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I previously wrote about Hillary Clinton’s call on European countries to pass censorship laws to force social media companies like Twitter to regulate speech even after Elon Musk’s pledge to restore free speech to Twitter. Now the Parliament has called on Musk to testify and to explain his alarming pledge to restore free speech.

The Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board head, Nina Jankowisz, previously called upon Great Britain to impose state censorship rules. That call has grown since Musk’s purchase. Until now, a unified front of corporate censors was able to maintain an extensive system of censorship with the encouragement of politicians and pundits, including Joe Biden and Democratic members.

The head of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Julian Knight has assured her countrymen that they can stay calm and censor on. She issued a letter for Musk to appear before the committee to answer for his terrifying suggestion of free speech:

“At a time when social media companies face the prospect of tighter regulations around the world, we’re keen to learn more about how Mr Musk will balance his clear commitment to free speech with new obligations to protect Twitter’s users from online harms.”

We've invited @ElonMusk to discuss the future of @Twitter in Parliament.

Chair @JulianKnight15: "Appearing before the Committee will give Mr Musk an ideal opportunity to set out his proposals in more depth and we would look forward to welcoming him.”

🔎: https://t.co/HpYduMAcZY pic.twitter.com/UTU2wu1jnV

— Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsDCMS) May 4, 2022

Like the EU’s censorship plans under the Digital Services Act, the proposed Online Safety Bill would introduce state censorship through the purview of Ofcom (The Office of Communications), the broadcasting regulator in Britain. It would allow the company to fine firms up to ten percentof their global revenue should they violate ill-defined “harm” standards.

If passed, Clinton and others hope that the Europeans can replace corporate censorship with good old-fashioned state censorship. This includes confiscatory fines for anything deemed “grossly offensive.“  The bill would allow countries like Great Britain to impose censorship on the rest of the world.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates  (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech or “malicious communications” remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. Even having “toxic ideologies” is now a crime.

Great Britain would now make censorship one of its greatest exports. To do so, they first have to stomp out advocates for free speech like Musk by threatening to bankrupt his company if it tries to restore free speech to the Internet.

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I’ve been asking everyone: Show me the all-cause mortality data proving the vaccines are safe. I finally got some data. It’s from the UK government and it’s devastating. REALLY devastating.

Overview

New UK government data allows us to analyze the data in a way we couldn’t before. This new analysis shows clearly that the COVID vaccines kill more people than they save for all age groups. In other words, they shouldn’t be used by anyone. The younger you are, the less sense it makes.

Anyone can validate the data and methodology. The results make it clear that the COVID vaccines should be halted immediately.

If the vaccines really work, then why hasn’t any government anywhere in the world produced a proper risk-benefit analysis that shows the opposite result?

If the vaccines work, then why do all the lines in Figure 6 below show that Dose 1 and Dose 2 of the vaccines kill more people than they save?

Not a single public health authority in any country will have a conversation with us on the record to justify their vaccine recommendations by producing an all-cause risk benefit analysis similar to what I computed here. I wonder why?

What the data shows

Here’s the result of the analysis comparing unvaxxed vs. 2 doses given at least 6 months ago. I believe this analysis is conservative and the actual numbers are worse than this due to the seasonal variation of the all-cause mortality.

Figure 1. Risk/benefit determination from the UK data shows that for all ages, the vaccines kill more people than they save. A value of 15 means we kill 15 people from the vaccine to save 1 life from COVID. This is from the Exec Summary tab of the spreadsheet.

The data showed that for most age ranges, the vaccine reduced your chance of dying from COVID, but it increased your chances of dying from other causes. The former effect was smaller than the latter effect so the vaccines are nonsensical.

For example, if you are 25 years old, the vaccine kills 15 people for every person it saves from dying from COVID. Below 80, the younger you are, the more nonsensical vaccination is.

The cells in Figure 1 with a * means that the vaccinated had more COVID deaths than the unvaccinated. This is known as “negative vaccine efficacy.” This wasn’t surprising since we’ve been claiming that the vaccines damage your immune system.

Above 80, the UK data was too confounded to be useful. Until we have that data, it’s irresponsible to make a recommendation.

I describe below how you can compute this yourself from the UK data.

Please share this result on all your social media platforms. One user got 10,000 likes in less than 24 hours on Twitter and he had only 2,000 followers. So Twitter permanently suspended his account. So probably not a good idea to share on Twitter. According to Twitter, “health officials consider the COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people” and therefore any UK government data that shows that they are lying is a violation of Twitter Community Standards.

Introduction

One of my friends recently sent me a link to the mortality data from the UK government Office of National Statistics from January 1, 2021 to January 31, 2022. I had not seen this data before so I analyzed it.

What I found when I analyzed the data was absolutely stunning because it was consistent with the VAERS risk-benefit analysis by age that I had done in November, 2021.

The proper way to do a risk-benefit analysis

To show the vaccines are a beneficial intervention, you’d ideally want to do a randomized trial. We did that and the results showed 7 excess deaths for the single life we saved from COVID. More about that later. But the numbers we too small to be confident they weren’t statistical noise.

Since the trials are now all unblinded, we need to see is a retrospective study of matched individuals with 100,000 in each group selected on December 1, 2020 before the vaccines rolled out to the public.

One group goes the full vax route. The other group shuns the vax entirely.

We then look at the number of COVID vs. non-COVID deaths in each group and compute the risk-benefit analysis as we did earlier. Since each group is nearly identically matched except for the intervention, the comparison is fair.

That’s what we want to see.

What we get in the UK ONS data is something completely different (as we will explain below) and there is no clear way to repurpose that data for our study.

Where to get the UK government source data

The government data is archived here. You want to open the spreadsheet, and look at the spreadsheet tab labeled Table 6.

You can also access the original source here which you can see at the top of the page.

In either case, you click the green button labeled “xlsx” to get the spreadsheet, then go to tab “Table 6”:

To visualize it, see this tweet.

Note: The data is from England only, not all of the UK. On top of that, it is based on people in England who were both a) registered in the 2011 UK census and b) registered with a GP in 2019.

Where to get my analysis of the data

I annotated the UK source data and you can download it here. This makes it easier to see what is going on. You can see all the original data and my formulas for calculating the ACM ratios and risk benefit analysis on the Table 6 tab.

It is all in plain sight for everyone to see. I then copied values to the Summary and Exec Summary tabs from the Table 6 tab.

Interpreting the data

Here’s what the data looks like in Table 6:

Table 6 example from the ONS table

The definitions of each row is in the Definitions tab of the spreadsheet.

In summary, they track people as they spend time in each row based on their new status. So a triple vaccinated person who was vaccinated more than 21 days ago will spend time in every row except possibly the “Second dose, at least 6 months ago” which they would be able to skip if they got boosted before the 6 month waiting period. So if they waited 7 months before getting boosted, they’d only spend a month in that category. If people decided they weren’t high risk enough to get boosted, they’d accumulate time in the 2nd, 6+ category.

So that means if the vaccines are as deadly as we claim, the benefits of the vaccine against COVID will be minimal in the <21 days ago category and the ACM elevation over the unvaxxed should be the highest there. In short, the <21 days is the category where we should see the strongest risk-benefit signal so if you were an evil anti-vaxxer, this would clearly be the row you’d want to cherry pick to prove your point.

Conversely, if you were cherry picking for data to support your evil anti-vaxxer mission, the very last place you’d expect to find a strong signal is 6 months after the second dose since most of the people killed by the vaccine were killed in the 30 days after the shot as you can see from this graph from openvaers:

Furthermore, the non-COVID ACM in the unvaxxed group is going to be very high (since it peaks in Q1 when most people were contributing time in that group); that’s going to work against you. And as far as effectiveness, we all know these vaccines do wane over time, so there is still going to be a lot of protection left at that point.

So for the 2nd dose, 6m+ group, we have:

1. Low likelihood of death from the vaccine
2. ACM for the vaxxed will be naturally lower due to seasonality (lowest in Q3)
3. High ACM for the unvaxxed (which peaks in Q1)
4. Degraded, though still impressive protection from the vaccine at that point

In short, all four of these major factors works against you if you are an evil anti-vaxxer. It would be absolutely the worst row to examine to prove your point. It’s much more likely to show the vaccines are effective.

Which means if you can show there is a strong signal against the vaccines on this row, that’s really powerful since this has to be the row with the weakest case against the vaccines.

So this is exactly what we are going to do here: prove using the UK data that there is a very strong danger signal in the hardest place to find it.

The quality of the data

The data quality here is strongly biased in favor of making the vaccine look effective.

They are massively underestimating the proportion who are unvaccinated and they are putting ludicrous faith in the accuracy of the NIMs and GP records. Fenton and his team have written extensively about the problems with miscategorization in the ONS data and missing vaccination deaths.

The other huge problem with the data is that it shows that if you died, the % of COVID related deaths ranged from 10% in the very young to over 40% in the elderly if you were not vaccinated. That’s impossibly high. In 2020 in the US when everyone wasn’t vaccinated, the % of COVID deaths was 15%. The numbers in the ONS database just don’t make sense.

The data is not available for researchers to use freely; you have to tell the ONS up front what your study is about before you are allowed to look at the data and they have to approve any publication you want to make. So if you find something bad, you can’t talk about it. This isn’t government transparency. It is the opposite.

The ONS data and reports are produced by a team led by Vahé Nafilyan and Charlotte Bermingham. They are the lead authors on this March 23, 2022 paper which claims that it was COVID (and not the vaccines) that was causing cardio problems in young people. Here’s what they wrote:

There was a decrease in the risk of all-cause death in the first week after vaccination and no change in each of weeks 2 to 6 after vaccination or whole six-week period after vaccination. Subgroup analyses by sex, age, vaccine type, and last dose also showed no change in the risk of death in the first six weeks after vaccination

There is no way that can be right because it doesn’t match any reality I’ve ever seen. So this is yet another example that the ONS data is HIGHLY skewed to be favorable for the vaccine.

What this means is that it should be nearly impossible to find anything negative in the data, even if you were cherry picking because according to the authors the vaccine is perfectly safe and is massively effective.

You’d normally then look in the place most favorable to support an anti-vaxx hypothesis.

So it is stunning that in the last place anyone expected to find a signal, we find a very strong signal. Here, we found it across every age group under 80 without exception. That cannot happen by chance. We picked the exact same row for each age group and we picked the worst possible row. You cannot explain that away no matter how hard you try. It should have strongly favored the vaccine as safe and effective, yet we found exactly the opposite. That’s stunning.

Also, the Substack article, All-Cause Mortality by Vaccination Status, is excellent and provides a wide range of charts that are particularly illuminating showing visually that the the vaccines are not as safe as people claim. Just look at the black link here which is the unvaccinated.

Lines above the 1x line are cohorts where the vaccine is nonsensical. In short, over time, it becomes more and more obvious that the vaccines are a disaster.

Figure 6. Only at the start of the data collection period did the numbers look favorable for the vaccine. They all turn negative over time for Doses 1 and 2 over time meaning the vaccines are nonsensical. No cherry picking required. You can see it visually. Source: All-Cause Mortality by Vaccination Status

The article concludes:

This data is all very alarming. A poorly functioning vaccine should still have at least a small positive effect. A non-functioning vaccine should have no effect. Yet we see a negative effect in all age groups for both 1 or 2 doses taken ‘at least 21 days ago’, and it is most cases the negative effect is quite large. The fact that the pattern is consistent and predictable, meaning it moves smoothly from month to month and age bracket to age bracket, gives even more credibility to the pattern.

It’s a great read.

Methodology

I compared the all-cause mortality (ACM) for people who got 2 shots at least 6 months ago with the unvaccinated since this was the row that would be the most difficult to show an anti-vaxx signal.

Our goal in this analysis was not to get definitive numbers. We describe later the proper way to do a risk-benefit analysis. Our goal was to show that the vaccines are dangerous even if you look at a row that is least likely to make your point.

Summary of the data

This summary below (which I put on the Summary tab which is to the right of the Table 6 tab) shows the rates of all-cause mortality per 100,000 person-years for each age range and also shows the risk benefit ratio.

Figure 2. A summary of the calculations from the UK data. This is shown in the Summary tab of my spreadsheet.

Here’s the legend for each column:

1. A: age range for the row
2. B: ACM rate for unvaxxed
3. C: ACM rate for vaxxed
4. D: Risk benefit calculation which is # non-COVID lives lost due to the vaccine / # of COVID lives saved from the vaccine. This is the single best metric for justifying the use of an intervention. The larger this number is, the less sense the intervention makes. A value >1 means the intervention should never be used. The cells with * means that the vaccine actually caused more COVID cases to happen than the unvaccinated. Note: you need to view the full spreadsheet to see the data used to calculate this number. You cannot do it from the summary data on this screen.
5. E: ACM of vaxxed/ACM unvaxed, i.e., Column C/ Column
   B. A value >1 means the intervention should never be used since it is costing lives. This is a crude measure of the effectiveness of an intervention as we explain below.
6. F: % of ACM deaths due to COVID, i.e., the fraction of all the ACM deaths that were caused by COVID.

The data clearly shows that any mortality benefit you get from taking the vaccine and lowering your risk of death from COVID is more than offset by the mortality you lose from the vaccine itself. This isn’t new. It is something I have been saying since May, 2021. But now I finally found direct government data where I could demonstrate this for all ages under 80.

In the Pfizer Phase 3 trial, there was a 40% increase in ACM in the vaccinated group. They killed an estimated 7 people for every person they saved from COVID!

In the Pfizer Phase 3 trial, there were a total of 21 deaths in the vaccine group and 15 deaths in the placebo group.

This 40% increase in the all-cause mortality in the trial (21/15=1.4) was of course dismissed as not statistically significant. While that is true, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to the number.

But now, based on the UK data, we know that the result in the Phase 3 trial wasn’t a statistical fluke. Not at all.

In fact, if we look at the risk benefit, we see that we saved 1 life from dying from COVID (1 COVID death in the treatment group vs. 2 COVID deaths in the placebo group= 1 life saved), but there were 7 excess non-COVID deaths (20 – 13).

So the Pfizer trial showed that for every person we saved from COVID, we killed 7 people. However the numbers were too small to place a high confidence in this point estimate.

However, I’d argue that Pfizer trial was a best case because:

1. The trial enrolled abnormally healthy people who died at a 10X lower rate than the population (there is a 1% US average death rate per year, yet there were just 15 deaths in the 22,000 placebo arm in 6 months which is a .1% death rate)
2. They were able to get rid of anyone who had a reaction to the first dose without counting them

The most important point though is that the Pfizer trial killed: save ratio of 7:1 and the ACM ratio of 1.4 is consistent with the hypothesis that the vaccine kills more people than it saves.

My ACM risk/benefit estimate using VAERS

This is from a risk/benefit computation I did on November 1, 2021 using the VAERS data to compute the ratio of the # of people killed from the vaccine (V) to the # of people who might be saved from COVID (C) if they took the vaccine and it had 90% effectiveness over 6 months (since we knew it waned over time and variants would change). Of course that was a conservative estimate of the benefit, but that’s because I wanted to make sure I was on solid ground if attacked.

So now we know that my VAERS calculations approximately match the actual UK data in Figure 1. Since my analysis was deliberately conservative, many of the numbers are smaller than the actuals.

This is another example that people who claim (without evidence) that the VAERS data is too “unreliable to use” are wrong. If it is so unreliable, how did it match the real world UK results so well?

Figure 3: Risk-benefit analysis from VAERS

Note how that VAERS showed exactly the same effect back then that we just learned from this UK data: that the younger you are, the more nonsensical getting vaccinated is.

Our V:C column decreases as you get older (from 6:1 down to 1.8:1) just like column E decreases (from 1.9:1 to 1:1 over the same range) in Figure 2.

Isn’t that an interesting “coincidence”? They are within a factor of 3 of each other.

Confirmation from others

I’m hardly the only person noting that the COVID vaccines kill more people than they save. Other articles show either no benefit at all or a negative benefit.

For example, check out:

1. 99.6% of COVID deaths in Canada were among fully vaccinated people between April 10-17 which can only happen if the vaccinated have a great ACM than the unvaccinated since there is only an 86% vaccination rate in Canada. This is hard for anyone to explain.
2. Fully Vaccinated 6x Higher Overall Mortality Than Non-Vaccinated (October 30, 2021)
3. Follow-up of trial participants found ‘no effect on overall mortality’

Figure 4. Table from the Denmark paper published as a preprint in the Lancet

1. Horowitz: The failure of the mRNA shots is on display for all with open eyes

Note that the Denmark paper (pre-published in the Lancet) showed overall zero all-cause mortality benefit based on clinical trial data. That’s certainly more optimistic than the UK numbers, but the problem for the vaccine makers is that the UK numbers showed up to 38% of the deaths were from COVID so if the vaccines actually worked and were safe, you’d see a huge ACM benefit and you saw nothing.

Why are we mandating a vaccine with a zero ACM benefit?? No public health official wants to answer questions about that.

What makes this analysis different than previous work

The UK ONS data is more detailed than in the more frequently cited UK Health Security Agency summaries. It contains both COVID and non-COVID deaths by age. We haven’t had that before February 2022.

This enables me to validate the data as I explain in the next section.

Why I picked the 2nd dose, 6 month row only

There are three reasons I picked the 2nd dose, 6 month row for the comparison with the unvaccinated:

1. It is the hardest row to make a case since most vax deaths happen within 30 days after the vaccine. So if I can prove the vaccine is dangerous for this row, it’s simply stunning. You don’t expect any excess non-COVID ACM deaths from people 6 months from their last dose of the vaccine.
2. The data in this row consistently met a very simple sanity test which allows for a fair comparison (described below)
3. The vaccines were still effective in preventing COVID deaths in this row, e.g., for age 50-54 there was still a 50% efficacy in reducing COVID deaths which is in line with assertions by the government about effectiveness (64 COVID deaths rate delta for the vaccinated vs. 127 COVID death rate for the unvaxxed).

So nobody can really accuse me of “cheating.” This is the most difficult row to make a my case.

One commenter speculated anyone in this bucket must be sickly which explains the higher non-COVID ACM. That’s wrong. Anyone sickly wouldn’t have even made it into the bucket. They would have been killed by COVID or the 2 doses long before entering the 6 months from COVID shot bucket. If they made it into this bucket, these people are super healthy.

The sanity test

The all-cause mortality (ACM) rates for NON-COVID deaths in the vaxxed cohorts should be the same as the rates for the unvaccinated for a perfectly safe vaccine; it should be higher for sure for this vaccine as we know from VAERS; we have over 10 ways showing that this vaccine significantly INCREASES your non-COVID ACM.

Note that a number of people claim that Professor Christine Stabell Benn has said that vaccine can positively affect your ACM. While this might be true theoretically for a perfect vaccine, nobody I know has pointed me to any real-life vaccine that has this “fountain of youth” property for anything other than the disease the vaccine was designed for. Bobby Kennedy Jr. tried for 20 years to get a debate on this and nobody would challenge him. In particular, all the COVID vaccines share the same problems of increasing ACM. You can see it very clearly yourself in Figure 6 above. All ages, doses 1 and 2. The ACMs are all worse.

Therefore, anytime that non-COVID ACM is lower for the vaccinated than the unvaccinated in a given age cohort, the row is unreliable (either corrupt or seriously confounded, e.g., by season). Others noticed this as well; without being able to adjust the data, we get nonsense results. Adjusting for bias is a huge task and would be subject to “data manipulation” attacks which would open up another level of attack. So we resigned our analysis to using data we didn’t have to normalize. The 2nd dose, 6 month row fit our purposes.

If I ignored the sanity check and include all the data for the vaccinated in the UK report, then the vaccines are marvelous life savers but ONLY if you are 25 years old or older. The vaccine will keep you from dying from cancer, car accidents, etc. especially if you are elderly. It’s like a fountain of youth for the elderly if you do that. Which doesn’t jive at all with reality where funeral home directors like John O’Looney couldn’t believe how many calls he was getting of elderly that had died when the jabs rolled out. The point is simple: Garbage data in, garbage data out.

Here’s a more in-depth explanation of the confounding due to survivor bias which explains why these data sets are not constructed for our purposes.

Could my sanity check be wrong because the vaccine is actually able to keep you from dying from all diseases and also accidents as well? Very unlikely. VAERS would be empty if this drug reduced adverse events and doctors would report elderly people being cured of disease. Instead of adverse event reports, doctors would be filing Beneficial Event Reports (BER) after vaccination.

I’ve written about this supposed “fountain of youth” effect on November 12, 2021.

The bottom line is data analysis is tricky so sanity checks are important if you want credible results.

Should those over 80 get the shot?

My VAERS analysis said no.

The anecdotal data from nursing homes from whistleblowers all says no (see slides 53 to 59). This includes Abrien Aguirre on Oahu, Sunnycrest nursing home in Canada, and John O’Looney’s experience, and experience from embalmers where most of the bodies being embalmed have telltale blood clots caused by the vaccine.

Based on curve fitting, it doesn’t look good for the elderly, for either (see this reader comment for details).

The UK dataset used in this article was too confounded to use since the non-COVID ACM rate for the vaccinated was lower than the vaccinated so it didn’t meet the sanity check.

All the anecdotal data I hear is strongly negative. The ONS data shows the COVID vaccines are a fountain of youth and will cut your risk of dying from every cause in half.

If I was over 80, I wouldn’t get the shot until I saw reliable, self-consistent data showing a clear benefit from multiple independent sources. Seen any of that lately?

If I am vaccinated, should I continue to get my boosters, or not?

Consider that 75% of the people in the radiology department of Marin/UCSF got religious exemptions so they didn’t have to take the booster.

Does that help? They aren’t reading ONS data. They are seeing patients with 1, 2, and 3 doses of the vaccine.

We see over and over that each shot increases your risk of side-effects and death.

It’s like asking the question: “The first bullet I fired into my brain didn’t kill me. Should I try again?”

ACM ratio vs. risk/benefit analysis

Now that we have the basics out of the way, I want to explain in greater detail the difference between the ACM ratio and the risk/benefit number and why the latter is what we should be focusing on.

For example, Toby Rogers estimated that we kill 117 kids from the COVID vaccine for every child we might save from dying of COVID in the 5 to 11 age range.

Here, in an even older cohort (10 to 14), we found it is 1600 to 1. The problem with this young age range is that there are so few deaths, that there is a lot of statistical noise since the denominator is so small (close to 0). But the UK data clearly showed that vaccinating kids younger than 20 years old is insane. Arguing whether it is 117 or 1600 is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Just say “no.”

Here’s a simple example to illustrate the difference between the ACM ratio and the risk benefit analysis:

1. Suppose 100 people per 100,000 die per year normally in a particular age group.
2. We have a vaccine that saves 1 life per person, but kills 10. That’s a lousy intervention because it kills 10 times more people than it saves.
3. But if we compare the ACM rates of the two groups, we’d have 100 in the unvaccinated group and 109 dead people in the vaccinated group. So the ACM ratio would only be 1.1, a 10% increase. But the risk/benefit is 10:1 more risk than benefit.

So that’s why the risk-benefit ratio is the number to look at, not the ratio of the ACMs of each group.

Attempts to debunk this

Daniel Wilson, aka “Debunk the Funk,” cited Morris’s article (UK death data artifacts: “Stragglers” who delay vaccine doses a select group with higher death risk) when I asked him to debunk this article. No other explanation provided.

Morris claims that people who vaccinate late have higher death rates.

First of all, I wasn’t impressed with Morris’ analysis, but even I believed it, it’s completely irrelevant because the category I chose weren’t “stragglers” (since the biggest contributors got their second dose long long ago) and as I noted earlier, it is the single hardest row to see a signal. These people survived COVID and survived two shots so their ACM should be way lower than the average unvaccinated person. Basically, people in this category got shot early with two bullets and are still alive.

So much for the hand-waving debunk attempt.

My result is very consistent with other reliable independent data points that I know. If you want to debunk me, show us how, using exactly the same dataset, you can get a more accurate estimate of the “true” value. I’m skeptical anyone can do that, but I’m open to being shown a better way.

It turns out Table 6 wasn’t the best table to have used.

Take a look at Figure 6 above. After a startup period, the data all settles out and all dose 1 and dose 2 curves show higher ACM than the unvaccinated. No cherry picking or sanity test needed. A raw, untouched data.

So that’s an independent look at the data showing very visually that “whoops, these vaccines are killing more people than they save.”

You can do worse than this analysis; that’s easy

For example, this table from Morris’ article is from the UK dataset as well, and it indicates you are way better off if you got the vax.

Figure 5. Table from Morris article

The problem is death rates that are as low as 20% of the unvaxed death rate (as noted in this table) doesn’t match reality such as the up to 21X increase athlete deaths (Jan 2021 vs Jan 2022) that we can see in plain sight. Nobody has been able to explain away the athlete data, not even Professor Glen Pyle. While government data can be manipulated, athlete deaths cannot be manipulated because they are public. Which do you trust more? Clearly, the data that is in full public view.

Also, in Table 3 of the UK data, it says if you’ve been vaccinated with COVID, you have close to half of the non-COVID ACM death rate as the unvaccinated (compare E23 with E31).

In other words, according to UK government data, the vaccine is a fountain of youthbecause it will reduce your non-COVID ACM by a factor of 2. It’s just not believable. There is no mechanism of action that can do that and you’d expect the VAERS reports (and individual doctor reports) would all be lower than previous vaccines in all categories rather than off the charts.

Furthermore, if the COVID vaccines reduced non-COVID ACM by 2X, the government would be shouting this from the rooftops as a miracle cure for all diseases. They aren’t. They are silent. What does that tell you? It tells you the UK government is smart enough to realize the data is confounded and you can’t make such assessments: you can’t say it is safe, and you can’t say it is dangerous.

Figure 5 above is also inconsistent with Canada’s high rate of fully vaccinated deaths, the huge number of VAERS reports, reports by individual doctors of 100X or more increase in adverse events after vaccination, Facebook groups with hundred of thousands of vaccine victims, the huge spike in athlete deaths, the 75% of radiologists at UCSF/Marin who refused the booster, etc.

Limitations

Here are some limitations of using the UK data courtesy of Martin Kulldorff, the most important one being the first one.

Does this cause me to doubt the results? No. I specifically chose the row I did to minimize these confounders. These limitations mean my results are conservative (because the seasonality skew of the vaccinated increases their non-COVID ACM). We also have way too many real-world confirmation points that could not be explained if the vaccine were beneficial (see my list of questions).

1. Seasonality: In England, all-cause mortality is highly seasonal, as is COVID mortality as well as COVID vaccinations. This creates a bias in the analysis. There is much more unvaccinated person time during the early part of 2021, while there is much more D2 6+ month person time in the later parts of 2021 and January 2022. To adjust for this bias, in whichever direction it goes, it is necessary to adjust for calendar time. Depending on the data, that can be done in different ways. Note that this bias affects the results differently for different age groups, both because the rollout of the vaccine varied by age group and because the seasonal mortality patterns may differ by age.
2. Negative efficacy on COVID:  The negative efficacy on COVID mortality in the 30-34 and 40-44 age groups (the * rows) may seem counter intuitive, but there is a likely explanation. The same phenomena was seen an a recent New York State analysis of COVID vaccines in children. In that study, the vaccine was effective at preventing symptomatic COVID during the first few weeks after vaccination, but for 5-11 year old children, the efficacy we negative after seven weeks, so that there were more COVID in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. The likely explanation for this is that the vaccine provides temporary protection during the first few weeks, so after 7 weeks we are comparing unvaccinated children with a high proportion of natural immunity from having had COVID with vaccinated children with a lower proportion with natural immunity.  This phenomenon will be seen with any vaccine that only gives short-term protection, and it could potentially also affect COVID mortality statistics. Suppose that the vaccine does not prevent COVID deaths, but just postpone them until a later date. Then there may be a vaccine benefit seen 0-6 months after vaccination, but a vaccine harm 6-12 months after vaccination. When Pfizer and Moderna only evaluated the vaccines for a few months, that give incomplete and potentially misleading information about the efficacy of the vaccines. The same is true if we only look at a subsequent tie interval of e.g. 6-12 month after the vaccination. There are ways to overcome this issue, but I am not sufficiently familiar with the English data to know if it can be extracted from that.
3. Prior COVID infection: The unvaccinated group consists of two sub-groups,(i) those who have recovered from COVID and who hence have natural immunity to COVID, which is superior to vaccine induced immunity, and (ii) those who have never had COVID. People with natural immunity have minuscule if any benefit from the vaccine on COVID disease and should not be vaccinated. To determine whether those without a prior COVID infection benefit from vaccination, it is necessary to compare the vaccinated without a prior COVID infection with the unvaccinated without a prior COVID infection.
4. Risk metrics: Although both are worth calculating, I agree that risk/benefit is a more relevant number of vaccine efficacy than vax/unvax ACM rates. The best metrics to evaluate the vaccines is not a risk ratio though, but attributable risk. That is, for every 1,000 people who get the vaccine, or for every 1,000,000, how many deaths are prevented by the vaccine or how many deaths are caused by the vaccine.

Could the underlying UK data be wrong?

There are always going to be studies that contradict other studies.

There are always going to be compromised data sources, the DMED data being another recent example.

There are always going to be seemingly credible sources of data that are not as credible as they seem at first glance.

So yeah, as I noted in the section above, the ONS data provided was less than ideal.

Our job is to sort out the reliable data from the unreliable data. We do that by using multiple pieces of independent evidence from credible sources and doing sanity checks on the data we use.

My results agreed with other data I’m aware of so I’m reasonably happy with the quality of the data, e.g., the risk/benefit went down with increasing age in a way that matched my expectations.

“Show me the DATA”

All my analysis here serves one purpose which is to highlight the point that you can make a very legitimate case that these vaccines do nothing and at worse, make things worse. I’m hardly alone in this belief. Showing us different rows in the ONS data shows a different result, but doesn’t cause the red flag to disappear.

The only way you can trump the red flag I pointed out is to do a PROPER analysis.

Remember the movie Jerry Maguire where Rod Tidwell advises Jerry that to keep him as a client all Jerry has to do is “Show me the money!”?

We should all be asking the same thing of the CDC but instead of money, we should be asking them to “Show me the DATA!”

Why isn’t the CDC showing us the ACM study that we need? Namely:

We want to see two matched groups, one who took the intervention, the other that didn’t, and see who is standing at the end of the 1 year period.

Where is that study? The data exists.

There is a reason the proper study does not exist. Because it would make it clear to everyone that nobody should get jabbed.

Without seeing that study and the underlying data, nobody of any age should get the jab or recommend it.

I’ll go even further and say:

1. It is irresponsible for the CDC to keep that data hidden from public view.
2. It’s irresponsible for the medical community to not demand to see this data.
3. It’s irresponsible for the medical community to encourage anyone to get vaccinated without seeing this data especially in light of the alarming data in VAERS and other sources.

Summary

Based on this new UK government data, we can estimate a true risk-benefit ratio for each age group. For all groups, it’s negative. The younger you are, the less sense it makes to take the vaccine. Figure 6 is a visual way to see this. All the dose 1 and 2 curves are above the unvaccinated line.

It shows clearly that our governments have been publicly killing us with these vaccines and vaccine mandates.

The data was used is fully reported data right from the UK government and the math is straightforward. The row I used was not normalized or manipulated. It was the hardest row to prove my point. The only way to explain the results is that the vaccines kill more people than they save. But you can also look at Figure 6 too.

At a minimum, this result should cast serious doubt about the safe and effective narrative. I took a dataset that was clearly biased to show a positive vaccine result and found a hugely negative signal hidden inside by selecting data that should have shown the opposite. No tricks were used. That shouldn’t have been possible if the vaccine was really safe.

We need to see a proper analysis on the data and we need to see it now.

The medical community has never demanded to see a proper risk-benefit study before recommending the vaccines. To this day, they continue to this day to keep their head in the sand and not demand to see the ACM data. It’s deplorable.

Until we see the data and the study and validate both showing the vaccines are safe and effective, the vaccines should not be used.

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This was a presentation at a Chongyang Institute’s organized international webinar on 6 May 2022 on the topic of “Seeking Peace and Promoting Development”. The Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies is a thinktank attached to the Renmin University of Beijing.

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In today’s world of regional conflicts, technological upgrading, epidemic stalemate and system reform – peace is priority number one for an international sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development.

The present most infamous conflict, is the Ukraine – Russia war. China could play an important role as moderator, as proposed on several occasion by President Xi Jinping. It might belong to the United Nations peace-promoting role, to override western and NATO interests, by initiating President Xi’s mediating proposal for peace negotiations.

But the call for Peace goes also and especially to the NATO countries which continue delivering billions of dollars-worth of sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine to help them fight Russia. But the world, including such international bodies like the UN, is quiet, tolerating this direct interference, or worse, they encourage it. This definitely does not make for Peace, but puts the world at risk of a WWIII scenario.

Second – Trade has since ancient times been a means of preserving Peace.

The original Silk Road 2100 years ago is currently still a vivid example. Today, China’s Belt and Road Initiative – a modern times Silk Road – might again be an instrument to foster and sustain equitable development, while preserving peace. What is crucial in this process is the respect of individual countries’ sovereignty.

Third – A just monetary system, sovereign local currencies, backed by natioal economies. Dominance by fiat money must be a thing of the past. Justice in fair international monetary policies – outside the current western dominated fiat system, is a MUST.

If Peace and development are to be sustainable, western “sanctioning” of countries that do not follow western political and economic narratives, are no longer to be possible. Nor the stealing of foreign exchange reserves from countries which by their sovereign right, choose their own political and economic internal and external policies.

This means abandoning the current privately-run monopoly-type SWIFT monetary transfer methods, in exchange for an internationally honored scheme – where countries deal and exchange directly with each other, for example, through foreign exchange swaps.

We may indeed need a new “Bretton Woods Moment” — promoting a JUST system of weighted equality among countries with sovereign currencies backed by nations’ respective economies.

A post-US-dollar system may be market based, with sovereign local currencies tied to a number of measurable, tangible commodities such as gold and other precious metals, grain, hydrocarbons, as well as various internationally used goods. Factors of economic efficiency and scientific innovation may also become part of a currency backing formula.

