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Another cache of emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) reveals Dr. Anthony Fauci and his boss, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, colluded to quash dissenting views on the lockdowns
October 4, 2020, three medical professors — Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford — launched the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of high-risk individuals rather than the continuation of blanket lockdowns
As support of the declaration rapidly spread, Fauci and Collins discussed how they could stop the call for a sane, science-based approach. In an email to Fauci, Collins wrote, “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises”
The emails between Fauci and Collins are the smoking gun showing that it is they who are waging war against science
Despite having a combined annual budget of $58 billion, and a combined staff of 31,000, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH/NIAID have not yet conducted an actual study to determine how natural immunity stacks up against the COVID jab, likely because they don’t want to know the answer
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The more we learn about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the worse he looks. The grandfatherly figurehead has now had two years in the limelight, urging people to “follow the science,” which he has shamelessly equated to his own ever-shifting opinion.
Another cache of emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) now reveals Fauci and his boss, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, colluded behind the scenes to quash dissenting views on the lockdowns.1
Fauci and Collins Conspired to Destroy Dissent
October 4, 2020, three medical professors — Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford — launched the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement anyone could sign onto that called for focused protection of high-risk individuals, such as the elderly, rather than the continuation of blanket lockdowns. AIER sponsored the declaration.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration stated. “Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”
As support of the declaration rapidly spread, Fauci and Collins seemingly panicked, and discussed how they could possibly stop the growing call for a sane, science-based approach. In an October 8, 2020, email to Fauci, Collins wrote:2,3,4,5
“The proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises …”
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Fauci replied. Later, Fauci sent Collins links to newly published articles refuting the focused protection solution, including an op-ed in Wired magazine, and an article in The Nation, titled “Focused Protection, Herd Immunity and Other Deadly Delusions.” “Excellent,” Collins replied.
This correspondence is a real peek behind the curtain as to who Fauci and Collins really are. They’re not interested in debating scientific merit. Their go-to strategy is simply to demolish the opposition by any means necessary.
Clearly, there’s nothing “fringe” about these scientists. Bhattacharya, for example, has conducted NIH-funded research for decades.6 If he’s a “fringe” scientist, why is Collins funding him?
As noted by Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Liberty Report (video above), behind the scenes, Fauci and Collins are just “nasty bureaucrats who want to destroy anyone who challenges their power … The scientific method does not involve, ‘Oh my gosh, that guy said something that contradicts me, I must destroy him.’”
Fauci’s War on Science
As noted by Jeffrey Tucker in a December 19, 2021, Brownstone article,7 the attacks on the declaration and its creators were particularly shocking considering “They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more.”
Indeed, March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter8 to the White House warning against the use of lockdowns, travel restrictions and the closing of businesses and schools.
Fauci himself had even told a Washington Post reporter that “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine”9 — a scientifically correct stance he’s since abandoned. According to Tucker, the emails between Fauci and Collins are the smoking gun showing that it is they who are waging war against science.
“What we find in these emails are highly political people who are obsessed not with science but with messaging and popular influences on the public mind,” Tuckerwrites.10
“What do we learn from these emails? The attacks on tens of thousands of medical professionals and scientists were indeed encouraged from the top. The basis for the attacks were not scientific articles. They were heavily political popular pieces.
This adds serious weight to the impression we all had at the time, which was that this was not really about science but about something far more insidious. You can discover more about this in Scott Atlas’s book on the topic [‘A Plague Upon Our House’]. These new emails confirm his account. It was an outright war on top scientists …
My own estimate is that the convinced advocates of lockdowns when they took place were probably fewer than 50 in the U.S. How and why they managed to grab hold of the reins of power will be investigated by historians for many decades.
The incredibly positive response to the Great Barrington Declaration, which has garnered 900,000 signatures in the meantime, demonstrates that there was and is still life remaining in traditional public health measures deployed throughout the 20th century and still respect for human dignity and science remaining among medical professionals and the general public.
This war on dissent against lockdowns is not only a scandal of our times. The lockdowns and now the mandates have fundamentally transformed society …
We seem ever more to be on the precipice of total disaster, one that will be difficult to reverse. It is urgent that we know who did this, as well as how and why, and take steps to stop it before more damage is done and then becomes permanent.”
Bhattacharya Speaks Out
When news of the Fauci-Collins collusion broke, Bhattacharya tweeted,11 “Now I know what it feels like to be the subject of a propaganda attack by my own government. Discussion and engagement would have been a better path.”
According to Bhattacharya, Collins and Fauci cooked up the false counternarrative that focused protection would “let the virus rip” through populations with devastating effect. This erroneous talking point was then thrown at them again and again.
“When reporters started asking me why I wanted to ‘let the virus rip,’ I was puzzled,”Bhattacharya tweeted December 19, 2021.12 “Now I know that Collins and Fauci primed the media attack with the lie.
I was also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD [Great Barrington Declaration] as a ‘herd immunity strategy,’ Biologically the epidemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity, either through COVID recovery or vax. Lockdown, let-it-rip, and the GBD all lead to that.
As Martin Kulldorff has said, it makes as much sense to say ‘herd immunity strategy’ as it does to say ‘gravity strategy’ for landing an airplane. The only question is how to land safely, not whether gravity applies.
So the question is how to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm, where the harms considered include all of public health, not just COVID. The GBD and focused protection of the vulnerable is a middle ground between lockdown and let-it-rip.
Lockdowners like Collins & Fauci … could have engaged honestly in a discussion about it, but would have found that public health is fundamentally about focused protection … Instead, Fauci & Collins decided to smear Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, me and supporters of the GBD. They lied about the ideas it contains and orchestrated a propaganda campaign against us …
Fauci & Collins are silent about lockdown harms because they are culpable. The sad fact is that they won the policy war, they got their lockdowns, and now … own the harms. They cannot deny it. The GBD warned them.
They also cannot say that the lockdowns worked to suppress COVID. In the U.S., we followed the Fauci/Collins lockdown strategy and we have 800k COVID deaths. Sweden — more focused on protecting the vulnerable — did better and cannot be ignored …
[History] will judge those in charge of the COVID policy, and it will not judge kindly. [Collins] smears the GBD and its authors because he has no substantive argument left … Collins’ interview with Baier marks a sad end to an illustrious career, and I take no joy in saying so. Fauci should join him in retirement. They have done enough damage.”
Against Fading Odds, Fauci Tries to Keep Narrative Alive
The damaging character revelations emerge just as Fauci and President Biden struggle to whip up panic about Omicron to keep the need for pandemic countermeasures going. It’s a challenge, for sure, as most people have already realized that Omicron is no worse than a common cold.
During a December 19, 2021, CNN interview, Fauci stated that they “did not anticipate the extent of mutations” that occurred in Omicron.13 So, basically, despite sinking billions of dollars into research, scientists were unable to predict the mutations. That should tell us something.
Disturbingly, there’s now evidence suggesting Omicron might be yet another lab creation. In a recent Bannons War Room interview, Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,14 reviewed what we know so far about the Omicron variant.
As noted by Malone, the press has been talking about “everything except for the obvious, which is that this is a ‘vaccine’-escaped mutant.’” The variant appears highly resistant to the COVID shots, which is a sign of it having mutated within one or more COVID-jabbed individuals, yet the first recommendation from the mental giants in charge of COVID responses was to push COVID booster shots. This is as irresponsible and irrational as it is unscientific.
“The boosters are a perfect way to bias our immune system so we’re LESS able to respond to this new variant,” Malone explained. “This is [like] jabbing everybody with a flu vaccine from three seasons ago and expecting it to have effects against the current [flu strains].”
Omicron Emerged From Old 2020 Strain
As for the nature and origin of Omicron, Malone said:
“It has the hallmark of a viral agent under tight genetic selection for evolution to escape the ‘vaccine’ responses against the receptor bonding domain. The question that is outstanding right now is — because this is so different from the other strains that are being tracked; it’s in its own separate little evolutionary branch — how did this happen?”
What Malone is referring to is the fact that the closest genetic sequences to Omicron date back to mid-2020. It doesn’t seem to belong to any of the evolutionary branches that have emerged since.15In the time-lapse graphic16 below, Twitter user Chief Nerd illustrates the genomic epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 from the original strain until now, using data from nextstrain.org.17
Time-lapse I made of the genomic epidemiology of SARS-COV-2 since the 2020 Wuhan strain
Notice that Omicron makes a sudden appearance inconsistent with the other variants, and contains the largest number of mutations
It’s a great illustration of just how odd an unnatural Omicron’s emergence really is. As the time-lapse gets toward the end of 2021, suddenly there’s Omicron, emerging like a straight line from a mid-2020 strain, having no semblance to any of the other strains. There’s no precedent for this oddity occurring in nature.
In all, Omicron is said to have some 50 mutations from the original Alpha strain, many of which specifically allow it to circumvent COVID shot-induced antibody defenses.
According to molecular biologist and cancer geneticist Philip Buckhaults, Ph.D.,18 Omicron has 25 nonsynonymous and only one synonymous spike mutation compared to its most recent common ancestor (AV.1). Were it a natural occurrence, that ratio ought to be somewhere between 25 to 50 and 25 to 100.
Until and unless we end up with conclusive proof of its origin, we need to keep all options open, Malone says, and that includes the possibility of Omicron being cooked up in a lab from a previous strain.
One plausible theory is that scientists enabled an early SARS-CoV-2 variant to build antibody resistance, possibly by passaging them through human or humanized cell lines in the presence of convalescent plasma.
Congressman Calls for Natural Immunity Study
December 14, 2021, a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis held a remote hearing in which they debated the need for an accelerated vaccination effort. In the outtake from that meeting (video above), Congressman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, points out that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH/NIAID have a combined annual budget of about $58 billion, and a combined staff of 31,000.
With that kind of budget and an army of staff, why has the U.S. government not done a study to determine how natural immunity stacks up against the COVID jab? Jordan asked. The answer he received (from an, unfortunately, unidentified doctor) was refreshingly direct:
“I don’t think they want to know the answer,” because “it would undermine the indiscriminate vaccination policy for every single human being, including extremely low risk people.”
According to a Columbia University study, more than half the American population have now been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in one form or another, and have natural immunity, and according to an Israeli study, natural immunity is 27 times more effective than the COVID shot.19
So, why are government leaders and so-called health authorities still acting as though natural immunity is irrelevant and the only way to control the pandemic is through repeated injections with experimental — and clearly hazardous — gene transfer technology?
I believe the answer is they’re ignoring natural immunity because their primary objective and goal it to have everyone injected. They want everyone routinely jabbed so they can justify the rollout of health passports, which will become the foundation for an all-encompassing digital ID control system.
In short, our public health agencies have been hijacked and are carrying out an anti-human, anti-health agenda intended to enslave the public in a technocratic control grid.
There’s no doubt anymore that the vaccine passports will be expanded to encompass financial transactions and incorporate a social credit system. Together, all of these pieces will allow an unelected elite to control the lives of every person on the planet, down to the minutest details of our everyday lives.
While Fauci and Collins are certainly not alone in this effort, and likely not even close to the top of the technocratic food chain, they have played very important roles. It’s time to see them for who and what they are, and demand that they be held to account for their actions.
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I sent the letter below to a group of fellow socialists who support lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns and mandatory vaccinations for healthcare staff. After 30 years active in the movement I was shocked by how so much of the Left has gone along with government mismanagement of the pandemic. So I decided to engage fellow socialists in debate. Below is my first missive in this attempt to stimulate debate.
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Dear …
I am rather disturbed by your ringing endorsement of vaccines as the answer to the pandemic.
This displays an element of covid derangement syndrome that has gripped most sections of the left during the pandemic.
First of all, vaccines do not prevent people catching or transmitting the virus.
Secondly, natural immunity from having had covid provides much greater protection than the vaccines do.
Thirdly, governments across the world and apex public health bodies have completely failed to promote policies that would strengthen peoples immune systems e.g. exercise, good diet, plenty of rest and sleep, vitally important medicines such as vitamin D and C.
Governments and apex health bodies such as the CDC, NIH have endorsed toxic drugs such as Remdesivir based on slim medical evidence. The WHO’s solidarity trial has since come out against the drug as not only does it not work but many patients find it quite toxic. Yet hospitals across the world, including the UK, use Remdesivir to treat covid patients.
Meanwhile, there has been an international campaign to demonize cheap, ultra safe repurposed drugs which are the key to ending the pandemic. These range from Fluvoxamine, Colchicine, Ivermectin, I could go on.
The most well known case of an attempt to demonization a repurposed drug is that of Ivermectin. It has 69 medical trials proving its efficacy as a prophylactic and treatment for the different stages of Covid-19. I would refer you to the work of Professor Paul Marik of EVMS, who is one of the most highly published intensive care specialists in the world, on the efficacy, cheapness and ultra safe nature of Ivermectin. Meta analysis proves Ivermectin to be superior to any other anti viral out there.
Ivermectin is used in dozens of low income countries particularly in Africa. Scientists from the UK/USA puzzle over the low infection rates while Africa has very low vaccination rates. Ivermectin use is very widespread across Africa and has been for decades.
Epidemiologist Dr.Juan Chamie has produced date to show that the highest covid infection rates are in the wealthiest countries with the highest rates of vaccination where there are no effective anti virals available to treat the illness and have high levels of inflammatory illnesses caused by unhealthy lifestyle.
Epidemiological evidence from the Indian state of Utter Pradesh, population 241 million, Mexico City and Japan reveals how Ivermectin has crushed infection rates and emptied hospitals of covid patients.
Your analysis also ignores the immense harm caused by vaccines as noted by the VAERS system in the US. Dr.Robert Malone, one of the inventors of MRNA vaccine technology and world renown cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough have both talked about this issue and faced tremendous censorship and attacks from the media. If the vaccines are so safe then remove the liability protection that the drug companies have.
The current crop of vaccines are leaky, non sterilizing vaccines that only stimulate one part of the immune system. They don’t prevent people catching or transmitting covid-19.
Yet we have lock downs of the unvaccinated going on in Austria. Next year Germany and Austria, which should know better considering their Nazi heritages, are going to force people to take vaccines which is a blatent violation of the Nuremburg Medical Code developed after the trials of Nazi doctors at the end of WW2.
Governments engaging in such measures are pursuing a policy of divide and rule of the population. Meanwhile they are free to pursue reactionary social and economic policies.
Much of the Left appears unable to link up the regulatory capture of public health agencies by Big Pharma and the complete failure of the many health policies promoted by governments across the world. Ordinary people across the world in their hundreds of thousands are protesting vaccine passports yet most of the Left will not even cover these protests. Look at the dockers in Triest blockading the port in protest at the vaccine passport of the Italian government.
Capitalism is going into a decade of extreme crisis in the 2020s. its complete failure to deal with Sars-Cov-2 does not bode well for dealing with much bigger issues over the next period.
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Before your child is injected, watch Dr. Robert Malone’s statement on child COVID vaccinations.
Before you vaccinate your child, which is irreversible and potentially permanently damaging, find out why 15,000 physicians and medical scientists around the world signed a declaration publicly declaring that healthy children should NOT be vaccinated for COVID-19.
On behalf of these MDs and PhDs, Dr. Robert Malone, who has devoted his career to vaccine development, provides parents a clear statement outlining the scientific facts behind this decision.
Full Text of Malone Statement
My name is Robert Malone, and I am speaking to you as a parent, grandparent, physician and scientist. I don’t usually read from a prepared speech, but this is so important that I wanted to make sure that I get every single word and scientific fact correct.
I stand by this statement with a career dedicated to vaccine research and development. I’m vaccinated for COVID and I’m generally pro-vaccination. I have devoted my entire career to developing safe and effective ways to prevent and treat infectious diseases.
After this, I will be posting the text of this statement so you can share it with your friends and family.
Before you inject your child – a decision that is irreversible – I wanted to let you know the scientific facts about this genetic vaccine, which is based on the mRNA vaccine technology I created:
There are three issues parents need to understand:
The first is that a viral gene will be injected into your children’s cells. This gene forces your child’s body to make toxic spike proteins. These proteins often cause permanent damage in children’s critical organs, including
Their brain and nervous system
Their heart and blood vessels, including blood clots
Their reproductive system, and
This vaccine can trigger fundamental changes to their immune system
The most alarming point about this is that once these damages have occurred, they are irreparable
You can’t fix the lesions within their brain
You can’t repair heart tissue scarring
You can’t repair a genetically reset immune system, and
This vaccine can cause reproductive damage that could affect future generations of your family
The second thing you need to know about is the fact that this novel technology has not been adequately tested.
We need at least 5 years of testing/research before we can really understand the risks
Harms and risks from new medicines often become revealed many years later
Ask yourself if you want your own child to be part of the most radical medical experiment in human history
One final point: the reason they’re giving you to vaccinate your child is a lie.
Your children represent no danger to their parents or grandparents
It’s actually the opposite. Their immunity, after getting COVID, is critical to save your family if not the world from this disease
In summary: there is no benefit for your children or your family to be vaccinating your children against the small risks of the virus, given the known health risks of the vaccine that as a parent, you and your children may have to live with for the rest of their lives.
The risk/benefit analysis isn’t even close.
As a parent and grandparent, my recommendation to you is to resist and fight to protect your children.
The statement was delivered at a December 12 livestream event hosted by Unity Project and Global Covid Summit.
Dr. Robert Malone and other leading physicians discussed their recent Physicians’ Declaration update, why healthy children should not be vaccinated and the associated risks. Read supporting evidence here.
Dr Robert Malone is the inventor of the mRNA technology.
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About The Unity Project
The Unity Project, a non-partisan, non-profit educational organization, promotes a “children-first” agenda focused on integrity, care, rationality, and evidence-based motivation. For more information, visit www.UnityProjectOnline.com.
About Global Covid Summit
Global Covid Summit is the product of an international alliance of physicians and medical scientists, committed to speaking truth to power about Covid pandemic research and treatment. Please read and consider signing our Declaration HERE.
I fact checked the fact checkers and couldn’t believe what I found. Despite the corporate press, Big Pharma, and the federal government telling us otherwise, it is absolutely true that there is no FDA approved COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States today. And there are no plans to make one available any time soon.
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I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s 100% true..And this reality implicates both Big Pharma and the US Public Health bureaucracy in an incredible scandal..On August 23, the FDA granted full approval for a COVID-19 vaccine to Pfizer-BioNtech for a specific product sold under the brand name Comirnaty..The landmark moment — the “full approval” endorsement from the FDA — was heralded by the Biden Administration and countless states, and quickly leveraged to coerce millions into taking the shots. This product, Comirnaty, was fully authorized for the “prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older.” Yet Comirnaty itself has never made its way into the United States. The fully-approved version is nowhere to be found within our borders..A separate product, which remains under emergency use authorization (EUA), is the only “Pfizer shot” available in the United States.Early on, Pfizer and its government allies seemed to have a reasonable explanation for this issue. They claimed that Comirnaty was not yet available because the EUA shots were still lining the shelves, and claimed that the FDA-approved version would be available to all soon.
Now, it’s been over 4 months since full approval, and Comirnaty is still not being distributed.
The FDA has recognized Comirnaty as a “legally distinct” product with “certain differences,” but claims it does not impact safety or effectiveness of the shots. “Fact checkers” leverage the latter point of safety and efficacy to claim that people are still getting access to ingredients akin to the fully approved product.
But here’s the issue: they have yet to explain why people still can’t get Comirnaty, now 128 days after full approval.
And if it is the case that the two products are the exact same thing, the FDA has not explained why they only approved a distinct product named Comirnaty, and not the injection currently being sold under the EUA label. Why won’t the FDA approve the EUA product? Pfizer doesn’t want them to. You’ll see in a moment.
The CDC continues to confirm that Comirnaty is “not orderable at this time.” Moreover, the CDC currently states that “Pfizer does not plan to produce any product with these NDCs (National Drug Codes) and labels over the next few months while EUA authorized product is still available and being made available for US distribution.”
Pfizer is likely refusing to make the fully authorized version available, while continuing to sell an EUA product because doing so opens up Pfizer and BioNTech to legal liability issues.
An EUA fully protects the drugmaker and grants zero legal recourse to the patient.
Additionally, Robert Kennedy Jr mentioned it on a recent podcast with Mikhaila Peterson. I looked into these claims extensively, and they are completely accurate. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which was passed into law in 1986, provides a legal liability shield to drug manufacturers if they receive full authorization for all ages.
Pfizer needs approval for children so that it can protect itself from lawsuits. The company is working with regulators, even clandestinely altering vaccine ingredients (a process that should require them to get full approval for an entirely separate product), to clear the path to legal indemnity.
Now you know why Pfizer, Moderna, and others are working relentlessly to authorize their products for children, who face near-zero risk from COVID-19, but continue to showcase alarming side effects from the vaccine.
If Comirnaty was available for adults in the United States, Americans would be able sue Pfizer for vaccine injuries. If Comirnaty is for all ages, that means Pfizer receives extensive legal protection. Big Pharma is using children as legal human shields for their products. Let’s hope they don’t get away with it again.
There is currently no fully authorized COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States today, and this reality has been attacked relentlessly by the corporate press. “Fact checkers” at Newsweek, USA Today, Reuters the Associated Press, and elsewhere peddled false information to cover up this absolute fact.
If you run a Google search on this issue, you will find the aforementioned “fact checks” as evidence that Comirnaty is available, when it is most certainly not available. Nobody in the United States is receiving the legally distinct, fully authorized shot, because that shot makes Big Pharma and corrupt regulators more legally vulnerable than they want to be.
There is a wave of vaccine-induced illnesses sweeping Southern California hospitals, and a few brave nurses have come forward to talk about it.
In Ventura County, located to the north of Los Angeles, cases of “unexplained” heart problems, strokes and blood clotting are skyrocketing at area hospitals. And many local doctors are refusing to link these events to Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) injections.
A critical care nurse at a Ventura County ICU came forward to tell the Conejo Guardian that he is “tired of all the B.S. that’s going on” as the medical establishment refuses to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
“It’s crazy how nobody questions anything anymore,” this person, named Sam, is quoted as saying.
Sam says that there has been a noticeable surge in young people experiencing these types of severe health problems after they get needled with the injections from Operation Warp Speed.
“We’ve been having a lot of younger people come in,” Sam added. “We’re seeing a lot of strokes, a lot of heart attacks.”
In one case, a 38-year-old woman came to the emergency room with occlusions, or blockages of blood flow, in her brain.
“They [doctors] were searching for everything under the sun and documenting this in the chart, but nowhere do you see if she was vaccinated or not,” Sam added.
“One thing the vaccine causes is thrombosis, clotting. Here you have a 38-year-old woman who was double-vaccinated and she’s having strokes they can’t explain. None of the doctors relates it to the vaccine. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage.”
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The vaccine-damaged are the ones flooding hospitals
In another instance, a 63-year-old woman with no previous cardiac history suffered a heart attack. Tests revealed that her coronary arteries were clean, however she had just taken a Moderna injection.
“One doctor actually questioned the vaccine, but they didn’t mention it in the chart because you can’t prove it,” Sam said.
Sam says that hospitals all around the area are seeing a significant spike in myocarditis, a well-known adverse effect caused by Chinese Flu shots.
“Everyone wants to downplay it – ‘It’s rare, it’s rare,’” Sam laments about how the medical establishment is not taking any of this seriously.
“Doctors don’t want to question it. We have these mass vaccinations happening and we’re seeing myocarditis more frequently and nobody wants to raise the red flag. When we discuss the case, they don’t even discuss it. They don’t mention it. They act like they don’t have a reason, that it’s spontaneous.”
Another ICU nurse by the name of Dana told the Conejo Guardian that her facility has “never been this busy,” and that “none of it is Covid-19.”
“We don’t normally see this amount of strokes, aneurysms and heart attacks all happening at once,” Dana says.
“Normally we’ll see six to ten aortic dissections a year. We’ve seen six in the last month. It’s crazy. Those have very high rates of mortality.”
Almost never do the doctors at Dana’s hospital ever even consider the fact that Wuhan Flu shots might be responsible for all this. Instead, they are blaming things like “the holidays” for this sudden uptick, which makes zero sense.
“I don’t understand how you can look at what’s going on and come up with just, ‘Yeah, it’s the holidays.’ There’s been a big change in everybody’s life, and it’s the vaccine.”
The vast majority of admitted patients are fully vaccinated, and yet an unprecedented number of them, Dana says, are “on pressers to keep their blood pressure up, people on ventilators, clotting issues, so we have a lot of Heparin drips to make sure they don’t stroke out.”
More of the latest news about Fauci Flu injections can be found at ChemicalViolence.com.
The last two weeks have brought three new studies finding negative efficacy for two vaccine doses, meaning the vaccinated are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated.
These are study findings, not raw data, so have been adjusted for various biases and confounders, making it harder to dismiss them as anomalous or skewed.
The first is a pre-print study from Denmark, published on December 23rd, which looked at nearly all PCR-positive SARS-CoV-2 infections in Denmark from November 20th to December 12th and investigated them to see if they were likely to be the Omicron variant. By comparing the vaccination status of those infected, the researchers found a vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron variant of minus-76.5% for Pfizer and minus-39.3% for Moderna three months after double vaccination (see chart above), meaning the double-vaccinated were considerably more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. They found the vaccine effectiveness against Omicron was significantly lower than against Delta, with Pfizer vaccine effectiveness at 53.8% and Moderna at 65% against Delta after three months. They reported that a third dose of Pfizer got vaccine effectiveness against Omicron back up to 54.6%, at least for a month. The full results are in the table below.
Hansen et al.
The latest vaccine effectiveness study from the UKHSA confirms these results. Against Omicron, the UKHSA reports zero or negative vaccine effectiveness from a double-dose of all three vaccines (AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna) after five months. The third dose takes it up again, but only into the 40-60% range, and dropping fast.
AstraZeneca
Pfizer
Moderna
A new study in Eurosurveillance from Norway also backs up the observation of negative vaccine effectiveness against Omicron, with a higher proportion of those who tested positive in the particular outbreak in the study being double-vaccinated than those who did not test positive (98% versus 93%).
Somestudies had already found negative vaccine effectiveness against Delta, in line with the unadjusted figures from the UKHSA, though many people had dismissed these results as anomalous or biased. With Omicron, the reports of negative efficacy are becoming impossible to ignore, with even the UKHSA publishing graphs showing it after three months on two doses. At some point, health authorities are going to need to grapple with what the data is showing on this and stop pretending it isn’t there
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According to President Biden, “a winter of death” awaits anyone who rejects the experimental COVID jab. If we are to go by actual science and data, the warning Biden issued should have gone out to the vaccinated, because everything points to the double and triple jabbed being at increased risk for infection, especially with the Omicron variant
One reason for this is because the COVID jab reprograms your innate and adaptive immune systems, causing immune depletion. Data also show that the more heavily “vaccinated” a population is, the higher the case rate gets
As predicted, we are rapidly approaching a time when the unvaccinated might be imprisoned for no other reason than their refusal of an experimental gene transfer injection
In early January 2021, a New York bill (A416) was introduced that would give the governor and his or her delegates the power to remove and/or indefinitely detain anyone suspected of being a threat to public health. Detainees would be kept in a “medical facility or other appropriate facility” — in other words, a medical prison camp — for a maximum of 60 days, although a court could extend the detention in 90-day increments, indefinitely
In Australia, medical incarceration is already underway. Anyone who has come in close contact with someone who tests positive must spend 14 days in the quarantine camp, even if they are triple jabbed and test negative for COVID
According to President Biden, “a winter of death” awaits anyone who rejects the experimental COVID jab which, by the way, has been consistently shown to do far more harm than good.
A December 16, 2021, White House statement reads: “For the unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death. For themselves, their family and the hospital they’ll soon overwhelm.” That exact sentence was reiterated the next day by COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients during a virtual press conference.
Backlash Over Biden’s Callousness
As reported by MSN’s Claire Goforth,1 the “prediction” didn’t go over well with the public. “Most people hate it. They feel it’s callous and cruel,” Goforth said, quoting a number of Twitter responses, including one from John D. Davidson:
“If you wanted to make half the country hate the administration and resist its edicts and advice, it would be hard to come up with a better strategy than this.”
A Twitter user by the name Martyr Made noted, “The aggressive Us/Them language in this White House message is insane.”2 Olivia Nuzzi, a Washington, D.C., reporter for New York Magazine tweeted, “Who is this for? Unvaccinated Americans are not going to be persuaded by messaging like this.”3
White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain defended Biden saying “we have a duty to warn people what they are facing if unvaccinated.”4 But from my perspective, the rub is that they continue to pretend that lies are truth and truth is lies. Everything is upside-down, and many are rejecting this “winter of woe” message for the simple fact that they know the opposite is true.
If we are to go by actual science and data, the warning Biden issued should have gone out to the vaccinated, because everything points to the double and triple jabbed being at increased risk for infection, especially with the Omicron variant.
One reason for this is because the COVID jab reprograms your innate and adaptive immune systems, causing immune depletion.5 Data also show that the more heavily “vaccinated” a population is, the higher the case rate gets.6 And even this fails to account for the massive increase risk of dying from the jab or becoming permanently disabled, as many jabbed millions have already suffered.
Former WHO Adviser Tells Vaccinated to Quarantine Over Winter
Back in August 2021, the U.K. Column interviewed professor Christian Perronne, a French infectious disease expert, long-time vaccine policy chief and former vice president of the World Health Organization’s European Advisory Group, who issued the opposite — and likely far more accurate — warning:7
“Vaccinated people are at risk of the new variants … It’s been proven in different countries, so vaccinated people should be put in quarantine and should be isolated from society. Unvaccinated people are not dangerous; vaccinated people are dangerous to others.
It’s proven in Israel now. I’m in contact with many physicians in Israel. They’re having big problems now; severe cases in hospitals are among vaccinated people. And in the UK also, you had a larger vaccination program and also there are problems.”
Not surprisingly, despite impeccable credentials, Peronne has been censored and shunned for his contrarian views on COVID countermeasures, the COVID gene transfer shots in particular. During his interview, he didn’t mince words, referring to the European COVID-19 policy as “completely stupid.”
Are Prison Camps for the Unjabbed Next?
As predicted, we are rapidly approaching a time when the unvaccinated might be imprisoned for no other reason than their refusal of an experimental gene transfer injection. In early January 2021, a New York bill (A416) was introduced that would give the governor and his or her delegates the power to remove and/or indefinitely detain anyone suspected of being a threat to public health.
Detainees would be kept in a “medical facility or other appropriate facility” — in other words, a medical prison camp — for a maximum of 60 days, although a court could extend the detention in 90-day increments, indefinitely. As reported by Reason:8
“The bill’s language is noticeably vague in defining the parameters around disease type, leaving the government wide latitude in conducting its risk analysis … The legislation was originally introduced during the 2015-16 session in response to the Ebola virus … Though [SARS-CoV-2] is a serious virus, it is also no Ebola, which carries an average case fatality rate of 50%, with some outbreaks reaching as high as 90% …
[T]he vagueness of its approach gives the state a great deal of discretion in locking people up who might have some sort of unnamed illness, as well as people who merely interacted with someone who might have that illness.”
The bill comes up for a vote in the New York Senate and Assembly sometime in the next legislative session, which begins January 5, 2022.9 In addition to indefinite detention for poorly specified reasons, the bill would “require an individual who has been exposed to or infected by a contagious disease to complete an appropriate, prescribed course of treatment, preventive medication or vaccination.”
In other words, this bill legalizes the forced vaccination of anyone who is detained under the mere suspicion of being infected with something or having been in close proximity to someone suspected of being infected. As reported by Rights and Freedoms:10
“There is no explicit reference to what types of contagious diseases qualify a person to be removed from public life, detained in a facility, and forced into medical treatment and vaccination. Anyone can technically be held in isolation until they are deemed non-contagious, which would also raise questions over whether those carrying HIV/AIDS could be released back into society.
The bill has received an overwhelmingly negative response on the NY Senate website.11Commenters have stated that, ‘this is disturbing and sets up a terrible precedent for future law. The governor can basically detain whoever [he/she] likes on the basis of scanty evidence.
This is un-American. It reminiscent of the Soviet Union locking up political opponents on the basis that they were ‘mentally unstable.’ We CANNOT allow this in our state.’ ‘This is a violation of fundamental human rights. The government should be working for the people, not locking them up without cause.’”
Australia Among the First to Test Medical Imprisonment Model
If you think being tossed into a prison camp without cause or recourse is impossible — after all, this is the United States of America, the land of the free, home of the brave — think again. Australia, another shining star of democracy, has backslidden into totalitarianism at a speed that has everyone’s head spinning.
The Australian government has gone full speed ahead, building a massive COVID quarantine camp, complete with barbed wire fences, guards and video surveillance. Once you’re in, you can’t just waltz out whenever you want to. In the video above, Hayley Hodgson describes what it was like to be detained and transferred to a COVID internment camp, even though she wasn’t sick.
Video surveillance placed her with a friend who had tested positive. They ran her license plate to retrieve her address and showed up at her house, telling her she had to quarantine. Even if you test negative, you still have to spend 14 days in a quarantine camp if you’ve been in close contact with someone who has tested positive. If you refuse, you’re fined $5,000 and forcibly taken there by police anyway.
“You feel like you’re in prison … It’s inhumane what they’re doing,” she says. “You are so small. They just overpower you. You’re literally nothing. It’s like, ‘You do what we say, or … we’ll lock you up for longer.’”
If someone can threaten to extend your stay in this “health hotel,” just what kind of medicine are we dealing with? Clearly, this is a prison model, not a health care model. When have you ever been in a hospital and the nurse tells you, “If you don’t eat your pudding, we’re keeping you here another three months”?
Life in the Biosecurity State
Based on Hodgson’s description of the camp, you don’t get much in terms of medical attention. One shudders to think what would happen to someone who actually had a severe case of COVID in there. Will hazmat suit-equipped police drop you at your room and then you don’t see them again unless you’re caught breaking some rule?
Food is delivered and dropped outside your door once a day. Each room has a 2×2 meter deck where you can go, but if you step outside your room or designated outdoor area without a mask, you’re fined $5,000. She was also told that additional infractions would result in her stay being extended past the 14 days — even though she wasn’t sick and there was no reason to keep her there in the first place.
“You’re literally treated like a prisoner in there,” she says. If you’re triple jabbed and think that means you’ll never see the inside of one of these prisons, think again. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been double or triple jabbed.
