrupt the production of wheat and other staple foods in the 21st century, understanding the links between financial industry profits and world hunger is a necessity.
Western diplomats have been eager to blame Russia’s war of aggression for the jarring rise in wheat prices, but some analysts say the causes are more complicated, blaming unregulated financial speculation for at least part of the recent crisis. Absent reforms to the way food is produced and how prices are set, more shocks are almost certain to be in store no matter what happens in Ukraine.
Russian soldiers guard an area next to a wheat field in Ukraine. Image by manhhai via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Power and grain
The wheat trade has long been associated with the rise and fall of great international powers and the development of national economies. The emergence of the United States as a global economic powerhouse in the 19th century was partly due to a massive boom in wheat production, which in turn fueled the growth of major European cities. And long before Vladimir Putin issued the order to invade Ukraine, Catherine the Great fought the Ottoman Empire for control of its fertile soil, establishing the port city of Odessa as a hub for lucrative commercial wheat exports to Western Europe.
Later, the failure of the Soviet Union’s collective farming schemes led to the socialist nation reaching out to the United States — at that point still the world’s largest wheat producer — to establish trade ties in the 1970s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, Russia underwent one of the most significant agricultural transitions in modern history, going from a net importer of wheat to the world’s largest exporter.
Russia maintains that position today, with nearly 40 million metric tons of its wheat sold on world markets in 2021, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures. Its closest competitors that year were the European Union and the U.S., at 30 million and 27 million metric tons, respectively, with Canada and Australia not far behind. Ukraine is also one of the world’s largest exporters, selling about 19 million metric tons between July 2021 and June 2022.
Most of the 800 million tons or so of wheat produced globally is consumed at home in the countries where it’s grown. Every year, around a quarter of that total is exported to other countries that consume more wheat than they grow, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. Together, Russia and Ukraine accounted for nearly 30% of those exports.
After1991, Russia underwent one of the most significant agricultural transitions in modern history, going from a net importer of wheat to the world’s largest exporter. Image by oec.world.
While wheat production in the world has steadily increased over the past two decades, helping contribute to an overall decline in global food insecurity, in recent years, unpredictable weather patterns — increasingly linked to climate change — have made harvests less reliable.
Despite the war in Ukraine, the USDA projects that overall global wheat production this and next year will be about the same as last year. But droughts in the U.S. and India damaged wheat harvests this year, and one 2019 study said that similar droughts could happen in 60% of the world’s wheat-growing areas in the coming years as climate change ramps up.
“We are facing highly unpredictable and likely precipitous kinds of ruptures rather than it just being a little bit hotter every year,” said Sophia Murphy, executive director of the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “Food has always been highly weather dependent.”
More recently, commercial distribution networks that move wheat and other foodstuffs from one point on the globe to another were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The recent rise in prices is linked to the pandemic and was to do mostly with transportation issues,” Murphy said. “So bottlenecks emerged as systems shut down in various ways and countries lost their purchasing power, with ports and ships being affected by the lack of personnel. There was a whole shock to the global distribution system we rely on.”
Global wheat production by nation. Image by Farmdoc Daily.
The start of the Ukraine-Russia war pushed those trends into crisis, which was made worse by an increase in the cost of fertilizer resulting from economic sanctions against Russia — the world’s biggest exporter of fertilizer. In a nine-day period after Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border, wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade shot up by 54%, demonstrating how critical the two countries have become in world food markets.
In North Africa and the Middle East, which together imported nearly 85 million metric tons of wheat in 2020/21, the rise in wheat prices has placed enormous pressure on low-income households. Bread provides 30% of the calories consumed in Egypt, for example, and 80% of its wheat is imported from Russia and Ukraine. While rural populations further south in Africa often grow and consume wild rice and other grains like sorghum, bread is a staple food in many African cities, making their residents vulnerable to global wheat market price hikes.
“Twenty-five years ago it wouldn’t have been the same because [Russia and Ukraine] wouldn’t have been as important to the global supply,” Murphy said.
But some analysts say the startling speed and extent of the price increase in March can’t be explained by the war alone, nor supply and demand on agricultural markets. While U.S. politicians have taken to describing rising food and other commodity costs as the “Putin price hike,” some observers see a more familiar hand also at the lever: Wall Street.
Gambling on conflict, climate change, and starvation
While most people understand the bite of higher food prices, few recognize the role the financial industry plays in setting those prices. Spot prices for all commodities — iron, oil, and also wheat — are heavily influenced by what’s called the “futures market.” And that market, some experts say, is in turn shaped by bets Wall Street places on commodity prices in the form of “swaps,” most of which are held by their overseas subsidiaries and are largely unregulated.
Healthy futures markets are necessary for the production and distribution of commodities. By locking in a price at a set date for delivery of goods, producers know what they’ll make in exchange for their work and investment. If the actual price is higher than the price in the futures contract, their counterparty gets to pocket the profit.
In the case of wheat, this means farmers know they’ll be able to sell their harvest at a profit and then plant the next crop.
But since the 1990s, a parallel, opaque market for swaps has emerged alongside the futures market. Worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, commodities swaps don’t involve the delivery of actual goods and are in essence a form of gambling on their future price. But because of its huge size, the swaps market can exert a gravitational pull on commodity futures markets, pushing consumer prices higher than supply and demand would normally dictate.
“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” said Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
For more than a decade, Greenberger has been sounding the alarm over a loophole in the Dodd-Frank Act, a U.S. law that covers Wall Street trading, that he says allows U.S. banks to dodge regulations on swaps, as long as they’re sold by their overseas subsidiaries and aren’t legally guaranteed by the parent institution.
According to Greenberger, a major factor in price inflation, including for wheat, is this unregulated speculation, which can rake in huge profits for banks at the expense of global consumer well-being. Typically, spot prices for a commodity are linked to its price on the futures market, meaning that when the latter soars, so do the prices that consumers and business have to pay.
“Commodity markets are supposed to be hedging markets for people who are dealing with the commodity involved,” he told Mongabay. “In the case of wheat, it would be farmers and people buying wheat. But if we looked at it, there would be banks in there with no interest in what the price of wheat is, writing swaps and controlling this price.”
Greenberger hasn’t been alone in noticing the disconnect between market fundamentals and the price of commodities like wheat this year. After Russia first invaded Ukraine, mania in futures markets reached such a fever pitch that at one point some farmers couldn’t sell their harvests because wheat buyers refused to pay prices they felt were out of touch with reality.
Wheat supply and use across the world in 2021-22.
“Increased financial investment on grain futures markets coincided with a sharp increase in the price of grain, far beyond what supply and demand conditions would indicate in that moment,” explained Jennifer Clapp, a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and professor at the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “While it is hard to say precisely what impact financial speculation has had on the markets, it almost certainly played a role pushing price trends beyond what the prevailing supply and demand conditions would indicate.”
Reporting for The Young Turks earlier this year, Jonathan Larsenmade the case that exploitation of this loophole is a major factor pushing up commodities prices across the board, from oil to other foodstuffs. If true, it would mean that the Ukraine war isn’t entirely to blame for a potential rise in global hunger and starvation — Wall Street might be simultaneously worsening the crisis and profiting from it to boot.
“It’s a very distracted time,” Greenberger said. “And it’s too easy to say the war in Ukraine has unbalanced all these markets, [or that] supply chains and the ports are shot, and that there’s a supply and demand reason for these prices going up. My own best guess is anywhere from 10% to 25% of the price, at least, is dictated by deregulated speculative activity.”
While the role that commodity swaps have played in driving the price of wheat higher is hard to quantify, there’s no question that the underlying cause is Russia’s invasion, along with COVID-19-related supply chain issues and other factors.
“The war in Ukraine is very important, and does explain much of the increase in prices we saw between February and May of this year,” said Patrick Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “However, the weather, global demand, exchange rates, and a host of other factors have played a role as well.”
Wheat sacks in a warehouse in Portland, Oregon, U.S. Image by OSU Special Collections & Archives via Flickr.
Since early March, the price of wheat itself has tracked major developments on the ground in the Ukraine war by little, if at all. After the United Nations announced a deal between Russia and Ukraine to allow wheat exports through the Black Sea on July 22, according to the website Macrotrends the price remained largely unchanged, going from $9.55 per bushel on July 21 to $9.38 on July 25.
In contrast, the price plummeted from a March 8 high of $12.84 to $9.24 by June 24, at the same time that stocks and other equities collapsed due to fears of a global recession and hawkish U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate policies. The drop in wheat spot and future prices during this period — just as a Russian offensive in Ukraine’s breadbasket Donbass region began — strongly suggests that tanks and artillery weren’t the only forces affecting food markets.
In the long run, Westhoff told Mongabay, price spikes from speculative betting frenzies tend to settle down as market fundamentals reassert themselves. But during those periods of distortion, prices can skyrocket — which is precisely what may have happened earlier this year.
“I would suggest that more than just the Ukrainian crisis was at play, whether it’s some combination of other fundamentals or just the whims of people trading that particular day of the week,” he said.
For millions of people across the world, those whims could be determining whether they can afford to eat or not. Barring a reform that closes the Dodd-Frank loophole, in the future, any crisis — be it war, great power standoffs, or an environmental disaster — could become a driver of runaway speculation, bringing with it increased market volatility, and potentially food shortages and starvation.
Experts suggest that the Ukraine war isn’t entirely to blame for a potential rise in global hunger and starvation — Wall Street might be simultaneously worsening the crisis and profiting from it to boot. Image by Carlos Delgado via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Planting the seeds of a new system
Beyond the immediate causes of the rise and fall of wheat prices this year lies a deeper, fundamental question regarding the resilience of global food systems. The underlying weaknesses in globalization and price setting that have been exposed by the current Ukraine crisis will almost certainly be tested in new and unpredictable ways by climate change.
In good times, the abundance of cheap wheat on international markets can be positive for importing countries. But the past two years are a stark reminder that market conditions can change fast, just as they did in the commodity price crisis of the late 2000s. That crisis led in part to the political upheavals of the so-called Arab Spring that rocked the Middle East and North Africa, eventually playing a role in the onset of multiple conflicts, many of which continue to smolder more than a decade later.
One lesson that is being learned: in precarious times, a nation’s food security depends on local production. Already, some of the countries most affected by this year’s rise in wheat prices have begun discussing ways to boost local crop yields and shift to native grains. Egypt plans to increase the amount of wheat planted on its own soil, and consumers in Africa are substituting expensive wheat imports with locally produced agricultural staples like sorghum and cassava. But building a new, locally focused food system won’t happen cheaply or without sustained effort.
“We need to invest in diversifying the places that food comes from,” Murphy of IATP said. “So that’s looking ahead to climate change and different changes in production. We saw with the COVID pandemic that in some places, the local system was resilient and able to respond and shift what it was producing to meet demand.”
And while the Ukraine war’s impact on wheat exports has captured headlines, extreme weather is also exerting its own destabilizing pull. According to a briefing paper put out in June by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K-based nonprofit, projected losses in 2022’s wheat harvests due to drought in the U.S., India and France are expected to amount to 12.4 million tons — significantly more than the 9 million ton shortfall from Ukraine as a result of Russia’s invasion.
A boy carries fresh bread in Egypt. Bread provides 30% of the calories consumed in Egypt and 80% of its wheat is imported from Russia and Ukraine. North Africa and the Middle East together imported nearly 85 million metric tons of wheat in 2020/21. Image by Nasser Nouri via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
On the other hand, some studies suggest climate change may counterintuitively prove to be a boon to wheat production — at least in the short term. A 2021 paper found that while unchecked warming could cause as much as a 24% decrease in maize harvests, wheat yields could rise by 17% as higher latitudes become more suitable for cultivation.
That contradiction highlights the uncertainty in accurately forecasting climate change impacts on global food systems, and the need to plan cooperatively for multiple scenarios. Given the difficulty in predicting how those impacts will play out, understanding the role that financial speculators play in times of crisis is a matter of urgent public interest — as is whether stricter regulations could prevent the kind of price spikes of basic foodstuffs like wheat that occurred earlier this year.
Escalating instability already seen over the first two decades of the 21st century make clear that the unexpected is becoming the norm for global food markets. It also presses home a case that some food advocates have been making for decades: The globalized system of production and distribution may have generated a world of abundance, but also one that’s dangerously fragile.
“More robust food systems — systems that are more resilient in the face of shocks — need to be based on the principle of diversity, rather than concentration and financialization,” Clapp of IPES-Food wrote. “That means more diverse production systems, more diverse trade and marketing systems, and more diverse diets. These kinds of diversity can ensure that there is enough slack in food systems to provide alternatives when things in one part of the system are disrupted.”
Genetic diversity of sorghum (left) and millet (right). Experts say crop diversity can ensure that there is enough slack in food systems to provide alternatives when things in one part of the system are disrupted. Image by ICRISAT via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
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Sources
Trnka, M., Feng, S., Semenov, M. A., Olesen, J. E., Kersebaum, K. C., Rötter, R. P., … Büntgen, U. (2019). Mitigation efforts will not fully alleviate the increase in water scarcity occurrence probability in wheat-producing areas. Science Advances, 5(9). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aau2406
Jägermeyr, J., Müller, C., Ruane, A. C., Elliott, J., Balkovic, J., Castillo, O., … Rosenzweig, C. (2021). Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Nature Food, 2(11), 873-885. doi:10.1038/s43016-021-00400-y
Featured image: Somali workers unload a ship carrying sacks of wheat donated by European communities at the port of Mogadishu, Somalia. Image by Expert Infantry via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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An official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used data from a flawed preprint study that exaggerated the risk of death for children from COVID-19 in her presentations to CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisors who were responsible for recommending Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines for infants and young children.
The study, first published May 25 on the medRxiv preprint server, was authored by a group of U.K. researchers. On June 28, the authors published a revised version of the study, after critics questioned some of their original findings.
“It’s really disturbing that data this poor made its way into the meetings to discuss childhood COVID and that it took me less than a few minutes to find a major flaw (and then I found many more as I looked deeper),” said Kelley K, who was the first to point out some of the study’s flaws on her website COVID-Georgia.com.
After learning of Kelley’s analysis, The Defender reviewed the original preprint, confirmed Kelley’s findings and uncovered additional flaws in the original preprint and also in the June 28 revised version.
Study falsely claimed COVID was leading cause of death in U.S. children
During a June 17 meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to discuss pediatric COVID-19 vaccines in children under 5, Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dutra, a pediatrician and pediatric emergency medicine physician with the CDC, presented a table that falsely claimed COVID-19 was a leading cause of death in U.S. children.
Fleming-Dutra earlier that week presented the same table during the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee meeting, along with other slides from the original U.K. study that also falsely claimed COVID-19 as a “top 5 cause of death” in children.
The table, which was sourced from the U.K. study, was disseminated widely by physicians on Twitter who claimed the data “made the case” for vaccinating children under 5.
The table was part of a slide deck on the epidemiology of COVID-19 in children and adolescents, developed under the direction of Fleming-Dutra.
A disclaimer at the end of the slide deck states, “The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
The table illustrated the study’s claim that COVID-19 caused more than 1 million deaths in the U.S, including at least 1,433 deaths among children and young people ages 0 to 19 years old from March 1, 2020, to April 30, 2022.
The study’s authors originally ranked COVID-19 ninth among all causes of death in children and adolescents ages 0 to 19, fifth in disease-related causes of death — excluding accidents, assault and suicide — and first in deaths caused by infectious/respiratory diseases.
The authors stated they “only consider COVID-19 as an underlying — and not contributing — cause of death.”
However, that statement is false — because the study in fact cited data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which tabulates COVID-19 deaths by including any death certificate that mentions COVID-19, not just those cases where COVID-19 was the primary reason for death.
Using NCHS data, there were 1,433 pediatric COVID-19 deaths through April 30.
However, using the CDC’s own mortality statistics, which count only those deaths where the virus was the underlying cause, there were only 1,088 pediatric deaths — nearly 25% less than the NCHS and the study stated.
After the misleading data was brought to the attention of the authors, they revised the study to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths among children and adolescents, from 1,433 deaths to 1,088 deaths — making COVID-19 the eighth leading cause of death in the 0 to 19 age group.
Cumulative versus annualized death rates — why it matters
According to Kelley K’s analysis, one key misleading aspect of the U.K. study was that it ranked cumulative COVID-19 deaths alongside annual rates for other causes of death.
Cumulative death rate refers to the proportion of a group that dies over a specified time interval. Annualized deaths are those that occur over the course of a year.
In ranking COVID-19 deaths by age group, the authors of the preprint included both cumulative (over 26 months) and annualized deaths, which inexplicably ranked COVID-19 twice for each age group, according to Kelley.
For instance, in the 1 to 4 age group, the paper listed cumulative COVID-19 deaths as the fifth leading cause of death.
The annualized COVID-19 deaths also appeared on the same list in their proper position.
For each age group, the cumulative COVID-19 death rate was more than double the annualized death rate.
Kelley recreated the results of the preprint using CDC WONDER, which utilizes “a rich ad-hoc query system for the analysis of public health data.”
Using that system, she obtained data where COVID-19 is listed as the underlying cause of death during the time period listed in the original study. She then annualized the results.
Kelley also showed the annualized number of deaths when using only those deaths where COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause.
When the data is annualized and includes only those deaths where the virus was the underlying cause, COVID-19 does not rank as a leading cause of death for young children, the Daily Caller reported.
For kids under age 1, COVID-19 ranks ninth — behind influenza and pneumonia, heart disease and homicide. And accidents are almost 25 times more likely to kill an infant than COVID-19, according to the CDC WONDER data.
Among kids ages 1 to 4 and 5 to 9, COVID-19 ranked in a four-way tie for the eighth leading cause of death. For ages 10 to 14, it ranked in a two-way tie for eighth. For teenagers between 15 and 19 years old, it dropped from fourth to sixth.
Even using correct data, there are still issues with showing the impact of COVID-19 deaths in children using rankings, according to Kelley.
Kelley wrote:
“Rankings overstate the impact of COVID, because the top few causes of death far outweigh the causes further down the list. For example, in ages 1 to 4, accidents account for almost 25 times as many deaths as COVID-19 on an annualized basis.
“Furthermore, for each of the 4 age groups covered by the CDC slide, the very broad ‘accidents’ is the leading cause of death. If we break that down further, causes of death like drownings, vehicle crashes, and drug overdoses, would be individual causes of death greater than COVID in various age groups.”
Why did U.K. researchers use U.S. COVID death data?
Another issue with the preprint is the use of pre-pandemic data from 2019, instead of 2020 or 2021, to compare other causes of death with COVID-19.
According to the CDC website on “excess deaths associated with COVID-19,” the nation’s response to the pandemic may have altered mortality patterns.
The CDC states:
“The estimates of excess deaths reported here may not be due to COVID-19, either directly or indirectly the pandemic may have changed mortality patterns for other causes of death.
“Upward trends in other causes of death (e.g., suicide, drug overdose, heart disease) may contribute to excess deaths in some jurisdictions. Future analyses of cause-specific excess mortality may provide additional information about these patterns.”
In addition, U.K. researchers incorrectly analyzed U.S. deaths, by using NCHS data instead of CDC WONDER data, raising the question of why they didn’t use data in their own country, Kelley said.
“Could it be because the U.S. counts COVID deaths very generously, so our data made it easier to present COVID as a leading cause of death in children?” Kelley asked.
“In addition, why did they inflate the counts by including 18- and 19-year-olds in the data, when the pediatric population is generally accepted to be 0-17?”
Kelley wrote:
“On the CDC side, how did Dr. Katherine E. Fleming-Dutra, M.D. at the CDC — a pediatrician and doctor of emergency medicine — not realize this data was seriously flawed and out of line with all other data about the impact of Covid on pediatric mortality?
“How did a pre-print get used in an ACIP and FDA presentation with such little oversight without the quality of the data being fully vetted? How did I uncover these issues, instead of them being identified by someone whose job it is to evaluate this kind of data?”
“We are forced to believe that the CDC researchers who put this data together are either incompetent or liars when all the mistakes go in the same direction,” Kelley said.
“It certainly seems like the CDC uses whatever data they can find to push their agenda without any consideration to its veracity,” she said.
Researchers revise preprint but still use mismatched data
In a revised preprint released June 28, the study’s authors admitted they improperly calculated COVID-19 deaths and adjusted the rankings for each age group using CDC WONDER data.
First, the authors reduced the study period from March 1, 2020 – April 30, 2022, to April 1, 2021 – March 31, 2022 — selecting the worst 12-month period of the pandemic.
The authors claimed that changing the date range “simplified” comparison time periods.
“We have fixed an error: our comparisons now use COVID-19 underlying cause of death data obtained from CDC Wonder. We have also simplified the comparison time periods,” the revised preprint states in a footnote.
Researchers then concluded, “COVID-19 mortality is a leading cause of death in CYP [children and young people] aged 0-19 years in the U.S.”
The authors of the study admitted in the revision that “deaths among U.S. CYP are rare in general” so they argued the mortality burden of COVID-19 in the younger age groups is “best understood in the context of all other causes of CYP death.”
The authors also altered the study, adding a “percentage of top 10 deaths” to the table for children ages 1 to 4, instead of noting where COVID-19 fits as a percentage of all-cause deaths.
COVID-19 appears as the seventh leading cause of death in children ages 1 to 4, however, it comprises only 2.7% of total deaths. To put that into perspective, the six more frequent causes add up to 89.5%.
The COVID-19 deaths were then compared to deaths from a different time period.
Kelley tweeted:
6/ Keep in mind that even by manipulating the dates to choose the worst months of Covid they couldn't get Covid to stay in the top 5 for age groups under 15. Is @CDCgov disappointed their big talking point has been officially busted? Will @CDCDirector ever admit it?
— Kelley K * covid-georgia.com (@KelleyKga) June 28, 2022
Dr. Susan Bewley, an obstetrician and BMJ award-winner, did a side-by-side comparison of the two preprints and concluded there should be a “major retraction” or “corrected post-publication” as the preprint was significantly altered.
Here are the pre-print changes demonstrated side by side. https://t.co/rs5GT7eRSl. This is what many papers would look like between draft 1 & submission. Less so after peer review. I'd praise the educational aspects, but it'd be a retraction / major correction post publication!
The Daily Caller reached out to the CDC about its misleading data and asked how the study made it through the agency’s “rigorous review process.”
The CDC did not respond to multiple requests.
The Defender also contacted the CDC for comment on the preprint used as the basis for authorizing COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use in children. We were directed to call the CDC’s media relations department, but the number listed and provided by the CDC and its automated system is no longer a working number.
“FDA speakers in the June 14-15th meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) did not cite the study in question in their presentations. FDA’s press release announcing the authorizations explains the basis for our determinations.”
But as the Daily Caller reported, and slides from the meeting show, that’s not entirely true.
Although the FDA itself did not present the paper during the meeting, the paper was presented by Fleming-Dutra who claimed COVID-19 was a leading cause of death among children and adolescents 1 to 19 years of age and cited the erroneous preprint and NCHS statistics as the source of the data.
That slide and others claiming COVID-19 was a leading cause of death among children helped form the basis of the panel’s decision to recommend expanding the Emergency Use Authorizationof Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines to infants and toddlers.
The Daily Caller reached out to all 11 authors listed as contributors to the research. Only Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London responded.
Gurdasani wouldn’t comment on the effect of publishing flawed research affecting the healthcare of millions of children other than to chastise Fox host and Daily Caller co-founder, Tucker Carlson.
Another author of the study, Seth Flaxman, with the U.K’s University of Oxford, tweeted after the flaws in the paper were exposed that his team was working on a revised version of the study.
Our preprint on Covid mortality in children and young people (https://t.co/UypTJMgAn2) in the US was cited at the FDA VRBPAC and CDC ACIP meetings this past week. It shows: Covid-19 is a leading cause of death in children in the US. 1/3
To date, neither the CDC nor FDA have publically issued a comment or correction on the flawed study cited by the CDC during vaccine advisory meetings to determine whether COVID-19 vaccines should be authorized for infants and small children.
The study has not been retracted.
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Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
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According to the World Bank, Russia holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves, the second largest coal reserves, and the eighth largest oil reserves. Over the past years, Russia has expressed heightened interest in exploring and producing oil and gas in Africa. Emboldened African leaders and industry executives have accepted proposals, several agreements and whatever were signed with Russian companies, but little have been achieved in the sector. With the rapidly changing geopolitical conditions and economic fragmentation fraught with competition and rivarly, African leaders have to understand that Russia might not heavily invest in the oil and gas sector, not even in the needed infrastructure in this industry.