This may indeed require a state or public-owned banking system. State-run banking systems are almost exponentially more efficient than private banking. It would keep money creation in the hands of governments, as opposed to private banks, the current western standard. Government control over money creation would also limit debt creation. It would substantially increase monetary efficiency. China is a vivid example.

According to Sergei Glazyev, Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the world’s future monetary system will be “underpinned by a digital currency, backed by a basket of (new) foreign currencies and natural resources. It will liberate the Global South from both, western debt and IMF-induced austerity.”

A debt-free economy is an Economy of Peace.

The transition from a western economic order toward a multipolar one, is crucial for attaining and preserving World Peace. As mentioned before, it must be an economic order that does not allow “sanctions” and stealing of foreign exchange reserves. Interfering by economic coercion in a sovereign country’s internal affairs and decision making, is against international law, against basic human rights, and ought not to be possible in a new monetary system.

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We may also need a new “United Nations Moment”. As it stands, over the past two to three decades, the UN has been highjacked by powerful western interests.

In a “new” UN, the noble role of preserving World Peace must be re-introduced. It may also require a restructured and more balanced Security Council.

A strong UN, for an international body is crucial to remain neutral and balanced in its role to remain a fair arbiter.

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As to Global Governance – there may be different interpretations of the meaning of Global Governance. If I have learned anything in my decades of international development work – mainly with the World Bank – it is that people in every country around the globe wish to preserve national autonomy, with cultural, judiciary and monetary sovereignty. Accent on sovereignty is key. They do definitely not want to be governed by an external force, a Global Government, or a western style One World Government.

These socioeconomic observations rule out a western Reset-type “Global Governance”.  It is essential that country leaders, as well as international organizations, the UN system, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO) – and not least, the World Health Organization (WHO) – listen to the people, and respect their views and wishes – if we eventually want a World of Peace, a world of sustainable and equitable development.

My interpretation of “globalization” — Chinese style – is connecting people through trade, joint projects, exchange of ideas, of cultural events and education, as in learning from each other. It is “globalization”, with the Belt and Road approach, by connecting in Peace, striving for new ideas to socioeconomic development, creating dynamics, where nations’ sovereignty remains an essential element. Thereby clearly promoting the building of a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind, in an effort to open up a bright and beautiful future for the world.

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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 has worked for over 30 years on water and environment 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 non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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***

Some three weeks after the reported meeting of the CIA chief William Burns with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Prince Mohammed bin Sultan, the OPEC+ ministerial held a videoconference on Thursday. 

The OPEC+ meet drew satisfaction that “continuing oil market fundamentals and the consensus on the outlook pointed to a balanced market.” The press release issued in Vienna says the ministerial “further noted the continuing effects of geopolitical factors and issues related to the ongoing pandemic” and decided that the OPEC+ sticks to the monthly production adjustment mechanism agreed in July last year “to adjust upward the monthly overall production by 0.432 million barrels/day for the month of June 2022.” 

As per the former publisher of the Journal Karen Elliott House, Burns came to Saudi Arabia for a “mating dance” with Prince Mohammad — namely, the Prince must cooperate on a new oil-for-security strategy to “increase production to save European nations from energy shortages.” 

Burns’ visit to the Kingdom took place just ahead of the 5th round of Saudi-Iranian normalisation talks in Baghdad between the Saudi intelligence chief and the deputy head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi who was acting as mediator and attended the latest round of talks told the state media last week,

“Our brothers in Saudi Arabia and Iran approach the dialogue with a big responsibility as demanded by the current regional situation. We are convinced that reconciliation is near.” 

Nournews, affiliated to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, also reported on April 24 that the fifth round of talks on a possible détente was “constructive” and the negotiators managed “to draw a clearer picture” of how to resume bilateral relations, and, “given the constructive bilateral dialogue so far, there is a possibility of a meeting between the Iranian and Saudi top diplomats in the near future.” 

Burns’ mission couldn’t have been indifferent toward the Saudis’ reconciliation track with Tehran. With the outcome of the JCPOA talks in Vienna uncertain, Iran’s close ties with Russia and China remains a major worry for Washington. And with Tehran’s stubborn refusal to trim its regional policies to suit US regional strategies, Washington has fallen back on the default option to resuscitate the anti-Iran front of its regional allies. The US hopes that Saudi Arabia will come on board the Abraham Accords. 

Meanwhile, the issue of oil prices has returned to the centre stage. Indeed, high oil prices mean high income for Russia. Russia’s sales of oil and natural gas far exceeded initial forecasts for 2021 as a result of skyrocketing prices, accounting for 36% of the country’s total budget. The revenues exceeded initial plans by 51.3%, totalling  $119 billion. The Biden administration’s best-laid plans to cripple the Russian economy are unravelling. Equally, high oil price is also a domestic issue for Biden. Above all, unless Europe finds other oil sources, it will continue buying Russian oil. 

However, Prince Mohammad has a different agenda. He is likely to rule Saudi Arabia for many decades—half a century if he lives to 86, his father’s age. And the Prince has been remarkably successful in creating a “power base”. His lifestyle changes have been a smashing hit with Saudis 35 and under—70% of the Kingdom’s citizens — and his ambition to transform Saudi Arabia into a modern technological leader ignites the imagination of the youth. 

Clearly, his refusal to punish Russia and his gesture to place the princely amount of $2bn in a new, untested investment fund started by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner speak for themselves. Prince Mohammed would have his own reasons too, starting with Biden’s contemptuous reference to Saudi Arabia as a “Pariah” state and refusal to deal in person. 

The Prince hit back recently by declining to take a call from Joe Biden. Besides, the US’ restrictions on arms sales; insufficient response to attacks on Saudi Arabia by Houthi forces; publication of a report into the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi — all these are in play here. 

Even if the administration is able to get Congressional approval for new security guarantees for Saudi Arabia (which is rather problematic), Prince Mohammad may not be swayed, since at the end of the day, high oil prices boost Saudi budget too. 

The paradox is, both Saudi Arabia and Russia are stakeholders in OPEC+ as is evident from the explicit warning to the EU by OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo last month that it would be impossible to replace more than 7 million barrels per day of Russian oil and other liquids exports potentially lost due to current or future sanctions or voluntary actions. 

In such a torrential stream where crosscurrents are foaming and weltering, what probably unnerves the Biden Administration most could be the talk that Chinese President Xi Jinping may be planning to visit Saudi Arabia, amidst persistent reports recently that Riyadh and Beijing are in talks to price some of the Gulf nation’s oil sales in yuan rather than dollars, which would indeed mark a profound shift for the oil market and help advance China’s efforts to convince more countries and international investors to transact in its currency. 

The Saudi explanation for the shift to the yuan is that the kingdom could use part of new currency revenues to pay Chinese contractors involved in mega projects within the kingdom domestically, which would reduce the risks associated with the capital controls Beijing imposes on its currency. But, for Washington, that means certain sensitive Saudi-China transactions in yuan do not appear in the rearview mirror of the SWIFT messaging infrastructure, making transaction monitoring unviable.  

There are persistent US reports that with Chinese support, Saudi Arabia may be constructing a new uranium processing facility near Al Ula to enhance its pursuit of nuclear technology. Saudi Arabia’s generous $8 billion in financial support for Pakistan, unveiled this week, will almost certainly raise hiccups in Washington. 

Saudi Arabia is a central pillar of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and ranks in the top three countries globally for Chinese construction projects, according to the China Global Investment Tracker, run by the American Enterprise Institute. Suffice to say, the CIA chief’s call could not have been for a friendly chat with Prince Mohammad. 

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After hounding the US and other NATO members for weeks about his need for heavy weapons to defend against Russia’s ongoing “special military operation”, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appears to have been granted his wish.

The US Congress, on April 28, passed legislation that breathed life into a World War II-era law that would allow the US to quickly supply weapons to Ukraine on loan.

By a vote of 417 to 10, the House of Representatives sent the revised 80-year-old law to the desk of President Joe Biden, where he is expected to sign it (the US Senate had earlier passed the legislation unanimously.)

“Passage of that act enabled Great Britain and Winston Churchill to keep fighting and to survive the fascist Nazi bombardment until the United States could enter the war,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland who has been at the forefront of anti-Russian legislation over the years. “President Zelensky has said that Ukraine needs weapons to sustain themselves, and President Biden has answered that call.”

The Congressional action comes on the heels of President Biden approving an additional $33 billion in military aid on top of the nearly $3 billion already provided to Ukraine since the start of the conflict with Russia. While much of the earlier weapons shipments focused on light weaponry such as anti-tank missiles and man-portable air defense systems, the new support package places an emphasis on heavy weaponry, such as howitzers and armored fighting vehicles, which Ukraine needs to replace equipment destroyed or damaged in battle.

Beware of what you wish for.

General Omar Bradley, a famous American military commander during World War II who knew more than a thing or two about killing Nazis, is attributed with saying “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” For every piece of heavy equipment that the Ukrainian military is about to receive as part of this massive infusion of military aid provided by the US there is attached the unspoken yet critical reality of the issue of maintenance and sustainability. Simply put, if it’s broke, you can’t use it. And military equipment breaks – frequently – especially when subjected to the strains and stress of unending modern combat.

Take the M777 155mm towed howitzer the US is providing to Ukraine – some 90 in total. Intended to be a lightweight, easily transportable replacement for the workhorse M198 howitzer used by the US Army and Marines from the mid-1980’s through the mid-2000’s, its design made sacrifices to reduce weight which, under combat conditions, resulted in “serious problems with metal fatigue, instability while firing, and damage inflicted by recoil quickly became apparent,” according to a fact-sheet about the system. Many of the problems faced by the M777 revolve around the materials used in its production.

“There are many problems with using titanium instead of steel,” the fact-sheet notes, “rooted in the fact that while it is similarly strong, titanium alloys are much less flexible (making them more prone to metal fatigue).” Moreover, the fact sheet concludes that “this artillery piece is too light for the powerful 155 mm ammunition. The lighter a weapon is that fires a given projectile and propellant charge, the more violent its recoil is. This has resulted in the recoil-absorption mechanisms in the M777 wearing out dangerously fast in combat conditions.”

The US Army experience at the National Training Center, in Fort Irwin, California, shows that the combat effectiveness of an M777-equipped artillery unit begins to degrade around the fourth day of operations, primarily due to maintenance issues. Left unresolved, an M777-equipped unit could find itself completely combat ineffective within a week. The US Army solution—extensive field-level maintenance supported by forward-deployment of critical spare parts and highly trained personnel—is one that can only be conducted by units trained to do so, and with the logistical infrastructure in place to allow it.

The Ukrainian Army, which is undergoing training on the M777 system at the US Army training center in Grafenwoehr, Germany, will be focused on the manpower-heavy requirements of M777 operation (which needs an eight-man crew, as opposed to the five-man crew of the M198), and not how to maintain the system in combat. But even if these weapons make it to the front lines, the complexity of the system will ensure inefficient operations, which sooner rather than later will result in the M777 howitzer breaking down with no means of repairing it.

The logistical problems of the M777 are replicated with each item of heavy military equipment the US and its NATO allies are providing to Ukraine, from 200 obsolete Vietnam-era M113 armored personnel carriers (whose 6V53 Detroit two-stroke six-cylinder diesel engines with Allison TX100-1 three-speed automatic transmissions are unlike anything in the Ukrainian military arsenal, meaning there is no one qualified to maintain or repair them in Ukraine) to the 50 obsolete 1960’s-era Gepard anti-aircraft armored vehicles dispatched by Germany (with separate engines for propulsion and energy supply to the turret, doubling the maintenance headache). The US and NATO seem content with providing Ukraine with old, worn out (obsolete is the operative word here) equipment that is virtually guaranteed to break down rapidly under combat conditions and for which Ukraine has no logistical support plan in place.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, recently visited Ukraine, where she told President Zelensky “America stands with Ukraine. We stand with Ukraine until victory is won,” adding “Our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.” Pelosi’s visit has been portrayed as an indication that the Biden administration, by providing Ukraine with the heavy weaponry it has been requesting, is committed to Ukraine prevailing in the ongoing conflict with Russia. But the reality is far different—by providing Ukraine with equipment which is all but guaranteed to break down shortly after entering combat, and for which Ukraine has no infrastructure on hand to maintain and repair, Biden and Pelosi are doing little more than feeding the Ukrainian military suicide pills and calling it nutrition.

With friends like these, who needs enemies.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

Featured image: US Marine gunners test fire an M777 howitzer. (Licensed under public domain)

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***

It’s been a week since Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R, IL-16) introduced his Authorization for Use of Military Force to Defend America’s Allies Resolution of 2022 (AUMF) that would authorize President Biden to respond militarily to Russian use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Yet not a single one of Kinzinger’s 434 fellow House members has signed on as co-sponsor.

That indicates every one views Kinzinger’s bill with alarm that it essentially sets up a trip wire for U.S. to directly attack Russian forces in Ukraine. Once that occurs, nuclear war between the 2 nuclear superpowers, possessing over 13,000 nukes, becomes likely; indeed inevitable.

One insidious aspect of his AUMF is it could inspire a Ukrainian false flag chemical attack to draw America directly into the fighting. That almost worked in Syria in 2012 till Obama blinked at what was likely a rebel false flag attack.

Promoting US Russian conflict is not new territory for Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran Kinzinger. Shortly after the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kinzinger proposed a No Fly Zone against Russian aircraft over Ukraine. Such a move was summarily rejected by President Biden who declared such a move was tantamount to igniting WWIII with Russia.

Kinzinger’s hard line anti-Russian agenda goes all the way back 8 years to his support of the US inspired coup that ousted pro Russian Ukraine president Victor Yanukovych, his support of NATO membership for Ukraine and support for arming the ultranationalist Ukraine government in their civil war against pro Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas. That now puts Kinzinger in the dubious position of goading the Russians to set up red lines against US aggression and now goading Congress to set up red lines against Russian aggression.

While a ratified AUMF may never be tested, or simply ignored if Russia did violate one of its prohibitions, it sets up a wholly irresponsible threat of nuclear war with no upside of ending the war in Ukraine.

One would have hoped Congressman Kinzinger would have learned the lessons from his service in 2 senseless US war that killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. Kinzinger’s district, indeed all Americans, world be better served if he stuck with his noble work of ferreting out treason in the Trump Republican party, than flailing away at provoking nuclear war with Russia.

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Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.

Featured image: Kinzinger piloting a Boeing KC-135 StratoTanker during his service with the United States Air Force. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

Russia’s ambassador to the US said on Thursday that NATO leaders are not taking the threat of nuclear war seriously enough.

“The current generation of NATO politicians clearly does not take the nuclear threat seriously,” ambassador Anatoly Antonov told Newsweek.

While it’s widely believed that a direct war between NATO and Russia would quickly turn nuclear, the danger doesn’t appear to be factored into the Western approach to the war in Ukraine.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the US and its NATO allies have been pouring weapons into the country and are openly sharing intelligence with the Ukrainians that is being used to kill Russian troops. On top of the strong support for Ukraine, the US and many other NATO countries have abandoned diplomacy with Moscow.

The Western campaign clearly risks sparking a direct war with Moscow, prompting Russian officials to warn of the danger of nuclear war. But the US has denounced the Russian warning as saber-rattling and continues to escalate its support for Kyiv. Antonov criticized what he called “a flurry of blatant misrepresentation of Russian officials’ statements on our country’s nuclear policy.”

Antonov reiterated Russia’s stance on the potential scenarios where it would use nuclear weapons. He said they “can be used in response to the use of WMD against Russia and its allies, or in the event of aggression against our country when the very existence of the state is jeopardized.”

The US and Russia possess about 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, but today, there is only one major arms control treaty between the two nations, the New START, which limits the number of missiles, bombers, and nuclear warheads each power can have deployed. Early on in Biden’s presidency, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to extend New START for five years, but progress on arms control has stalled since.

At a summit in Geneva last June, Biden and Putin agreed that the US and Russia would hold arms control talks, but Antonov said the dialogue has been “frozen” by Washington. “Regrettably, Washington has unilaterally ‘frozen’ the bilateral strategic stability dialogue that was launched at the Geneva summit, thus jeopardizing the prospects of keeping the foundation of arms control in place,” he said. “Russia is ready to resume the consultations as soon as the United States is ready.”

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

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute  

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It’s been shown that Pfizer and the CDC committed fraud when they willfully withheld critical data from the public, resulting in harm and death to thousands from the injections.

What’s going on here is criminal. For the people close to the data who said nothing, there will be legal consequences. They will either be witnesses or defendants.

The FDA and the CDC had to be sued to release the data on a biological product that every person is being asked, if not forced to take. This should make everyone very concerned.

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Overlooking potential public health risks, lingering scientific questions, and deficient public data, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) approved the extension of Oxitec’s two-year field trial on Wednesday, which includes releasing several billion more genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes into the Florida Keys — one of Florida’s most ecologically sensitive areas.

FDACS’ approval comes on the heels of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granting the British biotechnology company Oxitec a two-year extension for its Experimental Use Permit for the release of a GE version of the species Aedes aegypti across Monroe County, Florida.

“FDACS should have required Oxitec to cease claiming as ‘confidential business information’ their data on the human health and environmental effects of the release of the mosquitoes,” said Jaydee Hanson, Policy Director at Center for Food Safety. “In Spain, when Oxitec withheld the data, the Spanish government told Oxitec to make public the health and environmental safety effects of their genetically engineered insect. Florida should have done the same. Moreover, FDACS should not have allowed a second major release without making public the data from the first trial and having it reviewed by unbiased scientists in the field.”

FDACS’ approval came despite unresolved public health and environmental concerns raised by scientists, public health experts and environmental groups about potential impacts of the release. The data from Florida’s 2021 field trial release of genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys still has not been made public or reviewed by independent scientists.

“We should all be very concerned about an EPA that forgets its middle name, protection, with this approval. Our public trust is abused by Oxitec’s lack of scientific transparency and no independent scientific investigation from EPA to show this experimental insect will not create infinitely more problems than it will solve,” said Barry Wray, Director of Florida Keys Environmental Coalition. The EPA has behaved as if it is in partnership with Oxitec, disregarding the company’s history of deception and allowing a lobbyist to meet with former EPA Administrator Pruitt. “It is ethically repugnant to release these mosquitoes.”

Oxitec claims its GE mosquito field trials are intended to reduce the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — one species that can carry yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and Zika. However, the potential public health impacts of GE mosquitoes could be problematic. A Yale University study in Brazil observed that the GE mosquitoes bred with local Aedes aegypti, resulting in hybrid mosquitoes in the wild that may be more aggressive, more difficult to eradicate and may increase the spread of mosquito-borne disease.

Unfortunately, the EPA did not publicly share its entire public health analysis, and data about allergenicity and toxicity were redacted from public documents. EPA’s key environmental assessments were also insufficient and did not mandate scientific tests using caged trials ahead of environmental release.

“Poorly done, secretive science and lack of transparency is once again being rewarded with a free pass by government officials who are ignoring the voices of concerned scientists and those most impacted.” said Dana Perls, Emerging Technology Program Manager at Friends of the Earth. “First in Brazil, and now in Florida, government agencies have missed the mark and promoted the interests of a private corporation over public health and ecosystem protection.”

EPA also approved a new California field trial for Fresno, Tulare, San Bernadino and Stanislaus counties — major agricultural regions populated by farmworkers and vulnerable low-income communities. California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation is poised to decide whether to approve Oxitec’s permit for an open-air experiment in Tulare County, California. If approved, billions of GE mosquitoes could be released over a two-year period in the Central Valley, beginning in 2022.

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Amid the ongoing positional battles along the front lines in Ukraine, new victories have recently been proclaimed by the warring sides.

In the Kharkiv region, the front line have reportedly changed. The Ukrainian military launched a counteroffensive and achieved some success. After several days of fighting, units of the DPR, LPR and Russian Guards left the town of Russian Lozovaya and other nearby villages. The AFU established a stronghold  in the village of Stary Saltov. It is reported that the village was occupied by militants of the notorious Kraken special forces unit of the Azov nationalist regiment, who are known for openly conducting a “hunt” for civilians with a pro-Russian position in the Kharkiv region.

The AFU continue sabotage operations north of Tsirkuny village, and are actively strengthening positions in the Chuguev area.

In turn, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are strengthening their positions in the area of Cossack Lopan. Clashes are reported in the Kurulka and Pashkovo areas, as well as near Bolshaya Kamyshevakha.

 

In the area of the city of Kharkiv, there is a fairly small grouping of Russian forces, which for weeks continued to repel the Ukrainian counter offensives. One of their tasks in the region is to divert enemy forces from the active operations in the Izyum region, as well as to protect the supply roads.

It is reported that the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has transferred 3,000 soldiers and more than 100 units of heavy weapons to unblock the 93rd brigade, which fell into the operational environment in the area of Izyum. The AFU do not abandon attempts to force the Seversky Donets and hit the flank of the Russian grouping in Izyum who are advancing on Barvenkovo and Slavyansk. The AFU are trying to break through near the village of Protopovka, but so far without success. Russian artillery is delivering massive strikes on Ukrainian positions.

The battles for the town of Liman have been going on for several days. Russian troops and units of the People’s Militias of the DPR and LPR are storming the city to further advance to Slavyansk.

In the area of Bakhmutka, Russian troops took control of the village of Svetlichnoye, fighting is going on in Nizhny.

In the area of Severodonetsk-Lisichansk, Russian forces have almost completely established control over Rubezhnoe and nearby areas. The AFU were repelled from the forests in the Kudryashevo area.

Fighting began for Voivodovka, located between Rubezhny and Severodonetsk. The head of the Chechen forces who were deployed in the area, Ramzan Kadyrov, said that the AFU were knocked out of the areas to the north and northeast of the village. Fighting continues in the streets. Control over Voivodovka will provide an opportunity to blockade the city of Severodonetsk from the north.

In turn, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced the beginning of a counterattack in the Luhansk direction. However, at the moment, no success has been achieved. The main hotspots remain in the areas near Popasna, Kremennaya and Torskoe.

Russian troops continue to storm Popasnaya. The People’s Militia of the LPR controls half of the city.

In the Donetsk People’s Republic, on May 5, Russian forces took control of the village of Troitskoye, located 14 kilometers north of Yasinovataya. The People’s Militia of the DPR stated that the first separate mechanized battalion of the territorial defense of the DPR, with the support of special forces, moped up the resistance in the village. At the same time, the Ukrainian artillery continues to fire at the village from positions in Novoselovka and New York.

Positional battles continue on other fronts of Donbass and in the southern regions of Ukraine but no changes were reported on the front lines.

After the ceasefire regime established on April 30 and May 1 resulted in the evacuation of about a hundred of civilians, hostilities resumed on the territory of Azovstal in Mariupol. Ukrainian militants open fire in an attempt to find any weak points in the Russian positions around the plant. In their turn, Russian forces suppress the Ukrainian firing points with artillery, aviation as well as during the clashes in some areas in the facilities, in order to secure their positions and civilian areas nearby.

In order to suppress the firing points of Ukrainian militants, Russian naval artillery was involved, which inflicted a large-scale blow on the plant.

As soon as the fighting resumed, the Azov militants revealed that there were still civilians in the basements of Azovstal. Thus, clearly not all the hostages were allowed to leave the facilities.

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti cited an anonymous representative of the Russian military involved in the operation to liberate Azovstal saying that there could be more than 200 civilians, including women, children and the elderly held in the basements.

The source also revealed that the Azov militants offered to exchange the civilians for food and medicines.

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A Monetary Reset Where the Rich Don’t Own Everything

By Ellen Brown, May 08, 2022

We have a serious debt problem, but solutions such as the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” are not the future we want. It’s time to think outside the box for some new solutions.

“Virus Mitigation”, “Track and Trace”: The CDC Surveilled for COVID Lockdown Compliance

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, May 08, 2022

A missing piece of the great lockdown plot was enforcement. How precisely were authorities going to know the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of people without a veritable army of snoops?

Russian Oil Ban Plans Are Like ‘Dropping an Atomic Bomb on Hungary’s Economy’, Says Viktor Orban

By Jorge Liboreiro, Efi Koutsokosta, and et al., May 09, 2022

Brussels’s proposal for a gradual EU-wide ban on Russian oil imports is sowing division, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán comparing the embargo to an economic “atomic bomb”. The main point of contention is the ambitious timeline envisioned by the European Commission: a phase-out of all Russian crude in six months and all refined oil products by the end of the year.

UK: Starmer Threatens to Expel Corbyn and Any Labour MPs Not Backing NATO’s War on Russia

By Chris Marsden, May 09, 2022

Starmer, who has repeatedly declared Labour to be the “party of NATO” during its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, said he was “very clear” that support for the military alliance was at “the root of the Labour Party”.

US Senate Committee Passes Bill Pressuring OPEC, Russia Over High Oil Prices

By Middle East Eye, May 09, 2022

The bill would change US antitrust law to revoke the sovereign immunity that has long protected Opec and its national oil companies from lawsuits. By doing so, the US attorney general would then have the power to sue Opec, its members such as Saudi Arabia or its partners like Russia, in federal court on charges including market manipulation.

Bongbong Politics: Rehabilitating the Marcos Family. Philippine Elections.

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, May 08, 2022

Children should not pay for the sins of their parents.  But in some cases, a healthy suspicion of the offspring is needed, notably when it comes to profiting off ill-gotten gains. It is certainly needed in the case of Filipino politician and presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, who stands to win on May 9.

Is China a Communist or a Capitalist Country?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 08, 2022

In 1981-82, based at the University of Hong Kong, Centre for Asian Studies (CAS), I started my research on the process of capitalist restoration in China. I took a crash course in Mandarin at the HKU Language School as well as in Taiwan.  This research –which extended over a period of 4 years–  included fieldwork in several regions of China (1981-83) focussing on economic and social reforms, analysis of the defunct People’s Commune (abolished in 1983) and the development of privately owned capitalist industry including the cheap labor export economy.

History of World War II: Operation Barbarossa, the Allied Firebombing of German Cities and Japan’s Early Conquests

By Shane Quinn, May 08, 2022

The Nazi invasion was the most brutal the world had ever seen. In 1941 alone millions of Soviet citizens, both military personnel and non-combatants, would either be killed or sent to concentration camps. The murderous nature of the Nazi occupation led to increased resistance from the Soviet Army and local populations, many of whom came to despise the occupiers and joined partisan groups.

Adam Kinzinger Executes Neocon Vision for Ukraine

By Patrick MacFarlane, May 08, 2022

Congressman Adam Kinzinger proposed a new Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation, if passed, would allow President Joe Biden to deploy American forces to restore “the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event that Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

Carrot and Stick: US Pressure and Extortion to Break Latin America’s Ties with Russia and China

By Prof. Jorge Elbaum, May 08, 2022

In the last two weeks, the State Department has deployed an ambitious blackmailing persuasion program on countries located in the so-called “Western Hemisphere”, with the aim of limiting their trade and cooperation ties with Moscow and Beijing.

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***

The World Health Organization recently issued a ‘global alert’ about a new form of severe hepatitis affecting children.

The news came after the UK Government announced it was launching an urgent investigation after detecting higher than usual rates of liver inflammation (hepatitis) among children, after having ruled out the common viruses that cause the condition.

The current publicised, but not watertight theory is that this is due to an adenovirus. But not just any adenovirus. Evidence suggests that Medicine Regulators around the world believe it is due to an “attenuated” adenovirus variant in both the AstraZeneca and Janssen Covid-19 vaccines that has gone rogue.

On April 15 2022, the World Health Organization issued a global alert about a new form of severe acute Hepatitis with an unknown aetiology (cause) affecting previously healthy children in the UK over the last month. Cases have also been notified in Spain and Ireland. Tests have excluded all previously known Hepatitis viruses.

The announcement came after the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) recently detected higher than usual rates of liver inflammation (hepatitis) in children.

The hepatitis infections had been confirmed to have hit children in at least twelve different countries, with the majority of those cases spiking in the UK.

As of 3 May 2022, there have been 163 cases of acute non-A-E hepatitis with serumtransaminases greater than 500 IU/l identified in children aged under 16 years old in the UK since 1 January 2022.

Adenovirus remains the most frequently detected potential pathogen. Amongst 163 UK cases, 126 have been tested for adenovirus of which 91 had adenovirus detected (72%).

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) claims in their 2nd technical briefing on the matter that ‘the following hypotheses are all being actively tested by the investigations in process’-

• A normal adenovirus infection
• A novel variant adenovirus
• A post-infectious SARS-CoV-2 syndrome
• A drug, toxin or environmental exposure
• A novel pathogen either acting alone or as a coinfection
• A new variant of SARS-CoV-2.

Quite why they are going down the avenue of blaming this on Covid-19 beggar’s belief. Because SARS-CoV-2 has only been detected in 24 of the 132 cases with available results (18%).

But the adenovirus theory is certainly interesting when you consider what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on the 5th May 2021.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has limited the authorised use of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals 18 years of age and older for whom other authorised or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate.

The FDA claims this is due to conducting an updated analysis and finding that the risk of thrombosis following administration of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, warrants limiting the authorized use of the vaccine.

But hold on a minute. They already knew about the dangers of blood clots months ago and had added them to the Johnson & Johnson safety fact sheet. So why the sudden change of heart now?

Source

The mystery hepatitis cases have recently been recorded in 14 states across America. Doctors in Ohio have reported 7 cases in children as young as 18 months, and North Dakota confirmed their first case on 5th May. As of the same date, six children have required a liver transplant and one has died.

Could the actual reason for essentially banning the use of the Janssen vaccine instead have something to do with medicine regulators’ fears that the accentuated adenovirus it contains has gone rogue?

Both the J&J and AstraZeneca Covid-19 injections are viral vector gene therapies. Both allegedly work by doing the following –

First, the DNA instructions to create the SARS-CoV-2 antigen (spike protein; not the full SARS-CoV-2 virus) are inserted into a modified virus (adenovirus).

Then after the “vaccine” is injected into an individual, the viral vector delivers the spike protein DNA instructions to cells resulting in large amounts of the spike protein antigen.

The resulting immune response to SARS-CoV-2 allegedly helps mimic what occurs during natural infection and results in a cellular immune response.

The current theory, however, is that the adenovirus now circulating has been born from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Which would suggest the FDA have suspended the Janssen jab to prevent it from doing exactly the same thing. But that doesn’t mean the J&J jab isn’t the actual culprit.

The UK was the first country to roll-out the adenovirus based AstraZeneca Covid-19 injection en masse in January 2021, and it was also the first country to report an unusual increase in hepatitis cases of unknown cause among children. Just a coincidence?

The theory behind the AstraZeneca virus going rogue is that the virus contained in the vaccine combines with the E1 gene from another circulating adenovirus, of which there are many. The result is a replicating ChAdOx1 virus. (A wealth of scientific information and reasoning on the theory can be found here. Source)

Because most people have been exposed to Adenoviruses throughout their lives they will be immune. But young children who have been forced to stay at home for the past two years are now being hit with a dangerous adenovirus on first exposure.

But don’t take our word for it, take the word of this scientific study instead –

Source

And this study found in the British Medical Journal –

Source

Is it just a coincidence that –

• a wealth of scientific information supports the fact that it is perfectly possible for adenovirus vectors to go rogue,
• the leading theory on a sudden rise in deadly hepatitis cases among children is that it is due to an adenovirus,
• both the AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines contain adenovirus vectors,
• and the FDA have suddenly announced the J&J jab should only be used when no other option is available?

Or have Medicine Regulators finally realised the damage they have caused by granting emergency use authorisation for experimental gene therapies to be administered to a huge chunk of the world’s population?

If it is the Covid-19 injections then we’re sure we will never officially know.

If you want to attempt to fit the pieces of the puzzle together yourself then you can read more here –

• https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/acute-hepatitis-technical-briefing
• https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1073704/acute-hepatitis-technical-briefing-2.pdf
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359610121000265
• https://gut.bmj.com/content/48/5/733
• https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(02)90589-7
• https://www.janssenmd.com/janssen-covid19-vaccine/pharmacology/mechanism-of-action/mechanism-of-action-of-the-janssen-covid19-vaccine
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/UAW96097.1

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The Pentagon denied Thursday that the U.S. has shared intelligence with Ukraine with the intent of targeting and killing senior Russian military leaders, stressing that the goal of U.S. intelligence is simply to allow Ukrainian forces to defend themselves against Russia’s invasion.

Why it matters: The New York Times published a report Wednesday suggesting that U.S. intelligence-sharing has played a key role in the death of “many” of the Russian generals who have been killed in action during the war.

• Ukrainian officials claim their forces have killed at least 12 Russian generals — an attrition rate that has exceeded the pace of senior commanders killed during Russian or Soviet campaigns in Syria, Chechnya and Afghanistan.
• The U.S. sharing specific, real-time targeting intelligence with Ukraine would be seen as highly provocative in Moscow and have “few precedents,” according to the Times.

What they’re saying: “The United States provides battlefield intelligence to help Ukrainians defend their country. We do not provide intelligence on the location of senior military leaders on the battlefield or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said at a briefing Thursday.

• “Ukrainians have, quite frankly, a lot more information than we do. This is their country, their territory, and they have capable intelligence collection abilities of their own,” he continued.
• “Ukraine combines information that we and other partners provide with the intelligence that they themselves are gathering on the battlefield, and then they make their own decisions and they take their own actions.”

Kirby refused to comment on the specifics of the New York Times report, which said U.S. intelligence has had a “decisive effect on the battlefield” by “confirming targets identified by the Ukrainian military and pointing it to new targets.”

The big picture: The Biden administration’s fears of provoking Vladimir Putin with overt military assistance to Ukraine have largely dissipated as the scale of Russian atrocities has become clear.

• The U.S. and its European allies are now providing Ukraine with artillery, armored vehicles and other heavy weaponry deemed necessary for the battle in the eastern Donbas region.
• It’s a stark departure from the early weeks of the war, when the Pentagon was hesitant to even discuss sending Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that are now viewed as a staple of Western military aid.
• The Pentagon has also resumed training Ukrainian forces in Germany and at other sites in Europe, taking credit for some of their battlefield success even as the U.S. has gone to great lengths to avoid being directly sucked into the conflict.