If you’re found to have been in close contact with someone who tests positive, in you go. And there’s no legal process you can turn to for help if you disagree with the decree to quarantine. During her stay, three teenagers — all of whom had tested negative — managed to escape the camp. The manhunt that ensued is further evidence that we’re dealing with a prison model and nothing else.
US Has Hundreds of Ready-Made Prison Camps
While Australia is building its second camp, the U.S. already has 800 FEMA camps ready for action. As reported by AMG News:12
“FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations … The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby.
The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.”
The article goes on to list the many executive orders that can work together to suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively allowing government to seize control over all aspects of life, from food production and transportation to communications and health care functions.
There’s even an executive order that allows the government to mobilize civilians into “work brigades” to carry out whatever functions are deemed necessary, and one that allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate entire communities. To find the FEMA camp nearest you, check out the state listings in the AMG News article.13 Most states have three or more.
Interpret the Media Narrative — They Want Civil War
If you’ve been paying attention over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that you can almost always predict what the next phase of the narrative is going to be. They “advertise” or pave the way for the evolving narrative by putting out articles slanted in a given direction.
Based on recent headlines, I suspect “the powers that be” are hoping to incite a civil war. “CIA Advisor: US Is ‘Closer to Civil War’ Than Thought Possible,” the Daily Mail claims.14 “We’re Edging Closer to Civil War,” an opinion columnist at The New York Times declares.15 “US Closer to Civil War Than Most Would Like to Believe, New Book Says,” announces The Guardian.16
According to Dr. Barbara Walter, a political science professor who serves on the Political Instability Task Force, the U.S. meets several criteria that historically have served as indicators that an “open insurgency” may be imminent. In her book, “How Civil Wars Start,” she writes:17
“No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war. If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States … has entered very dangerous territory.”
Government Has Designated the Enemy, and It’s Us
The problem here is that while authoritarian politicians keep paying lip service to “democracy,” their own actions are anything but. Just who is undermining democracy? If you believe the news and CIA advisers, it’s the people who want the Constitution to stand and be adhered to that are the enemies of democracy. Never mind the mental gymnastics required to get to that conclusion.
It’s not hard to predict a scenario in which authoritarian leaders, acting on a falsely constructed narrative that a civil war is imminent, might start rounding up “dissidents.” And that’s in addition to the already existing, thinly veiled threat of tossing the unvaccinated into indefinite detention.
I agree with Walter’s assessment that we’re in dangerous territory, but not for the same reasons as she suggests. I would also argue that just about every country is a powder keg ready to blow, and for the same reason — people are being tyrannized by their governments and by unelected health authorities that claim powers they do not legally have.
Take England, for example. Entrepreneur and COVID blogger Steve Kirsch was recently notified that an anti-COVID restrictions campaign member had been detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act for not wearing a mask to a dentist appointment.18 Normally, it’s quite difficult to get a person sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but not anymore.
Refusing to wear a mask apparently qualifies as an acute mental health disorder warranting a month-long stay in a psych ward.
The man, Charlie Cunningham, is reportedly being held at Littlemore Mental Hospital in Oxford, “where he’s being deprived of sleep under the pretext of being suicidal,” according to the woman who contacted Kirsch. She added, “He’s now going to be detained over Christmas and New Year — [he’s] very upset as he feels he’s been kidnapped and being held against his will …”
While all the articles mentioned earlier that warn of civil war blame the decline in democracy on the Trump administration, the Trump administration can hardly be blamed for the civil rights abuses and power grabs that are occurring today. It’s time to judge each tree by its fruit. That said, knowing that a civil war would serve the totalitarian takeover agenda, it would be wise to make sure our resistance remains a peaceful one.
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2021 is arguably the year when intra-NATO tensions and rivalry widened more so then ever since the alliance’s inception in 1949. Although NATO most recently expanded its membership to include Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020, the rift caused by competing interests and the emboldening of revisionist ideologies (neo-Ottomanism and Anglo Chauvinism) among bloc members has only widened in recent years, but no other like 2021.
Intense NATO disunity first became prevalent during the Syrian War. Turkey continues to be enraged that the US, France and other member states train, fund and arm the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that Ankara recognizes as a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, Washington is furious that Turkey defied warnings to not purchase the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system, and thus in December 2020 imposed sanctions on its fellow NATO member, an unprecedented action. With former US President Donald Trump unwilling to confront Turkey in a serious way in order to not jeopardize his personal business interests in the country, his successor Joe Biden has more willingly confronted his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
On Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24, 2021), Biden recognized the Turkish-perpetrated Armenian Genocide, something successive presidents refused to do out of fear of alienating a Turkey that was once seen as a bulwark against the Soviet Union/Russian Federation. Seeing as the previous non-recognition of the genocide was for political and geopolitical reasons, the recognition signifies a major change in Washington’s attitude towards Ankara.
Although Washington bemoans Ankara as being revisionist, its own contradictory revisionism actually caused a deeper disunity among NATO members in 2021 following the announcement of AUKUS, a trilateral Anglo security pact between Australia, the UK and the US. Under the pact, the US will share nuclear propulsion technology with Australia. This culminated in Canberra cancelling without notice the French–Australian submarine deal worth €56 billion, ending efforts for the two countries to develop a deeper strategic partnership.
The sudden cancellation of a lucrative contract and defense strategy with Australia was a humiliation for Paris as its ambitions for more global influence was dealt a blow. The French Ambassadors to Washington and Canberra were recalled to Paris, and Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said “With Britain, there is no need. We know their constant opportunism.”
Washington pleaded to Paris that it had no knowledge that Canberra was about to “backstab”, as Le Drian termed it, their planned strategic alliance. The UK’s post-Brexit Anglo Chauvinistic ideology, something that Canberra naturally aligns with, motivated the humiliating manner in which France was sidelined to make way for AUKUS. This total disregard for French industry and strategic interests made Paris lose trust in NATO.
This “backstab” spurred on Paris to seek greater strategic alliances at a bilateral level, leading to a mutual defense pact that supersedes NATO with Greece. Greece is also frustrated with NATO as daily Turkish violations against its airspace, Turkish threats of a casus belli if it expands its maritime zone in the Aegean Sea to 12 nautical miles from its six (as permitted by international law), and Turkish attempts to exploit energy deposits in Greece’s maritime space, is met with indifference. In this way, Athens lost trust in NATO as a peace guarantor, something that made its pact with France a security necessity.
The Biden administration praised what Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis termed as “strategic autonomy” from Washington, a minor concession likely to try and appease Paris as it lost its more lucrative agreement with Australia. However, Ankara continually berates the French-Greek pact, with Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar saying that Greece’s alliance with France will cause cracks in NATO. On another occasion he said “[Greece is] trying to overpower Turkey with armaments and challenges, in cooperation with some other countries,” an indirect reference to France. Akar added: “[Greece] has different ambitions that it seeks to achieve through other alliances.”
There is clearly a major breakdown in NATO unity as accusations are being made between member states on who is responsible for causing cracks. This comes as the US continues to expect all member states to be compliant, as the UK retracts to Anglo Chauvinism under the guise of “Global Britain”, as France attempts to have more international influence, and as Turkey more aggressively pursues a neo-Ottoman policy.
2021 saw Greece and France lose trust in NATO, Turkey accuse Greece of causing disunity, the US angered as Turkey announces it wants to purchase another S-400 unit from Russia, and the formation of an Anglo bloc that seemingly supersedes NATO and French interests. Throw into this quagmire the massive disparity of interest among NATO members to support Ukraine against Russia, and it appears that the bloc is disunited like never before.
These events suggests that 2021 is a year where NATO’s fragility and disunity was more apparent than any other year, especially in the post-Cold War period. With these tensions, particular as the Anglo bloc and Turkey pursue revisionist policies and ideologies, disunity within NATO will not only continue into 2022, but intensify.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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This article was originally published in January 2021.
Every act of censorship inadvertently achieves its opposite by drawing attention to its subject.
Last week, an Israeli court ordered the 2002 film Jenin, Jenin to be banned in Israel and all copies of it confiscated.
The film – which was directed by Mohammed Bakri, a Palestinian citizen of Israel – has been the subject of censorship attempts since its release around 18 years ago.
Nissim Magnaji, a soldier who appears on archival footage in the film for just a few seconds, sued Bakri for defamation in 2016. His suit was supported by former Military Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit.
An Israeli judge ruled in Magnaji’s favor last week, ordering Bakri to pay more than $50,000 to the soldier and another $15,000 in court fees. Israeli government and military officials welcomed the court’s ruling.
Bakri is now planning to appeal the ruling in Israel’s highest court.
Following the court’s ruling, social media users shared links to the video and Bakri gave a number of interviews.
The Palestine Film Institute, a body that preserves and promotes Palestinian cinema, decided to make the film available to everyone. You can watch it for free at the top of this page.
Bearing witness
The film is a collection of interviews with residents of Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank following an Israeli military invasion in April 2002 that lasted almost two weeks.
The Israeli military killed at least 52 Palestinians and injured scores of others, according to a report compiled by the United Nations secretary-general at the time.
Israeli forces also shelled 150 buildings, leaving 450 families homeless. According to the report, 23 Israeli soldiers were dead by the end of the operation.
“It was not just the numbers involved that shocked the world at the time, but the brutal nature of an Israeli assault that was unprecedented even in the harsh history of the occupation,” Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote in The Electronic Intifada in 2017.
Bakri said he snuck into the camp on foot through the mountains about 10 days after the invasion to witness what Israel had done and speak to camp residents.
“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe,” Bakri told his son Adam Bakri in an interview on Sunday about his emotional reaction after he first arrived in the camp.
“I couldn’t hold my body, I mean, when I saw these things around me and I smelled that smell of death.”
Little in the camp was left unscathed.
“Their bombs came down on us like water,” a young Palestinian girl tells Bakri in the film.
“I saw dead bodies, houses in ruins and undescribable atrocities. After all I’ve been through, what will become of my life?”
The girl, who Bakri identified as Najwa in later interviews, gained notoriety for her remarkable courage and became an iconic face of the film.
The documentary-style film combines rapid-fire shots in between interviews with dramatic sound transitions for aesthetic effect. It is genre-bending. It has no voice over and it doesn’t identify anyone. Bakri, who is often shown walking away from the camera, is sometimes heard, but he never turns around.
The film does not pretend to do more than bear witness.
A technicality
The filmmaker isn’t new to dealing with censorship and lawsuits pertaining to his film.
Five soldiers sued Bakri following the film’s release accusing him of defamation. Their cases were later dismissed, because, as Bakri wrote in The Electronic Intifada in 2008, “I do not know them and neither are they mentioned or shown in the film.”
Magnaji tried to get the film censored on relatively similar grounds.
Magnaji appears briefly in the film with two other soldiers as a camp resident recounts how during a raid on his home, an Israeli military officer robbed him of his life’s savings that he had set aside in the hope of having a child one day.
The elderly man recounted asking the military officer about his money. “He said, ‘shut up or I will kill you,’” the man recalls, as a clip is shown of three Israeli soldiers walking near a military vehicle, including Magnaji, according to Israeli media.
Getting the film censored may provide Magnaji and his supporters in Israel’s government with some temporary satisfaction.
But no amount of censorship will change the indisputable fact that the Israeli military committed atrocities in that camp and in others during the second intifada, nor that these soldiers were members of the military that has reinforced occupation and committed countless crimes against Palestinians.
No amount of intimidation will shake the legendary courage and resilience of each camp resident who witnessed Israel’s crimes that month.
And no amount of lawsuits will make them forget.
That’s just a truth Israel and its soldiers will have to live with.
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Coupled with the continued global economic uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, the result is that the EU will continue suffering from high prices and unreliable supplies so long as it refuses to pragmatically reach long-term supply agreements with Russia.
President Putin recently expressed exasperation at the counterproductive policies being pushed by the EU amidst its ongoing energy crisis. He agreed with a Duma representative who earlier warned that Europe was at threat of freezing due to its politicization of Russian gas imports. In the Russian leader’s own words,
“Yes, I agree with your assessment. And it’s also stupid for those who are delaying the (Nord Stream II) system, because greater quantities of gas in the European market would surely lower the price of spot transactions. They don’t want to buy from us directly, but for them, the price would fall dramatically. They’re just chopping down the branch they’re sitting on. It’s remarkable.”
It’s very rare for President Putin to express exasperation about anything, let alone other countries’ policies, but that just goes to show how counterproductive he believes them to be. Contrary to what many in the Mainstream Media and Alt-Media Community (AMC) claim, each for their own ideological reasons of course and in pursuit of different narrative ends,
Russia doesn’t want Europe to freeze. It genuinely wants to continue mutually beneficial energy cooperation with the bloc and isn’t interested whatsoever in “punishing” those countries through the suspension of supplies for political reasons. That’s why this exasperates President Putin so much.
The EU’s radical “green” policies and anti-Russian paranoia are directly responsible for exacerbating the ongoing energycrisis.
The first refer to the bloc’s accelerated transition towards so-called “green” energy sources, which occurred at the expense of existing conventional (fossil fuel) ones. The result was that the EU had insufficient fuel supplies to accommodate the economy’s gradual recovery over the past months after the economic consequences of the international community’s uncoordinated efforts to contain COVID-19 dealt a powerful blow to it over nearly the past two years.
They should have gradually implemented moderate policies in hindsight instead of accelerate the implementation of radical ones.
The second factor relates to some countries’ US-instigated fears about Russia’s alleged political intentions when it comes to its role in supplying the EU’s energy.
The Baltic States and Poland have consistently claimed without any factual basis that Russia wants to “punish” all of the EU for whatever reason they claim at the time, be it the bloc’s so-called “democratic” and “human rights” standards or its imposition of sanctions against the Eurasian Great Power. Not once has Russia ever “weaponized” energy, with the only alleged case of this in the early 2000s being due to Ukraine failing to pay for its supplies and subsequently siphoning off resources as they transited through its territory westward.
Russia shut down its export routes per contractual agreement in order to prevent its resources from being stolen and in an attempt to compel the debtors to finally pay their bill. This legal move was maliciously spun as some sort of “collective punishment” against all of Europe, which explains the timing with which Ukraine’s US-backed government at the time carried out this unprecedented provocation.
Even so, it remains etched in some of the regional residents’ minds as Russia’s alleged “weaponization” of energy exports, which their governments now claim is happening once again. These countries would rather pay for more expensive and less reliable US LNG than clinch deals with neighboring Russia.
The state of affairs is such that the EU shows no signs of relenting on its accelerated imposition of radical “green” policies, and the bloc is still somewhat influenced by its Russophobic members’ paranoia about the Kremlin’s strategic intentions.
Coupled with the continued global economic uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, the result is that the EU will continue suffering from high prices and unreliable supplies so long as it refuses to pragmatically reach long-term supply agreements with Russia.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
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Comrades, many American citizens stood jaw agape as they watched Australian metropolitan police departments begin cracking skulls and making arrests for violating COVID rules and restrictions. Yes, it always seemed like Australia, New Zealand and Europe were the beta testing ground to see if police would comply with jackboot arrests of their own community.
Well, now we can see those same tactics being deployed in the U.S.
New York City was the first large metropolitan area to require vaccination identification cards to enter restaurants, bars, dining establishments and various public and private venues. Now comes the enforcement part.
Watch this video below to see the New York Police Department (NYPD) start deploying vaccination police, and making arrests of people who do not present papers to prove their status. WATCH:
When asked why they would arrest their own community members simply for being unvaccinated and wanting to eat a sandwich, the police turn a deaf ear. This should not be a surprise. When it comes to getting their own paychecks, or putting food on their family’s table, just about every single police officer in the U.S. will load you in the cattle car…. while saying, “It’s just my job.”
We watched this escalate in Victoria, New South Wales and various regions throughout Australia, as well as France, Germany, Austria and regions in Europe. If things go as they did in previous examples, when/if the citizens of New York City begin to push back against this, there’s no reason to believe the NYPD will not respond with armored cars, riot teams and rubber bullets.
It is profoundly disturbing, sickening and wrong, but shouldn’t be too surprising given what we have witnessed in other countries. When push comes to shove, very few police will not participate; most will do exactly what they are told by the local and state officials.
NYPD is the first to start showing their jackbooted nature. Next will likely be Chicago and Los Angeles; it spreads from there. Once the Blue State governors and city officials see they can turn to violence in order to retain their dictates, orders and demands, that violence will not stop – nor will it diminish.
The best course of action is to see the world as it is, not as you would wish it to be.
Watch the police in action, and take note of their irrelevance to the questions put to them. There have been multiple psychological studies of this behavior over the years, and all end up with the same result – the police will do what they are told regardless of their own views on the matter.
Many police and law enforcement officers will tell you they will not comply with such orders. However, when those orders actually materialize, the police compartmentalize their behavior and do exactly what they are told.
The local police in your town will do exactly the same if they are ordered to carry out the rules of the city officials in your area. Your local police will do this regardless of what they might say right now.
As we witnessed in Australia, once the police officers start carrying out these types of operations, the only way to make it stop is to make them uncomfortable. That requires mass non-compliance by large numbers of citizens to overcome the mental barrier the police use to justify their conduct.
Then, after the police start getting uncomfortable arresting moms, dads and children, it takes open and vocal public shaming on a large scale toward the officers on a community level to get them to stop.
Remember, when the Chinese government first told the regular army to open fire on the students in Tiananmen Square, the soldiers would not shoot. The Chinese Communist government then brought in the Mongolian divisions who had no connection to the local community. You know what happened next.
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Some of the most domineering public health figures during the covid-19 scandal are NAMED in a historic indictment sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC). These government, pharmaceutical and public health officials have ruled un-democratically over the people and imposed harmful policies of subjugation under the guise of “mitigating covid-19.”
Their unaccountable policies of subjugation have deprived people of basic human rights and equal opportunity. The defendants have used medical fraud, perpetrated by fraudulently calibrated PCR tests, to propagate a narrative that only emboldens their own power and control over people’s lives. Their disregard for efficacious treatments, immune system solutions and their censorship of natural immunity has ravaged the principle of informed consent, contributed to iatrogenic error and caused undo separation, isolation, medical malpractice and wrongful death. Their policies have forced provably dangerous genetic experiments onto people using discrimination, segregation and threats to one’s livelihood. These defendants have subverted the rule of law for nearly two years, ruining countless lives.
Fauci, Daszak, Gates, Hancock, Schwab all named in historic indictment
These beleaguered officials include
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO);
June Raine, executive director of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA);
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID);
Dr. Radiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation;
Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and Bill and Melinda Gates, who have openly funded and promoted much of these well-documented crimes against humanity.
The defendants also include notable UK officials, including
Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister;
Christopher Whitty, UK Chief Medical Adviser;
Matthew Hancock, former UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care; and
Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum.
The criminal complaint also lists the CEOs of four major pharmaceutical companies, who continue to commit acts of genocide through experimental gene interference “vaccines” that damage the cardiovascular system, innate immune responses and the reproductive health of women, among thousands of medical concerns documented by pharmacovigilance systems around the world.
These defendants include
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer;
Stephane Bancel, CEO of AstraZeneca;
Pascal Soriot, CEO of Moderna and
Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson and Johnson.
The criminal complaint is brought forth by
Former Pfizer vice president Dr. Michael Yeadon
Human rights lawyer Hannah Rose.
Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn,
Retired law enforcement officer Mark Sexton,
Nurse Louise Shotbolt,
Funeral director John O’Looney,
and human rights activist Johnny McStay.
The indictment accuses the defendants “of numerous violations of the Nuremberg Code,” “crimes of aggression” and “war crimes.”
Because the English court system refuses to take up this historic matter, the plaintiffs are asking the ICC with “utmost urgency” to “stop the deployment of COVID vaccines” and “illegal vaccination passports” and “all other types of illegal warfare” that is being “waged against the people of the United Kingdom” and against people around the world.
Historic indictment documents various crimes against humanity, violations of Nuremberg Code
Public health officials have forced people to use PCR tests that are “completely unreliable” as a diagnostic standard, misleading people and obfuscating data. These tests have been fraudulently calibrated and used to artificially inflate covid-19 case counts and deaths to perpetuate further medical tyranny and deprivation of individual rights.
Effective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been suppressed, leading to immune failure and severe disease.
This, in turn, led to reliance on drugs that cause renal failure and subsequent reliance on ventilators, which cause oxidative damage and cytokine storm, damaging lungs and putting patients at a greater risk of life-threatening pneumonia and death.
Moreover, the UK government has failed to investigate the massive wave of vaccine injury and death following covid-19 vaccination. There are at least 395,049 reported adverse reactions to COVID “vaccines” in the U.K. alone.
This experimental gene interference technology was designed from criminal gain-of-function research that weaponized coronavirus spike proteins so that genetic experiments could be deployed through “vaccination” using the engineered spike protein.
This experiment has led to a proven increase in eye disorders, heart inflammation, cardiac arrest and spontaneous abortion. A recent study published in the New England Medical Journal showed 8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after taking a Covid ‘vaccine’ before the third trimester.
Furthermore, the defendants’ lock down policies have not provably altered the course of infection in the public and have caused “wealth and business destruction, along with a sharp increase in ChildLine calls from children who were made more vulnerable due to destructive public health policies.
The defendant’s acceptance of vaccine passports has introduced a medical apartheid that violates the medical privacy and body autonomy of individuals through discrimination, segregation and other acts of malice.
Their policies have imposed psychological harm to children and severely deprived the physical liberty of the people, in “violation of fundamental rules of international law.”
These violations include travel and assembly bans and forced quarantine and self-isolation without due process of law.
The first principle of the Nuremberg Code is a willingness and informed consent by the person to receive treatment and participate in an experiment.
The person is supposed to activate freedom of choice without the intervention, either through force, deceit, fraud, threat, solicitation or any other type of binding or coercion. This guiding principle of medical ethics and the remaining tenants of the Nuremberg Code have all been violated during the covid-19 scandal. After violating these principles for nearly two years with no remorse, the perpetrators must now be brought to their knees.
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In 2021, President Joe Biden truly reaped a bitter harvest from the strategic foreign policy errors of four of his predecessors. But Washington would do well to think before it makes its next move
“America has just had its Suez Crisis,” commented a member of the Iranian delegation at the nuclear talks in Vienna about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, “but it has yet to see it.”
It’s not just the fall of Kabul.
In 2021, President Joe Biden truly reaped a bitter harvest from the strategic foreign policy errors of four of his predecessors. As he was the vice president for one of them, Barack Obama, he has trouble seeing this as well. The seeds of each of the major global conflict zones post – Afghanistan, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Iran were planted long ago.
What unravelled this year was no less than three decades of bungled US global governance.
Each US president in the post-Soviet period shared the belief that he had the file to himself. It was not something to be shared at the UN Security Council. He was the commander-in-chief of the largest, best-equipped and most mobile armed force in the world, one that could stage over the horizon attacks with devastating accuracy.
With that belief came two assumptions that proved to be fatally flawed: that the US monopoly on the use of force would last forever – it ended with Russia’s intervention in Syria – and that the US could continue to enforce a “rules-based” world order – so long as it continued to make the rules. Biden has quietly buried both assumptions by admitting that great powers will be forced to “manage” their competition to avoid conflict that no one can win.
But hang on a moment. There is something not quite right here.
This was done to give new meaning to Nato, a military pact whose purpose died when its enemy did. Complete rubbish was talked about Nato “cementing” democracy in Eastern Europe by guaranteeing its independence from Moscow. But remember the mood at the time. It was triumphalist. Not only was capitalism the only economic system left, but its neo-liberal brand was the only brand worth promoting.
For a brief moment, Moscow became an eastern gold rush, a Klondike for venture capitalists, Ikea, Carrefour, Irish pubs, and bible bashers. The Russians, meanwhile, were obsessed with designer labels, not politics.
The Americans in Moscow – at the time – did not bother much about what their hosts thought or did. Russia became irrelevant on the international stage. US advisers boasted about writing the decrees the Russian president Boris Yeltsin issued. And Yeltsin returned the favour by handing over the designs of the latest Russian tank and the wiring diagram of bugs placed by the KGB in the concrete foundation of an extension being built in the US embassy.
For Russian nationalists, this was nothing less than an act of treason. But doors were open so wide to the West that literally everything that was not nailed down flew through them – nuclear scientists, missile engineers, the cream of the KGB, and suitcases full of cash. Where do you think the Russians who settled in Highgate in North London, or the Hamptons on Long Island, or Cyprus, or Israel got their money from?
For a time, even the word “West” dropped out of Russian political vocabulary because the new Russians thought they had just joined it.
Ukraine, the West’s victim
The first US ambassador to the newly created Russian Federation, Robert Strauss, spent more time defending what happened in the Kremlin than the White House. Western embassies became spokesmen for a Russia they thought they now owned.
Strauss downplayed the first reports of the rise of the Russian mafia state, as a mere bagatelle. “This is what Chicago was like in the 20s,” he told me. This was followed by inanities about the green shoots of democracy and the time it took to mow an English lawn. As if he knew.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were similarly blasé about what they did in Russia.
The Russian army was “a joke”. When the Russians sent their armoured columns into Grozny in December 1994, the West thought it could be stopped by small bands of determined Chechens; their pilots had only three hours flying time each month: their frigates sailed in pairs – one to patrol, the second to tow back the first one when it broke down; their submarines sunk.
And so Nato pushed eastwards.
No one at the time bought the argument that all Nato would do was to push the line of confrontation eastwards. Russia’s pleas to negotiate a security architecture for Eastern Europe fell on deaf ears. They are not falling on deaf ears now, with 90,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders.
The victim of this gross act of western stupidity was Ukraine, which for at least the first decade after the fall of the Soviets had survived intact and largely in peace. Civil wars raged all around it, but Ukraine itself maintained its political and social unity despite being comprised of very different communities. With the exception of Western Ukraine, which never forgot that it had been captured by the Bolsheviks from the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, Russian and Ukrainian speakers lived in peace.
Now it is divided forever, scared by a civil war from which it will never recover. Ukraine will never regain its lost unity, and for that, Brussels is as much to thank as the bully boys from Moscow.
The new cold war
Then there is China. Pivoting eastwards surely did not mean ending one Cold War and starting a new one with China, but that too is inexorably happening. Biden cannot decide whether to calm President Xi down or confront him, but doing each in sequence will not work.
To get a measure of what mainland China feels when British warships sail through the Taiwan Strait, how would Britain react if Chinese warships appeared in the Irish Sea and sailed between Scotland and Northern Ireland?
The game of “managing” competition has human consequences as devastating as the superpower triumphalism of the 1990s, and those can be observed in Afghanistan today. The Afghanistan of the ousted Afghani president Ashraf Ghani truly was a Potemkin village, a facade of independent statehood.
An astonishing 300,000 troops and soldiers on its government’s books did not exist. “Ghost soldiers” were added to official lists so that generals would pocket their wages, Afghanistan’s former finance minister Khalid Payenda told the BBC. The black hole of the former corrupt regime’s finances was an open secret long before Biden set a date for withdrawal.
A report for the US special inspector general for Afghanistan (SIGAR) warned in 2016:
“Neither the United States nor its Afghan allies know how many Afghan soldiers and police actually exist, how many are in fact available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities.”
Now that the tap of US income has been turned off, Afghanistan is on the verge of a nationwide famine. But, incredibly, the US is blaming this situation on the Taliban. It withholds money on the grounds of human rights, the night-time revenge killings on former state employees, or the suppression of education for women.
Much of the Afghan central bank’s $10bn in assets is parked overseas, including $1.3bn in gold reserves in New York. The US Treasury is using this money as a lever to pressure the Taliban on women’s rights and the rule of law. It has granted a licence to the US government and its partners to facilitate humanitarian aid and it gave Western Union permission to resume processing personal remittances from migrants overseas.
But the US does not hold itself to account for having nurtured a state that cannot function without the money that it is now withholding. The US has direct responsibility for the famine that is now taking place in Afghanistan. To withhold money from the Taliban because they took power militarily, rather than negotiate their re-entry with other Afghan warlords, also wears somewhat thin.
Same story
The Taliban walked into Kabul with barely a shot fired because everything crumbled before them. The speed of the collapse of Afghan forces blindsided everybody – even Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who are accused by India and western governments of running the Haqqani network of the Taliban. The only country that really knew what was happening was Iran, because officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were with the Taliban as they walked in, according to Iranian sources close to the IRGC.
Even the ISI were blindsided by the speed of this collapse. An informed source told me in Islamabad: “We had expected the NDS [National Directorate of Security] to put up a fight in Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Kunduz. That would have produced a stalemate and the possibility for negotiation a more inclusive government.”
But we are where we are.
“There were some improvements in the last 20 years. There was a middle class in Kabul, women’s education. But if you want to lose everything, this is the way to do it. The Taliban will go hardline if the place runs out of money. If you want to protect the liberal elements, you have to make Afghanistan stable.”
The Pakistani source listed 10 jihadi groups, as opposed to the one jihadi group, al-Qaeda, that was around in 2001. And the ISI do not know what happened to the arms the Americans left behind.
“We simply don’t know in whose hands they have ended up,” he said. When they pressed the Taliban on forming an inclusive government, the Taliban shot back at them: “Do you have an inclusive government? Do you have a government that includes the PML-N? What do you think it would be like in Pakistan if you had to reconcile groups of fighters who had killed each other’s sons and cousins?”
Starved of funds, there is only one way for the breakaway groups to go – into the hands of the jihadists. He ended his analysis with the following thought: is it really in the US interest to stabilise Afghanistan? If they let the money through, it would mean supporting the very axis of China, Russia and Pakistan that they were now determined to push back. The faltering talks in Vienna, the crisis on Ukraine’s border, renewed tension and military posturing in Taiwan, are all part of the same story.
Strategic mistakes
Washington would do well to look at the map of the world and think before it makes its next move. A long period of reflection is needed. Thus far it has obtained the dubious distinction of getting every conflict it has engaged with in this century wrong.
The chance of a global conflict involving real armies and real arms has never been higher and the tripwire to using weapons of mass destruction has never been strung tighter. Nor have all the world’s military powers been better armed, able and willing to start their own inventions.
Biden should bear this in mind.
It is now in the US’ strategic interest to staunch any more bloodletting in the battlefields it created this century. That means the US should come to a deal with Iran by lifting the sanctions it imposed on Tehran since the 2015 JCPOA. If it wants to balance the growing Chinese and Russian influence in the Middle East, that is the surest way to do it.
Iran is not going to give up its missiles any more than Israel is going to ground its air force. But a deal in Vienna could be a precursor to regional Gulf security negotiations. The Emiratis, Qataris, Omanis and Kuwaitis are all ready for it. If Washington wants to apply rules, let it do so first with its allies, who have extraordinary impunity for their brutal actions.
If Washington is the champion of human rights it claims to be, start with Saudi Arabia or Egypt. If it is the enforcer of international law, let’s see Washington make Israel pay a price for its continued settlement policy, which makes a mockery of UN Security Council resolutions, and the US’ own policy for a resolution to the Palestinian conflict.
The Abraham Accords were devised to establish Israel as America’s declared and open regional surrogate. Had Donald Trump secured a second term, such a policy would have been a disaster for US strategic interests in the Middle East. Already Israel thinks it has a veto on US decision making in the region. With this policy fully in place, it would have been in charge of it, which would have meant permanent conflict created by a military power that always strikes first.
Israel acts with ruthless logic. It will use any opportunity to expand its borders until a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility. It probably has already succeeded in that aim. However, this is not US policy. But this expansion continues, almost week in, week out, because no one in Washington will lift a finger to stop it. Doing nothing about armed lynch mobs of settlers attacking unarmed Palestinian villagers in the West Bank is the same as agreeing to them.
If you want to be a champion of rules, apply those rules to yourself first.
This is the only way to regain lost global authority. The US has entered a new era where it can no longer change regimes by force of arms or sanctions. It has discovered the uselessness of force. It should drop the stick and start handing out bucket loads of carrots. It should get on with the urgent task of deconfliction.
After the damage done this century by conflicts ordered, created and backed by US presidents – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya – that is not only a responsibility but a duty.
Another US strategic mistake would be its, and Western Europe’s, last.
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David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was The Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
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While Civil Society and a global movement work steadfastly across dozens of fields for the abolition of nuclear weapons, planning, preparations, and rehearsals for attacks using deployed H-bombs and nuclear missiles are routine in the US military and NATO. Two years ago, the US Joint Chief of Staff published online, then quickly deleted, its thermonuclear mass destruction titled “Nuclear Operations, Joint Publication 3-72.”
Before the Joint Chiefs took it down, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists managed to preserve a copy. The manual relies on abstractions and euphemism to depict the unthinkable. It says, “The employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations.” Of course “employment” means detonation, and “significant influence” means searing fireballs, vaporized victims, blast and shock-wave devastation, demolished hospitals and schools, vast firestorms, and permanent radioactive contamination of water, soil, and the food chain.
The manual explains that nuclear attacks create “conditions” without describing them. It says, “Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability.” Then, as if US presidents had never said, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the report pretends it can and should. “[T]he use of a nuclear weapon will…create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”
US nuclear war practice takes place routinely with allied European militaries. “Steadfast Noon” is NATO’s code name for its annual nuclear attack practice, and Hans Kristensen reports for the Federation of American Scientists that, “This is the exercise that practices NATO’s nuclear strike mission with the B61 … nuclear bombs the US deploys in Europe.” Jan Merička wrote in European Security Journal News Oct. 19, 2017, that Steadfast Noon is designed “to simulate nuclear strikes…and was conducted from the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium and Büchel Air Base in Germany, where US B61 thermonuclear bombs with the force of up to 340 kilotons of TNT are stored.” (FYI: Hiroshima was incinerated with a 15 kiloton US bomb.)
To illustrate the Pentagon’s ho-hum acceptance of mass destruction, it recently opened in Omaha its new, $1.3 billion Strategic Command headquarters for supervising and targeting the nuclear arsenal, and it named the building after General Curtis LeMay, who, the Omaha World Herald reported, designed and conducted the incendiary bombing of 60 Japanese cities at the end of WWII, bombing that “incinerated entire cities” killing as many as 900,000 civilians. General LeMay’s motto and that of Strategic Command used to be “Death from Above,” but after the war it was changed to “Peace is Our Profession.”
In Germany, readiness for attacks with nuclear weapons is maintained by the USAF 702nd Munitions Support Squadron, which tends to Germany’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing at Büchel Air Force Base. Headlines from last October’s bombing “theater” included, and “NATO Holds Secret Nuclear War Exercises in Germany,” “German Air Force training for nuclear war as part of NATO;” from 2017, “NATO nuclear weapons exercise unusually open”; and in 2015, “NATO nuclear weapons exercise Steadfast Noon in Büchel.”