From our monitoring, research and several interviews with experts especially inside Africa, we can conclude that the Russia-Ukraine crisis has brought into its fold good opportunities. Russia is energy self-sufficient. It does not need to import energy from Africa, it can only act as a fortified gatekeeper. It has done this several years, primarily to ensure, to a considerable extent, control of Africa’s energy from entering the global market. Popular opinion now is that potential African producers can take advantage to attract investments required to build infrastructure that would enable them to expand exploration, production and exportation to meet the anticipated increase in demand in Europe.
Russia’s interests about possible participation in the oil and gas related projects is perceived by some experts as a bid to either sabotage or control the flow of oil and gas from Africa into Europe. Several experts have written about the implications of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and its meaning for Africa. The crisis casts a long shadow across Africa. There is need to forge a pan-African solidarity and adherence to working towards developing the continent’s natural resources. If this is not done, Africa will continue importing oil and gas.
During June 2021 interview discussions with NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber, a pan-African company that focuses on research, documentation, negotiations and transactions in the energy sector, he expressed the urgent necessity for scaling up Africa’s production capacity in order to achieve universal access to energy. He further noted the challenging tasks and pointed strongly to the need for a transformative partnership-based strategy, (that requires transparency, good governance and policies that could create a favourable investment climate) and that aims at increasing access to energy for all Africans.
Natural gas, affordable and abundant in Africa, has the power to spark significant job creation and capacity-building opportunities, economic diversification and growth. Sustainable development of African economies can only be attained by the development of local industry – by investing in Africans, building up African entrepreneurs and supporting the creation of indigenous companies. It requires cooperative efforts by Africans.
Can there be a unified approach to collaborating on issues of energy projects in Africa? NJ Ayuk observes that Africa has already made an indelible mark in the oil and gas industry. Africans must therefore become more accountable, and plan better in the energy sectors. Some potential external investors, like Russia, have for many decades shown interest in this sector but have not operationalized their agreements and promises.
Approximately 840 million Africans, mostly in sub-Saharan countries, have no access to electricity. Hundreds of millions have unreliable or limited power at best. Even during normal circumstances, energy poverty should not be the reality for most Africans. The popular narratives about the prevalence of energy poverty on the continent has to change. We need good governance that creates an enabling environment for widespread economic growth and improved infrastructure. African leaders need an unwavering determination to make Africa work for us, even when there are missteps and things go wrong.
The African Energy Chamber is raising A Banner for African Oil & Gas. It plans to hold Oil and Gas conference this October. As part of the conference, its special report titled “State of African Energy Q2 2022 Report” will be presented during the conference. According to the report seen by this author, increasing oil and gas activity and a record number of new discoveries have set the stage for significant industry growth in the second half of 2022.
In Namibia alone, for example, two breakthrough discoveries, Shell’s Graff and Total Energies’ Venus-1X, have opened frontier oil play onshore. Industry experts estimate that Venus-1X may hold recoverable resources of some 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest-ever oil discovery. Namibia, in fact, has led the way in new oil and gas activity this year and is emerging as an exploration hot spot. In northeast Namibia and northwest Botswana, ReconAfrica has licensed operations for the newly discovered 8.5-million-acre Kavango Basin, one of the world’s largest onshore undeveloped basins.
This is great news for our industry, which was hit especially hard by Covid-19 and has struggled to regain momentum. The energy sector was crippled by historically low volumes in 2020 and 2021, creating an even more critical need for new exploration. And Namibia is just one example of the new discoveries being made all over Africa. The Q2 2022 report outlines a number of new developments across the continent.
Map of Africa (Source: Kester Kenn Klomegah)
Eni discovered the Baleine field in Cote d’Ivoire last year, which contains as many as 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil and nearly 2 Tcf of gas offshore. This is a big deal for Côte d’Ivoire, which up until now has been producing about 34,000 barrels of crude per day from four blocks.
In Angola, TotalEnergies is drilling for the first time since 2018 and has executed a sale and purchase agreement with state-owned Sonangol for two blocks in the Kwanza Basin offshore. Other majors, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Eni, are active in Angola as well. More than a dozen high-impact wells are predicted in the next 18 months in Libya, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, Egypt, and others. Egypt alone has awarded eight oil and gas exploration blocks to Eni, BP, Apex International, Energean, United Energy, Enap Sipetrol, and INA.
And after long delays because of Covid-19, licensing rounds are planned, open, or under evaluation in more than a dozen countries including Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Gabon, and Congo. The results are expected to be announced this year. Higher greenfield spending is also forecast as more projects get the green light. In Kenya, for example, large investments are expected in the greenfield onshore development of Tullow’s South Lokichar basin, Turkana County. At an estimated 585 billion barrels, this is widely considered one of the last big conventional onshore projects in the world.
These discoveries and others referenced in the Chamber’s Q2 2022 report are tremendously exciting. And if managed them properly, it could make significant progress toward the goal of a just energy transition: alleviating energy poverty, stimulating economic growth, and improving the lives of everyday Africans.
The State of African Energy Q2 2022 Report outlines an unprecedented level of new oil and gas discoveries on the African continent. The simple, staggering fact that more than half of Sub-Saharan Africans lack access to electricity means priority must continue to end energy poverty. With Africa’s population projected to exceed two billion by 2040, generation capacity will need to be doubled by 2030 and multiplied fivefold by 2050.
Oil and gas are Africa’s lifeblood and the foundation for economic development. The future depends on sustaining the longevity of the industry. Africa’s wealth of new oil discoveries is not only a chance to recover some of the devastating losses suffered in the last two years – it represents an opportunity to achieve an energy transition that benefits all Africans. According to the report, increasing oil and gas activity and a record number of new discoveries have set the stage for significant industry growth in the second half of 2022.
Some experts believe that Europe can look to Africa as preferred energy supplier. Africa is ready to welcome investors currently pulling out of Russia if they can genuinely invest in developing oil and gas infrastructure which Africa seriously lacks in this industry. That’s a real opportunity, I think, for Africa at this point in time.
Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo, OPEC Secretary General, (before his death early July) stressed in his last speech that “It is essential if we are to develop new technologies, strengthen the human capacity and remain leaders in innovation so that we can do our part to meet the world’s growing need for energy, shrink our overall environmental footprint, and expand access to underserved communities. Yet the industry is now facing huge challenges along multiple fronts, and these threaten the investment potential now and in the longer term.”
Regrettably, we are seeing global energy cooperation becoming more fragmented. New regional alignments are threatening to reverse years of progress towards creating a more stable and interconnected energy system. We cannot afford to allow multilateral energy cooperation and global energy security become collateral damage of geopolitics, the OPEC Secretary General said.
It is necessary to underscore the importance of cooperation in exploring and producing this resource to support the needed sustainable development goals, and attempt at becoming more prominent on the global energy stage.
Undoubtedly, Africa has the fastest-growing population in the world, but half of this population is without energy supply. That is why African leaders have to seriously prioritize the right energy policies to make access to energy the most effective way possible.
Russian Presidential Special Representative for Middle East and Africa, Mikhail Bogdanov, in an April interview to Interfax news agency, was asked
“many people in Europe are convinced that Africa is capable of increasing the production and supplies of gas to Europe instead of Russia’s. In your opinion, how realistic is this?”
He explained that “the world is governed by market rules. The reason is the existence of a whole system – consumer markets, traditional suppliers, contracts, not to mention pipelines and oil terminals. In short, this cannot be done in an instant. It will take years to replace supply chains and to build new infrastructure.”
Bogdanov says that Africa is beyond any doubt the continent of the future, both from the point of view of human resources and being a storeroom of the world’s riches. Another issue is that colonial powers, as well as neocolonialists, have never let the Africans take advantage of the treasure under their feet.
President Vladimir Putin addressed the plenary session of the VTB Capital Russia Calling! Investment Forum organized and held by VTB Bank. As usual, the forum brought together from all over the world, business leaders, investment managers and consultants, as well as international experts in the field of the economy and finance. Putin listened to academics and researchers, sometimes even opposing views of the current developments, and enjoyed interactive exchange of opinions with potential investors, an insight into the mood of business partners both from Russia and abroad.
On Africa, Putin noted at the VTB Capital’s Russia Calling Forum, that many countries had been “stepping up their activities on the African continent” but added that Russia could not cooperate with Africa “as it was in the Soviet period, for political reasons.” For decades, Russia has been looking for effective ways to promote multifaceted ties and new strategies for cooperation in energy, oil and gas, trade and industry in Africa.
But so far, Russia’s investment efforts in the region have been limited. Russia is very cautious about making financial commitments in Africa.Russian companies currently have weak presence in Africa. There is no stimulus for efforts to localize production of equipment and strengthen technological partnership in the energy sector. Russia contentiously claims the leading position as a supplier and is now rapidly diversifying its products at discounted prices to the Asian market.
With the emerging new economic order characterized by competition and rivalry, and an additional fact that Russia already has thousands of decade-old undelivered pledges and several bilateral agreements signed which are yet to be implemented with individual countries in the continent, it is simply logical that Africans should not expect much in this oil and gas (energy) sector from the Russian Federation.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
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As I recently wrote, the US no longer has an economy.America is a market for goods produced offshore with foreign labor that US global corporations sell to Americans.The US which once produced its own manufactured goods and food now imports much of it.The result is that fewer and fewer American incomes are based in the production of goods and services consumed by Americans.This is the path of de-industrialization and poverty.
Not only does America no longer have an economy, it no longer seems to have any economic statistics or ones that make much sense.For example, allegedly inflation is at 9 percent annually, but gold and silver prices have fallen, with gold down about $250 an ounce and silver down about $6 an ounce. Percentage wise, these are large declines.Inflation is known to erode the value of paper fiat money, but the US dollar is up against the Euro and other currencies, and inflation is eroding the value of real money–gold and silver.
According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the economy has regained 9 million of the lost lockdown jobs, dropping unemployment to 3.6%.With about 2 job openings for every person seeking a job, we are at full employment.Wages have risen strongly but by less than inflation, so real earnings are declining but corporate profits are high. There are slight decreases in the number of people without health insurance and in the number receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.So there are signs that things are improving.
But despite full employment and high profits, consumer confidence in the economy has reached the lowest point on record.
Perhaps the explanation is high gasoline prices.
Perhaps it is the decline in the stock market and pension accumulations.
Perhaps it is fear of higher interest rates which will further reduce the values of pensions and real estate assets.
Perhaps it is the billions of dollars the Biden regime is throwing into the war in Ukraine.
Perhaps it is the attempt by the Democrats and a corrupt Department of Justice (sic) to criminalize Trump, his supporters,and the Republican Party.
Perhaps it is the rise of virulent anti-Americanism in school boards and universities.Perhaps it is the growing realization of the Covid vaccination deception which is arousing anxieties among the vaccinated.
Whatever is the cause, it is nevertheless strange that inflation is causing the paper dollar to rise and gold to fall, and that full employment has brought the lowest consumer confidence on record.
Perhaps the answer is that the numbers we are given are wrong and are serving some other secret agenda that is being fostered on us.
Clearly in the Western world confidence in government is collapsing.
The British prime minister has had to resign and also the Italian one.
Not even the Democrats will permit Biden to run for reelection. Many Western countries have governments comprised of coalitions in which the president or prime minister’s party only has 30% support.In other words, it is becoming obvious even to the insouciant that there is no leadership in the West.
Indeed, leadership is not possible. A leader would have to correct the situation, and that is against the interest of the established institutionalized interests.
Wherever Western peoples look, they see their culture under attack and truth disregarded.Corruption rules everywhere, even in the American Board of Internal Medicine which has decided to strip Dr. Peter McCullough of his board certification because he cured Covid patients with Ivermectin.
For curing patients, the ABIM accuses Dr. McCullough, one of the most respected and accomplished doctors in the world, of “spreading misinformation.”The ABIM has taken the position of Fauci and his corrupt colleagues at NIH and CDC that it is misinformation to say that there is a cure.
You see, the only way the untested “vaccine” could get into mass use was on the basis that there was no known cure.This, of course, was an intentional lie. There were two known cures–Ivermectin with zinc and HCQ with zinc.For proving beyond all doubt that Fauci, the CDC, FDA, and WHO were liars for Big Pharma profits, the corrupt ABIM, also a liar for Big Pharma profits, has to punish Dr. McCullough. See this.
What the US medical system is doing to Dr. McCullough is identical to what Soviet Authorities did to Russian genetics by declaring scientific genetics to be misinformation — “a bourgeois pseudoscience”.
The same thing is now happening to American medicine. There is an effort underway to discredit and disqualify the thousands of doctors and medical scientists who have opposed the Covid protocol that served only Big Pharma’s profits at the expense of the lives and health of millions of people.
There has now been research published in Sweden that found that the mRNA “vaccines” do change the vaccinated person’s DNA.If this finding is confirmed by other independent scientists, will science be strong enough to stand against Fauci, the whore Western media, and the bought-and-paid-for “scientists” of Big Pharma, or will American medical science suffer the fate of Soviet geneticists?
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Guest is Dr. Stefanie Seneff, a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has published over 170 referred articles on various subjects related to the intersection of biology and computation. In recent years, she has been concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Some of her books (selection):
“Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment”
“Fat and Cholesterol Don’t Cause Heart Attacks and Statins are Not The Solution “
“How to Prevent Autism: Expert Advice from Medical Professionals
This session is about her recently (June) published paper, written together with Greg Nigh, Anthony M Kyriakopoulos & Peter McCullough, entitled “Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs”.
In the paper, they present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health.
Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites.
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In April 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) explained why he was escalating US involvement in Vietnam. With an Orwellian touch, LBJ titled the speech “Peace without Conquest” as he announced the beginning of US air attacks on Vietnam. He explained that
“We must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny and only in such a world will our own freedom be secure… we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence and I intend to keep that promise. To dishonor that pledge, to abandon the small and brave nation to its enemies and the terror must follow would be an unforgivable wrong.”
Johnson further explained,
”We are also there to strengthen world order… To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s words.”
Learning no lessons from the failure and mass slaughter of the Korean War in the previous decade, the US military commenced widespread bombing of Vietnam and sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
At the time, spring 1965, about 400 US soldiers had died in the conflict. The war was not yet widely unpopular. Americans who protested against the Vietnam War were a small minority. It would be two years before Martin Luther King’s famous denunciation of the war.
Years later, after hundreds of thousands had been drafted into the military with the deaths of tens of thousands, the war became widely unpopular. Ultimately, over 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers died in the war. The cost in human lives and wasted resources was immense. The “Great Society” that LBJ hoped to build was stopped by the diversion of human lives, energy and resources into the Vietnam War.
There are similarities today with the US and NATO pouring tens of BILLIONS of dollars in weapons into Ukraine to counter the Russian military intervention. The US and western allies are providing additional support in intelligence and military advice. While there are not yet official US troops (as there were not in Vietnam for the first years), there are special operations and much other military support.
President Biden and administration leaders sound similar to LBJ in the early stage of the Vietnam War. In his remarks to Congress asking for additional funding for Ukraine, Biden said,
“We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom…. The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen.” Making clear that the US goal is not just the “freedom” of Ukraine, Biden continues, “Investing in Ukraine’s freedom and security is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.”
In both Vietnam and Ukraine, the US installed or promoted pro-US governments to counter “adversary” nations. In the 1950’s, the US prevented a nation-wide referendum in Vietnam which would have united the country without a war. In 2014, the US was instrumental in promoting the Ukraine coup which overthrew a democratically elected government leading to the secession of Crimea and civil war in eastern Ukraine. While most in the West think the Ukraine conflict began in February this year, it actually began in February 2014. The 2016 documentary “Ukraine on Fire”, banned by YouTube, describes the coup.
Western media portrayed the US and South Vietnam winning the war in South East Asia until the 1968 Tet offensive exposed the lies and reality. Similarly, western media portrays Ukrainians winning the war midst overwhelming Ukrainian public support. In reality, Russia and the secessionist Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) and Lugansk Peoples Republic (LPR) have steadily taken control of south east Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian president Zelensky has overseen the the imprisonment, torture and killing of opponents. The largest opposition party has been banned. Many Ukrainians oppose his policy and continuation of the war. There are rumors of presidential assassination attempts, just as there were in South Vietnam.
Ukrainians have become cannon fodder for the US geopolitical goals, just as the South Vietnamese were.
It is now clear that the LBJ’s escalation in 1965 was a huge and costly mistake. The needless war did immense damage to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It is also had enormous negative ramifications in the United States.
Will the US and allies continue to escalate the conflict in Ukraine, to “double down” on an intervention half way around the world with the goal of hurting Russia? Have we learned nothing from Vietnam and subsequent US/Western foreign policy disasters of the past 40 years?
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Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. He can contacted at [email protected].
Featured image: U.S. tanks use flamethrowers in a field during the Vietnam War in 1970. /CFP
As the saying goes, “knowledge is power.” The more informed we are the harder it becomes to deceive us.
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Despite Green/ABC propaganda, recent Australian floods were not caused by coal, cattle or cars. Weather is driven by winds; solar energy powers the winds and draws moisture for them from the oceans. These eternal natural rain-making processes have been aided recently by two extra factors.
Firstly, a big La Nina weather event in the Pacific Ocean has left warmer water closer to Australia.
Secondly, there is an increased underwater volcanism in this region as evidenced by the volcanic eruptions near Vanuatu.
Earth’s climate history is written in the rocks. Anyone who cares to read that record will see that recurring Ice Ages, not global warming, pose the greatest threat to life on Earth. Even in today’s warm Holocene Era, the Little Ice Age was a time of war, famine and distress whereas the Medieval Warm Period heralded a time of peace and plenty.
Earth’s weather is driven by winds powered by convection currents which get most of their energy from the Sun.
Eastern Australia is currently under the influence a large La Nina event in the Pacific Ocean. These periodic ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) weather cycles are Earth’s most significant short-term weather events and have been identified in Earth’s climate as far back as 1525, well before the Model T Ford and the Watt steam engine.
The great El Nino of 1877-78 heralded China’s Great Famine, brought droughts to Brazil and caused failures of the Nile floods and the Indian monsoon. Even the Titanic was an El Nino casualty when it met an iceberg blown far south by El Nino winds.
Australia’s famous weather forecaster, Inigo Jones, was well aware of the natural cycles in climate as far back as 1923 – long before coal, cattle and cars could be blamed for “Global Warming”.
ENSO oscillations are not driven by atmospheric conditions or human activities – they react to the beat of a geological drum. ENSO timing and strength is largely determined by volcanic activity and the movement of tectonic plates, particularly along the Pacific Ring of Fire and the mid-ocean ridges splitting both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
But largely hidden from view is another huge weather-maker – sub-sea volcanoes.
Right now, volcanic activity (mostly sub-oceanic) is melting parts of polar ice sheets as well as releasing volcanic dust and other natural gases into the oceans and atmosphere. The warmed sea water expands, raising sea levels and increasing the evaporation which produces clouds and rain. Right now, the Tonga volcanic eruption is evaporating sea water that is probably adding to the record La Nina rains of Eastern Australia.
Volcanic hot spots can also melt ice-bound methane from the sea floor thus releasing large unmeasured quantities of methane gas into the atmosphere.
Man’s coal, cars and cattle are puny compared to what nature can do.
Hysterical children and political agitators keep bleating about “man-made global warming”. But climate history shows that the real danger to life on Earth is “global cooling” – a return of the great continental ice sheets creating a frigid zone north of a line from London to Chicago. Russians and Alaskans know about frozen mammoth bodies in the ice, and understand this threat, but the western world continues to worship Saint Greta.
A bleak northern winter approaches. As blackouts beckon and the lights start to flicker, coal is suddenly OK again. But Europeans and Australians still plan a “Net Zero” ritual sacrifice of their farmers on the alarmist altar. None of this sacrifice will deter La Nina, or stop the volcanoes, or feed the people.
Someone should ask the new Green Government of Australia –
“If emissions of CO2 are the problem, why have we banned emissions-free nuclear power?”
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Viv Forbes has technical and financial qualifications and experience. He has solar panels on his roof, but no vested interests in coal, oil or gas apart from diesel farm equipment and a diesel generator in the shed. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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In 1953, when virtually all the progressive and revolutionary forces in Cuba offered no viable solution to oppose the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, Fidel Castro and his comrades did indeed work out a path. It was a route characterized by game-changing statements coupled with exceptionally courageous deeds, out of which emerged the July 26 Movement. This movement, supported by allies who later rallied to the cause, led to the January 1, 1959, Triumph of the Revolution. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. However, history is still being made today as Cuba endures major challenges.
Today, progressives throughout the world could learn many lessons from 1953. One particular lesson is worth delineating. How did the seed that was planted on July 26, 1953 rapidly grow into the July 26 Movement, which developed a plan that would eventually shake the foundations of the dictatorship? How did it break out of the box in 1953, straitjacketed as it was indeed? There was nothing on the horizon for the vast majority of Cuban people until July 26.
It is difficult to analyze this situation without embodying it in the persona of Fidel. By 1953, Fidel was already familiar with the life and some of the works of José Martí as well as other Cuban fighters in the nineteenth-century liberation struggle against Spain in favour of independence, a just society based on equality and the elimination of slavery. Fidel was simultaneously learning from the theories of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to the yet limited extent that he was aware of this source at the time. Yet, for Fidel, political thinking and action had always comprised one intertwined phenomenon. He had been very politically active for nearly one decade before July 26, 1953.
Thus, based on their accumulated experience and thinking since the mid-1940s, Fidel and his comrades worked out their July 26 plan by building upon different international and national political theories and varying practical participation. Fidel especially, as the acknowledged leader of this movement, was able to combine a variety of strands in political thinking as well as practice into one coherent vision. He succeeded where so many others had failed because he was able to amalgamate principles of thought as a guide to action. While he never for one second abandoned international and indigenous revolutionary theory for momentary expediency, he also refused to allow thinking to become a hindrance to revolutionary action.
Fidel is, in the words of Gabriel García Márquez, “the anti-dogmatist par excellence.” Dogmatism in the revolutionary ranks is often manifested by the stiff and sterile interpretation of what is perceived as “theory,” but is rendered useless by this type of reading. This dogmatism hinders the capacity to draw from accumulated practical experience – either positive or negative – in order to analyze concrete conditions with the perspective of the future requirements needed to move society forward. Perhaps this was the problem with most of the Cuban revolutionary left in the 1950s that left them impotent until a new vision of thinking and practice opened up horizons for them. This is why, when reflecting every year on July 26, the words of Che Guevara always seem to invade the thought process. Che wrote on July 26, 1967 in Bolivia about the significance of that day as “a rebellion against oligarchies and against revolutionary dogmas.” This may raise some eyebrows. However, Che was of course referring to dogmatism even infecting revolutionaries. Che’s allusion to much of the Cuban left at the time was based not only on his own practical experience but on his many years of evaluating the international communist movement.
The July 26 attacks did not result in a victory that day, and many were killed, injured or arrested, including Fidel. However, the attacks led to Fidel’s self-defence in court after he was captured and forced to stand trial. He had written his notes in prison, but was forced to deliver his two-hour defence from memory because the prison authorities confiscated his notes. This epic rebuttal later became known as “History Will Absolve Me” and was a result of his reconstruction by memory while in solitary confinement. It was and is a masterpiece of anti-dogmatism par excellence by someone who knew how to combine theory with the practical evolution of Cuban society at the time.
By 1954, many thousands of copies of his defence were distributed clandestinely throughout Cuba. The defence was converted into an offensive in conjunction with the people, which led to the 1959 victory. It has stood the test of time, since serving as the genesis of Cuba’s current anti-imperialist socialist project. July 26 and its repercussion, “History Will Absolve Me,” sparked the Cuban Revolution.
Today, Cuba is going through one of its most difficult periods since 1959. Its economic situation is fragile, multiplied many times by the Trump/Biden tightening of the genocidal blockade. Thus, the economic system is being tested once again, as President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the Cuban Parliament, the Communist Party of Cuba, and mass organizations are introducing daring new economic measures. As soon as these new decisions were made public last week following the Cuban Parliament’s discussion and debate, the enemies of the Revolution, “left”, right and center, went into high gear to attack Cuba’s socialist culture. This attack organized in Canada. led by the Canadian think tank pressures organised in Canada, is similar to other countries such is the US, even before the recent Cuban measures.