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Brussels’s proposal for a gradual EU-wide ban on Russian oil imports is sowing division, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán comparing the embargo to an economic “atomic bomb”. 

The main point of contention is the ambitious timeline envisioned by the European Commission: a phase-out of all Russian crude in six months and all refined oil products by the end of the year.

During consultations, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have emerged as the most sceptical countries.

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A US Senate committee has passed a bill that could open the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and its partners, including Russia, to lawsuits for collusion on the rise in crude oil prices.

The No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels (Nopec) bill, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley and Democrat Amy Klobuchar, passed 17-4 in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

However, it will need to pass the full Senate and House and be signed by President Joe Biden in order to become law.

The bill would change US antitrust law to revoke the sovereign immunity that has long protected Opec and its national oil companies from lawsuits.

By doing so, the US attorney general would then have the power to sue Opec, its members such as Saudi Arabia or its partners like Russia, in federal court on charges including market manipulation.

“I believe that free and competitive markets are better for consumers than markets controlled by a cartel of state-owned oil companies … competition is the very basis of our economic system,” Klobuchar said in a statement.

White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said the administration has concerns about the “potential implications and unintended consequences” of the legislation and that the White House is still studying the bill.

Versions of the legislation have failed in Congress for more than two decades. But lawmakers are increasingly worried about rising inflation driven in part by prices for US gasoline, which briefly hit a record above $4.30 a gallon this spring.

Saudi Arabia and other Opec members have rebuffed requests by the US to boost oil production beyond gradual amounts, even as global oil consumption recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic and Russian supply falls after its invasion of Ukraine.

Opec+, a partnership between Opec members and other oil producers including Russia, agreed on Thursday to stick to its existing plans to reverse the curbs with modest increases for another month.

Calls to rebalance US-Saudi ties

The Nopec bill is intended to protect US consumers and businesses from engineered spikes in the cost of gasoline, but some lawmakers and oil lobbyists warn that it could have dangerous unintended consequences.

In 2019, Saudi Arabia threatened to sell oil in currencies other than the dollar if Washington passed Nopec, a move that could undermine the dollar’s status as the world’s main reserve currency, reduce Washington’s clout in global trade and weaken its ability to enforce sanctions on nation-states.

The kingdom made similar news earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal reported that it was considering using the Chinese Yuan in oil deals with Beijing.

Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, the top US oil-producing state, opposed the bill, saying it could prompt Opec to restrict shipments to the country.

“If we really want to deal with price at the pump, we ought to produce more oil and gas here in America,” Cornyn said.

The bill is also opposed by the American Petroleum Institute, a top oil and gas lobbying group. In a letter to the committee’s leaders, API said Nopec “creates significant potential detrimental exposure to US diplomatic, military and business interests while likely having limited impact on the market concerns driving the legislation”.

The bill, meanwhile, comes amid a growing attitude in Congress to punish Saudi Arabia for its refusal to cooperate with the US on a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as a number of human rights issues.

Last month, a group of leading lawmakers sent a letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, calling on the administration to rebalance ties with Riyadh, citing Saudi Arabia’s refusal to boost oil production in recent months.

Tom Malinowski, a Democratic congressman, tweeted on Thursday:

“The main reason gas prices are sky high is that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are deliberately helping Russia, and undercutting our sanctions, by refusing to increase oil production”.

The congressman also recently sent a letter to the administration seeking to rein in any countries receiving American weapons while also being involved in the harassment of dissidents living in the US.

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Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told the Times May 3 that he would expel any Labour MP who did not declare “unshakeable support for Nato”.

Starmer, who has repeatedly declared Labour to be the “party of NATO” during its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, said he was “very clear” that support for the military alliance was at “the root of the Labour Party”.

Times Radio had reported earlier that Starmer’s allies wanted him to force hard-left MPs out of his party before the next general election. When asked by the Times about the report, Starmer replied,

“We’ve been very clear about the expectations of our members of parliament when it comes to issues like antisemitism, when it comes to the false equivalence that some argue between Russian aggression and the acts of Nato. I’ve been very, very clear about that. And I’ll be very clear and firm on those issues.”

Asked to clarify whether he would act against his own MPs, Starmer replied,

“Yes, these are principles that are absolutely the root of the Labour Party, the centre of the Labour Party…”

Starmer has indeed made clear not only that the de facto expulsion of former leader Jeremy Corbyn will be made permanent, but that it will be followed by similar treatment meted out to any of Corbyn’s allies not prepared to issue a grovelling pledge to support NATO’s war.

The only thing possibly preventing expulsions, given that hundreds of thousands of the socialist-minded members who joined Labour under Corbyn have since left the party, is the utter lack of political principle that characterises the Corbynite left.

On February 24, 11 Labour MPs, the rump of the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), collapsed in the face of a threat from Starmer to withdraw the party whip if they did not remove their signature from a Stop the War Coalition (STWC) statement calling for a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion and a negotiated settlement with Russia. All did so within an hour, including Corbyn’s closest allies, former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, former Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, and SCG leader Richard Burgon.

Another 11 SCG MPs had on January 21 announced a new group that would try to “pressure” and “steer” Starmer “rather than resist or remove him.”

One day later, February 25, Starmer suspended the Twitter account of the party’s youth wing, Young Labour, and scrapped its annual conference for criticising Labour for “backing Nato aggression.”

McDonnell made his amends by addressing a pro-Ukraine demonstration in London alongside the warmonger Paul Mason, while Abbott said in a TV interview, “Nobody wants to attack NATO… I am a loyal supporter of Keir Starmer”. Both subsequently withdrew from the platform of an STWC rally.

The only MPs now backing the eviscerated remnants of the STWC are Corbyn and Claudia Webbe, both having already had the Labour whip removed. Despite this, demands persist for McDonnell and Abbott to be removed along with “as many Corbynites as possible,” according to Blairite sources.

The Times cites one source saying, “Keir should have booted them out then… Forcing them to back down wasn’t enough. He still has to share a party with them.” Another said Starmer would not necessarily need a pretext like the STWC letter, because “when you control the NEC [national executive committee] there is always going to be a way.”

The collective spinelessness of the Corbynite “left” is nauseating. Both McDonnell and Abbott will be septuagenarians by the time of the next general election, with fat pensions awaiting them on retirement. But they would rather end their days in the Labour Party covered head to foot in political filth than take a stand on the supposed principles on which they have built their reputations over decades.

However, this is not a betrayal of “JC” by his disciples, as some of Corbyn’s despairing supporters maintain. He leads these political scoundrels and set the tone for their response to the Blairite threats with his own constant retreats during his five-year term as party leader and following his replacement by Starmer. Not for nothing did McDonnell most recently reply to Starmer’s attacks on Corbyn for criticising NATO by tweeting, “A commitment to Nato has been Labour policy democratically determined by party conference and accepted by every Labour leader for inclusion in every Labour manifesto, including by Jeremy Corbyn, since NATO’s inception.”

It was already obvious that there was no pathway back to being a Labour MP for Corbyn. On October 29, 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued a report that was the product of the witch-hunt organised by the Blairite and Zionist groups, denouncing critics of Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians as anti-Semites. Corbyn never opposed the expulsion of even his closest supporters on such trumped-up charges. But six months after being replaced by Starmer, he commented that “the scale of the problem” of anti-Semitism within Labour was “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”.

Corbyn was suspended from the party that same day. He was readmitted by the NEC on November 17, but Starmer refused to restore the party whip—forcing him to sit as an Independent in parliament. Corbyn was told he must “unequivocally, unambiguously and without reservation apologise” for his comments before readmission would be considered. Last November Starmer said Corbyn might not be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in Islington North in the next general election unless he did so.

For months Corbyn’s only political response to his expulsion was to set up the Peace and Justice Project. This one-man vanity operation gives him a platform from which to pontificate on the official “left” and “peace movements” around the world, while he speaks “in a personal capacity” at innumerable small demonstrations and small events mounted by Constituency Labour Party branches and local trade unions—carefully avoiding any conflict with the party that has driven him into this political wilderness.

On April 20, Corbyn gave two media interviews that underscored the miserable character of his opposition to Starmer et al. On Times Radio, Corbyn asked rhetorically, “Do military alliances bring peace?” He added, “I would want to see a world where we start to ultimately disband all military alliances.”

After issuing these political bromides about a future without militarism, Corbyn stressed, “I don’t blame NATO for the fact that Russia has invaded Ukraine” and reassured his right-wing audience that if he was Labour leader, he would be “supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself.”

An interview with the Standard that same day was an extended appeal for Starmer to let bygones be bygones. Stressing that he wanted to stand for Labour at the next general election, when he will be 73, Corbyn noted that he had not spoken to Starmer for two years. If he had the chance to do so, “I’d say I think Keir we need to move on… and I should be reinstated into the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party]…” It was “irritating the way I’ve been treated. And I have not indulged in any kind of personal attacks of vendettas and don’t intend to as far as I’m concerned…”

He told his Islington North London constituents, “I’m proud to be your member of parliament, and I hope to be your member of Parliament in the future as a Labour MP.”

Asked if he would stand as an independent if he is not readmitted to the Labour Party, he replied evasively, “let’s deal with that bridge when we get to it”.

Four days later, Starmer predictably reiterated to the BBC’s Sunday Morning, “It is very difficult to see how” Corbyn could ever be readmitted to the party following his mealy-mouthed comments on NATO.

Corbyn’s prostration before the right-wing continues to exact a toll on his political allies. Even as the vicious offensive against even the most partial expression of popular anti-war sentiment escalates, the anti-Semitism witch-hunt rumbles on. With both Corbyn and McDonnell scheduled to speak at the Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) Marxism 2022 event, the Jewish Chronicle denounced him for mounting a platform with “anti-Semites”. After slandering well-known rapper Lowkey and Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama of Sheffield Hallam University, the newspaper reported that the Union of Jewish Students was demanding that Queen Mary University in London cancel the upcoming event.

However, the conditions have emerged for overcoming the damage Corbyn did to the political development of the working class.

Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015, and defeated a move by the Blairites to unseat him in 2016, because broad layers of workers and young people were looking for a way to oppose the destruction of their living standards and democratic rights—and because of Corbyn’s long record of opposing war and imperialist oppression. His downfall was not because he held these views, as the big-business media asserts, but because he betrayed those who believed he would fight for them.

Today there is nothing left of the claim, trumpeted by pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Party and SWP, that Corbyn was leading a socialist transformation of the Labour Party. Labour’s policies are further to the right today than when Corbyn first became leader. Most fundamentally, Starmer is competing with the Conservative government to be the premier representative of imperialist warmongering against Russia.

As for Corbyn himself, he has rejected all pathetic appeals for him to head up a new “left” party. Instead he has made it known that his “pacifism” does not extend to opposing NATO’s plans to wage a war for regime change in Russia, even when this raises the threat of nuclear annihilation. His express aim is for Starmer to grant him an audience where they can discuss his reintegration into a party of austerity, militarism and war, led by McCarthyite witch-hunters.

These spent forces are in no position to capture a working class radicalised by price rises, pushing for a renewed wave of industrial action and repelled by the insane war propaganda of all the official parties and the media. That movement will find a political way forward in the Socialist Equality Party’s record of opposition to Corbynism over the past seven years. Defending the working class at home and opposing the drive to war means joining the SEP.

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***

We have a serious debt problem, but solutions such as the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” are not the future we want. It’s time to think outside the box for some new solutions.

In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors’ prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land. This could be done because the king was the representative of the gods who were said to own the land, and thus was the creditor to whom the debts were owed. The same policy was advocated in the Book of Leviticus, though it is unclear to what extent this biblical Jubilee was implemented.

That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can’t be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out. But we do have a serious debt problem, and it is largely structural. Governments have delegated the power to create money to private banks, which create most of the circulating money supply as debt at interest. They create the principal but not the interest, so more money must be repaid than was created in the original loan. Debt thus grows faster than the money supply, as seen in the chart from WorkableEconomics.com below. Debt grows until it cannot be repaid, when the board is cleared by some form of market crash such as the 2008 financial crisis, typically widening the wealth gap on the way down.

Today the remedy for an unsustainable debt buildup is called a “reset.” Far short of a Jubilee, such resets are necessary every few decades. Acceptance of a currency is based on trust, and a “currency reset” changes the backing of the currency to restore that trust when it has failed. In the 20th century, major currency resets occurred in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was instituted following a major banking crisis; in 1933 following another catastrophic banking crisis, when the dollar was taken off the gold standard domestically and deposits were federally insured; in 1944, at the Bretton Woods Conference concluding World War II, when the US dollar backed by gold was made the reserve currency for global trade; and in 1974, when the US finalized a deal with the OPEC countries to sell their oil only in US dollars, effectively “backing” the dollar with oil after Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard internationally in 1971. Central bank manipulations are also a form of reset, intended to restore faith in the currency or the banks; e.g. when Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised the interest rate on fed funds to 20% in 1980, and when the Fed bailed out Wall Street banks following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09 with quantitative easing.

But quantitative easing did not fix the debt buildup, which today has again reached unsustainable levels. According to Truth in Accounting, as of March 2022 the US federal government has a cumulative debt burden of $133.38 trillion, including unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises; and some countries are in even worse shape. Former investment banker Leslie Manookian stated in grand jury testimony that European countries have 44 trillion euros in unfunded pensions, and there is no source of funds to meet these obligations. There is virtually no European bond market, due to negative interest rates. The only alternative is to default. The concern is that when people realize that the social security and pension systems they have paid into for their entire working lives are bankrupt, they will take to the streets and chaos will reign.

Hence the need for another reset. Private creditors, however, want a reset that leaves them in control. Today a new sort of reset is setting off alarm bells, one that goes far beyond restoring the stability of the currency. The “Great Reset” being driven forward by the World Economic Forum would lock the world into a form of technocratic feudalism.

The WEF is that elite group of businessmen, politicians and academics that meets in Davos, Switzerland, every January. The Great Reset was the theme of its (virtual) 2021 Summit, based on a July 2020 book titled Covid-19: The Great Reset co-authored by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Some of the WEF’s proposals are summarized in a video on its website titled “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” The first prediction is, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. Whatever you want you’ll rent. And it will be delivered by drone.”

Schwab’s proposal would reset more than the currency. At a virtual meeting in June 2020, he said, “We need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.” But as talk show host Kim Iversen observes, the proposed solution is more capitalism by a new name: “stakeholder capitalism,” where ownership will be with corporate stakeholders. You will have an account with the central bank and a mandatory federal digital ID. You will receive a welfare payment in the form of a marginally adequate basic income – so long as you maintain a proper social credit score. Your central bank digital currency will be “programmable” – rationed, controlled, and canceled if you get out of line or disagree with the official narrative. You will be kept happy with computer games and drugs.

According to WEF speaker and author Prof. Yuval Harari, “Covid is critical, because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance…. We need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under the skin.”

Harari is aware of the dangers of digital dictatorships. He said at a pre-Covid Davos presentation in January 2020:

In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and of digital dictatorships.…

We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. … [I]f this power falls into the hands of a twenty-first century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history…

In the not-so-distant future, … algorithms might tell us where to work and who to marry, and also decide whether to hire us for a job, whether to give us a loan, and whether the central bank should raise the interest rate….

What will be the meaning of human life, when most decisions are taken by algorithms?

Clearing the Chessboard by Controlled Economic Demolition?

Before the game can be reset, the board must be cleared. What would make the population accept giving up their private property, surviving on a marginal basic income, and submitting to constant surveillance, internal and external?

The global pandemic and the lockdowns that followed have gone far toward achieving that result. Lockdowns not only eliminated smaller business competitors but drove up the debts of small countries, forcing them to increase their loans from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF is notorious for onerous loan terms, including imposing strict austerity measures, relinquishing control of natural resources, and marching in “lockstep” with pandemic restrictions.

In a June 2020 article on the blog of the IMF titled “From Great Lockdown To Great Transformation,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called the global policy response to the 2020 crisis the “Great Lockdown.” She is quoted as saying to the US Chamber of Commerce:

We call the current period ‘the Great Lockdown’ because we are fighting a health emergency by bringing production and consumption to a standstill….

In March, around one hundred billion dollars left emerging markets and developing countries—three times more than during the global financial crisis.

But in April and May—thanks to this massive injection of liquidity in advanced economies—some emerging markets were able to go back to the markets and issue bonds with competitive yields, with total issuance of around seventy-seven billion dollars. This is almost three and a half times as much as in the same two months last year. [Italics added.]

In other words, by bringing production and consumption to a standstill, the Great Lockdown had already, by June 2020, managed to strip emerging markets of $100 billion in additional assets and to lock them into $77 billion in new debt.

That helps explain why so many countries acquiesced to the Great Lockdown so quickly, even when some had only a handful of Covid-19 deaths. Lockdown was apparently a “conditionality” required for getting an IMF loan. At least that was true for Belarus, which rejected the offer. Said Belarus’ President:

We hear the demands … to model our coronavirus response on that of Italy. I do not want to see the Italian situation to be repeated in Belarus. We have our own country and our own situation. … [T]he IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune.

Unlike Belarus, most countries acquiesced, and so did households and businesses locked into the debt trap by an economy in which production and consumption were brought to a standstill. Like most emerging economies, they acquiesced to whatever terms were imposed for returning to “normal.”

The lockdowns have now been lifted in most places, but the debt trap is about to snap shut. A moratorium on U.S. rents and student debt is due to come to an end, and cumulative arrears may need to be paid. Debtors unable to meet that burden could be out in the street, joining the “useless class” described by Prof. Harari. They may be forced into accepting the technocratic feudalism of the WEF Great Reset, but is not the sort of future most people want. However, what are the alternatives?

A Eurasian Jubilee?

For sovereign debt (the debt of national governments), a form of jubilee is envisioned by Sergei Glazyev in conjunction with the alternative monetary system currently being designed by the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), detailed in my last article here. Glazyev is the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU. An article in The Cradle titled “Russia’s Sergey Glazyev Introduces the New Global Financial System” is headlined:

The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.

The article quotes Glazyev as stating:

Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of dollars. Since the US, Britain, EU, and Japan refused to honor their obligations and confiscated wealth of other nations which was held in their currencies, why should other countries be obliged to pay them back and to service their loans?

In any case, participation in the new economic system will not be constrained by the obligations in the old one. Countries of the Global South can be full participants of the new system regardless of their accumulated debts in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption. Further, should these countries reserve a portion of their natural resources for the backing of the new economic system, their respective weight in the currency basket of the new monetary unit would increase accordingly, providing that nation with larger currency reserves and credit capacity. In addition, bilateral swap lines with trading partner countries would provide them with adequate financing for co-investments and trade financing.

That may largely eliminate the sovereign debt overhang in the EAEU member countries, but what of the United States and other Western countries that are unlikely to join? Some innovative possibilities will be covered in Part 2 of this piece. Stay tuned.

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This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. 

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

A missing piece of the great lockdown plot was enforcement. How precisely were authorities going to know the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of people without a veritable army of snoops? 

Yes, there were some arrests and media reports and some private drones flying here and there to snap pictures of house parties to send to local papers for publication. Public health authorities were flooded with calls from rats coast to coast.

But in general, the plan to muscle the entire population in the name of virus mitigation had vast holes.

For example, for many months, there were regulations in place that forced people to quarantine (yes, even if you were perfectly well) when crossing state lines. Compliance was impossible for anyone who lived in one state and worked in another. But how was this to be enforced? And how precisely were authorities to know for certain whether you found a side entrance to a church and dared to show up with a few others to pray?

A clue came pretty early on in lockdowns. When you would drive from one border to another, your phone would light up with a warning that you had to quarantine for two weeks before you went back, and then one would receive another note coming back. Of course this was impossible but it became darn scary there for a while. Who precisely was monitoring this?

Our phones also installed for us, even if we didn’t want it, track-and-trace software that claimed to alert you if you came near a covid-positive person as if this virus was Ebola and infected people were milling around everywhere. I have heard no reports on how this software worked or if it did at all.

Still it’s on my phone now – labeled “exposure notifications” – but obviously shut off. There is no way to remove that application so far as I can tell.

Wikipedia explains:

Devices record received messages, retaining them locally for 14 days. If a user tests positive for infection, the last 14 days of their daily encryption keys can be uploaded to a central server, where it is then broadcast to all devices on the network. The method through which daily encryption keys are transmitted to the central server and broadcast is defined by individual app developers. The Google-developed reference implementation calls for a health official to request a one-time verification code (VC) from a verification server, which the user enters into the encounter logging app. This causes the app to obtain a cryptographically signed certificate, which is used to authorize the submission of keys to the central reporting server

So, basically a digital leper bell. Just what everyone wants.

I had friends who flew into airports and were greeted by National Guard troops demanding information on where people were staying plus a cell phone number so that authorities could check to make sure that you were staying put and not going places. Government set up robocalls with scary voices – “This is the sheriff’s office” – that would ring up visitors and scare the heck out of them.

Yes, you could lie, but what if you were caught? Were there criminal penalties? And what was the likelihood that you would get caught? No one knew for sure. Even the legal basis for all of this was extremely sketchy: it was all based on administrative dictate imposed under the cover of emergency.

As it turns out, the CDC later used your tax dollars to scarf up location data from shady sources during the depth of lockdowns to find out whether and to what extent people were complying with unconstitutional lockdowns, curfews, and capacity restrictions. We only know this thanks to a FOIA request from Motherboard, which revealed everyone’s worst-possible fear. According to Vice,

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.

In documents, the CDC claimed that it needed the data to give the agency “deeper insights into the pandemic as it pertains to human behavior.”

The data itself was scrapped by Safegraph from cell phone location trackers. Not everyone has that feature turned on but tens of millions do. The CDC shelled out half a million dollars to get what they had, all of it gathered without any concern for ethics or privacy.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people. The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker.

What this means is that the CDC was essentially monitoring if people went to get an illegal haircut, attended an illicit house party, or left the house after a 10 pm curfew. Or went to church. Or shopped at a nonessential store. It seems strange that we would have any such laws in the US regardless, and it is nothing short of an outrage that a government bureaucracy would pay a private-sector company for access to that in order to monitor your compliance.

And we can see here how this works. You get a phone and it includes apps that want to know your location, often for good reasons. You need a GPS. You want to see restaurants around you. You want to know the weather. People who push ads want them to be specific to where you are. So you leave location services on even when you could otherwise turn them off. This allows app companies to scrape vast information from your phone, mostly anonymous but not quite entirely.

This data then becomes available on the open market. The CDC becomes a customer, and why should any company hungry for cash refuse such an offer? Of course they should but too often revenue needs trump ethics in this world. The check arrives and out goes the data. In this way, the government has the means to spy on you nearly directly. And it does this without any legislative or judicial authorization.

This raises profound questions about deploying track-and-trace methods for a virus that is as prevalent as covid. It never held out any chance of controlling the spread, no matter what they say. It does introduce profound dangers of government surveillance of the citizenry to police people for compliance, which can very quickly become a means of political enforcement.

The damage is done already but it is wise to be aware now of what is possible. Much of the infrastructure was set up over these two years and it all still survives. There is every intention in place to deploy it all again if covid mutates again or if some other pathogen comes along. Lockdowns seem to be in disrepute among the public but the ruling class is still in love with them.

What can we learn from this fiasco?

1. Congress and the judiciary are not in control of government. Especially once there is an “emergency,” the administrative state believes itself to be an autonomous force, doing what it wants regardless of the constitution. There is almost no oversight.

2. Many private companies are no longer private at all. A main customer is the government and they adjust their operations to make their products marketable to them. They collect your data and sell it to the state. There is rarely anything in the terms of use of most apps that prevent that.

3. No matter how paranoid you are now, it is probably not enough. Pandemic control was a pretext for doing to the citizens what never would have been tolerated in normal times. The lockdowns are over but the aspiration to track and control us completely has just begun. The years 2020 and 2021 were just trial runs for what they want to be permanent.

4. There are things you can do to protect yourself but it requires volition and focus. Indiscriminate use of mainstream applications is dangerous to both privacy and liberty.

5. What I’ve reported above already happened a year ago, so it is right to ask the question: what are they doing now? They got away with it then, a fact which only encourages more egregious behavior.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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***

As the war in Ukraine approaches its tenth week, the steady flow of ominous headlines has grown to a floodwater deluge. Dissenting observers are made to watch, seemingly helpless, as the broader levy of sanity threatens to break, unleashing a torrent of death and destruction across Eastern Europe, and likely, the globe.

Leading the bad news cycle, on Sunday, May 1, Congressman Adam Kinzinger proposed a new Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation, if passed, would allow President Joe Biden to deploy American forces to restore “the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event that Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. When Kinzinger announced the legislation on Meet the Press, he stated that he “doesn’t think we need to be using force in Ukraine right now.” However, as Antiwar.com opinion editor Kyle Anzalone ominously noted, in 2002, then-Senator Joe Biden similarly downplayed the danger of war before voting for the 2002 AUMF—under which President George W. Bush later prosecuted the invasion of Iraq.

If bad Ukraine policy amounts to a downpour, Rep. Adam Kinzinger has been performing a rain dance for years now.

Kinzinger was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. In March 2014, while sitting on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Kinzinger pledged that the House would back the Obama administration’s efforts in Ukraine. Further, he stated the House would consider legislation calling for increased aid to Ukraine, up to and including adding Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Kinzinger’s pledge came soon after the conclusion of the 2014 Euromaidan Coup, where the US State Department played an instrumental role in ousting then-president Viktor Yanukovych. By April, 2014, Ukraine would launch a civil war against pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. In 2016 Kinzinger co-authored H.R. 5094, the Stability and Democracy for Ukraine Act (the STAND for Ukraine Act). On September 21, 2016, the STAND for Ukraine Act passed the U.S. House unanimously by voice vote. It was engineered to “contain, reverse, and deter Russian aggression in Ukraine, to support the sovereignty of Crimea against Russia’s illegal annexation, and to ultimately assist Ukraine’s democratic transition.” The STAND for Ukraine Act cemented sanctions as a permanent fixture of American policy by making it “effectively…impossible to remove certain anti-Russian sanctions unless Crimea is returned to Ukraine.”

Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kinzinger has repeatedly pushed to escalate a situation that his policy helped to create. On March 3, 2022, he publicly called for a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine to “prevent Russian air attacks.” If enforced, a no-fly zone in Ukraine would see U.S. forces shooting down Russian planes and even attacking targets in Russia.

Kinzinger’s corresponding press release cited his experience piloting an intelligence aircraft in Iraq as being some sort of qualification for such a daft and dangerous proposition:

Representative Kinzinger understands what being a hero means…Maybe Congress and President Joe Biden should listen to him. Kinzinger thinks that war with Russia might be inevitable. We would have the advantage now when few people would die. It looks as if we will find out.

Kinzinger likely wouldn’t state his true credentials for pushing such maniacal Ukrainian policy.

Indeed, through his years advocating—near universally—for an aggressive U.S. foreign policy, Kinzinger has been immersed in the neoconservative think-tank circuit.

On March 24, 2014, Kinzinger joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for a panel discussion involving arch-neoconservative Fredrick Kagan. During the panel, Kinzinger “underlined the…potential dangers associated with leaving [Afghanistan]” in the wake of the Karzai government.

For all the seven years of U.S. support for the Kabul government between Kinzinger’s 2014 panel appearance at AEI and his April 15, 2021 reprisal, the withdrawal had the same predictable result. In a matter of weeks, the Afghan National Army washed away like water breaking upon stone. The Kabul government disintegrated with it.

In 2022, nearly nine months after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the “potential dangers” Kinzinger foretold have failed to materialize—at least for the American public. Instead, Afghanistan has vanished from the U.S. news cycle. The AEI, who so loudly virtue-signaled for the rights of Afghanistan women, is now silent about the consequences of the twenty-year U.S. war there—except to the extent that it could be used to justify even further intervention. Beyond AEI, on May 26, 2016, Kinzinger attended an event hosted by the ultra-neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative and The Hudson Institute. He stated:

Our involvement in NATO is not because we just want to defend Europe out of the goodness of our heart, but because without NATO we never would have been able to drop the Iron Curtain and bring freedom to millions of people and make us safer…Are there challenges? Of course. But that needs to be done in the context of “how do we get NATO reengaged” versus “let’s just get out of the rest of the world. That’s a narcissistic foreign policy.”

The Foreign Policy Initiative was founded in 2009 by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and Brooking’s Institute Fellow Robert Kagan. In the 1990s, Kristol and Kagan founded the now-infamous Project for a New American Century are largely credited as being architects of the Global War on Terrorism.

Robert Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, served as assistant secretary of state during the 2014 Euromaidan Coup in Ukraine. In a leaked phone call with the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland lamented the European Union’s decision to limit its involvement. She then stated “Yats is the guy, he’s got the economic experience,” referring to opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The first prime minister of the post-Madian interim government was none other than Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The Hudson Institute is:

part of a closely-knit group of neoconservative institutes that champion aggressive, Israel-centric U.S. foreign policies. Founded in 1961 by several dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warriors, including Herman Kahn–a one-time RAND nuclear war theorist notorious for his efforts to develop “winnable” nuclear war strategies [emphasis added]. Kinzinger has also spoken at the Atlantic Council, a think tank that has long pushed increasing confrontation between the US and Russia over Ukraine. It is funded, to the tune of millions, by weapons manufacturers, the UAE, the Rockefeller Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, JP Morgan–Chase, and Palantir.

While it is unclear exactly how much influence the above-named think tanks have had on Kinzinger’s policy positions, it is clear that Kinzinger has played a starring role in escalating diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

Just as in the Global War on Terror, this time with Kinzinger as their thrall, the same ghouls slither forth from their crypts for another orgy of death.

Is our best hope another twenty-year, society-eating slog? Or will the NeoConservatives’ Ukrainian denouement detonate a flash ending?

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Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at [email protected]

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***

The range of ideological opposition to U.S. foreign policy is the most diverse since before World War II. Liberal and progressive critics, long the primary bastion of dissent, are once again making their presence known after a lapse during the Obama administration. And, on the right, fissures over U.S. foreign policy, which erupted in 2016, are here to stay. These disparate dissidents are attempting to parlay and turn their shared opposition into action.

Many within the commentariat are confused by this perplexing alliance. Some have slandered this relationship as a tenuous “Red-Brown coalition.” Such characterization is an unfortunate (if not an intentional) mischaracterization of this budding partnership. Left-wing opponents to the foreign policy status quo are not communists. Nor are the ranks of the right overpopulated with Nazis. Instead, the two wings of dissent are the inheritors of distinct but often overlapping strains of foreign policy opposition. Both traditions are firmly rooted in the American experience; neither are alien imports of a totalitarian ideology.

The reemergence of both strains signals a return to an earlier norm where opposition to U.S. foreign policy was not a definitive litmus test for a party or ideological affiliation. Understanding this history and how they came to be consumed by partisan politics should reassure those who desire a change in how the U.S. government conducts itself abroad.

The early interwar period constituted the high point of American non-interventionism in the 21st century. The horrors of the Great War and transpartisan suspicion of centralized power created a broad range of antiwar sentiments. In both Congress and the broader political culture, Americans across the political spectrum opposed American involvement in foreign wars, particularly at the prospect of fighting in Europe. Famous works like War is a Racket by retired major general Smedley Butler challenged the naive assumptions of American foreign policy and charged that economic and government interests had become intertwined. Butler’s treatise was preceded by another expose of the corporatist roots of modern war, Merchants of Death. Authored by H.C. Englebrecht and Frank Hanighen, Merchants of Death served as a forerunner of the “military-industrial complex” concept. They helped to spawn a congressional committee to investigate the origins of U.S. entry into the Great War. The differing ideologies of its authors served as proof of broad antiwar sentiment at the time. Englebrecht was a frequent columnist for The World Tomorrow, a leading magazine for Christian socialists; Hanighen would join the America First Committee (AFC) and co-found Human Events, a leading conservative magazine founded to advocate for non-interventionism.

Despite its reputation as an exclusively conservative organization, the AFC had former progressives among its members, like NAACP co-founder and former editor of the Nation magazine Oswald Garrison Villard and dissident liberals such as journalist John T. Flynn. The AFC also found much of its inspiration from progressive historian Charles Beard. While not officially a member of the AFC, Beard’s views paralleled their efforts. The AFC listed his book, A Foreign Policy for America, Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels on their book list, along with other antiwar books like Merchants of Death. Conversely, The Progressive, a left-wing antiwar magazine, ran articles from conservative non-interventionists like Frank Hanighen.

In this fluid ideological environment, boilerplate left-wing critiques of capitalism merged with right-wing criticisms of state power to form a potent opposition to future American involvement in overseas wars.

Despite this early consensus, the Overton Window on American involvement in overseas wars narrowed as Hitler’s armies marched across Europe. Nazi Germany’s conquest of France and the Low Countries and assault on the British Isles turned most liberals towards intervention. Similarly, the German invasion of the Soviet Union caused American communists, who had hitherto been counted among the ranks of the non-interventionists, to flip on a dime and join the cause of the Allies. In this collapsed ideological environment, only predominantly right-wing groups like the America First Committee and progressive holdouts like Charles Beard and The Progressive remained in opposition to U.S. entry into the war during the waning months of 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused official American entry into the war and narrowed the contours of American foreign policy debate for a generation.

However, even with the narrative weight of WWII, significant dissent remained across the political spectrum in the critical years before the Cold War became a fixture of American geopolitics. Individuals and groups that opposed conscription and its more encompassing cousin, universal military training, were as ideologically diverse as the American Labor Party and the American Civil Liberties Union on one side and Old Right figures like Howard Buffett (R-NE) on the other. The edges of the political spectrum also opposed the Marshall Plan, military aid to Greece and Turkey, and other key aspects of the early Cold War.

Despite these early dalliances, right and left-wing anti-imperialists were ultimately driven apart by the double burden of defeated fascism during World War II and the escalation of the Cold War. The so-called vital centerwas able to use the legacy of right-wing extremism (fascism) and the presence of the current left-wing threat (communism) to neutralize dissent on either side of the political consensus. Similarly, many so-called “Old Right” non-interventionists were active McCarthyites who relished the opportunity to red-bait individuals who had brown-baited them in the waning days of U.S. neutrality in World War II. Dissidents did, however, remain on either side of the political divide. Examples on the left included organizations like Fair Play for Cuba Committee and National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). On the right, groups like the Citizens Foreign Aid Committee and remnants of the Old Right in Congress opposed critical facets of the Cold War consensus. However, by the mid-1950s, the social costs of association created by hegemonic anticommunism, coupled with substantive differences over nuclear policy and the response to communism in the Western hemisphere, presented an ideological divide too great to span.