While the uninitiated might be aghast, the US military plans and prepares all year round for nuclear attacks at its far-flung “Defense Nuclear Weapons School” of the Air Force Nuclear College. According to the school’s website, one branch (of “Armageddon Academy”) is at the Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, the largest US military base outside the country. Other branches are in New Mexico, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Ohio. Outlines for this school’s ghoulish courses can been read online. (The site may have been altered since I first reported on it in last June.) For example, the school says boastfully that it “is responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters … every day.”
Course outlines on the website include, “Theater Nuclear Operations, a 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting. The course provides an overview of nuclear weapon design, capabilities, and effects…. Objectives: …Understand the US nuclear planning and execution process; Understand the targeting effects of nuclear weapon employment.” Another class is, “Integrated Munitions Effects Assessment … a five-day course that provides students … proficiency in creating target models, developing attack plans using … nuclear weapons….” Students “will be able to import, edit, and modify target sites”, “Calculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets; [and] develop attack plans using … nuclear weapons.…”
I am of the mind that setting the stage for nuclear attacks is both criminal and insane. Luckily, millions of people are involved in the newly invigorated movement to rid the world of such madness, via the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Read it sometime.
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John LaForge is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) 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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The price of natural gas on the European market has fallen by more than 20 percent due to favorable weather conditions and expected LNG supplies from the United States, which should eliminate the shortage of gas in storage facilities.
The European Union has launched an arbitration process within the WTO against the Russian Federation for 290 billion euros. The reason is Russia’s policy of import substitution as a response to Western sanctions.
Simultaneously, there were signals that the West is ready to negotiate with Moscow on European security issues.
A decrease of the West’s aggressive rhetoric always follows a drop in prices on the European energy market.
December 28 came with good news in the Luhansk People’s Republic, where no fire violations have been recorded in the last 24 hours. In the Donetsk People’s Republic, the shelling continues.
The activity of US military aircraft near the Donbass region has increased. On December 27, a USAF RC-135V Rivet Joint with the call sign HOMER19 patrolled along Eastern Ukraine. On December 28, he was joined by a USAF E-8C Joint STARS surveillance aircraft with the call sign REDEYE6 and was also accompanied by a Ukrainian Air Force IL-76MD.
The appearance of US aircraft over these particular frontlines is quite rare, unlike the provocative flights over the Russian borders in the Black Sea. According to the Russian Deputy Minister of Defense, the deployment of reconnaissance and combat aircraft over the Black Sea has increased by more than 60% compared to last year.
In the Black Sea, reconnaissance drones and bombers are accompanied by regular raids conducted by warships of the US and other NATO member countries, executing dangerous maneuvers off the coast of Crimea.
The most recent provocation took place in the Sea of Azov in early December. The Ukrainian vessel ‘Donbass’ was heading to the Kerch Strait, posing a threat to shipping. It was escorted by the Russian coast guard.
In 2021, there were 15 NATO military drills which took place in the Black Sea region, including the Sea Breeze 2021 exercise, organized jointly by Ukraine and the United States with total participation numbering 32 countries.
Moscow has consistently decried the provocative actions on its borders. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the United States had approached the “threshold of our house” with missiles and Russia will not tolerate it. The Kremlin demanded that Washington provide security guarantees and warned of a military response.
Russia’s switch from the traditional rhetoric of diplomatic concern to the language of ultimatums forced the West to declare its readiness for negotiations to stabilize the situation in Eastern Europe.
According to a representative of the White House National Security Council, representatives of both Russia and the United States will hold talks on January 10. They will be held within the Strategic security dialogue and will be devoted primarily to arms control and the situation on the Russian-Ukrainian border. A meeting of the Russia-NATO Council is expected to take place on January 12.
The Russian side expresses concern that these negotiations may be used by the US and NATO as a tool to distract attention and work as a delaying tatic on the eve of aggression against Russia.
At the same time, there is hope that the crisis can be overcome by reaching a compromise between Washington and Russia. The interests of Ukraine will traditionally not be taken into account, and the European energy market will be the subject of bargaining.
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Despite an overwhelming majority of New York residents being fully vaccinated, hospitals in the state are reportedly filled with Covid infected patients [based on the flawed PCR test] and an increasing number of those admitted with the virus are children.
During a remote press briefing from City Hall on Monday, outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed there were 17,343 new Covid-positive test results in the city, of which 296 were hospitalized.
Statewide, hospitalizations surged by 11 percent in just one day, from 4,891 on Christmas to 5,526 on Sunday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday.
The number of pediatric admissions in New York City increased by 395 percent in the past two weeks. From Dec. 5 to 11, there were 22 cases of Covid hospitalizations amongst children in NYC. The number jumped to 109 from Dec. 19 to Dec. 23, ABC 7 reports.
Statewide, pediatric hospitalizations increased from 70 to 184 during the same time frame.
Why is there an influx of Covid hospitalizations in regions with the highest vaccinated populations if the mandated experimental vaccines are actually “safe and effective?”
At least 16,126,203 people or 82 percent of New York’s population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while approximately 13,874,220 people or 71 percent of New York residents has been fully vaccinated, according to USA Facts.
As of December 24, 2021, 71.7 percent of children from 12 to 17 years of age in the state had received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccines, and 64.1 percent were been fully vaccinated. At least 27 percent of kids 5 to 11 years of age had received at least one dose and 16.1 percent were been fully vaccinated.
In New York City, at least 90 percent of adult residents have received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine and 82 percent are fully vaccinated, according to data published on the city’s official website.
Evidently, the COVID jabs do not inoculate against transmission of the coronavirus and masks are not “stopping the spread.” But the inefficacy of the experimental shots and face coverings is not stopping the Democrat lawmakers from continuing to coerce the public towards 100 percent COVID compliance.
The Big Apple, the city with some of the most stringent COVID regulations in the country, has forced millions of its residents to comply with its vaccine mandate to keep their jobs and go to school. New York City residents as young as 5-years old must present vaccine passports to legally enter restaurants, bars, gyms, sports arenas and nearly every indoor venue.
Getting caught forging a vaccine passport in New York City results in a 7-year prison sentence, while the penalty for a bootleg vaccine passport is a 1-year prison sentence in New York state.
Masks are required in every indoor venue and violators who choose not to wear face coverings face $1000 fines.
Hochul and De Blasio insist the recent uptick of Covid hospitalizations warrant even more sweeping Covid measures.
The latest daily report of Covid infections shows 17,343 new positive test results in the city, the New York Post reports.
De Blasio warns the “staggering figure” should serve as “a powerful, powerful reminder — once again — to get everyone vaccinated, everyone boosted as quickly as possible.”
The mayor’s vaccine mandate for private businesses, which specifies that employers “may not allow any unvaccinated workers to come to their workplace” went into effect on Monday.
Speaking to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, De Blasio warned, “every mayor, every governor, every CEO in America should do vaccine mandates now because 2022 has to be the year we leave COVID behind.”
Hochul on Monday urged parents to get their children vaccinated before returning to school in the new year.
“With respect to our young people, parents I’m calling on you this is the time, you have kids home from school, there are plenty of vaccination opportunities from your pediatrician, to a site set up by the state of New York, our urgent care centers, drug stores,” Hochul said. “So many places where you can go get your child vaccinated before they get back to school.”
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Alicia is an investigative journalist and multimedia reporter. Alicia has contributed to numerous outlets, including the Gateway Pundit, Project Veritas, World Net Daily, Townhall.com and Media Research Center, where she exposes public corruption, fraud and abuse in government, media and Big Tech. She has a Bachelor of Science in Political Science from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She served in the Correspondence Department of the George W. Bush administration. She also served as a War Room analyst for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee. Alicia is originally from New York City and currently resides in Washington D.C.
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The COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer
A paper published in early May 2021 reported the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion
Antigens in vaccines have been shown to induce defects in the immune system that can raise the risk of autoimmune diseases
Leaky or nonsterilizing vaccines can also trigger the evolution of more hazardous viruses, and the COVID jabs are among the leakiest “vaccines” ever created
According to health authorities, the vaccine-evading Omicron variant necessitates a third COVID injection, but this recommendation will only perpetuate mutation
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A number of medical experts, scientists and published studies now warn that the COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Pfizer Shot Reprograms Both Arms of Your Immune System
A paper1 posted May 6, 2021, on the preprint server medRxiv reported that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion.
While they confirmed the jab “induced effective humoral and cellular immunity against several SARS-CoV-2 variants,” the shot “also modulated the production of inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells upon stimulation with both specific (SARS-CoV-2) and nonspecific (viral, fungal and bacterial) stimuli.”
In other words, we’re looking at a horrible tradeoff. You may get some protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, but you’re weakening your overall immune function, which opens the door wide to all sorts of other health problems, from bacterial, fungal and viral infections to cancer and autoimmunity.
After the injection, innate immune cells had a markedly decreased response to toll-like receptors 4, 7 and 8 (TLR4, TLR7, TLR8) ligands, while cytokine responses induced by fungi were stronger. According to the authors, defects in TLR7 have previously been linked to an increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in young males.
People who were “fully vaccinated,” having received two doses of the Pfizer shot, also produced significantly less interferon upon stimulation, and this can hamper the initial innate immune response against the virus.
Repeated Vaccinations and the Risk of Autoimmunity
Pathogenic infections and cancer are but two potential outcomes of this kind of reprogramming. Previous research, for example, has linked defects in the immune system to a higher risk of autoimmune diseases. What’s more, it’s been shown that antigens in vaccines, specifically, can induce this kind of immune system dysfunction.2 As reported in the paper in question:3
“Repeated immunization with antigen causes systemic autoimmunity in mice otherwise not prone to spontaneous autoimmune diseases. Overstimulation of CD4+ T cells led to the development of autoantibody-inducing CD4+ T (aiCD4+ T) cell which had undergone T cell receptor (TCR) revision and was capable of inducing autoantibodies.
The aiCD4+ T cell was induced by de novo TCR revision but not by cross-reaction, and subsequently overstimulated CD8+ T cells, driving them to become antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL).
These CTLs could be further matured by antigen cross-presentation, after which they caused autoimmune tissue injury akin to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Systemic autoimmunity appears to be the inevitable consequence of over-stimulating the host’s immune ‘system’ by repeated immunization with antigen, to the levels that surpass system’s self-organized criticality.”
Fast-forward to mid-May 2021, when a study4 in the Journal of Clinical Investigations reported that “SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines induce broad CD4+ T cell responses that recognize SARS-CoV-2 variants and HCoV-NL63.” HCoV-NL63 is a human coronavirus associated with the common cold.
“Interestingly, we observed a 3-fold increase in the CD4+ T cell responses to HCoV-NL63 spike peptides after vaccination,” the authors stated, adding, “Our results suggest that T cell responses elicited or enhanced by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines may be able to control SARS-CoV-2 variants and lead to cross-protection against some endemic coronaviruses.”
What they did not address was that excessive CD4a+ T cell responses could also result in the development of autoantibodies and autoimmune disease.
COVID Shots May Also Cause More Hazardous Variants
We’ve long known that leaky or nonsterilizing vaccines can trigger the evolution of more hazardous viruses.5,6,7,8 So far, SARS-CoV-2 variants have mutated into less dangerous versions, which is fortunate, but the risk of the COVID shots creating a “monster” still remains.
In a February 9, 2021, article,9 NPR highlighted this risk, stating that “vaccines could drive the evolution of more COVID-19 mutants.” According to NPR science correspondent Richard Harris, “the virus is always mutating. And if one happens to produce a mutation that makes it less vulnerable to the vaccine, that virus could simply multiply in a vaccinated individual.”
The Omicron variant appears to have significant resistance against antibodies produced by the original COVID shots, which is why Omicron infection is being primarily reported in those who have received the injections.
In 2018, Quanta Magazine detailed how vaccines drive the evolution of pathogens.10 I’ve referenced that article on previous occasions, as have many others. In response, the editor of Quanta Magazine added a “disclaimer” dated December 6, 2021, to the article, stating:
“This article from 2018 discusses how leaky vaccines — vaccines that do not reduce viral replication or transmission to others — can drive the pathogens they target to evolve and become more virulent. These concerns do not apply to COVID-19 vaccines, because COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduce coronavirus replication and transmission, reducing the chance that mutations occur and variants arise …”
That statement is clearly false, as studies have repeatedly shown the COVID shots are in fact leaky. They do not “significantly reduce” viral replication or transmission, as the editor claims. Quite the opposite.
People who have received one or more COVID shots have been found to harbor higher viral loads than the unvaccinated, and Israel (which appears to have the best tracking and monitoring) reports that the worst COVID cases are in those who are fully vaxxed.
December 6, 2021, Newsweek11 reported a COVID outbreak among “fully vaccinated” hospital staff in Spain. After a Christmas dinner with more than 170 fully vaxxed health care workers in attendance, nearly 70 of them tested positive for COVID. Some reported mild symptoms. Daniel Horowitz pointed out the editor’s false note in a December 9, 2021, Blaze post:12
“Leaky vaccines are worse than no vaccine at all. That is the unmistakable conclusion one would derive from a May 2018 article in Quanta magazine, a top scientific publication, about the unsuccessful attempts to create vaccines for HIV, malaria, and anthrax that aren’t leaky and don’t run the risk of making the pathogens more dangerous.
Yet now that we are seeing such a microbiological Frankenstein play out in real life and people like Dr. Robert Malone have been citing this article to raise red flags about the leaky COVID shots, Quanta magazine took the unprecedented step of slapping an editor’s note on an article three and a half years later to get people to stop applying it to the leakiest vaccine of all time.”
COVID Shots Stop Working Within a Few Months
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine, published December 9, 2021, also confirms that whatever protection you get from the Pfizer COVID shot is short in duration. As explained by the authors:13
“In December 2020, Israel began a mass vaccination campaign against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) by administering the BNT162b2 vaccine, which led to a sharp curtailing of the outbreak.
After a period with almost no cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, a resurgent Covid-19 outbreak began in mid-June 2021. Possible reasons for the resurgence were reduced vaccine effectiveness against the delta (B.1.617.2) variant and waning immunity.
We used data on confirmed infection and severe disease collected from an Israeli national database for the period of July 11 to 31, 2021, for all Israeli residents who had been fully vaccinated before June 2021.
We used a Poisson regression model to compare rates of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe Covid-19 among persons vaccinated during different time periods, with stratification according to age group and with adjustment for possible confounding factors.
Among persons 60 years of age or older, the rate of infection in the July 11-31 period was higher among persons who became fully vaccinated in January 2021 (when they were first eligible) than among those fully vaccinated 2 months later, in March (rate ratio, 1.6 …)
Among persons 40 to 59 years of age, the rate ratio for infection among those fully vaccinated in February (when they were first eligible), as compared with 2 months later, in April, was 1.7 … Among persons 16 to 39 years of age, the rate ratio for infection among those fully vaccinated in March (when they were first eligible), as compared with 2 months later, in May, was 1.6 …
The rate ratio for severe disease among persons fully vaccinated in the month when they were first eligible, as compared with those fully vaccinated in March, was 1.8 … among persons 60 years of age or older and 2.2 … among those 40 to 59 years of age …
These findings indicate that immunity against the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 waned in all age groups a few months after receipt of the second dose of vaccine.”
Two Doses Aren’t Enough
Earlier this year, vaccine makers and health authorities said the shots were about 95% effective and if enough people got the shots, normalcy would be restored. We now know that was a false promise. The goal post was moved back with the emergence of Delta and then Omicron, for which we’re now told we need a third booster.
December 13, 2021, Reuters14 reported that British scientists have concluded “two-dose COVID-19 vaccine regimens do not induce enough neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron coronavirus variant,” and that “increased infections in those previously infected or vaccinated may be likely.”
‘Just Deal With’ Booster Shots, Fauci Says
When in mid-December 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked if Americans should expect annual COVID boosters, he replied in the affirmative, saying that Americans will “just have to deal with” the prospect of getting boosters at regular intervals.15 So, in essence, Fauci wants us to accept that booster deficiency is the reason why the COVID-19 “pandemic” continues.
Clearly, that is not the case. The real reason COVID is still an issue is because Fauci and the medical establishment have suppressed viable early treatments. If early treatment was the norm, COVID would rapidly become a distant memory.
Instead, the captured U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to novel gene transfer technologies that don’t work like conventional vaccines in that they don’t prevent infection and spread, thus creating an evil cycle of new vaccine-resistant variants. As demonstrated by James Lyons-Weiler (in a now broken weblink), the more we vaccinate, the higher the COVID caseload.
Weiler’s graph looks very much like that in a September 30, 2021, study16 in the European Journal of Epidemiology, which found that the higher the vaccination rate in a given area, the higher the COVID case rate.
Dr. Chris Martenson discusses this finding in the video below. As noted by Martenson, “the line goes the wrong way,” meaning the more heavily “vaccinated” a population is, the worse things get.
As predicted over a year ago, we’re now on an injection treadmill with no end in sight, and every single dose carries the risk of serious side effects, up to and including permanent disability and death. The only scientifically sound way out of this failed experiment is to stop. No more boosters.
Fortunately, it seems most Americans are starting to catch on, and so far, the fearmongering around Omicron has not resulted in a rush for boosters.17 According to an Axios/Ipsos poll conducted December 10 through December 13, 2021, 67% of unvaccinated respondents said Omicron makes no difference in their decision of whether to get vaccinated; 19% said it makes them more likely while 11% said it makes them less likely to get the shot.
Among respondents who already had received one or two doses, 59% said Omicron makes no difference in their decision to get a third dose; 36% said it makes them more likely and 5% said it makes them less likely to get it.
Considering the shots have been shown to deregulate your immune function, it would be wise to “just say no” to further boosters. Should you develop symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, remember there are safe and effective early treatment protocols, including the I-MASK+18 and I-MATH+,19 protocols, which are available for download on the COVID Critical Care website in multiple languages. Other protocols that have great success are:
This is a load of information to review, especially if you are fatigued and sick with COVID or have a family member struggling. After reviewing all of these protocols, I believe the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s protocol is among the easiest to follow. Below is a summary of that protocol, with minor amendments.
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On Friday, December 17, 2021, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, designated to handle multi-district litigation over the OSHA vaccine and testing mandate on large employers, dissolved a previous 5th Circuit stay of the mandate.
OSHA has announced that starting January 10, it will start enforcement…
Earlier today, at least two Emergency Petitions were filed with the Supreme Court. There may be more, but these are two that I was able to find (if readers find more, please post in the comments).
Separately, BST Holdings and dozens of other entities have filed their own Emergency Application which also focused on a limited question:
Did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) exceed its lawful authority by issuing an Emergency Temporary Standard that mandates vaccination policy for all workplaces with at least 100 employees?
In both cases, the applicants want to focus on OSHA’s (lack of) authority to issue such an order.
There apparently were additional petitions filed, and the Court has decided to hear four cases. The opposition papers are due December 30.
In the first set of cases the Biden administration is seeking to overturn lower court rulings halting a vaccine mandate issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
21A240 ) BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF U.S., ET AL. V. MISSOURI, ET AL.
21A241 ) BECERRA, SEC. OF H&HS, ET AL. V. LOUISIANA, ET AL.
Consideration of the application (21A240) for stay presented to Justice Kavanaugh and by him referred to the Court is deferred pending oral argument. Consideration of the application (21A241) for stay presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is deferred pending oral argument. The applications are consolidated, and a total of one hour is allotted for oral argument. The applications are set for oral argument on Friday, January 7, 2022.
In a second set of cases, litigants are seeking to halt the OSHA mandates which have dominated the news:
21A244 ) NAT. FED’N OF INDEP. BUS., ET AL. V. DEPT. OF LABOR, OSHA, ET AL.
21A247 ) OHIO, ET AL. V. DEPT. OF LABOR, OSHA, ET AL.
Consideration of the applications (21A244 and 21A247) for stay presented to Justice Kavanaugh and by him referred to the Court is deferred pending oral argument. The applications are consolidated, and a total of one hour is allotted for oral argument. The applications are set for oral argument on Friday, January 7, 2022.
Since OSHA enforcement starts January 10, setting an argument date of January 7 indicates an intention to render a fast decision.
Here is the summary of the arguments:
Anti-Mandate: The mandates exceed the authority of the issuing agencies and do not have a sound scientific basis.
Pro-Mandate: PEOPLE ARE GONNA DIE IF YOU DON’T LET US DO THIS! YOU HEAR THAT, BLOOD WILL BE ON YOUR HANDS!
Conveniently, I did a radio interview this morning with Chicago’s Morning Call, and they started off asking my views on the cases (which had not yet been accepted or argument scheduled).
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Prince Charles, one of the senior members of the Windsor Royal family, addressed the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26)[01] in Scotland on Oct 31st, 2021, where he brought to attention the similarities of just how devastating the (Fake) pandemic had been to the economy, while equating climate change and bio-diversity being no different, and that it posed an even greater existential threat due to the growing global population and its demand for finite resources.
Charles then went on to say that,
“we must go on a war like footing, must act with all dispatch, and decisively because time has quite literally run out…”
He also claims to have addressed his climate alarmism with most of the World Leaders in attendance over the past 18 months which of course coincides with the pandemic timeline. Is now a good time to say, “Never let a good manufactured crisis go to waste?”
In citing the UN’s IPCC Report “Code Red for Human Driven Global Heating” [02], Prince Charles then talked about carbon capture and carbon taxes, which of course, we’ve all heard before, as those who will be taxed, will be the commoner and small business owners that are blamed for, what they call “Human Driven Global Heating” while the big corporations owned by the cartel will be blessed with carbon credits which will be tradable on their rigged stock market while they continue to drive the biosphere into global ecological destruction.
The pretentious solution Prince Charles leads up to, is of course, sustainable growth.
However, the sustainable economic growth system Prince Charles is pushing is not a solution to ending the global environmental destruction that they are strangely calling climate change, because the continuation of a devastating consumer growth market will continue to be the real problem as it always has been in reference to the destruction of our environment.
The proposed solution pushed by Prince Charles will just continue the same program of growth economics, that destroys the land, water and forests, while deflecting the blame away from their mega international corporations, and placing the blame onto the global population.
Sustainable Growth for whom?
First of all, there is no such thing as a “sustainable growth economy” especially when it does not address the central defining issue that is causing all the problems, which of course is the interest-bearing debt-based banking system that drives the inflation and the need for economic growth. By any measure, its a reckless monster with no off switch.
Within this system, all business requires growth; it’s a mathematical necessity given the nature of the economic system which, by coincidence, is controlled by those looking for an “Economic Reset”.
The equation is derived through electronics and based on the discharge of a capacitor on a resistor where the fractional decrease in the charge of the capacitor is relative to time and so instead of showing a decay in fixed fraction unit time, we show something increasing over a fixed fraction unit time by changing the negative sign into a positive sign. I.e.: Growth rather than decay
[T2 = 70 / Percent Growth] in which T2 represents the doubling time; so, for an 8% annual growth, the time it takes to “DOUBLE” the size of your company or economy would be;
T2=70/ 8% = 8.75 years. The higher the growth percentage targeted, the shorter the amount of time it takes for a corporation to double in size.
It is in this way that ALL corporations are destructive to the environment because they are extremely wasteful, regardless of what prattle is believed.
For example:
One of the places I worked recently was in a printing company that made sports trading cards, restaurant brochures, cigarette packages, store flyers, cardboard boxes for disposable masks, thousands of blank police tickets, food canning labels etc.; all of which are disposable products (with the exception of the sports trading cards).
However, the process showed how truly wasteful the production process is where paper of different grades, textures and treatment were received on wooden pallets every day.
By the end of the week, hundreds of wood pallets were discarded, tons of paper wasted, hundreds of gallons of soap, chemicals and ink tins were also discarded while the products were all packaged in plastic wrap and with plastic straps, shipped in and shipped out by diesel trucks to and from our company, 357 days a year…
One to two containers of waste paper and wood was produced every week…
And that does not count the waste produced in the initial process of cutting the trees down, transporting them to mills, processing them into wood slats or paper rolls and then the transportation of those products to be further processed into their final shapes and sizes, which are then repackaged and shipped to a printing company…is that an environmentally ethical or sustainable business?
There are no real environmental laws imposed on corporations…
Well I suppose they will pass around a few carbon credits in the future…that should help the environment, right?
How many trees need to be cut down every year to make the pallets and paper? Since all of it ends up in the trash, final products and all, how deep of a hole do we need to bury all that trash in a continuous cycle?
For what purpose? Profit?
The example used is just one small business in the printing industry.
Imagine the amount of waste and environmental destruction we are talking about when every single corporation small, medium and large are taken into account…THAT is who, what, where and how the environment is being destroyed!
Is that a sustainable economic model? Define sustainable growth to me Prince Charles…
There are tens of millions of companies around the world encompassing every aspect of every economic stream that requires economic growth. Most every product is now single use or short life and so they all become disposable products, products that are extremely wasteful and destructive to the environment.
A larger example of the printing company I mentioned is of course an international monster corporation like Quebecor [04] where they have over 200 printing facilities in 15 countries. One of many mega printing corporations that has expanded into many other forms of media, industries and of course politics via their economic footprint. I’ll bet the Royal Families of Europe have a few preferred shares in a host of corporations like these.
Government Approved Essential Business
During the so-called pandemic, all the companies and corporations that contribute to the massive global economic machine were deemed “essential business” and remained open; the status and treatment of which was confirmed by Klaus Schwab, [05] of the World Economic Forum when he was pressed by a question from Edward Felsenthal of Time Magazine about the failure of small and medium sized businesses during the pandemic, Klaus said,
“No, it’s my big concern because small and medium sized companies have been much more hit by the crisis compared to most large companies. So, I’m very pleased and I think it’s a task of society to take care because they are an essential part of our economic tissue so we have to make sure that its not their fault, that they can survive the crisis because we need, at the end of the crisis, we need still a prospering middle class in the um…as far as companies are concerned.”
So, the rich dividend stock paying businesses owned by the cartel are integral to the future plans of a sustainable economic systemthat comes with the Economic Reset; while governments are encouraged to allow the small and medium support businesses to keep running (i.e.: giving them the status of being essential businesses).
Of course, all of these actions conflict with the idea of a green future that they are talking about, not to mention being open in times of a supposed pandemic, which is more like a pandemic of lies and coercion. [06]
Sustainable growth is not possible, unless you look into the more sinister possibilities of how they might achieve their goals.The most glaring one is of course, forced population reduction.
In fact, it is the only way in which their current push for a green sustainable solution can be achieved while maintaining their economic growth model of economics and if we are to believe their net zero carbon emissions goal.
The Final Solution?
World leaders are following plans outlined at the United Nations under “Agenda 21” [07], and “Agenda 2030” [08] that outlines a net zero emissions goal, a sustainable growth and population reduction. While at the same time, world leaders are determined to force their populations into obeying their dystopian dictates on a falsely declared pandemic by the World Health Organization by pushing a politically, corporate driven, inoculation program. All of which are being used as an economic reset for a sustainable future where the mandatory inoculation program brings about a fascist health pass security state with severe restrictions and punishments for those that do not comply.
Questions are not being answered by governments, governments that are becoming more totalitarian with each passing week. Is that what Prince Charles meant when he said “we must go on a war like footing, must act with all dispatch, and decisively…”?
I worry about what is not being talked about, because if they can lock the world down using lies about a flu that is 99.98% survivable, using a PCR test which cannot detect if you are sick and then lie to you about inoculations that THEY say are safe but censor science-based information on the dangers of their so-called vaccines, then they can lie to you about the contents of what they are really delivering to your body by inoculations that are now becoming a never-ending nightmare.
The possibility of a mass sterilization of the young, during their age group appointments for inoculation should be a major concern considering the development of new sterilization procedures through inoculation [11] that fit in with the mRNA technology they are now using on the global population.
So, when a senior citizen of the global elite calls for military action to force a final solution, what exactly is he talking about? Will they close down all businesses that are destructive to the environment, or just those that don’t belong to them?
They certainly are not clear about that nor are they clear about anything for that matter because they talk in circles with empty platitudes for their economic and environmental religions. So, as more governments are talking about forcing inoculations on the public [12], are you not just a little worried about what’s in that shot and what they really want?
Last Word
Of course, when looking at any type of growth economics, you need oil to power it especially on a global scale with a large population and so that must also be considered when looking for a reason to explain why these so-called world leaders are so determined to follow instruction from parasitic entities that are destroying our communities.
The cartels economic empire is on the edge of a cliff with a massive global population surrounding them that have been impoverished by the cartel’s greed and lust for power. Tell me I’m wrong, explain it to me please, because if the world is to move forward and evolve, it can only do so with truth, education and inclusivity with a combined effort to solve problems but we are seeing none of that. The banking real estate racket, which the economic cartel controls, could end tomorrow if they wanted it to…but unfortunately, sustained growth is what they have chosen which maintains their total control…
Sustainable growth is impossible to achieve today, unless of course you have a robust supply of oil and resources with a lot of people eliminated from the economic grid…
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Stewart Brennan is a Geo-political and economic analyst, activist, blogger and author. He’s worked in the Aviation, Packaging, Transportation and Logistics Industries and is the author of “The Activist Poet”, two books of political activism and poetry. (See Here and Here) He’s also the author of several blogs including World United News and World United Music and a contributor on Global Research.
This system is being put in place using lies, and it’s being put in place using lies for some purpose, and I believe that purpose is complete totalitarian control.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Federal Reserve and the globalist powers that be will use the dramatic rising of inflation as their excuse to bring down the US financial markets and with it, crash the greatest financial bubble in history.
In this brilliant interview, lawyer Anna de Buisseret explains clearly and eloquently how those responsible for causing harm will be held liable under the law in relation to the experimental injections currently being rolled out, especially to young children.
Untold thousands of deaths have already occurred from this, though most of them never make it into the government databases. Numerous presenters, including Dr. Peter McCullough, who has also long stood against the injections, revealed scientific evidence to support these and other claims.
NATO is preparing for an armed conflict with Russia, Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said at a briefing for military attachés and representatives of foreign embassies accredited in Moscow.
US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Since the George W. Bush administration, pre-emptive nuclear war has been portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.
Putin has, for the first time, explicitly warned that if the US and NATO decline to provide the security guarantees Moscow has sought, his future course of action will be solely guided by “the proposals that our military experts will make to me.” Clearly, there is no more wriggle room left.
While techniques have adapted to modern times, the essential ingredients for the science of discord remain relatively unchanged: keep resources scarce, fear and ignorance high, and let a targeted population clash over diminishing returns of scarcity.
Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters. Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.
Just in his twenties – after landing on the beaches of Normandy, fighting in the Battle of the Buldge, and liberating various Nazi concentration camps – Ben became responsible for prosecuting members of the Einsatzgruppen death units, responsible for the deaths of over one million innocent people during the Nazi invasion of Russia.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
This article was originally published on GreatGameIndia in April 2021.
Published on Global Research on July 20, 2021
Most of us have heard about ‘Vaccine Passports’ only after the pandemic, when different governments started emphasizing the requirement of ‘Vaccine Passports’ for travelling to other countries or even for going to public places.
However, the planning for executing the concept of ‘Vaccine Passports’ began 20 months prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. What these roadmap talk about is not just some document that would restrict your entry or movement to certain places. What they envision is an entire COVID eco-system, a future where each and every aspect of your life is monitored and regulated as per the whims and fancy of these Pharma Overlords.
Vaccine Passports Roadmap
The initial proposal for ‘Vaccine Passports’ was first published on 26 April, 2018 by the European Commission. The proposal, ignored by the mainstream media and was buried deep in a document (read below) dealing with ‘Strengthened Cooperation against Vaccine Preventable Diseases’.
As per the initial roadmap (issued in early 2019) to implement the European Commission’s proposal, the primary action was to “examine the feasibility of developing a common vaccination card/passport” for European citizens that is “compatible with electronic immunization information systems and recognized for use across borders.”
It was planned to get a legislative proposal issued by 2022, in Europe.
Terms – such as “countering vaccine hesitancy”, “unexpected outbreaks” – that were not so common before the outbreak were also mentioned in the proposal.
Other points in the roadmap document included supporting the authorization of “innovative vaccines, including for emerging health threats.”
Stating that the “vaccine manufacturing industry” has a “key role” in meeting the aims described in the roadmap document, it lists “improving EU manufacturing capacity” and stockpiling vaccines as further action points to be implemented.
The roadmap also focuses on strengthening “existing partnerships” and “collaboration with international actors and initiatives,” and refers to the Global Vaccination Summit that was held in 2019. The attendees and the agenda of this summit is also revealing.
Global Vaccination Summit 2019
The 3 Roundtables
The summit was held on 12 September 2019, in Brussels, Belgium, that was just 3 months prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. The summit was not reported by most of the mainstream media outlets. It was organized by European Commission in cooperation with W.H.O.
The summit was structured around three round tables entitled:
In Vaccines We Trust
The Magic Of Science
Vaccines Protecting Everyone, Everywhere
Noteable Panel Members
The attendees of this summit were political leaders, high-level representatives from health ministries, United Nations, leading academics, health professionals and scientists, non-government and private sectors.
Noteable panel members for these round tables included Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, Nanette Cocero, Global President of Pfizer Vaccines, the Global Vaccine Alliance – an organization that has received vast amounts of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Joe Cerrell, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Managing Director for Global Policy and Advocacy.
In the 41st session of the Corona Investigative Committee she said the rules under which countries work with WHO virtually put WHO in charge of all rules and formal edicts and announcements — with Gates being right there as part of the executive board like an unofficial member state, making decisions that affect the entire world.
Pandemic Planning
Pandemic planning was clearly in evidence at this summit meeting. Key documents distributed to the participants included reports on:
Pandemic influenza preparedness planning
A pandemic influenza exercise for the European Union
Avian Influenza and Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Planning
Pandemic influenza preparedness and response planning
Towards sufficiency of Pandemic Influenza Vaccines in the EU
A “Public Private Partnership” on European Pandemic influenza vaccines
Across all these documents, the goal of strengthening collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry is repeatedly stressed, as also is the message that a global pandemic was now inevitable.
The major beneficiary of these Vaccine Passports projects will be the multinational pharmaceutical industry and not the common man.
In addition to it, the ordinary people will have to share their medical records in order to prove themselves fit to travel internationally or even to watch a movie.