Thus, in 2022, the dialectical approach combining principled thinking with the practicalities of the struggle as exemplified by Fidel Castro since 1953, stands valid today as a model. How are the principles of Cuban socialism applied to the ongoing efforts to decentralize the state, further open up space for small businesses and much-needed increased foreign investment? How does this further opening of Cuba in the economic sphere affect Cuban socialism, its socialist political culture and sovereignty? Even though these are not easy questions to address, the Cuban Revolution has been striving to do so. In fact, once again, as in 1953 and in 1959, Cuban revolutionaries find themselves in ongoing largely uncharted waters that only their tradition of combining principles and practical tactics can navigate.
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Arnold August is an award-winning journalist and author of three acclaimed books. His three books on Cuba-US-Latin America have been acclaimed by experts in the field. In 2013, he was awarded the Félix Elmuza Award by the Association of Cuban Journalists and contributes to outlets in English, Spanish and French in many parts of the world. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most humans were engaged in agriculture. Our relationship with nature was immediate. Within just a few generations, however, for many people across the world, their link with the land has been severed. Food now arrives pre-packaged (often precooked), preserved with chemicals and contains harmful pesticides, micro-plastics, hormones and/or various other contaminants. We are also being served a narrower menu of high-calorie food with lower nutrient content.
Since 1900, there’s been a 74% decline in mortality rates in developed countries, largely due to a marked decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. How much of this decline was due to vaccines? The history and data provide clear answers that matter greatly in today’s vitriolic debate about vaccines.
Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, is reportedly scheduled to visit Taipei in August 2022. The stated purpose is supporting Asian democracy. The trip has more than irked the Chinese. The trip has obviously not been approved by the one recognized government of China in Beijing. Some may downplay the speaker of the US House of Representatives as being largely ceremonial, but the Speaker is second in line, after the vice-president, should the addled president be unable to fulfill his duties, a scenario wholly within the realm of possibility.
After two years of unprecedented government tyranny in the name of fighting a virus, the prime instigators of this infamy are walking free, writing books, and openly pretending they never said the things they clearly said over and over. Take Trump’s White House Covid response coordinator Deborah Birx, for example. She was, as the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker points out in a recent article, the principal architect of the disastrous “lockdown” policy that destroyed more lives than Covid itself.
United States President Joe Biden announced during July that he would host a summit with African leaders at the White House in December. This announcement by Biden comes in the aftermath of several important political developments which have exposed the ineffective foreign policy orientation of the world’s leading capitalist country.
The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy’s Food Compass, unveiled in late 2021, is another Great Reset tool designed to discourage consumption of animal foods by falsely rating them as unhealthy, and encouraging consumption of ultraprocessed foods by giving them high nutritional ratings.
JFK: Destiny Betrayed presents convincing evidence confirming that U.S. intelligence orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Directed by Oliver Stone and written by Jim DiEugenio, the documentary series builds on Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film JFK. It illuminates JFK’s opposition to the imperialist machinations of American oligarchs, who enlisted U.S. intelligence and the Mafia to orchestrate his assassination and then cover it up for decades.
We’re now facing a situation where a huge number of very powerful organizations and elites at an international and at national levels are calling for policies that are basically a suicide pact. Basically a death wish of some sort.
Beidaihe, a coastal resort some 280 km north of Beijing, does not see the country’s leading politicians taking the plunge into the blue, to escape the sultry heat, but it does see them testing the political waters for two weeks from the beginning of August. The jostling for position and power brokers doing deals may be reminiscent of political conclaves the world over but this is in a league of its own. One showpiece event will focus their minds this year.
The COVID-19 crisis is not the result of a single virus. No single virus could create such deep uncertainty and fear in our country; no disease could unleash such horrific ambivalence and unspeakable loathing.
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This article was first published in March 2019.
Since 1900, there’s been a 74% decline in mortality rates in developed countries, largely due to a marked decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. How much of this decline was due to vaccines? The history and data provide clear answers that matter greatly in today’s vitriolic debate about vaccines.
Since 1900, the mortality rate in America and other first-world countries has declined by roughly 74%, creating a dramatic improvement in quality of life and life expectancy for Americans.
The simple question: “How did this happen?”
Why did the mortality rate decline so precipitously? If you listen to vaccine promoters, the answer is simple: vaccines saved us. What’s crazy about this narrative is how easy it is to disprove, the data is hiding in plain sight. The fact that this easily-proven-false narrative persists, however, tells us a lot about the world we live in, and I hope will encourage parents to reconsider the veracity of many of the narratives they’ve been fed about vaccines, and do their own primary research.
1970, Dr. Edward H. Kass
Standing before his colleagues on October 19, 1970, Harvard’s Dr. Edward H. Kass gave a speech to the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America that would likely get him run out of this same profession today. At the time, Dr. Kass was actually the President of the organization, which made the things he had to say about vaccines and their impact on the reduction in American mortality rates even more shocking, at least by today’s standards. Forty-eight years after Dr. Kass’ speech, vaccines have taken on a mythological status in many corners of our world, hyped up by the people who benefit the most from their use. Of course vaccines saved the world. Of course every child should get every vaccine. If you don’t vaccinate, you will enable the return of deadly childhood diseases. If you don’t vaccinate, your child will die. If you question vaccines, even a little, you’re an “anti-vaxxer” who should be shunned and dismissed!
But what if most of the history about the role vaccines played in declining mortality isn’t even true?
In his famous speech, Dr. Kass took his infectious disease colleagues to task, warning them that drawing false conclusions about WHY mortality rates had declined so much could cause them to focus on the wrong things. As he explained:
“…we had accepted some half truths and had stopped searching for the whole truths. The principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past —tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc. —and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy, thus providing the American people with the highest level of health available in the world. That these are half truths is known but is perhaps not as well known as it should be.”
Dr. Kass then shared some eye-opening charts with his colleagues. I’m trying to imagine a President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America sharing one of these charts today at a meeting of public health officials. I picture someone turning the power off for the room where he’s presenting and then he gets tackled and carried off the stage…here’s the first example of a chart Dr. Kass shared in 1970:
But wait a minute, Dr. Kass’ chart doesn’t even include the measles vaccine…what gives? Well, in 1970, the measles vaccine was just beginning to be rolled out, and as you can clearly see, measles had long since experienced a dramatic decline in mortality. With Pertussis (Whooping Cough), he produced a similar chart:
In this case, you can actually see when the Pertussis vaccine was introduced. He also showed a chart for Scarlett Fever, which furthers the confusion about the role of vaccines, because there’s never been a Scarlett Fever vaccine, and yet the chart of a huge decline in mortality from Scarlett Fever looks very similar to measles and pertussis:
What’s the point?
Dr. Kass was trying to make a simple point to his colleagues, but one with profound implications for public health. His point was so important, I’m going to quote him in really big font to try and drive it home:
“This decline in rates of certain disorders, correlated roughly with socioeconomic circumstances, is merely the most important happening in the history of the health of man, yet we have only the vaguest and most general notions about how it happened and by what mechanisms socioeconomic improvement and decreased rates of certain diseases run in parallel.”
Dr. Kass pled with his colleagues to be open to understanding WHY infectious diseases had declined so dramatically in the U.S. (as well as other first world countries). Was it nutrition? Sanitary methods? A reduction in home crowding? (We’ve since learned the answer to all three questions is, “Yes.”) He encouraged his colleagues to be careful not to jump to conclusions prematurely and to maintain objectivity and “devote ourselves to new possibilities.”
Luckily for us, Dr. Kass’ speech that day has been saved for posterity, as it was printed in its entirety in a medical journal. In fact, it’s a journal that Dr. Kass himself founded, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, and his speech is called, “Infectious Disease and Social Change.” There are a number of things about Dr. Kass’ speech that I found breathtaking, especially given that he was the President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Namely:
He never referred to vaccines as “mankind’s greatest invention” or one of the other many hyperbolic ways vaccines are described all the time by vaccine promoters in the press today. Vaccines weren’t responsible for saving “millions of lives” in the United States, as Dr. Kass well knew.
In fact, he never gave vaccines much credit AT ALL for the developed world’s dramatic mortality decline. Which makes sense, because none of the data he had would have supported that view. Which made me wonder, “has anyone tried to put the contribution of vaccines to the decline in human mortality in the 20th century in context?” Said differently, is there any data that measures exactly how much impact vaccines had in saving humanity? Yes, indeed there is. Read on.
1977: McKinlay & McKinlay: The most famous study you’ve never heard of
It won’t be the world’s easiest read, but I hope you take the time to read every word. In 1977, Boston University epidemiologists (and husband and wife) John and Sonja McKinlay published the seminal work on the role vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive decline in mortality seen in the twentieth century, that 74% number I talked about in my opening paragraph. Not only that, but their study warned against the very behavior we are now seeing in the world of vaccines. Namely, they warned that a group of profiteers might take more credit for the results of an intervention (vaccines) than the intervention deserves, and then use those fake results to create a world where their product must be used by everyone. Seriously, they predicted that this would happen. (It’s worth noting that the McKinlay Study used to be required reading at every medical school.)
…they warned that a group of profiteers might take more credit for the results of an intervention (vaccines) than the intervention deserves, and then use those fake results to create a world where their product must be used by everyone.
“that the introduction of specific medical measures and/or the expansion of medical services are generally not responsible for most of the modern decline in mortality.”
By “medical measures,” the McKinlay’s really meant ANYTHING modern medicine had come up with, whether that was antibiotics, vaccines, new prescription drugs, whatever. The McKinlay’s 23-page study really should be read cover to cover, but in a nutshell the McKinlay’s sought to analyze how much of an impact medical interventions (antibiotics, surgery, vaccines) had on this massive decline in mortality rates between 1900 and 1970:
Here are some of the major points their paper made:
92.3% of the mortality rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950 [before most vaccines existed]
Medical measures “appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in the United States since about 1900–having in many instances been introduced several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no detectable influence in most instances.”
And, here’s the two doozies…
The paper makes two points that I really want to highlight, because they are so important. The first one concerns vaccines. They write:
“Even if it were assumed that this change was entirely due to the vaccines, then only about one percent of the decline following interventions for the diseases considered here could be attributed to medical measures. Rather more conservatively, if we attribute some of the subsequent fall in the death rates for pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, and diphtheria to medical measures, then perhaps 3.5 percent of the fall in the overall death rate can be explained through medical intervention in the major infectious diseases considered here. Indeed, given that it is precisely for these diseases that medicine claims most success in lowering mortality, 3.5 percent probably represents a reasonable upper-limit estimate of the total contribution of medical measures to the decline in mortality in the United States since 1900.”
In plain English: of the total decline in mortality since 1900, that 74% number I keep mentioning, vaccines (and other medical interventions like antibiotics) were responsible for somewhere between 1% and 3.5% of that decline. Said differently, at least 96.5% of the decline (and likely more than that since their numbers included ALL medical interventions, not ONLY vaccines) had nothing to do with vaccines.
You don’t get to say you saved humanity if, at most, you were responsible for 3.5% of the decline in mortality rates since 1900 (and probably closer to 1%).
And then the McKinlay’s wrote something that made me laugh out loud, because it’s the thing we are seeing every day in today’s vaccine-hyped world:
“It is not uncommon today for biotechnological knowledge and specific medical interventions to be invoked as the major reason for most of the modern (twentieth century) decline in mortality. Responsibility for this decline is often claimed by, or ascribed to, the present-day major beneficiaries of this prevailing explanation.”
Sound familiar?
2000: the CDC puts the final nail in the coffin
In 1970, Dr. Kass raised the idea that public health officials need to be careful to not give the wrong things credit for the twentieth century’s massive mortality rate decline in the developed world. In 1977, Drs. McKinlay & McKinlay put data around Dr. Kass’ ideas, and showed that vaccines (and other medical interventions) were responsible for between 1-3.5% of the total decline in mortality since 1900. In 2000, CDC scientists reconfirmed all this data, but also provided more insight into the things that actually have led to declines in mortality.
Published in September 2000 in the journal Pediatrics and titled, “Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th Century,” epidemiologists from both Johns Hopkins and the Centers for Disease Control reaffirmed what we had already learned from McKinlay and McKinlay:
“Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century…nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccine were available.”
The study went on to explain the things that actually were responsible for a massive decline in mortality: “water treatment, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices.” Also, “improvements in crowding in US cities” played a major role. Clean water. Safe food. Nutrition. Plumbing. Hygiene. These were the primary reasons mortality declined so precipitously. At least according to the data and published science.
Recent history
I get really strong reactions when I share this chart, compiled from CDC data:
This chart is compiled from this dataset provided by the CDC. You can see that nine vaccines we give children today didn’t even exist in the mid-1980s. Moreover, the vaccination rates for the three vaccines that did exist were hovering near 60% or less as late as the mid-1980s. Today, vaccination rates are all well north of 90% for American children. I think it’s fair to ask, “why so much panic”? If you think about this chart for long enough, it makes you realize how silly the oft-invoked notion of “herd immunity” really is, since we obviously couldn’t have been anywhere near vaccine-induced herd immunity in the mid-1980s. In fact, we’re really no closer today, because adult vaccination rates remain so low, and vaccines wane over time.
Why the truth matters
As McKinlay and McKinlay warned, if the wrong intervention (like vaccines) is singled out as the reason Americans and the rest of the first world experienced such a dramatic decrease in mortality in the 20th century, that misinformation can be abused to do things like:
Rapidly expanding the number of vaccines given to children
Browbeating parents who chose to follow a different vaccine schedule and making them feel guilty
Making vaccines mandatory
Speaking about vaccines in such reverential terms that even questioning them (like I’m doing in this article) is viewed as sacreligious and irresponsible.
And, denying that vaccines injuries happen at high rates, to keep the whole machine moving in the right direction. (By the way, the best guess of vaccine injury rate is about 2% of people who receive vaccines, according to this study commissioned and paid for by the CDC when they actually automated the tracking of vaccine injuries. The “one in a million” figure thrown around by vaccine promoters is simply an unsupportable lie.)
Africa, and other third world countries
Vaccine promoters will often quote statistics about present-day deaths from infectious diseases that sound deeply alarming. Using examples of a disease like measles, they might explain how many children still die from measles every year, and therefore its gravely important that EVERY American parent vaccinate their child for measles. Of course, what they don’t mention is that these infectious disease deaths are happening in places that still have quality of life conditions akin to American children of the early 1900s. Poor nutrition. No plumbing or refrigeration. Bad hygiene practices. Crowded living conditions. All the things that ACTUALLY impacted the mortality rate the most haven’t yet been addressed in certain parts of Africa and other third world countries, and JUST implementing vaccines won’t change the facts. This was Dr. Kass’ point in the first place: know what actually led to the mortality rate decline, and do more of that!
In fact, we now have some data that shows vaccinating children living in situations where they have poor nutrition and lack of sanitation can actually do more harm than good:
The “Aaby Study”
Published in the peer-reviewed journal EBioMedicine in 2017, the study is titled, “The Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural Experiment.” Researchers from the Research Center for Vitamins and Vaccines, Statens Serum Institut (Denmark), and Bandim Health Project looked closely at data from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The scientists in this study closely explored the concept of NSEs, “nonspecific effects” of vaccines, which is a fancy way of saying vaccines may make a child more susceptible to other infections. They found that the data for African children who had been vaccinated with the DTP vaccine:
“was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DTP. . . . DTP is the most widely used vaccine. . . . All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus, or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease, it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.”
In lay terms, this means that giving an African child the DTP vaccine may make the child sick from other infections. It appears that in Africa, the living conditions are more important than the vaccine (as you would very much expect from Dr. Kass’ and the Drs. McKinlay’s work), and the DTP vaccine did indeed do more harm than good. (It’s worth noting that Dr. Aaby was a highly regarded vaccine researcher until he published this study in 2017. It’s my understanding that he has since lost his funding sources. Welcome to today’s world of vaccine “science.”)
Every Second Child
We have another real world example of this phenomenon from the late 1970s. Dr. Archie Kalokerinos made a simple discovery, as he explains:
“At first it was just a simple clinical observation. I observed that many infants, after they received routine vaccines like tetanus, diphtheria, polio, whooping cough or whatever, became ill. Some became extremely ill, and in fact some died. It was an observation, It was not a theory. So my first reaction was to look at the reasons why this happened. Of course I found it was more likely to happen in infants who were ill at the time of receiving a vaccine, or infants who had been ill recently, or infants who were incubating an infection. Of course in the early stages of incubation there is no way whatsoever that anyone can detect the disease. They turn up later on. Furthermore, some of the reactions to the vaccines were not those that were listed in the standard literature.
They were very strange reactions indeed. A third observation was that with some of these reactions which normally resulted in death I found that I could reverse them by giving large amounts of vitamin C intramuscularly or intravenously. One would have expected, of course, that the authorities would take an interest in these observations that resulted in a dramatic drop in the death rate of infants in the area under my control, a very dramatic drop. But instead of taking an interest their reaction was one of extreme hostility. This forced me to look into the question of vaccination further, and the further I looked into it the more shocked I became. I found that the whole vaccine business was indeed a gigantic hoax. Most doctors are convinced that they are useful, but if you look at the proper statistics and study the instance of these diseases you will realise that this is not so.”
Dr Kalokerinos also said something in 1995 that it appears Dr. Aaby’s study was able to corroborate in 2017:
“And if you want to see what harm vaccines do, don’t come to Australia or New Zealand or any place, go to Africa and you will see it there.”
We actually knew the truth in the early 1900s, even before the rapid decline in mortality Well ahead of his time, Englishman John Thomas Biggs was the sanitary engineer for his town of Leicester and had to actively respond to outbreaks of smallpox. He quickly learned that the public health outcomes from sanitation vastly outweighed the impact of vaccination (where he saw dramatic vaccine injury and ineffectiveness). He wrote a definitive work in 1912, Leicester: Sanitation versus Vaccination. More than one hundred years ago, Mr. Biggs discovered what the CDC reaffirmed in 2000: Nothing protects from infectious disease like proper sanitation. He explained:
“Leicester has furnished, both by precept and example, irrefutable proof of the capability and influence of Sanitation, not only in combating and controlling, but also in practically banishing infectious diseases from its midst. . . . A town newly planned on the most up-to-date principles of space and air, and adopting the “Leicester Method” of Sanitation, could bid defiance not to small-pox only, but to other infectious, if not to nearly all zymotic, diseases.”
Dr. Andrew Weil, the oft-quoted celebrity doctor, reenforces the point, explaining that “medicine has taken credit it does not deserve for some advances in health. Most people believe that victory over the infectious diseases of the last century came with the invention of immunizations. In fact, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough, and the others were in decline before vaccines for them became available — the result of better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal, and distribution of food and water.”
Finally
Vaccines didn’t save humanity. Their impact was somewhere between 1-3.5% of the total decline in mortality rates. Improvement in sanitation and standards of living really did (nutrition, living conditions, etc.). Did vaccines contribute to a small decrease of certain acute illnesses? Yes, but their relative benefit is often exaggerated to an extreme, and then used to browbeat, guilt, and scare parents.
So am I saying no one should vaccinate? No, I’m not. Vaccines provide temporary protection from certain acute illnesses. Some matter more than others. I personally think we give way too many vaccines, and I think the risk/benefit equation of each vaccine is often obscured. Worse, the lie that vaccines saved humanity in the twentieth century has turned many vaccine promoters into zealots, even though their narratives are simply not supported by the facts. But, by all means, get as many vaccines as you want, I respect your right to make your own medical care choices.
In late 2017, it was reported that Emory University scientists were developing a common cold vaccine. Professor Martin Moore bragged that his research “takes 50 strains of the common cold and puts it into one shot” and that the monkeys who served as test subjects “responded very well.” You should expect to see this vaccine at your pediatrician’s office in the next five years, which will likely be rolled out soon after the stories start to appear in the media about the common cold causing childhood deaths, and that millions of lives will be saved, much as vaccines saved the world in the twentieth century…parents beware, and do your own research!
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The resumption of full-scale joint military exercises between the US and South Korea will increase tensions on the Korean Peninsula. After South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol came to power on March 22, pressure on North Korea increased, and in reaction, Pyongyang may react harshly to the strengthening of military ties between Seoul and Washington.
The resumption of large-scale joint exercises between South Korea and the US, including joint training in the field, is one of Seoul’s defence priorities. South Korean Defence Minister Lee Jong-sup made the statement while speaking at a regular news conference on July 22, Yonhap news agency reported. He also said the country will urgently push for the US’s high-altitude missile defence system to be deployed in the country to counter threats emanating from North Korea.
South Korea has publicly announced the details of the resumption of full-scale joint military exercises, which were cancelled in 2018. The first such exercise will take place from August 22 to September 1. The exercise will combine computer simulation training, field drills, and civilian response drills. There will be a total of 11 joint field exercises, including at the brigade and regiment levels.
In fact, that equates to the resumption of the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise. UFG was cancelled in 2018 under the administration of President Moon Jae-in due to Seoul’s interest in facilitating diplomacy with North Korea. Pyongyang views the UFG drills as a war manoeuvre.
North Korea views the joint military exercises between South Korea and the US as a direct threat to national security and will therefore react negatively to their resumption. Since coming to power, President Yoon Suk-yeol has increased pressure on North Korea and prioritised the strengthening of his country’s military relations with the US.
It is noted that senior South Korean military figures began using the term “enemy” when talking about North Korea. In recent years, the term has not been used in inter-Korean relations. Seemingly, it appears that Seoul is gearing up for a confrontation with Pyongyang instead of looking for common ground. With such premises, there is no chance to start a dialogue and to resolve the division of Korea that has persisted for more than 70 years.
The Seoul government has repeated that it will take further actions following the recent series of weapons tests, something that will only increase tensions. On July 22, the South Korean President warned that North Korea could not only test nuclear weapons, but also have the ability to “do it at any time it wants.”
It is no coincidence that this statement coincides with the announcement of South Korea’s defence plans. Clearly, Seoul is working closely with the US to incite increased military confrontation on the Korean Peninsula to justify the need to hold regular large-scale military exercises.
This comes as North Korea condemned on July 23 remarks made by US deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, Anne Neuberger, about Pyongyang’s cyberattack capabilities. North Korea said it would continue to stand against what it called US aggression towards it. A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that Neuberger’s branding of the country’s leadership as a “group of criminals” revealed the true nature of Washington’s hostile policy.
Neuberger claimed that the North Koreans were a criminal syndicate pursuing revenue “in the guise of a country”, alleging that thousands of trained hackers are stealing cryptocurrencies to fund the sanctions-hit state.
“After all, the US administration has revealed the true picture of its most vile hostile policy, once covered under the veil of ‘dialogue with no strings attached’ and ‘diplomatic engagement’,” state news agency KCNA said, citing the foreign ministry spokesperson. “In a similar fashion, the DPRK will face off the US, the world’s one and only group of criminals.”
It also comes as the FBI and Justice Department announced on July 19 that it disrupted the activities of a hacking group that was sponsored by the North Korean government and was targeting US hospitals with ransomware.
In this way, North Korea has demonstrated that it is making retaliatory actions against the US. If North Korea is willing to make retaliatory actions against the US, despite it being the world’s current greatest technological and military power, South Korea is playing a dangerous game by escalating provocations, all because its emboldened new president wants his country to have an elevated position as a Major non-NATO ally.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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Van Welbergen is a specialist in biomedicine who deals with chronic cases. He has postgrad work in women’s health in pharmacology, bio-pharmacology, advanced pain management and aesthetic medicine, which is why he was able to detect developments of patients that were seemingly out of character or did not make sense in terms of the patients’ diagnostic history.
“One of the tests that we run routinely as a diagnostic support tool is red blood cell morphology – it means that certain conditions can change the shape of a perfectly good red blood cell from a lovely little donut with a dimple to very strange shapes,” he explained during a recent appearance on the “Dr. Jane Ruby Show.”
The host, Dr. Jane Ruby, pointed out that there are two main ways the injections – whatever is in them – can be transferred to another person who is not vaccinated. This could be through inhalation or skin-to-skin contact.
Van Welberger said that in looking at the pure blood smears, which he took straight from an individual to the microscope, he noticed that the unstained blood “started picking up unusual, tiny structures” that he has never seen before.