The bloodshed and horror of the Vietnam War once again presented opportunities for left-right cooperation. Libertarians like Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, and former Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess attempted to make inroads with like-minded members of the New Left. To this end, Liggio and Rothbard founded Left and Right, a radical libertarian journal dedicated to, among other things, opposition to the draft, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War generally. Their enterprise, however, was not to last as the cultural and political divides between the two halves were too vast to bridge.

Similarly, in the aftermath of Vietnam, the Republican Party homogenized its foreign policy thinking as the New Right emerged as strident supporters of the Cold War consensus. The transformation of the Republican Right occurred as Vietnam War opposition became ideologically coded as a left-wing, and the vestiges of the Old Right’s non-interventionism were purged from the airwaves by the federal government. The result of this transformation ushered in the Reagan Revolution and set the ideological landscape on foreign policy which remained the norm until 20 years of war snapped the Reaganite consensus.

The current ideological landscape of dissent on U.S. foreign policy is the most diverse it has been since the mid-1930s. The cost in blood and treasure of 20 years of war has opened the minds of vast swathes of the body politic to the idea of foreign policy restraint. And, unlike previous eras, there is no overriding “threat” that should be able to wedge the left and the right apart when it comes to antiwar activism and non-interventionism. While its impact remains to be seen, President Biden’s autocracies v. democracies rhetoric lacks the narrative authority of past authoritarianisms, nor does it possess a clear ideological wedge that can be leveled against either side of the dissident camp.

Also, for the first time since before WWII, left and right-wing antiwar and non-interventionist critiques largely mirror one another. Common to the various strains of foreign policy dissidents, both left and right is a rejection of the corporatist consensus, which created and benefits from the interventionist status quo. While left critics may focus on the capital side of the consensus and the right on the state, they both observe and critique the same institutional problems. There is no ordained reason why opponents of this consensus cannot work around this relatively minor difference in their diagnosis to achieve a shared goal of greater restraint in America’s behavior in the world. If America is to stave off collapse and survive as a political entity resembling a democratic republic, then the left and right need to find ways to do so.

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Brandan P. Buck is a Ph.D. candidate in history at George Mason University where is currently researching the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century. Brandan is also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and former intelligence professional. He occasionally tweets @brandan_buck.

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***

In the last two weeks, the State Department has deployed an ambitious blackmailing persuasion program on countries located in the so-called “Western Hemisphere”, with the aim of limiting their trade and cooperation ties with Moscow and Beijing. The proximity models deployed in Latin America and the Caribbean offer a wide menu of alternatives that range from threats and sanctions to the offer of better conditions for exports, guarantees for the continuity of remittances or for the extended authorization of visas.

On April 7, the Russian Federation was suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council, as a result of the denunciations made by Ukraine regarding war crimes. The measure was carried out without surveys or investigations on the ground.

On April 21, it was decided to suspend Russia’s seat as Permanent Observer of the Organization of American States (OAS). In the first vote, Argentina endorsed the suspension, while in the second round, it abstained. While these two votes were taking place, the State Department tried – unsuccessfully – to expel Moscow from the UN Security Council.

No consensus on expelling Russia from G20 – only three countries boycotted Russian Finance Minister

Last Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen invited the G20 finance ministers to boycott the speech by Anton Siluanov, head of the Russian finance ministry. The Argentine representative at the meeting held in Washington rejected the boycott and remained on his bench, along with 16 other officials. The only three representatives that left the deliberations were Yellen herself and the ministers from Canada and the United Kingdom.

At the press conference, Yellen justified the limited success of the proposed boycott:

“To expel a country from participation really requires a very high level of agreement in many forums, including the G20, and tn that session, that level of agreement was not present.”

The offensive of sanctions, boycotts and blockades is directly related to the purpose of weakening any country that defends its sovereignty against the rules imposed by the United States, and/or that seeks to articulate alternative commercial blocs to the one configured by Atlanticism.

That was the geopolitical cause for which the ancestral conflict between the Ukrainian and Russian nationalist sectors was stimulated: it sought to prevent the constitution of a Eurasian continental geopolitical axis, capable of articulating Western Europe with Southeast Asia, placing Moscow as a nexus between both continents. Once at war – previously incited –, the highest authority of the US Treasury proposed the next steps:

“The earnings from the sale of oil and gas is an important source of income for Russia. It would be very useful to find a way to reduce that income.”

Washington’s offensive is related to the surprising failure of its sanctions: despite the fact that Russia was separated from the SWIFT system and foreign reserves were frozen, the value of the ruble stabilized at values similar to those exhibited prior to military intervention; Russian gas, oil and coal continue to be shipped to Western Europe; and the Central Bank continues to increase its international reserves. During the last week it added 1,700 million dollars, reaching the sum of 611,100 million. That is the reason why on April 13 the spokeswoman for the White House, Jen Psaki, advanced the request for the exclusion of Vladimir Putin from the next G20 summit, to be held between November 15 and 16 in Bali. To reinforce the pressure, the head of the Treasury held a meeting last Tuesday with the Finance Minister of the Republic of Indonesia, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, to whom she demanded the removal of the Russian President from the list of guests for November.

The State Department’s attack is aimed primarily at Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In mid-April, officials close to Anthony Blinken connected with the Argentine ambassador in Washington to urge him to question Putin at the UN Human Rights Commission. The decision to accompany Russia’s suspension proposal from said institution was decided by Alberto Fernández, Gustavo Béliz and Santiago Cafiero after the intimidation of extortion insinuated in relation to the continuity of the agreements with the International Monetary Fund.

Diplomatic blackmail

A similar attack has been observed during the last two weeks against the Mexican government, questioned by Washington for its neutrality regarding the Russian military intervention. The irritation of the Biden administration against Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was expressed in context to the nationalization of lithium – approved during the last week by Parliament – and the approval of the Electricity Industry Law, endorsed by the Supreme Court of Justice. A week before these rulings, the former head of Barack Obama’s State Department and current head of the White House climate agency, John Kerry, warned that the new electricity legislation would generate “deterioration of the environment”, and that its application would result in an exclusion of US companies investing in Mexico. AMLO reported – after his meeting with Kerry – that Washington intended to “impose a group to monitor us, to observe [the debates on electricity regulations]. Nobody allows that. Maybe in other times, with submissive governments, submissive, but these no longer the times of before.

The disappointment over the new electricity regulations adds to the danger – conjectured by US officials – of a potential use of Mexican lithium by Chinese companies. The nationalization of the mineral was approved last Tuesday after its international price increased by 400% in the last year. Lithium is one of the core components of the batteries needed to manufacture electric vehicles. The automotive company Tesla – owned by mega-millionaire Elon Musk – appears as one of the promoters of diplomatic and coercive pressure to guarantee said input and prevent these resources from promoting competition from cars produced by Beijing.

The production of the mineral would have to increase by 500% until 2050 to be able to face the productive reconversion that is intended for the automotive industry. The United States Geological Survey quantifies its neighbor’s holdings at 1.7 million tons – 2.3% of world reserves. The leader is Bolivia, with 21 million, and Argentina appears in second place, with 19 million. On July 24, 2020, Musk responded to an accusation about his participation in the coup against Evo Morales, promoted and endorsed by the State Department: “We will overthrow whoever we want.” According to Kenneth Smith, an embassy contractor, Washington and Ottawa could challenge the nationalization of lithium in Mexico since it violates some of the agreements reached in the T-MEC (Free Trade Agreement signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States). The underlying issue is the fear that China may access some portion of that value chain, or buy its product directly from the state.

The offense is not only against Mexico or Argentina. The White House has openly repudiated the neutrality of the BRICS (economic and political alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in relation to the military intervention in Ukraine. However, last Tuesday, Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, responded to the State Department by announcing that he would propose the Argentina to join the New Development Bank of the BRICS group. The Biden administration’s attack was also frustrated in Panama, where Antony Blinken and Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretaries of State and National Security, were present. The visit sought to promote some type of restriction on ships carrying Chinese or Russian products through the canal, but their requests were not granted. In the case of Honduras, despite the resistance of the Xiomara Castro government, the financial dependence on remittances from relatives residing in the United States imposed an alignment with the situation in Ukraine.

Venezuela is paradoxically one of the most favored. Given the sovereignty acquired by that country since 1999, Biden lacks extortion mechanisms (political, commercial or military), while imploring to dump barrels of oil on the international market to avoid the global inflationary spiral. The same was attempted with Saudi Arabia, a country that was asked to increase oil production in order to lower its price and thus undermine Moscow’s ability to obtain resources. The kingdom, however, refused to increase production.

In the case of Cuba the situation is ambivalent. For the first time since 2018, meetings between US and Cuban officials were held on April 21 to give continuity to the migratory agreements broken by the Washington authorities in the last four years. These meetings granted by the Biden administration seek to decompress the levels of confrontation with Latin America and the Caribbean – while continuing to extort money – to reprioritize what Democratic think tanks call the “Eurasian emergency”. However, the sanctions against Putin seem to make a bigger dent in Russia’s partners than in Moscow: in early February a freighter left Russia with a delivery of 19,526 tons of wheat for Havana. The Russian ambassador in Havana, Andréi Guskov, explained that the delay was due to the disconnection of several Russian banks from the SWIFT system, which prevented the freight from being paid.

Who does not seem to have this type of problems is Colombia, the only country that follows Washington’s recommendations to the letter. While Iván Duque continues without giving explanations about the daily massacres of social leaders and peasants, his authorities automatically join in all the measures and speeches requested by the White House. On Thursday, the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, María Sajárova, highlighted in a statement that

“we take note of the statements made by the President of Colombia on Russian-Colombian relations. We regret that he made them in the spirit of the negative rhetoric imposed on other countries by the United States government.”

The attack against China – promoted by Washington – includes carrots and wishes: the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean are repeatedly told that in the future, they will be able to replace segments of the supply chains, today controlled by China, heralding a new stage of relocation (nearshoring). A move that would boost the growth of the subcontinent, if they are capable of offering reduced internal markets and meager wages.

The model promoted by the Biden administration is that of a permanent fragmentation of the world economy, with two alternative circuits of trade and international cooperation based on geopolitical blocs. To achieve this goal, it must strive to sever solid ties and prevent – simultaneously – Eurasia from failing to escape imposed apartheid.

The novelist Henry Miller slipped, shortly before his death, a doubt that sharply worries international analysts: “My only doubt is to know whether the United States will end the world, or the world is going to end the United States”.

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Prof. Jorge Elbaum is Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. This article previously was published in spanish on Diario y Radio de Universidad de Chile.

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***

The U.S. Government Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) was updated today, and there have now been 1,255,355 cases of adverse reactions filed following COVID-19 vaccines since December of 2020, a 17-month time frame.

This includes 27,758 deaths and 51,600 permanent disabilities. (Source.)

By way of contrast, for the previous 30 years before the COVID vaccines were rushed to market with EUAs (emergency use authorizations), there were 936,214 cases reported with 12,964 deaths and 23,838 permanent disabilities following all FDA-approved vaccines during a 360-month period. (Source.)

That’s a 4,434.22% increase in deaths following COVID-19 vaccines, compared to deaths following ALL FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years.

And yet, the CDC continues to refer to COVID-19 vaccines as “safe and effective.”

“Effective” in what? The symptoms associated with “COVID-19” are easily treatable as many doctors have said since the beginning of the “pandemic” that they were healing COVID-19 patients with older drugs such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

The annual “flu virus” has all but disappeared since COVID-19 arrived, so this will go down as the biggest medical scam in the history of the human race.

The CDC and FDA acknowledge that there are serious side effects with these vaccines, but they call them “rare,” a term that is really not defined.

Yesterday, however, the FDA announced that they were only recommending the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine now in certain cases, due to the reports of blood clots following the vaccines.

For Immediate Release:
May 05, 2022

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has limited the authorized use of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals 18 years of age and older for whom other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate, and to individuals 18 years of age and older who elect to receive the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine because they would otherwise not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Key Points:

• After conducting an updated analysis, evaluation and investigation of reported cases, the FDA has determined that the risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a syndrome of rare and potentially life-threatening blood clots in combination with low levels of blood platelets with onset of symptoms approximately one to two weeks following administration of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, warrants limiting the authorized use of the vaccine.

• The FDA has determined that the known and potential benefits of the vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 outweigh the known and potential risks for individuals 18 years of age and older for whom other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate, and for individuals 18 years of age and older who elect to receive the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine because they would otherwise not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

• The Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine  now reflects the revision of the authorized use of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and includes a warning statement at the beginning of the fact sheet for prominence which summarizes information on the risk for TTS. Additionally, information on the revision to the authorized use of the vaccine and updated information on this risk of blood clots with low levels of blood platelets has been added to the Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers.

Full press release here.

How long before they issue similar statements for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines? Probably when a new class of COVID vaccines hit the market, so that the cash can keep flowing to the Pharmaceutical companies, who are the real entities they are protecting, and not the public.

Here are some more deaths of younger people who believed the propaganda about the COVID-19 vaccines but would probably regret their decisions, if they were still alive.

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Frank Harrington Jr: 44-year-old father of four diagnosed with aggressive post-injection brain cancer, dies three weeks later

by the COVID Blog

PULASKI, NEW YORK — A 44-year-old father, grandfather, and long-time worker for a heat transfer equipment manufacturer is dead, as post-injection cancer continues claiming lives across the globe.

Mr. Frank Harrington Jr. practically lived on social media. He posted at least 15 times per day on Facebook since April 2021. Thus it is difficult to scan his entire profile, as Facebook overloads and freezes. One thing is clear. Mr. Harrington never posted the band-aid “I’m vaccinated” photos to his profile. It’s also clear that Mr. Harrington was a mask zealot, vaxx zealot and very loyal to the overall COVID-19 faith.

The mask and COVID zealotry started very early in the so-called pandemic. Keep in mind that Mr. Harrington rarely posted original thoughts. Most of his Facebook posts were memes and images.

He mocked people who caught the flu at a Wisconsin protest against lockdowns in May 2020.

A few days later, he mockingly compared the American Revolution to wearing masks.

By August 31, 2021, Mr. Harrington mocked people who died from so-called COVID-19. It can be reasonably assumed that he had received his first two injections by this time.

Three weeks later, Mr. Harrington equated parents who opposed masks for their kids at school, to Casey Anthony.

He then referred to the non-vaccinated as “drama queens” on October 12, 2021, and compared experimental mRNA injections to the measles and tetanus shots from the 1970s.

Mr. Harrington also fallaciously equated 1950s polio vaccines to the experimental mRNA injections in late December 2021.

Liberal vaxx zealotry would not be complete without their misconceptions about Donald Trump. For whatever reason, these types want to believe so badly that Trump is an “anti-vaxxer” when in fact he is one of the top 20 vaxx zealots in the United States.

Sad irony and death

Mr. Harrington continued his attacks on the non-vaccinated after the New Year. He mockingly posted on January 11 that the non-vaccinated would rather drink urine than receive experimental mRNA injections.

Again, Mr. Harrington never posted his band-aid/needle photos. But he made clear on January 20, 2022, “I’ll get vaccinated again” in order to see Rage Against the Machine in concert.

The sad parts of this story unfolded from this point forward. Mr. Harrington apparently lost 70 pounds from January 2021 to January 2022.

He wrote on February 3 that friends and family were teasing him, and asking if he had cancer due to the major weight loss.

Almost exactly two months later, on April 2, 2022, Mr. Harrington was diagnosed with grade IV glioblastoma multiforme. It is one of the most aggressive brain cancers known to man. It is also the same brain cancer that Atlanta news anchor Jovita Moore developed less than two weeks after her second Pfizer mRNA injection in April 2021. Ms. Moore died six months later, on October 29, 2021, which is about the longest prognosis patients with this condition can expect.

Mr. Harrington had brain surgery on Friday, April 8 to remove as much of the malignant tumors as possible. Unfortunately some of the masses were inoperable.

Mr. Harrington underwent several rounds of chemotherapy and radiation to treat the inoperable tumor in the following weeks. But the cancer was far too aggressive. Mrs. Dawn Draper Harrington, Frank’s widow, announced that her husband passed away on Monday morning, April 25.

He was laid to rest on April 30.

Read the full article at the COVID Blog.

Click here to read more cases.

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One month after the commencement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, peace talks in Istanbul were already in the pipeline.

There were reports of concessions from both sides, indicating fruitful negotiations. However, it seems that the said development has been quashed by the continuous huge inflow of military aid from Western allies into the besieged nation.

Given Russia’s  objectives and Ukraine’s relentless appeal for international support to “win” the war, is peace even on the horizon? Or are we facing the imminent danger of a third world war?

Read our selection below and take the liberty of sharing and forwarding.

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A Statement on Ukraine from the Black Liberation Movement

By Black Liberation Movement Organizations, May 05, 2022

The ongoing crisis and war in Ukraine threatens to pull the world into a disastrous nuclear confrontation. Disinformation, lies, and propaganda from the US and other western media are aimed at confusing millions of people inside the US and around the world to view Russia as the aggressor, while hiding the US role in the evolution of this conflict.

Congress Must Reject the Application to Russia of the Crazy AUMF (Post 9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force)

By Daniel Larison, May 05, 2022

The US has no business joining the war in Ukraine, and Congress should refuse to approve any measure that endorses direct intervention in the conflict. Rep. Adam Kinzinger is sponsoring a new resolution authorizing the use of American military force in the war, and it is vital that Congress rejects it.

Nancy and the Nazis. Speaker of the House Arrived Unannounced in Ukraine

By Kurt Nimmo, May 05, 2022

On April 30, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, arrived unannounced in Ukraine with a small congressional delegation. Pelosi met withPresident Volodymyr Zelenskyy and received the Order of Princess Olga (or Olha) award. It is an ideal award for a woman who celebrated the gruesome murder of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi by Obama and his NATO assassins.

Are the Neocons Setting Up the World for Nuclear War?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, May 04, 2022

A false flag event is not the only avenue to nuclear war.  The expansion of NATO to Finland and Sweden is another.  Washington is not only pressuring the governments to apply for NATO membership but also is bribing Swedish and Finnish government officials to do so.  

“World War III is Closer than Ever”: US War Machine to Increase Lethal Military Aid by Sending “Suicide Drones” to Ukraine

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, May 04, 2022

Despite the US economic decline, the Biden regime is sending another $33 billion to support Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia. Biden called on the US congress with the majority who are in the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex to provide Ukraine with the necessary assistance to defeat Russia.

“Preemptive Nuclear War”: The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Threatens the Future of Humanity

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 04, 2022

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

Dangerous Ambiguity: UK Policy Towards Ukraine. “A War of Attrition with No End in Sight”

By Richard Norton-Taylor, May 02, 2022

After resisting Ukraine’s pleas for help for so long – while sending entirely wrong messages to Putin – the government now seems to do whatever Volodymyr Zelensky wants both in supplying weapons and in war aims.

Enormous U.S. Military Spending, EU Dragged into Abyss of War against Russia. Italy Out of the War!

By Manlio Dinucci, May 01, 2022

The US and NATO are thus conducting a proxy war against Russia in Europe, which began with the 2014 coup d’état and the attack on the Russian populations of Ukraine. Dramatic evidence of this is the massacre in Odessa on May 2, 2014, carried out by the neo-Nazi forces – Pravi Sektor, Azov Battalion and others – that have since assumed power in Kiev.

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First published on May 4, 2022

***

Despite the US economic decline, the Biden regime is sending another $33 billion to support Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia. Biden called on the US congress with the majority who are in the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex to provide Ukraine with the necessary assistance to defeat Russia. A CBS news report titled ‘Biden asks Congress for $33 billion in Ukraine aid to ramp up pressure on Russia’ on Biden’s recent comments on the proposed bill, he said,

“That’s why today, in order to sustain Ukraine as it continues to fight, I’m sending Congress a supplemental budget request,” he said. “It’s going to keep weapons and ammunitions flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and continue delivering economic and humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainian people.”

The majority of the $33 billion, around $20 billion of the US taxpayer-funded war will be used for “artillery, armored vehicles and anti-armor and anti-air capabilities, according to the White House.”

Washington and the Military-Industrial Complex will continue to instigate war with Russia by continuing to send the Ukrainian military and their Nazi battalions more suicide drones.  In a report by Military.com ‘The Phoenix Ghost, a Secretive ‘Suicide Drone’ Developed in California, Is Headed to Ukraine’ said that “the Ukrainian military will soon begin tracking and attacking Russian forces with a secret new “suicide drone” produced by Aevex Aerospace, a little-known Solana Beach company that has considerable experience with unmanned aerial systems.”  The Biden regime is supposed to send more than 121 of the Phoenix Ghost drones to the Ukraine:

Defense analysts say it appears the Phoenix Ghost will loiter in the sky, quietly looking for targets. Once it finds one, the drone goes into a dive and rams the object, setting off its explosive warhead. Analysts speculate that it is a comparatively small weapon that could be hard to see against the cloud cover that shrouds much of Ukraine in late April and in May

The Pentagon has been developing the Phoenix Ghost drones since last February, “We can’t talk about details,” said Brian Raduenz, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who serves as chief executive officer of Aevex Aerospace. “I have to refer you to the remarks that John Kirby made about this.”  John Kirby, a Pentagon press secretary and then a spokesman for the State Department under Barack Obama recently had a press conference briefing and mentioned the Phoenix Ghost drone and said that

it has “been in development before the invasion, clearly.  The Air Force was working this.  And in discussions with the Ukrainians, again, about their requirements, we believed that this particular system would very nicely suit their needs, particularly in eastern Ukraine” and later concluded that “This unmanned aerial system is designed for tactical operations. In other words, largely, but not exclusively, to attack targets. … It can also be used to give you a site picture of what it is seeing, of course. But it’s principal focus is attack…its purpose is akin to that of the Switchblade, which we have been talking about in the past, which is basically a one-way drone and attack drone. And that’s essentially what this is designed to do.” (emphasis added)

A U.S. Marine launches a lethal miniature aerial missile system during an exercise at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif. on Sept. 2, 2020. According to reports on Saturday, April 30, 2022, the new Phoenix Ghost drone, recently developed and said to function similarly to the Switchblade drone, is being sent to Ukraine. (Jennessa Davey/U.S. Marine Corps )

The switch blade is described as a

“quiet, lightweight, all-electric drone made by AeroVironment.” AeroVironment also produces another drone which is a “5.5-pound 300 version of Switchblade can be carried in a soldier’s backpack and quickly launched — making it highly useful for Ukrainian soldiers who are trying to maneuver around Russian troop and vehicles. The larger 600 version of Switchblade is being used to destroy Russian tanks and armored vehicles, many which litter roads in the Donbas region of Ukraine.” 

Militay.com said that the Biden regime has sent over 1,000 switchblades to the Ukraine so far, a move that surely angered Moscow.

Russia has warned the US and its NATO allies that they were “adding fuel” to the conflict and that there can be “unpredictable consequences.”  Washington and its NATO allies are not listening, they should know that Russia is not bluffing.  What will happen if this continues?

I believe World War III is closer than ever before, so why does Washington want this war in the first place?

Well since the US economy is collapsing with tensions increasing between liberals and conservatives and an increase of violent crime that is sweeping across the nation followed by an influx of illegal immigration on its southern borders, Washington has failed on every level.

This leads to what Gerald Celente of the Trends Journal has famously said “when all else fails, they take you to war!” Given the rapid decline of the US empire, Celente’s quote should not be taken lightly during these dangerous times.  War is coming soon; times will be very different so prepare for the worst.

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

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a

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“I am saying to you today, that for the first time, Pakistan’s policies won’t be for the few rich people, it will be for the poor, for our women, for our minorities, whose rights are not respected. My whole aim will be to protect our lower classes and to bring them up.”

–  Imran Khan, 2018 election campaign speech [1]

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In the early hours of April 9, the Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi, faced a no-confidence motion in the country’s National Assembly resulting in his removal from power. This was the first time ever that an official of his stature was removed in such a manner. [2]

What makes this move so geopolitically significant was the unique significance of this state as a square on the tabletop of the grand chessboard between the United States, and Russia and China.

On the one hand, Pakistan has traditionally used the country’s military and the intelligence services, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as partners. Over the course of the last twenty years, the Islamic State was a leading local site from which to launch air and ground operations in favor of America’s War on Terrorism. And as Michel Chossudovsky wrote back at the time of the infamous September 11th terrorist attacks, the ISI played a key role in acting as a “go-between” between the CIA and the Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan going back to 1979. This would in large part lead to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. [3][4]

On the other hand, Pakistan has gained partners both in Russia and in China. There was a vital 1100km gas pipeline project between Lahore and Karachi in which the goods would be provided from Russia. And in November of 2014, Russia and Pakistan signed a defense cooperation pact followed by a military-technical cooperation agreement all of which would serve toward “Strengthening of mutual trust and international security, counter-terrorist and arms control activities.” [5][6][7]

And then there was China’s “One Belt One Road” initiative, which would ultimately help undermine dependence on the Strait of Malacca and building a conduit between China and West Asia and the Middle East. [8]

These alliances have been tightening under the new leader Khan. On the same night Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized the Ukraine intervention, Khan had been meeting with him to discuss a wide variety of subjects including economic and energy cooperation. He did not announce a formal disapproval of the intervention in Ukraine then, nor did he do it when he returned home. [9][10]

Did Khan then cross the rubicon and slot himself in the bad books of Washington? Maybe it’s a coincidence, but in the lead-up to the National Assembly vote of no confidence, Prime Minister Khan cited the following quote of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu as evidence the U.S. was behind this move:

“If Prime Minister Imran Khan remained in office, then Pakistan will be isolated from the United States and we will take the issue head on; but if the vote of no-confidence succeeds, all will be forgiven.” [11]

Was this yet another plot of regime change by the United States? And how would the people coming out in unprecedented number in support of their removed Prime Minister prevail in his return to power? We will examine these questions on this edition of the Global Research News Hour.

In Part One of our series, we will talk to Professor Junaid Ahmad, who has a background in Pakistan about the details of the coup, the reasons for Khan to go, and the resulting push back from the people of Pakistan. And in our second half hour, we present a repeat broadcast from October of 2012 of an interview with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, founder/director of the Centre for Research on Globalization. His talk mostly deals with Afghanistan and 9/11, although he touches also on Pakistan’s then pivotal role in the military-intelligent quagmire surrounding the whole affair.

Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion, Law, and Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of thirteen books including The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity (2015), and the international best America’s “War on Terrorism”  Second Edition (2005). He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization. 

(Global Research News Hour Episode 354)

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Other stations airing the show:

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CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

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Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

1. ‘Imran Khan’s speech in full’ (July 26, 2018), Al Jazeera;

   https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/7/26/imran-khans-speech-in-full

2. No-Trust Motion: Imran Khan Becomes First Prime Minister To Be Voted Out Of Power (April 10, 2022), The Nation; https://nation.com.pk/2022/04/10/no-trust-motion-imran-khan-becomes-first-prime-minister-to-be-voted-out-of-pow/

3. https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/pakistan-leans-towards-giving-us-military-bases/
4. https://www.globalresearch.ca/september-11-2001-the-crimes-of-war-committed-in-the-name-of-911/5311561
5. https://cscr.pk/explore/themes/trade-economics/pakistan-russia-china-emerging-coalition/
6. https://www.ilaan.com/news/gas-pipelines-to-be-laid-from-lahore-to-karachi
7. https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/2019/05/03/russia-and-pakistan-a-new-arms-deal-on-the-horizon/
8. https://cscr.pk/explore/themes/trade-economics/pakistan-russia-china-emerging-coalition/
9. https://www.gulftoday.ae/news/2022/02/24/pakistan-prime-minister-imran-khan-in-russia-to-meet-putin
10. https://www.globalresearch.ca/regime-change-islamabad/5776219
11. https://www.globalresearch.ca/pakistan-pivot-russia-ouster-imran-khan/5777970?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles

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First published May 1, 2022

The Office for National Statistics has revealed without realising it that children are up to 52 times more likely to die following Covid-19 vaccination than children who have not had the Covid-19 vaccine.

Source Data

Back on 20th Dec 21, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published a dataset containing details on ‘deaths by vaccination status in England’ between 1st Jan and 31st Oct 21.

The dataset contains various tables showing details such as, ‘Monthly age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status for deaths involving COVID-19’, and ‘Monthly age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status for non-COVID-19 deaths’.

What the dataset also includes is ‘age-standardised mortality rates by age-group and vaccination status for all deaths’, however they have conveniently left out the data for children, and only included data on age groups over the age of 18.

What they also did in the data they included is bunch all young adults together meaning the rates of death are calculated for 18-39 year-olds, a total of 22 years. But for every other age group the rates of death are calculated for a total of 10 years, with 40-49, 50-59 etc.

However, on table 9 of the ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status’ dataset, the ONS have inadvertently provided enough details on deaths among children and teenagers by vaccination status for us to calculate the mortality rates ourselves, and to put it bluntly, they are horrifying, and make it obvious as to why the ONS chose to exclude children from the mortality rates dataset.

What the ONS have done, as can be seen in the above table, is provide an age standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years, rather than per 100,000 population.

The reason for this is that the size of each vaccination status population has been changing all the time, due to the unvaccinated moving into the one-dose category, and the one-dose vaccinated moving into the two-dose vaccinated category throughout the year.

So by doing it this way it provides a much more accurate picture of the mortality rates because it accounts both the number of people and the amount of time a person has spent in each vaccination status.

And on table 9, the ONS have provided us with the number of deaths by vaccination status among children and teenagers, and have kindly also provided us with the person-years, meaning we can calculate the mortality rate per 100,000 person years for 10-14 year olds, and 15-19 year olds by vaccination status.

According to the ONS, between 2nd January and 31st October 2021 there were 96 deaths recorded among 10-14-year-olds who had not been vaccinated, and 160 deaths recorded among 15-19-year-olds who had not been vaccinated.

The ONS have calculated the person-years among unvaccinated 10-14 year-olds during this period to be 2,094,711, whilst they’ve calculated person-years among unvaccinated 15-19 year-olds during this period to be 1,587,072.

To work out the mortality-rate per 100,000 person years all we need to now do is divide the person-years by 100,000, and then divide the number of deaths by the answer to that equation.

So for 10-14 year-olds we perform the following calculation –

• 2,094,711 (person-years) / 100,000 = 20.94711
• 96 (deaths) / 20.94711 = 4.58

Therefore, the mortality rate per 100,000 person-years among unvaccinated 10-14-year-olds is 4.58 deaths per 100,000 person-years between 1st Jan and 31st Oct 21.

By using the same formula we find that the the mortality rate among unvaccinated 15-19-year-olds is 10.08 deaths per 100,000 person-years.

Now all we have to do is use the same formula to calculate the mortality rate among one-dose vaccinated and two dose vaccinated 10-14, and 15-19 year-olds, by using the person-years and number of deaths provided by the ONS in table 9 of their ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status’ report, which are as follows –

Source Data

Source Data

Here are the calculated mortality rates by vaccination status among 15-19-year-olds based on the ONS calculated person-years –

Source Data

And here are the calculated mortality rates by vaccination status among 10-14-year-olds based on the ONS calculated person-years –

Source Data

These figures are horrifying. The ONS data shows that between 1st Jan and 31st Oct 21, children aged 10-14 were statistically 10 times more likely to die than unvaccinated children, and teenagers aged 15-19 were statistically 2 times more likely to die than unvaccinated teenagers.

But it’s the double vaccinated figures that are truly frightening.

The ONS data shows that between 1st Jan and 31st Oct 21, teenagers aged 15-19 were statistically 3 times more likely to die than unvaccinated teenagers, but children aged 10-14 were statistically 52 times more likely to die than unvaccinated children, recording a death rate of 238.37 per 100,000 person years.

Source Data

But these figures are in fact even worse than they first appear, as if they weren’t already bad enough. This is because the unvaccinated mortality rate among 10-14-year-olds includes children aged 10 and 11 who are not eligible for vaccination.

Whereas the vaccinated mortality rates do not include 10 and 11 year olds because they were not eligible for vaccination at the time, with the JCVI only recently recommending on 22nd Dec 21 that 5 to 11-year-old children deemed to be high risk should be offered a Covid-19 vaccination.

Therefore, if the Covid-19 injections were not causing the untimely deaths of children then we would actually expect to see a mortality rate that is lower among the vaccinated population than the mortality rate among the unvaccinated population, not a mortality rate that is similar, and certainly not a mortality rate 52 times higher.

This jaw dropping and horrifying data should be national headline news.

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First published on April 20, 2022

***

There had been an increase in the number of women who have lost their unborn or newly born children in the United States following their Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination. The number has now surpassed 4,000, just 16 months after the first COVID vaccine was given emergency use authorization.

By comparison, only 565 women have lost their children following flu vaccinations since 1990. By comparing the flu shots for the previous 30 years to the COVID-19 shots in the past 16 months, you can get an average of 1.5 fetal deaths per month following the flu shots and an average of 251 fetal deaths a month following the COVID-19 vaccines. That is a 16,633 percent increase in fetal deaths following COVID-19 vaccines compared to flu vaccines.

While that number is already alarming, it is actually much worse that because there had been more flu jabs administered during pregnancy over a period of 30 years.

During the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) update on April 8, over 100 cases were added where an unborn child died after the mother received a COVID-19 vaccine, bringing the total number of fetal deaths to 4,023.

To put that in perspective, there had only been 2,238 recorded deaths of unborn babies in VAERS over the 30 years following the administration of all other FDA-approved vaccines combined prior to the emergency use authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020.

In data pulled from VAERS, the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine has caused more fetal deaths after being injected into pregnant women than any other vaccine in the history of the United States.

For the previous 30 years before the vaccines were given emergency use authorization, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine, which was approved by the FDA in 2006, had the most recorded fetal deaths with a record of 563 in 14 years.

Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continue to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women. The FDA is said to be planning on modeling the COVID-19 vaccines after the flu vaccines to keep injecting people every year with the shots.

Pfizer vaccines resulted in spontaneous abortions and ectopic pregnancies

In a study made by Pfizer, 23 of 32 expectant mothers who received Pfizer’s COVID vaccines resulted in “spontaneous abortions” or miscarriages. It was also found that there had been over 50 times increase in ectopic pregnancies, which result in fetal death.

Experts have long warned expectant mothers against getting the mRNA vaccines, including vaccine expert Pamela Acker and former Pfizer executive Michael Yeadon, who both said that women of childbearing age should reject getting the vaccine entirely. Yeadon stressed that inadequately tested medicines and medicinal products should not be tested on pregnant women.

Despite evidence showing the dangers of the mRNA shots to unborn children, the CDC maintains that people aged 18 to 49 with certain medical conditions, including pregnancy, should be inoculated – including a booster dose.

Data from different surveillance systems did not indicate the safety signals regarding pregnancies or neonatal outcomes associated with the vaccinations. However, experts believe that fetal deaths are associated with the vaccines, especially in women who have been vaccinated early in their pregnancies.

Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, previously said there are known potential mid-pregnancy risks with the use of the vaccine, noting that there is a high risk of mid-pregnancy miscarriages.

“It’s lunacy to get this experimental vaccine if you’re a young female. It’s that simple, I would flat out forbid any young female from getting this vaccine, and I think it’s very unethical for any physician to offer this to a young female,” she said.

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First published on January 19, 2022

***

Among the first reports handed over by Pfizer was a ‘Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports’ describing events reported to Pfizer up until February 2021.

Netflix reality TV star Maya Vander told her fans last week of her devastating grief after she delivered a stillborn baby at 38 weeks of pregnancy December 9.

“Yesterday was the hardest day of my life,” Vander, 39, posted on Instagram, with a picture of new baby clothes in a memory box she was taking home from hospital instead of her baby boy. “I always heard of it but never imagined I’ll be part of the statistics.”

Vander, a Beverly Hills real estate agent who stars on the show “Selling Sunset,” had posted a photo of herself in November from a pregnancy shoot and looked the picture of health. Described as “fully vaccinated,” by US magazine, Vander has two other children: Aiden, two, and daughter Elle, one.

After her loss, she wrote in Insider magazine that she had felt less movement from the baby a few days before she learned her baby had died and also that her husband and two children were COVID-positive, although she had tested negative. She said the baby, who was “perfect” and weighed seven pounds and four ounces, would be autopsied.

There was a flurry of sympathetic news coverage about Vander’s loss, but not one article dared to ask burning questions: did COVID shots during her pregnancy have something to do with this baby’s death? Or did COVID have something to do with it, and the COVID shots failed?

Data Pfizer didn’t want you to see

When a group called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency asked Pfizer to share the raw data from their COVID vaccine trials and post-marketing surveillance that was used to license the injection, the pharma giant linked up with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to refuse the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

In fact, the FDA (meant to serve and protect public health) hired Justice Department lawyers and went to court to shield the pharmaceutical giant from having to reveal its data – for 55 years. That’s right. The FDA and Pfizer did not want anyone to see the numbers behind their COVID vaccine until 2076.

Fortunately, a judge ruled that the FDA and Pfizer would have to answer their FOIA requests. Among the first reports handed over by Pfizer was a “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports” describing events reported to Pfizer up until February 2021.

It reveals that the drug behemoth received more than 150,000 serious adverse event reports within three months of rolling out its COVID shot, but here we will focus on Table 6 of the data on pregnant and lactating women who received the shots in the first few months of the rollout, which began December 11. Most of these women would have been healthcare workers because that was who the first rounds of shots went to. As the clinical trials preceding the rollout excluded pregnant women, these would have been the first pregnant and lactating women to have ever received the vaccines.

Table 6 states that of 270 “unique pregnancies” that were exposed to the vaccine, “no outcome was provided for 238 pregnancies.”

This leaves 32 pregnancies with known outcomes.

Pfizer’s report states that there were 23 spontaneous abortions (miscarriages), two premature births with neonatal death, two spontaneous abortions with intrauterine death, one spontaneous abortion with neonatal death, and one pregnancy with “normal outcome.” That means that of 32 pregnancies with known outcome, 28 resulted in fetal death.

Pfizer’s report states that there were five pregnancies with “outcome pending” as well as the 238 with “no outcome provided.” But 32 minus 28 equals four, not five.

Because of this confusion, I called Pfizer and emailed questions to their media rep. Were 28 of 32 known pregnancy outcomes actually fatal in the first 10 weeks that the vaccine became available, as their report suggests? That’s an 87.5% pregnancy loss rate? And only one pregnancy outcome was “normal”? Please correct me if I’m wrong about this.

No reply.

The FDA would have had these data in their hands by the end of April. Maybe this is why they wanted to hide it for 55 years?

Ordinarily, when a new drug or medical device is put into action, the onus is, and should be, on the drug maker to prove that any unexpected events that occur afterwards are not related to the product. “All spontaneous reports have an implied causal relationship as per regulatory guidance, regardless of the reporter’s assessment,” according to adverse event reporting guidelines. But Pfizer and the FDA ignored events with temporal association and plausible cause for injury and have blithely declared the vaccine “safe and effective” for pregnant women.

Allowed it to be mandated, even.

Canadian stillbirth reports

In Canada, there have been whistleblower reports claiming spiking stillborn death rates after COVID injections. A retired doctor in British Columbia, Dr. Mel Bruchet, claimed in November that he was told by doulas that there had been 13 stillbirths in a 24-hour period at the Lion’s Gate Hospital in Vancouver. A grandmother whose grandbaby was stillborn at the hospital tweeted November 21: “My daughter got that damned poison vaccine one month ago because she couldn’t go to a restaurant, and people were freaking out because that she was unvaxxed. I want to sue the government.” The message was scrubbed from Twitter.

Dr. Daniel Nagase, an Alberta doctor who was ordered to leave his Alberta hospital for treating three COVID patients (all of whom who went home from hospital alive) with ivermectin, told a reporter that he had been informed of 86 stillbirths in Waterloo, Ontario between January and July.

“Normally, it’s only five or six stillbirths every year. So, about one stillbirth every two months is the usual rate,” he said. “So, to suddenly get to 86 stillbirths in six months, that’s highly unusual. But, the most important confirmation that we have from the Waterloo, Ontario report was that all of the [mothers of the] 86 stillbirths were fully vaccinated.”

Fuzzy fact-checks

Media and hospitals immediately decried the claims as misinformation, but their “fact-checks” did not actually refute them. They provided data from the “last fiscal year,” or from April to August.

“Data specifically from Lions Gate Hospital could not be disclosed due to privacy reasons,” said Global News. They gave not-so-reassuring statements from doctor like, “There is a growing body of evidence that the vaccination is safe.” The “growing body of evidence” is clearly coming from the pregnant women and their babies themselves who are the clinical trial.

Factcheck quoted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website which confirms this, stating that, according to the CDC, “the benefits of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine outweigh any known or potential risks of vaccination during pregnancy” (emphasis added). That’s cover-your-butt language. We are not responsible until we know there is a problem or until we see a potential risk realized.

‘You will die in ICU’

When independent MP Rick Nicholls raised a question about stillbirths in the Ontario legislature, the minister of health only replied that the CDC and Food and Drug Administration are recommending the jabs.

“She didn’t even answer properly, just repeated what all the other puppets always say, ‘it’s safe,’” commented one mother, Chané Neveling. “This makes me so mad. I just had my baby girl in July [and] the amount or pressure I felt from my doctors to get the [vaccine] while pregnant almost made me go against my morals and I almost got it. My OBGYN’s exact words to me were ‘you are stupid for not getting it. You will die in ICU.’”

If doctors are fearmongering like that to patients, is it unreasonable to think there is at least a problem of under-reporting of adverse events following vaccination? What doctor who is so dogmatic about his latest pharma cocktail is going to consider (let alone admit) there could be a problem with it?

There are 3,604 reports of spontaneous abortions, miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonate deaths on the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) through December 10, 2021. These include thousands of miscarriages and early pregnancy losses shortly after injection of experimental gene-modifying mRNA COVID vaccines; reports of babies that abruptly stop growing, or experience a stroke in utero; of malformed babies; a baby dying from an inflamed placenta; and a baby born fatally bleeding from its mouth, nose, and lungs. A surprising number of these reports note that there was no autopsy done and admit “no further information.” It’s as if public health doesn’t want to know what caused these babies to die – even if there are plenty of reasonable theories to explain why these events might be occurring.

VigiBase data

Given the high numbers of doses given, the number of adverse events continues to climb. VigiBase, the database of the World Health Organization, reports pregnancy complications including:

• 3,952 spontaneous abortions
• 353 foetal deaths
• 189 missed abortions
• 166 premature labours
• 160 premature babies
• 154 abortions
• 150 slow movement of unborn baby
• 146 hemorrhages in pregnancy
• 132 premature deliveries
• 123 fetal growth restriction
• 120 stillbirths
• 105 ectopic pregnancies
• 90 pre-eclampsia

Problematic studies

Public health agencies justify these dangers by claiming that women (or their babies) are more likely to experience them with exposure to the virus than to the vaccine – but they provide no evidence for this. The study they refer to most comes from the CDC itself. A comparison of stillbirth rates in 1,249,634 deliveries at 736 hospitals during March 2020–September 2021 among women with and without COVID infection, it establishes that there was indeed a surge in stillbirths – but not at the height of the first deadly wave of the virus, only “during the period of Delta variant predominance,” i.e., after pregnant women were being pressured into vaccines. CDC wouldn’t consider that the experimental, “novel platform” mRNA injections could be the reason that stillbirth affected only 0.98% of COVID-19–affected deliveries pre-Delta compared to 2.70% after the vaccines were introduced.

“Vaccination status was unable to be assessed in this analysis,” the CDC wrote. This is the agency that is calling for vaccine mandates and introducing QR codes across the country. It can demand to know if you are vaccinated or not if you want to go to your local restaurant, or gym, or football game, but for a national study of its “most critical,” supposedly lifesaving intervention during a supposedly unprecedented global pandemic, it’s just not possible for the most powerful health agency in the world to determine vaccination status? Everyone knows that every pregnant woman entering a hospital for the past 18 months gets a COVID test. The CDC knows which women were vaccinated and which weren’t in this, it just doesn’t want to tell us.

COVID vaccine science is like their abortion ‘science’

Instead, the CDC “experts” resort to platitudes. “However, because COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective, and COVID-19 vaccination coverage among pregnant women was approximately 30% as of July 2021, most women with COVID-19 at delivery were likelyunvaccinated” (emphasis added). Why does that sound so unscientific? Good science isn’t usually an assumption based on a slogan added to a guesstimate. Haven’t we seen this kind of science before? When they told us that women don’t have complications after abortion – and the CDC did their magical disappearing act of all the sepsis and the bleed outs, the perforated wombs and the post-abortion psychological sequelae? They just pay the right scientists to manipulate the data and whitewash the unwanted numbers until they vanish. Nothing to see. Vaccine science is just like abortion science. Now, they’re literally fusing.

82% pregnancy loss?

Another study that’s being heavily relied upon by the “experts” is from the New England Journal of Medicine. However, its authors at the CDC were forced to issue a major correction when analysts recognized their data calculations actually showed the possibility of an 82% miscarriage rate in early pregnancy, while it concluded that COVID shots were safe and effective.

Initially the study was published with Table 4 showing “Spontaneous Abortion” after vaccination. The authors claimed that 104 pregnancy losses divided by 827 pregnancies resulted in 12.6% pregnancy loss rate, which is within a normal range. However, as Deanna McLeod, a professional cancer data analyst from Kaleidoscope Strategic Inc.in Toronto, and her colleagues pointed out in a letter to the NEJM, in the tiny print below the table was a statement that a “total of 700 participants received their first eligible dose in the third trimester.” Since the definition of spontaneous abortion pertains to pregnancy loss under 20 weeks gestation, that meant 700 women didn’t belong in the denominator because when they were vaccinated, they were already past the point of being able to have a spontaneous abortion. So, properly read, the fraction changed from 104/827 to 104/127 (81.9%). Hence, an 82% pregnancy loss rate for the first trimester pregnancies.

The CDC experts wrote a correction but the New England Journal of Medicine actually just erased the faulty denominator from the original publication and kept all the same conclusions.

The 82% figure has been bandied about quite a bit, and McLeod told LifeSite that it is likely an overestimate, but the true pregnancy outcome is still not available and in fact other scientists have looked at the data and calculated a 91.2% early pregnancy loss rate. These figures fit with Pfizer’s hidden data.

Researchers published a follow-up to the study but that was equally flawed. “First, they start with the absurd premise that ‘there is no compelling biological reason to expect that mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (either preconception or during pregnancy) presents a risk to pregnancy’” says Jeremy Hammond, an independent journalist and political analyst who has analyzed flu shot data in pregnancy. “That’s a bald-faced lie, of course, since maternal immune activation in and of itself is a compelling biological mechanism known to be associated with fetal harm.”

Next, Hammond says, “they confounded their analysis of the risk of vaccination during pregnancy by including women who were vaccinated up to 30 days before conception but offered no reason for this.” Then, the defined spontaneous abortion as pregnancy loss between six and 20 weeks, thereby excluding all losses in the first five weeks (when 90% of spontaneous abortions occur).

“This means that if a woman got vaccinated, then 3 weeks later got pregnant, then made it through 6 weeks of gestation without a miscarriage, she was included;” says Hammond, “whereas if a woman got vaccinated, then 3 weeks later got pregnant, then 5 weeks later had a miscarriage, she was excluded. This obviously biases their data in favor of finding no increased risk of miscarriage.”

What all of this tells us is that we have public health agencies and scientists willing to manipulate data to protect pharmaceutical interests rather than the women and babies they exist to serve. At least some of the stories that are percolating around us of stillborn babies, hemorrhages, and miscarriages are linked to the experimental new injections – perhaps many more than we think. But it will be a long time – and many more babies’ lives will be lost – before we learn the whole truth.

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Introduction

A QR Verification Code is now being developed to be applied Worldwide simultaneously in 194 member states of the UN with a combined population of  7.9 billion people.

The Worldwide QR Global Verification Agenda is to be carried out under the auspices of the WHO is liaison with ID2020 and the Gavi Alliance, both of which are funded by the Gates Foundation. 

Peter Koenig describes the QR Code as “an all-electronic ID – linking everything to everything of each individual (records of health, banking, personal and private, etc.).”   

The QR Verification App potentially sets the stage for the instatement of “a global police state” controlled by the financial establishment. It’s part of what the late David Rockefeller entitled “the march towards World Government”: 

“…The world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” (quoted by Aspen Times, August 15, 2011, emphasis added)

The QR Code and the Worldwide Digital Currency System (CBDC)  

Consultations are also ongoing with the World Economic Forum and central banks with a view to implementing a so-called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) network. According to David Scripac 

“A worldwide digital ID system is in the making. … the aim of the WEF—and of all the central banks [is] to implement a global system in which everyone’s personal data will be incorporated into the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) network. 

Once that goal is accomplished, every aspect of our lives will be controlled, from womb to crematorium, by the so-called 1% who run the world’s most influential institutions and comprise its bluest bloodlines.

(Yes, bloodlines. As in the Rockefellers, Morgans, du Ponts, Rothschilds, British royals, and Dutch royals, to name a few of the supposedly superior families whose wealth and power have been dominating the global population for centuries.) 

What do I mean by “every aspect of our lives”?  For starters, what we can purchase with our CBDC money.

And from there . . . whom we may—or may not—associate with. How much electricity we can use in our (rental) dwellings. What we are allowed to read, see, hear, say—and even eat.

Whether and where we can travel. The list of “forbiddens” will keep growing. And so will the social demerits we pile up for bad behavior. That is, for disobeying our slave masters.

“Digitization of the World”: The Global Features of the QR Verification App

The WHO has signed a major contract with Deutsche Telekom T Systems to develop a QR Verification App and Software which is to be applied Worldwide.

Sofar we have scanty details regarding the project which indelibly derogates on the rights of sovereign countries.

Has WHO Director General Dr. Tedros sought the approval of the WHO’s 194 member states?

With the exception of Reuters (see below) there has been no media coverage or analysis, nor has the WHO made a formal announcement of the project:

The World Health Organization has signed a contract with Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) subsidiary T-Systems to build a software solution for global electronic verification of coronavirus vaccination certificates, the telecoms company said.

The QR code-based software solution will be used for other vaccinations as well, such as polio or yellow fever, T-Systems said in a statement … adding that the WHO would support its 194 member states in building national and regional verification technology.

T-Systems previously worked with SAP (SAPG.DE) to develop Germany’s Corona-Warn-App tracing and verification app and a Europe-wide digital COVID-19 vaccine verification system.” (Reuters)

According to a Deutsche Telekom I-T Systems Communique  “The WHO’s gateway service also serves as a bridge between regional systems“, which essentially implies a coordinated global structure of QR surveillance, which oversees the entire World population.

And once established: it will police “every aspect of our lives”, wherever our location on Planet location.

“It can also be used as part of future vaccination campaigns and home-based records.“

According to the CEO of Deutsche Telecom T Systems

“Corona has a grip on the world. Digitization keeps the world running”

Who has the Grip on the World? A giant data bank pertaining to 7.9 billion people controlled by Big Money.

“Keep the World Running” on Whose Behalf?

While Bill Gates funds both the WHO and ID2020, he also has a vested interest in Deutsche Telekom. In the late 1990s, Gates entered into negotiations on behalf of Microsoft with Deutsche Telecom’s CEO Ron Sommer. The objective was to establish a longstanding “Strategic Partnership” between the two companies.

Confronting the Architects of Digital Tyranny

People Worldwide in a broad movement of solidarity must confront the architects of this infamous project of Digital Tyranny.

We will seek all avenues through peaceful means to disable and undermine this totalitarian project including dialogue with and within public and private institutions, law enforcement officials, members of the military and the judicial.

What is required is to break down the structures of corruption, hierarchy and abusive authority, namely to pursue what might be described as: “the democratization of decision-making within our institutions”. (Michel Chossudovky, Chapter XIV of  E-Book)

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In his interview with Rete 4 Mediaset, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov raised a series of issues of the utmost importance for Italy and Europe. However, nobody in the Italian and European political world took them into consideration. Prime Minister Draghi dismissed the interview with these words:

“We are talking about a country, Italy, where there is freedom of expression. Minister Lavrov belongs to a country where there is no freedom of expression. This country, Italy, allows people to express their opinions freely, even when they are obviously false, aberrant. What Minister Lavrov said is aberrant.”

The Italian government thus confirms not only that it has turned Italy into a belligerent country, ranking fourth among suppliers of arms to Kiev’s forces, but that it seeks all-out confrontation with Russia.

This is in line with what is happening in Europe and the United States, where the attack on everything Russian is underway: while Russian women’s soccer teams are banned from European championships, the Metropolitan Opera in New York expels Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, because she refuses to condemn her government.

At the same time, RAI invites to Porta a Porta “the wives of the fighters of the Azov battalion”, which is presented as a handful of heroic resistance to the Russian invaders.

To the recycling campaign of the neo-Nazis of Azov also participate the 7 and the major Italian newspapers.

 

To demonstrate the true nature of the Azov battalion, now upgraded to the level of special forces regiment, is a report of Time magazine of just a year ago, before the same magazine turned the page by joining the international campaign of support to the Kiev regime.

A report by Vittorio Rangeloni from Mariupol demolishes, through the testimonies of the inhabitants of Mariupol themselves, the image of Azov presented by the Italian and Western mainstream.

Our life is at stake

The war advances, but it is not the one that the political-media mainstream makes it appear to our eyes. To understand this, one cannot remain at the still image of what is happening in Ukraine. One must watch the docufilm of the events that, from the end of the Second World War to today, have led to the current situation.

Crucial is the moment in which, after the end of the Cold War with the disintegration of the USSR, the United States and the other Western powers impose their unipolar order, their economic hegemony with globalization, their unique thought with the sprawling multimedia apparatus, while the US and NATO demolish with war the States that are an obstacle to their plans of domination.

On this background the Russian military operation in Ukraine takes place. It is not only a response to the US-NATO escalation, including nuclear escalation, which endangers Russia’s security. It is a response to the West’s claim to maintain a unipolar world under its own domination. This opens the challenge of the new historical period, that of building a multipolar world.

It is not a coincidence that, after the daily terrorist hammering on the deadly threat of the virus, the mainstream now carries out the daily terrorist hammering on the deadly threat of Russia, demonizing President Putin. While the European Union is suicidally severing economic ties and demolishing centuries-old cultural bridges with Russia, it is up to the peoples of Europe to make the no-longer-postponed choices on which our future and our very lives depend.

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This article was originally published in Italian on byoblu.

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

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“Little, perhaps nothing, of the experience of most Western readers and historians will have prepared them for what they will find in the history of Russia’s War’’ – Richard Overy

In 2022 we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, which marked a turning point in the war against German fascism.  Stalingrad represented the first nail in the coffin of the German Wehrmacht.  Russia’s war against German fascism lasted four years and took an immense toll on the people of the Soviet Union with over 25 million soldiers and civilians killed. As Overy notes,

“The cost of the war dwarfed the sacrifices of any other fighting power.’’

In the West lip service is paid to the massive price paid by the Soviet people during the course of the Nazis war of annihilation on the Eastern front.  Mainstream media, politicians and even school curricula will highlight the contribution made by Allied forces during the D-Day landings of 1944 but will remain curiously silent over the events and the vast battlefields of the Soviet Union.

Thankfully, there are a few Western voices that recognise, however significant the Anglo-American role in defeating Hitler’s armies was, this was fundamentally brought about by events on the Eastern Front.  Hitler’s war of extermination ended by destroying its German initiators and by embedding a Soviet presence in Central and Eastern Europe for over half a century.

In this article we shall review the evidence provided by , who is one of Britain’s leading historians of the Second World War, in his book Russia’s War. This fine piece of research helps us understand more clearly than ever the enormous achievements and the horrendous price which the Soviet people paid for victory over German fascism.

Overy provides a fascinating account, revealing how the Soviet Union was able to defeat the German Wehrmacht which, in 1941, had the best trained, most well-equipped troops in the world, as well as the vast resources of a subjugated Europe at its disposal.

It is worth recalling that at the outset of the German invasion of the USSR most governments expected Hitler’s forces to rapidly triumph over the Red Army. After the German invasion was launched American Secretary of State Henry Stimson informed President Roosevelt that the unanimous opinion of the US Chiefs of Staff was that:”Germany will be thoroughly occupied in beating Russia for a minimum of a month and possible maximum of three months.’’

Richard Overy starts with a brief description of the development of the Soviet Red Army from the October Revolution of 1917 to the highly damaging purges of the late 1930s, when the Red Army leadership was decimated by waves of arrests and executions. Estimates vary, but there is no doubt that tens of thousands of officers were executed or sent into internal exile. This had the impact of greatly weakening the effectiveness of the Red Army as a fighting force. It greatly encouraged Hitler in his decision to prepare for a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union and enabled him to feel secure about his planned attack on France in 1940.

The author describes in a dramatic manner, the disaster which befell the Red Army during the year which followed the German invasion of 1941, when it lost 6 million soldiers to the Nazi onslaught. 

As Overy reveals, the Red Army defeats of this period, which brought the German army to the gates of Moscow, can be largely put down to the incompetent military leadership of Stalin who ignored repeated warnings of the impending German invasion. His interference in the work of Red Army commanders during 1941 only served to turn Russian retreats into full-scale military disasters.  Professor Overy also gives credit to the tactical brilliance of German military commanders, whose mastery of rapid mechanised warfare was unsurpassed at that time.

During the winter of 1941-42, when the Wehrmacht was laying siege to both Moscow and Leningrad, the Soviet Union appeared close to defeat.  Yet, by the spring of 1943 the balance of forces on the Eastern Front been decisively transformed in favour of the Red Army.  Richard Overy puts this down to several interlinked processes.

The Russian economy was completely reorganised during the winter of 1941-42 as German troops pressed 500 miles into Soviet territory.  Thousands of factories were dismantled and moved to the Urals and Western Siberia.  The entire population was mobilised on a vast scale into war production and the armed forces, that were made up of the Red Army and the partisan units behind German lines. 

Overy pays tribute here to the critical role played by the state owned planned economy in the successes of the Soviet armed forces.  Despite the loss of most of its how industrialised western regions, the Soviet planned economy displayed a great flexibility and organisational power that enabled it to out-produce the vast German economy.  By 1943 the Soviet Union was out-producing Germany in the critical areas of aircraft, tank and artillery production.

The other factor following the massive defeats 1941 and 1942, was that the Stalinist bureaucracy which governed the Soviet Union was forced to ease its iron grip on Soviet society.  As Overy notes: “The emergency freed many Soviet officials, managers and soldiers from an atmosphere of passivity and fear of responsibility.’’

On both the military and home fronts, this led to a period of ‘spontaneous de-Stalinisation’, which unleashed the long suppressed initiative and creativity of the Soviet people at all levels, ranging from Red Army generals and factory workers.  This led to a great improvement in the morale and efficiency of the armed forces and the military economy, which were temporarily freed from the dead weight of bureaucratic control.

As Overy points out, despite the significance of the Anglo-American role on the Western front, it was events on the Eastern Front, which broke the back of the German war machine.  Over 80% of German battle casualties occurred on the Eastern Front where the overwhelming weight of the Wehrmacht was concentrated.  In June 1944 the Wehrmacht had 228 divisions facing the Red Army and only 58 divisions facing the Western allies.

The Nazi leadership of Germany never expected the Soviet Union to recover its economic/military strength following the devastating losses of 1941-1942. Nor did it expect the Red Army to be able to reform its armed forces, adopt new tactics and produce commanders of remarkable ability. Besides this, Soviet military intelligence again and again was able to outfox its German counterparts which gave Red Army offensives from 1943 onwards a major tactical advantage.

Richard Overy points out another critical factor that contributed to the Soviet victory and that was the role played by women in sustaining the Soviet war effort and the modernization of the armed forces especially in critical the field of weapons production:

“It is a myth that the Soviet Union won the war because it had endless spaces in the East from which to suck its manpower. The Soviet Union survived only by mobilizing two-thirds of its women to run the factories and farms, and by modernizing its armed forces so that they did not have to rely any longer on raw numbers of men, but could rely, like the American army, on mass produced weapons.’’

By early February 1943 the Red Army had inflicted a decisive and crushing defeat on Army Group South following the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. It was the first nail in the coffin of German fascism. Hitler had lost one of his most experienced armies which was an irreplaceable loss. This was followed by the devastating and decisive defeats suffered by the German army at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 and Operation Bagration (summer 1944) that destroyed Army Group Centre, which at that point, was Germany’s largest and most experienced military formation.

Russia’s War looks at the course of the apocalyptic struggle on the Eastern Front from the point of view of the Red Army troops and ordinary Russian peasants and workers.  It also notes the high price which the Soviet people paid in the defeat of fascist barbarism.  Overy pays tribute to the forgotten victims of the titanic struggle waged by the Soviet people in their defeat of German fascism:

“There is no dispute that the Soviet population suffered out of all proportion to the sufferings of Soviet allies, and suffered in many cases not a quick end from bomb or bullet but an agonizing end from starvation, or torture, or enslavement, or from countless atrocities whose mere recital still, after the accumulation of almost sixty years of further miseries world-wide, humbles and defeats the imagination.’’

On 2 May the capital of Hitler’s thousand year Reich fell to Soviet troops. The German garrison surrendered to Marshal Chuikov, who had led the Red Army’s grim resistance at Stalingrad. Yet fighting continued in the south where 600,000 Germans continued fruitless resistance to the Red Army in Czechoslovakia.

Hitler’s successor Admiral Doenitz had fled to Flensburg in Northern Germany where he engaged in surrender negotiations with the Western allies. On 7 May General Jodl, Hitler’s chief of operations, signed an act of  unconditional surrender in a ceremony orchestrated by the United States.

On hearing of this news Stalin was furious as he believed that the Soviet war effort was the real source of Hitler’s defeat. He refused to accept the German surrender to the Western allies on 7 May:

“The surrender must be arranged as a most important historical fact, and accepted not on the territory of the conquerors but at the place where the fascist aggression sprang from.’’

Marshall Zhukov was ordered to arrange a new surrender ceremony in Berlin as Stalin was keen to, ‘demonstrate to the world the important part the Soviet people and their leader played in the downfall of Hitler.’

At 12.43 am 9 May Field Marshal Keitel signed the surrender in front of Zhukov and several senior Western generals. In the evening of May 9 between 2 to 3 million people gathered in Red Square to celebrate the hard fought victory over German fascism. To this day the Russian people have celebrated 9 May as Victory Day as they remember the terrible sacrifices their country made to defeat the bestial regime of Hitler.

The people of Europe owe a great debt of gratitude to the Red Army and the Soviet people for their freedom from fascist tyranny. Despite its somewhat dry academic style, Russia’s War conclusively proves that it was the Red Army which was largely responsible for defeating Hitler’s armies.

Instead of gratitude, we have the current situation where most Europeans support the Russophobic hostility of the EU towards Russia.

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Dr. Leon Tressell is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: The center of Stalingrad after liberation, 2 February 1943 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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On May 1 US lawmaker Adam Kinziger in an interview at CBS, talked about his proposed bill which would authorize the American President to use the Armed Forces against Russia to protect its “national security interests” and to “restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine” upon confirmation Moscow has used weapons of mass destruction. This bill is part of a larger trend. It appears part of the North-American political and military elite desires direct war with the Russian Federation – even risking nuclear conflict.

Last month, US Senator Chris Coons said Washington should “not merely send arms to Ukraine” but rather should consider sending US “troops to the aid in defense” of that country. These US officials are basically stating that a regional conflict should turn into a NATO-Russia war (thus making it an existential issue for Moscow) and potentially escalating into global and nuclear warfare.

This is the worrisome culmination of a kind of rhetoric that has been going on since the beginning of the current conflict. On February 23 French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said during a news conference that Russian President Vladimir Putin should understand that “NATO is a nuclear alliance”.

One month before Moscow started its current military operations in Ukraine, Evelyn N. Farkas (who is a former senior advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, and who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia in the Obama administration) argued that Washington should issue the Kremlin an ultimatum (demanding it not attack Kiev). She urged the US to organize “coalition forces” to take action to “enforce” such an ultimatum and even use the American military “to roll back Russians – even at risk of direct combat.” She could not have been more clear. But she does not seem to be an isolated voice.

Shortly after the current crisis began, three retired US generals, George Joulwan, Wesley Clark, and Philip Breedlove (all of them being former NATO commanders) proposed the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would have the effect of bringing Russian and American military closer into lethal conflict and war.

Robert C. O’Brien, chairman of American Global Strategies LLC and a former White House national security adviser (2019-2021), in his April 19 opinion piece, proposed a series of responses aimed at “deterring nuclear war”. They include “sending a message” to the Kremlin about the consequences of employing nuclear weapons.

Basically, American strategists are worried – so they claim – that the Kremlin could use the nuclear option and thus they are advocating Washington do it first – or at least prepare itself for that – in a dangerous kind of reasoning that only fuels further escalation.

Seth Cropsey, who is a maritime defense strategy expert and a former Secretary of Defense assistant (under Reagan) and is also an influential lobbyist and political figure in Washington today goes beyond O’Brien proposal, arguing that the United States needs to be prepared to actually “win a nuclear war”. This seems to make sense even, from an American perspective, but the very concept of “winning” a nuclear conflict is problematic – and it is problematic not only from the US point of view, but from humanity’s perspective really.

Nuclear weapons today are way more powerful than the atomic bombs of 1945 – the only time any such arms have been ever employed so far. Today, the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be considered “low-yield”. Some of the current thermonuclear weapons which Russia and the United States possess are over 3,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

The largest nuclear weapon ever tested so far was the so-called Tsar Bomba, detonated over the Novaya Zemlya island (north of the Arctic Circle) in 1961 by the Soviet Union – it produced a 50 megaton blast and a mushroom cloud about 4.5 times the height of Mount Everest. People were able to see its flash from up to 630 miles (1013 kilometers) away.

One 100-kiloton nuclear bomb dropped on New York City, for example, could kill over 580 thousand people, according to Nukemap, a Stevens Institute of Technology-sponsored website. Therefore, a nuclear war today would be destructive beyond imagination.

A 2019 scientific study involving experts from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Rutgers University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, and other institutions analyzed a scenario in which India, a nuclear power, employs strategic weapons to attack the urban centers of its nuclear power rival, Pakistan. The study concluded that in this scenario there would be up to 125 million deaths. Moreover, besides spreading dangerous levels of radioactivity, the nuclear-ignited fires would release up to 36 Tg of black carbon smoke which would reach the upper atmosphere, thus blocking out the sun and thereby dropping temperatures globally to unprecedented levels and also reducing precipitation up to 30%. Amid this darkness and drought, food production would surely collapse, causing global famine and further collateral fatalities. Recovery would take at least 10 years and the political, economic, social, and psychological impacts worldwide could simply destroy modern civilization. It is merely logical to assume a similar scenario would ensue if a nuclear conflict involving Russia and NATO took place.

The dangerous times we are living require good diplomacy and lots of table talks.

Instead of discussing “nuclear primacy” scenarios, responsible Western leaders should work to reopen diplomatic communication channels with Moscow. The hard truth is that in a nuclear warfare scenario there will be no true winners.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute  

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***

Robert Epstein, Ph.D. warns about Google’s ability to control public policy, swing elections and brainwash our children

The methods Google uses are ephemeral and leave no paper trail behind, making it very difficult to track and prove that they’re using humans as pawns, manipulating us via ways that we can’t counteract

Research by Epstein and colleagues has found that biased search results can change people’s opinions and voting preferences, shifting opinions in undecided voters by 20% to 80% in certain demographic groups

Google’s “autocomplete” feature on its search engine can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into nearly a 90/10 split — all without people realizing they’re being manipulated

The first step to breaking free from Google’s dictatorship is recognizing that the manipulation is occurring; the next involves consciously opting out of it as much as possible by protecting your privacy online

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Google has the power to manipulate what you see online, targeting you with certain advertisements and burying search results they’d rather you not see. But can they go so far as to control the outcome of political elections? Absolutely, according to Robert Epstein, Ph.D., a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT).