The estimated business these pharmaceutical giants are aiming is worth $1.5 trillion in 2021 alone.
What these roadmap talk about is not just some document that would restrict your entry or movement to certain places. What they envision is an entire COVID eco-system, a future where each and every aspect of your life is monitored and regulated as per the whims and fancy of these Pharma Overlords.
Below we mention few projects that would give you an idea of what that future would look like.
After Vaccine Passports for people, now Hollywood comes up with COVID-19 Health Seal for businesses. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Robert De Niro are using Covid-19 to promote an expensive ‘health seal’ scheme that will certify your business location as COVID-19 free.
These celebrities are preaching people to buy this health seal that could cost you over $12,000 and which “does not guarantee that a space is safe or free from pathogens.” The WELL Building Standard is aligned with the United Nations.
Vaccination Propaganda
With the rising cases of multiple adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine, now out of blue vaccination propaganda videos with no scientific basis are popping up to nudge you to just love vaccines and ask no questions and keep injecting the vaccines year after year after year.
A controversial No Vaccine No Salary order was issued by health authorities in the Indian state of Jharkhand which was forced to be withdrawn after backslash from employees.
This is not a random occurrence. It is a glimpse of what is to come.
QR Code based Freedom Passports
Britain may soon roll-out QR based Coronavirus Freedom Passport to determine if you’re COVID-19 innocent. If found to be COVID-19 positive you may be barred from entering pubs, schools and workplaces.
Together, they will collect, store and monitor your health data based on which the apps will decide whether you are eligible to travel, study, go to office, etc.
The researchers showed that their new dye, which consists of nanocrystals called quantum dots, can remain for at least five years under the skin, where it emits near-infrared light that can be detected by a specially equipped smartphone.
Under the ‘One Nation One Health Card’ scheme, a person’s medical history records, including all the treatments and tests that the person has undergone, will be digitally saved in this card.
Hospitals, clinics, and doctors will all be linked to a central server. The move is aimed at mapping the health records of every citizen of the country in a digital format.
A research group at a Mexican university is using bioinformatics and computational genetic engineering to identify candidate antigens for a vaccine that can be expressed in tomato plants.
Eating the fruit from these plants would then confer immunity against COVID-19, the scientists claim.
The program said to “evolve as you evolve” is part of the Global War on Cash and has the potential dual use for the purposes of surveillance and “predictive policing” based on your vaccination history.
Those who may not wish to be vaccinated may be locked out of the system based on their trust score.
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What we are seeing is a large number of deaths due to heart attack, stroke, and aneurysm, as a direct result of thrombosis embolisms in the lungs.
This is well-documented by the local coroners across the country. Yet nobody seems to be concerned on the alarming rise in them.
Watch the video below.
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Comments Off on Video: Funeral Director John O’Looney: “Deaths due to Heart Attack, Stroke, Aneurysm, as Direct Result of Thrombosis Embolisms in the Lungs”
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“We, the survivors of the atrocities committed against humanity during the Second World War, feel bound to follow our conscience. … Another holocaust of greater magnitude is taking place before our eyes. We call upon you to stop this ungodly medical experiment on humankind immediately. It is a medical experiment to which the Nuremberg Code must be applied.” (Rabbi Hillel Handler, Hagar Schafrir, Sorin Shapira, Mascha Orel, Morry Krispijn et al, see complete text here)
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The mRNA vaccine is “experimental’ and unapproved. Since December 2020, it has resulted in a worldwide upward trend in deaths and injuries.
Numerous scientific studies confirm the nature of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine which is being imposed on all humanity.
The stated objective is to enforce the Worldwide vaccination of 7.9 billion people in more than 190 countries, to be followed by the imposition of a digitized “vaccine passport”.
Needless to say this is a multi-billion dollar operation for Big Pharma. In a bitter irony, Pfizer which is playing a dominant role in marketing the vaccine at the level of the entire planet, has a criminal record with the US Department of Justice (for more details see below).
The national health authorities cannot say: we did not know. Nor can they say that the objective is “to save lives”. This is a killer vaccine. And they know it.
The latest official figures (September 15, 2021) point to approximately:
40,666 mRNA vaccine reported and registered deaths in the EU, UK and US (combined) and
6.6 Million reported “adverse events”.
EU/EEA/Switzerland to 11 September 2021 – 24,528 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 2,292,967 injuries, per EudraVigilance Database.
UK to 1 September 2021 – 1,632 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 1,186,844 injuries, per MHRA Yellow Card Scheme.
USA to 3 September 2021 – 14,506 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 3,146,691 injuries, per VAERS database.
TOTAL for EU/UK/USA – 40,666 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 6,626,502 injuries reported as at 15 September 2021.
But only a small fraction of the victims or families of the deceased will go through the tedious process of reporting vaccine related deaths and adverse events to the national health authorities.
Those death and injury figures (EU, UK, US) SOFAR are at least ten times higher than the official reported cases.
410,000 deaths, 66 million injuries out of a population of approximately 850 million.
Moreover, the health authorities are actively involved in obfuscating the deaths and injuries resulting from the mRNA “vaccine”, while inflating the number of Covid-19 related deaths. (“autopsies not required”).
Video: Michel Chossudovsky provides a broad picture of the ongoing crisis which is destroying people’s lives Worldwide.
The vaccine is being applied and imposed Worldwide. The target population is 7.9 billion. Several doses are contemplated. It is the largest vaccination program in World history.
The WHO “Guidelines” for establishing a Worldwide Digital Informations System for issuing so-called “Digital Certificates for Covid-19” are generously funded by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations.
The mRNA vaccine is not a project of a UN intergovernmental body (WHO) on behalf the member states of the UN: This is a private initiative. The billionaire elites which fund and enforce the Vaccine Project Worldwide are Eugenists committed to Depopulation.
Big Pharma: Pfizer Seeks Worldwide Dominance
The global vaccine project entitled COVAX is coordinated Worldwide by the WHO, GAVI, CEPI, the Gates Foundation in liaison with the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Wellcome Trust, DARPA and Big Pharma which is increasingly dominated by the Pfizer-GSK partnership established barely four months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis in early January 2020.
Pfizer –which has a criminal record with the US Department of Justice– is playing a “near monopoly role” in the marketing of the mRNA “vaccine”. Already in the EU, Pfizer is slated to deliver 1.8 billion doses which is equivalent to four times the population of the European Union.
In a historic US Department of Justice decision in September 2009, Pfizer Inc. pleaded guilty to criminal charges. It was “The Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement” in the History of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In addition to compliance and enforcement, the “vaccine poison” imposed at the level of the entire planet is produced by a pharmaceutical company which has been indicted by the DOJ on charges of “fraudulent marketing”.
Compliance: No Jab, No Job
“Fraudulent Marketing” in relation to the mRNA vaccine is a gross understatement. The health authorities as well as Big Pharma not to mention the WHO, the Rockefellers and the Gates foundation are fully aware that the vaccine has resulted in countless deaths and injuries, including blood clots, infertility, brain damage, myocarditis, etc.
And yet the governments (with the 24/7 support of the media) are pressuring people to take the jab. “It will save lives”.
The health risks are known and documented, yet at the same time people are not only misinformed, they are forced into accepting the vaccine. Or else…
No career, no income, no future… It’s an issue of compliance. And no access to education and health services if you are not vaccinated.
If they refuse the jab, they loose their job.
Students are barred from attending schools, colleges and universities, health workers and high school teachers who do not conform are fired, civil society is precipitated into a state of chaos.
Relevance of the Nuremberg Code
Focussing on the experimental nature of the mRNA vaccine and its devastating health impacts, legal analysts have raised the issue of the historic Nuremberg “Nazi Doctors Trial’ (1946-47) in which Nazi doctors were charged for war crimes, specifically in the conduct of medical experiments on both prisoners in the concentration camps and civilians.
The Medical Case, U.S.A. vs. Karl Brandt, et al. (also known as the Doctors’ Trial), was prosecuted in 1946-47 against twenty-three doctors and administrators accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of medical experiments and medical procedures inflicted on prisoners and civilians.
Karl Brandt, the lead defendant, was the senior medical official of the German government during World War II; other defendants included senior doctors and administrators in the armed forces and SS. See Harvard Documents
Resulting from the verdict on August 19, 1947, the Nuremberg Code was enacted. Reviewed below are the Ten Principles of the Nuremberg Code. Several of these principles –in relation to the mRNA vaccine and the vaccine passport– have been blatantly violated.
The first principle of the “Nuremberg Code.” states that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” And that is precisely what is being denied in relation to the “vaccine”(see sentences in bold below).
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probably cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
emphasis added
Entire populations in a large number of countries are under threat to comply and get vaccinated.
With reference to the Nuremberg Code, they are unable:
“to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion” (Nuremberg 1 above).
Amply documented, there is an upward trend in mRNA vaccine deaths and injuries Worldwide and the health authorities are fully aware of the “health risks”, yet they have not informed the public. There is no informed consent. And the media is lying through their teeth:
“No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur” (Nuremberg 5 above).
That “a priori reason” outlined in Nuremberg principle 5, is amply documented: Deaths and disabling injuries are ongoing at the level of the entire planet. They are confirmed by the official statistics of mRNA vaccine mortality and morbidity (EU, US, UK).
Video: The mRNA vaccine was launched in mid to late December 2020.In many countries, there was a significant shift in mortality following the introduction of the mRNA vaccine
Source: HeathData.org
Nazi “Medical Experiments”
Let us recall the categorization of specific crimes pertaining to Nazi “medical experiments” conducted on concentration camp prisoners. These included “the killing of Jews for anatomical research, the killing of tubercular Poles, and the euthanasia of sick and disabled civilians in Germany and occupied territories. …”
Karl Brandt and six other defendants were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed; nine defendants were convicted and sentenced to terms in prison; and seven defendants were acquitted.
The trial documents and evidence are all on file. The defendants were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Nuremberg Doctors Trial
The Scale and Size of the Worldwide Covid-19 Vaxx Operation
I have not been able to review the relevant documents in detail with a view to establishing the number of victims resulting from the Nazi medical experiments.
While the Nuremberg principles are of utmost relevance to the Covid-19 vaccine project, simplistic comparisons should be avoided. The context, the history and the mechanisms of compliance pertaining to the mRNA “vaccine” are fundamentally different.
The scale and size of the Worldwide Vaxx operation as well as its complex organizational structure (WHO, GAVI, Gates Foundation, Big Pharma) is unprecedented.
Humanity in its entirety is the objective of the Vaxx project. The target population for vaccine experimentation of the Covid-19 vaccine is the entire population of Planet Earth:
7.9 billion people, involving several doses.
Multiply the World’s population by 4 doses (as proposed by Pfizer): the order of magnitude is 30 billion doses Worldwide.
The numbers are in the billions. The likely impacts on mortality and morbidity are beyond description.
Big Money is behind this public-private partnership project.
We are dealing with a Worldwide process of crimes against humanity. Entire populations in a large number of member states of the UN are subject to compliance and enforcement (without the Rule of Law).
If they refuse the vaccine, they are socially marginalized and confined, rejected by their employers, rejected by society: no education, no career, no life. Their lives are destroyed.
If they accept the vaccine, their health and their life are potentially in jeopardy. The evidence of mortality and morbidity resulting from vaccine inoculation both present (official data) and future (e.g. undetected microscopic blood clots) is overwhelming.
And that’s just the beginning.
Extensive crimes against humanity Worldwide are being committed.
The mRNA “vaccine” modifies the human genome at the level of the entire Planet. It’s Genocide.
It’s a “Holocaust of Greater Magnitude, Taking Place before our Eyes”.
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About the Author
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.
He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)
He is the author of twelve books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).
He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Russia, through its Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, and the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic), through the spokesman of the people’s militia, Eduard Basurin, have expressed concerns about on a possible chemical weapons provocation by Ukraine in the Donbass, with the help of the US.
“The presence of more than 120 employees of American mercenary companies in the Avdeyevka and Pryazovskoye localities of the Donetsk region has been established with certainty. They are setting up firing positions in residential buildings and socially important infrastructure, and training Ukrainian special operations forces and radical armed groups in active combat operations,” he said.
“Everyone knows that the United States of America has sent various types of weapons to Ukraine. In October, an antidote was delivered with one of the shipments… There is a type of chemical weapon – botulinum toxin, it causes botulism, but more simply paralysis. In November, the chemical itself was delivered in 40mm metal containers, usable for example in grenade launchers. Or from drones, the weight is light enough to be dropped from drones. The chemical weapons were supplied by the US,” Basurin told TV channel Rossia 1.
He added that, according to his information, another container was delivered to Mariupol at the same time.
“The weight of the container was 300 kg, it contained a chemical warfare agent – benzoxazepine, which is used in the form of an aerosol,” Basurin said.
“All this was brought to the Kharkov region, there are artillery depots near Slavyansk and this can be brought to the contact line very quickly. These are the chemicals we know about,” Basurin added.
He also said that US mercenaries are present on the line of contact in the Donbass, and that they “prepare firing positions, they are subordinate to certain people, they are not subject to the general command of the Ukrainian armed forces – these ‘wild geese’ are there to make provocations and kill people“.
To understand the choice of locations to which these chemical tanks were sent, it should be remembered that Krasny Liman is the only major railway junction in the Donbass with sorting capacity that is still under Ukrainian control. A chemical weapons provocation there would inevitably result in both civilian and military casualties.
Moreover, there are unexploited uranium mines in the forests near the town, which have no industrial value, but which can be used to increase the sensational scope of the provocation. Finally, Krasny Liman is located not far from the Donets River, and the Seversky Donets-Donbass Canal, which supplies water to the DPR!
“We already know that chemicals are being dumped into the Seversky Donets River. Then everything goes to our territory via water from Ukraine. We have no other source of water. And we had a problematic situation with the water for several weeks, with a chemical smell, there were ammonium impurities and some other substances. I don’t exclude that Ukraine is trying to poison the water. You can expect anything from this terrorist organisation,” said Vladislav Berdichevsky, deputy of the DPR People’s Council.
“These statements by Minister Shoygu are completely wrong,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. With such a short denial, one is left a little hungry.
Especially since several disturbing facts seem to indicate that something is indeed brewing regarding the Donbass, both in Ukraine and in the United States. Indeed, on the website of the US State Department, the fact sheet concerning recommendations for travel to Ukraine was updated on 20 December 2021.
Another disturbing fact is that while major international media have not applied for accreditation in the DPR for some time, the Republic received five accreditation requests in December alone from American (NBC News and Associated Press), British (Sky News and the Financial Times), and Canadian (CBC Radio-Canada) media. If a chemical weapons provocation were to take place in the Donbass, it is clear that the major media from NATO countries must be there to report on this “war crime”. Without proper media coverage, the provocation falls apart.
Indeed, while Kiev still refuses to proceed with the judicial clearance of exchanged prisoners, as foreseen in the Minsk Package, the Ukrainian representative in the contact group in charge of humanitarian issues declared that it was necessary to agree on an exchange mechanism suitable for Ukraine because “there will soon be more prisoners” in the country!
Such a statement implies that Ukraine will embark on a military operation. Otherwise, it is difficult to see how Ukraine can increase the number of its prisoners significantly enough to justify imposing its conditions on the exchange procedure.
It is to be hoped that the denunciation of this chemical weapon provocation in advance will prevent its implementation and its use in the media to justify an attack on the Donbass by Ukraine.
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Michael Yeadon is a powerful voice. His carefully researched analysis provides an understanding of the devastating impacts of the mRNA “vaccine” and the “vaccine passport”.
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“This system is being put in place using lies,
and it’s being put in place using lies for some purpose,
and I believe that purpose is complete totalitarian control.”
Video:
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Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expressed concern over the weekend about NATO’s efforts to expand into Sweden and Finland. She warned that “It’s quite obvious that Finland and Sweden joining NATO … would have serious military and political consequences that would require an adequate response from the Russian side.” Although Finland isn’t officially regarded as part of Scandinavia, its history of Swedish rule prior to incorporation into the Russian Empire and geographic proximity to that neighboring state can lead to observers considering it to be part of “Greater Scandinavia”, if one will.
This region is arguably one of the targets of “Shadow NATO”, a concept that refers to the de facto inclusion of countries into the US-led military alliance. Shadow NATO has already crept into Ukraine, which was one of the triggers for the undeclared US-provoked missile crisis in Europe after Russia became concerned that America plans to clandestinely deploy strike missiles there under the cover of so-called “anti-missile systems”. “Greater Scandinavia”, in particular Sweden and Finland, are also targets of this plot and have been since 2015 when they both began engaging in phantom Russian sub hunts at the time.
Seeing as how Russia’s “security equation” proposal aims to responsibly regulate that country’s military rivalry with the US in Europe, it’s imperative that Shadow NATO’s creeping influence into Greater Scandinavia is kept in check as part of the forthcoming negotiations. Neither Ukraine nor Sweden or Finland should be allowed to become de facto members of that alliance since such efforts are responsible for the unprecedented post-Old Cold War security crisis in the continent. Even if Russia’s concerns over Ukraine’s informal membership are addressed, the crisis will inevitably repeat itself with time in Northern Europe if Sweden and Finland continue being informally absorbed by the bloc.
After all, the Arctic is considered by many observers to be an emerging front in the New Cold War. The US aims to militarize this region as it becomes more important for international shipping through the gradual opening of the “Northern Sea Route” (NSR) via the waterways under Russia’s sovereign control. China will begin to utilize this route more frequently through its “Polar Silk Road” vision of expanding trade ties with the EU through the Arctic. US-led NATO militancy in Northern Europe will directly harm Russia’s security interests even if it’s implemented under the pretext of “containing” China. Under no circumstances must Sweden and Finland be allowed to functionally move closer to NATO.
Not a lot of attention has been paid to the “Viking Bloc” that the US plans to assemble between the three traditional Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (the last of which isn’t formally part of NATO) and the other two countries that comprise the “Greater Scandinavian” concept: NATO-member Iceland and aspirational “Shadow NATO” member Finland. This issue will have to be settled as part of the forthcoming negotiations over Russia’s “security equation” that explicitly proposes halting the bloc’s expansion. The devil is in the details, as they say, but it was timely for Zakharova to bring this up ahead of next year’s talks in order to signal that this issue will definitely be on the agenda.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
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Dr Peter McCullough is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases and clinical lipidology. He cares for advanced patients with common medical problems including heart and kidney disease, lipid disorders and diabetes.
He has broadly published on a range of topics in medicine with more than 1,000 publications and 600+ citations in the National Library of Medicine. He also has a master’s degree in public health and is known for being one of the top five most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals. He has 51 peer-reviewed publications on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He is considered to be an expert on early intervention protocols in the treatment of COVID-19.
Dr McCullough has testified before the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Colorado General Assembly, the New Hampshire Senate and the South Carolina Senate concerning many aspects of the COVID-19 response.
He recently gave a brief interview for the India-based Qvive media network where he discusses the vaccine rollout and the Omicron variant. He concludes that this variant is very mild, resolves on its own and “may mark the end of the pandemic”. He argues there is no need to persist with the vaccine rollout. This interview discusses the global situation as well as the implications for India.
It coincides with a statement signed by medical scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, civil servants, civil society organisations and citizens of India who call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to end the mass rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. The statement asserts that these vaccines should be halted immediately, not least because they pose serious dangers.
Dr Peter McCullough was one of a group of internationally renowned professionals in the field of medical science who contributed to the statement by providing relevant expertise.
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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal.
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In the early hours of 28 December, the Israeli occupation launched an attack on the Syrian port of Latakia, leaving dozens of shipping containers in flames.
Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that the occupation fired several missiles targeting the container terminal in the port. Quoting a senior military official, SANA said most of the missiles were intercepted and destroyed by the country’s air defense system.
SANA added that firefighters were deployed to the site. Videos shared on social media show explosions followed by huge flames and plumes of smoke billowing from the port.
A local television station reported that the attack also caused damage to a hospital and residential buildings near the port. Initial reports have not indicated if there were any casualties.
The attack is the second that the occupation has carried out on the port of Latakia in the month of December.
On 7 December, Israeli fighter jets fired missiles on the port destroying several shipping containers. Israeli media claimed that the airstrike was targeting a shipping container that contained arms destined for the Hezbollah resistance movement.
The Israeli occupation has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian territory since 2011, when western-backed armed groups launched an insurgency to overthrow the government of Syria.
Five people were killed in the governorate of Homs on 24 November when Israeli missiles hit a residential building.
A Syrian soldier was killed on 16 December when the Israeli occupation fired a barrage of missiles into the southern region of Syria.
Damascus has, on numerous occasions, launched complaints to the United Nations demanding an end to the attacks by Israel.
Most of the Israeli missile attacks have been launched from the Syrian Golan that Israel has occupied since 1967 despite numerous resolutions from the United Nations demanding Israel’s withdrawal from the territory.
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Featured image: Firefighters putting out a blaze caused by an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian port of Latakia on 28 December 2021. (SANA)
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Iran and Iraq issued a joint statement today on the “criminal and terrorist” assassinations of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and Popular Mobilisation Forces deputy head Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The two nations condemned last year’s killings as a “violation of the rules of international law, including relevant international conventions on the fight against terrorism.”
According to senior Iranian judiciary official Kazem Gharibabadi, they remain determined to “identify, prosecute and punish all those involved in deciding, planning and implementing this criminal act.”
He was speaking after the second joint session of an Iran-Iraq committee that is investigating the killing of the two men in a drone strike at Baghdad international airport in January 2020.
The attack was ordered by then US president Donald Trump and there were claims that the victims were lured to their death by being invited to talks sanctioned by Washington.
Tehran claims to have information on scores of individuals and organisations involved in the plot and has previously called for an international arrest warrant to be issued for Mr Trump and other senior US officials.
British outsourcing company G4S, which operates Baghdad airport, has denied allegations that it was complicit in the assassinations after Iran accused it of providing details of Gen Soleimani’s arrival.
Earlier this week, retired Israeli Major-General Tamir Hayman gave the first admission that Tel Aviv had played a role in the killings, supplying US intelligence with at least three of Gen Soleimani’s mobile phone numbers.
Tehran alleges that the assassination took place with German support, with the US air force’s Ramstein base believed to have been used to co-ordinate the attack.
Research also revealed in October that “it was probable” that the Menwith Hill electronic spying base in Britain had also played a part in Gen Soleimani’s killing.
Iran and Iraq pledged to continue to use “legal and judicial capacities at national and international levels to deliver justice and prevent the occurrence of such criminal acts,” Mr Gharibabadi said.
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We are at a Dangerous Crossroads in the History of Humanity.
Rick Rozoff provides us with a selection of excerpts from major Russian media sources pertaining to the Russia- US/NATO confrontation on Russia’s Western border with Ukraine.
The objective is to inform Western readers on how the official Russian media views and analyses this ongoing crisis which could lead the World into a World War III Scenario.
The excerpts include statements by Russia’s Defense Ministry
“NATO is preparing for an armed conflict with Russia , Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said at a briefing for military attachés and representatives of foreign embassies accredited in Moscow.
“The military construction of the bloc has been completely redirected to prepare for a large-scale, high-intensity armed conflict with Russia,” the colonel-general said.
He explained that the North Atlantic Alliance in its documents, including the military strategy of 2019, directly calls our country the main source of “threats to coalition security.”
At the same time, Fomin noted, the Rome Declaration is still in force, which states that Russia and NATO do not consider each other as adversaries. The parties confirmed this at the 2010 summit in Lisbon. [At which Dmitry Medvedev became the first and to date only Russian or Soviet head of state to participate in a NATO summit – RR]
Targeted provocations by NATO near the Russian borders are highly likely to lead to an armed conflict, the Deputy Defense Minister emphasized. As an example, he cited the attempt of the British destroyer Defender in June of this year to penetrate the territorial waters of Russia off the coast of Crimea. At the same time, the actions of the British Navy ship were provided by the American strategic reconnaissance aircraft RC-135.
As Fomin pointed out, the intensity of such flights in the Black Sea region increased by more than 60 percent compared to 2020, the number of sorties increased from 436 to 710. Strategic bombers B-IB and B-52H of the US Air Force flew 92 times against 78 in 2020 in the airspace of the Black Sea region with access to the conditional line of using weapons. To the west of Crimea, the planes flew up to the Russian borders at a distance of 15 kilometers.
“In total, this year, the command of the NATO Joint Armed Forces conducted 15 exercises in the Black Sea. In 2020, there were eight,” the Deputy Defense Minister continued.
The presence of ships and auxiliary vessels from non-regional NATO states “has become virtually permanent.”
“From January to December of this year, 30 calls of NATO ships were made, in 2020 there were 23 of them. The total duration of stay was more than 400 days, in 2020 – 359,” Fomin said.
Activity in the Baltic region
In the Baltic zone, aircraft of NATO countries made more than 1,200 sorties, and more than 50 warships went out for naval reconnaissance. More than 20 exercises were held in the region in 2021.
“At the same time, neutral states and our closest neighbors: Finland and Sweden are actively involved in coalition activities ,” the colonel-general noted.
He also stressed that after the US withdrew from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, NATO actually ignored Vladimir Putin ‘s initiative to impose a moratorium on the deployment of new intermediate and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the possibility of developing reciprocal measures to remove existing fears.
“Every year, the NATO bloc conducts 30 major exercises, during which scenarios for conducting military operations against Russia are being worked out. Within the framework of combat training events, special attention is paid to the creation of strike groups near the borders of our country. In particular, a series of Defender exercises were held in May-June of this year. Europe-2021 with the transfer from the United States of America and Western Europe to the “eastern flank” of reinforcement troops of up to 40 thousand people,” Fomin said.”
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At the same time, a contingent of about 13 thousand troops from the non-regional states of the bloc is constantly present in Eastern Europe. It has about 200 tanks, 400 armored vehicles, 50 guns and three dozen aircraft and helicopters.
Moscow has expressed concerns about the concentration of Western alliance missile systems, troops, warships and aircraft near Russia’s borders, and NATO’s decades’ long eastward expansion. This month, the Russian Foreign Ministry formally signalled that it considers Ukraine to be a ‘red line’ for Moscow which NATO is strongly advised not to cross.
NATO is preparing for a large-scale armed conflict with Russia, in contravention of the Rome Declaration of 2002, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin has said.
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From Drang nach Osten “Push Eastwards”
[Russia’s] deputy defence minister warned that NATO’s efforts to expand and strengthen its military infrastructure on its eastern flank have had a negative impact on the security architecture of the entire European continent, but are only one of multiple actions taken by the alliance over the decades to do so.
“In 1999, a military operation which was not approved by the United Nations was carried out in Yugoslavia. The bombing of Belgrade killed innocent civilians, and the country’s economy was disrupted. The disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a new round expansion of the bloc and the incorporation of Albania, Croatia and Montenegro, and after that Northern Macedonia,” Fomin said.
At the same time, he noted, the ‘Western partners’ continued to assure Moscow “of the absence of aggressive designs against Russia,” and that Russia believed these assurances, notwithstanding the freezing of interaction with NATO in 1999 in connection with the Yugoslav crisis.
Fomin recalled that the most significant expansion of NATO eastward took place in 2004, when the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the bloc.
This and other waves of expansion significantly increasing the alliance’s military potential on its eastern flank, he said, pointing out that NATO’s borders have moved over 1,000 km eastward, providing it with opportunities to use non-strategic weapons to strike targets inside Russia.
“For example, the minimum flight time from air bases in Estonia to St. Petersburg has been reduced to several minutes. Most of Kaliningrad region is within striking range of artillery systems alone….A significant number of pieces of infrastructure have been transferred to NATO’s disposal, expanding the possibility for the deployment and transfer of troops,” Fomin said.
The reference to Lakenheath is outdated.
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The officer added that the bloc’s arsenal was beefed up considerably by weapons, vehicles and personnel of the former Warsaw Pact members, plus new ports in the Baltic and Black Seas, and an expansion of NATO’s naval forces.
NATO has focused on the military deterrence of Russia while it used to prefer engaging in joint projects, said Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin.
“The current deplorable state of relations between Russia and NATO can be explained by the fact that the alliance has often resorted to using hybrid methods to contain Russia, combining dialogue with a build-up of military preparations,” Fomin said on Monday….
He said that the deterioration of relations between Russia and NATO began earlier than 2014.
“After the end of the Cold War, the Russian Federation has repeatedly made attempts to find new forms of engagement with NATO, to create a stable, equal system of European security for all,” Fomin said. “It would be wrong to believe that the deterioration of Russia-NATO relations began in 2014.”
“The declared goals of equal cooperation by the alliance were not fulfilled much earlier, in fact, immediately after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact,” he went on to say. “At the same time, Russia was then unprecedentedly open to constructive partnership with the West and carried out a voluntary demilitarization of the country on its western borders.”
Russia also withdrew its troops from the Warsaw Pact countries, the deputy minister said.
North Macedonia has joined as a full member and Finland, Georgia, Sweden and Ukraine as Enhanced Opportunity Partners since the above map was designed.
The Rossiya 1 state television in Moscow broadcast today President Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on Friday. It conveys a much fuller picture of the grave crisis brewing in the Russian-American relations than what the excerpts in the Russian media sought to convey over the weekend.
Putin has, for the first time, explicitly warned that if the US and NATO decline to provide the security guarantees Moscow has sought, his future course of action will be solely guided by “the proposals that our military experts will make to me.” Clearly, there is no more wriggle room left.
This is anything but the White House cliche that “all options are on the table” when Washington intervened in Venezuela or Syria. Putin implies that since core issues of Russia’s national defence are involved here, military considerations will reign supreme.
That is to say, Russia cannot accept NATO’s eastward expansion and the US deployments in Ukraine and elsewhere in East Europe or the creation of anti-Russian states along its borders. And Russia expects “to reach a legally binding outcome of diplomatic talks on the documents.”
Unsurprisingly, Putin also said Russia will seek to achieve a positive outcome in the talks on security guarantees.Moscow is demanding an early meeting. Interestingly, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has underlined that Moscow is not seeking a presidential meeting between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden.
The probability is low that the US will agree to give a security guarantee to Russia in legally binding terms. There are obstacles on the way. For a start, Biden simply doesn’t have the political capital to carry the Congress along on a conciliatory path towards normalisation with Russia. A consensus is hard to reach among the US’ European allies, too, over the tricky issue of NATO expansion — that is, assuming that Washington is amenable to Russia’s demands (which it is not.)
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned yesterday that not only Ukraine and Georgia, but a possible inclusion of Sweden and Finland in NATO also will have “serious” military and political consequences that won’t be left unanswered by Moscow. Simply put, Russia expects the US and its allies to fulfil the assurance given to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that the NATO would not expand “an inch” further. (The Kremlin-funded RT publicised on Saturday the relevant declassified documents.)
Yet, the heart of the matter is that so soon after the debacle in Afghanistan, NATO’s withdrawal from Ukraine will irreparably dent its credibility. In fact, NATO may wither away if it stops expanding. Unless NATO can focus on an “enemy”, it loses its mooring and lacks a raison d’etre for its very existence. The transatlantic system will be in disarray if NATO starts drifting. And NATO happens to be the anchor sheet of the US’ global strategies. It is as simple as that.
As regards Ukraine, the West bit more than it could chew when the CIA staged a coup in 2014 in Kiev to overthrow the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich and had it replaced by a pro-US set-up. The regime change agenda was pushed with no real understanding that present-day Ukraine is a country but not a nation.
Ukraine was the creation of Josef Stalin. In a brilliant essay last week, titled Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided, Ambassador Jack Matlock, the American envoy to Moscow who played a seminal role as the confidante of Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in negotiating the end of the Cold War, has forewarned that Ukraine has no future without Russia’s helping hand.
On the other hand, the Deep State in the US and large sections of the foreign and security policy establishment in the Beltway have been harbouring fantasies that the CIA can entrap Russia in a quagmire in Ukraine. Last week, David Ignatius at the Washington Post penned a columnthreatening Moscow that it will face a full-blown guerrilla war backed by the US if it dared to intervene in Ukraine militarily. Matlock’s essay will come as a cold shower to these daydreamers.
The main problem here is that Biden finds himself in a fix personally. Biden had a hands-on role in the regime change project in Ukraine. Whether President Obama delegated the dirty job to Biden or the latter asked fro it, we will never know.Suffice to say, Biden must take the responsibility today for the mess in Ukraine, which has turned into a kleptocracy, a bastion of neo-Nazis, a basket case, and a cesspool of venality and depravity.
One false step and Europe will have a refugee flow from that country (population: 45 million) of such massive proportions right on its doorstep that will make Syria seem a picnic — and this, at a time when the ghost of Yugoslavia is stalking the Balkans.
Equally, given his past record of being an ardent votary of Obama’s containment strategy against Russia, it will be a bitter pill to swallow for Biden if he were to be the Western leader chosen by destiny to underwrite Russia’s national security. And that too, with Vladimir Putin at the helm of affairs in the Kremlin, a leader towards whom Obama and Hillary Clinton harboured visceral hatred.
Biden himself has barely concealed his dislike of the Russian leader. Biden brought into his presidency as his foreign policy team people who are known to be Russophobes. The incumbent Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland was personally involved in the regime change in Kiev in 2014 and is today in charge of the policies on Ukraine.
The protagonists in Washington have been delusional. Fundamentally, they fancied that Russia is a declining power — a broken, sulking, petulant country nostalgic for its superpower pedestal. Dire prophesies of Russian collapse have belatedly given way lately to a grudging acceptance that Russia is a persistent power. Russia’s resurgence — its soft and has power as well as its smart power — has taken the West by surprise.
The upgrading of Russia’s nuclear and conventional forces under Putin has produced staggeringly impressive results. Putin restored the nation’s pride that it is the “heir to an old and enduring identity – forged during the time of Peter the Great and persisting through the Soviet era – as a major player on the international stage” — to quote from a commentary by Andrew Latham, American professor in international relations, titled Reports of Russia’s decline are greatly exaggerated.
Why such a crisis at this point in time? The crux of the matter is that the US has decided that it must first clip Russia’s wings before taking on China. Although there is no formal military alliance between Moscow and Beijing, Russia provides “strategic depth” to China simply by being a great power pursuing independent foreign policies and sharing an alternate vision to the so-called liberal international order in terms of a democratised world order based on UN Charter and multipolarity. The Russia-China relations are at their highest level in history today.