He then presented data showing that red blood cells – which are usually round and doughnut-shaped – have been damaged by the spike protein. Those cells have become quadrangles or octagon-shaped instead of round. They have become messed up due to the spike protein damage and cannot be restored. (Related: Is graphene oxide what caused Japanese authorities to suspend Moderna’s “contaminated” covid vaccines?)
“You can’t repair red blood cells,” Van Welverger explained. “So these things are basically lost to us.”
Moreover, because these cells have lost their shape, they cannot move through the macro circulatory system. Instead, they just bunch together and block things.
The unvaccinated somehow ended up full of graphene and self-assembling nanoparticles in their blood, which is the manifestation of shedding of those who took the vaccines themselves. This is often seen in unvaccinated children with vaccinated parents.
Children who had been infected with graphene oxide in their bodies, have seen different effects, although gastrointestinal complaints are the most common. This is because the cells are associated with ulcers, bleeding and even some forms of cancer.
Parents essentially allowing death of children if they let them get vaccinated against COVID-19
Taking a sample from a three-year-old, Van Welbergen showed that the child’s blood showed the presence of sloughed graphene fragments in blood samples, which he said were likely to have been passed down.
Another sample, from an eight-year-old unvaccinated child, had his right arm and upper right leg basically paralyzed, with his thigh unable to move normally. Van Welbergen said this means the child has experienced graphene transmission and infection.
Van Welbergen is not the only one who saw the negative effects of graphene oxide in vaccines on human red blood cells.
Dr. Bärbel Ghitalla and his colleague Axel Bolland, along with two lawyers Holger Fischer and Elmar Becker, found graphene oxide in their bodies after they had been injected with Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.
British microbiologist Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi also said that if parents allow their children to be vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, it means that they are willing to have their children killed.
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Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, is reportedly scheduled to visit Taipei in August 2022. The stated purpose is supporting Asian democracy. The trip has more than irked the Chinese.
The trip has obviously not been approved by the one recognized government of China in Beijing. Some may downplay the speaker of the US House of Representatives as being largely ceremonial, but the Speaker is second in line, after the vice-president, should the addled president be unable to fulfill his duties, a scenario wholly within the realm of possibility.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian warned that Pelosi’s trip would have a “grave impact” on US-China ties:
If the US were to insist on going down the wrong path, China will take resolute and strong measures to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity. All the ensuing consequences shall be borne by the US side.
The US paid scant heed to the red lines that president Vladimir Putin expressed about Russian security concerns, and Ukraine is paying the military consequences of this right now while European countries are reaping the economic blowback of sanctions they leveled against Russia.
It is now widely conceded that Putin does not bluff.
To underscore the sincerity of China about the Pelosi trip to Taiwan, another Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, “We mean what we say.”
Biden seems to be wavering on the Pelosi visit, saying,
“I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now, but I don’t know what the status of it is.”
The US has placed itself in a no-win situation: either it backs down from the provocation of a Pelosi visit or it opens itself to “resolute and strong measures” from China.
The intrigues against China are not new. What is different is the Chinese response. China has become decidedly more forceful in its diplomacy.
The Biden administration carried forward the Sinophobia from the outgoing Trump administration. This was apparent in the meeting of Chinese and American heads in Anchorage, Alaska. US Secretary of state Antony Blinkenspoke of:
deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters…
In his remarks, Yang Jiechi, Chinese director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs pointed out salient differences between the US and China:
China’s per-capita GDP is only one-fifth of that of the United States, but we have managed to end absolute poverty for all people in China….
Our values are the same as the common values of humanity. Those are: peace, development, fairness, justice, freedom and democracy.
What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called rules-based international order.
A stage was set in Alaska; China emphatically laid out its intention to follow a peaceful, non-hegemonic world order based on international law.
Nonetheless, the US contrary to signed state-to-state undertakings of a One China Policy has frittered away its word and corralled Europe into its deceit. Thus on 6 July, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg alleged:
China is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbors, threatening Taiwan … monitoring and controlling its own citizens through advanced technology, and spreading Russian lies and disinformation…
Japan as American Catspaw
A second US zone of contention is the South China Sea. In the case of Taiwan, the US and allies, such as Japan, seek to undermine the One China Policy.
The recently assassinated former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in late November 2021:
Any armed invasion of Taiwan would present a serious threat to Japan. A Taiwan crisis would be a Japan crisis and therefore a crisis for the Japan-U.S. alliance.
Japan is a former colonizer of Taiwan. Being militarily weak, the Qing dynasty was forced by the Treaty of Shimonoseki to cede Taiwan. The Potsdam Proclamation at the end of WWII saw Taiwan revert to Chinese sovereignty. However, the US 7th fleet intervened in a Chinese civil war and allowed for the Guomindang, led by Jiang Jie Shi (known in the West as Chiang Kai-shek), to escape from the mainland to Taiwan, thereby leading to two claimants to be the government of China.
Japan abides in words to the One China Policy, but it hands are tied by its American hegemon. [3]
Japan claims concern about a threat to its territorial security if Taiwan were to be formally reunited with China. But such a concern reeks of hypocrisy because territorial and defensive concerns underlie Russia control over what Japan calls its Northern Territories, the islands northeast of Hokkaido: Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashiri and Etorofu.
China Blames US-NATO
Taiwan spills over into Ukraine. When a country considers itself a unipolar power, then it will seek to compel obedience with its directives elsewhere in the world. Thus, NATO head Stoltenberg has demanded that China condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
First, what the Russians are doing in fighting Nazism in Ukraine is completely different from the responsibility to protect pretext that NATO cited for fomenting violence in ex-Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria. Russia finally intervened after eight years of Ukraine shelling Donbass — what Putin calls a genocide. Second, China is a close and staunch ally of Russia and calls for a peaceful settlement of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Since the US controls the anti-Russia media narrative at home and supplies Ukraine with weaponry, it is argued that the fighting in Ukraine represents a proxy war against Russia.
It is little wonder given US non-compliance with the One China Policy that China identifies the US as a belligerent in Ukraine. Nonetheless, it is China that NATO has declared a “systemic challenge.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded in his Regular Press Conference on 6 July:
The history of NATO is one of creating conflicts and waging wars. From Bosnia and Herzegovina to Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine, the self-claimed “defensive organization” has been making advances into new areas and domains, arbitrarily launching wars and killing innocent civilians. Even to this day, there is no sign of change. Facts have proven that it is not China that poses a systemic challenge to NATO, but NATO that brings a looming “systemic challenge” to world peace and security.
Zhao in his Regular Press Conference on 19 July said:
As the one who started the Ukraine crisis and the biggest factor fueling it, the US needs to deeply reflect on its erroneous actions of exerting extreme pressure and fanning the flame on the Ukraine issue and stop playing up bloc confrontation and creating a new Cold War by taking advantage of the situation. The US needs to facilitate a proper settlement of the crisis in a responsible way and create the environment and conditions needed for peace talks between parties concerned.
In deeds, China has revealed itself to be a steadfast ally. In words, China has become an assertive voice for peace based on international law and order.
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Kim Petersen is a scuba diver, independent writer, and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
1. See Gideon Polya, US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide (2020).
2. Visit the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre, erected on a site where many of the 300,000 victims were dumped in a mass grave. Read Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997).
3. Daojiong Zha, “The Taiwan Problem in Japan-China Relations: From an Irritant to a Destroyer?” Indian Journal of Asian Affairs, 14(1/2), June & December, 2001: 15-31.
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After two years of unprecedented government tyranny in the name of fighting a virus, the prime instigators of this infamy are walking free, writing books, and openly pretending they never said the things they clearly said over and over.
Take Trump’s White House Covid response coordinator Deborah Birx, for example. She was, as the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker points out in a recent article, the principal architect of the disastrous “lockdown” policy that destroyed more lives than Covid itself. Birx knew that locking a country down in response to a virus was a radical move that would never be endorsed. So, as she admits in her new book, she lied about it.
She sold the White House on the out-of-thin-air “fifteen days to slow the spread” all the while knowing there was no evidence it would do any such thing. As she wrote in her new book, Silent Invasion, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.”
She was playing for time with no evidence. As it turns out, she was also destroying the lives of millions of Americans. The hysteria she created led to countless businesses destroyed, countless suicides, major depressions, drug and alcohol addictions. It led to countless deaths due to delays in treatment for other diseases. It may turn out to be the most deadly mistake in medical history.
As she revealed in her book, she actually wanted to isolate every single person in the United States! Writing about how many people would be allowed to gather, she said: “If I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”
She wanted to prevent even two people from meeting. How is it possible that someone like this came to gain so much power over our lives?
Last week in a Fox News interview she again revealed the extent of her treachery. After months of relentlessly demanding that all Americans get the Covid shots, she revealed that the “vaccines” were not vaccines at all!
“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,” she told Fox. “And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.”
So when did she know this? Did she know it when she told ABC in late 2020 that “this is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic about the vaccine”?
If she knew all along that the “vaccines” were not vaccines, why didn’t she tell us? Because, as she admits in her book, she believes it’s just fine to lie to people in order to get them to do what she wants.
She admits that she employed “subterfuge” against her boss – President Donald Trump – to implement Covid policies he opposed. So it should be no surprise that she lied to the American people about the efficacy of the Covid shots.
The big question now, after what appears to be a tsunami of vaccine-related injuries, is will anyone be forced to pay for the lies and subterfuge? Will anyone be held to account for the lives lost for the arrogance of the Birxes and Faucis of the world?
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Several geopolitical powers are seeking to enhance their influence and cooperation with the continent of Africa.
United States President Joe Biden announced during July that he would host a summit with African leaders at the White House in December.
This announcement by Biden comes in the aftermath of several important political developments which have exposed the ineffective foreign policy orientation of the world’s leading capitalist country. Within the United Nations, many African states abstained from two resolutions which condemned the Russian Federation during the early phase of Moscow’s special military operation in neighboring Ukraine.
In addition, most African governments have not made pronouncements in favor of the war program of the U.S. Compounding these complicated relationships is the reliance by several AU states on Russian and Ukrainian agricultural products and inputs. The imposition of unprecedented sanctions by the Biden administration and the European Union (EU) has hampered the flow of goods and services.
The two leading officials of the AU, President Macky Sall of Senegal, who is the chair of the continental organization and Commissioner Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, traveled to Sochi in June to hold high-level discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The AU statement issued in the aftermath of the meeting reiterated the position of the organization that the conflict in Ukraine should be resolved diplomatically through negotiations. This is a position at variance with the Biden presidency which has openly declared that the administration wants to remove Putin from power and weaken Russia as a world power.
Also, the talks between Putin and the AU resulted in the reconvening of the Russia-Africa Summit which will meet towards the end of the year in Ethiopia. In fact, during late July, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked upon a tour to several African countries including Egypt, Uganda and Ethiopia.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said in a press conference with Lavrov that the enemies of the U.S. were not the adversaries of his government. He noted that Uganda wants to trade with the U.S., Russia and any other country which respects its independence and sovereignty.
The Russian envoy emphasized that Moscow has always supported Africa in the struggle against colonialism. Museveni exclaimed during the press conference held at Entebbe: “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us? If Russia makes mistakes, we tell them. When they have not made mistakes, we can’t be against them.” See this.
A report published by the Tass News Agency said of the Kremlin’s chief envoy’s trip to Africa emphasizing:
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov arrived on Tuesday (July 26) in Ethiopia on a working visit, TASS reports from the site. On Wednesday, Lavrov is expected to hold talks with his Ethiopian counterpart Demeke Mekonnen. The top diplomat visits Ethiopia on the last leg of his tour of Africa. From Ethiopia, he will travel to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Council of Foreign Ministers.”
Lavrov visited four African states during his tour. These countries were Egypt, Congo-Brazzaville, Uganda and Ethiopia, where the AU headquarters is located in the capital of Addis Ababa. The Russian foreign minister denied the allegations made by the U.S. and the EU that Moscow is responsible for the global food crisis.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meets with Egyptian counterpart (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
According to Ahram online published in Cairo, Egypt, Lavrov said:
“There is a very loud campaign around this, but our African friends understand their root cause. They are not related to what is happening within the special military operation.”
France Attempting to Recover Lost Credibility
French President Emmanuel Macron started an African trip at the same time as Lavrov’s visit across the continent. France has come under fire in recent months for its military presence in several countries including the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso. The CAR and Malian governments are utilizing Russian military consultants from the Wagner Group, which Moscow has denied is an arm of its foreign policy.
Nonetheless, the burgeoning hostility towards Paris within its former colonies on the continent has proved to be worrisome for the Macron government. French military and diplomatic personnel in Mali were requested to leave the country immediately. France has maintained a military presence in many of its former colonies since the 1960s. These forces have intervened in internal political struggles in a manner which benefits France and not necessarily the African states involved.
Although Macron is obviously seeking to counter the heightened scrutiny being placed on France’s involvement in Africa, it is by no means clear what Paris has to offer countries such as Cameroon, Mali, Guinea-Conakry, the CAR, Ivory Coast, among others. In recent years, France has attempted to bolster its CFA zone domination over currencies in various African states even to the point of proposing a new monetary system which would maintain links to Paris.
Even the U.S. State Department-funded Voice of America (VOA), wrote on the mission of the French president while he visited Cameroon noting that:
“Macron said European economic sanctions on Russia, which are having an indirect effect on Africa, are intended to stop Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and not to punish Africans. He said France is interested in the well-being of civilians in both African countries and Ukraine. The visiting French president did not say how much France would invest to boost agricultural production in Africa, but said Cameroon is one of the countries chosen for agricultural investments. The U.N. says that Africa depends on Russia and Ukraine for more than 50 percent of its wheat imports.”
Such an admission by the VOA utilizing United Nations data raises the question of why have African governments turned to Russia to meet their domestic consumption demands? France’s foreign policy orientation has heavily relied on military force to advance its strategic interests in Africa.
Moreover, in recent months since the expulsion of French diplomatic and military personnel from Mali, it has become necessary for Macron to advance a new and ostensibly more “compassionate” approach towards various African states. Such a superficial policy shift conflicts with statements made by Macron leading up to the 60th anniversary of Algerian independence when the French leader suggested that atrocities committed by its colonial officials have been exaggerated by successive administrations in Algiers. France controlled Algeria as a colonial outpost for 132 years. Millions of Algerians lost their lives to French forces through massacres dating back to the 19th century notwithstanding the counter-insurgency operations during the war of independence between 1954-1962, when Paris withdrew its military from the North African state.
Biden Maintains Same Imperialist Policy Towards Africa
Mike Hammer, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa, began a tour to Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on July 24. Supposedly the purpose of Hammer’s trip was to facilitate a settlement surrounding the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the status of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has opposed the GERD saying it will redirect water from the Blue Nile jeopardizing the well-being of its people. The current demarcations for usage from the strategic waterway was instituted by Britain during its colonial domination over Egypt in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ethiopia maintains that GERD utilizing its full capacity would be beneficial to the entire regions of North and East Africa.
What is significant about the U.S. posture as a mediator in this dispute is that the previous administration of President Donald Trump sided openly with Egypt in 2020, even encouraging Cairo to “blow up” the GERD project. The Biden administration, similarly to Trump’s, has worked to either weaken or overthrow the Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
Biden and many members of the Democratic Party in Congress have imposed a ban on Ethiopia’s participation in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) program which has been in operation since the concluding days of the administration of former President Bill Clinton. In addition to the purging of Ethiopia from AGOA, the Congress had threatened to pass legislative measures designed to implement even more draconian sanctions on the Horn of Africa state which houses the headquarters of the AU.
As a result of Washington’s posture towards Ethiopia, many women garment workers have had their plants closed due to lack of demand from the U.S. Hammer claims that the Biden administration is concerned about the equitable and efficient distribution of aid to Ethiopia where the government has battled the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in the north of the country. Successive U.S. administrations have supported the TPLF during its period in power from 1991-2018, when their government collapsed as a result of a national uprising in Ethiopia.
These factors must be taken into consideration when evaluating the diplomatic competition taking place between Washington, Paris and Moscow. If recent events are any indication, the African people along with their governments will struggle to make decisions which benefit the continent as opposed to the western imperialist states.
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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: Ethiopian Foreign Minister with Russian counterpart (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
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***
As the Cuban government celebrates the July 26 Day of the National Rebellion–a public holiday commemorating the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks that is considered the precursor to the 1959 revolution–U.S. groups are calling on the Biden administration to stop its cruel sanctions that are creating such hardship for the Cuban people. In particular, they are pushing President Biden to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Being on this list subjects Cuba to a series of devastating international financial restrictions. It is illegal for U.S. banks to process transactions to Cuba, but U.S. sanctions also have an unlawful extraterritorial reach. Fearful of getting in the crosshairs of U.S. regulations, most Western banks have also stopped processing transactions involving Cuba or have implemented new layers of compliance. This has hampered everything from imports to humanitarian aid to development assistance, and has sparked a new European campaign to challenge their banks’ compliance with U.S. sanctions.
These banking restrictions and Trump-era sanctions, together with the economic fallout from COVID-19, have led to a severe humanitarian and economic crisis for the very Cuban people the administration claims to support. They are also a major cause of the recent increase in migration of Cubans that has become a major political liability for the Biden administration.
At the beginning of Biden’s presidency, he stated that Cuba’s designation on this list was under review. Eighteen months later, with the administration obviously more concerned about Florida politics than the welfare of the Cuban people, the results of this review have still not been revealed. Cuba remains on the list, with no justification and despite Biden hailing diplomacy – not escalation of tension and conflict – as his administration’s preferred path.
During the Obama administration, when there was a warming of bilateral relations with Cuba, the Obama-Biden White House undertook its own review and certified that the government of Cuba was not supporting terrorism and had provided the U.S. with assurances that it would not do so in the future. As a result, Cuba was taken off the infamous list.
When Donald Trump became president, he not only imposed over 200 new, harsh sanctions on the island, but in the last days of his administration, in a final move to curry favor with anti-normalization Cuban-Americans, he added Cuba back onto this list. The only other countries with this designation are Syria, Iran and North Korea.
The addition of Cuba to the list by then Secretary of State Pompeo curtailed a process of congressional consultation and avoided conducting any actual formal review of Cuba’s supposed actions to justify its addition to the list again.
The nonsensical rationale by Pompeo to add Cuba back to the list was that Cuba was granting safe harbor to Colombian terrorists. But these Colombian groups were in Cuba as part of an internationally recognized process of peace negotiations that the United States, Norway, Colombia and even Pope Francis supported.
Trump specifically cited Cuba’s refusal to extradite ten members of the ELN (National Liberation Army), as requested during Colombia’s Ivan Duque administration. However, Cuba was under no obligation to extradite anyone as they have no extradition treaty with the United States, nor is the failure to extradite someone based solely on the United States’ desires an act of “terrorism.” In addition, Colombia’s Constitution states that “extradition shall not be granted for a political crime.” Moreover, Gustavo Petro, a former member of another rebel group called M-19, will soon be inaugurated as the next president of Colombia. He has said to the ELN and all existing armed groups that “the time for peace has come”—a message the Biden administration should embrace.
The other reason stated by the Trump administration for adding Cuba to the list is that Cuba harbors U.S. fugitives from justice. The 2020 State Department report cited three cases, all involving incidents that occurred in the early 1970s. The most famous is the case of Assata Shakur (born Joanne Chesimard), who has become an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement. Shakur, now 75 years old, was a member of the Black Liberation Army. In a trial that many deemed unfair, she was convicted of killing a state trooper when, in 1973, the car she was traveling in was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike for a broken tail light. Shakur escaped from prison and was granted political asylum in Cuba. Fidel Castro called her a victim of “the fierce repression against the Black movement in the United States” and “a true political prisoner.” Her co-defendant Sundiata Acoli, now in his mid-80s, was granted parole this year. Given how old the claims are and that these considerations were already previously reviewed by the Obama-Biden administration and not found to be sufficient to justify designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, it’s certainly time for the Biden administration to remember that and bury the hatchet.
In any case, U.S. attorney Robert Museinsists that providing asylum to U.S. citizens does not justify putting Cuba on a terrorist list. U.S. law defines international terrorism as “acts involving the citizens or the territory of more than one country.” None of the U.S. citizens residing in Cuba committed a terrorist act that was international in nature.
Using this terrorist list for purely political reasons undermines the legitimacy of the terrorism designation itself. As Sen. Patrick Leahysaid, “This blatantly politicized designation makes a mockery of what had been a credible, objective measure of a foreign government’s active support for terrorism. Nothing remotely like that exists [in Cuba].” On the contrary, Cuba has often been praised for its international cooperation and solidarity, especially in providing free or low-cost healthcare and medical support to poor countries worldwide, including throughout the global pandemic.
If anything, it is Cuba that has been the victim of international terrorism emanating mainly from the United States. This ranges from the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro to the downing of a Cuban civilian airplane (while the United States provided actual cover to the terrorist, who lived out his life peacefully in Miami) and the bombing of Cuban hotels. Just last April, the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C., came under an armed attack by a U.S. citizen. The United States continues to provide millions of dollars in taxpayer funding every year to organizations engaged in defamation and smear campaigns, and to directly undermine the sovereignty of another government with little to no oversight.
Removing Cuba from the terrorist list would facilitate the island’s ability to receive loans, access critical foreign assistance and benefit from humanitarian aid. You can join the campaign to tell Biden to reverse the outrageous Trump-era designation that is unjust, harmful to the Cuban people, and damaging to U.S.-Cuban relations.
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Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the social justice organization Global Exchange. She serves on the steering committee of ACERE (Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect) and has written three books on Cuba, including No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan is a human rights lawyer and has written extensively about the principles of self-determination, democratic norms and gender justice. She is on the steering committee of ACERE (Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect).
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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***
As the conflict in Ukraine slouches toward Odessa, the war gets elevated to the sphere of a romantic adventure. If Alexander Dumas was alive, the idea might have struck him to write a sequel to his Three Musketeers, the historical novel written in 1844, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice, highlighting the absurdities of the Ancient Régime in a setting when the debate in France between republicans and monarchists was still fierce.
The absurdity of raking up a non-existent controversy over the Russian missile strike on Odessa on Friday casts Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the second time in a lead role with three swashbuckling musketeers —US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
The first time was when Zelensky acted in a Russian musical film based on Dumas’ novel, with three beautiful Soviet actresses — Anna Ardova, Ruslana Pysanka and Alyona Sviridova — as musketeers, which was released in Moscow on New Year’s Eve in 2004.
Coming back to time present, on Friday, it was a controversy waiting to happen when Russia fired four high precision Kalibr missiles and destroyed Ukrainian military infrastructure in Odessa Port just a day after the Russia-Ukraine grain deal was signed in Istanbul, which provides for the resumption of grain exports from the region.
Zelensky promptly shouted that the missile strike was a “barbaric” act. And Blinken came on the line to level charges against Russia; Guterres jumped into the fray “unequivocally” condemning the Russian strike; and, Borrell lazily wrote on Tweeter that the missile strike was “particularly reprehensible & again demonstrates Russia’s total disregard for international law & commitments.”
As for the Russians, well, they slept over it — that is, until Sunday, when late in the afternoon, the Defence Ministry in Moscow inserted two tersely-worded sentences into its customary daily bulletin on the day’s operations in Ukraine:
“Attack launched by high-precision long-range sea-based missiles has resulted in the elimination of Ukrainian military ship and a depot of Harpoon anti-ship missiles delivered by USA to the Kiev regime in the seaport of Odessa. The list of neutralised targets also includes the production facilities of an entity specialised in repairing and modernising the fleet of Ukrainian Navy.”
Zelensky soon issued a clarification that the implementation of the grain deal from Odessa Port was not in doubt. Apparently, he hadn’t coordinated with the three musketeers sitting elsewhere who reacted prematurely. Blinken probably did the logical thing by distracting attention from the corruption concerns being revived in the Beltway regarding America’s gravy train to Ukraine.
Fundamentally, the grain deal is an eyesore for the Biden administration, which in the first instance never expected an agreement could be negotiated that requires great flexibility on the Russian military’s side. Even more galling is that the deal is turning out to be a political victory for Russia.
Moscow is getting good publicity over its pragmatism to lift its naval blockade for addressing the global food crisis. But what is not obvious to most people is that the grain deal is also a back-to-back deal which commits the UN to get the restrictions being put by the EU and the US on Russia’s grain and fertiliser exports lifted.