Epstein, a Harvard-trained psychologist who founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, likens Google to a dictator with unprecedented power because it relies on techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history. The free services they provide really aren’t free, he warns. “You pay for it the with your freedom.”¹

Google Uses Ephemeral Manipulation Tools

In the video above, Epstein speaks with Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times, about Google’s ability to control public policy, swing elections and brainwash our children. Google has the power “to censor content, to track our every move, to tear societies apart, to alter the human mind, and even to reengineer humanity,” Epstein writes in his report, “Google’s Triple Threat,”² which he details in his interview with Jekielek.

The methods Google uses are ephemeral and leave no paper trail, making it very difficult to track and prove that they’re using humans as pawns, manipulating us via ways that we can’t counteract. Ephemeral experiences occur briefly, then disappear, and include things like a list of suggested videos on YouTube, search suggestions and topics in a newsfeed.

“They affect us, they disappear, they’re stored nowhere and they’re gone,” Epstein says. “It’s the ideal form of manipulation. People have no idea they’re being manipulated, number one, and number two, authorities can’t go back in time to see what people were being shown, in other words, how they were being manipulated.”³

Epstein and his team, however, have found ways to track Google’s invisible, almost subliminal, tools, including the search engine manipulation effect (SEME). According to Epstein:⁴

“SEME is one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences … It leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion. It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. Worse still, the very few people who can detect bias in search results shift even farther in the direction of the bias, so merely being able to see the bias doesn’t protect you from it.”

Research by Epstein and colleagues has found that biased search results can change people’s opinions and voting preferences, shifting opinions in undecided voters by 20% to 80% in certain demographic groups.⁵ Internal emails leaked from Google talk about “ephemeral experience,” and the company makes a point to engineer ephemeral experiences intended to alter the way people think.

SEME, however, is just one of about a dozen subliminal tools that Epstein’s team has discovered. Others include the “search suggestion effect,” the “opinion matching effect” and the “YouTube manipulation effect.”⁶

Google Shifted Millions of Votes in 2020

As Epstein and his team began to preserve politically related ephemeral experiences, extreme political bias was uncovered on Google and YouTube, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet.

In the days leading up to the 2020 Presidential election and 2021 Senate runoff elections in Georgia, for instance, they preserved 1.5 million ephemeral experiences and more than 3 million web pages, which were sufficient to shift “at least 6 million votes in the presidential election without people’s knowledge.”⁷

This isn’t an isolated incident. In 2016, Google’s search algorithm generated biased search results that influenced undecided voters, giving 2.6 million to 10.2 million votes to Hillary Clinton.

Epstein makes a point to state that he leans left politically, but despite Google’s bias working to support the candidates he supported, he can’t applaud it, “because rigorous research I have been conducting since 2013 has shown me how dangerous these companies are – Google-and-the-Gang, I call them.”⁸

Even displaying a “Go Vote” reminder on Google on election day in 2018, Epstein found, gave one political party an extra 800,000 to 4.6 million votes compared to what the other party got. What’s more, Epstein says those numbers are “quite conservative.”⁹ “In other words,” Epstein explained, “Google’s ‘Go Vote’ prompt was not a public service; it was a vote manipulation. This type of vote manipulation is an example of what I call the ‘Differential Demographics Effect.’”¹⁰

Epstein also had a monitoring system in place in 2018, which preserved more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo, along with nearly 400,000 web pages that the search results linked to. The political bias that was uncovered in the results may have shifted 78.2 million votes to one political party.¹¹

Even the “autocomplete” feature that occurs when you start to type in Google’s search engine is a powerful manipulation tool. “A growing body of evidence suggests that Google is manipulating people’s thinking and behavior from the very first character people type into the search box,” Epstein writes.¹² Just from this feature alone, Epstein’s research found Google can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into nearly a 90/10 split — all without people realizing they’re being manipulated.

Further, because Google’s persuasive technologies are so powerful, and many elections worldwide are very close, Epstein’s data suggest Google has likely been determining the outcomes of up to 25% of national elections worldwide since at least 2015.¹³

Google Is a Surveillance Agency

Click here to watch the video.

It’s important to understand that Google is a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers, and this is one of their primary threats to society. As noted by Epstein:¹⁴

“The search engine … Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, YouTube, these are surveillance platforms. In other words, from their perspective, the value these tools have is they give them more information about you. Surveillance is what they do.”

While surveillance is Google’s primary business, their revenue — which exceeds $130 billion a year — comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal information you’ve provided them through their various products is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience. Meanwhile, they also have an unprecedented censorship ability. By restricting or blocking access to websites, they decide what you can and cannot see.

The most crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If a certain type of information is removed from search, and you don’t know it should exist somewhere, you will never know and you won’t go looking for it. This is how hundreds of millions of people have been deprived of learning the power of natural healing from me and many other clinicians who have been censored by Google.

For example, Google has been investing in DNA repositories for quite a long time, and adding DNA information to our profiles. According to Epstein, Google has taken over the national DNA repository, but articles about that — which he has cited in his own writings — have all vanished. As it stands, Epstein is worried for the future if no one steps in to stop Google’s power:¹⁵

“As the father of five children, I am especially concerned about what humanity’s future will look like if Big Tech is allowed to continue unobstructed on its path toward world domination. In the 1950s, British economist Kenneth Boulding wrote, ‘A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.’

I am writing this essay because I believe that such a world already exists, and that unless we act quickly and decisively, the power that the technology company executives have garnered will become so firmly entrenched that we will never be able to unseat them from their invisible thrones.”

Epstein’s Six Top Privacy Tips

The first step to breaking free from Google’s dictatorship is recognizing that the manipulation is occurring. The next involves consciously opting out of it as much as possible. It’s especially important that children are protected, as they are among the most vulnerable to the onslaught of manipulation, which will have serious consequences to future generations. Epstein noted:¹⁶

“We’re trying to figure out how the manipulation works. But most importantly, we’re trying to quantify it … Because I think that what’s really happening is that there is a cumulative effect of, not just political bias, but a value literally a cumulative effect of being exposed to certain kinds of values, over and over and over again, on one tech platform, or after another.

And I think that the people who are most vulnerable to being impacted by that kind of process are children.”

Epstein has compiled six steps that can help protect your privacy online, noting that he hasn’t received a targeted ad on his computer or mobile phone since 2014 as a result. To take back some of your online privacy, for yourself as well as your children, he recommends:¹⁷

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If the inflation narrative we are being fed is true, the sanctions policy of the US government makes no sense as the worst sufferers are the American and European populations who are paying for the supply restrictions in higher prices and interest rates.  

As Russia is an exporter of energy and minerals, higher prices result in more export earnings.  It is Americans and Europeans hit with the high prices who are experiencing the sanctions.

Ask yourself why with supply shortages, disrupted supply chains from the mindless lockdown policy, and rising inflation the US government drove inflation higher by inhibiting supply with sanctions.  Is the cause of the current inflation Federal Reserve money printing or is the cause the reduction in the supply of goods and services caused by Washington’s Covid protocol and “Russian sanctions”?  

Ask yourself why the Biden regime is more concerned about gangster-state Ukraine than it is about the US inflation rate and the welfare of American citizens.  

Ask yourself if the current high gasoline price is really a result of sanctions preventing oil from coming to market. As far as I can tell, Russia continues to sell oil and natural gas.  It is only the small US purchases of Russian oil that have stopped.  The small amount of oil involved cannot explain the price rise.  Most likely it is the oil companies using the “crisis” narrative to raise prices.

Ask yourself if an interest rate rise by half a percentage point is enough to cause a 1,000 drop in the Dow Jones. 

Presumably, the argument is that a higher interest rate raises costs and drops earnings, thus the stock market’s decline. 

But if higher interest rates raise costs, how are they anti-inflationary? 

Most likely the stock market fell because the Federal Reserve said it is halting its policy of printing money to support stock and bond prices. Instead, the Federal Reserve is going to sell stocks and bonds from its $9 trillion dollar portfolio built by buying stocks and bonds for more than a decade in order to support the New York Banks and Wall Street. 

When Quantitative Easing began, the Federal Reserves portfolio was $800 billion. Today it is 11 times larger. This huge increase in the Federal Reserve’s portfolio explains the long rise in the Dow Jones and the fortunes made on Wall Street.

None of the narratives we are fed are true.  The narratives serve agendas that are not disclosed to the public.  

It is a fiction that “Western democracies” are self-governing.  How can people self-govern when they live in a world governed by false explanations serving hidden agendas?  

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The European Union announced on May 4 their intention to ban Russian oil imports within six months and refined products by the end of the year as part of their latest round of economic sanctions against Moscow. According to Oil Price, a barrel surged to over $110 for Brent and $108 for West Texas Intermediate following the European Commission’s announcement. Therefore, banning Russian oil imports is not only a rather arduous task, but the cost of this decision will be high.

“In the short term it might leave Russian revenues high while implying negative consequences for the EU and the global economy in terms of higher prices – not to mention retaliation risks [by Russia] on natural gas supplies,”Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel warned following the European Commission’s announcement. However, an EU diplomat told EURACTIV on condition of anonymity that “Politically, Europe cannot afford not adopting the sixth package [of economic sanctions].”

The EU will be once again be divided as its rare instance of geopolitical posturing is being challenged by the economic interests of individual member states. Hungary and Slovakia oppose the European Commission’s proposal despite being given until the end of 2023 to phase out Russian oil. At the same time, Bulgaria and Czechia have also asked to be given such an extension.

Sources have said Greece raised objections to another proposal to ban all shipping companies that are EU-owned or have European interests from transferring Russian oil into Europe or elsewhere, something of major importance since the Mediterranean country has the largest mercantile fleet in the world. Although Athens deeply supports all of the EU’s hostile actions against Russia, such as the expulsion of diplomats, imposition of sanctions and even the sending of weapons to Ukraine that could have ended up in the hands of the Azov Battalion that has persecuted the Greek minority, threatening the profits of Greek oligarchs provokes one of the rare instances of opposition from Greece’s ruling New Democracy party.

New Democracy is traditionally the pro-US/neo-liberal party of Greece that has served the interests of the country’s oligarchs, or softly known as magnates or tycoons, particularly the shipowners. Consider that 71% of Greeks in a poll said Greece’s position in the Ukraine War should be neutral, something that was categorically ignored by the Greek government as it strongly backed Ukraine instead. However, the moment that the profits of shipowners arethreatened, and not over the past few months as citizens have dealt with rising energy and food costs, Athens voiced its first concern against the EU’s anti-Russia sanctions.

Theoretically, although Russian oil can be phased out of most of the EU within six months, it will none-the-less be a very difficult task, especially when taking into account the fact that there is currently an energy shortage. In addition, the imposition of such a policy could lead to a build-up of shocks in the EU economy.

The Russian economy will naturally be affected as it will be deprived of a major market. But of higher concern, for European citizens at least, is the realization of the effects that anti-Russia sanctions has even on their own daily lives. And whilst Europeans suffer from rising energy and food costs, Asia could very much become Gazprom’s main export market in five to seven years.

Although this does not offset the loss of the EU as an oil market, shifting most exports to much friendlier Asian markets will lessen the effects of Western sanctions, even if this shift could take several years. Although the problem is the supply price and the development of the corresponding gas transport infrastructure, including in countries like China, it is recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin made a directive to the government to submit a plan by June 1 on how to build related infrastructure. The directive requested a proposal for a large-scale development of a gas pipeline system in Eastern Siberia, aimed at directing the flow of gas exports to the Chinese market.

China currently consumes about 350 billion cubic meters of gas per year, while the majority of the energy balance (about 70%) remains coal. Demand for gas in China is expected to grow to 450-480 billion cubic meters by 2025 andin the next 10 years, as coal is phased out, perhaps even nearly one trillion cubic meters of gas per year.

Currently, Russian gas supplies to China arrive through the “Power of Siberia” pipeline. Deliveries along this route began at the end of 2019 and in 2020 reached 4.1 billion cubic meters. It is expected that the annual supply volume will gradually increase until it reaches its capacity of 38 billion cubic meters in 2025. Taking into account the new agreement signed in February, the total gas capacity supplied to China via the Far Eastern pipeline could reach 48 billion cubic meters per year.

In this way, although Russia will be hurt in the short term by losing the European market for its oil, this action will only propel the flow of Russian energy eastward to an Asia that is continuously increasing its demand. Equally of interest is that Europe persistently promises that sanctions against Russia cannot hurt European citizens in equal measure, but weaning off Russian oil within a six-month period will only increase the likelihood of such an outcome.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Electoral tensions are growing in Brazil. On the one hand, Jair Bolsonaro, who began his government with a stance of automatic alignment with the US, now appears to be the candidate with the most “neutral” foreign policy agenda, while, on the other hand, Lula, who is known for having maintained a strategy of regional integration and intra-BRICS cooperation during his terms, now seems to be the option desired by the globalist and pro-Western elites. Recently, US Undersecretary of Political Affairs Victoria Nuland visited Brazil and held conferences in which she advised Brazilians to trust their own electoral system. Previously, CIA agents had already made this same statement about electoral confidence, which is supported and replicated by the Brazilian media. Considering that the hegemonic Brazilian press supports Lula, Bolsonaro’s supporters interpret this clamor for “confidence” as a sign that there will be electoral fraud.

On April 25, Victoria Nuland arrived in Brazil to participate in a business event called “U.S.-Brazil High Level Dialogue 2022: Economic Growth & Prosperity”, where the undersecretary was committed to talking to “young Brazilian entrepreneurs”.

Her aim was supposedly to align cooperation projects based on the main contemporary global demands, such as energy, sustainability, COVID-19, among others. What surprised many experts who followed the event was the fact that Nuland had published photos on her social networks with some of the supposed “young Brazilian entrepreneurs” and none of them was recognized as a prominent professional in the business area. It is speculated that the visit was intended only to establish concrete dialogues with some specific representatives of the Brazilian political elite to pressure them to serve American interests, with the event serving only as a “disguise”.

For example, recently, the Brazilian Minister of Mines and Energy, Bento Costa, had already claimed to have received “guidelines” from the White House, for Brazil to maximize its oil production, focusing on exports to European countries. The aim is to make the South American country an alternative to Russian oil, making Brazil an important strategic partner for the world order project desired by Washington. This seems to have been, finally, one of the points of discussion between Nuland and the Brazilians, with a clear focus on increasing the pressure for Brasília to resume a policy of automatic alignment.

However, what drew the most attention was a statement by Nuland saying that she has “confidence” in the Brazilian electoral system and affirming that Brazilians should do the same. The undersecretary stated that the US fully trusts the electronic voting system used in Brazil and that Brazilian authorities should not suspect it. Obviously, her message was indirectly addressed to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, who have repeatedly expressed their suspicions about the existence of fraud in the electronic vote counting and have tried unsuccessfully to recover the printed vote system.

It is also curious to note that Nuland’s speech was not an isolated event. CIA Director William Burns told senior Brazilian officials in late 2021 that President Jair Bolsonaro should stop doubting the country’s electoral system before the October 2022 elections, expressing full US support for the permanence of the electronic vote counting procedure. The matter becomes even more controversial when we mention the fact that electronic counting in Brazil is operated exclusively by an American company, Oracle Corporation, which has ties to the CIA according to several reports. Since 1996, when electronic voting was adopted by the Brazilian government, the Electoral Court has ensured that Oracle is the official service provider for Brasília, which explains at least in part why US authorities seem so confident in this system.

In parallel with all this, the opposition candidate, ex-president Lula, seems to be gaining more and more notoriety among Americans and Europeans. After promising the EU a participation in the “governance” of the Amazon and condemning the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Lula became the preferred candidate of globalist elites for this year’s electoral dispute, making the cover of Time Magazine last month. The Brazilian hegemonic media, which was enthusiastic about the American support for the electoral system and has been campaigning strongly for electronic voting, also supports Lula, who now seems to bring together all the attributes of the globalist agenda, being aligned with green capitalism and sanctions against Russia.

For Bolsonaro’s supporters, the fact that Nuland visited Brazil, refused to meet the president, and made notes about the need to trust local electoral institutions is a clear sign that there will be fraud, controlled by the American political elite – which has become an opponent of Bolsonaro since the Biden’s inauguration – for Lula to be elected. Saying this may sound exaggerated, but considering Nuland’s previous actions, being one of the responsible for mediating the coup in Kiev, having delivered 5 billion dollars to Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions, it does not seem so far from reality.

Since 2020, everything has been reversed in the Brazilian political scenario: Lula has become an ally of international elites against BRICS partners and Bolsonaro has been forced to adopt a more neutral foreign policy due to Biden’s refusal to cooperate with him. Regardless of which side wins, tensions will continue: if Lula wins, Bolsonaro will allege fraud; if Bolsonaro wins, the global elites who support Lula will be able to try some kind of lawfare operation, considering that the Supreme and Electoral Courts also support Lula. Instability is the only certainty for the future.

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The EU Commission’s health division has launched a new public consultation on the new wave of genetically modified plants (new GMOs), moving ahead with far reaching deregulation plans.

With this consultation, the EU Commission is yet again widely following the wish list of some agribusiness lobby groups as nearly all the questions are framed in a way to support the Commission’s deregulation plans. Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides is tragically giving credit to agribusiness’ false promise that new GMOs – currently in the research pipeline stage –  would be a useful tool for the  transformation of food systems towards sustainability.

EU GMO safety and labelling laws currently also apply to these new genomic or breeding techniques. Exempting them would keep farmers and consumers in the dark as to whether their crops and food are GMOs or not, and would lead to the release of untested and fossil fuel dependent GMOs into the environment.

Mute Schimpf, food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said:

“The debate on the deregulation of new GMO is a flagrant attempt to divert time, money and attention away from truly sustainable and already-proven solutions like agroecology. We don’t have time to waste with empty and dangerous promises that would only have us more dependent on dirty fossil fuels. Our message to the Commission is clear: stop pushing for the deregulation of new GMOs and keep them strictly labelled and safety checked.”

Friends of the Earth Europe assessed the content presented in the new consultation launched by the Commission.

What is positive:

• The European Commission asks if the new generation of GMOs should be kept under the current legal framework for GMOs, meaning that labelling, pre-market authorisation and safety checks would still be applied to them. This is what more than 69.000 citizens demanded during the 4-week consultation that took place last autumn.

Examples of the agribusiness spin on the consultation:

• The Commission asks which new GMO traits are most relevant for contributing to sustainability, but these new GM plants are still in the research pipeline. How is it possible to assess the sustainability of a plant that doesn’t exist yet?
  • What it should have done: Make its communication and consultation evidence based. Sustainability claims on new GMOs are based on promised by big biotech developers, but various products in the research pipeline have never materialised. In the case they would be ready for marketing, they can still fail to meet farmers’ interests.
  • Why it’s wrong:  Farming practices such as agroecology and organic present long term evidence of contributing to a drastic pesticide and GHG emission cut, building crop resilience and stabilising yields. These are the farming systems that will help achieve the goals of the of Farm to Fork Strategy.
•  The EU Commission asks if the (claimed) sustainability of new GM plants should be used for food labelling. However, there is no EU wide definition yet of what constitutes sustainable food systems and GM plants are in any case part of a highly industrial way of farming.
  • What it should have done: Again, it should have make its consultation evidence based and it should not prejudge the outcomes of other legislative processes on sustainable food systems.
  • Why it’s wrong: One plant characteristic cannot make a food system sustainable. Sustainable food systems require a holistic approach taking into account climate resilience, biodiversity benefits and local adaptation. This goes against two decades of records showing pesticide increase linked to GMOs.
• The EU Commission claims that certain new GMO plants are as safe as conventionally- bred plants.
  • What it should have done: Ask what new risks for the environment and human health can occur from new GMOs.
  • Why it’s wrong: Such impacts should be assessed in this type of consultation as described in the Commission’s own toolbox (the Better Regulation toolbox set standards for consultation and Impact Assessment for Commission staff, such as tool 16 identifying policy option, tool 32 assessing health impacts, tool 36 assessing environmental impact).

Next steps:

• The Consultation runs until 22 July 2022 and is the main tool for stakeholders to feed in their input.
• In parallel, meetings with national officials are planned in May 2022.
• The Consultation is also expected to be discussed among farm or environment ministers in an upcoming Council meeting.
• The EU Commission will finalise the Impact Assessment report by the end of the year.
• If accepted by the EU Commission, a new draft law for deregulating new GMO plants is to be published by summer 2023.

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Texaco operations in Ecuador from 1962 to 1994 dumped 70 billion litres of “wastewater”, heavily contaminated with oil and other chemicals, into the Amazon rainforest, plus over 650,000 barrels of crude oil. They polluted over 800,000 hectares.

It is one of the worst ecological disasters in history — 30 times greater than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and 85 times greater than the Gulf of Mexico spill by British Petroleum (BP) in 2010. During the supposed clean up in the provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana, before it left Ecuador, Texaco hid over a thousand different swamps of toxic waste throughout the rainforests, dumping a layer of topsoil over them.

Texaco was taken over by Chevron in 2000. Chevron claims that Texaco only ever extracted $490 million in profit from Ecuador over 30 years. The accounting of that is hotly contested by the Amazon Defense Coalition which claims Texaco made $30 billion profit. One thing for sure is that even the Chevron figure is at historic values, not real terms, and would be worth vastly more today.

The cost of the pollution to the inhabitants of the Amazon is incalculable in simple monetary terms, as is the cost of the environmental catastrophe to the entire world. However in the mid 1990’s Ecuador was firmly under the United States heel and – as Chevron’s legal team assert – in 1995 the Government of Ecuador was persuaded to sign a ludicrous clean-up agreement with Texaco as it left the country, releasing it from all legal obligations at a cost of just US $40 million.

Yes, that really is just $40 million. Compare that to the $61.6 billion that BP paid out for the almost 100 times smaller Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the corrupt, US controlled, government of Ecuadorean President Jamil Mahuad signed a final release relieving Texaco for all liability from economic pollution. That release has now been upheld by the Court of International Arbitration in the Hague.

How this was achieved by Chevron/Texaco is well explained in a book I highly recommend, a copy of which was sent to me in prison by a supporter:

The Misery of International Law by Linarelli, Salomon and Sornarajah (Oxford University Press 2018).

A Chevron lobbyist in 2008 said that “we can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this”. At the time of this writing, Chevron is the fourth largest company headquartered in the United States, operating in over one hundred countries, with gross revenues twice that of Ecuador’s GDP. When Texaco began operations in Ecuador in 1964, the country was unstable and extremely poor, with bananas as its main export. One lawyer who works for Oxfam had argued that “Texaco ran the country for twenty years. They had the US Embassy in their pocket. They had the military. Politically, there was no way that Texaco was going to be held accountable in Ecuador.” At the time Ecuador needed Texaco’s expertise and technology if it was to extract the oil. The lawsuit alleged that Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the water system in the region, along with 17 billion gallons of crude oil, and left 916 clearly visible unlined toxic waste pits full of black sludge throughout the region. At the time, Texaco’s operations did not violate Ecuadorean law. Ecuador had no real environmental law at the time. While Chevron vigorously contests the facts, the evidence shows that Texaco failed to use environmentally sustainable technologies in its operations in Ecuador. As the former Ecuador Ambassador to the United States Nathalie Cely has put it: “When Texaco left Ecuador, significant profits in hand, it left unprecedented damage to the environment in its wake and no compensation to those affected.”

In my writing I always try to add value when I can by giving my own experience where relevant, and the situation described here reminds me precisely of the impunity with which Shell acted in Nigeria in their similarly massive pollution of the Niger Delta. I witnessed this close up when I was Second Secretary at the British High Commission in Lagos from 1986 to 1990. My brief was “Agriculture and Water Resources” and I therefore encountered the environmental devastation at first hand.

From my privileged diplomatic position I also saw the political power wielded by Shell in Nigeria through corruption and bribery, and I absolutely recognise the description given above of Texaco in Ecuador: “They had the US Embassy in their pocket”. In Nigeria, Shell had the British High Commission in their pocket, throughout decades in which all bar one of Nigeria’s military dictators was trained at Sandhurst, and the exception went to another British military college.

The Chairman and MD of Shell Nigeria, Brian Lavers, was treated as a deity and lived a life of extraordinary power and luxury. The British High Commissioner, Sir Martin Ewans, himself a very haughty man, deferred routinely to Lavers. I recall one occasion when the diplomatic staff were all instructed to attend a private briefing by Lavers in the High Commission. He made some dismissive and complacent comments about the “fuss” over pollution. I, a rather diffident and nervous young man on my first diplomatic assignment, very respectfully queried him on something I knew from direct observation to be untrue. I got a public ticking off from the High Commissioner followed by a massive private bollocking from my boss, and was later told that Shell made a complaint against me to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

So, in brief, I know of what they speak. I should add that I am still extremely upset by all of this because of the subsequent execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, whom I knew, and other indigenous environmental activists, for which I hold Shell in part culpable. 35 years since I got carpeted for raising the shocking effects, and 25 years since the executions shocked the world, Shell’s devastation of the Niger Delta continues. (see Footnote).

Image on the right: Steven Donziger (Source: Amnesty International)

29 years ago, in 1993, Steven Donziger, a New York lawyer, visited Ecuador and saw communities who lived their lives with their bare feet and hands permanently covered in oil sludge and other pollutants, whose agriculture was ruined and who suffered high levels of mortality and birth defects. He started a class action against Texaco in the United States, representing over 30,000 local people. Texaco, confident that they had control of Ecuador, requested the US court to rule that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. It also set about obtaining the agreement from the Government of Ecuador to cancel any liability. In 2002 the New York court finally agreed with Texaco (now Chevron) that is had no jurisdiction and the case moved to Ecuador, much to Chevron’s delight.

What Chevron had not bargained for was that corrupt US control of Ecuador might loosen. In 2007 left wing Rafael Correa became President and Chevron’s previously total impunity in the country dissolved. In 2011 Donziger and his team won an award of $18 billion in compensation for the local population from a provincial Ecuadorean court, later reduced to $9.5 billion by the Supreme Court of Ecuador.

Chevron now did two things. Firstly, it invoked the bribery obtained agreements of 1995 and 1998 limiting its liability to the paltry $40 million clean-up operation, and appealed to the international tribunals specified in those agreements. Chevron succeeded, as was fairly certain to happen. The agreements had indeed been signed and did relieve Texaco/Chevron of any liability.

This brings us into precisely the same area as Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements and the ability of huge multinationals to bully or bribe poorer states into signing away their sovereign authority in favour of judgement, not by a multilateral state institution like the International Court of Justice, but of a commercial tribunal formed of western corporate lawyers of strong neo-conservative ideology.

Western governments put enormous pressure on developing countries to succumb to such jurisdiction, including making it a condition of aid flows. The system is so unfair on developing countries that even Hillary Clinton inveighed against it, before she started fund-raising for her Presidential bid.

Big oil apologists are cock-a-hoop that the disgraceful, well-feathered right wing jurists of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague gave Chevron a judgement that their bribed 1998 “Get out of jail free” card did indeed say “Get out of jail free”. This case in itself damns the arbitration system. The truth is, of course, that no developing country has ever initiated surrendering its sovereignty to such a tribunal, and it is strongly in the institutional and financial interest of the tribunal and its members to find in favour of the big western corporations on which their very existence thus depends.

The second thing that Chevron did was to attempt to destroy Steven Donziger personally. In 2011 they filed a suit in New York under the anti-mob Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act, arguing that in Ecuador Donziger had bribed a judge, bribed witnesses and plaintiffs, ghost-written the original judgement and subverted expert witnesses.

The case against Donziger now becomes an incredible tale of corrupt judges in both Ecuador and the United States, of whom the most corrupt of all is US District Judge Lewis A Kaplan. It is important to note that the case against Donziger came before Kaplan as a civil case, not a criminal case. Chevron were seeking an injunction to stop Donziger acting further against them. Originally they were suing Donziger for $60 billion in damages, but that was dropped because it would have meant Donziger had a jury. By merely seeking an injunction, Chevron could ensure that Kaplan was unconstrained.

What happened next beggars belief. Kaplan made a ruling setting aside the judgement of the Ecuadorean court on the grounds it was based on racketeering, coercion and bribery. It should be recalled that, at Chevron’s insistence, the New York District Court had nine years earlier ruled it had no jurisdiction over the case, and that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. Kaplan now ruled the opposite; both times Chevron got what they wanted.

So who is Kaplan? From 1970 to 1994 he was in private practice, representing in particular the interests of tobacco companies including Philip Morris – itself, I would argue, sufficient sign of moral bankruptcy. He was also the “trusty” judge the federal government used to rule that years of detention and torture in Guantanamo Bay did not affect prosecutions of detainees there. On the plus side, Kaplan did allow Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew to go ahead; but then Andrew is not a US state or commercial interest.

The only testimony of bribery and corruption which Kaplan heard came from a single source, Ecuadorean judge Alberto Guerra. He claimed he was bribed to support the local plaintiff’s case against Chevron and to ghost write the judgement with Donziger for the trial judge. No other evidence of racketeering or bribery was given before Kaplan.

Guerra was extremely unconvincing in court. In his judgement for Chevron Kaplan stated that:

“Guerra on many occasions has acted deceitfully and broken the law […] but that does not necessarily mean that it should be disregarded wholesale…evidence leads to one conclusion: Guerra told the truth regarding the bribe and the essential fact as to who wrote the Judgment.”

Guerra produced no corroboration of his story. He could not, for example, show any draft of, or work on, the judgement he had allegedly ghostwritten with Donziger. A forensic search of Donziger’s laptop found nothing either. The reason for this was to become clear when Guerra admitted, before the International Court of Arbitration, that he had invented the whole story.

Not only had Guerra invented the whole story, but he had in fact been bribed by Chevron with a large sum for his testimony. Guerra admitted that he had invented the story to Chevron of Donziger offering to buy him for $300,000, simply to raise the price which Chevron would pay him. Before giving evidence in the USA, Guerra spent 51 days being coached on his evidence by Chevron’s lawyers – which Kaplan permitted as it was a civil not a criminal case.

In 2016 the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kaplan’s verdict for Chevron, on the grounds that Guerra’s evidence had been properly given in a US court, and it had not been recanted in any formal evidence to a US court; while Donziger could not prove, without Guerra’s testimony in court, that Guerra had been paid by Chevron.

Image below is from MYND: SAMSETT / STUNDIN

Followers of the Assange case will of course note the parallels with Siggi Thordarson, the convicted fraudster who was paid by the CIA to give evidence against Assange that is central to the “hacking” charges under the Espionage Act, but whose open admission that he lied in his testimony the English High Court refused to hear as he has not formally withdrawn his evidence in court.

In the interests of scrupulous honesty, I should note that Chevron seem to me to have one good legal point. There was unlawful coordination between one technical expert in the case in Ecuador and Donziger’s legal team. This was motivated by genuine environmental concern and goodwill, and not by bribery, but was nevertheless unwise. I do not however believe that any reasonable judge would find this in itself sufficient to dismiss the case, given the great weight of other evidence on the pollution and its effects.

Kaplan now set out, at Chevron’s behest, to destroy Donziger as an individual. Extraordinarily in a civil case, Kaplan ruled that Donziger must turn over all of his phones, laptops and communications devices to Chevron, so they could investigate his dealings with others over the Ecuadorean case.

Donziger of course refused on the grounds that he was an attorney representing the local plaintiffs in the case, and the devices held numerous communications covered by attorney-client privilege. Kaplan ruled that the clients were not in US jurisdiction so attorney-client privilege did not apply. He then sought to institute a criminal prosecution of Donziger for contempt of court for refusing to obey his order to hand them over to Chevron.

It should be noted that by this stage Rafael Correa had retired as President of Ecuador as decreed by the constitution, and the CIA was again firmly in control through the traitorous President Lenin Moreno. Not only was Donziger entitled on absolute grounds to refuse to hand over attorney-client communication, there was now a real danger the indigenous people and other locals involved in the case might be targeted for reprisals in Ecuador by Moreno and the CIA.

There is again a startling resonance with the Assange case. When Moreno removed Assange’s diplomatic immunity, and Assange was grabbed from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and imprisoned, all of Assange’s papers were seized by the Ecuadorean government and shipped back to Quito, where they all were handed over to the CIA. These specifically included thousands of documents relating to Assange’s defence against extradition, documents which were covered by attorney-client privilege. Again, when dealing with an “enemy of the state” like Assange or Donziger, the judges decided that this did not matter.

Let me again interpolate some personal experience. Judge Kaplan now decided to transform Chevron’s civil case against Donziger into an explicitly criminal case of contempt of court. In Scotland and throughout the UK, Kaplan could simply have declared Donziger guilty of violating his own Order and sent him to jail, precisely as judge Lady Dorrian did to me. But in the United States – as in every other democracy outside the UK – a judge cannot arbitrarily decide on a violation of their own order.

Kaplan therefore referred Donziger’s “contempt” to the federal prosecutors of the Southern District of New York. But they declined to prosecute. Here we had a civil case brought by Chevron over a decision by an Ecuadorean court which the US courts had insisted had jurisdiction, but which Kaplan had repatriated, found for Chevron on the basis of extremely dodgy evidence, and now turned into the criminal trial of an environmental activist lawyer based on a complete repudiation of attorney-client privilege. Federal prosecutors viewed none of this as valid.

So Kaplan now did something for which nobody can provide a convincing precedent. In 2020 he appointed private legal prosecutors, paid for by his court, to bring the criminal case against Donziger which the state prosecutors had declined to bring. Kaplan had personal links to the firm involved, Seward and Kissel, who had been acting for Chevron in various matters less than two years previously. During the prosecution process, Seward and Kissel as prosecutors were in constant contact with Chevron’s avowed lead lawyers, Gibson Dunn and Crutcher, over the case.

For all these reasons the Donziger case has been described as the first private criminal prosecution by a corporation in US history. Chevron’s ability to control the entire judicial and legal process has been terrifying. Every public affairs NGO you can think of, not in the pockets of big oil and climate change denial, has raised serious concerns about the case.