The pragmatism of the Russian elite is legion. The Americans apparently thought that the Kremlin can be placated somehow. Putin’s statements must have come as a rude shock. The point is, Russia’s maximalist demands and minimalist stance are one and the same. That leaves no leeway for wheeling-dealing for even a consummate politician like Biden.
“We have nowhere to retreat,” Putin said, adding that NATO could deploy missiles in Ukraine that would take just four or five minutes to reach Moscow.
“They have pushed us to a line that we can’t cross. They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them: ‘Stop!’”
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For those who find themselves with excess time this holiday season which they would prefer not to squander with idleness or Netflix binges, then I’d like to offer this serving of Frank Capra films to uplift the soul.
Frank Capra (1897-1991) stands as one of the most brilliant directors/producers of the 20th Century, and sadly also one of the least understood- known at best for the film It’s a Wonderful Life played every year as a Christmas tradition, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Unbeknownst to even many film connoisseurs today, Capra was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind’s higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:
“My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other”
During World War II, Capra’s Why We Fight series was one of the most important educational tools used to shape the hearts and minds of the American population towards the strategic nature and purpose of the war against the fascist machine which had received much of its support from financiers in the Anglo-American establishment. In America, these groups were masquerading as “patriots” under the American Liberty League promoting America’s neutrality in that conflict. It was an open secret that these groups preferred to let Hitler and Mussolini usher in a new order which they saw as a wonderful opportunity to rule the world, and it was to these groups that FDR declared famously “they who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order”. The President knew of what he spoke as he had declared open war on these American fascists from 1932 onward.
Capra not only struggled to revive Roosevelt’s mission to end poverty, hunger and war after the war ended, but also struggled against the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was created in 1949 to shape the new era of art, music and cinema in the post war age as weapons against communism. The CCF had spared no time in purging Hollywood of all “FDR patriots” under the FBI-steered witch hunt known as Mcarthyism on the one hand while promoting a new culture of banality on the other pouring millions of dollars into mind deadening film scripts conducive to an age of white collar consumerism. This CIA/CCF agenda was recognized by only a few leading film directors as a spiritual virus that had to be stopped at all costs.
Other film makers at the time that stood against this corruption included Robert Kennedy’s close friend John Frankenheimer (7 Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate), and Stanley Kramer, whose film Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) still stands alone as one of the most potent artistic exposures of the western support for eugenics and fascism.
Frankenheimer’s 7 Days in May (1964) showcased the real-life planned coup to overthrow JFK which had been arranged by the Military’s Joint Chiefs under the helm of Anglophile General Lyman Lemnitzer in 1962 after Kennedy rejected the General’s plans for Operations Northwoods.
Capra’s approach to combating this virus during the years of Cold War terror took a different path to that chosen by Frankenheimer and Kramer. Rather than exposing the rot directly, Capra focused on uplifting the image of mankind by channeling all his efforts on science documentaries for children which he felt would have the most long term benefit to humanity.
Capra had been a target of the House on Un-American Activities due to his friendship with many blacklisted film makers, and watched as Hollywood was purged of those key individuals who acted as it’s conscience when Hollwood’s role as a tool of patriotism or fascism was still undetermined. Just as the political world was being re-shaped to a new post-moral world order, so too was Hollywood, and as historian Micheal Medved stated, “Capra refused to adjust to the cynicism of the new order.”
Capra’s documentary The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays illustrates his powerful technique that sought to unite science and art through a reverence for God’s creation which is in many ways as cutting edge today as it was 60 years ago.
Capra’s Greatest Films for this Holiday Season
After watching the brilliant It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) which not only exposed the crushing schemes of Wall Street financiers who sought to ruin local productive businesses/commercial banks but also awoke a higher sentiment of transformative love in the hearts of the audience, I would highly recommend watching his lesser known, yet equally powerful pieces You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Meet John Doe (1941) and State of the Union (1949). Taken alongsideMr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), these films act as incredible Schillerian masterpieces which express the best potential for the moral use of cinema as a tool to both spiritually and politically ennoble a nation’s citizenry.
Capra dedicated himself to John F. Kennedy’s challenge to embark upon a new age of “open-system” collaboration around un-ending discoveries in space, producing his last film “Rendez-vous in Space” in 1964. Spliced with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony which set Schiller’s immortal poem Ode to Joy to music celebrating humanity’s eventual emergence into an age of reason, Capra had his narrator end with the powerful words: “The Sun still lights up and gives life to our planet, but only the mind of man can light up, and give meaning to the light of the universe.”
Even though darkness clouds the path to that better future towards which world citizens like Frank Capra dedicated their lives, the light that they knew was there is getting stronger by the day. So take the time to welcome the year 2022 by adding some spiritual kindling onto your flame and let Capra’s intention come alive again.
Happy Holidays to all.
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At a recent online symposium on covid science that was organized by Doctors for COVID Ethics, the most detailed evidence yet against Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” was presented for the world’s consideration.
This international group, which has long opposed the mass rollout of Fauci Flu shots, argued that the human immune system, provoked by the injections, could end up attacking its own tissues (autoimmune disease) when it detects the presence of synthetic spike proteins.
Untold thousands of deaths have already occurred from this, though most of them never make it into the government databases. Numerous presenters, including Dr. Peter McCullough, who has also long stood against the injections, revealed scientific evidence to support these and other claims.
McCullough, by the way, has actually come out to say that covid “vaccines” are the “most dangerous biological medicinal product rollout in human history.” He remains one of the most vocal opponents to the current agenda.
German pathologist and professor Dr. Arne Burkhardt, who has more than 40 years of experience in the field, also presented at the symposium. He conducted his own research on the tissues and organs from 15 different patients where a post-mortem had been performed.
Eight of the bodies were women and seven were men, all between the ages of 28 and 95. Each of these individuals died between seven days and six months post-injection.
What Burkhardt found is that in nearly every case, the jabs caused the individuals’ bodies to self-destruct. A specific type of immune cell called a lymphocyte was found to have invaded various parts of the body, eventually causing early death.
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Burkhardt presented slides showing that lymphocytes had infiltrated the heart muscle in particular, causing systemic inflammation. The resulting lesions were small and probably overlooked, “but the destruction of just a few muscle cells may have a devastating effect,” he warned.
“If the inflammatory infiltration is found where the impulse for the contraction of the heart is given, this may lead to heart failure,” he further said.
It was also discovered that a lymphocyte invasion occurred in other vital organs such as the liver, kidneys, uterus, brain, thyroid and skin, all of which showed signs of autoimmune damage.
How much mRNA poison can the body handle before it goes kaput?
Canadian microbiologist and professor Dr. Michael Palmer summed up Burkhardt’s presentation by explaining that anyone with honest medical training will clearly see “just how devastating the effect of these vaccines can be, at least in those who die after the vaccination.”
“We also now know why the authorities were very hesitant to have autopsies performed on such victims,” Palmer added.
As to why some people are not suffering such an extreme fate post-injection, Palmer warned that the total lifetime dose of messenger RNA toxins is limited, suggesting that it varies from person to person.
Due to a lack of experimental data, it is unknown what these thresholds are. And according to Palmer, this is “one of the great scandals of these vaccines, that no proper toxicity studies have been carried out.”
We do know from animal studies that the contents of the jabs do not remain at the site of injection. They circulate throughout the entire body, combining with receptors and lining blood vessels, which in many people causes clotting and excessive bleeding.
The long-term risks of this are what will really be telling once the contents of the jabs really make their way throughout people’s bodies over the long haul. Widespread death from seemingly no specific cause is likely to occur in the coming months and years.
More related news about Fauci Flu shots can be found at Genocide.news.
On 27 October 2020 Lord Sumption delivered the 2020 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture entitled “Government by decree – Covid-19 and the Constitution”.
The disputes over Brexit last year saw an attempt to make the executive, not Parliament, the prime source of authority in the Constitution. The coronavirus crisis has provoked another attempt to marginalise Parliament, this time with the willing acquiescence of the House of Commons. Is this to be our future?
Lord Sumption is an author, historian and lawyer of note. He was appointed directly from the practising Bar to the Supreme Court, and served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012-18.
In 2019, he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, “Law and the Decline of Politics”, and is now a regular commentator in the media. He continues to sit as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. Alongside his career as a lawyer, he has also produced a substantial and highly-regarded narrative history of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (with volume V still to come).
Full transcript of the video follows.
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, the British state has exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted.
It has taken effective legal control, enforced by the police, over the personal lives of the entire population: where they could go, whom they could meet, what they could do even within their own homes. For three months it placed everybody under a form of house arrest, qualified only by their right to do a limited number of things approved by ministers. All of this has been authorised by ministerial decree with minimal Parliamentary involvement. It has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one.
It is customary for those who doubt the legality or constitutional propriety of the government’s acts to start with a hand-wringing declaration that they do so with a heavy heart, not doubting for a moment the need for the measures taken. I shall not follow that tradition. I do not doubt the seriousness of the epidemic, but I believe that history will look back on the measures taken to contain it as a monument of collective hysteria and governmental folly. This evening, however, I am not concerned with the wisdom of this policy, but only with its implications for the government of our country. So remarkable a departure from our liberal traditions surely calls for some consideration of its legal and constitutional basis.
The present government came to office after the general election of December 2019 with a large majority and a good deal of constitutional baggage.
It had not had an absolute majority in the previous Parliament, which had rejected its policy on the terms for leaving the European Union. It had responded to Parliamentary opposition with indignation. The Attorney- General told the House of Commons in September 2019 that they were unfit to sit, surely one of the more extraordinary statements ever made in public by a law officer of the Crown.
The government had endeavoured to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of their negotiations with the EU by proroguing it, and had been prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller (No. 2).
The ground for the Court’s intervention was that the prorogation impeded the essential function of Parliament in holding the government to account. This decision was certainly controversial in expressing as a rule of law something which had traditionally been regarded as no more than a political convention, although I have no doubt for my part that the Court was right. But whether it is properly classified as law or convention, the constitutional principle which the court stated was surely beyond question. Governments hold power in Britain on the sufferance of the elected chamber of the legislature. Without that, we are no democracy. As the court pointed out, the dependence of government on Parliamentary support was the means by which “the policies of the executive are subjected to consideration by the representatives of the electorate, the executive is required to report, explain and defend its actions, and citizens are protected from the arbitrary exercise of executive power.” The present government has a different approach. It seeks to derive its legitimacy directly from the people, bypassing their elected representatives. Since the people have no institutional mechanism for holding governments to account, other than Parliament, the effect is that ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at general elections.
Within four months of the election, the new government was faced with the coronavirus pandemic. The minutes of the meetings of SAGE, its panel of expert scientific advisers, record that shortly before the lockdown was announced the behavioural scientists advised against the use of coercive powers. “Citizens should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk,” they had said. The government did not act on this advice. Encouraged by the public panic and the general demand for action, it opted for a course which it believed would make it popular. It chose coercion. For this, it needed statutory powers.
There were three relevant statutes.
The Coronavirus Act was passed specifically to deal with Covid-19. This hefty document of 348 pages with 102 sections and 29 schedules was pushed through all its stages in a single day in each House as the lockdown was announced. In the time available, no serious scrutiny of its terms can have been possible.
The Act was primarily concerned to enlarge the government’s powers to marshal the medical resources of the country and to authorise additional public expenditure. But tucked away in Schedules 21 and 22 were additional powers to control the movement of people. Schedule 21 authorises public health officials to screen and test people for infectious diseases. They are given extensive powers to control the movement of anyone found to be infectious and to call on the police to enforce their directions.
Schedule 22 confers on the Secretary of State extensive powers to forbid “events” or “gatherings” and to close premises for the purpose of controlling the transmission of Covid-19. For present purposes, however, the important point to note is that apart from the power to prevent events or gatherings, the Act conferred no power to control the lives of healthy people. The measure stood in a long tradition dating back many centuries by which infectious diseases were controlled by the confinement of infectious people, not by the confinement of healthy ones.
A power to confine healthy people was, however, conferred by another Act, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. The Civil Contingencies Act is the only statute specifically designed for emergencies serious enough to require the kind of measures that we have had. It authorises ministers to make regulations to deal with a wide variety of “events or situations”, including those which threaten “serious damage to human welfare”. These are defined so as to include things which may cause loss of life or illness. The regulation-making power could not be wider. Ministers are authorised to do by regulation anything that Parliament could do by statute, i.e. anything at all. In other words, it authorises government by executive decree. Specific examples given in the Act include restricting the movement or assembly of people and controlling travel. In enacting these provisions, Parliament recognized that emergency legislation of this kind is constitutionally extremely dangerous. It therefore provided for the powers to be exercisable only under stringent Parliamentary control. I shall return to that.
The government chose not to include a general lockdown power in the Coronavirus Act and not to use the power that it already had under the Civil Contingencies Act. Instead it resorted to the much more limited powers conferred by Part IIA of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, as amended in 2008. Section 45C(1) authorises the Secretary of State to make regulations “for the purpose of preventing, protecting against, controlling or providing a public health response to the incidence or spread of infection or contamination in England and Wales.” That sounds very wide, but the problem about it is that the power is couched in wholly general terms. It is a basic constitutional principle that general words are not to be read as authorizing the infringement of fundamental rights. The best known formulation of what has been called the “principle of legality” comes from the speech of Lord Hoffmann in Ex parte Simms [2000] 2 AC 115, 131. His words are well known, but they are so apposite as to be well worth repeating. Parliament, he said,
“must squarely confront what it is doing and accept the political cost. Fundamental rights cannot be overridden by general or ambiguous words. This is because there is too great a risk that the full implications of their unqualified meaning may have passed unnoticed in the democratic process. In the absence of express language or necessary implication to the contrary, the courts therefore presume that even the most general words were intended to be subject to the basic rights of the individual. In this way the courts of the United Kingdom, though acknowledging the sovereignty of Parliament, apply principles of constitutionality little different from those which exist in countries where the power of the legislature is expressly limited by a constitutional document.”
There are few more fundamental rights than personal liberty. The effect of the principle of legality is that those proposing its curtailment must be specific about it and take the political heat.
So what specific powers to curtail personal liberty does the Public Health Act confer? The answer is that its main purpose is to confer extensive powers on magistrates to make orders in relation to particular people thought to be infectious or specific premises thought to be contaminated. Magistrates can make orders disinfecting infectious people, quarantining or isolating them or removing them to hospitals, among other things. They can order the closure or decontamination of contaminated premises. Ministers are given very limited powers in this area, only two of which were relevant to the lockdown or to current measures of social control. Under Section 45C they have a specific power to make regulations controlling “events or gatherings”. A “gathering” is not defined, but the context shows it to be concerned with more substantial assemblies than ordinary social interchange in peoples’ homes. The object was to deal with threats to public order. Otherwise the only specific power conferred on ministers is a power to do some of the things that a magistrate could do. The result is that ministers can make regulations controlling people thought to be infectious. There is no specific power under the Act to confine or control the movements of healthy people. To interpret it as conferring such a power would not only be inconsistent with the principle of legality. It would also be contrary to the whole tenor of this part of the Act. It is axiomatic that if a statute deals in terms with the circumstances in which a power can be exercised so as to curtail the liberty of the subject, it is not open to a public authority to exercise the power in different or wider circumstances. The courts will I suspect be tempted to give the government more leeway than they are entitled to. But on well established legal principles, the powers under the Public Health Act were not intended to authorise measures as drastic as those which have been imposed.
Why did the government not include a lockdown power in the Coronavirus Act given that it was drafted at the inception of the crisis? The most plausible explanation is that it thought that there might be difficulty in getting such a thing through Parliament without further debate and possibly amendment. Why did they not use the Civil Contingencies Act, which was already on the statute book? The most plausible answer is that the Civil Contingencies Act required a high degree of Parliamentary scrutiny which ministers wished to avoid. Emergency regulations under the Civil Contingencies Act must be laid before Parliament in draft before they are made.
If the case is too urgent for that, they must be laid before Parliament within seven days or they will lapse. If necessary, Parliament must be recalled. Even if the regulations are approved, the regulations can remain in force for only 30 days unless they are renewed and reapproved. Unusually, Parliament is authorised to amend or revoke them at any time. By comparison the degree of scrutiny provided for under the Public Health Act is limited. In urgent cases, regulations under the Public Health Act have provisional validity, pending Parliamentary approval, for 28 days, and that limit is extended for any period when Parliament is not sitting. Parliament cannot amend them, and once it has approved them it cannot revoke them. They remain in force for whatever period ministers may decide. These differences in the level of Parliamentary scrutiny were remarked upon at the time when the powers in question were added to the Public Health Act in 2008. The government of the day told the Constitution Committee of the House of Lords that the lesser degree of Parliamentary scrutiny was appropriate because the powers under the Public Health Act were not intended to authorize anything very radical. They were mainly directed at controlling the behaviour of infected people, and then only in cases where the proposed measure was urgent but “minor in scope and effect.”
The problems begin with the very first days of the lockdown. In his televised press conference of 23 March, the Prime Minister described his announcement of the lockdown as an “instruction” to the British people. He said that he was “immediately” stopping gatherings of more than two people in public and all social events except funerals. A number of police forces announced within minutes of the broadcast that they would be enforcing this at once. The Health Secretary, Mr. Hancock, made a statement in the House of Commons the next day in which he said: “these measures are not advice; they are rules.” All of this was bluff. Even on the widest view of the legislation, the government had no power to give such orders without making statutory regulations. No such regulations existed until 1 p.m. on 26 March, three days after the announcement. The Prime Minister had no power to give “instructions” to the British people, and certainly no power to do so by a mere oral announcement at a Downing Street press conference. The police had no power to enforce them. Mr Hancock’s statement in the House of Commons was not correct. Until 26 March the government’s statements were not rules, but advice, which every citizen was at liberty to ignore.
To complain about the gap of three days during which the government pretended that the rules were in effect when they were not, may strike some people as pedantic. The regulations were eventually made, albeit late. But it revealed a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers which has continued to characterise the government’s behaviour. Over the following weeks the government made a succession of press statements containing what it called “guidance”, which went well beyond anything in the regulations. These statements had no legal status whatever, although this fact was never made clear. The two-meter distancing rule, for example, never had the force of law in England. Many police forces set about enforcing the guidance nonetheless, until the College of Policing issued firm advice to them that they had no business doing so.
Why did the government, once they had announced the lockdown on 23 March wait for three days until 26th before making their regulations, and then resort to the emergency procedure on the ground that it was so urgent that Parliament could not be consulted in advance? The obvious answer, I am afraid, is that Parliament adjourned for the Easter recess on 25th. They deliberately delayed their urgent regulations so that there would be no opportunity to debate them before the recess. The period of 28 days before any kind of Parliamentary scrutiny was required was thus extended by the 21 days of the recess, i.e. to the middle of May.
This is not the only respect in which the level of Parliamentary scrutiny of the executive has been curtailed. The Coronavirus Act authorises any payments connected with coronavirus without limit and without any form of advance Parliamentary scrutiny. The Contingencies Fund Act, which passed through every stage in the House of Commons on the day after the Coronavirus Bill, authorised an increase in the statutory maximum in the Contingencies Fund, from to 2 per cent of the previous year’s authorised expenditure, to 50 per cent. The result was to make an additional £266 billion available to the government with no advance Parliamentary scrutiny. These measures departed from a century and a half of constitutional principle by which Parliament controls exactly how public funds are spent.
There was a number of other steps radically affecting the rights of individuals, which the government took without any Parliamentary sanction. Most of these involved exploiting existing regulatory regimes. The two meter distancing rule, for example, was uncritically adopted by the Health and Safety Executive. As a result, a number of building sites and factories where it was impractical to observe it were required to close although not included in the closure orders made under statutory powers. Perhaps the most remarkable example concerns the steps which the government took to deprive people of access to medical and dental services. The provision of medical and dental services was expressly excluded from the closure orders made under the Public Health Act. But a combination of government advice and government-inspired pressure from regulators was used to limit access to general practitioners. They were required to conduct video triages and refer serious cases to hospitals while telling other cases to wait. This has had a serious impact on the diagnosis and early treatment of far more mortal diseases than Covid-19, notably cancer. More drastic still were the steps taken to close down dental practices. On 25 March the Chief Dental Officer, a government official, published a statement referring to the Prime Minister’s announcement of the lockdown and requiring dentists to stop all non-urgent activity. In reality, they were required to stop even urgent activity.
Their role was limited to carrying out a video triage of patients. Urgent cases were to be referred to a small number of local urgent dental units which essentially performed extractions. Treatment was refused in other cases. This direction, which had no statutory basis, left many people in pain or discomfort and threatened a significant number of dental practices with insolvency. Even after it was lifted at the beginning of June, distancing rules were imposed which seriously reduced the number of patients that a dentist could see and made many dental practices financially unviable. This is a serious matter, because the government’s use of non- statutory procedures like these escapes Parliamentary scrutiny. Parliament may, for example, be taken to have approved, albeit seven weeks late, the exception in the Health Protection Regulations which allowed the provision of dental services to continue. Parliament has never had the opportunity to approve the instruction of the Chief Dental Officer to the opposite effect.
These events give rise to concern on a number of counts. The most draconian of the government’s interventions with the most far-reaching economic and social effects have been imposed under an Act which does not appear to authorise them. The sheer scale on which the government has sought to govern by decree, creating new criminal offences, sometimes several times a week on the mere say-so of ministers, is in constitutional terms truly breathtaking. The government has routinely made use of the exceptional procedure authorizing it in urgent cases to dispense with advance Parliamentary approval, even where the measure in question has been mooted for days or weeks. Thus the original lockdown was imposed without any kind of Parliamentary scrutiny until the middle of May, seven weeks later. Thereafter, there was little scope for further scrutiny. Even the powers which the government purported to exercise were gratuitously expanded by tendentious and misleading “guidance”, generally announced at press conferences.
A special word needs to be said about the remarkable discretionary powers of enforcement conferred on the police. The police received power to enforce the lockdown regulations by giving directions to citizens which it was a criminal offence to disobey. Fixed penalty notices are normally authorised in modest amounts for minor regulatory infractions, parking and the lesser driving offences. The government’s Regulations, however, authorised them for a great variety of newly created offences and sometimes in very large amounts.
On 26 August the government introduced by decree an offence of “being involved” in a gathering exceeding thirty people, and empowered any policeman in the land to issue a fixed penalty notice of £10,000. This sum, enough to ruin most people, was far in excess of any fine that would be imposed by a court for such an offence. The power, which was originally advertised as being intended to deal with “raves” has of course been widely exercised for other purposes. In particular, it has been used to suppress protests against the government’s coronavirus policies. On 30 August, the police served a £10,000 fixed penalty notice on Mr Piers Corbyn for addressing a rally against masks in Trafalgar Square. The regulations contain an exception for political protest, provided that the organisers have agreed a risk assessment and taken reasonable steps to ensure safety. On 26 September the police broke up a demonstration against the government’s measures, whose organisers had agreed a risk assessment and had taken reasonable steps. The police claim to have done this because some of the demonstrators had not acted in accordance with the arrangements made by the organisers. They cleared the square using batons with considerable violence, injuring some 20 people who were guilty of nothing other than attending an apparently lawful protest.
There is a noticeable process of selection involved in these actions. No such fines, arrests or assaults have been seen in other demonstrations, such as those organised by Black Lives Matter, or Extinction Rebellion which did not observe social distancing but were thought to have greater public support. The Mayor of London applauded the police action. The silence from civil rights organisations such as Liberty was deafening.
The police’s powers of summary arrest are regulated by primary legislation, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Under Regulation 9(7) of the original lockdown regulations, the government purported to amend that Act by enlarging their powers of arrest so that they extended to any case in which a policeman reasonably believed that it was necessary to arrest a citizen to maintain public health. I need hardly say that the Public Health Act confers no power on ministers to amend other primary legislation in this way.
In fact, the police substantially exceeded even the vast powers that they received. In the period immediately after the announcement of the lockdown, a number of Chief Constables announced that they would stop people acting in a way which the regarded as inessential, although there was no warrant for this in the regulations. One of them threatened to go through the shopping baskets of those exercising their right to obtain supplies, so as to ensure that they were not buying anything that his constables might regard as inessential. Other forces set up road blocks to enforce powers that they did not have. Derbyshire police notoriously sent up surveillance drones and published on the internet a film clip denouncing people taking exercise in the Derbyshire fells, something which people were absolutely entitled to do. When I ventured to criticise them in a BBC interview for acting beyond their powers, I received a letter from the Derbyshire Police Commissioner objecting to my remarks on the ground that in a crisis such things were necessary. The implication was that in a crisis the police were entitled to do whatever they thought fit, without being unduly concerned about their legal powers. That is my definition of a police state.
Many people think that in an emergency public authorities should be free to behave in this way because the ordinary processes of lawmaking are too deliberate and slow.
I do not share this view. I believe that in the long run the principles on which we are governed matter more than the way that we deal with any particular crisis.
They are particularly important in a country like ours in which many basic rights and liberties depend on convention. They depend on a recognition not just that the government must act within its powers, but that not everything that a government is legally entitled to do is legitimate.
The Public Health Act requires any exercise of its regulation-making powers to be proportionate. The government has included in every regulation to date a formulaic statement that it is. But its actions speak differently. Its public position is explicable only on the basis that absolutely anything is justifiable in the interest of hindering the transmission of this disease. I reject that claim. Powers as wide and intrusive as those which this government has purported to exercise should not be available to a minister on his mere say-so. In a society with the liberal traditions of ours, the police ought not to have the kind of arbitrary enforcement powers that they have been given, let alone the wider powers that they have not been given but have exercised anyway.
These things should not happen without specific Parliamentary authority, in the course of which the government can be required to explain its reasons and the evidence behind them in detail, and its proposals can be properly debated, amended or rejected by a democratic legislature. Their imposition by decree, even if the decrees are lawful, is not consistent with the constitutional traditions of this country.
There are, I would suggest, at least three lessons to be learned from this dismal story.
The first lesson is one to which I drew attention in my BBC Reith lectures last year. Our society craves security. The public has unbounded confidence, which no amount of experience will dent, in the benign power of the state to protect them against an ever wider range of risks. In Britain, the lockdown was followed by a brief period in which the government’s approval ratings were sky-high.
This is how freedom dies. When societies lose their liberty, it is not usually because some despot has crushed it under his boot. It is because people voluntarily surrendered their liberty out of fear of some external threat. Historically, fear has always been the most potent instrument of the authoritarian state. This is what we are witnessing today. But the fault is not just in our government. It is in ourselves. Fear provokes strident demands for abrasive action, much of which is unhelpful or damaging. It promotes intolerant conformism. It encourages abuse directed against anyone who steps out of line, including many responsible opponents of this government’s measures and some notable scientists who have questioned their empirical basis. These are the authentic ingredients of a totalitarian society.
So, I regret to say, is the propaganda by which the government has to some extent been able to create its own public opinion.
Fear was deliberately stoked up by the government: the language of impending doom; the daily press conferences; the alarmist projections of the mathematical modellers; the manipulative use of selected statistics; the presentation of exceptional tragedies as if they were the normal effects of Covid-19; above all the attempt to suggest that that Covid-19 was an indiscriminate killer, when the truth was that it killed identifiable groups, notably those with serious underlying conditions and the old, who could and arguably should have been sheltered without coercing the entire population. These exaggerations followed naturally from the logic of the measures themselves.
They were necessary in order to justify the extreme steps which the government had taken, and to promote compliance. As a strategy, this was completely successful.
So successful was it that when the government woke up to the damage it was doing, especially to the economy and the education of children, it found it difficult to reverse course.
The public naturally asked themselves what had changed. The honest answer to that question would have been that nothing much had changed. The threat had not been fairly presented in the first place. Other governments, in Germany, in France, in Sweden and elsewhere, addressed their citizens in measured terms, and the level of fear was lower. It is not fair to criticise the government for the mere fact that the death toll in Britain is the second highest in Europe. There are too many factors other than government action which determine the mortality of Covid-19. But it is fair to blame them for the fear which means that Britain seems likely to suffer greater economic damage than almost every other European country.
The ease with which people could be terrorized into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence as social beings came as a shock to me in March 2020. So has much of the subsequent debate. I certainly never expected to hear the word libertarian, which only means a believer in freedom, used as a term of abuse. Perhaps I should have done. For this is not a new problem. Four centuries ago the political theorist Thomas Hobbes formulated his notorious apology for absolute government. The basis of human society, he argued, is that people have no right to be free, for they completely and irrevocably surrender their liberty to an overpowering state in return for security. In an age obsessed with escaping from risk, this has become one of the major issues of our time.
I have criticised the way in which the government has invaded civil liberties with limited Parliamentary scrutiny or none. But of course Parliamentary scrutiny is not enough unless Parliament is also willing to live up to its high constitutional calling. It has to be ready to demand rational explanations of ministerial actions and to and to vote down regulations if they are not forthcoming. There is unfortunately little evidence of this. The public’s fear effectively silenced opposition in the House of Commons.
The official opposition did not dare to challenge the government, except to suggest that they should have been even tougher even quicker.
Parliament allowed the Coronavirus Act to be steam-rollered through with no real scrutiny. It agreed to go into recess at the critical point in March and April when the need for active scrutiny of government was at its highest. When it returned, it meekly accepted government guidance on social distancing, and submitted to a regime under which only 50 out of the 650 members could be in the Chamber at any one time with up to 120 more participating remotely on screens. This has meant that instead of answering to a raucous and often querulous and difficult assembly, whose packed ranks can test governments with the largest majorities, ministers had an easy ride. The exclusion of most of the House from participating in the core activities for which they had been elected by their constituents, was a most remarkable abdication of the House’s constitutional functions. It has reduced its scrutiny of the government to the status of a radio phone-in program.
However, the basic problem is even more fundamental. Under its standing orders, the House of Commons has no control over its own agenda.
Its business is determined by the Leader of the House, a government minister, and by the Speaker. Backbenchers, however numerous, have no say and the official opposition not much more. In this respect the Commons is unlike almost every other legislature in the world.
Other legislatures determine their own agenda through bipartisan committees or rules which entitle members with a minimum level of support to move their own business. When, in September, MPs began to kick back against the government’s dictatorial measures, the only way that they could do it was to tack a proviso onto a resolution authorizing the continuance of the Coronavirus Act, requiring the government to obtain Parliamentary approval of regulations made under the Public Health Act. The Speaker, probably rightly, ruled this out as an abuse. But it should not have been necessary to resort to devices like this. The standing orders date from another age when there was a shared political culture at Westminster which made space for dissenting views, and a shared respect for the institution of Parliament. The procedures of the House are not fit for a world in which the government seeks to shove MPs into the margins. Speaker Hoyle was surely right to accuse ministers of despising Parliament. But it will take more than schoolmasterly lectures to address the problem. Over the past few decades, the House of Commons has lost much of the prestige and public respect that it once enjoyed. Mr Cox’s strictures against Parliament in September 2019 were outrageous. But Parliament will richly deserve them unless it can rise to the challenge of controlling the most determined attempt by any modern government to rule by decree.
So much for the first lesson of recent events. The second is a variant of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Ministers do not readily surrender coercive powers when the need has passed. The Scott Inquiry into the Matrix Churchill scandal, which reported in 1996, drew attention to a broad class of emergency powers which had been conferred on the government at the outset of the Second World War until such time as His Majesty should declare by Order in Council that the war had ended. These had been kept in force by the simple device of ensuring that no such Order in Council was ever placed before His Majesty. They were still being used in the 1970s and 1980s on the footing that the Second World War was still in progress, for purposes quite different from those originally envisaged. Likewise, the powers conferred on ministers and the police by the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006 have been employed not just to combat terrorism but for a variety of other purposes, including the control of peaceful demonstrations, the enlargement of police stop and search powers to deal with ordinary non-terrorist offences, and the freezing of the assets of Icelandic banks for the protection of their UK depositors. It will therefore surprise no one that the present government, having announced on 23 March that the lockdown would last until the NHS was able to cope with peak hospitalisations, should have continued them in May and June after this objective had been achieved. Ministers did this notwithstanding the warning of their scientific advisers in reports submitted to SAGE in February and March that a lockdown could delay infections and deaths but not stop them. Once again, fear persuaded people to accept the surrender of their liberty, even when the lockdown was no longer capable of the objective originally claimed for it. If the government had made its regulations under the Civil Contingencies Act, as it should have done, they would have had to be reapproved by Parliament every 30 days. Even with a relatively supine House of Commons, it is permissible to hope that Parliament would at least have called for a coherent explanation of this pointless and profoundly damaging decision.
The third and last lesson which I want to draw from these events is that government by decree is not only constitutionally objectionable. It is usually bad government.
There is a common delusion that authoritarian government is efficient. It does not waste time in argument or debate. Strongmen get things done.
Historical experience should warn us that this idea is usually wrong.
The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enables governments to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning or research. Within the government’s own ranks, it promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice. The want of criticism encourages self-confidence, and self-confidence banishes moderation and restraint. Authoritarian rulers sustain themselves in power by appealing to the emotional and the irrational in collective opinion. The present government’s mishandling of Covid-19 exemplifies all of these vices. Whatever one might think about the merits of its decisions, it is impossible to think well of the process which produced them, which can only be described as jerky, clumsy, inconsistent and poorly thought out.
There is not, and never has been an exit plan or anything that can be described as a long-term strategy – only a series of expedients. The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons reported in July that the lockdown was announced without any kind of cost-benefit analysis or advance planning for its disruptive economic effects. The many relevant social and educational considerations were disregarded in favour of an exclusive concentration on public health issues and only some of those. These are all classic problems of authoritarian government. It is habitually inefficient, destructive, blinkered and ultimately not even popular.
The British public has not even begun to understand the seriousness of what is happening to our country. Many, perhaps most of them don’t care, and won’t care until it is too late. They instinctively feel that the end justifies the means, the motto of every totalitarian government which has ever been. Yet what holds us together as a society is precisely the means by which we do things.
It is a common respect for a way of making collective decisions, even if we disagree with the decisions themselves. It is difficult to respect the way in which this government’s decisions have been made. It marks a move to a more authoritarian model of politics which will outlast the present crisis. There is little doubt that for some ministers and their advisers this is a desirable outcome. The next few years is likely to see a radical and lasting transformation of the relationship between the state and the citizen. With it will come an equally fundamental change in our relations with each other, a change characterized by distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. In the nature of things, authoritarian governments fracture the societies which they govern. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion is corrosive. It divides and it embitters. In this case, it is aggravated by the sustained assault on social interaction which will sooner or later loosen the glue that helped us to deal with earlier crises. The unequal impact of the government’s measures is eroding any sense of national solidarity.