Besides, apart from the big income out of grain and fertiliser exports, there is that unquantifiable goodwill that Moscow earns from so many countries which critically depend on Russian wheat, especially in West Asia and Africa. Evidently, the itch to spoil the party in Moscow was found irresistible by Blinken & Co.
Enter Sergey Lavrov. From Oyo, Republic of the Congo, deep in the heart of Africa, where he was travelling to follow up on the grain deal — Russia is the number 1 grain supplier to Africa — Foreign Minister Lavrov sensed immense potentials in the emergent situation. Lavrov made three points while flying out of Oyo in the direction of Kampala:
The grain deal contains nothing “to bar us from continuing the special military operation and hit military infrastructure and other military targets. And the United Nations secretariat representatives… confirmed this interpretation of the documents yesterday.” (Guterres was apparently unaware.)
The missile strike was aimed at “a separate part of the Odessa port, the so-called military part” and, therefore, “there are no obstacles for shipping grain to contractors under the Istanbul agreements and we have created none.” (Indeed, Zelensky himself is acknowledging it.)
The missile strike was aimed at the depot where the Pentagon’s Harpoon anti-ship missiles were stored. “These missiles were delivered to pose threats to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Now, they pose no threats.”
What Lavrov didn’t say but would have implied is that Odessa war theatre has now become “kinetic” and Friday’s attack sets a precedent. The missile strike underscores that Moscow likely anticipated Pentagon’s antics to use the grain deal to shield its deployment of advanced Harpoon missiles in Odessa Port.
Curiously, off Bulgaria, next door to Odessa, on July 14-25, the US took part in a multinational maritime exercise, Breeze 2022, involving 24 warships, cutters, auxiliary vessels, five planes, and four helicopters manned by 1,390 naval personnel from eleven NATO member countries!
The controversy over the missile strike highlights that Russia’s special military operations in Ukraine will remain incomplete and inconclusive until Moscow altogether cuts off the US’ and NATO’s access to Odessa Port and cripples the alliance’s capability in the Black Sea. Obviously, that’s still some way off.
Meanwhile, the great game is accelerating in the Black Sea with Blinken doubling down to woo Azerbaijan. He spoke with President Aliyev on Monday to press Washington’s pending offer “in helping facilitate the opening of regional transportation and communication linkages.” Azerbaijan is the chosen bridgehead for the NATO in southern Caucasus. (See my blog Ukraine’s Great Game surfaces in Transcaucasia.)
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Featured image: A 1894 image of Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers by Maurice Leloir, the French illustrator, watercolourist and writer (Source: IP)
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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***
The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy’s Food Compass, unveiled in late 2021, is another Great Reset tool designed to discourage consumption of animal foods by falsely rating them as unhealthy, and encouraging consumption of ultraprocessed foods by giving them high nutritional ratings
Food Compass rates Frosted Mini Wheats as three times healthier than ground beef, with a score of 87 out of 100, compared to 26 for ground beef
Food Compass also gives high scores to fries, Lucky Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios, chocolate covered almonds and almond M&Ms, while rating whole egg fried in butter, cheddar cheese and ground beef as foods that should be avoided. Based on this tool, you’ll be healthier if you replace whole egg, cheddar cheese and ground beef with candy
Studies have repeatedly shown that diets high in processed foods lead to poor health and depression, and the more processed your diet is, the greater your risk of obesity and chronic diseases that shave years, if not decades, off your life span
Health, food security, independence and freedom are what the global elitists, led by the World Economic Forum, intend to destroy so that they can then roll out a new food system based entirely on patented, processed imitation foods, including lab-grown and plant- or fungi-based “meats” and “clean, green” protein alternatives such as cricket meal and mealworms
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In recent months, I’ve dedicated many articles to exposing the intentional destruction of our food system. The decision of the Dutch government to impose nitrogen pollution restrictions on farmers is but one example of this. This “green” policy will cut livestock production in the country by 30% in the next year, put farmers out of business, and force them to sell their land.
Since The Netherlands is the largest meat exporter in the European Union,1 it will also result in meat shortages around the world. According to Dutch Parliament member Thierry Baudet,2 this “green” policy is really a thinly veiled excuse for a land grab.
The government is following the script of The Great Reset, he says, which requires weakening the country, making it more dependent on food imports, and diluting nationalism by taking in more immigrants. And, to make room for immigrant housing, they need to take land from the farmers.
At the same time, Bill Gates is buying up high-priced farmland3 and telling the world to transition from beef to lab-grown meat alternatives. Insect farms to create human protein alternatives are also being set up and promoted,4 farms and food facilities are mysteriously being burnt to the ground at surprising frequency,5,6 and the Rockefeller Foundation is calling for restructuring the whole food system7 to make it more “fair and equitable.”
These things are not happening by chance. It’s all part of a plan to eliminate naturally-grown foods so they can then be replaced with patented foodstuffs, which this “New World Order” cabal of course owns.
Food Compass to Further Destroy Nutrition Guidance
The hidden globalist cabal has been busy undermining health for decades, and if you want an example of what I’m talking about, look no further than the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy’s Food Compass,8 unveiled in late 2021. As explained by Tufts Now:9
“A scientific team at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts has developed a new tool to help consumers, food companies, restaurants, and cafeterias choose and produce healthier foods and officials to make sound public nutrition policy.
Food Compass is a new nutrient profiling system, developed over three years, that incorporates cutting-edge science on how different characteristics of foods positively or negatively impact health … The new Food Compass system was developed and then tested using a detailed national database of 8,032 foods and beverages consumed by Americans.
It scores 54 different characteristics across nine domains representing different health-relevant aspects of foods, drinks, and mixed meals, providing for one of the most comprehensive nutrient profiling systems in the world.
The characteristics and domains were selected based on nutritional attributes linked to major chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and cancer, as well as to risk of undernutrition, especially for mothers, young children, and the elderly … Potential uses of Food Compass include:
Encouraging the food industry to develop healthier foods and reformulate the ingredients in popular processed foods and snacks;
Providing food purchasing incentives for employees through worksite wellness, health care, and nutrition assistance programs;
Supplying the science for local and national policies such as package labeling, taxation, warning labels, and restrictions on marketing to children;
Enabling restaurants and school, business, and hospital cafeterias to present healthier food options;
Informing agricultural trade policy; and
Guiding institutional and individual investors on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investment decisions”
All of that sounds good, in theory. The problem is, Food Compass clearly was not created to guide people toward optimal health through nutrition. Its primary purpose is to lead people away from wholesome natural foods, toward processed junk foods.
Absurd Food Ranking Tool to Mislead the Masses
While the food score example10 given by Tufts Now is not overly heinous, a deeper dive into the system reveals serious problems. Case in point: Frosted Mini Wheats scores three times higher than ground beef (87 out of 100, compared to 26), as illustrated in the graph below, posted on Twitter by independent journalist Nina Teicholz.11
The fact that “egg substitute fried in vegetable oil” gets a score above zero is a frightening demonstration of their fundamental nutrition ignorance of the foundational fact that excessive omega-6 fats in the form of industrially processed seed oils are the most pernicious poisons in the food supply. The high scores of fries, Lucky Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios, chocolate covered almonds and almond M&Ms certainly don’t help.
Who in their right mind can believe M&Ms are healthier than whole food — any whole food? According to Food Compass, anything with a score below 30 should be minimized, so based on this tool, you’ll be healthier if you replace whole egg, cheddar cheese and ground beef with literal candy, which is nothing short of insanity.
Based on this tool, government would also be justified in restricting marketing of beef, egg and cheese to children, while schools could be encouraged to load M&Ms into school lunches. The whole thing is absurd and indefensible.
In a July 25, 2022, Substack article,12 Teicholz also pointed out that one of the creators of Food Compass, Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, is also part of the development team for the White House conference on nutrition, scheduled to take place in September 2022. As noted by Teicholz, this doesn’t bode well:
“The Food Compass, which gives top ratings to Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs, is absurd on the face of it. In all, nearly 70 brand-named cereals from General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Post are ranked twice as high as eggs cooked in butter or a piece of plain, whole-wheat toast …
What kind of dystopian world has nutrition “science” entered into whereby a university, a peer-reviewed journal, and one of the field’s most influential leaders legitimize advice telling the public to eat more Lucky Charms and fewer eggs? Simply eyeballing these recommendations should be enough to know this diet is a get-sick, diabetes diet, a high-carb, sugar-laden, candy-coated highway to ill-health …
Since Mozaffarian is widely credited with being the driving force behind the upcoming White House conference, his views on nutrition are worth examining. If he and his team at Tufts really think Frosted Mini Wheats are a super food, there’s clearly reason to have some concerns about the outcome of this event.”
Reductionist Assumptions Can Be Disastrous
In an undated white paper, eight authors review “the limitations of the Food Compass Nutrient Profiling System.” As noted in the abstract:13
“Nutrient Profiling Systems provide algorithms which are designed to assess the healthfulness of foods based on nutrient composition, and intended as a strategy to improve diets.
Many Nutrient Profiling Systems are founded on a reductionist assumption that the healthfulness of foods is determined by the sum of their nutrients, with little consideration for the extent and purpose of processing and its health implications.
A novel Nutrient Profiling System called Food Compass attempted to address existing gaps and provide a more holistic assessment of the healthfulness of foods.
While a conceptually impressive effort, we propose that the chosen algorithm is not well justified and produces results that fail to discriminate for common shortfall nutrients, exaggerate the risks associated with animal-source foods, and underestimate the risks associated with ultra-processed foods.
We caution against the use of Food Compass in its current form to inform consumer choices, policies, programs, industry reformulations, and investment decisions.”
The team correctly stresses that “health is not determined by the consumption of single foods but rather by overall diet quality.” Of crucial importance is whether a food has been processed, and what kind of processing it has undergone.
“Food processing is not invariably benign,” the authors write, noting that “While acknowledging there is a large variation in the health effects of different types of ultra-processed foods (UPF), in general the higher the share of UPF in the diet the higher the risk of non-communicable diseases.”
There’s absolutely no shortage of studies14,15,16,17,18,19 showing that diets high in processed foods lead to poor health and depression, and the more processed your diet is, the worse your health and the greater your risk of obesity and chronic diseases that shave years, if not decades, off your life span.
In my references, I’ve included several studies published in 2020, 2021 and 2022, but similar findings have been published for decades. Remember, in most processed foods seeds oils are the highest percentage of calories.
Ultraprocessed Diets Lead to an Early Grave
For example, a February 2021 study20 found those with the highest intakes of ultraprocessed food were, on average, 58% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease compared to those with the lowest intake, 52% more likely to die of ischemic heart disease, and 26% more likely to die from any cause.
As noted by the authors, “These findings should serve as an incentive for limiting consumption of UPF, and encouraging natural or minimally processed foods …” Another meta-analysis, also published in February 2021, found:21
“… the highest UPF consumption was associated with a significant increase in the risk of overweight/obesity (+39 %), high waist circumference (+39 %), low HDL-cholesterol levels (+102 %) and the metabolic syndrome (+79 %) …
For prospective cohort studies evaluating a total population of 183,491 participants followed for a period ranging from 3·5 to 19 years, highest UPF consumption was found to be associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality in five studies (risk ratio (RR) 1·25…), increased risk of CVD in three studies (RR 1·29…), cerebrovascular disease in two studies (RR 1·34…) and depression in two studies (RR 1·20…).
In conclusion, increased UPF consumption was associated … with a worse cardiometabolic risk profile and a higher risk of CVD, cerebrovascular disease, depression and all-cause mortality.”
As detailed in “Ultraprocessed Food Makes You Vulnerable to COVID-19,” a processed food diet is precisely the wrong choice at a time when infectious disease is widespread, as it causes metabolic dysfunction, impairs your gut microbiome and harms your immune system.
Food Compass — Another ‘Great Reset’ Tool
Despite such evidence, Food Compass’ algorithms encourage consumption of ultraprocessed foods, while strongly discouraging consumption of all animal foods, including saturated animal fats.
So, this tool — just as the Dutch effort to get rid of livestock farmers — is really all about eliminating animal foods from the average person’s diet. And why? Because the ultra-rich elitists who want to rule the world don’t want you to eat real food, be healthy and live long. They want you to be dependent on their processed and patented foods so that you’ll be under their control.
If you get sick, they’ll clean out your bank account to treat you, and if you die sooner rather than later, all the better. They think there are far too many useless eaters on the planet as it is, and humans will soon become even more expendable as artificial intelligence and robotics take over.
Saturated Fats Do Not Cause Disease
The fact that saturated animal fats continue to be demonized is a testament to the fact that current “nutritional science” is not based on actual science. It’s based on ancient, outdated assumptions that have long since been debunked and proven wrong.
Real-world data also do not support the notion that saturated fats harm your health by clogging arteries and promoting heart disease. This was yet again highlighted in a systematic review in the Frontiers of Nutrition, published in January 2022, which analyzed dietary trends and food consumption data in the U.S. from 1800 until 2019:22
“Processed and ultra-processed foods increased from <5 to >60% of foods. Large increases occurred for sugar, white and whole wheat flour, rice, poultry, eggs, vegetable oils, dairy products, and fresh vegetables. Saturated fats from animal sources declined while polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils rose.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) rose over the twentieth century in parallel with increased consumption of processed foods, including sugar, refined flour and rice, and vegetable oils. Saturated fats from animal sources were inversely correlated with the prevalence of NCDs.”
Looking back again at the Food Compass chart above, “egg substitute fried in vegetable oil” is listed as having a nutritional rating of 62 out of 100, while whole egg fried in butter gets a suboptimal rating of 29. These two examples are basically inverted.
In my view, vegetable oils — also referred to as seed oils — are the single most dangerous food component there is, exponentially worse than sugar even, and a key metabolic driver of obesity, heart disease, cancer and most all chronic disease.23,24,25,26,27,28,29
One of the reasons these oils are so harmful is because they’re loaded with linoleic acid (LA). When consumed in excess — and you really don’t need much LA — it acts as a metabolic poison, damaging your metabolism and impeding your body’s ability to generate energy in your mitochondria. I’ve discussed the ins and outs of this in many previous articles. For a refresher, see “How Linoleic Acid Wrecks Your Health.”
Saturated fats such as butter and red meat, on the other hand, are rich in important micronutrients that are hard to obtain elsewhere. In fact, foods high in saturated fats are among the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet, and these nutrients are also highly bioavailable.
Interestingly, research30 published in 2020 even found that high saturated fat intake was associated with lower COVID-19 mortality, while high intake of unsaturated fats raised that risk.
Nutritional Guideline to Limit Saturated Fat Was All Wrong
In mid-June 2020, we even had a paper31 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that admitted the long-standing nutritional guideline to limit saturated fat has been incorrect, and ought to be changed. As noted in the abstract:
“The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke.
Although SFAs increase low-density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol, in most individuals, this is not due to increasing levels of small, dense LDL particles, but rather larger LDL which are much less strongly related to CVD risk.
It is also apparent that the health effects of foods cannot be predicted by their content in any nutrient group, without considering the overall macronutrient distribution.
Whole-fat dairy, unprocessed meat, eggs and dark chocolate are SFA-rich foods with a complex matrix that are not associated with increased risk of CVD. The totality of available evidence does not support further limiting the intake of such foods.”
They’re Coming for Your Food, Your Wealth and Your Freedom
Acknowledging that saturated animal fats are healthy, and that processed industrial seed oils and processed grains are not, would decimate the processed food industry, as it relies on cheap seed oils and grains. The healthy alternative is real food, and there’s no big industry profits to be made from that.
The same goes for unprocessed animal foods in general. They can’t be patented, and just about anyone with enough land can raise their own food and become partially, if not fully, independent of major food conglomerates.
All of this — health, food security, independence and freedom — are what the global elitists, led by the World Economic Forum, intend to destroy so that they can then roll out a new food system based entirely on patented, cheaply-made, ultraprocessed imitation foods, including lab-grown32and plant-33 or fungi-based34 meat substitutes and “clean, green” protein alternatives such as cricket meal and mealworms.35,36
If they get their way, the entire world will go the way of Sri Lanka,37 where new “green” agricultural policies implemented in 2021 resulted in island-wide harvest failures which, combined with simultaneous fuel shortages and national bankruptcy, have led to violent riots and famine. Predictably, the United Nations — which is part of The Great Reset — has stepped in to offer food vouchers to underserved areas.
That’s how the takeover occurs. They destroy your ability to work, make a living and feed yourself, and provide shelter for you and your family, and then they offer to “help” you by making you dependent on them for your most basic needs. It’ll only get worse from there.
The end goal of The Great Reset-pushing elitists is to own everything and control the entire global population through a combination of false flag disasters, social engineering technologies, “green” and “sustainable” development policies, a revamped food system of their own making, and global biosecurity measures.
Unless we want to end up in a slave system we’ll never be able to break free from, we have to resist and reject all of these takeover strategies in whatever form they appear, and start building our own parallel systems on the local level.
This would also include the wholesale rejection of the Food Compass tool, and the rejection of and opposition to any institution that uses it to make nutritional decisions for large numbers of people. It’s not just unreliable. It’s absurd, and a blatant attempt to condition people into embracing an even unhealthier diet than what’s been pushed upon us in decades past.
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***
Declassified UK’s new film on the Manchester Arena attack investigates the long-term political roots of the tragedy, probing the role of British foreign policy. It uncovers evidence UK authorities not only failed to prevent the atrocity, but contributed to it.
The father of the youngest person to be killed in the Manchester Arena attack believes the government and MI5 “have blood on their hands” for failing to prevent the suicide bombing.
Salman Abedi, a British man of Libyan heritage, murdered 22 people at a pop concert in May 2017. The Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility.
Andrew Roussos, whose eight-year-old daughter Saffie-Rose died in the atrocity, says counter-terrorism police “should be embarrassed of themselves” over their monitoring of Abedi and his family.
Roussos also accuses the British authorities of “using them for their own gain”, in a reference to how the Abedi family fought on the same side as Nato forces during the uprising against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
He made the remarks in an interview for a new documentary, Blowback: The Road to Manchester, which is available to watch from today for Declassified UK subscribers.The 72-minute film will be released more widely on Monday.
Unlike other documentaries about the Manchester Arena attack, which tend to focus on failures by the emergency services in the hours before and after the bombing, Blowback examines the longer-term political causes of the tragedy.
Produced by myself and presented by Mark Curtis, the author of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion With Radical Islam, the film traces the links between the bomber’s family and UK foreign policy towards Libya.
We investigate the claim made days after the attack by the Labour Party’s then leader, Jeremy Corbyn, that there were connections between terrorism at home and wars Britain had fought abroad – something that at the time was deemed controversial.
The road to Manchester
The UK Home Office allowed a wave of Libyan dissidents to settle in Manchester in the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which the West blamed on Gaddafi’s regime.
Among these exiles was Salman Abedi’s father, Ramadan, who arrived in the city in 1993 having fought in Afghanistan on the same side as Osama Bin Laden.
Ramadan Abedi was a supporter of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant organisation associated with Al Qaeda.
Kenny MacAskill MP, who handled the Lockerbie file when he was Scotland’s justice secretary, tells the film, “Britain wasn’t acting against them because the focus was Gaddafi.”
Blowback explores the complex relationship between the LIFG and British intelligence, who initially supported the group in a plot to kill Gaddafi. After 9/11, MI6 switched sides and handed over the LIFG’s leadership to be tortured in Libya, as part of Tony Blair’s ‘deal in the desert’.
The Arab Spring saw another dramatic policy shift, when David Cameron allied with LIFG remnants to overthrow Gaddafi in 2011.
A lawyer for the Roussos family, Pete Weatherby QC, says Cameron’s government had “an incredibly stupid and naïve British colonial approach to my enemy’s enemy is my friend. So they completely blank out who they are backing.”
Among the LIFG veterans fighting alongside Nato was Ramadan Abedi, accompanied by his three teenage sons Ismail, Salman and Hashem.
Weatherby, who works at barristers’ chambers Garden Court North in Manchester, believes Salman Abedi “was radicalised by the people he was almost certainly knocking around with” in the 2011 conflict. “There was the experience of extreme violence and all that comes with it, death and injury,” he said.
The RAF gave air cover for Islamist militias, led by LIFG veterans, to take over Libya’s capital Tripoli. Hillary Clinton’s State Department then paid a militia linked to the Abedis, the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, to protect US diplomats in post-war Libya.
Blowback
Islamists failed to win a majority at elections that were held in Libya after Gaddafi’s death. However, they refused to disarm their militias, sending the country into another round of civil war. The chaos provided fertile ground for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist group.
The Abedi family continued travelling between Britain and Libya during this civil war. The Royal Navy evacuated Salman and Hashem from Tripoli in 2014. Once back in Manchester, MI5 overlooked the Abedi brothers’ increasing links to IS.
Commenting on British policy towards young men going to fight in Libya, Andrew Roussos tells us: “I don’t understand the reasons why, when you do bring them back to this country and you do know what these people are involved in, not to have a close eye on them. That’s what I can’t swallow.”
Curtis traces the bomber’s movements in the years leading up to the attack. He navigates viewers through a wall of silence from MI5, the Home Office and even, at times, the official inquiry, to show how many opportunities there were to prevent the massacre.
MacAskill, who oversaw the UK’s second largest police force, draws a disturbing parallel between British state collusion with terrorist groups in Northern Ireland and their haphazard handling of the Abedi family. He comments: “The fact that Libyans would be allowed to come and go, some would be let in and out. None of that surprises me.”
The film comes at a volatile time in Libya, where earlier this month protesters torched a parliament building. The country is split between two different Prime Ministers.
One of them, Fathi Bashagha, recently told the House of Commons foreign affairs committee: “More than a decade after the revolution that got rid of the Gaddafi regime…we are still in chaos.”
Bashagha claimed that his British-backed rival, Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh, is “sitting in Tripoli protected by a limited number of militias, some of which are believed to be linked to international terrorist groups.”
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Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo
Featured image: Bereaved father Andrew Roussos. (Photo: Phil Miller / DCUK)
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***
As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson set the scene in spectacular fashion. All who sought to confine him to history, perished. He was the only one who seemed to survive, and reject, one diabolical scandal after the next – till now.
No leader with such a such destructive sense of presence could do anything but impair those who followed him. But that impairment lingers in the contenders who are seeking to replace him, and it shows.
In a system that is admirably daft, the governing party, namely the Conservatives, have given themselves a remarkable span of time to pick Johnson’s successor. A number of candidates initially put their name forth, a chaff-wheat separation exercise that eventually led to the selection of chaff.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss rallies the Tories within the party ranks (a YouGov poll puts Truss at 62 per cent over her rival contender, Rishi Sunak, at 38 per cent). Sunak seems more appealing to the wider conservative vote. Both are unappealing in several ways and have already shown that they are not beneath populism and demagoguery in convincing the party faithful.
Like most Tories hoping to court gullible voters in the centre, we are facing an elaborate deception of privilege burnished as hard work and triumph in adversity. This is the season for counterfeiters.
Sunak is proving something of an adept in this, diminishing his privileged background in order to polish and flash invisible, underprivileged credentials. Truss supporter, culture secretary Nadine Dorries, will have none of it, noting that Truss will campaign around the country in £4.50 earrings, but Sunak will do so in a £3,500 bespoke suit, along with £450 Prada loafers.
Truss is also playing on false images, though prefers to lie in more confident fashion. With mendacious thrill, she claims to have grown up in a “red wall” seat, as if it might have proved anything. “I got where I am today through working hard and focusing on results.” If it is that mindless, corrosive activity of Instagramming, then she might have a point. If an event is not posted on social media, it never took place.
In terms of policy, if we dare go there, Truss is a conventional supply sider, wanting to cut taxes despite obstinately rising inflation. She argues that the budget has enough fiscal headroom to the tune of £30 billion, an amount that will be dramatically cheapened with inflation. She also boasts of delivering a number of trade agreements, though many were simply copied, roll-over versions of deals made when the UK was an EU member.
Sunak, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, does not see taxes as satanic, and is considering raising them as a dampening measure to cope with rising prices. Should he become Prime Minister, the corporation tax rate will rise from 19 per cent to 25 per cent in 2023.