Contrary to convention, though not contrary to law, Kaplan also personally appointed the judge to hear the case for criminal breach of his order, rather than leaving it to the court system. His nominee, Judge Loretta Preska, committed Donziger to house arrest pending trial. On October 21 2021 she sentenced Donziger to six months in prison; the maximum for contempt of court in the USA (I was sentenced to 8 months in Scotland). After 45 days Donziger was released from prison due to Covid, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. In total, before and after trial, Donziger spent 993 days in detention. He was released two days ago.

Donziger has been disbarred as a lawyer. Chevron have a lien on his home and all his assets for compensation. They have paid nothing to the victims of their pollution of the Amazon.

I really cannot think of any individual story that better incorporates so many aspects of the dreadful corruption of modern western society. We are all, in a sense, the prisoners of corporations which dictate the terms on which we live, work and share knowledge. Justice against the powerful appears impossible. It is profoundly disturbing, and I recommend everyone to take a few minutes to reflect about the full meaning of the Donziger story in all its many tangents.

There is a good interview with Steve Donziger, which understandably concentrates on the personal effect upon him, here.

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Featured image: Crude contaminates the Aguarico 4 oil pit, an open pool abandoned by Texaco after 6 years of production and never remediated. (Source: Craig Murray)

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Residents of Iwakuni, which hosts one of the largest US foreign bases, recently announced that they will file a lawsuit that could have wider implications for foreign military bases in Japan

A group of residents of the city of Iwakuni, in the Yamaguchi Prefecture, announced plans to use a lawsuit to demand a ban on military aircraft flights in the city on May 2. Residents have long complained of noise pollution from both Japanese and US aircrafts in the city’s military base, and have sought a ban on their activities as well as damages. The group is expected to file the lawsuit at the Yamaguchi District Court later in the month.

Once filed, the lawsuit will be the second of its kind to emerge from Iwakuni. According to reports, the same group of residents were plaintiffs or supporters of an earlier lawsuit in 2009 that won JPY 735 million (USD 5.66 million) in damages for the noise pollution. The earlier lawsuit failed to win the ban on military aircrafts that the petitioner had also demanded.

This comes just days after the Japanese government made promises to redistribute US military infrastructure in Japan away from the island of Okinawa. On April 28, on the 70th anniversary of the San Francisco Treaty taking effect, Japan’s House of Representatives passed a resolution to reduce Okinawa’s burden of hosting US military bases.

The resolution, which also comes ahead of the 50th anniversary of Okinawa’s accession to Japan in 1972 on May 15, was shortly followed by promises by prime minister Fumio Kishida to “make tangible progress in reducing [Okinawa’s] base-hosting burden”.

Despite the promises, the proposed lawsuit by Iwakuni residents has the potential of highlighting the pitfalls of moving US bases to other parts of Japan. Iwakuni currently houses one of the largest US foreign air bases in East Asia in terms of number of aircrafts.

In 2018, the air base had doubled the number of aircrafts after 60 planes were relocated from Naval Air Facility Atsugi in the Kanagawa prefecture. The military bases around the city are seen as one of the facilities with potential for expansion if the Japanese government implements the proposed base redistribution plans.

The lawsuit highlights the wider discontent against the continued US military presence in Japan. A recent survey conducted by Kyodo News found that while most of the respondents—79%—believe that Okinawa’s disproportionately large burden of hosting the US military was unfair and 58% supported calls to redistribute the bases, over 69% were opposed to moving the bases near their place of residence.

From 1945 to 1972, Okinawa was under military occupation by the United States, when the US held the Ryukyu Islands. Despite Okinawa being back under Japanese sovereignty, the US continues to maintain its extensive military presence in the islands. Left-wing parties like the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), as well as peace advocates and movements based in the island have for long demanded complete withdrawal of the US military.

Over the past decade the movement against US bases has grown in Japan, with Okinawa at the epicenter. Earlier this year, the bases came under further scrutiny after disproportionately large COVID-19 outbreaks were reported in Okinawa, which reported over a fifth of new cases despite contributing less than one percent of the national population, along with other locations hosting large US bases.

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Featured image: Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa is one of the largest US foreign air bases. The island of Okinawa hosts a bulk of US military stationed in Japan and has witnessed popular unrest over this issue in recent times. (Source: Peoples Dispatch)

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A Baloch suicide bombing targeting Chinese workers in Karachi comes a mere month after the US-backed ousting of PM Imran Khan. Pakistan is a critical BRI hub in Beijing’s vast Eurasian connectivity project, and it looks like CPEC is the ultimate target of this disruption.

This is the concise story of how a suicide bombing may carry the potential to subvert the whole, ongoing, complex process of Eurasia integration.

Recently, the Balochistan Liberation Movement (BLA) had released an ISIS-influenced video threatening “Chinese officials and installations” in Pakistan’s vast province.

Yet what actually happened in late April was a suicide bombing outside of the University of Karachi’s Confucius Institute – not Balochistan – and targeting Chinese teachers, not “officials and installations.”

The suicide bomber was a woman, Shaari Baloch, alias Bramsh, who detonated her vest just as a van carrying Institute staff members approached the entrance. The attack was claimed by the BLA’s Majeed Brigade, which stressed that this was the first time they used a female suicide bomber.

Shaari Baloch was a schoolteacher with a Zoology degree, enrolled to pursue a second Master’s degree, married to a dentist and professor at Makran Medical College in her hometown of Turbat, in southern Balochistan. Her three brothers include a doctor, a deputy director at a government-funded project, and a civil servant.

So Shaari Baloch was far from being a mere destitute online-indoctrinated Salafi-jihadi.

The Pakistani Foreign Office had to stress the obvious: this was a “direct attack on the Pakistan-China friendship and ongoing cooperation,” always qualified, by both sides, as “iron brothers.” Pakistan is an absolutely key node of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to connect the Eurasian landmass.

This was no standard terrorist attack. Its reverberations are immense – not only in one of Pakistan’s provinces and South Asia regionally, but for the whole of Eurasia. It may be a harbinger of serious turbulence ahead.

Shaari Baloch’s act of desperation should be seen, to start with, as the embodiment of a deep-seated Baloch alienation felt by the educated middle classes, from lawyers and traders to students, constantly permeating the complex relationship with a distant Islamabad. A significant part of the puzzle is that 26 Pakistani intel agencies never saw it coming.

Baloch leaders instantly made the point that the best possible reaction would be to call a Grand Jirga – modeled on the Shahi Jirga practiced at the time of the partition of the subcontinent – that would unite all tribal elders to address the most pressing local grievances.

Round up the usual suspects

Balochistan, geostrategically, is as valuable as rare earth minerals: an immense desert positioned east of Iran, south of Afghanistan, and boasting three Arabian Sea ports, including Gwadar, practically at the mouth of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Comprising nearly 48 percent of Pakistan’s area, Balochistan is rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, produces more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, and sparsely populated. The Baloch account for the majority of the population, followed by Pashtuns. Quetta, the large provincial capital, for years was considered Taliban Central by the Pentagon.

Gwadar, the port built by China on the southwestern Balochistan coast of the Arabian Sea – directly across from Oman – is the absolute key node of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and doubles as the essential link in a never-ending pipeline saga. The Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline, previously known as the “peace pipeline,” with plans to cross from Iranian to Pakistani Balochistan (India still has not made up its mind) is absolute anathema to Washington since the George W. Bush era.

CPEC remains an endless source of controversy even inside Pakistan. Beyond all the links planned between Gwadar and Xinjiang by the year 2030, most of this ambitious connectivity corridor deals with energy, industrial zones and road and rail projects in different parts of the country – an overall improvement of its lagging infrastructure. The Chinese, for years, have quipped that in fact “all of Pakistan is a corridor.”

The US security establishment, predictably, has been planning for years to instrumentalize an insurgency in Balochistan to – what else – “disrupt” first the possibility of an energy pipeline from Gwadar to Xinjiang, and then the overall CPEC project. Usual suspects like the US’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are very much present in Balochistan. WikiLeaks had revealed a great deal of the game back in 2015.

A Carnegie Institute report noted how “many Baloch nationalist leaders now come from the urbanized districts of Kech, Panjgur, and Gwadar (and to a lesser extent from Quetta, Khuzdar, Turbat, Kharan, and Lasbela). They are well connected to Karachi and Gulf cities, where tribal structures are non-existent. In fact, while there is violence all over the province, the insurgency seems to concentrate mainly in these urbanized areas.”

Suicide bomber Shaari Baloch came from Turbat, the province’s second largest city, where the BLA is very much active. From the point of view of the usual suspects, these are choice assets, especially after the death of important tribal leaders such as Akbar Bugti. The report duly noted how “the educated and middle-class Baloch youth are in the forefront” of the insurgency.

The anti-China instrumentalization of the BLA also ties in with the regime-change parliament operation in Islamabad that recently deposed former prime minister Imran Khan, who was always a fierce adversary of the American “Forever War” in Afghanistan. Khan resolutely denied Pakistan’s use in “over the horizon” US military ops: that was one of the key reasons for him to be ousted.

Now, with a pliant, Washington-approved, new regime in town, a miracle has just happened: the Pentagon is about to clinch a formal agreement with Islamabad to use Pakistani airspace to – what else – keep interfering in Afghanistan.

Beijing, as well as other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), won’t be amused. Only weeks before the white coup, Khan had met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and once again underscored how Pakistan and China are “iron brothers.”

Imran Khan was a serious thorn in the side of the west because he kept impressing on Pakistanis that the Forever War in Afghanistan was militarily unwinnable. He knew how all the proxies – including the BLA – that destabilized both Afghanistan and Pakistan for decades were, and continue to be, part of US covert operations.

Not an Iran-India plot

Balochistan is as deeply tribal as the Pashtun tribal areas. Local tribal chiefs can be as ultra-conservative as Islamabad is neglectful (and they are not exactly paragons of human rights either). Most tribes though bow to Islamabad’s authority – except, first and foremost, the Bugti.

And then there’s the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which both Washington and London used to brand as a terrorist group, and then forgot about it. The BLA operated for years out of Kandahar in Afghanistan (only two hours away from Quetta), and already in the previous decade – simultaneous to the announcement of the New Silk Roads and CPEC – stressed it was getting ready to attack non-Balochis (code for the government in Islamabad as well as Chinese foreigners).

Balochis are inclined to consider the BLA as a resistance group. But Islamabad has always denied it, saying their support is not beyond 10 percent of the provincial population.

An ample controversy has raged in Pakistan for years on whether the BLA was totally hijacked by the CIA, the MI6 and the Mossad. During a 2006 visit to Iran, I was prevented from going to the Sistan-Balochistan province in southeast Iran because, according to Tehran’s version, infiltrated CIA from Pakistani Balochistan were involved in covert, cross-border attacks. It was no secret to anyone in the region that since 9/11 the US virtually controlled the Baloch air bases in Dalbandin and Panjgur.

In October 2001, while waiting for an opening to cross to Kandahar from Quetta, I spent quite some time with a number of BLA associates and sympathizers. They described themselves as “progressive, nationalist, anti-imperialist” (and that would make them difficult to be co-opted by the US). They were heavily critical of “Punjabi chauvinism,” and always insisted the region’s resources belong to Balochis first; that was their rationale for attacks on gas pipelines.

Stressing an atrocious, provincial literacy rate of only 16 percent (“It’s government policy to keep Balochistan backward”), they resented the fact that most people still lacked drinking water. They claimed support from at least 70 percent of the Baloch population (“Whenever the BLA fires a rocket, it’s the talk of the bazaars”). They also claimed to be united, and in coordination with Iranian Balochis. And they insisted that “Pakistan had turned Balochistan into a US cantonment, which affected a lot the relationship between the Afghan and Baloch peoples.”

Two decades later, and after the whole ISIS saga in Syria and Iraq, it’s a completely different story. BLA sympathizers may still be prepared to remain within a Pakistani confederation, although with infinitely more autonomy. But now they seem to be willing to use western imperial help to strike not only at the central government in Islamabad, but also at the “near abroad” foreign profiteer (China).

After the Karachi suicide bombing, a narrative started to emerge in some Pakistani circles that Iran and India were in cahoots to destabilize Balochistan.

That makes absolutely no sense. Both Tehran and Islamabad are tightly linked to Beijing through several nodes of the New Silk Roads. Iran would draw less than zero benefit to collude with India to destabilize an area that borders Afghanistan, especially when the SCO is fully engaged in incorporating Kabul into the Eurasia integration process. Moreover, the IPI has its best chances ever to come to fruition in the near future, consolidating an umbilical cord from Southwest Asia to South Asia.

During the late years of Barack Obama’s administration, the BLA, though still a fringe group with a political wing and a military wing, was regrouping and rearming, while the chief minister of Balochistan, Nawab Raisani, was suspected of being a CIA asset (there was no conclusive proof).

Already at the time, the fear in Islamabad was that the government had taken its eye off the Balochistan ball – and that the BLA was about to be effectively used by the US for balkanization purposes. That seems to be the picture right now. Yet the heart of the matter – glaringly expressed by the Karachi suicide bombing – is that Islamabad still remains impervious to the key Baloch grievance: we want to profit from our natural wealth, and we want autonomy.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

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James Mitchell, one of a pair of psychologists paid $81 million to oversee the CIA’s interrogation of suspected terrorists, said detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri “liked” being in a box used to torture him.

One of the psychologists paid tens of millions of dollars by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to oversee the interrogation of prisoners in the so-called War on Terror provided new details on Monday about the torture of a Guantánamo Bay detainee at CIA “black site” in Thailand.

The New York Times reports James E. Mitchell told a military judge during a pretrial hearing at Guantánamo that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri—a Saudi national facing possible execution for allegedly masterminding the deadly 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen—broke quickly under torture and became so obedient that he would crawl into a cramped confinement box before guards ordered him to do so.

Initially, guards had to force al-Nashiri into the box. But according to Mitchell, the prisoner “liked being in the box” and would “get in and close it himself.”

Annie W. Morgan, a former Air Force defense attorney who is a member of al-Nashiri’s legal team, told the Times that when she heard Mitchell’s testimony,

“I got the image of crate-training a dog and became nauseous.”

“That was the goal of the program, to create a sense of learned helplessness and to become completely dependent upon and submissive to his captors,” she added, referencing a tactic taught in U.S. torture programs and documents dating back to the 1950s.

Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst who advocates Guantánamo’s closure, tweeted, “Imagine the hell Mr. Nashiri experienced outside of that box that made him prefer being inside it.”

All of these guys belong in prison: Mitchell described his treatment of the defendant — to condition him to answer questions in interrogation — as having been strictly monitored by C.I.A. doctors and authorized by Justice Department lawyers. https://t.co/WcIKbl8Yud

— Hussein Ibish (@Ibishblog) May 4, 2022

Al-Nashiri’s attorneys—who argue that evidence in the case is tainted by torture—questioned Mitchell about what happened at the Thailand black site in November 2002, when former CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw the secret prison.

The psychologist’s testimony is meant to shed light on abuse that may have been recorded on scores of videotapes documenting detainee torture that were later destroyed at the behest of then-CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez, who claimed in his memoir that Haspel drafted the 2005 cable ordering the move.

Mitchell—who along with fellow psychologist John “Bruce” Jessen was paid $81 million by the CIA to develop and supervise an interrogation regimen for terrorism suspects—described how the diminutive al-Nashiri was so scrawny that guards stopped subjecting him to the interrupted drowning torture commonly called waterboarding for fear the prisoner might be seriously hurt.

In addition to waterboarding and other approved torture techniques, a declassified 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report revealed how interrogators threatened to sexually assault al-Nashiri’s mother, and how he was terrorized with a power drill and raped with a garden hose in a practice known as rectal hydration that was administered to Guantánamo prisoners who refused to eat or drink.

An image drawn by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, shows how the C.I.A. applied an approved torture technique called “cramped confinement.” NYTimes caption…
that’s right: *an approved torture technique*https://t.co/TatFheWpzP pic.twitter.com/Enq6tUGsU4

— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) December 5, 2019

Mitchell told the court that:

• One interrogator used a belt to strap al-Nashiri’s arms behind his back and lift him up from behind to his tiptoes. Mitchell said he objected after the prisoner howled in pain, fearing his shoulders would be dislocated. The torture continued.
• Guards forced the shackled prisoner onto his knees then bent him backward, with a broomstick placed behind his knees.
• In a bid to train al-Nashiri to call him “sir,” the chief interrogator gave him a cold bath before scraping a stiff-bristled brush from his anus to his face and mouth.

The Times previously reported:

Interrogators continually told Mr. Nashiri they did not believe he was telling everything he knew, threatening him with worse treatment if he did not tell them more. The prisoner, already subjected to the whole array of C.I.A. torture techniques—loud noise, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, wall-slamming, and waterboarding—insisted he was trying to remember and tell them everything.

But the interrogators appear to have ultimately concluded that Mr. Nashiri was not lying. Some of the cables back to headquarters, apparently written by Ms. Haspel, described him as “compliant and cooperative,” according to the 2014 report on the interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In addition to the black site in Thailand, al-Nashiri—who was captured in Dubai in October 2002—was imprisoned at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and possibly Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo in September 2006.

In 2010 he was granted victim status by the Polish government, whose cooperation with and complicity in the George W. Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition and torture program was later revealed and investigated.

In March, human rights advocates condemned the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision allowing the Biden administration to block Mitchell and Jessen from cooperating with Polish prosecutors investigating the torture of Saudi terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.

The Bush administration officials who devised, approved, and implemented the post-9/11 torture regimen have enjoyed total impunity. Not only did Bush’s successor, former President Barack Obama, break a campaign promise to investigate and prosecute abuses as required by U.S. and international law, his Justice Department actively shielded them from accountability as torture continued at Guantánamo.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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The Food and Drug Administration has restricted the use of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine to adults who are unable or unwilling to get the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA shots.

The decision comes after the agency completed an updated risk analysis of developing thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, a rare and possibly fatal combination of blood clots and low platelet counts one to two weeks after receiving the vaccine, the agency said Thursday.

Given the severity and urgency of the syndrome, and the availability of other Covid-19 vaccines, FDA decided that the benefits of Covid-19 protection from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine outweigh the risk of TTS only for those who cannot or will not receive other forms of vaccination.

“Our action reflects our updated analysis of the risk of [thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome] following administration of this vaccine and limits the use of the vaccine to certain individuals,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “We recognize that the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine still has a role in the current pandemic response in the United States and across the global community … The agency will continue to monitor the safety of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and all other vaccines.”

Johnson & Johnson said in a statement it will continue to work with regulators worldwide to ensure consumers “are warned and fully informed about reports of TTS.”

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Europe and Russia are entering a fateful competition over energy trade. Europe is diversifying its sources of energy away from Russia. Russia is racing with Europe to reduce its own dependence on the European market and substitute with a “Look East” policy that taps into the vast potentials of the Asian energy market.

Washington’s hopes to be the beneficiary. It can substitute Russian gas and oil with own exports to the European market; Russian economy may take a beating if income from Europe’s energy market dries up; and, a weakened Russia would make a sub-optimal partner for China. 

Russia has an edge insofar as it is easier said than done for Europe to spurn Russian oil and gas because of low prices at which Russia supplies via pipelines on long-term contracts.

Russia plans to use this interlude to develop new markets. India and China stand to gain the most out of Russia’s quest for new markets. Russia has offered discounted prices to them and payment systems in local currencies. 

However, India and China’s response present a study in contrast. India takes a defensive stance that its energy imports from Russia are minuscule. But coming under  concerted Western pressure, Delhi hopes for some sort of quid pro quo from the West. India’s European diplomacy is in overdrive. 

Everything in the Indian calculus has a “China angle” to it, inevitably. India hopes to cash in on any erosion in EU-China ties as a fallout of the Ukraine crisis. Expectations are running high, but the Ukraine crisis has put big question marks on the future of Europe itself.

A commentary by Xinhua has noted:

“Against the backdrop of an economic slowdown, supply chain disruptions and weak consumer morale after more than two years into COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and subsequent sanctions on Russia are wreaking more havoc in Europe, causing widespread panic over regional security, soaring food and energy prices and a looming drop in the standard of living.” 

An influential section of Indian opinion espouses that India should astutely stay put on the “right side of history” — namely, align with the West. The former prime minister Manmohan Singh has written against buying discounted Russian oil or commodities.

“In the long run, India stands to gain more from unfettered access to the western bloc markets for Indian exports under the established trading order than from discounted commodities purchased under new bilateral currency arrangements that seek to create a new and parallel global trade structure,” he wrote.  

The elitist viewpoint blithely assumes that the US West has a strategic interest in building up India as a counterweight to China. The prevailing narrative in India is also that the “Free West” is winning the war against the Russia-China axis of autocracy. 

Enter China. Succinctly put, Chinese approach is firmly supportive of Russia while cautiously avoiding needless entanglement with the Western sanctions regime. Senior US officials remain wary about China’s long-standing support for Russia, but they say they have not detected overt Chinese military and economic support to Russia or  systematic efforts to help Russia evade our sanctions — at least for now. The best outcome for the West will be to get Beijing into an enforced balancing act between Russia and the West. 

President Biden who is hyperactive on Ukraine issue, has not spoken of China helping Russia. Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China is dealing with a “significant reputational risk” of being Russia’s ally and that “for now we’re not seeing significant support from China for Russia’s military actions.” Biden’s forthcoming Asia tour to Japan and South Korea, his first as president, will be a pivotal event. 

That said, facts speak for themselves. Russia’s natural gas exports to China went up 60 per cent in the first four months of the year from the same period of 2021. Gazprom said in a statement Sunday that Russian gas shipments to China via the upcoming Far East routes could reach 48 billion cubic metres per year by 2026 from around 10 billion cubic metres in 2021. 

Meanwhile, Gazprom is also working on plans for another pipeline – the Soyuz Vostok – that will run from Russia to China via Mongolia, which would mean an additional 50 billion cubic metres of gas could be piped to China every year. 

Clearly, China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, is sticking to its guns that it opposes sanctions and that its trade with Russia, including cooperation on oil and gas, will continue. Global demand remains high and prices have risen sharply since last year for natural gas and oil as well as coal and Russian energy’s difficulty to reach world markets could only drive them even higher. 

Therefore, the Western game is not really to reduce or nullify Russian exports so much as to reduce the Russian oil and gas revenues. The Chinese policymakers have grasped this important distinction. 

Interestingly, so does Japan, which has announced the intention to stick to its 27.5 per cent stake in Sakhalin-2 in Russia’s Far East, despite joining tough G7 sanctions on Moscow. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the project helps to provide “long-term, inexpensive and stable LNG supplies” to Japan and is “an extremely important project in terms of our energy security.”  

This is where opportunities lie for India too, which has extensive refinery industries that are typically interested in the Russian crude oil. (Natural gas is going to be harder for India to source from Russia.) 

The Chinese consultancy Fenwei Energy Information Service said earlier this month that Russian coal and oil paid for in yuan is about to start flowing into China and the first cargoes will arrive this month. These will be the first commodity shipments paid for in yuan since the US and Europe cut off several of Russian banks from the international financial system. 

Indeed, China is viewing the paradigm of western sanctions from a vastly different perspective from Manmohan Singh’s — how to take advantage of the sanctions optimally while also enhancing the partnership with Russia by adding more content to it. India’s record, in contrast, has been that under the leadership of the previous government (2004-2014), India’s relationship with Russia remained stagnant. 

The Reserve Bank of India recently estimated that India is expected to overcome Covid-19 losses in 2034-35. But it is predicated on the big assumption of a sustained 7.5 percent annual growth of GDP. The consensus opinion of international economists puts India’s GDP growth next year, and possibly beyond that, closer to 6 percent. 

Clearly, India needs to figure out the algorithm of EU and US sanctions against Russia so as to take the fullest advantage of business opportunities at a critical juncture when the country’s economic recovery ought to be the topmost national priority. Excessive geopolitical gyrations give an intoxicating sense of being smart. 

While in Delhi recently, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen promised us the moon. But we must be realistic. The EU has absolutely no history of building up world class powers. Leading American think tanks have been sceptical about the EU’s own future even before the debris from Ukraine overburdened it. 

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Featured image: Russian liquefied natural gas tanker at a terminal in Tianjin, China (Source: Indian Punchline)

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In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page article titled “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.”

Co-authored by Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger, the article cited satellite imagery and a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to argue that North Korea was continuing to secretly develop missiles in violation of the June 2018 Singapore agreement between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

However, the prominently embedded satellite photo was actually dated March 2018—three months before Kim and Trump met in Singapore—and the missile bases presented as damning evidence of Kim’s duplicity had been known to South Korea for at least two years.

Source: nytimes.com

The Times’s deception is part of a larger media propaganda campaign against North Korea that has helped condition the U.S. public to accept draconian U.S. sanctions policies, the spending of billions of dollars per year beefing up the South Korean military, and the $7.1 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative that includes a major naval build-up in the South China Sea.

Felix Abt was one of the first foreign entrepreneurs to work in North Korea, and the founding president of the first foreign chamber of commerce in North Korea, set up by a dozen resident foreign business people in 2005, and co-founder and director of the Pyongyang Business School.

He has just published a book entitled A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs? An Alternative Account to the Western Media’s Blinkered North Korea Portrayal, which debunks the media’s narrative of North Korea as a “monolithic gulag network filled with slaves” and a “hellhole…rife with suffering and starvation.”

Abt’s first memoir, A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom (Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2014), was blacklisted in Western media.

Photo courtesy of Felix Abt

In this latest book, he writes that,

“for decades, the United States has been waging a vitriolic public-opinion war against North Korea,” which functions as a “necessary bogeyman to persuade the American taxpayers that the mammoth defense budgets for the benefit of one of its largest and most profitable industries, is justified.”

Forgotten is the litany of crimes committed by the United States against North Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953), including the systematic incineration of North Korean cities and villages with napalm, bombing dams to cause flooding on the rice fields and thus mass starvation, and dropping plague-infected flies in order to spread disease.

For all the hysteria in U.S. media about North Korea’s nuclear threat, Abt was told by almost everyone he met that North Korea needed nuclear weapons for defensive purposes to prevent a first strike from America—which threatened to destroy their country as it had done in the Korean War. Kim Jong-un would never be crazy enough to risk the catastrophic results of firing the weapons first.

Not Even Up to the Level of the National Enquirer

The multitude of outrageous stories about North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un do not generally match basic journalistic standards—or even those of the National Inquirer.

Often, they rely on defectors who are paid by the South Korean government and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spread disinformation.

In August 2013, the London Telegraph reported that Kim Jong-un had his ex-lover executed by firing squad because she allegedly made a pornographic film, though later the same publication reported that she had reappeared on North Korean television.

Source: slideshare.net

ABC ridiculously also reported that all male university students in Pyongyang were required to get haircuts exactly like Kim Jong-Un, though later there were reports that Kim had banned leather coats to stop people from copying his style.

“Critical thinking just goes out the window on North Korea,” observed Chad O’Carroll, founder of the NK News website.

A More Positive Picture Than in U.S. Demonology

Abt found that, while propaganda does abound in North Korea, the claim about a total news blackout is false. Kids recited to him old Korean folktales, not regime propaganda, and many people read foreign literature.

Example of misleading propaganda in Western media that presents North Korea in the worst possible light. [Source: japantimes.co]

Despite the crippling U.S. sanctions, North Korea has a growing economy, replete with an emerging entrepreneurial middle class and has made important technological advances.

Kim Chaek University of Technology, for example, developed a cranial CT scanner, which it sells to domestic hospitals.

DPRK-produced CT scanner, Kim Chaek University. [Photo courtesy Felix Abt]

Kim Chaek University [Source: alchetron.com]

Dr. Kee B. Park, a neurosurgeon on the faculty at Harvard University who has traveled to North Korea 18 times to advise its health programs, told Abt that the images from the CT scan he had seen in North Korea were “of satisfactory quality,” and could “help doctors detect a variety of diseases and conditions.”

Despite sanctions that banned fertilizer, spare parts for agricultural machines and fuel for farm vehicles, Kim Chaek University had also developed methods that increased the yields of rice crops while decreasing plant disease.

Lies About Famine

During the 1990s, when North Korea experienced a famine precipitated by natural disasters and exacerbated by a drastic reduction in oil imports from the crumbling Soviet Union, Western think tanks, activists, and media from the Wall Street Journal to Reuters amplified the death toll by five times, thereby vilifying “evil” North Korea.

They claimed more than 3 million deaths out of a population of 22 million when the actual number was below 500,000, according to the French coordinator of the United Nations food distribution efforts. (The U.S. Census Bureau gave an estimate of between 500,000 and 600,000).

Despite a much-improved situation in the 2000s, the U.S. and world media continued to run stories every autumn quoting international aid agencies saying that North Korea was once again on the brink of mass starvation.

Source: quora.com

Abt reports that, with no indigenous sources of oil and natural gas, North Korea depends on imported energy inputs to produce fertilizers and pesticides, to fuel irrigation equipment and agricultural machinery and to transport seeds and crops.

The UN prohibition on essential energy imports thus helped provoke the collapse of North Korea’s agricultural production in 2018 to levels similar to those of the famine years—though the source of the crisis was ignored, and human rights groups in the West shamefully did not call for the lifting of the sanctions.

Despite all of its problems, North Korea still ranks above India on the Global Hunger Index. The country has improved its agricultural productivity through land reclamation projects and imported potato varieties from Europe that were cheap, easy to grow and nutritious.

Photo courtesy of Felix Abt

An Orwellian Dystopia—or Something Else?

Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick, in her 2010 best-selling book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, compared North Korea to George Orwell’s Oceania, a futuristic dystopia where the “only color to be found was in propaganda posters.”

Source: amazon.com

Melanie Kirkpatrick reported in the Wall Street Journal that North Korea kept its “citizens in the dark ages,” with ”foreign goods being kept out.”

In reality, it was not the North Korean government but U.S. sanctions that kept foreign goods out—including household items like lipstick, salami sausages, knives and watches, whose importation was all banned.

And while there are certainly oppressive features of society, including a harsh criminal justice system, life in North Korea in Abt’s observations is far from dystopic or out of the dark ages.

Rather, it is not very different from other countries: Buildings are painted in all kinds of colors (color is not only found in propaganda posters), the people enjoy pizza, sweets, and other delicacies along with trips to the beach, and kids ride bikes, roller-skate and play other games in the street.

Photos courtesy of Felix Abt

Women particularly thrive as North Korea’s constitution accords them equal social status and rights with men, and a range of benefits including maternity leave.^[1]

Felix Abt with North Korean businesswomen. [Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

Rather than being starved or downtrodden, most of the workers that Abt met were reasonably well compensated and diligent. The pharmaceutical company that he ran was obsessed with quality and achieved good manufacturing practices as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), winning bidding competitions against foreign competitors.

North Korea’s airline, Air Koryo, meanwhile, meets high safety standards despite being called in the West the “world’s worst airline.”

Stewardess with North Korea’s national airline, Air Koryo, which the media called the world’s worst airline, but which actually meets high safety standards. [Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

Tantamount to Another Act of War

A cruel feature of the sanctions policy was its denying North Koreans the opportunity to work abroad, shattering the aspirations of many working people.

North Korean painters are now prohibited from selling their paintings abroad. Other sanctions have prevented North Korea from rebuilding water supplies and drainage systems, causing an upsurge of health problems, and blocked it from importing mechanical parts and fuel to operate agricultural machinery, causing food shortages.

Because U.S. and UK credit and financial institutions were prohibited from dealing with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK-North Korea), North Korean importers and exporters had to travel to their foreign suppliers with suitcases stashed with cash or empty money bags to collect payments.

The sanctions furthermore a) helped prevent the signing of a 9-digit dollar contract with a Swiss company that would have greatly improved North Korea’s power network; b) led to reduction in quality and availability of medicines; c) destroyed the possibility of safe mines because of the banning of the import of mine-safety equipment; and d) forced numerous garment factories to close, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

North Korean miners are deprived of property safety because of the inability to import mine safety equipment due to U.S. sanctions. [Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

A businessman adversely impacted by sanctions told Abt that he considered the sanctions “tantamount to another act of war by hostile Western powers,” adding that “we in our company have never done anything wrong or illegal.”

As America Wishes It to Be Viewed

Abt concludes his book by noting that,

“given the dominant U.S.-centric North Korea narrative, with no other voice to offer balance or express the true reality, it is hard to blame the general global populace for accepting the situation as America and its supporters wish it to be viewed.”

Perhaps if more Americans learned about the history of the Korean War and its barbarism, they might show some empathy for North Koreans and try and better understand the country’s policies; or perhaps, if more foreign exchanges are established, they might press their government to end the brutal sanctions and to pursue a formal end to the Korean War.

Until that time, we can expect that North Korea will be continuously invoked as a reference point for tyranny and its leader ridiculed, in quasi-racist fashion, as a clownish dictator.

Source: Madison.com

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Abt points out that North Korea has more female bank managers than does South Korea. 

Featured image: A family eats ice cream in North Korea [taken by Eva Bartlett]

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First published on May 2, 2022

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“Children have had no voice or vote, regarding their potential Covid vaccination. Children depend entirely on their parents to make a well-informed and wise decision. Ethically, experimental pharmaceutical products, particularly experimental vaccines that have been rushed into use before adequate testing for safety could be completed, must not be administered to anyone, particularly children, without adequate informed consent.” – Dr. Robert Rennebohm

In March Dr. Robert Rennebohm, an American paediatrician with nearly 50 years of experience, penned an extensive open letter to parents and paediatricians regarding Covid “vaccinations” for children.  At the end of his 119-page letter, he lists over 1,000 references – almost all of which have either been published in peer-reviewed medical journals or submitted as pre-prints for publication. Just before the list of references, he has included links to several helpful educational video interviews and video presentations.

“Parents, I apologise for the length of this Letter … Much is at stake. So, for the sake of your child and all children, please consider taking the time to read this Letter. If you don’t have time, consider reading just the ‘Summary – shorter version of this open letter’,” Dr. Rennebohm wrote.

Paediatricians are legally and morally required to honour the principle of “Informed Consent” and make certain that parents are sufficiently informed before they (the parents) agree to have their children vaccinated.