The poor, the inadequately housed, the precariously employed and the socially isolated have suffered most from the government’s measures. Above all, the young, who are little affected by the disease itself, have been made to bear almost all the burden, in the form of blighted educational opportunities and employment prospects whose effects will last for years. Their resentment of democratic forms, which was already noticeable before the epidemic, is mounting, as recent polls have confirmed.
The government has discovered the power of public fear to let it get its way. It will not forget. Aristotle argued in his Politics that democracy was an inherently defective and unstable form of government. It was, he thought, too easily subverted by demagogues seeking to obtain or keep power by appeals to public emotion and fear. What has saved us from this fate in the two centuries that democracy has subsisted in this country is a tradition of responsible government, based not just on law but on convention, deliberation and restraint, and on the effective exercise of Parliamentary as opposed to executive sovereignty. But like all principles which depend on a shared political culture, this is a fragile tradition. It may now founder after two centuries in which it has served this country well. What will replace it is a nominal democracy, with a less deliberative and consensual style and an authoritarian reality which we will like a great deal less.
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Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.
Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.
In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:
Riots, martial law and the Deep State’s coup. A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over on January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. The subsequent military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next was little more than martial law disguised as national security. The January 6 attempt to storm the Capitol by so-called insurrectionists created the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.
The imperial president. All of the imperial powers amassed by Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Joe Biden, the nation’s 46th president.
The Surveillance State. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. Consider that it took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots. Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.
A new war on terror. “Domestic terrorism,” used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous,” became the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties. As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to wage war on so-called political extremism, ushering in what investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald described as “a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Culture wars. Political correctness gave way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule which, coupled with government and corporate censors and a cancel culture determined not to offend “certain” viewpoints, was all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. Critical race theory also moved to the forefront of the culture wars.
Bodily integrity. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these were just a few ways in which Americans continued to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
COVID-19. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) expanded their powers, abused their authority, and further oppressed their constituents. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it remains to be seen how the rights of the individual will hold up in the face of long-term COVID-19 authoritarianism.
Financial tyranny. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) exceeded $29 trillion and is growing. That translates to almost $230,000 per taxpayer. The amount this country owes is now greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051. Meanwhile, the government continued to spend taxpayer money it didn’t have on programs it couldn’t afford; businesses shuttered for lack of customers, resources and employees; and consumers continued to encounter global supply chain shortages (and skyrocketing prices) on everything from computer chips and cars to construction materials.
Global Deep State. Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it became increasingly obvious that we had entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. Fascism became a global menace.
20 years of crises. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years from 9/11 to COVID-19 has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before.
The state of our nation. There may have been a new guy in charge this year, but for the most part, nothing changed. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.
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This video was originally published in November 2020.
The Story of Benjamin Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials.
Just in his twenties – after landing on the beaches of Normandy, fighting in the Battle of the Buldge, and liberating various Nazi concentration camps – Ben became responsible for prosecuting members of the Einsatzgruppen death units, responsible for the deaths of over one million innocent people during the Nazi invasion of Russia.
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Benjamin Franklin once famously wrote to his fellow colonials: “Either we hang together or we hang separately.”
Those words are just as true today as they were 270 years ago, for empires have always controlled by dividing their victims into regional tribal interests in order to be better conquered.
While techniques have adapted to modern times, the essential ingredients for the science of discord remain relatively unchanged: keep resources scarce, fear and ignorance high, and let a targeted population clash over diminishing returns of scarcity.
Amid this division, myopic ethnic, religious, and linguistic prejudices have fertile soil to grow to the benefit of an oligarchic elite.
Today’s Americans, sitting as they are on the precipice of a their own internal civil clashes, and economic collapse more broadly, have not heeded the advice of their own founding fathers well enough.
However, it is no small irony that Ben Franklin’s advice is being taken to heart in another part of the world far removed from the decaying republic.
The China-Russia-Iran alliance challenges rules-based disorder
Since Iran finalized its Comprehensive 25 Year Cooperation Plan with China on 27 March, a completely new geometry has arisen in Southwest Asia, which is evolving at breakneck speed.
An ancient civilization serving as the third foundational pillar supporting the Greater Eurasian Partnership, and having joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on 17 September, Iran has finally emerged as a leading driver for stabilization and progress.
Alongside security agreements with Russia that have seen the two nations conducting Indian Ocean military drills in February 2021, Russia, Iran and China (RIC) have also announced that all three parties would hold joint naval drills in the Persian Gulf by the start of 2022.
Russian-Iran relations don’t end here, but a 20-year cooperation agreement – modelled on the Iran-China agreement – between the two powers is also in the final stages of negotiation.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh stated on 11 December: “Like the 25-year cooperation roadmap we developed with China, we can do the same with major neighboring countries.”
This transformative corridor is an obvious synergistic component to the China-led east-west Belt and Road Initiative, and Russian-Indian led International North South Transportation Corridor, both of which are sweeping across the world island.
The Iran-Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan gas swap
At the 28 November Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) summit in Ashgabat, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan overcame immense hurdles by finalizing an important gas swap deal that will involve Iran receiving two billion cubic meters of gas per year from Turkmenistan, which it will also send in equal proportions to Azerbaijan.
This agreement broke through the five-year block on gas relations between Turkmenistan and Iran, which had collapsed in 2016 due to complaints over unpaid oil from over a decade earlier. Additionally, the war which many commentators were warning might break out just a few months ago between Azerbaijan and Iran makes the agreement for renewed cooperation between the two nations that much more important.
Iranian president Raisi alluded to the foreign interests that were provoking fires during that heated period saying: “We must never allow others to interfere in our relations. We must resolve our own problems, work together to advance our relations and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation. Experience so far shows that when we discuss our issues ourselves, we manage to resolve many of them.”
The Trans-Caspian and White Stream pipelines complement the Southern Gas Corridor (Source: Trans-Caspian Pipeline)
The three nations also agreed to deepen integration and cooperation in transportation, trade, shipping, tourism and, most importantly, the development of the incredibly bountiful offshore oil and gas resources within the Caspian Sea.
While southern Iran holds the world’s second largest oil and natural gas reserves (behind Russia, who sits at #1), Turkmenistan is 4th on the list, while offshore deposits in the Caspian Sea represent some of the largest in the world.
As Pepe Escobar has observed in his recent contribution to The Cradle, the Chalous Gas fields in the Caspian not only represent the tenth largest reserves in the world with a $5.4 trillion value but, according to experts, this region alone could service 52 percent of Europe’s natural gas needs for 20 years. As of this writing, agreements have been signed, which will see this region developed by Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests.
The long overdue 300 km Trans Caspian Pipeline (TCP) crossing the Caspian has also come much closer to being realized alongside this harmonization of interests. With its completion in 2022, the TCP will connect to the Southern Gas Corridor and Turkey’s TANAP.
The final branch to Europe via the Nabucco gas pipeline will easily be completed (if political sabotage is avoided), providing Europe with abundant gas for generations. This will give both Iran and Russia a position of vast economic leverage with a mismanaged Europe now experiencing one of the worst man-made energy crises in history.
The INSTC as a game changer
The International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC, involving Russia, Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and India) is a 7,200 km multimodal transit system very much in synergy with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Source: CSIS: Reconnecting Asia
Since the ECO summit, a plethora of agreements have been signed to accelerate this megaproject as well. While many talking heads have tried hard to paint this 20-year-old project as a Russian competitive challenge to China’s BRI, it is increasingly obvious that the two projects are entirely harmonious.
On 28 November, a three-way Iran-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan memorandum of understanding was signed to build a new railway which will add to the 917 km railway from Ozen (in Kazakhstan) to Gorgan (in Iran) via Turkmenistan that began in 2014 and which was funded primarily by the three powers.
Another agreement was signed on 10 December to create an Iran-Azerbaijan-Georgia transit route connecting the Persian Gulf with the Black Sea to be completed in March 2022.
Once built, this new route will allow goods to move from Iran’s southern ports to Europe and Central Europe directly over land.
Reporting on this development, the Caspian Report stated that “effectively combining the capacity of all three would allow Iran to connect the Oman Sea and the Gulf to the south, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, Central Asia to the northeast and the Caucasus to the northwest.”
On 12 November, Iranian, Turkish and UAE leaders signed a new cooperation agreement to start work on a new transportation corridor between the three nations with goods arriving from the UAE to Iran’s Port Shahid Rajaee, then transported over land to Turkey and thence to Europe, cutting eight days off conventional sea routes.
This is all part of the broader INSTC which just last summer saw the first cargo arriving to India via Iran from Finland.
Security cooperation
In addition to building new transport and energy grids between the historic rivals, the leaders of Turkey and Iran signed a strategic security agreement on 21 October with Iran’s Interior Minister Vahidi saying: “Iran-Turkey ties will speed up. The two states will together end regional instability and foil enemy plots. The two countries will not allow others to disrupt their relations.”
One month later, Vahidi’s sentiments were amplified by Prime Minister Erdogan who held a press conferencealongside Raisi saying: “The White House is training and arming all terrorist groups in the region, including ISIS and the PKK, and providing them with terrorist equipment and tools to create insecurity.”
The two leaders not only signed security cooperation agreements to fight foreign-sponsored terrorism, but also advanced plans for a new free trade zone with preferential tariffs for all regional nations.
While Saudi Arabia has been among the most stubborn of the Persian Gulf states to adapt to the new reality shaping Southwest Asia, the UAE has been among the quickest.
No longer do the promises of western backers appear as attractive as they did a decade ago, especially considering the speed of economic disintegration of the ‘Titanic’ speculative bubbles known as the Trans-Atlantic economy.
On 6 December, Iran’s President met with the UAE’s National Security in Tehran saying: “the security of the countries in the region is intertwined and Iran supports the Persian Gulf littoral states. There should be no obstacle in the relations between the two Muslim countries of Iran and the UAE, and these relations must not be influenced by outsiders.”
The UAE representative stated in return: “We are the children of this region and we have a common destiny, so the development of relations between our two countries is on our agenda … we hope that a new chapter of relations with our two countries will begin.”
A new paradigm emerges
While the west is busy sabre-rattling, imposing unilateral sanctions and virtue signaling their rules-based superiority, the world has moved ahead towards a new multipolar system premised on genuine cooperation.
Based on this positive momentum, it is only a matter of time before the Economic Cooperation Organization fully incorporates into the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) which itself has already integrated deeply into China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
As it stands the long-awaited Iran-EAEU free trade zone is on the cusp of being finalized and this watershed will create many potentials for an expanded power bloc.
As Iranian MP Mohsen Zanganeh stated: “I think that if we focus our attention on Eastern countries, especially those in Central Asia, East Asia, as well as Eastern Europe, instead of focusing on the West, we can definitely benefit from their considerable economic potential… As you are aware, we are facing a lot of challenges in interacting with Western countries, because of the United States and Israel’s attitudes toward Iran. But the same challenges don’t exist in our ties with Eastern nations. That creates a great opportunity for our economy.”
If the 2018 Iraq-Iran Provisional Agreement is also revived, then this small railway can be extended 1,570 km through Iraq to Syria’s Latakia Port and Lebanon as a southern corridor for the New Silk Road. Syria’s return to the Arab League in the coming months makes this project much easier to achieve.
Despite the fact that old imperial habits die hard, there is obviously a new game in town, and anyone who wants to have a future should come to the recognition that they must learn to play by a new set of rules. These are rules which reject regime changes, divide-to-conquer tactics, or zero-sum thinking.
Much more in alignment with natural law, the Greater Eurasian Partnership is driven by win-win cooperation and building up the powers of productivity within a community of sovereign nation states.
Where one paradigm is unipolar, the other is multipolar; and where one is premised on extracting wealth from a fixed set of resources in order to get nations to fight for scraps, the other creates new wealth while harmonizing diverse interests into a greater whole. Which one would you rather live in?
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This article was originally published on The Cradle.
We are told by our governments that It’s Christmas under Lockdown. To protect you and your loved ones against the so-called deadly Covid Omicron Variant. The announcement was made on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Anthony Fauci led the disinformation campaign, intimating that Omicron “is already in the United States but has yet to be detected”.
Amid the 2020 global covid lockdowns and economic dislocations it has caused, Klaus Schwab, a previously low-profile founder of a Swiss-based business forum, emerged on the world stage calling for what he called a Great Reset of the entire world economy, using the pandemic as driver.
Different methods in choosing and employing judges form a possible factor in the contrasting judicial reception to schemes for mandatory injections in the United States and Canada.
It is a proven, indisputable scientific fact that the “vaccine” does not prevent infection and spread of the Covid virus or variants. It is also an indisputable fact that we are experiencing a pandemic of the vaccinated.
Omicron, a so-called covid-variant, has never been isolated. Whatever the current narrative – 193 UN member governments tell you in lockstep, what the mainstream media tell you in lockstep – and what the majority in the street of the 193 betrayed UN member countries believe in lockstep – is a Big Lie.
On Christmas Eve, Dr Scott Jensen, a general practitioner and candidate for Governor of Minnesota, released a video explaining how he has been targeted by his state’s medical board with an investigation for the FIFTH time. The move by the state appears to be political in nature, and is designed to harass and deter Jensen from continuing to help his patients.
As a child of the Cold War, I grew up only knowing the Soviet Union as our enemy. When it collapsed, it created a vacuum when it came to defending the US. It turns out we needed the USSR to bring purpose to our own existence.
There is no doubt that Christmas is a time when we become aware of the precariousness of nature as the sun’s light fades, leaves fall off the trees and the weather gets colder. The sun seems to stop moving (solstice) for three days, and then as if by magic starts moving again in the other direction and seems to be reborn.
Following the Taliban’s victory over US-NATO forces in Afghanistan, Washington is walking into another death trap, but this time on Russia’s borders with the neighboring Ukraine. So now, Washington’s non-partisan bureaucrats and the Military-Industrial Complex are calling for ways to fight “Russian aggression”.
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We have clients in 23 different countries, but most reside within the continental United States – in recent weeks, we keep hearing countless stories of self-proclaimed 24-hour turnaround testing centers to do a PCR test, then taking more than 80 hours to get the results back. Friends in New Jersey tell us not one pharmacy or walk-in clinic in a 100-mile radius has appointments available in the next week. Home testing has improved but for those traveling overseas – it is a PCR test that is needed.
The question that haunts us now is that, almost two years into this crisis and an $11 Trillion U.S. Fiscal and Monetary spending deluge, we still don’t have an adequate testing infrastructure? It blows us away – we are still dealing with endless waiting lines, no availability of testing appointments, shortages of at-home tests and overwhelmed testing labs scrambling to process vials. Where did all that money go?
State and Federal Debts Add Up
In the US, the corona crisis started on January 29, 2020, when the White House initiated its coronavirus task force. Since then, the US has gone from crisis to crisis and the media and our politicians have been obsessed with this epidemic and its consequences ever since. Amidst all the turmoil, the US government has left no stone unturned to throw money at this disaster. The Fed kicked off in early March by lowering interest rates to zero and shortly after began rolled out an alphabet soup of emergency programs. From buying high yield debt to bankrolling bailout checks (PPP loans), nothing was left on the table for our adroit stewards at the Fed. The byzantine maze of fiscal stimuli has left everyone confused. Nevertheless, the total amount of support the Fed has pumped into the economy is best measured by the expansion of its balance sheet. When the Fed finishes its asset tapering program in March of 2022, its balance sheet will have expanded by $5 Trillion. In less than two years the Fed deployed more money than during, and in the 10 years after, the great financial crisis ($3.5TR). This monetary support alone is also more than that of the entire GDP of Japan, the third-largest economy in the world.
Not to be outdone, the Federal government opened the floodgates by quickly passing spending bill after spending bill. After less than two years, the total amount of fiscal stimulus, as measured by the fiscal deficit spending, has reached a mind-blowing $6 Trillion. U.S. Federal debt has reached $29 Trillion and $32 Trillion if you add State and Local debt. At this point, US debt is a whopping 134% of GDP, giving the U.S. the dubious honor of being among top ten most indebted countries worldwide. This is a spot the erstwhile creditor to the world shares with the likes of Italy and Venezuela.
Where did all the money go?
And what did we, the American people, get for this colossal $11 Trillion in a monetary and fiscal deluge? As we find ourselves in the midst of yet another massive outbreak is case count, this seems like a valid question. You would think that the priority for these funds is to bolster essential healthcare needs to address this medical crisis. But even now, the US is still woefully ill-equipped with testing capabilities, almost two years into this crisis. Our friends in Europe tell us testing is quickly done there. They live in urban areas such as Paris where testing is still readily available. France is also in the midst of another outbreak but seems to have no problem providing its citizens with ample testing facilities.
In hospitals, there has apparently been no improvement in available capacity in the critical ICUs, judged by the Johns Hopkins weekly hospitalization trends.
Hospitalizations
Incredulously, ICU beds-in-use compared to overall availability is almost higher now than it was a year ago.
So Where did the Money Go?
According to the Congressional Research Service, $25 Billion was appropriated for “selected domestic COVID-19 vaccine-related activities”. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a mere 0.5% of the federal emergency spending in the last two years. It turns out that the department of health and human services wasn’t even the biggest recipient of all the emergency spending. It was fourth on the list, which was topped by the Treasury Department, the small business administration, and the department of labor. Other major recipients were the department of education and the agriculture department. Why farmers needed a $160 Billion windfall during the pandemic is incomprehensible, especially since most crop commodities have been at record highs for a year now.
Reasonable people can agree that small businesses needed support during this crisis, especially during the lockdown. But the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed security Loan Facility (TALF), Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities ((P/S) MCCF), and Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) had absolutely nothing to do with small business assistance. These programs, together with the $5 Trillion purchases of Treasuries and agency debt, helped to foster an explosion in debt issuance by big business. Fueling stock buybacks – Investment-grade debt issued in this year and last year was a total of $3.1 Trillion, almost half the size of the total IG market. High yield issuance was even more baffling, setting issuance records two years in a row amidst a debilitating epidemic.
Junk Bond Bonanza Fueling Stock Buybacks
The effect of all this government largesse has had a profound impact on the stock market. The total market value of all stocks has risen from $34 Trillion to $53 Trillion; a whopping $19 Trillion (50%) increase from pre-pandemic levels. The IPO market has been red hot this year, with 1000 deals for the first time in history. Rock bottom interest rates and epic multiple expansion have driven investors into IPOs, as they clamor for excess returns in the most unsavory deals. U.S. junk bonds, we see new supply to plunge as much as 30% in 2022 as refinancings, the driver for almost 60% of issuance this year, will shrink because companies already capitalized on low yields and lengthened maturities. Likewise, a Fed in a hiking cycle should tighten financial conditions – shrink issuance.
Buybacks Driving S&P and Nasdaq Higher – On Leverage
Congress wants to tax stock buybacks – the implications are sky-high as a colossal equity market bid comes from Fed-induced corporate bond sales- See above with @SamRo – he notes just 20 companies are responsible for half the stock buybacks – this is one enormous – central bank fueled – leveraged Ponzi is driving stock indexes (S&P 500 and Nasdaq) higher. Of course in Q1 – Q2 2020 when stocks were on sale – few companies were buying back stock. Per Fitch – U.S. dollar-denominated, investment-grade (IG), corporate bond volume, excluding financial institutions, supranationals, sovereigns, and agencies, tallied $705 billion through Dec. 16, 2021. We saw the second-highest issuance through the first 10 months of the year and are up 27% and 13%, from 2018’s and 2019’s respective levels. Volume is down 36% versus the record 2020 amount; though that gap could shrink by year’s end as the final two months of 2020’s issuance was well below 2021’s monthly average. The volume disparity between 2020 and 2021 relates to deal size. Last year, there were double the number of transactions done for $4 billion or more compared with this year (60 in 2020 versus 29 in 2021). Both years featured at least two $20 billion issuances, with AT&T Inc. and The Boeing Company driving 2020 while Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T led 2021. Several prominent companies tapped the IG market in 2021, including Verizon, AT&T, Amazon.com Inc., Oracle Corp., Comcast Corp. and Apple Inc. These six issuers comprised 21% of the year’s total volume, with all completing bond transactions of $15 billion or more. In fact, the 10 largest issuers make up 29% of 2021’s volume, highlighting the market’s concentration.
The problem is – central banks are fueling unsustainable inequality.
Share of Total Net Worth held by the Top 1%
2021: 32.5%
2010s: 31.2%
2000s: 27.2%
1990s: 26.7%
1980s: 23.2%
*Since 2003, the Bottom 50% total net worth held has plunged from 39% to 30%. Federal Reserve data. For 20 years 1990-2010, the top 1% net worth held was range-bound 26-27% – since central bank aggression in balance sheet expansion in 2009, inequality has exploded higher.
The Great Heist at the Taxpayers Expense
This is all great if you own stocks, or when you are a Fortune 500 company issuing debt to repurchase your own stock, but neither the deluge in debt nor the record number of buybacks (at a run-rate of $1 Trillion this year) have done anything to bolster our country’s medical care or Americans’ health. More troubling even is reports showing outright theft of funds earmarked for pandemic emergency spending. The Wall Street Journal quoted the U.S. Secret Service who said that “some $100 billion has potentially been stolen from Covid-19 relief programs designed to help individuals and businesses harmed by the pandemic.” The main culprits are worldwide organized crime networks, who defrauded primarily the pandemic unemployment insurance program. On top of that, as much as 15% of the PPP loans ($76 billion out of $800 billion total) may have been fraudulent, according to the New York Times.
The Middle Class is in Pain
After $11 Trillion of emergency spending and support, the US healthcare system is just as inadequate as it was before the crisis, violent crime is rampant, drug overdoses have never been higher and the economy is showing signs of stagflation, as illustrated by the record spread between Treasury breakevens and TIPS yields¹. What these bond market metrics suggest is that the potential growth rate of the US economy has structurally declined since the pandemic (it already declined a lot since the “great financial crisis”) and that any growth future growth is coming from price increases. The bond market is telling us – a significant portion of future GDP growth is coming from price increases, but there is little real growth in the economy, which is why TIPS yields are -1.00%.
Consumers in Pain
Since August – we have had THREE sub-80 readings from the University of Michigan Consumer Economic Confidence Data. Looking back over the last 30 years – it is HIGHLY unusual for the Fed to hike rates with consumers in this kind of pain. Inflation´s taxing powers over the consumer have already hiked rates 100bps for the Fed in our view – colossal demand destruction has taken place. These stagflationary conditions erode people’s real disposable income, making them worse off. Ultimately, most of the $11 Trillion ended up benefiting the top wealthiest Americans, by inflating the prices of assets such as bonds and stocks and lowering interest rates for borrowers with the highest credit rating. For the average citizen, this has been a very raw deal.
Loud Covid Narrative Hides Inconvenient Truths
We must look at the big picture. There is a high price from lockdowns and Covid human suppression / OUTSIDE of cases. The number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 45 is now fentanyl overdoses, with nearly 79,000 victims in the age range dying to them between 2020 and 2021.
Inflation is a Regressive Tax on the Middle Class
TIPS: Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities: The principal of a TIPS increases with inflation and decreases with deflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. When a TIPS matures, you are paid the adjusted principal or original principal, whichever is greater. Breakeven yield is calculated by deducting TIPS yields from real yields. Breakeven rates derive the rate of inflation priced in by the bond market for applicable maturity (such as 10-year breakevens express the implied rate of inflation in the next 10 years).
Trillions of Fiscal and Monetary Support
What is so painful is that not only is there no discernable improvement in the healthcare infrastructure to deal with the corona crisis, but other facets of America’s healthcare are now even worse off. The CDC reported this week that fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among teenagers. These drugs have killed more people between the ages of 18 to 45 than corona, car accidents, and suicides. Data from Families Against Fentanyl suggests that now one person dies from an overdose every 8.5 minutes. The pandemic has pushed drug abuse into overdrive as “the stress of the pandemic has led more people to use these types of drugs, according to experts.” The Census Bureau this week reported that America’s population grew at the lowest rate in history. In the year that ended July 1, the U.S. recorded only 148,000 more births than deaths, with the balance coming from net immigration. America’s life expectancy last year declined by an unprecedented 1.8 years to 77 years. Besides corona, increases in mortality from drug overdoses, heart disease, homicide and diabetes also decreased life expectancy. Violent crime especially has seen a dramatic increase in the last two years. CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that homicide rates rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 and they continue to go up this year. At least 12 major U.S. cities have broken annual homicide records in 2021 — and there’s still three weeks to go in the year.
US Annual Population Growth
2021: 0.1%
2011: 0.8%
2001: 1.0%
1991: 1.2%
*America is dying – and it’s NOT just a Covid narrative. From 1999–2019, nearly 500,000 people died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids -CDC data.
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Lawrence McDonald is the New York Times Bestselling Author of “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” – The Lehman Brothers Inside Story – one of the best-selling business books in the world, now published in 12 languages – ranked a top 20 all-time at the CFA Institute.
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Begun in California, but spreading throughout the United States and the world, the Unity Project pulls together parents, activists, doctors, and scientists, all working together to stop, block, and end COVID-19 vaccine mandates for children.
With corporate-captured media and public health agencies working aggressively and criminally to inject children with the experimental shots that have proven to be all risk and no benefit, it is up to us. It is up to each and every one of us to stand up, to speak out, and protect the children.
It is time to nullify the unjust, unethical, and unconstitutional mandates.
How can YOU help? Wherever you are, wherever you go, distribute information to help parents find the facts. Below is a printable flyer. For more resources from the Unity Project, visit their website.
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It is a proven, indisputable scientific fact that the “vaccine” does not prevent infection and spread of the Covid virus or variants. It is also an indisputable fact that we are experiencing a pandemic of the vaccinated. Vaccination causes injurious side-effects and deaths that hospitals mislabel “Covid deaths,” and the vaccine damages the human immune system, thus spreading the virus. The “vaccine” also cause variants that are used propagandistically to keep the fear hype going despite the fact that hardly any serious injuries or deaths are associated with the “Omicron variant.”
So why are public authorities using extreme tyrannical methods to force people to infect themselves with a dangerous “vaccine” when, even if the “vaccine” did protect, the mortality of Covid is extremely low and does not justify the dangerous side effects of the “vaccine.”
It is an established fact that there are very few “deaths from Covid.” The deaths are “with Covid” among untreated infected people denied HCQ and Ivermectin who had serious comorbidities. In other words, the entire panic is orchestrated and nonsensical.
Here again are the infection fatality ratios and survival rates by age group.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Government has been paying for purchasing, promoting, and distributing experimental coronavirus “vaccines” to Americans. Government has even been mandating many people take the shots in order to continue working at their jobs, while also pressuring these and other people to take the shots by imposing vaccine passport requirements that bar from ordinary activities people who have not taken the shots.
Yet, at the same time, government is saying that if individuals who succumb to the marketing and coercion end up being hurt or killed by the shots, those individuals or their families are barred from suing the pharmaceutical companies that have been raking in big bucks off the shots.
Legal commentator Andrew Napolitano took on this liability shield outrage in a brief compelling video commentary. In the Wednesday video commentary, Napolitano tags the United States government created liability shied for the big pharmaceutical companies behind the experimental coronavirus vaccine shotes as both “morally wrong” and “corporatism.”
As Napolitano explains in the video commentary, absent the creation of special legal protections these big pharmaceutical companies would be, as are other companies that provide products, liable for harm their products cause. Indeed, there is a field of law called torts that deals largely with such liability and a class of lawyers who sue companies for injuries caused by products.
But, the United States government has given these large pharmaceutical companies a shield protecting them from this liability that is otherwise a routine part of doing business in America. This special protection, Napolitano points out is “morally wrong.” Napolitano elaborates:
But, look, one of the principles of American law is “where there’s a wrong, there’s a remedy.” If the vaccine manufacturers have done something wrong or put something into your body or a loved one’s body that harms or kills them, there ought to be a remedy, and Congress is not in the business of interfering with that remedy. Someone punches you in the nose, you have the right to punch them back, and then you have the right to sue them for the cost of repairing your nose. Someone puts a vaccine in your arm and you get sick, you have the right to sue them. These are moral rights, and they used to be legal rights until the Congress interfered with them.
This special protection from liability for vaccine manufacturers Napolitano further condemns as an exercise of corporatism — “the government favoring certain capitalistic ventures by making it easy and inexpensive for these capitalistic groups to distribute their product.” That’s something that can work out great for big pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line by letting the companies avoid having to pay anything to people harmed by the companies’ dangerous shots.
But, maybe that is not the end of this story. Napolitano intriguingly concludes his discussion of the issue with this comment: “Wait until the lawsuits start coming.” This suggests Napolitano thinks there may be means to overcome the pharmaceutical companies’ liability shield for damages caused by the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots. Maybe there will be some justice after all.
Watch Napolitano’s video commentary here:
Napolitano is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
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What should be understood is that according to statements by the WHO and the CDC the PCR test used to “detect” and “identify” SARS-CoV-2 and its variants should be considered as invalid.
Omicron has not been identified. Testing positive for Omicron using the PCR test (which has been used since November 26, when Omicron was first announced) is an impossibility.
The so-called estimates of “Test Positive for Omicron” for vaxxed indicate that vaccinated individuals are more likely to test PCR positive for two reasons.
Because their immune system has been affected by the vaccine, they are more likely to test PCR positive in comparison to the unvaxxed.
Moreover, the vaccinated will seek medical care upon developing adverse events. Upon their admission to hospitals and clinics, they will be routinely subjected to the taking the PCR test.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2021
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According to figures released by the UK government via the Office for National Statistics, people who are triple vaxxed are 4.5 times more likely to test positive for Omicron than those who are unvaccinated.
The numbers also illustrate how the double-vaccinated are 2.3 times more likely to be infected with Omicron than those who haven’t taken any jabs.
The data, which is summarized by the Daily Sceptic’s Will Jones in this article, bolsters assertions that the Omicron variant is effective at evading vaccines.
“Note that this is the probability of an infection being Omicron given a person is infected, so it doesn’t tell us how likely a person is to test positive in the first place,” writes Jones.
“This means it doesn’t tell us that the vaccines are making things worse overall, only that they are making it much more likely that a vaccinated person is infected with Omicron than another variant. In other words, it is a measure of how well Omicron evades the vaccines compared to Delta. The fact that the triple-vaccinated are much more likely to be infected with Omicron than the double-vaccinated confirms this vaccine evading ability.”
Jones concludes from the data that, “The current Omicron outbreak is largely an epidemic of the vaccinated and is being driven, not by the unvaccinated, but by those who have been double and triple jabbed.”
The numbers completely demolish claims that the Omicron outbreak is a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.
As Will Jones also documents in this piece, claims that NHS hospitals are being overwhelmed by the unvaccinated aren’t backed by any actual evidence.
Despite this, over the weekend UK Health Secretary blasted unvaccinated people for taking up hospital beds, telling them they “must really think about the damage they are doing to society.”
UK scientists will today present evidence that the Omicron variant is milder than previous strains of COVID-19, something that health experts in South Africa have been saying for weeks.
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On Christmas Eve, Dr Scott Jensen, a general practitioner and candidate for Governor of Minnesota, released a video explaining how he has been targeted by his state’s medical board with an investigation for the FIFTH time. The move by the state appears to be political in nature, and is designed to harass and deter Jensen from continuing to help his patients. His crimes, according to the state: “spreading misinformation”, not being vaccinated, recommending children not wear masks in school, “promoting natural immunity,” and prescribing Ivermectin, What’s worse, his faceless, nameless accusers are asking him to handover the private medical records of his patients who have been given Ivermectin. Dr Jensen warns that this is a dangerous precedent, and could be the shape of things to come.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to you. It’s happening to you right now,” said Dr Jensen. Watch:
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China’s State Assets Management and Supervision Commission has approved the merger of three major companies operating in the rare earth mining sector. As such, the new super-enterprise includes three of the world’s six largest rare earth producers, and keeping in mind that China controls about 80% of the global rare earth supply, these mergers will secure the Asian country’s dominance in the industry. In fact, state media described the China Rare Earth Group as an “aircraft carrier” due to its size and industrial might. They also noted that the China Rare Earth Group will control over 70% of the country’s rare earths output.
The new group will be formed under the merger of China Minmetals Rare Earth Co, Chinalco Rare Earth & Metals Co and China Southern Rare Earth Group Co. According to media reports, the newly formed company will mine rare earths in China’s south. The State Assets Management and Supervision Commission will own 31.21% of the total shares of the new group. Each of the three group members will receive a 20.33% stake.
Rare earth metals, as the name suggests, are critical in almost every modern electronic device, from the standard smartphone to the most advanced military equipment. Although China has huge reserves of rare earths, about 36 million tons, or a third of the world’s reserves, extracting rare earths is extremely difficult.
China’s main competitive advantage today is the establishment of an integrated technology process of metal ores. The US was once the main supplier of these products, but since rare earth mining and processing is difficult from a safety point of view and is associated with environmental risks, the US phased out the industry gradually. Due to this, about 80% of US imports of rare earths now comes from China.
As relations with Beijing deteriorate, Washington has repeatedly spoken out about the need to create independent supply chains that bypass China. However, as the US completely abandoned the industry, it is almost impossible for them to challenge China anytime soon. None-the-less, in the context of globalization and the international division of labour, relying on suppliers with a competitive advantage often brings much greater efficiency.
Western experts note that China is creating a giant corporation and is merging rare earth producers for tighter controls on rare earth prices. Meanwhile, because the new group is mainly focused on primary production, management will be able to strengthen control over compliance with environmental standards. The distribution market is much harder to control, and as small companies that also exploit rare earths have fewer opportunities, their operations can harm the environment due to cost cutting measures.
It should also be understood that the combined companies in the new group specialize in heavy group rare earth mining. At the same time, outside of China, investments in the US, Australia and the UK focus mainly on light group rare earths. With the Anglo countries focusing on light group rare earths, China will continue to play a key role in the supply of heavy group rare earths.
On the one hand, the global economy and industry are recovering from the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the demand for rare earth metals is increasing – in the past year, the price of dysprosium and terbium has increased by about 60% and 90% respectively compared to a year ago. On the other hand, political instability in Myanmar, the second-largest supplier of rare earths, is forcing China to shoulder the responsibility of meeting global rare earth demand.
Contrary to the concerns of Washington and some other Western countries, for Beijing, it is important to show that it is a responsible party in the global supply chain. Under the five-year plan, starting in 2020, China increased its annual rare earth mining quota to 140,000 tons, and this year increased it by 20%.