Sunak, in some respects, is going for a softer touch, such as improving home insulation to cut energy bills. Unfortunately, the Energy Savings Trust has found that loft insulation, while saving a terraced home £230 a year on energy bills, would also cost £500 to install. Even as Chancellor, his efforts to encourage homes to install insulation via the green homes grant scheme failed to gain momentum, resulting in its scrapping.
On foreign policy, however, Sunak claims to be the hardest of hard men. Having been called by Chinese state outlet Global Times “clear and pragmatic” in the face of Sinophobia, he was bound to insist on a measure of difference. To that end, the closure of the Confucius Institutes in Britain – namely, all 30 of them – is promised. In doing so, he hopes to strangle Chinese “soft power” while rooting out Beijing’s industrial espionage efforts.
With militant fervour, he also promises to “kick the CCP out of our universities”, the sort of meaningless babble that risks harming academic endeavours. The method of doing so will involve mandating higher education establishments to disclose the nature of their foreign funding associations for amounts above £50,000, including the review of research partnerships. All such proposals always tend to harm the host institution more than the foreign target.
This was of little concern to Sunak, who has suddenly discovered an interest in human rights. “They torture, detain and indoctrinate their own people, including in Xinjian and Hong Kong, in contravention of their human rights. And they have continually rigged the global economy in their favour by suppressing their currency.”
Sunak’s language on rights is rich given his own attitude to those wishing to find sanctuary in Britain. His ideas on irregular migration have ranged from housing arrivals in cruise ships in a hark back to the bad old days of British penology to enthusiastically supporting, along with Truss, the transfer of irregular migrants to Rwanda, a country not exactly famed for its human rights record. This, from a grandson of immigrants from Punjab who ended up in East Africa before making their way to Britain.
A deliciously appropriate note on the campaign so far was struck in this week’s The Sun and TalkTV debate, hosted by journalist Kate McCann. Both Truss and Sunak fronted up. Harry Cole, political editor of The Sun, intended to co-host, but contracted Covid. McCann, left in charge, made her solid contribution to the whole affair by fainting. “We apologise to our viewers and listeners,” the channel stated with regret, sparing the audience the inanity of it all by calling the whole thing off. Johnson must have relished it all.
In the slime-touched final runoff between two bottom-of-the-barrel finds, voters meet two candidates who, in finding wealth or coming from it, seek the ultimate prize of a country that once kept a quarter of the globe in described, cricket-enlightened subjecthood. The prize is barely worth it, and, with Britain no longer part of the EU, barely noticeable.
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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]
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***
Corporate CEOs’ “greedflation” in pay and perks, especially bonuses and stock options, highlights the latest AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch study, says federation Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond.
And—no great surprise—the new CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, leads the way, at least in the ratio of his compensation to workers’ pay.
Jassy, successor to Amazon founder and still controlling owner Jeff Bezos, received $212.7 million last year, according to federal filings the AFL-CIO uses for Paywatch. That’s 6,424 times the $32,855 median pay of Amazon workers. The median is the point where half the workers are above and half below.
What makes it even worse, Redmond said, is that overall compensation of CEOs in the Standard & Poor’s 500 big companies listed increased by 18.2% in 2021, the last year for which full figures are available. That was more than double inflation, 7.1%.
And the median CEO saw $2.8 million more in pay and perks in 2021, Paywatch says.
“Wall Street elites have been quick to blame workers’ wages and low unemployment for causing inflation. But in reality, U.S. workers’ earnings actually fell behind inflation, rising just 4.7% in 2021. In real terms, average hourly earnings fell 2.4% last year,” the fed said.
Or as Redmond put it: “It’s another version of more for them and less for us.”
Overall, the report says the median CEO-to-worker ratio in 2021 was 324 to 1, another record since the federation started such Paywatch reports. In other words, the median pay for a CEO is higher in a day than it is for a worker in a year, once you remove weekends.
“During the pandemic, the ratio between CEO and worker pay jumped 23%,” said Redmond during a press conference.
“Instead of investing in their workforces by raising wages and keeping the prices of their goods and services in check, their solution is to reap record profits from rising prices and cause a recession that will put working people out of our jobs.”
No wonder the number of union organizing drives is up 69% compared to this time last year, Redmond said.
Though Amazon’s Jassy had the largest pay inequity ratio with Amazon workers, he didn’t draw the largest combo of pay, perks, and bonuses. That “honor” went to Peter Kern of Expedia, the discount travel aggregator, at $296.25 million. Kern got 2,897 times the median pay of his workers, the second-largest ratio, behind Amazon’s Jassy.
Instead of paying his workers a decent wage, Amazon’s Jassy is waging a multimillion-dollar campaign
against union efforts to organize them, especially at his warehouses in Staten Island, Bessemer, Ala., and Chicago, complete with hiring high-priced “union avoidance” law firms, a.k.a. union-busters, to harangue them and lie.
One question always up for discussion is if the corporate class really earns, much less deserves, its high compensation. Asked several years ago whether bosses should get multimillion-dollar checks, the late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka bluntly said “no.”
Proof of his point: Though the report doesn’t say so, Investor’s Business Daily reports dozens of firms in the S&P 500, part of Paywatch, lost money in 2021. Notable among them: ExxonMobil and American Airlines. Both got hit hard by the coronavirus-caused depression.
Yet the CEOs of both took home millions in compensation.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods received $23.57 million total, with $4.7 million in pay and bonuses, 60% of overall the value of stock awards, and the rest in a pension hike. The ratio between his compensation and a median ExxonMobil worker’s pay: 125-1.
American CEO W. Parker took no pay or bonuses but got $7.2 million in stock awards. Parker’s workers got median paychecks of $62,765. The ratio was 115-1.
Below is the Paywatch Report.
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Greedflation
by Paywatch
Working People’s Real Wages Fall While CEO Pay Soars
In 2021, corporate CEOs were quick to blame worker wages for causing inflation. But workers’ real wages actually fell 2.4% in 2021 after adjusting for inflation.
Working people experienced a pay cut with every price increase while U.S. companies enjoyed record profits and CEO pay increased at an even faster rate.
Greedflation by the Numbers
In 2021, CEOs of S&P 500 companies received, on average, $18.3 million in total compensation. CEO pay rose 18.2%, faster than the U.S. inflation rate of 7.1%.
In contrast, U.S. workers’ wages fell behind inflation, with worker wages rising only 4.7% in 2021. The average S&P 500 company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 324-to-1.
Runaway CEO pay is a symptom of greedflation — when companies increase prices to boost corporate profits and create windfall payouts for corporate CEOs.
Amazon Delivers the Highest CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratio in the S&P 500
In 2021, Amazon’s new CEO Andy Jassy received $212.7 million in total compensation, giving Amazon the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio out of all S&P 500 Index companies.
Amazon’s CEO Total Compensation: $212,701,169
Amazon’s Median Worker Pay: $32,855
Amazon’s CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratio: 6,474-to-1
CEO Pay Matters
The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is important. A higher pay ratio could be a sign that companies suffer from a winner-take-all philosophy, where executives reap the lion’s share of compensation. A lower pay ratio could indicate the companies that are dedicated to creating high-wage jobs and investing in their employees for the company’s long-term health.
2021 Average CEO Pay at S&P 500 Index Companies
CEO Pay by State
Too many working people across the country are struggling to afford the basics, much less save for college or retirement. Some states serve as stark examples of the incredible gap between CEOs and the hardworking people who make their companies profitable.
This map shows how the CEO pay at companies headquartered in each state compares to the pay of the average employee in the state.
CEO Pay by Industry at S&P 500 Index Companies
CEO pay rose fastest in the consumer discretionary sector in 2021, up 79% compared to the previous year. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is also the highest in the consumer discretionary sector that includes retail companies like Amazon, where the median worker made only $32,855 in 2021.
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Award winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). El galardonado periodista Mark Gruenberg es el director de la oficina de People’s World en Washington, D.C. Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but a holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
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***
Beidaihe, a coastal resort some 280 km north of Beijing, does not see the country’s leading politicians taking the plunge into the blue, to escape the sultry heat, but it does see them testing the political waters for two weeks from the beginning of August. The jostling for position and power brokers doing deals may be reminiscent of political conclaves the world over but this is in a league of its own. One showpiece event will focus their minds this year.
In November central Beijing will cordon off its roads, and close it subway stations as the quinquennial20th National Congress of the Communist Party takes place. President Xi Jinping wants to take this opportunity to be chosen for an unprecedented third term as party secretary and get his allies into top positions. Xi’s hope was that the political atmosphere could be summed up, ahead of the congress, as steady as she goes. That hope has vanished, evaporated like mist in the glare of an unforgiving sun.
Nationwide lockdowns have left more than 200 million under de facto house arrest. China is tackling challenges unlike any it has seen since the party came to power in 1949. College graduates face difficult times getting employment. Urban areas have seen protests at both Covid policies and corruption in banks that have seen deposits wiped out. Property developers are going bust and millions of people have lost their down payments.
Growth, according to the World Bank, will slow to about 4 per cent in 2022 far lower than projected in December. Nothing concentrates party minds as much as lack of growth. A growing economy is a major part of its bargain with the public that authorizes the denial of full political rights in exchange for prosperity.
But there are signs of disquiet. In recent months Premier Li Keqiang has pulled off an almost miraculous recovery for a rival who was meant to have been sidelined and was due to retire to obscurity. Xi and Li are bitter rivals. Li has issued chilling warnings over stalling economic growth.
His words are getting traction. The People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, ran a prominent 9,000-word speech by Li in May. Tongues may be wagging but it does not mean Xi will be toppled. But neither is the president as secure as he might have expected to be at the beginning of the year.
While most commentators will focus on the party congress in November, it is at the annual August seaside get-together of party elders and top officials that policies are fleshed out and promotions and demotions approved. The meeting is never announced and there are no press releases or daily updates. Party leaders arrive in their Beidaihe compound under tight security and never mingle with the tourists. If they are short of sunblock it is provided for them.
It seems almost contradictory but in a country without democracy, public opinion is listened to and taken on board. The party is in touch and Beidaihe is where it acts at its most efficient and brutal. It is a place of plain speaking. Arguments break out, positions are challenged. Consequently, it is the most important political meeting in China. Decisions taken here will never be announced but will play out over the following years.
On the international front, China is isolated. Its aggressive posturing, often with blood-curdling language that Xi encourages his diplomats to use, has also contributed to the alienation between China and the West. The international community is nervous about the militarization of the South China Sea as it becomes a Chinese lake. Xi openly allying himself to Vladimir Putin is also causing Europeans to increasingly distance themselves from Beijing. Taiwan and the threat of an invasion is eroding China’s reputation.
Although one can never be sure what happens behind Beidaihe’s closed doors it would seem a safe bet that Xi is trying to bolster his support. Ten years ago when he assumed office people thought he would be stepping down in 2022. His decision to continue will have consequences as will the meeting at a popular seaside resort north of Beijing. What those consequences will be we do not know. But they will be felt globally.
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Geopolitical analyst Tom Clifford reporting from Beijing. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Comments Off on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Holds Its Annual Strategic Private Meeting: “Shaping the Future of China”. Deep-seated Political Divisions within Chinese Leadership?
Contrary to perception, largely sustained by opponents of the Climate Change campaign, this campaign was never the handiwork of some vast leftist conspiracy. Rather, the prime movers behind the Global Warming scare were a coterie of centre-right politicians such as: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, US President George Bush Sr., Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and above all others, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher.
NATO loitering drones murdered two Syrians and wounded twelve others attending the inauguration of the Aya Sophia Church in Suqaylabiyah City, Hama governate, Syria. The drones (one, or two, according to different sources) were jammed with explosives, meant to do the most damage to the church and to the Christians in attendance.
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed in an interview that the US prosecution of Assange is a way of sending a “threatening message to whistleblowers and journalists” who expose dirty secrets of the US government.
Ever since United States President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he’s been trying to bring Saudi Arabia back to the political West’s flock. The attempts to do so have escalated significantly after Russia launched its counteroffensive against NATO’s encroachment. Biden made numerous futile attempts to contact Saudi leadership, culminating with a failed visit on July 15.
According to an article published by the Sunday Mirror, the UK Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service trained Ukrainian soldiers to organize an operation to retake and occupy the Zmeiny Island in the Black Sea, popularly called Snake Island, which was under Russian control until recently.
Guest is Sonia Elijah, an investigative journalist and broadcaster at trialsitenews.com. She has a background in economics and was a former BBC researcher. Her analysis on the Pfizer COVID vaccine safety report received worldwide attention.
Anyone listening to the pronouncements of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF), its transhumanist disciple Yuval Harari, its Young Global Leaders in lockstep mouthing “Build Back Better,” or Bill Gates touting forced medical intervention for every body/soul on earth, will catch an echo of this fundamental mantra of our time.
The Hagia Sophia Church in Al-Suqaylabiyah, Syria was attacked by Radical Islamic terrorists using a drone which was launched from the terrorist controlled enclave of Idlib on July 24. Two persons were killed while 12 others were wounded.
There are some things that I believe to be true about the anarchy that purports to be US foreign policy. First, and most important, I do not believe that any voter cast a ballot for Joe Biden because he or she wanted him to relentlessly pursue a needless conflict with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war with unimaginable consequences for all parties.
Let us be clear: We are in the midst of what one may call “WW III”, executed by the WEF’s Great Reset, backed by those invisible financial masters of the WEF. Among them the interlinked financial giants BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet, plus the western world’s banking system, in the forefront the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), also called the Central Bank of all central banks, as well as the FED, European Central Bank (ECB) – and specially the western international banking conglomerate.
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NATO loitering drones murdered two Syrians and wounded twelve others attending the inauguration of the Aya Sophia Church in Suqaylabiyah City, Hama governate, Syria. The drones (one, or two, according to different sources) were jammed with explosives, meant to do the most damage to the church and to the Christians in attendance.
Al Suqaylabiyah is a predominately Greek Orthodox Christian city that has seen several massacres since the launch of the March 2011 NATO Spring against the indigenous citizenry of the Syrian Arab Republic, by the “freedom-loving,” mostly foreign, Wahhabi takfiri terrorists. The Aya Sophia Church is part of the Syrian Greek Orthodox community.
Just hours before the drone bombing of the Suqaylabiyah gathering, the “town of Abu Rasin and the villages of Rubayat, Matmoura, Umm Haramleh, and Dada Abdal came under heavy indiscriminate shelling in the early hours of dawn today, Sunday 24 July.” These war crimes by NATO Erdogan’s criminal Turkish occupiers and various mercenary and militia gangs, came “fresh from the Tehran Summit,” once again demonstrating that all fingers must be counted after shaking hands with the treacherous caliph wannabe.
The NATO drone(s) came from the Erdogan criminally occupied area of terrorists-controlled Idlib, which on 22 July, had bombed the area with four grad missiles, in what independent investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley presciently described as an “[a]ttempt to prevent Aya Sophia opening ceremony Sunday.”
Beeley was in attendance for the ceremony, and we share several of her videos, photographs, and tweets.
2 metres further to the right this would have been a massacre of children, civilians & diplomats, faith leaders.
The "Democratic" terrorist forces now trying to blame #SAA or #Iran.
When the terrorist drone hit today there was panic among teenagers & kids from #Sqeilbiyyeh. Russian Orthodox priest from Hmemim base did not panic or leave, he calmed down terrified children & gathered them together to pass to adults who took them to safety. pic.twitter.com/J6kvMyDEOu
This statue protected most of us from the blast during the terrorist drone attack on Hagia Sophia and remained standing after the explosion.#Syrian_Arab_Army
Syrian Arab Army soldier Hisham Fahd Elias succumbed to his wounds shortly after the NATO-supporter terrorist bombings.
Almost twenty-four hours after the most recent, deadly, war crime against the Syrian people, this author notes that not a single NATO-affiliated medium has reported on the deaths and injuries from terrorists’ explosives at the Aya Sophia church ceremony — nor has any member of the NATO junta ruling the United Nations uttered a single word of condolence, including the esteemed Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres.
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All images in this article are from Syria News unless otherwise stated; featured image: NATO Turkey Caliph Wannabe, Erdogan
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***
The COVID-19 crisis is not the result of a single virus. No single virus could create such deep uncertainty and fear in our country; no disease could unleash such horrific ambivalence and unspeakable loathing.
No, we face the collapse of an economic system that has been so puffed up with air, so corrupted by derivatives and quantitative easing, so diluted by stock buybacks and other financial products cooked up by experts who know, better than you do, what is in your interest. In a word, the economy no longer has anything to do with our lives. It had become an ethereal realm, a kingdom of deception where the powerful live in cloud castles.
This “economy” if that is the right word for it, had nothing to do with us, with working people who try to feed our children. We watch hopelessly as our country is being torn apart, all beyond our control, beyond our knowledge, and beyond our paygrade.
The economy has collapsed, and we must rebuild it.
But if we try to restore the rotted house that stood there before, our future will be grim.
The Federal Reserve cannot print up jobs, or print up clean air or pristine water. In fact, as long as the government remains the prisoner of the rich and powerful, it cannot do anything at all. We must cut the strings of this devious puppet master; we must create a government, and an economy, of the people, for the people and by the people.
The currency that is driving the rapid transformation of our economy is the currency of fear; it spreads like horrific virus, mutating everything that it touches into despair and uncertainty. It is a monstrous Midas that destroys all value and all goodness.
And what about that check for a thousand dollars they said they will mail you? Will the post office still be delivering mail? Will one thousand dollars still buy the same amount of food, or of toilet paper, in six months? Certainly, the investment banks that speculate in derivatives do not have to wait so long for payment, nor the fossil fuel companies destroying our climate.
But we do not have to have the rules dictated to us by Mammon. We, as citizens, can take control of our nation’s economy and we can transform it. That transformation will not start in the cushy offices of a Senate committee, nor in the hip cafes frequented by the bankers at Blackstone or Morgan Stanley.
No, the recovery from this catastrophe will not be provided by those who intentionally created this crisis. Salvation this time will not be found by following the same bloated swine who led us to slaughter back in 2008.
What is the economy?
What is the economy? It seems like such a simple question as to be beneath the dignity of financial experts who strut out on news shows to tell us how things have to be, who lecture us about interest rates and competitiveness, while preparing their own nest eggs in secret.
Let us focus on this critical question which we were supposed to forget about in the current panic.
The basics of the economy have nothing to do with the complex equations produced in the pseudoscience of economics for the purpose of intimidating us. It is a profound farce that experts assume that a person who has not taken calculus is not capable of understanding economics.
But the basics of the economy are simple. The basics of the economy are assuring that all of us have healthy food to eat, a clean place to live and meaningful work to employ us that contributes to the wellbeing of society. In addition, there should be time in our days for artistic expression, for spiritual inquiry, for the care of our beloved family members and friends, and for participating in our local community.
As we know well, those whose lives are spiritually meaningful, those who love their work and who feel comfortable with family and friends, do not feel a need to spend much money or to live in a big house. The traditional value of frugality, however, has been demolished over the past fifty years. In its place corporations have erected a shrine to the cult of the self, to greed and to narcissism.
That march towards moral decay is being led by the super rich today. I want to share with you a quote describing the very rich by the author F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.”
What is sold to us as an “economy” consists primarily of the speculative activities of the stock market, and the sloshing of huge sums of money around the world by investment banks. And those bloodthirsty banks are not even run by people anymore, but by cold ruthless supercomputers that calculate profits to twenty decimal points.
This false economy promotes mindless and depraved consumption; it demand of us that we must buy and waste food, that we must drive cars to get to work, that we watch pornography, and buy frivolous cosmetics and clothes in order to be happy, in order to appear successful. This economy of appearances was cooked up by public relations firms and advertisers to make us buy.
Consumption is at the core of this economic system. But no one is permitted to question this false idol. It is assumed that we must waste things, the more the better, every day, so that the economy will grow. Much of the money we pay in taxes, directly or indirectly, funds consumption-based corporations, and encourages people to consume, and thereby destroy the environment. That process brings little happiness, but it does downgrade our experience, crushing spirituality, personal relations and degrading life into the pursuit of the superficial.
Growth is the conjoined twin of consumption that represents by a number how much we destroy. If we look at the extinction of species, the warming of oceans, the poverty in our nation, we can see that there is no real growth. Yet empty skyscrapers and shopping malls keep being built, plastic and meat are shipped needlessly across the oceans in the pursuit of ephemeral wealth.
If we define the economy in terms of growth and consumption, if we assume the only thing we can do to improve things is to either raise or lower interest rates, that means your love for your family, your moral struggle for a better world, your decision to be frugal, your decision to honor the traditions of your parents, have no value. You are supposed to throw everything away and to buy new things, fashionable things, at the mall.
There are other crimes lurking behind this false economy about which you must know.
You hold in your hand those printed pieces of paper, what we call money. You have been told that they have value. You can exchange them to get food, or a computer, or a lawnmower, at the store. But where does that value come from? Why can you make that exchange? And why are so many of us dependent on corporations, and not people, to provide with it?
In the old days, currency was backed by gold, and you could take your money in and exchange it for gold. But America gave up that gold standard a long time ago.
The value of that money does not come from any contract, any agreement, between you and your community. That money is made by the Federal Reserve, an ambiguous and unregulated organization run by private banks for the profit of the few.
Your wages buy less and less because the banks create money out of nowhere in that evil black box of finance. The destruction of your lives does not bother them at all. In fact, they are pleased to have you dependent on them. You are so scared of losing your job that you do not have time to question where those trillions of dollars went that they created to pay off speculators after the recent crash.
All the money they are creating through magic has opened the door to hyperinflation. When hyperinflation comes, the cost of a loaf of bread could go from $3 to $10 to $100, or even to $1000 in a short period of time. It has happened before under similar circumstances.
The lying media will not tell you anything, but the writing is on the wall. The truth is that inflation for food and for services is already far, far higher than what has been reported for the last decade. You know this from your own experience. You do not need a Harvard professor to tell you.
Money today is not anchored in anything. Its value is determined by impressions, by mood, and by culture. Money has value in that people trust the United States and trust the global system in which it plays a central role. If they cease to believe in the United States, or in that global system, then our money will not be worth much.
There are plenty of signs that such trust is dissolving as I speak.
The bankers have tried to make sure the dollar keeps its value while printing money to line their pockets. They have employed two magic tricks.
First, they have encouraged the use of military force, and cultivated militarism among the people. Militarism allowed them to make trillions of dollars from the sales of weapons, the promotion of pointless wars, and a Pentagon that has become a black hole for money. The use of military force made the United States seem powerful and that has, so far, helped to keep the value of the dollar up even though it is backed by nothing.
But the bankers also tied the dollar to petroleum, working ceaselessly to make sure that petroleum is sold in US dollars and that the major producers of oil use the dollar for all transactions. This creation of value through the promotion of petroleum is criminal in nature. Petroleum is destroying our climate and dooming our children to a bleak future. Yet, sadly, petroleum defines our economy, forcing you to use throw-away plastics, forcing you to drive automobiles, forcing you to use the electricity that they provide.
Corporations pay off experts to pretend that polluting our environment, forcing people to drive for hours every day, is natural. And the red blood of young Americans flows in foreign wars so that money can be printed with the black ooze of oil.
The dependency of our economy on petroleum was made clear in the recent crash of the price of oil. That event has led to the utter collapse of the domestic economy. The forced dependency on petroleum means that ordinary people have been devastated by obscure battles between the powerful. Enormous sections of our population have had their lives forcibly tied to the petroleum economy (whether they are building highways, working at refineries, or at gas stations, or at car repair shops).
An economy of the people, for the people and by the people
The economy has not collapsed; it has rather been fundamentally transformed so that it services only a tiny group of the rich. We face doom if we follow the foolish advice of the economists telling us we have only the choices of raising or lowering interest rates, or of printing more money, or of printing even more money.
The economy must be democratic, and it must be participatory. All citizens must be provided with knowledge of the true economy in a transparent manner through honest journalism, and they must be given the education necessary to understand how that economy works. They must be provided the means to produce value, to produce goods and services that contribute to society, and the means to exchange those goods and services with each other, or to sell them to each other, at the local and national levels.
But most such economic activities today are undertaken by massive corporations like Walmart, corporations that make tens of billions of dollars for their owners while paying starvation wages to workers. Workers, and “consumers” (as we call citizens who have no choice about where they shop) are not permitted to make suggestions as to how such markets, restaurants, convenience stores or other businesses are run. You may work for a company like Walmart for a lifetime but you will not be given any stock (any ownership) and your opinions will be completely ignored. In fact, you are encouraged to be passive, to think only about eating food, about watching silly videos, or reading fashion magazines. This passivity is no accident.