The information and concerns explained in this Open Letter represent the kind of information needed for a parent to make a well-informed decision before granting consent for vaccination of their child.

An Open Letter to Parents and Pediatricians Regarding Covid Vaccination, Dr. Robert Rennebohm, March 2022

The following are excerpts taken from the summary section, pages 7 to 18, of Dr. Rennebohm’s Open Letter.

Introduction

Two contradictory views on Covid vaccination have been expressed: a prevailing narrative – get vaccinated, immediately! Vaccination is our way out of the pandemic, and an alternative narrative – stop the Covid vaccination campaign immediately! Covid vaccination is dangerous and makes the pandemic worse. Unfortunately, there has been little or no healthy scientific dialogue between proponents of the two narratives, despite repeated pleas for such from leaders of the alternative narrative.

This Open Letter is intended to help parents and paediatricians to better understand the science behind the conflicting narratives and decide on the best course of action regarding Covid vaccination of children. This Letter seeks to:

• clarify the science behind Covid vaccination issues;
• facilitate healthy, inclusive dialogue; and,
• bring people together to jointly determine what would be best for children and humanity as a whole.

Overview of the Human Immune System

The immune system can be divided into two major compartments—the mucosal immune system and the systemic immune system. Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi has helpfully referred to these two compartments as the “Air Force” (mucosal compartment) and the “Navy” (systemic compartment).

An Open Letter to Parents and Pediatricians Regarding Covid Vaccination, Dr. Robert Rennebohm, March 2022

The Air Force is “based” in the mucosa and submucosa (the space underneath the mucosal lining) of the respiratory tract, the GI tract, and the mucosa/submucosa of other mucous membrane-lined organs (e.g., bladder, uterus, etc.).

The Navy is based (has “bases”) throughout the rest of the body—in lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow, blood circulation, within solid organs, etc.

Both the Air Force and the Navy have an innate immunity division and an acquired (adaptive) immunity division.

When the SARS-CoV-2 virus invades a person, the human immune system potentially uses all of its multiple dimensions—both its mucosal immune system (the Air Force) and its systemic immune system (the Navy), both of which have an innate immunity division and an acquired immunity division—to quickly subdue the virus (initially by innate immunity troops of the Air Force) and create robust, durable, multi-dimensional acquired immunity to protect the person from future invasion by that virus.

In comparison, the Covid vaccines provide uni-dimensional training of the systemic immune system and little, if any, training of the mucosal immune system.

There is a legitimate concern that the current Covid vaccines could be interfering with innate immunity and detrimentally disrupting the flow and optimal function of the natural human immune ecosystem.

Effects of a Respiratory Pandemic Without a Vaccine

When a respiratory viral pandemic like the Covid pandemic is not treated with a vaccine (which was the case during the first year of the Covid pandemic, when no Covid vaccine was available), a considerable percentage of the population (primarily people under age 60, who are out and about) eventually become infected with the virus (the SARS-CoV-2 virus in this pandemic).

The most vulnerable, including the elderly, must be carefully protected from exposure to the virus. Those who do become infected need to be proactively treated (much more promptly and aggressively than has been the case throughout the Covid pandemic).  Those who become infected (and recover) develop robust naturally acquired sterilising immunity that contributes to increasing development of herd immunity.

The natural course of a respiratory virus pandemic is one of gradual resolution, usually over a period of months, and this resolution is largely due to increasing development of robust sterilising herd immunity.

It is important to understand that herd immunity via natural infection is far superior to herd immunity attempted via mass vaccination with a sub-optimal (non-sterilising) vaccine in the midst of an active pandemic. Herd immunity cannot be achieved through mass vaccination with a sub-optimal (non-sterilising) vaccine. And, in fact, such vaccination interferes with the development of herd immunity.

Effects of a Respiratory Pandemic Treated Primarily with a Vaccine

The current Covid pandemic has been primarily managed with the roll-out of a rapid, mass vaccination campaign (across all age groups), using sub-optimal (non-sterilising) uni-dimensional vaccines (directed at only the spike protein), in the midst of the active pandemic and in the midst of considerable lockdown measures.

According to many experienced virologists/vaccinologists, a mass vaccination campaign using a sub-optimal (non-sterilising) vaccine in the midst of a pandemic is a recipe for disaster.  Because:

• When a person who has been vaccinated with a sub-optimal vaccine is subsequently exposed to the virus, the vaccine does not prevent the virus from entering cells, replicating in those cells, and spreading to other people.
• When the virus replicates in the vaccinated person’s cells, new mutations develop, and under the pressure of the mass vaccination campaign and the added pressure of lockdown measures, the mutated variants that will be successful. Covid mass vaccination will inevitably result in predominant variants with increased vaccine resistance and increased transmissibility.
• The mass vaccination campaign might eventually generate a predominant variant that is intrinsically more virulent (deadly) than any of its predecessors—an intrinsically more virulent variant that could be harmful to everyone, including children, regardless of vaccination status. Covid illness may become more life-threatening because of vaccine-induced ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement).

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a leading proponent of the alternative narrative, disagrees that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” On the contrary, he views it as a pandemic that has become prolonged and more dangerous because of the mass vaccination campaign. Furthermore, he worries that it is the vaccinated people who are becoming the most likely “spreaders” of the virus—because the vaccine allows the vaccine-resistant variant to enter their cells and replicate, while the vaccine might indirectly make them less symptomatic, even asymptomatic, which results in their possibly being unwitting asymptomatic spreaders.

Dr. Vanden Bossche thinks it is a huge mistake to continue the current Covid mass vaccination campaign. He strongly urges that we stop vaccinating before it is too late.

According to the alternative narrative, the total cumulative numbers of Covid hospitalisations, Covid ICU admissions, and Covid deaths during the Covid pandemic (from the beginning of the pandemic through January 2022) would have been lower if the pandemic had not been treated with the mass vaccination campaign and, instead, had been managed.

Other Concerns About the Covid Vaccines, Adverse Events

In addition to concerns that current mass vaccination is driving the development of more transmissible and potentially more lethal strains, may be harming natural innate immune function (particularly in children), and is interfering with the development of sterilising herd immunity, many scientists and physicians are deeply concerned that the Covid vaccines are unsafe in other important ways – causing unacceptable short- and long-term side effects for individuals.  For example myocarditis and pericarditis in adolescents and young adults; lethal clotting and devastating neurologic side effects in adults.

References at the end of Dr. Rennebohm’s Open Letter include 757 articles in the medical literature that report serious side effects of Covid vaccinations (reference nos. 271-1028). This represents an alarming and unprecedented number of reports of adverse effects of a new pharmaceutical product. The VAERS data also reveal an alarming number of severe adverse reactions and deaths associated with the Covid vaccines.

Problems With the Covid PCR Test and Covid Data

The prevailing narrative (its data, its conclusions, and its policies) has been fundamentally based on the use of the Covid PCR test.

A positive Covid PCR test at a Ct (cycle threshold) greater than 30 is likely to represent either a false positive (commonly) or detection of a tiny amount of dead virus. Many of such people have not, in fact, had Covid, and if they have had Covid, they are no longer infectious.

Even when a Covid PCR test is positive at a low Ct value, this does not assure that the patient definitely has Covid. The most accurate test for confirmation of Covid is genomic sequencing. Since the beginning of the pandemic, confirmed diagnoses of Covid should have been based on genomic sequencing, not on PCR testing.

By basing data collection on the Covid PCR test CDC and State Health Departments have generated scientifically unsound data. Data collection has been based on scientifically unsound criteria for the designation of “Covid cases,” “Covid hospitalisations,” and “Covid deaths.”

The prevailing narrative has not been based on proper conduct of science. This has been a huge and fundamental problem throughout the pandemic.

Efficacy of the Vaccines

Proponents of the alternative narrative are concerned that the Covid vaccines are not nearly as effective as initially and subsequently claimed by their manufacturers.

Covid vaccines are sub-optimal (non-sterilising) and uni-dimensional; only partially train the systemic immune system; have little or no effect on the mucosal immune system; may be interfering with normal immune function, and drive the appearance and predominance of viral variants that “escape” the vaccinal antibodies and become increasingly transmissible and potentially more lethal.

Several studies suggest that the Covid vaccines actually increase the risk of Covid infection and Covid death during the 5 weeks after the first dose; then there is temporary and modest protection (at best) for a matter of only weeks or a few months; then there appears to be a negative effect (increased susceptibility to Covid infection); and it is likely that Boosters will prove to provide only transient benefit, which is likely due to brief non-specific stimulation of natural immunity.

Furthermore, there is legitimate concern that vaccine-induced ADE phenomena might be increasing disease severity and death in vaccinated people when they subsequently become infected; and there is some evidence that vaccinated people may be more likely to spread the virus than are the unvaccinated (because the vaccines may actually facilitate viral entry into cells).

Conclusions

In section 10 of his Open Letter summary, pages 16 to 18, Dr. Rennebohm lists his conclusions.  If you are very short of time this may be a good place to start.  His final two concluding points state:

“For the sake of our children, grandchildren, and all of humanity, we have an individual and collective social responsibility to call for an immediate and complete halt to the current Covid vaccination campaign, on a scientific basis alone, until an appropriate Covid Commission is convened to thoroughly and accurately evaluate the Covid situation. In the meantime, current scientific evidence strongly suggests that to participate in the continuation of the Covid vaccination campaign – to promote it, to remain silent about it, or to personally receive further Covid vaccination – is to contribute to the harm of children and humanity, as well as harm to oneself.

“Morally, ethically, and scientifically, we have a social responsibility to call for at least temporary cessation of the Covid vaccination campaign. Such a call is an unselfish, science-based act of courage and social responsibility, behind which all of humanity (whether currently unvaccinated or already vaccinated) can confidently unite, to the mutual support and the emotional, social, and health benefit of all.”

You can read and download the full ‘Open Letter to Parents and Paediatricians Regarding Covid Vaccination’ for sharing with medical professionals and others HERE.

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Dr. Rennebohm has written 21 articles covering most aspects of Covid including one titled ‘A Call for an Independent International Covid Commission’.  You can find all his articles HERE.

Featured image is from Vaccines.news

CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

By Joseph Cox, May 05, 2022

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard.

Russian Orthodox Church Under Threat of EU Sanctions

By Steven Sahiounie, May 06, 2022

The Ukraine had been closely united with Russia.  The prevailing faith in Ukraine was the Russian Orthodox Church. A large percentage of those living in Ukraine speak Russian and identify themselves as ethnically Russians.  However, in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the independent status of Ukraine, the government there has been leaning toward the West.  They want to join the EU, NATO and accept western views on gay issues.

The 2020-22 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 05, 2022

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.

Delinking from Dollar Dominated Trade: Circumventing US Sanctions. Iran–Venezuela Energy Cooperation

By Peter Koenig and Press TV, May 05, 2022

Iran and Venezuela are poised to enter a new era to fight US sanctions. Their cooperation in Hydrocarbons production as well as trade may help them gradually detach from western sanctions.

Congress Must Reject the Application to Russia of the Crazy AUMC (Post 9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force)

By Daniel Larison, May 05, 2022

Rep. Adam Kinzinger is sponsoring a new resolution authorizing the use of American military force in the war, and it is vital that Congress rejects it. Kinzinger has been one of the loudest agitators for military action in Ukraine, and he wants this authorization in order to give the president a free hand to take the US into a potentially catastrophic war.

Patient Betrayal: The Corruption of Healthcare, Informed Consent and the Physician-Patient Relationship

By James A. Thorp, Thomas Kenny, and et al., May 05, 2022

There are 1,013 peer-reviewed medical journal publications documenting morbidities and mortalities of the experimental COVID-19 nucleic acid therapy. VAERS data demonstrate a significant risk associated with this experimental gene therapy in women of reproductive age and pregnant women.

Serious Adverse Jab Reactions 40 Times Higher Than Previously Reported

By Free West Media, May 05, 2022

A German study has found that the number of serious side effects after Corona vaccines was 40 times higher than previously reported. The Charité, a well-known hospital in Berlin, interviewed 40 000 vaccinated people after they had received their mandated jabs.

US Launches Two Sets of Military Exercises in Europe

By Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter, May 05, 2022

Swift Response 2022, an annual drill hosted by the US Army’s Europe and Africa component command, kicked off on Monday and is set to run until May 20. It will be carried out across locations in the Arctic High North, the Baltics, the Balkans and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Army said in a statement.

US Officials Say US Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals

By Dave DeCamp, May 05, 2022

Ukraine has claimed to have killed 12 Russian generals, but the number is not confirmed, and Kyiv has an interest in exaggerating its success on the battlefield, and the officials wouldn’t specify how many Russian officers were killed as a result of the assistance. But either way, the claim by US officials that they are helping kill Russian generals is a major provocation toward Moscow.

Leaking for Roe v Wade

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, May 05, 2022

A statement from the Supreme Court, in an effort to keep up appearances, claims that its operations has only suffered a minor hiccup.  “Although the document described in yesterday’s reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case.”

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The European Union is debating on imposing sanctions on Patriarch Kirill, the head of The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, who leads about 100 million believers. The EU has accused him of supporting the war in Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin. The sanctions would entail an asset freeze and a travel ban, with EU diplomats set to meet this week to discuss the sanctions, which is part of a wider package proposed by the EU on Wednesday.

About 75% of Russians and 60% of Ukrainians profess to be Orthodox Christians, which can be both a religious as well as cultural affiliation.

In a sermon in March, Kirill preached against western values such as greed and gay pride parades.  Kirill and many Russians who hold his views, see the war in Ukraine in terms of religious values, defending conservative moral values against a corrupt West. Kirill has referred to “so-called homosexual marriages” as a threat to family values. “When laws are detached from morality they cease being laws people can accept.”

The Ukraine had been closely united with Russia.  The prevailing faith in Ukraine was the Russian Orthodox Church. A large percentage of those living in Ukraine speak Russian and identify themselves as ethnically Russians.  However, in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the independent status of Ukraine, the government there has been leaning toward the West.  They want to join the EU, NATO and accept western views on gay issues.

“By separating from Moscow we are adhering to the Christian vision of the world,” said Father Vladymir Melnichuk of the Russian Orthodox Church in Udine, Italy.  Melnichuk recently split his church from Moscow, and instead allied with a church based in Istanbul.

In 2018, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP), were considered “schismatics” (illegally segregated groups) by the Patriarchate of Moscow (ROC), as well as by the other Eastern Orthodox churches. The schism forms part of a wider political conflict involving Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea and its military intervention in Ukraine, as well as Ukraine’s desire to join the EU and NATO.

Russian values are not the same as Western values.  The Russian Orthodox Church does not approve of gay marriages, or educating children about their options to declare themselves gay, or choose a different gender to identify with.  What has become common place in USA is not accepted everywhere, but the US government seeks to impose their own values on other countries, in their role as the global superpower.

The US has a long list of regime-change projects: Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria.  Imposing a US style of freedom and democracy on foreign countries has become a decades old mantra at the State Department.  Similarly imposing US style secular values on foreign countries has become a point of derision.

The American society, government, schools and churches have made gay rights and transgender issues an accepted fact of life.  If there are conservative Americans with different views, they have been encouraged to remain silent, and accept the prevailing notion that everyone has a right to choose.

The Russians not the same as Americans.  There are different opinions and viewpoints based on history, religion and culture.

Putin, in responding to prevailing Russian opinion on issues involving homosexuality, passed laws preventing indoctrinating minors about homosexuality and preventing gay pride rallies which would have been seen by children.

In July 2020, Putin mocked the US embassy in Moscow for flying a rainbow flag to celebrate LGBT rights.  Russia had conducted a nationwide vote on constitutional reforms that included an amendment enshrining the definition of marriage specifically as a union between a man and a woman.

“It’s no big deal though. We have spoken about this many times, and our position is clear,” said Putin, who has sought to distance Russia from liberal Western values and aligned himself with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin added,

“Yes, we passed a law banning the propaganda of homosexuality among minors. So what? Let people grow up, become adults and then decide their own destinies.”

Russia had decriminalized homosexuality after the fall of communism in 1993, but anti-gay sentiments have been on the rise in the country in the past decade.

Under the Obama administration, the issue of gay rights became extremely import.  Obama sent gay Ambassadors to five countries in order to send a message on where the US government stood on the issue.  Promoting gay pride, and same-sex marriages in foreign countries became an important foreign policy in Obama’s State Department.

During Obama’s terms in office, the push to make lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights became an international issue. The high point came in December 2011, when then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton went to the United Nations in Geneva and proclaimed LGBT rights “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time”.

In 2014, US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, said he was proud of the message the United States gave Russia on gay rights leading up to the Olympics, and said the Obama administration had been tough on Russia on human rights throughout his tenure in Moscow.

“We as an administration, starting with the president, virtually every day are very open in criticizing the Russian government when we see human rights abuses,” McFaul said.

US advice and encouragement is sometimes condemned as unacceptable meddling with foreign cultures and religious values. Some conservative American groups are outraged by the policy. Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, calls it “a slap in the face to the majority of Americans”, given that American voters have rejected same-sex marriage in a number of state referendums.

“This is taking a flawed view of what it means to be a human being male and female and trying to impose that on countries throughout the world,” Brown said. “The administration would like people to believe that this is simply ‘live and let live.’ No, this is coercion in its worst possible form.”

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

Featured image is from MD

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***

In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.

Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.

BREAKING: MintPress News & @AlanRMacLeod has been banned from PayPal for unspecified reasons.

Help us fight back against this onslaught of censorship: https://t.co/dzLbAlo48o https://t.co/7CkUbXPFQy

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) April 28, 2022

MintPress News happens to have published critical journalism about PayPal itself in the past, like the articles it published in 2018 by Whitney Webb documenting the way shady PayPal-linked billionaires Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have advanced the interests of the US empire and facilitated imperial narrative control, or this one from 2016 on how the company blocks Palestinians from opening accounts while showing no such bias against illegal Israeli settlers.

I asked MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley for comment on PayPal’s move. Here is her response in full:

“Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars.

“In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department.

“It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’.

“We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.

“No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.”

I am banned from PayPal. pic.twitter.com/GB6IrT80wq

— Caleb T. Maupin (@calebmaupin) April 28, 2022

PayPal has also banned Caleb Maupin, an American speaker and journalist whose work has already seen his personal Twitter account branded “Russia state-affiliated media” by the US state-affiliated platform.

“Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” said Maupin when asked for comment. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”

Indeed, a very effective way to silence unauthorized media voices is to make it difficult for them to earn a living making their voices heard. Speaking from experience I know for a fact I couldn’t put out a fraction of the content I put out if I was forced to work a 9-5 job in some office rather than having the freedom to put all my time and mental energy into this work thanks to the generous support of my readers. Cutting me off from that funding would be the same as censoring me directly, because there’s no way I could continue the kind of work I do.

We are at a profoundly dangerous and frightening point in human history. The US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is escalating by the day and the drums of war are beating ever louder against China over the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think censorship is bad now, wait until this global power grab really gets going.

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***

Iran and Venezuela are poised to enter a new era to fight US sanctions. Their cooperation in Hydrocarbons production as well as trade may help them gradually detach from western sanctions.

An idea brought forward in this interview is their joint exit from the dollar-dominated trade economy, by selling their petrol and gas in one or more other currencies than the US dollar or even the Euro. Ideally, they may want to join the Russian move of selling gas for rubles instead of US dollars.

This Russian initiative, of course, has been a major “explosion” in Europe and elsewhere in the world, but most countries eventually accept this new payment mode – one that is totally delinked from the US dollar and its little brother, the Euro.

It is a move away from the SWIFT transfer system which makes countries vulnerable to sanctions, because using SWIFT – the western payment mode — all transfers have to transit via US banks, thus increasing vulnerability to western, mostly US, interferences or sanctions.

After all, still today 84% of all energy used in the world stems from hydrocarbons, as compared to some 87% in the year 2000. And this despite much talk of shunning petrol and gas, the Paris Climate Agenda, and especially propagating a Green Agenda – empty words, manipulating people’s minds towards a new form of capitalism.

Another strategy which both countries are actively considering, is increasingly delinking their trading from the west and orienting their economies towards the east, i.e., the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Association of South Asian Nations (ASEAN), uniting 11 Asian countries, plus Russia and China. Earlier this year, Iran has been admitted as a member of the SCO.

These Eastern block economies, together make up for about 50% of Mother Earth’s population and at least a third of the world’s GDP. Becoming part of this union is definitely a decisive step away from western domination and US sanctions.

See Peter Koenig’s Interview (PressTV-PK – video 12 min – 3 May 2022) 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 has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more-general CDC purposes.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.

The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021.

Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data marketplace, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the documents:

“The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)

Motherboard obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CDC.

The documents contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data.” They include:

• “Track patterns of those visiting K-12 schools by the school and compare to 2019; compare with epi metrics [Environmental Performance Index] if possible.”
• “Examination of the correlation of mobility patterns data and rise in COVID-19 cases […] Movement restrictions (Border closures, inter-regional and nigh curfews) to show compliance.”
• “Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”

At the start of the pandemic, cellphone location data was seen as a potentially useful tool. Multiple media organizations, including the New York Times, used location data provided by companies in the industry to show where people were traveling to once lockdowns started to lift, or highlight that poorer communities were unable to shelter in place as much as richer ones.

The COVID-19 pandemic as a whole has been a flashpoint in a broader culture war, with conservatives and anti-vaccine groups protesting government mask and vaccine mandates. They’ve also expressed a specific paranoia that vaccine passports would be used as a tracking or surveillance tool, framing vaccine refusal as a civil liberties issue. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense, one of the more influential and monied anti-vaccine groups in the U.S., has promoted fears that digital vaccine certificates could be used to surveil citizens. QAnon promoter Dustin Nemos wrote on Telegram in December that vaccine passports are “a Trojan horse being used to create a completely new type of controlled and surveilled society in which the freedom we enjoy today will be a distant memory.”

Against that inflamed backdrop, the use of cellphone location data for such a wide variety of tracking measures, even if effective for becoming better informed on the pandemic’s spread or for informing policy, is likely to be controversial. It’s also likely to give anti-vaccine groups a real-world data point on which to pin their darkest warnings.

A SCREENSHOT OF THE USE CASES PROPOSED BY THE CDC. IMAGE: MOTHERBOARD.

The procurement documents say that “This is an URGENT COVID-19 PR [procurement request],” and asks for the purchase to be expedited.

But some of the use cases are not explicitly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. One reads “Research points of interest for physical activity and chronic disease prevention such as visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses.”

Another section of the document elaborates on the location data’s use for non-COVID-19–related programs.

“CDC also plans to use mobility data and services acquired through this acquisition to support non-COVID-19 programmatic areas and public health priorities across the agency, including but not limited to travel to parks and green spaces, physical activity and mode of travel, and population migration before, during, and after natural disasters,” it reads. “The mobility data obtained under this contract will be available for CDC agency-wide use and will support numerous CDC priorities.”

The CDC did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on which use cases it deployed SafeGraph data for.

SafeGraph is part of the ballooning location industry, and SafeGraph has previously shared datasets containing 18 million cellphones from the United States. The documents say this acquisition is for data that is geographically representative, “i.e., derived from at least 20 million active cellphone users per day across the United States.”

Generally, companies in this industry ask, or pay, app developers to include location data gathering code in their apps. The location data then funnels up to companies that may resell the raw location data outright or package it into products.

SafeGraph sells both. On the developed product side, SafeGraph has several different products. “Places” concerns points of interest (POIs) such as where particular stores or buildings are located. “Patterns” is based on mobile phone location data that can show for how long people visit a location, and “Where they came from” and “Where else they go,” according to SafeGraph’s website. More recently SafeGraph has started offering aggregated transaction data, showing how much consumers typically spend at specific locations, under the “Spend” product. SafeGraph sells its products to a wide range of industries, such as real estate, insurance, and advertising. These products include aggregated data on movements and spends, rather than the location of specific devices. Motherboard previously bought a set of SafeGraph location data for $200. The data was aggregated, meaning it was not supposed to pinpoint the movements of specific devices and hence people, but at the time, Edwards said, “In my opinion the SafeGraph data is way beyond any safe thresholds [around anonymity].” Edwards pointed to a search result in SafeGraph’s data portal that displayed data related to a specific doctor’s office, showing how finely tuned the company’s data can be. Theoretically, an attacker could use that data to then attempt to unmask the specific users, something which researchers have repeatedly demonstrated is possible.

In January 2019, the Illinois Department of Transportation bought such data from SafeGraph that related to over 5 million phones, activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) previously found.

The CDC documents show that the agency bought access to SafeGraph’s “U.S. Core Place Data,” “Weekly Patterns Data,” and “Neighborhood Patterns Data. That last product includes information such as home dwelling time, and is aggregated by state and census block.

“SafeGraph offers visitor data at the Census Block Group level that allows for extremely accurate insights related to age, gender, race, citizenship status, income, and more,” one of the CDC documents reads.

Both SafeGraph and the CDC have previously touched on their partnership, but not in the detail that is revealed in the documents. The CDC published a study in September 2020 which looked at whether people around the country were following stay-at-home orders, which appeared to use SafeGraph data.

SafeGraph wrote in a blog post in April 2020 that “To play our part in the fight against the COVID-19 health crisis—and its devastating impact on the global economy—we decided to expand our program further, making our foot traffic data free for nonprofit organizations and government agencies at the local, state, and federal level.” Multiple location data companies touted their data as a potential mitigation to the pandemic during its peak in the United States, and provided data to government and media organizations.

A year later, the CDC purchased access to the data because SafeGraph no longer wanted to provide it for free, according to the documents. The Data Use Agreement for the in-kind provided data was set to expire on March 31, 2021, the documents add. The data was still important to access as the U.S. opened up, the CDC argued in the documents.

“CDC has interest in continued access to this mobility data as the country opens back up. This data is used by several teams/groups in the response and have been resulting in deeper insights into the pandemic as it pertains to human behavior,” one section reads.

Researchers at the EFF separately obtained documents concerning the CDC’s purchase of similar location data products from a company called Cubeiq as well as the SafeGraph documents. The EFF shared those documents with Motherboard. They showed that the CDC also asked to speed up the purchase of Cubeiq’s data because of COVID-19, and intended to use it for non-COVID-19 purposes. The documents also listed the same potential use-cases for Cubeiq’s data as in the SafeGraph documents.

Google banned SafeGraph from its Google Play Store in June. This meant that any app developers using SafeGraph’s code had to remove it from their apps, or face having their app removed from the store. It is not entirely clear how effective this ban has been: SafeGraph has previously said it obtains location data via Veraset, a spin-off company which interfaces with the app developers.

SafeGraph did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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The US has no business joining the war in Ukraine, and Congress should refuse to approve any measure that endorses direct intervention in the conflict. Rep. Adam Kinzinger is sponsoring a new resolution authorizing the use of American military force in the war, and it is vital that Congress rejects it. Kinzinger has been one of the loudest agitators for military action in Ukraine, and he wants this authorization in order to give the president a free hand to take the US into a potentially catastrophic war.

Kinzinger’s resolution would give the president authorization to use force to “assist” in “defending and restoring the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event of a Russian biological, chemical, or nuclear attack. Lumping these types of attacks together serves to blur the differences between them, and if the resolution passed it would draw an unnecessary red line that the US would then be under pressure to enforce. The president should make clear that he doesn’t want the authority Kinzinger is proposing, and Kinzinger’s colleagues in Congress should firmly repudiate his warmongering by voting down his resolution.

If the US did what Kinzinger wanted, it would lead at best to a dangerous and unnecessary war for the United States and at worst it would lead to a nuclear exchange that would devastate our country and much of the world. It makes no sense to respond to Russian unconventional attacks with an armed intervention that makes it more likely that Russia launches many nuclear strikes. The Russian government has made it abundantly clear that direct intervention by outside powers in Ukraine would trigger a severe response, and that is widely assumed to include the use of nuclear weapons. It would be reckless in the extreme to assume that the Russian leadership is bluffing about that.

Because the resolution refers to “restoring” Ukraine’s territorial integrity, that implies that the US would be expected to participate in retaking every piece of territory that has been under Russian control since 2014. That would presumably include using US forces to take Crimea, which Moscow now considers to be part of its territory. If direct US intervention in the war didn’t provoke further escalation from Russia right away, trying to seize control of Crimea surely would.

The resolution obscures the reality of what would be involved in providing this “assistance,” since it would necessarily mean open war with Russia and it would presumably require US attacks on Russian soil. Once US forces start attacking the Russian military, retaliation against the US and its European allies would be inevitable. That would mean turning a local war into a general war between the two states with the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet. There is no scenario in which a general war between the US and Russia results in anything but massive death and destruction for all parties. Actively courting that outcome as Kinzinger does is pure madness. For all of Kinzinger’s talk of “standing with our allies,” his preferred course of action would very likely lead to huge losses of life in dozens of allied countries.

Even if the consequences of using force were not so grave, it would be foolish to authorize the use of force in advance. We have seen before with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the 2002 AUMF what happens when Congress hands over blanket, open-ended authority to the president, and we also know how these authorizations can be stretched and applied in ways that they were not intended to be used. Congress should never volunteer to give the president authority to wage a war, especially one as potentially costly and disastrous as a war with Russia over Ukraine. Pre-authorizations like the one Kinzinger proposes are the foreign policy equivalent of loaded guns, and they prematurely cede authority to the president to decide on the question of war. Nothing good can come from them, and they are designed for the sole purpose of getting the US into wars that have nothing to do with defending this country.

Among its other defects, the resolution also uses dishonest language. The text of the resolution refers to defending the “territorial integrity of United States allies,” but Ukraine is the only country whose territory is mentioned in the resolution. Crucially, Ukraine is not and never has been an ally of the United States. Not only is the US not obliged to go to war for Ukraine, but the US also has no vital interests in Ukraine that could possibly justify doing so. Kinzinger’s description of Ukraine as an ally is a bit of sleight-of-hand that many hawks in both parties have used before, but it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. He is calling on the US to defend the territory of allies, but that is exactly what going to war to defend Ukraine wouldn’t be.

Going to war with Russia is not in the interests of the United States or its treaty allies, and there is no plausible scenario in which it is.

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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor and weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

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A German study has found that the number of serious side effects after Corona vaccines was 40 times higher than previously reported. The Charité, a well-known hospital in Berlin, interviewed 40 000 vaccinated people after they had received their mandated jabs.

The interviews showed that the number of serious side effects was 40 times higher than previously reported by medical supervisors the Paul Ehrlich Institute, according to MDR, the public broadcaster of the states of Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. The number of side effects resulting from normal vaccines, such as those against polio or measles, is considerably lower, researchers pointed out.

NEW – "The number of severe complications after vaccination against Sars-CoV-2 is 40 times higher than previously recorded by the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI)," a study with around 40,000 participants by the Berlin Charité concludes.https://t.co/GSys7hSTzY

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 3, 2022

Sweden, Israel and Canada

Lead researcher Harald Matthes said the figures corresponded to the picture in countries such as Sweden, Israel and Canada. Even the makers of the vaccines come up with similar numbers in their own studies.

Last year, Dutch data analyst Wouter Aukema analysed data from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for all EU member states and saw a similar picture emerge.

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Defying threats from the European Union, Hungary has announced they will not stop purchasing oil and gas from Russia and join a blockade of energy products by the 27 member EU alliance.

Hungary will not support sanctions that would make Russian oil and gas shipments to Hungary impossible, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a statement on Tuesday.

Speaking in Kazakhstan, Szijjarto said Russian oil shipments via the Druzhba pipeline accounted for about 65% of the oil Hungary needed and there were no alternative supply routes that could replace that. (link)

Slovakia has also announced they will not participate, which makes any collective EU action problematic.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is reported to be using his connection to the U.S. and Joe Biden in an effort to force the EU to deliver additional sanctions.   Essentially, if an EU country does not fall in line, Zelenskyy will instruct Biden not to support that EU country with the money congress is preparing to use as blackmail.

Source: The Last Refuge

The polish government has collapsed under the pressure of Joe Biden and the NATO alliance. However, if you look closely at the $33 billion spending demand from the White House, it’s clear to see the U.S. State Dept, specifically those who are currently operating the proxy war along with the CIA, are positioning the funds for use as bribes to EU allies.

Any deal on Russian oil would require the consent of all 27 EU members, meaning it could not pass without Hungary and Slovakia’s approval. The bloc agreed on an embargo on Russian coal in the fifth package last month, while it has not yet ventured into gas.

[…] Ministers from other EU states have spoken of sympathising with oil-reliant neighbours but urged unity during the crisis. Hungary and its Russia-friendly leader Viktor Orban have irked Ukraine with an equivocal stance on the war. (more)

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The United States and its Western partners have embarked on two simultaneous rounds of war games in Eastern Europe as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third month. 

Swift Response 2022, an annual drill hosted by the US Army’s Europe and Africa component command, kicked off on Monday and is set to run until May 20. It will be carried out across locations in the Arctic High North, the Baltics, the Balkans and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Army said in a statement.

Around 9,000 soldiers – among them 2,700 Americans and 6,300 troops from 16 allied nations – will take part in the exercise. In addition to training for “arctic defense operations,” the servicemen will simulate airborne “Joint Forcible Entries” in Latvia, Lithuania and North Macedonia.

Poland, meanwhile, announced the start of the Defender Europe 2022 military drills on Sunday, noting they would take place May 1–27 in nine countries and will involve 18,000 soldiers from more than 20 nations.

“The troops’ ability to cooperate in a joint combat operation will be put to test using various training episodes including long-distance tactical marches, bridging rivers and live-fire training,” a statement from Warsaw said.

This year’s Defender Europe will be scaled back compared to prior iterations, as more than 30,000 soldiers from 27 nations participated in the drills in 2021. The previous year involved even more troops, and was reportedly one of the largest military exercises held on the continent since the Cold War.

Though Russia has repeatedly denounced such war games as aggressive posturing which “[simulate] offensive military action,” Poland claimed the Defender Europe exercise “demonstrates the United States’ unshakable commitment to NATO,” touting it as “a prime example of our collective capabilities.”

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Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute.

Will Porter is the assistant news editor of the Libertarian Insitute and a staff writer at RT. Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter host Conflicts of Interest along with Connor Freeman.

Featured image is from TLI