Enigmatic former leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, previously said that “The Middle East has oil and China has rare earths.” In this way, China has certainly positioned itself to dominate the industry, and the latest merger between major Chinese companies will ensure that this status quo will remain this way for the foreseeable future.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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The Israeli military has changed its rules of engagement to allow its forces to fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. The new rule is a sop to Israeli settlers, the IDF’s clientele.
From now on, Israel Defense Force militants may fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. Or, in the IDF parlance, when they’re escaping. These changes in the IDF’s Rules of Engagement (RoE) were exposed by Roee Sharon of Channel 13 on Sunday (Hebrew). This change requires three comments.
First of all, the timing. Sharon notes that the RoE were changed within the last few weeks – but the IDF allowed the publishing of the information only on Sunday. Why? Because of the crisis in the illegal outpost of Homesh, situated on the land of the village of Burqa, near Nablus. Following the killing of a settler, Yehuda Dimentman, and a wave of settler violence, hundreds of settlers attempted to reach the outpost, and clashed with the army, wounding one soldier by running him over (Hebrew).
The army knows it will likely have to remove the outpost soon, so it bribes the settlers: Here, you see, we made shooting Palestinians easier!
An interjection is essential here. On Saturday, the IDF militants shot 15 Burqa residents, protesting the mass emigration of settlers to their land, with rubber-coated bullets, and caused some 50 of them to inhale CS gas; on Sunday, the IDF militants again shot eight Burqa residents with rubber-coated bullets, and again caused some 50 of them to inhale CS gas. Needless to say, the Israeli media didn’t cover those incidents.
The IDF has a record of allowing the injuring of Palestinians in order to mollify settlers. In 2015, then-Brigadier General Tamir Yadai, then the commander of the AYOSH Division (West bank, but he’s been promoted since) told (Hebrew) the settlers of Halamish that he changed the RoE, saying:
“We’ve been a bit tougher with the people around here. Where we used to fire gas grenades or rubber [coated bullets], we now shoot Ruger [bullets] or live fire.”
Contrary to what Yadai implied, the Ruger 0.22 fires rounds which, while less powerful than normal ammunition, are still very much lethal. Note that it was to settlers, Yadai’s true clientele, that he announced the order for the use of excessive force – so as to mollify them.
Secondly, the use of excessive force, when you know it’s excessive, is a war crime. Shooting an escaping, unarmed, person who poses no threat to you is a war crime. These war crimes are committed essentially for public relation purposes. The IDF returns to the RoE it used in Operation Doorstep Keepers, the massacre on the Gaza border in 2018-2019 during the Great March of Return. Those RoE were changed quietly afterwards, because they caused the IDF public relations damage.
But now it’s time to bribe the settlers again; the IDF has become inured to committing war crimes; and it knows no one in Israel will complain, and that if it kills children who threw stones and escaped, the Israeli media will simply not report it, or at worse will run the IDF’s Spokesman daily lie. So what’s to lose?
And thirdly, the elephant in the room: While the official RoE does not discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian stone-throwers, the rules on the ground certainly do. No IDF militant will shoot to injure, much less kill, Jewish stone throwers. A soldier will not use live ammo, Ruger bullets, rubber-coated bullets, CS grenades, or stun grenades against Jews.
He will not do so if even if the Jewish rioters personally attack him, run him over. Not only will he not shoot at them, he will not even detain them.
Stones thrown by Jews are as damaging as stones thrown by Palestinians, but the procedures – and how can that be otherwise, in an Apartheid regime? – change according to the ethnic origin of the stone thrower. And the Israeli public grows inured to that, day by day.
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In response to an Israeli attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility back in April, Tehran began enriching some uranium at 60 percent, which is still below the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade. When asked by Sputnik if Iran would exceed 60 percent enrichment, Iran’s atomic energy chief Mohammad Eslami answered, “No.”
“All our nuclear activities are carried out according to the agreements, statutes, and regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Eslami added.
The JCPOA negotiations in Vienna are currently on pause but are expected to resume on Monday. Since the talks resumed at the end of November, the US has been accusing Iran of not taking the process seriously. The Biden administration wants Tehran to accept a draft agreement that was reached during earlier negotiations with the previous Iranian government, but Iran wants more sanctions relief.
US officials have also been warning that time is running out on the talks. Last week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Israel and said the deadline for the negotiations will come “within weeks” if an agreement isn’t reached.” He also met with Israeli officials to reassure them that the US was willing to take a harder line on Iran.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace prize laureate, died on Sunday aged 90.
A contemporary of Nelson Mandela, Tutu was known not just for his role in ending a dark chapter of racial discrimination in his country but also for speaking out against injustices around the world, including in the Middle East.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa honoured this fight in a tribute to Tutu announcing the archbishop’s death.
“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” he said in a statement.
“A man of extraordinary intellect, integrity and invincibility against the forces of apartheid, he was also tender and vulnerable in his compassion for those who had suffered oppression, injustice and violence under apartheid, and oppressed and downtrodden people around the world.”
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Archbishop Tutu was an outspoken critic of Israeli occupation in Palestine and the siege on Gaza.
“I wish I could keep quiet about the plight of the Palestinians. I can’t! The God who was there and showed that we should become free is the God described in the Scriptures as the same yesterday, today and forever,” he told the Washington Post in 2013.
He drew parallels between Israeli occupation and apartheid in South Africa.
“What’s being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it’s the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.”
Tutu was to lead a UN fact-finding mission with Professor Christine Chinkin to investigate a November 2006 Israeli attack on Gaza’s Beit Hanoun district that led to the deaths of 19 Palestinians, including seven children.
Israel refused to grant Archbishop Tutu and Professor Chinkin authorisation to enter Gaza, but they were eventually able to travel to the besieged territory via Egypt. They met with survivors and eye-witnesses and produced a report to the Human Rights Council.
In a May 2008 statement about his mission, the archbishop decried the Israeli siege on Gaza, in place since 2007, as “a gross violation of human rights”. He also said the Israeli siege contradicted the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
“Those scriptures speak about a God: a God of the Exodus, a God notoriously biased in favour of the weak, of the oppressed, of the suffering, of the orphan, of the widow, of the alien,” he said.
“We are in a state of shock, exacerbated by what we subsequently heard from the victims and survivors of the Beit Hanoun massacre. For us, the entire situation is abominable,” the joint statement by Desmond Tutu and Professor Chinkin said.
“We believe that ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade, this siege if they knew what it meant for ordinary people like themselves. No, they would not support a policy which limits fuel supplies or automatically cuts off the electricity supply.
“They would not support a policy which jeopardizes the lives of ordinary men and women in hospital, that cuts off water and food from hospitals jeopardizing the lives of babies.”
In August 2009, Desmond Tutu joined a delegation of the international NGO “The Elders” in a visit to Israel and occupied Palestinian territories to advocate for peace.
Most recently, in an article published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2014, Desmond Tutu declared his support for the international movement of boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) as a peaceful means of opposing Israeli occupation.
“Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of ‘normalcy’ in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice. They are contributing to the perpetuation of a profoundly unjust status quo,” he wrote.
The archbishop voiced his opposition to acts of violence by both sides of the conflict, although he described Israel’s response to Palestinian missiles as “disproportionately brutal”.
“I have condemned those in Palestine responsible for firing missiles and rockets at Israel. They are fanning the flames of hatred. I am opposed to all manifestations of violence.
“Missiles, bombs and crude invective are not part of the solution. There is no military solution.
“The solution is more likely to come from that nonviolent toolbox we developed in South Africa in the 1980s, to persuade the government of the necessity of altering its policies.”
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The South African Ministry of Health has announced that it has suspended all quarantine measures for asymptomatic Covid-19 cases with immediate effect, official broadcaster SABC News reported. This applies to both the unvaccinated and vaccinated people.
In addition, contact tracking will be discontinued – except in cases of so-called cluster outbreaks.
According to a statement by the ministry, people with a positive Corona test but without symptoms would no longer be obliged to self-isolate.
There is also no longer the obligation to submit a negative Corona test before resuming work after an isolation period of eight days. All infected people should be able to return to work after eight to ten days without presenting a test.
The majority of new cases are incidentally in the Western Cape, which is also the most vaccinated province. Overall, South Africa has a low vaccination rate of around 20 percent.
If South Africa can get through Omicron without panic why has all of Europe lost their minds? https://t.co/zIWmopwUSb
The rich, vax'd & boosted, "West" currently reporting 3X the case rate as the rest of the world (22X per capita).
More importantly, infections in the relatively unvax'd nations have trended down since late April while infections spike in the West. pic.twitter.com/1GxJpmn03O
The same pattern holds for deaths, as well, with deaths per capita 6X higher in the West currently.
For 88% of the world, the pandemic appears to peaked when only 1.5% were vaccinated and Omicron is not apparently impacting these nations. pic.twitter.com/IY1HGiKW4t
The rich, vax'd & boosted, "West" currently reporting 3X the case rate as the rest of the world (22X per capita).
More importantly, infections in the relatively unvax'd nations have trended down since late April while infections spike in the West. pic.twitter.com/1GxJpmn03O
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An intensive six-week study of key political shows across multiple networks and a review of lobbyist filings conducted by Ricochet in collaboration with Jacobin Magazine has revealed significant bias in Canadian television news shows. Lobbyists for banks, oil companies, arms manufacturers and other sundry corporate interests routinely appear on news shows without any public disclosure of their big money ties.
In a typical example of the practice, former Liberal New Brunswick premier Brian Gallant appeared numerous times on CBC News Network’s flagship political show, Power and Politics, in the days leading up to this year’s federal election. Viewers of the show were not informed of Gallant’s position as a senior advisor at Navigator Inc., one of the country’s largest corporate PR and lobbying firms.
More than one in every 10 guests analyzing the news worked for firms paid to influence the government and the public. Despite their vested interests, networks often described these panellists as “strategists.”
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Political panelists’ corporate lobbying interests are rarely disclosed on Canadian news shows, and this lack of transparency undermines news outlets’ claims to impartiality.
In the wake of the federal election, there was plenty of commentary about how media coverage of the party leaders and campaigns has shaped the views of the electorate. What this framing ignores is that even between elections, our media moulds our politics.
Manufacturing consent
Despite the digital revolution, television remains the dominant source of news in Canada. Last year, a study by the Media Technology Monitor found that nearly half the population finds out about current affairs by watching TV. More than twice as many said TV was their go-to medium rather than online sources, apps and social media.
Jacobin and Ricochet’s review of Canadian television news commentary and analysis from March 29 to May 9, 2021, catalogued data on more than 860 relevant television appearances. More than one in every 10 guests analyzing the news worked for firms paid to influence the government and the public. Despite their vested interests, networks often described these panellists as “strategists.”
Among on-air commentators, lobbyist or PR professional was the fourth-most-common occupation. Government officials and politicians, journalists, and medical professionals (during a pandemic) were the only occupations more commonly featured.
Corporate influencers are, unsurprisingly, more often present in discussions of certain key issues. Across Canada’s big three networks — CBC, CTV and Global — one in every five guests brought on to comment on climate change, one in every five guests analyzing the federal budget, and a staggering one in every three guests analyzing federal politics were active in the PR industry.
Furthermore, comments made by guests often found their way into other news programs as part of reports or were included in online stories. In some cases, there was no disclosure at all of the guests’ ties. At other times, critical information on a group’s funding was omitted. Often there was a lack of disclosure of guests’ relevant clients or lobbying interests. In still other instances, guests were introduced as being affiliated with one organization or company but no mention was made of their affiliations with other relevant corporations or lobbies.
PR hacks on CBC
Gallant, for example, appeared on CBC’s Power & Politics on five occasions during the study period. CBC’s hosts introduced him as the head of the Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation (CCPC). No details were provided about the organization on-air.
A review of the CCPC’s website reveals that it is a subsection of the main website for Navigator Ltd. The online news outlet VICE described Navigator as “the company famous Canadians turn to when they face public relations crises.” The PR and corporate lobbying giant created and continues to fund the CCPC.
The CCPC’s website fails to properly explain the organization’s aims. Instead, the company hides behind a series of poorly written platitudes:
The Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation is an initiative that will help equip Canadian businesses and organizations with insights, tools, and support as they work to redefine and strengthen both the scope of their purpose and the contributions they make more broadly to society.
For clarification, Ricochet and Jacobin reached out to Gallant. Reproducing the policy wonk–speak from his company’s website, Gallant wrote back that the CCPC seeks to help businesses “redefine and strengthen the scope of their purpose and the contributions they make to their stakeholders — and more broadly to society — through insights, tools, and research.”
Aside from being head of the CCPC, Gallant also works as a senior advisor at Navigator. This affiliation is disclosed on the CBC’s website. However, over the six-week viewing period, the audience was not made aware of this fact in five of his six appearances on the CBC, where he was called upon to give his opinion on COVID-19, corporate taxation, infrastructure spending, and climate change.
Gallant was mostly forthcoming in response to media questions, stating that the CBC asks all panellists to self-disclose “any interests that are potentially linked to any of the subjects which will be discussed.” However, he said he could not discuss whether Navigator has any clients with interests in areas that would need be disclosed under these guidelines, due to the company’s privacy policy.
Giving limited disclosure the heave-ho
The CBC introduced Shakir Chambers, another regular TV panellist associated with the firm at the time, as a “political commentator” on four occasions. Viewers were not given any details of his work for Navigator. The CBC is well aware of his work for the firm — at the time of his appearances, the Power & Politics website noted that he “plays a leading role in the firm’s government relations practice and provides strategic counsel for high profile clients.”
On three occasions, former Alberta United Conservative Party president Erica Barootes of Enterprise Canada, a national lobbying firm, provided on-air commentary about COVID-19 for the CBC. The network did not disclose her registration as a lobbyist for both Astellas Pharma Canada Inc. and Shoppers Drug Mart. In addition, she was registered in three provinces as a lobbyist for Purolator — one disclosure filing shows her lobbying was related to COVID-19 vaccine distribution logistics, a frequently discussed news topic given the delay in the vaccine rollout at the time. Only her affiliation to Enterprise was noted during her appearances. The CBC did not make viewers aware of what business Enterprise conducts, let alone any of Barootes’ potentially relevant lobbying or business activities.
One in every seven guests appearing on the CBC programs was from a lobbying or government relations firm.
Earlier this year, in response to a complaint from a member of the public, the CBC’s public ombudsman, Jack Nagler, noted that merely stating the name of a firm during an introduction is “rather pointless.” In his view, the name of a firm is of little use to viewers seeking to understand whose interests they represent. “The reference to their company names is a form of shorthand that might work for people familiar with Parliament Hill but does not work for the rest of us,” he wrote.
The CBC also invited Jenni Byrne, former top aide to Doug Ford and Stephen Harper, to share her opinions on the pandemic while she was a registered lobbyist for Tridan/CBS Group Inc. The company was, at the time of her appearance, pursuing a government contract for its COVID-19 rapid test kits. In addition, Byrne lobbies the Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care and has also registered to lobby for BioVaxsys Tech, Bausch Health Companies, and Proctor & Gamble. Only her eponymous company name was disclosed by the CBC.
PR on CTV
CTV is also guilty of failing to disclose commentators’ affiliations. In April, the network twice invited former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt to discuss the federal budget and pandemic-related airline bailout packages.
Raitt was introduced as a former cabinet minister, but no mention was made at that time of the fact she is the vice-chair of global investment banking at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Presumably the bank and its clientele would have an interest in the government’s approach to issues such as corporate taxes, wealth taxes, wage subsidies, and federal deficit spending contained in the budget.
In cases where a television commentator’s most relevant company affiliation was noted, the nature of the firm’s lobbying or business activities often wasn’t disclosed by CTV. This was the case even when they were related to the supposed expert analysis being provided to viewers.
CTV did not disclose that Marr is the former CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, or that the Canada West Foundation is heavily funded by fossil fuel corporations.
Greg MacEachern, the senior VP of Proof Strategies, appeared on CTV News Channel multiple times to discuss subjects such as the federal budget and COVID-19. His affiliation with the lobbying firm was properly disclosed, but the fact that he is a registered lobbyist for companies such as Netflix and eBay was not mentioned. These firms stood to be negatively affected by changes to internet taxation and regulation contained in the federal budget and in Bill C-10, which sought to alter how the internet is regulated in Canada. A review of the federal lobby registry shows that, around the time of his appearances, MacEachern held discussions with the federal government ministries involved in these changes.
Proof Strategies is registered in multiple provinces to lobby on behalf of Scarsin Corporation, a health technology firm seeking COVID-related contracts from provincial governments. MacEachern has led the government relations work at Proof Strategies since 2011, according to the lobby firm’s website.
In response to emailed questions, he stated that he meets with producers “a few hours before the panel is taped and the topics [that will be discussed] are specifically reviewed and flagged for any conflicts.”
Not just the right
One might assume that these undisclosed ties to corporate interests occur mostly among guests representing the right wing of the political spectrum. However, a number of former operatives from Canada’s New Democratic Party have also transitioned into lobbying.
In one instance, former NDP strategist Kathleen Monk — at the time a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group — discussed the ongoing pandemic on Power & Politics. CBC did not note that she is listed in the federal lobby registry as a representative of organizations with interests in COVID-related policy. This work includes lobbying for a company named InkSmith. The aforementioned firm has advocated for intellectual property rights to be applied to vaccines during the pandemic. In fact, Monk met with a senior ministerial staffer to represent InkSmith on files related to COVID-19 issues two days before one of her CBC appearances, according to lobbying filings reviewed by Ricochet and Jacobin.
The “responsibility to disclose and address conflicts of interest to our audience — perceived or otherwise — falls to the lobbyists.”
The publicly funded broadcaster regularly invites Monk onto its shows to represent the NDP perspective. Brad Lavigne, a former senior aide to late NDP leader Jack Layton, is also regularly brought onto CBC shows to discuss current affairs and present the NDP perspective. Lavigne is currently a partner and vice president at Counsel Public Affairs, another national lobbying firm.
On five occasions, Lavigne discussed COVID-19 in on-air appearances without CBC noting that he was a registered lobbyist for a health industry firm in Alberta. The CBC also did not mention Lavigne’s presence in the B.C. provincial lobby registry due to his COVID-19 work on behalf of multiple clients.
Counsel Public Affairs has several other staff lobbying for pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and other health industry clients on issues that may be linked to the analysis Lavigne provides on national television. Lavigne and Counsel Public Affairs did not respond to questions about this work.
Think tank “shadow lobbying”
Ricochet and Jacobin’s review also provided a glimpse into possible disclosure issues among guests representing think tanks. Such guests can engage in what is often called “shadow lobbying,” in which donors underwrite their work and benefit from seemingly neutral third parties advocating for their interests.
CTV’s Power Play invited Gary Mar, president of the Canada West Foundation, to discuss the potential shutdown of the Line 5 pipeline, which brings fossil fuels to Quebec and Ontario via the United States. The governor of Michigan along with several environmental groups are opposed to the pipeline, which is owned by Alberta-based Enbridge. In his CTV segment Mar stated that he thought that “Enbridge is taking the right position to say ‘we are not shutting down any of the supply until we are ordered to do so by a court.’”
This range of perspectives does not appear to include civil society, or advocacy or activist groups. Such voices were largely absent from the airwaves.
CTV did not disclose that Marr is the former CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, or that the Canada West Foundation is heavily funded by fossil fuel corporations, including Cenovus, Suncor, Husky Energy, Shell, Imperial Oil, Ovintiv and others. Most notably, Enbridge itself has provided at least $50,000 annually to the think tank, according to its most recent publicly available annual report. This makes the corporation a top donor to the foundation. Enbridge’s funding may in fact be significantly higher than that number — $50,000 and above is the highest donation threshold listed in the report.
The Canada West Foundation declined to comment on whether CTV was aware of Mar’s ties to Enbridge prior to arranging what turned out to be positive commentary on the company’s pipeline. A spokesperson responded that the think tank acknowledges supporters publicly on its website and in communications materials: “We think it’s great that engaged citizens and organizations are willing to open their wallets in the pursuit of good public policy.”
Ricochet and Jacobin reached out to multiple CTV staff for comment but did not receive a reply.
Suspicious ratios
The proportion of guests who were journalists or medical professionals was roughly the same across both CTV and CBC. However, the proportion of commentators on CBC whose day jobs were in lobbying or PR was roughly double that of CTV.
Although COVID-19 dominated the news, making up nearly half of the news coverage on both networks, one in every seven guests appearing on the CBC programs was from a lobbying or government relations firm. This is roughly the same proportion as that of medical professionals invited onto panels during a pandemic.
In an email, Chuck Thompson, CBC’s head of public affairs, said that lobbyists are featured “on occasion” due to “their past experience, often as government leaders or decision makers.” He added that they are not invited for their objectivity, but for their ideological perspective and partisan political analysis. Thompson claims that the network achieves the right mix of guests comprising “a cross section of individuals who bring different perspectives to any given discussion.” This range of perspectives does not appear to include civil society, or advocacy or activist groups. Such voices were largely absent from the airwaves.
When guests’ views are informed by their lobbying work, this narrows the spectrum of viewpoints available to an audience. CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices states that “it is important to mention any association, affiliation or special interest a guest or commentator may have so that the public can fully understand that person’s perspective.”
CBC was asked what processes the network uses to adhere to this principle. The public broadcaster replied that it takes the issue seriously, and the “responsibility to disclose and address conflicts of interest to our audience — perceived or otherwise — falls to the lobbyists after speaking with our chase producers. The process we have in place goes a long way to ensuring transparency.”
What this research shows is that these processes clearly do not go far enough.
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The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Unicameral Parliament) adopted a law that allows foreign forces on its territory to participate in multinational exercises in 2022. The decision was made at a meeting on Tuesday and was supported by 318 parliamentarians (out of the 423 seats that are occupied), far surpassing the required minimum of 226 votes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the Rada to approve his decision on allowing foreign forces on Ukrainian territory to participate in military exercises in 2022. In particular, these are for the United Efforts multinational exercises, the Ukrainian-American Rapid Trident exercises, the Ukrainian-British Cossack Mace, the multinational Light Avalanche, the Ukrainian-Polish Silver Saber, the Ukrainian-American Sea Breeze, the Ukrainian-Romanian Riverine, the multinational Maple Arch exercise and the Viking multinational exercise.
According to Ukrainian legislation, the functioning of any military formation is not provided for by law and is therefore prohibited on the country’s territory. Also, the deployment of foreign military bases is not allowed in Ukraine, therefore, foreign troops are only allowed each time into the country by a special law.
The Ukrainian law change comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin held his 17th annual major press conference this week, where he highlighted that it is not Russia building military bases or placing missiles on the US’ border, but rather it is the US with their missiles that are “coming to our home, they’re on the doorstep of our home.” Putin also highlighted that NATO broke their 1990’s promise of not expanding the bloc eastwards towards Russia’s borders.
Even if Ukraine is not a NATO member, Kiev is certainly desperate to be accepted into the NATO Membership Action Plan and loyally enacts Washington’s interests in Eastern Europe. With this, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second CIS Department said that in 2021, seven joint military maneuvers between Kiev and NATO members took place on Ukrainian territory. Nine maneuvers will be carried out in 2022 and the number of military personnel participating in them will almost double compared to 2021 – to 64,000. The number of aircraft and helicopters will more than triple – to 361, and warships almost 4 times – to 256.
“The scale, territorial scope and duration of joint exercises between Ukraine and NATO countries are increasing… All exercises are linked by a single concept and have an anti-Russian orientation,” highlighted the Second CIS Department.
On Thursday, a senior US official felt the need to reiterate that the Biden administration would issue “massive sanctions” on Russia if it were to invaded Ukraine, something that Moscow continually repeats that it has no plans of doing. However, even more provocatively, the official stressed the increase in defensive aid to Kiev and NATO allies in central and Eastern Europe. “We and our allies are prepared to impose severe damage to Russia’s economy, and bring about exactly what it says it does not want: more NATO capabilities, not less, and closer [geographically] to Russia, not further away.”
Effectively, the US announced that it has no plans on scaling back escalations with Russia in Eastern Europe, and rather plans to continue provocations and tensions by promising more pressure on the borders of the Eurasian Giant.
Germany’s Welt newspaper quoted an unnamed senior NATO source as saying that NATO has strengthened its Response Force’s combat readiness because of Russia’s supposed actions.
“Before the Russian military increased near the border with Ukraine, NATO responded with the first concrete military measure and increased readiness for 40,000 rapid response forces,” the source said.
In this way, Putin’s claim that it is NATO encroaching on the borders of Russia and not vice versa is shamelessly not even denied by the Biden administration and NATO, but rather is highlighted with a sense of pride. The increase in combat readiness of NATO rapid response forces and Ukraine welcoming foreign troops on its territory near Russia’s borders is part of the ongoing hybrid war against Moscow.
NATO is attempting to pressure Moscow before the upcoming scheduled Putin-Biden meeting in an attempt to influence the negotiation process between the two leaders. It is also likely that Biden will weaponize this Ukrainian law change to place more US troops right on the border with Russia to continue its campaign of pressure that aims to limit Russian influence and compete for its traditional sphere of influence.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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Canada’s diplomatic boycott of Beijing’s Olympic Games flouts the Olympic spirit, is based on false reports, and promotes cold war with China.
The ancient Olympics brought Greeks together in a peaceful sporting/cultural festival, despite inter-city conflicts. An Olympic Truce was declared, so all Greeks could participate in safety.
Impressively, on December 2nd, in a consensus vote, the 193-member UN General Assembly reaffirmed the Olympic Truce for the Beijing Games. UNGA President Shahid observed:
“Nations should use sport as a tool to support dialogue and reconciliation, striving for a peaceful world aligned with the principles and values enshrined in the United Nations Charter.”1
International Olympic Committee Chair Bach stated,
“We can only accomplish this mission… if the Olympic Games are politically neutral and do not become a tool to achieve political goals.”2
Clearly, in mimicking Biden’s petty diplomatic boycott, Trudeau is playing politics and is out of step with this international consensus.
Additionally, Trudeau’s diplomatic boycott is based upon false charges of human rights abuses. Contrary to your editorial, China’s Uyghur population is growing in number3 and prosperity.4
Unlike Canada’s native peoples, Chinese Uyghurs have an Autonomous Republic. Along with 800 million Chinese, Uyghurs were lifted out of poverty during the past five years – an unprecedented accomplishment in world history.5
One might question Trudeau’s concern about Uyghur Muslims in the context of Canada’s role in recent US wars.
In mainly-Muslim Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers routinely conducted night-time raids on civilian homes and reportedly turned over Afghanis for torture.
Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament to avoid this scandal in 2008. In predominantly-Muslim Libya, a Canadian general led NATO’s attack, turning Libya into a failed state. Canada was part of the US regime-change coalition in mainly-Muslim Syria, where a half million were killed and more than thirteen million turned into displaced persons.6 So, why is the PM so concerned about Muslims in China? I suggest there’s an ulterior motive.
Again, contrary to your editorial, most Hongkongers are relieved finally to be peacefully reunited with the People’s Republic after 150 years of British imperialism.
For several years, they endured western-funded NGO’s terrorizing the former colony with violence, arson, and property damage.7 Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai is doing fine, as she has attested in recent public communications.8 She merely requested the western media respect her privacy.9 Taiwan is a Chinese province, recognized so officially by Canada since 1970.10 And it wasn’t China, but Canada, which politically kidnapped Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the Trump Administration. The Two Michaels signed confessions of violating national security laws, according to Chinese sources,11 facts unreported in the Spec.
China’s Ottawa embassy recently stated:
“Canada… has committed heinous crimes against indigenous people. Until today, systematic racial discrimination is still severe in Canada. Canada… is certainly in no position to judge China on this front.”12
The embassy is correct: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Finally, the Biden-led diplomatic boycott isolates Canada and promotes cold war with China.
So far, it appears only four countries formally joined: Canada, USA, UK, and Australia, all predominantly-white, English-speaking countries, representing a tiny minority of countries and the global population. This tiny cabal is out of step with most of the world on many issues but especially on China, with which, since Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”, it appears endlessly to be causing problems and raising tensions.
The rest of the world, however, looks to China for prosperity through its Belt-and-Road Initiative.
Canada, whose second largest trading partner is China, should too. Most countries are increasingly focussed on preventing twin nightmares of nuclear warfare and climate chaos. But the “anglosphere” seems intent on recreating a cold war with China. Its ulterior motives are hegemony and profits through an arms race, including Canada’s obscenely expensive new fighter jets and warships.
The diplomatic boycott is one more reason that Canadians have been calling for an independent foreign policy. Instead of aping US pettiness, Canadians should applaud the Olympic Truce and celebrate the participation of our athletes in Beijing.
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Ken Stone is a long time antiwar, anti-racism, environmental, and labour activist, resident in Hamilton. He is Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual press conference on December 23, 2021. Expanded meeting of the Board of the Ministry of Defense took place on December 21, 2021.
“The ball is in their court.”
Putin expressed optimism toward talks with Washington on security guarantees proposed by Moscow. He called the current negotiations with the U.S. “positive” and hinted at fresh direct talks in Geneva in 2022.
But “Russia’s actions will depend on whether the unconditional guarantee of Russia’s security will be ensured rather than on the results of negotiations.”
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“NATO’s eastward expansion is unacceptable… They lied to us. There’ve been five waves of NATO’s enlargement. And here’s the result – Romania and Poland received missile systems. We are not the ones threatening someone. We are not the ones approaching the US or British borders… The West must provide us with guarantees immediately. Now.”
“Not too much to ask”
“It was the United States that came to our home with its missiles … Is this too much to ask for? Not to place attack systems near our home? What is so unusual here?”
Earlier, Putin claimed that Moscow is
” extremely concerned that elements of the US global missile defense are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers located in Romania and planned to be deployed in Poland are adapted to the use of Tomahawk systems. If this infrastructure is moved towards, if the US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, then their flight time to Moscow will be reduced to seven to ten minutes, and when placing hypersonic weapons – up to five. This is a serious challenge for us – a challenge to our security.”
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu: “US units with a total number of about 8000 military personnel are deployed in the countries of Eastern Europe. Infrastructure is being created to accommodate the US armored brigade. The deployment of the Aegis Ashore anti-missile complex is being completed in Poland. In Romania, combat duty is already being carried out at a similar missile defense facility.
“Third Military Operation”
“There is an impression that, maybe, they are preparing for the third military operation [in Ukraine] and give us a fair warning: do not intervene, do not protect these people but if you do intervene and protect them, there will be new sanctions. Perhaps, we should prepare for that.”
Sergei Shoigu :
“The United States and NATO are purposefully increasing the scale and intensity of troop training activities near Russia with increased involvement of strategic aviation, carrying out conditional launches of nuclear missiles at our facilities. The number of their flights near the Russian borders has more than doubled. NATO pays special attention to the transfer of troops to the eastern flank of the alliance, including from the USA.”
He added that advisers from U.S. private military companies (PMCs) have been dispatched to Ukraine’s Donbass setting up firing positions and defences, training Ukrainian special forces. He claimed that provocations with chemical weapons are prepared in Eastern Ukraine.
“The situation is aggravated by the supply of helicopters, attack unmanned aerial vehicles, ATGMs by the US and its allies. The presence of more than 120 employees of American private military companies in the settlements of Avdiivka and Priazovskoye in the Donetsk region has been reliably confirmed.”
Sanctions for Democracy
Putin:
“It is a strange situation: if someone thinks that Crimea is occupied then Crimeans are victims of aggression. So why are they being punished more? But if they chose to rejoin Russia in a referendum then it is a display of democracy.
Are they [the West] fighting democracy? The answer is: they don’t give a damn about the interests of Crimeans and Russia or democracy. They are pursuing their geopolitical agenda. That’s all. We understand it and we will respond accordingly”.
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JFK’s April 1961 message the America’s Media is of utmost relevance to the global crisis which we are currently living, namely the role of the mainstream media in obfuscating the truth,spreading lies, not to mention the relentless threats, smear campaigns and acts of censorship taken against the voices of independent media.
When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no Moving Backwards
Michel Chossudovsky,
Global Research, December 27, 2021
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President John F. Kennedy
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City
April 27, 1961
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.
You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.
You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.”
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.
I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight “The President and the Press.” Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded “The President Versus the Press.” But those are not my sentiments tonight.
It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.
Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.
Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.
If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.
On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses that they once did.
It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one’s golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man.
My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.
I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future–for reducing this threat or living with it–there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security–a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.
This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President–two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.
I
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of “clear and present danger,” the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.
Today no war has been declared–and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger,” then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.
It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security–and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.
For the facts of the matter are that this nation’s foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage; that details of this nation’s covert preparations to counter the enemy’s covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least in one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby satellites were followed required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.
The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.
The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to the nation, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration.
On many earlier occasions, I have said–and your newspapers have constantly said–that these are times that appeal to every citizen’s sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.
I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.
Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: “Is it news?” All I suggest is that you add the question: “Is it in the interest of the national security?” And I hope that every group in America–unions and businessmen and public officials at every level– will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests.
And should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations.
Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war. In times of peace, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of peace and peril which knows no precedent in history.
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It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation–an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people–to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well–the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.
No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.
I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers–I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.
Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed–and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment– the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”–but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
This means greater coverage and analysis of international news–for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security–and we intend to do it.
III
It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.
And so it is to the printing press–to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news–that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.
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The following note was originally published almost three years ago; however, with the victory of Gabriel Boric in the Chilean presidential race on Sunday, we consider it important to take another look at it.
In the midst of the joyous celebrations in Chile for Boric’s win against pinochetista Kast, and perhaps as a response of memory to some who are exaggerating too much about the president-elect to compare him with Salvador Allende, with Pablo Neruda or with other icons of the international left, a text by doctor Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, grandson of Chile’s former President Salvador Allende who was overthrown and assassinated in 1973, has been circulating on social media as well as on some online publications. Said text was an “open letter” in response to statements made by the Frente Amplio deputy—now president-elect—Gabriel Boric, who has repeatedly called on the Chilean left to “condemn the human rights situation” in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all of them Latin American countries with socialist projects.
It is worth rereading it, in order to have all the information at hand and not just those which are being amplified by the logical enthusiasm generated by Kast’s defeat.
Doctor Sepúlveda Allende’s open letter to Boric is translated and reproduced below:
Deputy,
I dare to respond to you because I see the danger that it represents for important leaders like you, young referents of the “new left” that has emerged in the Frente Amplio, to make simplistic, absurd and misinformed comparisons on issues as delicate as that of human rights.