The wealth of those running these corporations is not a result of their genius, or of their innovations. Those companies get massive loans from banks, loans backed by you, for decades at low interest rates. With that money they can put all smaller competitors (like you, or like the mom and pop store your parents ran) out of business in a brutal manner. Truth be told, if the big retail chains did not have all that free money, their inefficient, wasteful and corrupt stores could not compete with a healthy local economy run by the people.
And remember, when those banks, which are neither democratic nor transparent, print up their own money out of nowhere they thereby reduce the value of your money.
But there can be an economy which brings us great richness without ecological and spiritual destruction. We can build houses that last for five hundred years. We can use furniture that lasts for a hundred years, and wear clothes that last for thirty years. We can share tools and skills with our neighbors — -and thereby reduce our expenses while improving our health. We have no need for a destructive fourth industrial revolution that uses AI to render us docile.
If we had a democratic economy, you would have as much right, more of a right, to get a loan as Walmart does. If you wanted solar panels, or a windmill, that allowed you to generate your own energy and thereby save our planet, and thereby be independent from the oil companies that prey on us, then the bank, which you would own stock in as a member, would lend you the money you need via a low-interest 50 year loan. That would make wind power, or solar power, cheaper than the dangerous fossil fuels that the banks want to pour down your throat.
There will be no more of the brainwashing perpetrated on us by advertising firms that encourages narcissism, the cult of the self, and mindless consumption. This dangerous business has destroyed families and has torn our neighborhoods apart.
A lot of us, most of us, are now unemployed; we find ourselves under lockdown at home. We are made even more dependent on a corrupt government. Suddenly we need someone to send us a check to help us buy food.
This is the stage before a slave economy. My words are so harsh that many do not want to hear them. They want to dismiss such talk as the blather of conspiracy theorists. But that is where we find ourselves today.
What do we do?
There are two critical steps to creating a democratic, participatory and sustainable economy.
First, we need to organize ourselves at the local level to create real villages made up of the members of our community. We will transcend ethnicity and culture, working together for the common good. These communities will create their own value and plan their own activities. They will not let the multinational banks and corporations interfere. Eventually we will create own banks and cooperatives that are entirely independent. The first step will be to sign a contract between the individual members of our communities and hold a series of meetings for us where we, not overpaid politicians, start thinking for ourselves about what needs to be done and how we will do it.
The second stage will be to create local, national and international institutions in government, and in civil society, that will protect the efforts by citizens from interference by the rich and the powerful. The government must be transformed into an institution that can seize the trillions of dollars squirreled away by the rich, and that can assure that the decision-making process in our nation is never for sale.
But we must not be naïve. Governments can be used to restore democracy and equality, but they can be used just as easily for nefarious purposes. Moreover, even the bravest reformers can be overwhelmed, or put in a gilded cage, if they try to make revolutionary changes, or even little improvements, in a corrupt system.
We will not be able to implement policies at the national and international level unless we have powerful support from citizens at the local level who are organized and informed. They will not be organized for some fleeting election, but rather to fight for an honest and just economy every day.
Our participatory and democratic groups will create our own economy, one that is honest, transparent and ethical.
We do not need, and do not expect, approval or support from Washington, or from any authority figures. If your organization is administered like an ethical and committed government, then the “so-called” government will start to learn from you, to take inspiration from you. That would be a far smarter way to change our country than to elect magicians.
Unlike the United States of sixty years ago, most of us have literally no way to produce food, or furniture, or tools locally. All that was taken away during the abominable rites held to satisfy the dark gods of technology and globalization. We buy unnecessary items because the media tells us we must be more fashionable, more modern, than our neighbors.
We do not recognize the authority of banks, billionaires and other elite players to create money out of nowhere and sprinkle it on their friends.
This time we not going to bail out those criminals; no, my administration is going to confiscate all the assets that they amassed illegally and to cancel all the fake money that they have created with their pals at the Federal Reserve. Truly, the party is over.
We will build an economy that is shared between us, the citizens, an economy that we create, and develop, at the local level, and the national level, and through cooperation with other citizens around the world, people like us.
You know much better than elite bankers, people who speculate in futures and in foreign currencies, what is necessary for a healthy economy and for your community.
I am certain that once you are in the driver’s seat, you will feel a deep sense of commitment to help your children and your neighbors. If there is profit to be made from the food you eat, or from the tools you use, that profit should come back to you, to your children and to your neighbors — and not go to speculators.
And what about this COVID-19 pandemic? It has become a bonanza for the rich and the powerful. America’s richest have added another $280 billion to their pile just as many Americans find themselves locked down at home, facing the possibility, for the first time since the 1930s, of starvation.
But please, Mr. Banker, don’t get me wrong! I completely understand your position. You have made such a fortune from COVID-19 that I am sure you can hardly wait for COVID-20! You would love more vaccines for viruses, but most definitely not for parasites.
Let me close with a few words about our campaign. A close friend asked me yesterday where our funding comes from. She said that it is impossible for an independent, especially one who is not popular with the rich, the powerful, with the lobbyists and consultants, to raise the money required for a campaign.
This is what I told her,
“I discovered a remarkable fact the other day. I discovered that the most valuable thing in the world is truth and that although one may pay a terrible price for it, in monetary terms, the truth is absolutely free. In fact, the truth will set you free.”
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
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At 10:40 AM local time on July 14 three cruise missiles launched from a Black Sea-based Russian submarine struck an 8-storey office building in downtown Vinnytsia – a city of 370,000 located 260 kilometers southwest of Kyiv and 400 kilometers north of the Black Sea coast. (See map below).
In his nightly address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the attack as a Russian terror bombing. He claimed the target was a cultural centre frequented by veterans, and that 23 civilians, including 3 children, died. He implored Western allies to designate Russia as a terrorist state.
Two curiosities came in the attack’s aftermath.
First, mere hours after the attack the US Embassy in Ukraine posted a directive stating:
“The US Embassy urges US citizens not to enter Ukraine and those in Ukraine to depart immediately.”
American media ignored this directive. Reuters gave it a perfunctory report.
Secondly, a day or so after the attack Zelensky fired his two top security officials – Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova, and Ivan Bakanov, head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU). Both were Zelensky appointees. Bakanov had been Zelensky’s childhood chum.
The rationale accompanying the dismissals complained of Ukraine’s government being riddled with treasonous Russian collaborators. The statement mentioned 651 ongoing prosecutions against subordinates of the two dismissed officials. Several additional intel officers were fired along with Venediktova and Bakanov.
What happened in Vinnytsia?
According to the Russian Defense Ministry:
“On July 14, Kalibr high-precision sea-based missiles attacked the building of the House of Officers in the city of Vinnytsia. At the time of the strike, a meeting was taking place between the command of the Ukrainian Air Force and representatives of foreign arms suppliers about the next batch of aircraft and weapons to the Ukrainian military, as well as organizing the repair of the Ukrainian aviation fleet.”
All attendees perished.
The Vinnytsia attack signifies a tactical change threatened by Putin and Belarusian President Lukashenko. Urban-situated offices of Ukrainian military and intelligence agencies are now fair game. On July 2 Lukashenko, responding to alleged Ukrainian provocations on Belarusian territory, warned Ukrainian leaders that he had instructed his Generals to place “decision-making centres in your capitol at gunpoint.” Putin made similar promises.
The Vinnytsia attack exposes critical deficiencies in Ukraine’s security/intelligence establishment. Here we have a top-secret confab convened in a remote location to discuss highly classified information; yet the Russians knew the meeting’s date, time, location, attendees and agenda!
At war’s outset 60 SBU agents fled to the Donbass taking with them knowledge of their former employer and their passwords, codes etc. Russian hackers already had access to the full breadth and depth of Ukraine’s digital infrastructure, and they now cooperate with Russian Aerospace’s electronic interception specialists. These spies find eager collaborators among the millions of Ukrainian citizens who, not being ethnic Ukrainians, aren’t happy with the direction Ukraine took after Obama’s 2014 coup; and they in turn are joined by millions of ethnic Ukrainians opposed to prolonging Whitey Biden’s War.
Vinnytsia was not the first meeting of Ukrainian brass interrupted by a missile. A huddle of frontline Army commanders got blasted a month ago. Moreover, since February 24 Russian missiles have destroyed several hundred buildings situated behind the lines, clear across Ukraine. Hitherto, prime targets have been munitions warehouses and barracks housing foreign fighters.
This war’s frontline is not simply the perimeter of that one-sixth of Ukrainian territory captured by Russian forces and their Donbass allies. The real frontline includes the Black Sea coast and the 1,084-kilometer Belarus-Ukraine border. The real frontline is a 3,000-kilometer semi-circle almost engulfing Ukraine. There is not a building in Ukraine over 400 kilometers from this frontline.
There is not a building in Ukraine the Russians cannot destroy given a few hours preparation. Given the velocities of Russian missiles and aircraft, and the mismatch in the adversaries’ electronic warfare capabilities, Ukrainians receive mere minutes of warning before the missiles strike.
The Russians have set their sites onto the urban work-stations of Ukraine’s command-and-controllers, and their American Deep State enablers. This tactical change, coupled with the intractable crisis in Ukraine’s intelligence services, explains the US Embassy’s “Get Out of Dodge” directive.
Ukraine’s problems are rectifiable only with a sweeping purge of its intel agencies, and by a complete overhaul of its air defences. The latter was under discussion in Vinnytsia when the Kalibrs crashed through the ceiling.
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William Walter Kay is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Die in der Überschrift zitierte Tagebuchaufzeichnung Camus‘ erwähnte ich mit Quellenangabe bereits im „Global-Research“- und „NRhZ“-Artikel „Salz der Erde sein…“. Da es sich um einen wissenschaftlichen Artikel handelte, wurde mein eigener Standpunkt nicht deutlich. Doch die Wissenschaft ist dem Leben entsprungen und dazu berufen, der Not der Menschen zu dienen und nicht zu schweigen.
Wissenschaftler, die zu einem systematisierten Menschenmord, genannt Krieg, nichts beizutragen haben, richten sich selbst: Die Not der Menschheit rührt nicht an ihr Herz und damit wird all ihre Weisheit und Wissenschaft degradiert zu einem selbstgefälligen Spiel des Verstandes, das keine Verbindlichkeit kennt. Dies lehrte mich vor vielen Jahren mein geschätzter Psychologie-Professor.
In dem Land, in dem ich gegenwärtig lebe, kann ich noch immer Russia Today (RTD) empfangen und den mörderischen Stellvertreter-Krieg des US-Westens in der Ukraine aus einer anderen Perspektive betrachten als durch die Augen deutscher Massenmedien. Deren unsägliche Kriegshetze aus warmen Schreiberlingen-Büros heraus – allen voran der „SPIEGEL“, der für uns Studenten in den Nachkriegsjahren ein stolzes Intellektuellenblatt war – kann ein zivilisierter Mensch kaum ertragen und müsste von einer Ethikkommission untersagt werden.
Die täglichen TV-Bilder aus völlig zerstörten und qualmenden Kriegsgebieten schnüren Kehle und Magen zu. Es sind vor allem TV-Berichte über die unbeschreiblichen Qualen der Zivilbevölkerung und des multinationalen Militärs. Alte Frauen und Männer sowie junge Mütter mit ihren Säuglingen und Kindern vegetieren aus Todesangst zusammen mit Haustieren in dunklen, feuchten Kellergeschossen unter zerbombten Häusern – und das oft tagelang ohne Brot, Wasser und medizinische Versorgung. Voller Hoffnung warten sie auf eine gnädige Seele, die sie vor dem Hungertod bewahrt.
Wer diese Zeugenberichte aus dem Donbass oder anderen Teilen des Kriegsgebiets als zu vernachlässigende russische Propaganda arrogant abtut, dem hat die Propaganda-Walze des US-Westens bereits das Herz versteinert – er kann nicht mehr fühlen wie ein Mensch.
Abschließend soll nicht unerwähnt bleiben, dass alle Kriege der herrschenden machtgierigen Obrigkeit aus dem Leben der Menschheit verbannt werden sollten, auch aus dem Jemen, aus Syrien oder aus Palästina.
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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Schwerpunkte: Klinische-, Pädagogische-, Medien- sowie Individual-Psychologie). Als Pensionär arbeitete er in Lindau am Bodensee viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.
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Introduction
Julian Assange through WikiLeaks rose to fame in 2010 after his publication of classified military information pertaining to US war crimes and human rights violations in the course of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Of particular importance, one that predicated Assange’s controversial arrest in Britain is an incriminating footage of American soldiers shooting blankly at Iraqi civilians and Reuters news staff in 2007.
WikiLeaks famously dubbed the video as “Collateral Murder” essentially because the deliberate killing of a wounded civilian being separated from a targeted van is downright murder[1].
Following the publication of US war logs, Assange received both compliments and vitriol — one for imperiling personal security and reputation for the sake of truthful journalism, and the other for allegedly risking other people’s safety and endangering national security. The debate concerning the nature of Assange’s activities surfaced, raising questions of whether he is a journalist, a whistleblower or a hacker, and whether or not he should be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.
The case of Julian Assange is one that is far more complex and controversial than is imaginable. While the topic per se is arguably more legal than political, the centrality of the political motivation behind the extradition request from the US simply cannot be undermined. In 2017, former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasted WikiLeaks as a “non-state, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors” and called Assange as “darling of terrorist groups”[2]. Further, then Vice President Joe Biden branded him as a “high-tech terrorist”[3]. Another former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed in an interview that the US prosecution of Assange is a way of sending a “threatening message to whistleblowers and journalists” who expose dirty secrets of the US government[4]. In this respect, the legal underpinnings of the case are of lesser significance in this essay than its political aspect.
Assange’s extradition has both personal and global ramifications vis-à-vis human rights and democracy, particularly on press freedom. The European Union has a key role in the obstruction of the American pursuit of Assange and should therefore play its part as a legitimate institution whose raison d’etre is the promotion and preservation of global norms. While several international human rights organizations[5], civil society groups[6], individual authorities[7] and even the Council of Europe[8] stood for Assange and criticized the extradition case as a crackdown on investigative journalism, the EU as a collective entity could have employed a variety of its human rights instruments to interfere in the criminal proceedings but nevertheless remains mum and passive. The EU and US have long history of diplomatic relations that date back to 1953. Theirs is “one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world”[9]. Against this background, this essay argues that the EU as a rational actor has goals, interests and strategies of its own; the silence surrounding Assange’s extradition case represents a double standard in its commitment, or the lack thereof, to the protection of human rights and democracy that instead of being comprehensively integrated into its external service, in actuality it is just a variable. Realpolitik precedes any normative standard in international relations (IR) insofar as the EU, US and Assange are concerned.
Assange and his extradition
Julian Assange is an Australian citizen, residing and working in the United Kingdom. In 2006, he founded WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy website that “specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.”[10] The ongoing detention of Assange involves three states: Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. However, the present uproar — and the crux of this essay — relates more importantly to the imminent extradition case involving the UK and the US.
Since the 2010 WikiLeaks publication of massive classified documents dumped by a US military personnel later known to be Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), Assange has been in the crosshairs of the US government. Fearing US extradition[11], he took refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London after granted political asylum in 2012 by then Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa. Changes in the Ecuadorean government (new President Lenin Moreno) prompted his arrest[12] and transfer to Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison in London in 2019 where he has since been detained unjustly. According to a thorough medical assessment, Assange showed symptoms such as “extreme stress, chronic anxiety, and intense psychological trauma” which are “cumulative effects of what can only be described as psychological torture”[13]. Additionally, calls for medical attention concerning his physical ailments have gone unheeded[14]. His mental health has also deteriorated over a long period of solitary confinement[15].
The US extradition request is based on the said publication whereby Assange faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy, allegedly assisting Manning to hack a US Department of Defense computer[16]. His extradition has serious human rights implications that go beyond his individual case. Apart from potential violation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), particularly Article 3[17], 5[18], 6[19], and 7[20], the US indictment has a chilling effect on press freedom which is in violation of Article 10[21]. It should be noted that the information leaked by Manning is of public interest and should therefore be taken with absolute transparency and democratic accountability. It is the public’s right to be informed of government wrongdoing. This is the cornerstone of media freedom[22]. Assange through WikiLeaks has been fulfilling this endeavor for more than a decade and has in fact received numerous international awards for its crucial contribution to journalism[23]. For the purpose of this essay, it is worth iterating that the extradition case is politically motivated[24]. Deciding on the request based on ‘humanitarian’ promises of Assange’s fair and just treatment downplays the mendacity of the US government as revealed by historical precedents[25].
The EU and human rights and democracy
The protection of human rights and democracy is the EU’s raison d’etre. The integration of human rights norms and democratic values into its external relations demonstrates what constructivists call as “moral proselytizing”[26]. It strategically partners with local NGOs in an effort to promote the localization of these norms in third countries[27]. Its bilateral relations with foreign states are ostensibly predicated on these norms, in such a way that either the EU withdraws from the cooperation or that states conform. These endeavors, however, are futile without institutions and legal rules to enforce and facilitate.
The EU’s institutional architecture vis-à-vis its external relations is comprised of the EU Parliament, European Commission, European External Action Service (EEAS) and the EU DevCo[28][29][30]. Nakanishi (2018) has added the European Council (EC) to the active organs that oversee the promotion of human rights and democracy in its external relations[31]. These formal EU institutions are compounded with regimes that facilitate the enforcement of norms and values; among them are global human rights sanctions regime[32] and trade regime[33].
Members of the EU are legally bound by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which is consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). ECHR is enforceable by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
EU-US relations
President of the European Commission Von der Leyen (left), US President Biden (center) and President of the European Council Michel (right) in Brussels in June 2021 (Licensed under the public domain)
According to the European Parliament[34], the EU and the US “share the values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and economic and political freedom, and have overlapping foreign policy and security concerns”. On the one hand, they have established the Transatlantic Legislators’ Dialogue or the collaboration between the European Parliament (EP) and the US Congress narrowly defined. Members of the EP and the US House of Representatives meet biannually to discuss matters of mutual concern. This interparliamentary process dates back to 1972. On the other hand, the EU and the US are each other’s largest investors and valuable trading partners[35]. The US was the EU’s primary goods export destination in 2020 and second largest goods import partner[36]. They enjoy one of the lowest average tariffs (under 3%) in the world[37]. Moreover, US investment in the EU is “three times higher than in the whole of Asia” and the EU investment in the US is “eight times higher than in India and China combined”[38]. Essentially, the EU and US investments are the real driver of the transatlantic relationship[39].
Furthermore, in 2020 the EU through the European Commission and High Representative/Vice President for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy had a renewed vigor vis-à-vis the EU-US relations. It drafted a proposal for a new, forward-looking transatlantic agenda that is centered on COVID-19, climate change, technology, trade and standards, but also on democracy and security. The EU vows to work closely with the US in fighting corruption, authoritarianism, and human rights abuses around the world.
The EU in the extradition case of Assange
The case of Julian Assange is a strong representation of the kind of (Western) democracy that prevails in the world today — one that is characterized by secrecy, impunity and a weak justice system being easily overtaken by powerful interests; or that rule of law is undermined, narrowly defined. Humanitarian concerns surrounding the extradition case raise serious questions over the credibility of the EU as an advocate for human rights and democracy. What has the regional institution as a collective entity done that demonstrates its commitment to normative values?
In 2012, credit card companies that processed donations for WikiLeaks introduced a blockade that resulted in a major blow to the organization’s revenue and fund[40]. The European Commission simply affirmed the move by suggesting that it has not violated EU anti-trust rules. As a representative of 27 sovereign states, the EU has not issued a communique announcing its opinion on the Assange case. A group of Members of Parliament called on the European Commission to “intervene and stop the extradition”[41] but due to the insufficient number of signatories, the request fell on deaf ears. In what is referred to as a landmark law, the EU Parliament passed in 2019 an EU-wide directive that mandates the protection of whistleblowers in response to recent events such as the bombshell revelations of Edward Snowden. Two years on, the directive has hardly any implication in the Assange case albeit “no European prosecution agency charged Assange with breaking any European law”[42].
The lack of any definitive measures from the EU that push back the extradition request is a display of “powerlessness” but also of the supremacy of strategic interests to the detriment of normative values. This is illustrated by a contrast in the EU’s response between the case of Snowden and Assange. The European Parliament expressed outrage over the reported surveillance by the US as leaked by Snowden and warned of repercussions for the EU-US relations[43]. As a rational actor — one that is akin to a sovereign state in the international system —, the EU acts on its national interest and security. Apparent acquiescence in Assange’s extradition zeroes in on the perceived absence of threat to its national security and more on the vitality of the transatlantic relationship. Why can’t the EU apply trade sanctions or conditionalities to the US in the same way as Cambodia and the Philippines? The answer brings us back to the principle of strategic interest — the US has the upper hand in the bilateral relationship, and should the EU leverage its established indispensability to the US’s economy, the consequences would hurt the EU more than the US. The IR concept of ‘bandwagoning’ best explains the decision of the EU to remain mum and passive despite its capacity in the face of a hegemon so that no matter the egregious war crimes and gross human rights abuses, the US enjoys impunity and continues to derail the rules-based international order.
Conclusion
The exemplary case of Julian Assange informs us that the Western concept of democracy is twisted and that protection of human rights is contingent on national interest and security.
The European Union’s silence on the Assange case reinforces the neorealist assumption that states operate in a self-help system where each of them has the power to inflict harm on its neighbors. As a self-interested rational actor, the EU ‘cooperates’ with the hegemon to maintain the status quo, both domestically and internationally.
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Jezile Torculas has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science. She is an Assistant Editor at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[1] Julian Assange in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2010.
[5] Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed concern over violation of Assange’s human rights when extradited to the US.
[6] Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, independent journalists and media organizations, among others, show solidarity with Assange and lambasted his indictment as travesty of justice.
[7] German Commissioner on Human Rights Barbel Kofler urged the UK to adhere to human rights in the extradition proceedings. UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer urged the UK to drop the extradition appeal.
[8] The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted to oppose the extradition of Assange and called for his immediate release.
[26] Nadelmann (1990) as cited in Sikkink (1998) equated the desire to convert others to an advocacy to moral proselytizing. This involves promoting norms that govern the way states treat individuals or how individuals treat each other.
[27] Cristina Churruca Muguruza, “Human Rights and Democracy at the heart of the EU’s foreign
policy?” in EU Human Rights and Democratization Policies: Achievements and Challenges, ed. Felipe Gomez Isa et al. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 49-71.
[28] Jennifer Sterling-Folker, “Neoliberalism” in International Relations Theory. Discipline and Diversity 3rd Edition, ed. Tim Dunne et al. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 114-131.
[30] Samantha Velluti, “The Promotion and Integration of Human Rights in EU External Trade Relations.” Utrecht Journal of International and European Law 32, no. 83 (2016): 41-68.
[31] Yumiko Nakanishi, “Mechanisms to Protect Human Rights in the EU’s External Relations.” in Contemporary Issues in Human Rights Law, ed. Yumiko Nakanishi (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2018), 3-21.
[32] The European Commission defines EU sanctions as “a foreign policy tool which helps to achieve key EU objectives such as preserving peace, strengthening international security, and consolidating and supporting democracy, international law and human rights.” https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pt/ip_20_2419
[43] Thierry Balzacq and Benjamin Puybareau, “The economy of secrecy: security, information control, and EU-US relations.” West European Politics 41, no. 4 (2018): 890-913.
Featured image is from Elekhh, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
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Ever since United States President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he’s been trying to bring Saudi Arabia back to the political West’s flock. The attempts to do so have escalated significantly after Russia launched its counteroffensive against NATO’s encroachment. Biden made numerous futile attempts to contact Saudi leadership, culminating with a failed visit on July 15.
The reasons why Saudi Arabia has been reluctant are many, including the openly declared intention of the US leadership to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. With oil being the lifeblood of Saudi Arabia virtually since its inception as a modern country, it is quite clear why Saudi leadership is not too keen to help the US achieve such a goal.
Joe Biden engaged in a sort of quasi-Reaganian attempt to have Saudi Arabia significantly increase oil production, which should have accomplished at least two goals. First, bring down oil prices, alleviating the pressure on the US economy while it transitioned towards alternative energy sources, and second, help bring Russia’s economy to its knees, very much in the same manner late US President Ronald Reagan did during the 1980s, which many in the political West believe helped bring down the Soviet Union. However, it seems President Biden did not only fail to achieve either of the two, but has actually made things worse for the political West.
Naturally, all major oil-producing countries have used oil price hikes on the global market to profit exponentially more while having to pump virtually the same quantity of oil. This is especially true for Saudi Arabia, the world’s third-largest oil producer, right after Russia and the US. After the political West imposed sanctions on Russia, the markets went into a frenzy, which immediately caused an increase in the price of all energy products, including crude oil. However, now it was Russia that was selling the cheapest oil, making it extremely attractive for other countries which simply couldn’t afford anything more expensive. Soon, massive oil importing countries like China and India started buying more Russian oil than ever before.
At this point, Russia was starting to overtake Saudi market share in other countries, including China, one of the world’s largest oil consumers. At a glance, this should’ve made Saudis more open to the idea of ramping up oil production and causing a drop in prices. But again, why would they do that for the interests of the US, whose government takes an openly hostile approach toward the oil industry, including its own? Expectedly, Riyadh had to find an alternative. And that’s exactly what happened after it made a deal with Russia within the OPEC+ framework. Among other things, this deal also seems to include an increase in Saudi import of cheaper Russian oil. And indeed, according to Reuters, the Wahhabi monarchy doubled its Russian oil imports in the second quarter of this year.
Now, we might ask ourselves, why would the world’s third-largest oil producer and a net exporter want to import more oil? Although it might not have much sense at a glance, in reality, it is very convenient for the Saudis to do so. After the political West imposed the suicidal sanctions on Russia, effectively enforcing an oil embargo on itself, Saudi leadership realized how much of an opportunity this was for Riyadh to buy the cheaper Russian oil and then re-export it to the European Union and elsewhere. For Russia, this was not only acceptable but even desirable. The EU, which did just as much damage to Russia’s interests in the post-Soviet region as the US itself, is now effectively still buying Russian oil, just through a middleman, paying exorbitant prices to get the same amount of oil as before February.
This is weakening the EU, putting tremendous pressure on the already failing European economies, which haven’t even recovered from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also affecting the US, as oil prices are soaring, exacerbating the inflation problem, which is now at the highest point in over 40 years. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is profiting immensely, as it is now effectively a middleman, reselling Russian oil to the political West. This also alleviates the strain on the Saudi oil industry, making it possible to work less, while profiting more. In addition, it nullifies Saudi losses in other markets, particularly in China and India, both of which are now buying more Russian oil.
The only losing side in this situation is the political West, particularly the EU. As long as Brussels is locked in a confrontation with Russia, it will be forced to buy Russian oil through Saudi Arabia and other middlemen. This is weakening EU economies, making them less competitive on the global market while also draining the resources of the domestic market, bringing down demand and effectively causing a recession.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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According to an article published by the Sunday Mirror, the UK Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service trained Ukrainian soldiers to organize an operation to retake and occupy the Zmeiny Island in the Black Sea, popularly called Snake Island, which was under Russian control until recently.
Ukrainian personnel trained by the British Navy would be linked to Kiev’s 73rd Naval Special Purpose Center and would primarily include military divers specialized in amphibious operations, also known as “frogmen”.
In addition to having given instructions, the British would have provided war material appropriate for the service. Sources claim that British agents involved in the training landed in Ukraine holding propulsion devices for divers, which would be used to facilitate the work of the Ukrainian soldiers during the operation. The assault would essentially consist of an amphibious attack, carried out by special divers equipped with British devices, which would allow them to cross long distances submerged without any detection by the Russian forces. Thus, when arriving on the island, the “frogmen” would initiate a surprise confrontation, trying to neutralize their enemies.
It is also mentioned that at a certain time, whose precise date was not revealed, Ukrainian frogmen arrived on the island, secretly carrying out reconnaissance operations, searching for landmines and collecting data to help in the construction of the attack’s strategy. No details are provided in the report about the consequences of such an operation or how Ukrainian agents managed to evade Russian forces.
Regardless of details, the report really seems to be authentic, as in fact this type of work, with extensive use of advanced military diving equipment, modern communication systems, qualified personnel and complex intelligence networks would only be possible with strong foreign support. Although the Ukrainian armed forces are reasonably strong, their current capacity would not allow such a plan to be considered as the country is completely destabilized and has other military priorities. The British Navy, however, is extremely efficient in this type of operation and could undoubtedly help the Ukrainian forces in this objective. So, if in fact there was an attack plan and such a reconnaissance operation really happened, it was only possible because of British logistics.
In this situation we can see the destabilizing power of Western interventionism. If an operation to retake the island were started, Russia would respond incisively, resorting to heavy naval artillery and air power. And the Ukrainian effort, in addition to being a military failure, would be absolutely unnecessary, as the Russians were already planning to leave the island, as in fact they did on June 30, when Moscow’s forces left Zmeiny, showing a gesture of goodwill and diplomacy.
This Russian gesture has an important pragmatic foundation, which is to give Kiev all the necessary conditions to maintain its normal volume of grain exports. With that, the Russian government fulfills its role to avoid the global supply crisis, allowing the grains to be transported by sea using the strategic location of the island. The Russian Defense Ministry even commented on some occasions that, with the departure of troops from Snake Island, Kiev would no longer have any excuse to stop exporting its stored grains.
However, the Ukrainian attitude towards the Russian gesture was precisely an attempt at military “reconquest”. On July 7, Ukrainian troops invaded the island, prompting Russian forces to react with a heavy air strike, resulting in the death of several Ukrainian soldiers. In fact, considering the events, the most likely is that the retake operation planned jointly by the Ukrainians and the British was postponed due to the Russian withdrawal and finally consummated with this failed attack.
July 7 episode just showed what would happen in any Ukrainian invasion attempt on the island: incisive military response and the death of the agents involved in the assault. Kiev did not need to plan any invasion to get the Russians off the island, just show willingness to use it for peaceful purposes, as Moscow was already working to evacuate troops. And, in the same sense, with the island liberated, the right thing to do would be to use it immediately to help exports, not try to turn it into a military base, which Moscow would never tolerate. However, Western interventionism, materialized in the sending of equipment and training of agents, fueled Kiev’s bellicose disposition – and once again made Ukrainian victims.
This case illustrates what experts have been saying for months: Western aid delays the end of the conflict and causes more deaths of Ukrainian soldiers. As long as there is interventionism, the conflict will continue.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.
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Guest is Sonia Elijah, an investigative journalist and broadcaster at trialsitenews.com. She has a background in economics and was a former BBC researcher. Her analysis on the Pfizer COVID vaccine safety report received worldwide attention.
This session talks about her investigation of the Pfizer trial documents that were released by court order. She has singlehandedly gone through thousands of pages of documents and discovered many anomalies that commit fraud.
She has written 4 in-depth investigative reports for Trial Site News. An interview of her by an Australian media company regarding her first report went viral on YouTube with over 1.4 million views in 3 days just before YouTube banned it.
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***
Three doctors from Ontario died after the hospital where they worked started administering the fourth booster shot to their staff.
Is it a coincidence or are they victims of this diabolical worldwide vaccination campaign?
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
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Before embarking on a second career as a politician (governor of California, where he said, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all”) and leader of the “free world” (US president 1980-88), Ronald Reagan was an actor, and host of the TV show General Electric Theater (1954-62). Each week he delivered the punch line of the show’s introduction, and the telling slogan of its corporate sponsor: “Progress is our most important product.”
Anyone listening to the pronouncements of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF), its transhumanist disciple Yuval Harari, its Young Global Leaders in lockstep mouthing “Build Back Better,” or Bill Gates touting forced medical intervention for every body/soul on earth, will catch an echo of this fundamental mantra of our time. Indeed, the same ethos could be traced back to the biblical injunction for humans to have “dominion” over all the planet and its creatures.
In between, we’ve had the neolithic (tool-making) revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Age. Today we embark on the next frontier, where reality itself is digitized, replaced by its virtual facsimile, overwritten by a new, synthetic narrative. Welcome back to Story Time.
“The primary motivating factor of any such ideology is its utopian vision. It’s that nebulous vision of something better–the ideal future–that acts as an attractor for the hopes and thus actions of those under its spell. . . . The vagueness of the notion is its greatest strength–like a societal Rorschach test. The masses latch on to it as the means to end their anxiety, vent their aggression, and achieve the “justice” they feel they have been denied. The attractor is simple: a better world, otherwise undefined. The details don’t need to be clear, but the goal is noble, in their minds.” –Harrison Koehli, On the Fractal Nature of Conspiracy
On the receiving end, Mother Nature suffers all the abuse heaped on her by proud man and his tools, excuses, illusions, conquests, schemes and scams. All undertaken “for the greater good” of homo sapiens, exclusively. But is this vaunted progress and the riches it yields truly to the benefit of all humans concerned? Or has “a better life” been hijacked as an irresistible bandwagon, while the drivers prosper and the passengers pay?
This is not to dispute the value of tools for survival. Electric lighting, modern dentistry, the written word. . . but where does it end? Few question the train or its tracks, the engineer’s ulterior motives, the collateral damage along the way. The Green movement gives lip service to environmental ethics, but meanwhile gets captured by financial interests, skewed science, and an alternative industry with costs to nature that are hidden or ignored.
Taking heed of a rising ecological ethic, the technocrats at the top have put a new spin on a Greener future. Their solution is the simplest: reduce human population, by whatever means necessary. Self-appointed as the fittest to survive, they will remain on top, naturally.
“Being able to see the globalists’ plan as clearly as we can see it now, we have an obligation to future generations to resist, denounce and refuse any and all implementations of the technocratic agenda.” —Dr. Joseph Mercola
Where there is destruction and dishonesty, there is always pushback. In England under early industrialization, the Luddites resisted the loss of their livelihood to textile machinery. The Amish religious sect has opted to live without electricity and automobiles. Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses are known to refuse blood transfusions. Notable in some aboriginal societies was the principle of judging policy by its effect seven generations down the line.
In today’s parlance such tech-hesitancy takes the form of the precautionary principle, a safeguard against blindly innovating when safety is in question and future harms are unknown. As a legal caution it has found wider application than the aforementioned examples of various dissident groups. Yet the overriding force of Western civilization, especially, throws caution to the wind in promoting and pursuing “progress” without question, at any cost.
But of course, there are always costs. The question then turns to: who will pay?
“Here we’re just faced by a toxic mix of hubris, abhorring mediocrity, delusion, crude ideological sheep-think and outright irrationality wallowing in white man’s burden racist/supremacist slush – all symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.” –Pepe Escobar, Russia and China Haven’t Even Started to Ratchet Up the Pain Dial
The current Geopolitical Revolution notwithstanding, where do we stand with Nature now?
If the species does manage to survive the predations of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, what can we learn from our species-wide rise and fall? Where did we go wrong, and how can we make it right?
As with most dilemmas, the answer probably lies between the extremes. To be circumspect about new solutions, selective in our choices, wary of shiny promises, mindful of future consequences from our automatic reflex for present gratification.
The seven generations rule is the most likely to stand the test of time. What’s not to like about honoring our ancestors, and looking out for our children and their children? Anything else smacks of a sales pitch, another episode of “General Electric Theater.”
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***
The Hagia Sophia Church in Al-Suqaylabiyah, Syria was attacked by Radical Islamic terrorists using a drone which was launched from the terrorist controlled enclave of Idlib on July 24. Two persons were killed while 12 others were wounded. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR) confirmed the attack from their UK office, and the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) also reported locally. Hisham Fahed Elias was one of those killed in the drone attack.
The Greek Orthodox church was holding an inauguration ceremony at the time of the attack.
Hundreds of churches in Syria have been destroyed or damaged by terrorists who began a US-NATO sponsored attack on Syria for regime change.
The church is located in the Hama province adjacent to the Idlib province, which is under the occupation and control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly known as Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
Recently, the UN security council agreed on the process of delivering humanitarian aid to Idlib. There are about three million civilians living there, among the terrorists and their families and supporters. Experts question the stalemate in Idlib, which prevents the attack on terrorists there, while prolonging millions as hostages and human shields.
The Obama administration began the war in 2011 but failed to overthrow the government of Syria, though the administrations of Trump and Biden have equally failed in the US plan to install the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Damascus. A similar US plan was successful in Egypt, but a peoples’ revolution brought down the US-backed Morsi government.
Who are the terrorists who attacked the church?
According to the BBC, the last remaining terrorist held territory in Syria is Idlib province, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham controls the area in an Islamic administration, as did ISIS previously in Mosul and Reqqa.
The terrorists are under military protection of Turkish occupation forces who have built numerous military outposts in Idlib which prevent the Syrian government forces, or their allies the Russians from attacking and liberating the civilians held against their will.
Why do the US-EU and Turkey protect the terrorists and stalemate of Idlib?
The US and EU are supporting the occupation of Idlib as a bargaining chip in the future political negotiations to solve the Syrian crisis. Turkey is a member of NATO and an ally of both the US and EU. Turkey’s President Erdogan and his ruling AKP party are followers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
During the Syrian conflict which began in 2011, the US government worked closely with the Turkish administration to funnel both weapons and Al Qaeda fighters into northern Syria from Turkey. In 2017, Trump shut down the CIA operations in Turkey which supported the terrorists fighting in Syria.
Syrian Christians
According to the BBC, Syria’s Christian community is one of the oldest in the world, going back two thousand years. The apostle Paul was converted to Christianity in Damascus, while some Christians from the town of Maaloula still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
Thousands of Christians in Syria were forced from their homes as Radical Islamic terrorists took over areas and ordered Christians to convert to Islam, pay a tax, or be killed. Clerics were kidnapped and killed by ISIS and Al Qaeda in Idlib and elsewhere.
Christians are believed to have constituted about 30% of the Syrian population as recently as the 1920s, but today number only about 10% of Syria’s 22 million people. Christians have held high political offices and high military ranks since 1963.
Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregorios III Laham said that more than 1,000 Christians had been killed, entire villages cleared, and dozens of churches and Christian centers damaged or destroyed. As sectarian violence increased, Christians in Syria supported President Assad.
In April 2013, Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Aleppo, and Bishop Boulos Yaziji, head of the Greek Orthodox Church there, were kidnapped by gunmen while they were on a humanitarian trip and remaining missing.
ISIS is embedded in Idlib
Recently, the SOHR, from the UK, published a report which proves that the areas under Turkish occupation, such as Idlib, are ‘hotbeds of terrorists’.
The report points out that nearly 50 terrorists were killed in areas under the control of Turkish forces and their mercenaries in the past few years, concluding that such areas have become the ‘most prominent hotbeds of terrorist and extremist groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other jihadist groups’.
The report begins from the death of Islamic State (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi who was hunted down by US forces 27 October 2019 in Idlib.
It goes on to give a list of 48 Syrian and non-Syrian jihadists, including leaders and senior members of ISIS, Hurras Al-Din and Al-Qaeda, who were killed in Idlib and other areas under Turkish military occupation.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, killed on 27 October 2019 in Idlib
Former ISIS emirs A’zu Al-Akkal and Fayez Al-Akkal, killed on 20 June 2020
ISIS commander known as ‘Shujaa Al-Muhammad’, killed on 20 July 2020
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the head of ISIS, killed on 3 February 2022
Maher al-Agal, one of ISIS leaders, killed on 12 July 2022
As an example of close ties between terrorists and Turkish forces, the report notes that a senior ISIS official, explosive expert and drone specialist, the son of an assassinated ISIS leader known as ‘Fawaz Al-Kurdi’, was arrested by US forces on June 2022 in the village of Al-Hamirah in the countryside of Jarablus, four km from the Turkish border. The report states that Hani Al-Kurdi has been living in an area controlled by Turkey for a long time, and owned oil trucks.
The report said:
“SOHR points out that the most of ISIS leaders and members entered areas controlled by ‘National Army’ and ‘Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham’ with the protection and complicity of leaders of the Turkish-backed ‘National Army.’ Some ISIS members and leaders entered those areas after paying huge sums of money to Turkish-backed commanders.”
“It has become as clear as daylight that Turkish forces-held areas in Idlib, northern and eastern countryside of Aleppo and areas in the countryside of Al-Hasakah and Al-Raqqa are the most prominent hotbeds of terrorist and extremist groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other jihadist groups that are overtly or covertly affiliated with Al-Qaeda.”
It is apparent, that the terrorists in control of Idlib are harboring ISIS leaders and officials on a very regular basis. If the UN charter states that all UN members must kill Al Qaeda and ISIS anywhere on earth they exist, then why is the UN, US and EU protecting Idlib?
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***
This article is derived from a speech I made at the July 23rd Peace and Freedom Rally in Kingston New York.
There are some things that I believe to be true about the anarchy that purports to be US foreign policy. First, and most important, I do not believe that any voter cast a ballot for Joe Biden because he or she wanted him to relentlessly pursue a needless conflict with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war with unimaginable consequences for all parties. Biden has recently declared that the US will support Ukraine “until we win” and, as there are already tens of billions of dollars of weapons going to Ukraine plus American “advisers” on the ground, it constitutes a scenario in which American and Russian soldiers will soon likely be shooting at each other. The President of Serbia and columnists like Pat Buchanan and Tulsi Gabbard believe that we are already de facto in World War 3 and one has to wonder how the White House is getting away with ignoring the War Powers mandates in the US Constitution.
Second, I believe that the Russians approached the United States and its allies with some quite reasonable requests regarding their own national security given that a hostile military alliance was about to land on its doorsteps. The issues at stake were fully negotiable but the US refused to budge on anything and Russia felt compelled to take military action. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a good war. I categorically reject anyone invading anyone else unless there is a dire and immediate threat, but the onus on how the Ukraine situation developed the way it did is on Washington.
Third, I believe that the US and British governments in particularly have been relentlessly lying to the people and that the media in most of west is party to the dissemination of the lies to sustain the war effort against Russia in Ukraine. The lies include both the genesis and progress of the war and there has also been a sustained effort to demonize President Vladimir Putin and anything Russian, including food, drinks, the Russian language and culture and even professional athletes. The latest victim is a Tchaikovsky symphony banned in Canada. Putin is being personally blamed for inflation, food shortages and energy problems which more properly are the fault of the Washington-led ill-thought-out reaction to him. There is considerable irony in the fact that Biden is giving Ukraine $1.7 billion for healthcare, while healthcare in the US is generally considered among the poorest in the developed world.
I believe that Russia is winning the war comfortably and Ukraine will be forced to give up territory while the American taxpayer gets the bill for the reckless spending policies, currently totaling more than $60 billion, while also looking forward to runaway inflation, energy shortages, and, in a worst-case scenario, a possible collapse of the dollar.
All of the above and the politics behind it has led me to believe that the United States, assisted by some of its allies, has become addicted to war as an excuse for domestic failures as well as a replacement for diplomacy to settle international disputes. The White House hypocritically describes its role as “global leadership” or maintaining a “rules based international order” or even defending “democracy against authoritarianism.” But at the same time the Biden Administration has just completed a fiasco evacuation that ended a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from Afghanistan, there are now US troops illegally present in Syria and Iraq and Washington is conniving to attack Iran over false claims made by Israel that the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon. Neither Syria nor Iraq nor Iran in any way threaten the United States, just as the Russians did not threaten Americans prior to a regime change intervention in Ukraine starting in 2014, when the US arranged the overthrow of a government that was friendly to Moscow. The US has also begun to energize NATO to start looking at steps to take to confront the alleged Chinese threat.
The toll coming from constant warfare and fearmongering has also enabled a steady erosion of the liberties that Americans once enjoyed, including free speech and freedom to associate. I would like to discuss what the ordinary concerned citizen can do to cut through all the lies surrounding what is currently taking place, which might well be described as the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, far more extensive than the lying and dissimulation by the White House and Pentagon officials that preceded the disastrous Iraq war. It is an information plus propaganda war that sustains the actual fighting on the ground, and it is in some senses far more dangerous as it seeks to involve more countries in the carnage while also creating a global threat perception that will be used to justify further military interventions.
Part of the problem is that the US government is awash with bad information that it does not know how to manage so it makes it hard to identify anything that might actually be true. Back in my time as an intelligence officer operating overseas, there were a number of short cuts that were used to categorize and evaluate information. For example, if one were hanging out in a local bar and overheard two apparent government officials discussing something of interest that might be happening in the next week, one might report it to Washington with a source description FNU/LNU, which stood for “first name unknown” and “last name unknown.” In other words, it was unverifiable hearsay coming from two individuals who could not be identified. As such it was pretty much worthless, but it clogged up the system and invited speculation.
My personal favorite, however, was the more precise source descriptions developed by military intelligence using an alphabet letter followed by a number in a sequence running from A-1 to F-6. At the top of an intelligence report there would be an assessment of the source, or agent. A-1 meant a piece of information that was both credible and had been confirmed by other sources and that was also produced by an agent that had actual access to the information in question. At the other end of the scale, an F-6 was information that was dubious produced by a source that appeared to have no actual access to the information.
By that standard, we Americans have been fed a lot of largely fabricated F-6 “fake information” coming from both the government and the media to justify the Ukraine disaster. Here is how you can spot it. If it is a newspaper or magazine article skim all the way down the text until you reach a point towards the end where the sourcing of the information is generally hidden. If it is attributed to a named individual who indeed indisputably had direct access to the information it would at least suggest that the reporting contains a kernel of truth. But that is almost never the case, and one normally sees the source described as an “anonymous source” or a “government official” or even, in many cases, there is no source attribution at all. That generally means that the information conveyed in the reporting is completely unreliable and should be considered the product of a fabricator or a government and media propaganda mill. When a story is written by a journalist who claims to be on the scene it is also important to check out whether he or she is actually on site or working from a pool operating safely in Poland to produce the reporting. Yahoo News takes the prize in spreading propaganda as it currently reproduces press releases originating with the Ukrainian government and posts them as if they are unbiased reporting on what is taking place on the ground.
Another trick to making fake news look real is to route it through a third country. When I was in Turkey we in CIA never placed a story in the media there directly. Instead, a journalist on our payroll in France would do the story and the Turkish media would pick it up, believing that because it had appeared in Paris it must be true even though it was not. Currently, I have noted that a lot of apparently MI-6 produced fake stories on Ukraine have been appearing in the British media, most notably the Telegraph and Guardian. They are then replayed in the US media and elsewhere to validate stories that are essentially fabricated.
Television and radio media is even worse than print media as it almost never identifies the sources for the stories that it carries. So my advice is to be skeptical of what you read or hear regarding wars and rumors of wars. The war party is bipartisan in the United States and it is just itching to seize the opportunity to get a new venture going, and they are oblivious to the fact that they might in the process be about to destroy the world as we know it. We must expose their lies and unite and fight to make sure that they can’t get away with it!
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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Let us be clear: We are in the midst of what one may call “WW III”, executed by the WEF’s Great Reset, backed by those invisible financial masters of the WEF. Among them the interlinked financial giants BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet, plus the western world’s banking system, in the forefront the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), also called the Central Bank of all central banks, as well as the FED, European Central Bank (ECB) – and specially the western international banking conglomerate.
If we observe the Fed and the ECB rising their base rates, pretending fighting skyrocketing inflation, officially in both the US and Europe below the 10% mark (US 9.1%, EU-zone (8.6%), but in reality, both monetary zones’ inflation rates are well into the double-digit-levels, we are also observing another mind-manipulation or lie. You can obviously not master a double-digit inflation with an interest hike of one to two percent. But you may prompt a chain of devastating social, economic and financial events.
These interest rate rises are part of a bigger picture. They are aiming at creating monetary and financial instability, high inflation, bankruptcies, unemployment, misery, disease and worse.
So, we should never lose sight of the Big Picture, when we deal and analyze individual “battles” of the multi-faceted Reset War, for which the UN and its 193 member countries, and also all major so-called UN-agencies, have been coopted, blackmailed or coerced.
Foremost is the World Health Organization (WHO) which is currently concocting behind closed doors a World Health Tyranny, called “Pandemic Treaty”. This treaty, if approved – not yet the case – will be the final nail in the coffin of democracy. It will override individual nations’ health sovereignties.
The goal of the WEF and its handlers, is to take absolute control of the world’s assets, natural resources and – yes – the world population. And no means are off limit.
Peter Koenig, July 25, 2022
See full interview below.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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