It is very biased and rude that you equate—without the slightest argument—the supposed “weakening of the basic democratic conditions in Venezuela,” the “permanent restriction of freedoms in Cuba” and “the repression of the Ortega government in Nicaragua” with the proven atrocities of the military dictatorship in Chile, the evident criminal interventionism of the United States around the world, and the State of Israel’s terrorism against the people of Palestine.
The fact that you write such nonsense does not “make you a pseudo CIA agent,” but it does denote a significant irresponsibility and political immaturity that can transform you into a useful idiot for the right-wing, or worse, make you end up being that “left” that the right craves: a dumb, ambiguous left, a harmless left which, due to opportunism, prefers to appear as “politically correct,” a lukewarm left that does not want to have problems with anyone.
Such a left is confusing, because it does not dare to point out and courageously confront the true enemies of the peoples. Hence the danger of issuing politically immature opinions.
Have you ever wondered why Venezuela is being so vilified and attacked in the media?
Why is it on the news every day in practically all the countries of the Western world where the mainstream media dominate?
Why is it outnumbered and attacked from all sides?
Why do these big newscasts keep quiet about the continuous massacres in Colombia and Mexico?
Why do those who tear their hair out worrying about a Venezuelan deputy who confessed to participating in an assassination attempt not have the courage to demand that Israel stop the genocide of the Palestinian people?
A world upside down. That is the world of politics without heart and without courage.
Margarita Labarca Goddard [Chilean human rights lawyer] has already argued clearly and forcefully why you are mistaken in your judgments towards Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. I will only add that Venezuela has a much healthier and more transparent democracy than the one in Chile, if you wish I can point out my arguments to you and we can have a debate, if you are interested.
It is also easy to argue why the “permanent restriction of liberties in Cuba” is a fallacy. Not to mention that the word “freedom” is so misused that by now its true meaning is ambiguous, and a sensible definition requires even a philosophical debate. Or tell me, what is freedom?
I name these two countries because I know them quite well. I lived in Cuba for nine years and in Venezuela I have been living for another nine.
I do not know Nicaragua first-hand, but I invite you to ask yourself what would have been the reaction of a right-wing government to the actions of hired and heavily armed criminal gangs who took over whole sectors of the most important cities in the country.
Additionally, said mercenary gangs were organized to commit abominable acts such as kidnapping, torture, maiming, rape and even burning dozens of human beings alive, for the mere fact of being sympathizers of a cause—in this case, Sandinistas. The persecution reached the point where entire families were murdered in their own homes.
Even with the resources, the legal framework, and the strength to take immediate forceful action against such fascist destabilization, the legitimately elected government of Nicaragua exercised restraint. Do you think that if a right-wing government had been in power, they would have had such a conciliatory position and would have called for dialogue to resolve the conflict?
History gives us answers.
I understand that you may have been confused by the powerful “media” that took upon itself the charge of victimizing the perpetrators, just like they did a year ago in Venezuela during the time of the so-called guarimbas.
Therefore, Gabriel, objectively speaking and through a serious argumentation—and not opinions formed and shaped by a media that repeats misrepresentations and lies on a daily basis—there is no such thing as a double standard by which we defend Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
These countries do not have disappeared or tortured people; they do not imprison those who think differently, but yes, they imprison criminals, be these deputies, politicians or so-called students. Rather, it seems to me that you are the one with the “double standards,” issuing comfortable judgments of morality formed through manipulation and ignorance,
When it comes to the media, democracy and freedoms, we could compare Chile with these countries. I assure you that, unfortunately, Chile would not fare very well, and even less so, if we include human, economic and social rights, since in Chile these seem to be nothing more than merchandise.
“A person reaches his highest level of ignorance when he repudiates something of which he knows nothing.”
Regards!
Featured image: Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, a doctor, a coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity (REDH), and grandson of former President Salvador Allende Gossens, responded to now president-elect Gabriel Boric over his position on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Photo: The Clinic
“The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered.
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” Genesis 9:2-3
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There is no doubt that Christmas is a time when we become aware of the precariousness of nature as the sun’s light fades, leaves fall off the trees and the weather gets colder. The sun seems to stop moving (solstice) for three days, and then as if by magic starts moving again in the other direction and seems to be reborn. This phenomenon was noticed thousands of years before Christian celebrations of the birth of Jesus.
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At some point, elements of Saturnalia, Midwinter, Yule and other pagan traditions became merged into the general Christmas traditions that are observed today. It is a festival that celebrates life in all its forms.
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Christmas cards glorify nature in their depictions of many types of snowy woodland scenes and animals: robins, reindeer, donkeys, sheep, oxen (bullocks), doves, etc. In every culture today there are still elements of nature-worship: in the maintenance of old traditions like the goddess Pachamama (revered by the indigenous peoples of the Ande) or various forms of neo-paganism that hark back to pre-Christian times.
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Çatalhöyük Wall Paintings, Çatalhöyük, Bull hunting scene. Copies of painting on plaster. 6 th millennium BC.
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Modern secular paganism places “great emphasis on the divinity of nature” while the animistic aspects of Pagan theology asserts “that all things have a soul – not just humans or organic life – so this bond is held with mountains and rivers as well as trees and wild animals.” For example:”Secular Paganism is a set of principles shared by diverse groups around the world. It is a natural outgrowth of many peoples’ personal ethics and beliefs about life. It is not a religion but rather an ethical view based on the belief that nature is sacred and must be respected and treasured. Secular Pagans believe that we are a part of nature, not her master.”
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Illustration of medieval pig stunning, from The Medieval Cookbook
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However, our relationship with nature is contradictory and we treat the different parts of nature in very different ways. This can be seen in the way we treat some animals as pets, others as a danger, and most as a source of food that is produced on a massive industrial scale with slaughterhouses, factories, and many forms of processing. This is reflected in art down through the ages, some of which glorifies hunting and killing animals, and some which tries to show the terror animals are put through before coming to a grisly end. In her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, Melanie Joy tries to make sense of this and theorizes a distinction between carnivores and carnists: “Carnivores require meat in their diet for survival, but carnists choose to eat meat based on their beliefs.” Thus:
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“Carnism denies there is a problem with eating animals; second, it justifies eating meat as normal, natural, and necessary; third, to prevent cognitive dissonance, carnism alters the perception of the animals as living individuals into food objects, abstractions, and categories. Joy argues there is a neurological basis for empathy; most people care about nonhuman animals and want to prevent their suffering. Further, humans value compassion, reciprocity, and justice. However, human behavior does not match these values. To continue to eat animals, Joy argues, people engage in psychic numbing, which alters the perception of our behavior towards animals and uses defense mechanisms to block empathy.”
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Psychic numbing describes the way we withdraw from overwhelming issues like the contradiction between our love of animals and the way we treat them. It can be the way we deal with many big problems such as “impending doom, chaos, and ultimately mankind’s extinction.”
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The Butcher and his Servant (1568), drawn and engraved by Jost Amman
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We withdraw because we know that dealing with one serious issue tends to open up many other interlinked issues, while, at the same time getting progressively bigger as well as stretching backwards and forwards in time. Claudia von Werlhof grasps these widening problems and deals with them head on. She believes that the essential problem is rooted in an ideology which has as its basis a hatred for life itself. She blames the centuries-old socio-political systems of patriarchy and capitalism that are “characterized by exploitation, extraction and appropriation.” She notes:
“The sinister motive of hating life needs to be hidden. The unspeakable crimes that all patriarchies have committed against life itself, against children, women, and all human beings, against the Earth, animals, and plants must not be revealed. The hatred of life is the reason and the rational justification for the violence against it; a violence that intends to prevent any rebellion or uprising of those not believing in the system it protects; a system that many would see as a grave assault on their dignity if they only recognized it.”
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Furthermore she makes a distinction between killing and death:
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“It has been repeatedly suggested that the patriarchal system is a system of death. That is not entirely correct. The patriarchal system is a system of killing, that is of artificial death: ecocide, matricide, homicide in general and finally “omnicide,” the killing of everything. […] We are up against a totalitarian system that does not care for its subjects, that cannot (or no longer) be stopped, and that is constantly becoming faster and more efficient in its attempt to end life on this planet – while turning even this very process into a tool for further accumulation of profit and power.”
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Man’s best friend, animals’ worst enemy
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Over the centuries the system of killing has become more and more sophisticated. In art, depictions of hunting show changes from trapping to chasing with dogs to shooting with guns. In many paintings dogs are the ‘collaborationists’ who turn on their fellow animals for the benefit of their masters.
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A 14th-century depiction of boar hunting with hounds from Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century)
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Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Hunting At The Saint-jean Pond In The Forest Of Compiegne, Before 1734
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In one extraordinary set of paintings by the artist Paulus Potter (1625–1654), Punishment of a Hunter, we see different forms of entrapment and killing depicted around two central paintings, one of which shows the hunter going on trial before a court of animals, while the other shows some animals dancing for joy as the ‘treacherous’ dogs are hung and the dead hunter is roasted in a roaring fire.
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Punishment of a Hunter, painting with 14 frames by Paulus Potter, 1 of which is by Cornelis van Poelenburgh (ca.1650)
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Frans Snyders (1579-1657) (studio of) – The Fowl Market
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Changing attitudes towards hunting and selling of animal carcasses has been growing in recent decades and can be seen similarly in the artistic depiction of such practices as Maxwell Williams notes: “Upset students at Cambridge University successfully petitioned to have a painting depicting a butcher removed from their dining hall. The painting, The Fowl Market by the studio of early-17th-century Dutch painter Frans Snyders, loomed large above those in the dining room at Hughes Hall, a postgraduate school within Cambridge. The painting depicts the butcher at his labors, surrounded by a veritable mountain of dead animals. Nearby, a living dog appears to be barking.”
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Hunting the seas
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Negative attitudes towards hunting on land also extend to whale hunting and fishing as the seas are depleted of life and thus potentially creating a catastrophic collapse of the marine ecological cycle. Factory ships, fish farming and whaling have come in for much criticism, while quotas for certain species of fish have been imposed by governments due to overfishing. In the examples shown here we see whale hunting being depicted as heroic as the hunters deal with huge whales and fierce weather, then an ambivalent merchant, to a later painting of a cruel, knife-wielding monger.
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Robert Walter Weir Jr, Taking a Whale / Shooting a Whale with a Shoulder Gun (ca. 1855-1866)
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A 16th-century Flemish fishmonger painted by Joachim Beuckelaer.
The greatest criticism in recent decades has been reserved for the practices carried out in slaughterhouses using what were declared to be ‘humane’ ways of killing animals.Time and time again shocking, secretly filmed footage has emerged of extreme cruelty towards sentient beings uttering horrific shrieks as they are chased and battered to death. In recent depictions shown here artists use Expressionist techniques to try and depict the horror of the slaughterhouse bloodletting.
Nicolai Fechin (1881–1955) – The Slaughterhouse (1919)
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Sue Coe (born 1951) is an English artist and illustrator who goes one step further by using her works to benefit animal rights organizations as well as illustrating books and essays to explore issues such as factory farming and meat packing.
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Sue Coe – My mother and I watch a pig escape the slaughterhouse
The struggle against all these different old and modern practices of industrializing and converting our fellow beings into various types of products seems to be finally taking hold of the popular imagination. In a recent article in the UK Andrew Anthony wrote that:
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“Meat consumption in this country has declined by 17% over the past decade. The Economist magazine named 2019 “The Year of the Vegan”. And last year the World Health Organization recommended a plant-based diet for a healthy life. That endorsement, along with growing concerns about the impact of dairy farming on the environment, combined with the lifestyle rethink enabled by the lockdown, has significantly increased the number of people turning their backs on animal products in the UK.”
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The Vegan Society commissioned research that found that: “At least 542,000 people in Britain are now following a vegan diet and never consume any animal products including meat, fish, milk, cheese, eggs and honey. This is a whopping increase since the last estimate of 150,000 ten years ago, making veganism one of Britain’s fastest growing lifestyle movements.” Furthermore, Jasmijn de Boo, CEO of The Vegan Society commented that “more people than ever before are acting upon the health and environmental benefits of veganism, and finding out what really goes on in the meat and dairy industries and deciding they do not want to contribute to the pain and suffering of animals.” Maybe we are seeing the seeds of a new enlightened attitude towards animals which will also be reflected in a more positive art in the future.
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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.
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He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Amid the 2020 global covid lockdowns and economic dislocations it has caused, Klaus Schwab, a previously low-profile founder of a Swiss-based business forum, emerged on the world stage calling for what he called a Great Reset of the entire world economy, using the pandemic as driver.
He even published a book in July 2020 outlining his blueprint. It has been rightly called a technocratic society with global top-down central planning. Schwab uses global warming fears and the plight of the world’s poor to justify what is in effect a plan for global totalitarianism where, as the Davos website puts it, nobody will own anything.
What is not well-known is the fact that the inspiration for Schwab’s dystopian plans comes from a Catholic bishop whom he met in Brazil in the 1970’s. That bishop links Schwab’s vast globalist network with the powerful political influence of the present Pope Francis.
Far from a traditional Catholic priest, this bishop was known as the “Red Bishop” and endorsed Castro’s Cuba model, as well as the Mao Cultural Revolution in which millions of Chinese were killed or destroyed in a purge of the enemies of Mao. His name was Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, the leading early figure spreading the Church movement known as “Liberation Theology” during the 1960s and 1970s.
From Nazi to Communist?
Helder Camara made a transition from the two extremes of the political spectrum. In 1934 Camara was a leading figure in a pro-Mussolini Brazilian clerical fascist movement,
Brazilian Integralist Action or Acao Integralista Brasileira (AIB). It was no casual involvement. As a young Catholic Priest Father Camara became part of the Supreme Council of the AIB. By 1936 Camara had become personal secretary of AIB founder, Plinio Salgado, and National Secretary of the AIB.
Similar to Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts in the 1920s, Brazil’s AIB were the Greenshirts, fielding paramilitary groups who actively and violently attacked communists on the streets during the 1930s in Brazil.
When Camara was ordained a priest in the early 1930s he reportedly wore the Greenshirt under his cassock. Later when a Brazilian author wrote a biography of Camara, by then a Bishop, Helder Camara and the Church intervened to prohibit mention of the now famous leftist as an earlier pro-fascist activist, one of the many curious parts of Camara’s history.
By the end of the war, in 1946, Helder Camara had somehow managed to transition from the pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler fascism of the AIB to a pro-Marxist “progressivism” as Assistant General of the Brazilian Catholic Action, whose youth group, JUC, openly embraced the Castro Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1963 a faction of the JUC with whom Camara was supportive, the Ação Popular (AP), defined itself as socialist and declared their support for the “socialization of the means of production.”
The Catholic group AP adopted statutes which contained praise for the Soviet Revolution and a recognition of “the crucial importance of Marxism in revolutionary theory and praxis.” Dom Helder became Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in the Northeast of Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
A Founder of Liberation Theology
Helder Camara was an instrumental figure in a movement that soon spread worldwide not only in the Catholic Church but among other churches as well. It was later called Liberation Theology by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez.
The “liberation” referred to what the priests claimed was the message of Christianity that, “God loves the poor preferentially.”
Helder Camara at the WEF in 1974 (source WEF)
The movement claimed that the role of the Church should be committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land in the Third World. The movement marked a radical shift in the position of the Catholic Church. Priests began to legitimize violence against dictators such as Nicaragua’s Somoza, even as a number of them took arms and joined the Sandinistas and other Marxist groups in the 1970s.
Gustavo Gutierrez explicitly called “to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society, freer and more human.”
To put it mildly, this was a radical departure in which the Church was to focus on liberating the poorest of society in the developing world by force if necessary and redistribute the wealth. Communist-backed guerilla movements in predominately Catholic countries were quick to see the usefulness of priests giving their wars a social legitimacy beyond Marxist doctrine. Gutierrez said, “The theology of liberation is rooted in a revolutionary militancy.”
A fellow Brazilian advocate of Helder Camara’s social activism for the Church, Father Leonardo Boff, stated,
“What we propose is Marxism, historical materialism, in theology.”
Boff and others have since moved from advocating radical land reform, taking land from large owners and giving it to poor peasants, to backing radical global warming agendas as part of their liberation agenda. The movement has since spread from Latin America to Africa and Asia, from Zimbabwe to Sri Lanka.
In essence, Helder Camara’s Liberation Theology created the social climate and fostered the spread through society for the “victim” ideology of today’s widespread movements from ANTIFA to BLM and the entire Green Agenda movement.
Red Bishop Meets Schwab
In recent public statements Klaus Schwab, founder of the Davos World Economic Forum a half century ago, cited two men who he said changed his life.
One was Henry Kissinger who was his mentor when Schwab was at Harvard in the late 1960s.
The other, surprisingly, was the Red Bishop, Dom Helder Camara.
It was Kissinger who as Nixon Secretary of State plotted to assassinate left-leaning governments in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, replacing them with brutal military dictatorships such as Pinochet and Videla, while Helder Camara was working the opposite end, mobilizing the poor against the state.
In 2010 Schwab’s World Economic Forum published a self-congratulating book modestly titled, “The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History–The First 40 Years 1971 – 2010.”
There Schwab describes the central role Kissinger played from the first in selecting speakers and guests for Schwab’s elite business gatherings.
For the year 1974 Schwab wrote,
“At the 1974 European Management Symposium (today WEF), Dom Hélder Câmara, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, made a notable appearance, bolstering the Forum’s role as a platform for provocative yet vital voices.”
Câmara had been invited to Davos despite the fact that he was considered persona non grata by many governments and business leaders.
He had dubbed himself “the spokesperson of those two-thirds of humanity who suffer from the unfair distribution of nature’s resources.”
Schwab’s account continued,
“Dom Hélder predicted that developing countries could some day challenge and clash with the leading economic powers. He criticized multinationals for keeping so much of mankind in appalling conditions. He called for a higher social responsibility, fairer wealth distribution and a reassessment of “the false values of a ‘waste society’” to achieve prosperity for all people.”
Schwab in a video stated,
“one example which for me was probably a crucial moment in my life. I traveled for the first time to Brazil, I met a priest who was known at that time as the priest of the poor people, his name was Dom Hélder Câmara.”
WEF and Pope Francis
In a 2013 visit to Brazil early in his papacy, Francis named Dom Helder Camara as someone who indelibly marked the “journey of the Church in Brazil.”
In his Evangelii gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) the same year, Francis declared in language of the Liberation Theology of Helder Camara and others,
“Without the preferential option for the poor, the proclamation of the Gospel … risks being misunderstood or submerged.”
The term “preferential option for the poor” is key. It sounds noble but what in reality does it mean?
Notably, in 2014 Klaus Schwab extended a personal invitation to Pope Francis to address the Davos meeting.
Francis has since written numerous such letters to Schwab and is listed by the World Economic Forum as an Agenda Contributor. In October 2020, the official website of the Davos WEF wrote,
“In a striking, 43,000-word-long encyclical published last Sunday, the pope put his stamp on efforts to shape what’s been termed a Great Reset of the global economy in response to the devastation of COVID-19.”
By 2015 Francis, who himself poses as the special guardian of the poor, had given his sanction to initiating the official process, by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, to begin a process of Helder Camara’s “beatification.”
Since then the present Pope has taken unprecedented political stands for Global Warming Green Agenda measures, vaccines against covid, support for gender equality, migration, wealth redistribution from rich to poor, and other social actions which have dominated his controversial papacy.
The Great Reset
The relevant question to be asked is why the founder of the world’s most influential corporate globalization forum, Klaus Schwab, would embrace the founder of the Liberation Theology and the current liberal Pope Francis, the first-ever Jesuit Pope who slyly revives those ideas today?
It’s definitely not that Klaus Schwab who is embracing Marxism. Schwab is the “Godfather of Globalization.”
The fusion of the ideologies of Francis and Schwab is a clever way of creating mass support, especially among younger and poorer people round the world for the wholesale attack on private property and on a stable middle-class required for the global corporatist Great Reset, a global technocratic fascism from above.
In November 2020, Pope Francis declared that a new “social justice” is needed, and that private ownership is not something obvious in Christianity: “Let us build the new social justice and admit that the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and immovable,” said Francis. He does not elaborate.
Image source: WEF (Pope Francis Message at WEF Annual Meeting, Davos, 2018
In October, 2020 the pope issued an encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti, in which he went after private property. He wrote,
“Business abilities, which are a gift from God, should always be clearly directed to the development of others and to the elimination of poverty…”
He declared,
“The right to private property is always accompanied by the primary and prior principle of the subordination of all private property to the universal destination of the earth´s goods, and thus the right of all to their use.”
This is remarkably similar to what Schwab of the WEF writes in his 2020 book, The Great Reset, where he states,
“First and foremost, the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour.”
Schwab claims that the era of free market neoliberalism is over and major Government intervention is needed to enact “sustainable” environmental policies.
On the WEF website Schwab’s organization described their vision of the reset to a world where no one owns anything. A video declares of their vision of the world in 2030, “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” adding that “Whatever you need, you will rent.”
It would even include renting your clothes!
In 2030 “You’ll own nothing, And you’ll be happy.” (see video below)
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Schwab states that this radical redistribution of property rights globally will be necessary to attain “ecological justice.” This echoes Francis’ call for a “green financial agenda” to replace the current financial system.
The Davos embrace of the Vatican agenda is far more sinister than it might seem.
Their Great Reset is about the end to human liberty or freedom in favor of a new globalist agenda of total control, high-tech surveillance, mandated medications and massive income redistribution from the middle class of society down. Schwab is nothing if not a master of marketing, and his dystopian Great Reset and its “ecological justice” is just that.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.
He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
The Fed has options for countering the record inflation the U.S. is facing that are more productive and less risky than raising interest rates.
The Federal Reserve is caught between a rock and a hard place. Inflation grew by 6.8% in November, the fastest in 40 years, a trend the Fed has now acknowledged is not “transitory.” The conventional theory is that inflation is due to too much money chasing too few goods, so the Fed is under heavy pressure to “tighten” or shrink the money supply. Its conventional tools for this purpose are to reduce asset purchases and raise interest rates. But corporate debt has risen by $1.3 trillion just since early 2020; so if the Fed raises rates, a massive wave of defaults is likely to result. According to financial advisor Graham Summers in an article titled “The Fed Is About to Start Playing with Matches Next to a $30 Trillion Debt Bomb,” the stock market could collapse by as much as 50%.
Even more at risk are the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are the backbone of the productive economy, companies that need bank credit to survive. In 2020, 200,000 more U.S. businesses closed than in normal pre-pandemic years. SMEs targeted as “nonessential” were restricted in their ability to conduct business, while the large international corporations remained open. Raising interest rates on the surviving SMEs could be the final blow.
Cut Demand or Increase Supply?
The argument for raising interest rates is that it will reduce the demand for bank credit, which is now acknowledged to be the source of most of the new money in the money supply. In 2014, the Bank of England wrote in its first-quarter report that 97% of the UK money supply was created by banks when they made loans. In the U.S. the figure is not quite so high, but well over 90% of the U.S. money supply is also created by bank lending.
Left unanswered is whether raising interest rates will lower prices in an economy beset with supply problems. Oil and natural gas shortages, food shortages, and supply chain disruptions are major contributors to today’s high prices. Raising interest rates will hurt, not help, the producers and distributors of those products, by raising their borrowing costs. As observed by Canadian senator and economist Diane Bellemare:
Raising interest rates may cool off demand, but today’s high prices are tightly tied to supply issues – goods not coming through to manufacturers or retailers in a predictable way, and global markets not able to react quickly enough to changing tastes of consumers.
… A singular focus on inflation could lead to a ratcheting up of interest rates at a time when Canada [and the U.S.] should be increasing its ability to produce more goods, and supplying retailers and consumers alike with what they need.
Rather than a reduction in demand, we need more supply available locally; and to fund its production, credit-money needs to increase. When supply and demand increase together, prices remain stable, while GDP and incomes go up.
So argues UK Prof. Richard Werner, a German-born economist who invented the term “quantitative easing” (QE) when he was working in Japan in the 1990s. Japanese banks had pumped up demand for housing, driving up prices to unsustainable levels, until the market inevitably crashed and took the economy down with it. The QE that Werner prescribed was not the asset-inflating money creation we see today. Rather, he recommended increasing GDP by driving money into the real, productive economy; and that is what he recommends for today’s economic crisis.
How to Fund Local Production
SMES make up around 97-99% of the private sector of almost every economy globally. Despite massive losses from the pandemic lockdowns, in the U.S. there were still 30.7 million small businesses reported in December 2020. Small companies account for 64 percent of new U.S. jobs; yet in most U.S. manufacturing sectors, productivity growth is substantially below the standards set by Germany, and many U.S. SMEs are not productive enough to compete with the cost advantages of Chinese and other low-wage competitors. Why?
Werner observes that Germany exports nearly as much as China does, although the German population is a mere 6% of China’s. The Chinese also have low-wage advantages. How can German small firms compete when U.S. firms cannot? Werner credits Germany’s 1,500 not-for-profit/community banks, the largest number in the world. Seventy percent of German deposits are with these local banks – 26.6% with cooperative banks and 42.9% with publicly-owned savings banks called Sparkassen, which are legally limited to lending in their own communities. Together these local banks do over 90% of SME lending. Germany has more than ten times as many banks engaged in SME lending as the UK, and German SMEs are world market leaders in many industries.
Small banks lend to small companies, while large banks lend to large companies – and to large-scale financial speculators. German community banks were not affected by the 2008 crisis, says Werner, so they were able to increase SME lending after 2008; and as a result, there was no German recession and no increase in unemployment.
China’s success, too, Werner attributes to its large network of community banks. Under Mao, China had a single centralized national banking system. In 1982, guided by Deng Xiaoping, China reformed its money system and introduced thousands of commercial banks, including hundreds of cooperative banks. Decades of double-digit growth followed. “Window guidance” was also used: harmful bank credit creation for asset transactions and consumption were suppressed, while productive credit was encouraged.
Werner’s recommendations for today’s economic conditions are to reform the money system by: banning bank credit for transactions that don’t contribute to GDP; creating a network of many small community banks lending for productive purposes, returning all gains to the community; and making bank behavior transparent, accountable and sustainable. He is chairman of the board of Hampshire Community Bank, launched just this year, which lays out the model. It includes no bonus payments to staff, only ordinary modest salaries; credit advanced mainly to SMEs and for housing construction (buy-to-build mortgages); and ownership by a local charity for the benefit of the people in the county, with half the votes in the hands of the local authorities and universities that are its investors.
Public Banking in the United States: North Dakota’s Success
That model – cut out the middlemen and operationalize community banks to create credit for local production – also underlies the success of the century-old Bank of North Dakota (BND), the only state-owned U.S. bank in existence. North Dakota is also the only state to have escaped the 2008-09 recession, having a state budget that never dropped into the red. The state has nearly six times as many local banks per capita as the country overall. The BND does not compete with these community banks but partners with them, a very productive arrangement for all parties.
In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published an article stating that the BND was more profitable even than JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author credited North Dakota’s oil boom, but the boom turned into a bust that very year, yet the BND continued to report record profits. It has averaged a 20% return on equity over the last 19 years, far exceeding the ROI of JPMorgan Chaseand Wells Fargo, where state governments typically place their deposits. According to its 2020 annual report, in 2019 the BND had completed 16 years of record-breaking profits.
Its 2020 ROI of 15%, while not quite as good, was still stellar considering the economic crisis hitting the nation that year. The BND had the largest percentage of Payroll Protection Plan recipients per capita of any state; it tripled its loans for the commercial and agricultural sectors in 2020; and it lowered its fixed interest rate on student loans by 1%, saving borrowers an average of $6,400 over the life of the loan. The BND closed 2020 with $7.7 billion in assets.
Why is the BND so profitable, then, if not due to oil? Its business model allows it to have much lower costs than other banks. It has no private investors skimming off short-term profits, no high paid executives, no need to advertise, and, until recently, it had only one branch, now expanded to two. By law, all of the state’s revenues are deposited in the BND. It partners with local banks on loans, helping with capitalization, liquidity and regulations. The BND’s savings are returned to the state or passed on to local borrowers in the form of lower interest rates.
What the Fed Could Do Now
The BND and Sparkassen banks are great public banking models, but implementing them takes time, and the Fed is under pressure to deal with an inflation crisis right now. Prof. Werner worries about centralization and thinks we don’t need central banks at all; but as long as we have them, we might as well put them to use serving the Main Street economy.
In September 2020, Saqib Bhatti and Brittany Alston of the Action Center on Race and the Economy proposed a plan for stimulating local production that could be implemented by the Fed immediately. It could make interest-free loans directly to state and local governments for productive purposes. To better fit with prevailing Fed policies, perhaps it could make 0.25% loans, as it now makes to private banks through its discount window and to repo market investors through its standing repo facility.
They noted that interest payments on municipal debt transfer more than $160 billion every year from taxpayers to wealthy investors and banks on Wall Street. These funds could be put to more productive public use if the Federal Reserve were to make long-term zero-cost loans available to all U.S. state and local governments and government agencies. With that money, they could refinance old debts and take out loans for new long-term capital infrastructure projects, while canceling nearly all of their existing interest payments. Interest and fees typically make up 50% of the cost of infrastructure. Dropping the interest rate nearly to zero could stimulate a boom in those desperately needed projects. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates in its 2021 report that $6.1 trillion is needed just to repair our nation’s infrastructure.
As for the risk that state and local governments might not pay back their debts, Bhatti and Alston contend that it is virtually nonexistent. States are not legally allowed to default, and about half the states do not permit their cities to file for bankruptcy. The authors write:
According to Moody’s Investors Service, the cumulative ten-year default rate for municipal bonds between 1970 and 2019 was just 0.16%, compared with 10.17% for corporate bonds, meaning corporate bonds were a whopping 63 times more likely to default. …[M]unicipal bonds as a whole were safer investment than the safest 3% of corporate bonds. … US municipal bonds are extremely safe investments, and the interest rates that most state and local government borrowers are forced to pay are unjustifiably high.
… The major rating agencies have a long history of using credit ratings to push an austerity agenda and demand cuts to public services …. Moreover, they discriminate against municipal borrowers by giving them lower credit ratings than corporations that are significantly more likely to default.
… [T]he same banks that are major bond underwriters also have a record of collusion and bid-rigging in the municipal bond market. … Several banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, have pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid billions in fines to financial regulators.
… There is no reason for banks and bondholders to be able to profit from this basic piece of infrastructure if the Federal Reserve could do it for free. [Citations omitted.]
To ensure repayment and discourage overborrowing, say Bhatti and Alston, the Fed could adopt regulations such as requiring any borrower that misses a payment to levy an automatic tax on residents above a certain income threshold. Borrowing limits could also be put in place. Politicization of loans could be avoided by making loans available indiscriminately to all public borrowers within their borrowing limits. Another possibility might be to mediate the loans through a National Infrastructure Bank, as proposed in HR 3339.
All of this could be done without new legislation. The Federal Reserve has statutory authority under the Federal Reserve Act to lend to municipal borrowers for a period of up to six months. It could just agree to roll over these loans for a fixed period of years. Bhatti and Alston observe that under the 2020 CARES Act, the Fed was given permission to make up to $500 billion in indefinite, long-term loans to municipal borrowers, but it failed to act on that authority to the extent allowed. Loans were limited to no more than three years, and the interest rate charged was so high that most municipal borrowers could get lower rates on the open municipal bond market.
Private corporations, which the authors show are 63 times more likely to default, were offered much more generous terms on corporate debt; and 330 corporations took the offer, versus only two municipal takers through the Municipal Liquidity Facility. The federal government also made $10.4 trillion in bailouts and backstops available to the financial sector after the 2008 financial crisis, a sum that is 2.5 times the size of the entire U.S. municipal bond market.
Stoking the Fire with Credit for Local Production
Playing with matches that could trigger a $30 trillion debt bomb is obviously something the Fed should try to avoid. Prof. Werner would probably argue that its policy mistake, like Japan’s in the 1980s, has been to inject credit so that it has gone into speculative assets, inflating asset prices. The Fed’s liquidity fire hose needs to be directed at local production. This can be done through local community or public banks, or by making near-zero interest loans to state and local governments, perhaps mediated through a National Infrastructure Bank.
Following the Taliban’s victory over US-NATO forces in Afghanistan, Washington is walking into another death trap, but this time on Russia’s borders with the neighboring Ukraine. So now, Washington’s non-partisan bureaucrats and the Military-Industrial Complex are calling for ways to fight “Russian aggression”.
The Russian leader, who questioned why NATO had ignored repeated Russian warnings and expanded its military infrastructure eastwards, singled out the deployment in Poland and Romania of the Aegis Ashore missile defence system. He made it clear he did not want to see the same launch MK41 systems, which Russia has long complained can be used to also launch offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles, in Ukraine.
“Creating such threats (in Ukraine) would be red lines for us. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that a sense of common sense, responsibility for both our countries and the world community will prevail,” said Putin
To make matters worse, US senators from the Republican party submitted a bill that calls for $450 million in military aid to the Ukraine with new sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project. The bill will also label Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” according to a December 18th report from rt.com, ‘Russia reacts to US ‘state sponsor of terrorism threat’:
On Wednesday, eight American Republican party senators submitted a bill, speculatively titled the ‘GUARD Act’, containing a range of measures designed to support Kiev. The proposed legislation would authorize an additional $450 million in military aid and impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the recently constructed pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Europe through the Baltic Sea, which Ukraine and the US have strongly opposed.
The bill would also officially designate Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” if Moscow advances militarily on its eastern European neighbor. In recent weeks, American and Ukrainian intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of “aggressive actions” on the border with Ukraine, including troop buildup, and said they suspected a Russian invasion could be in the works
A financial partnership between China and Russia, the world’s largest energy importer and the world’s largest energy exporter, is an indispensable instrument for dethroning the petrodollar. In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value
Russia and China has also been working on alternatives to the SWIFT system:
The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.
China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further
The US wants its dollar to remain king by any means necessary. One of the main reasons Washington went to war with Iraq was not only about oil, it was because Saddam Hussein had switched from selling oil in US dollars to accepting payments in Euros as retribution for US sanctions. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered by US-backed forces because he was creating an alternative currency which was a gold-backed African dinar to replace U.S. dollars and Euros in the African continent.
A recent press conference, the US president and liberal war hawk, Joe Biden was asked about what consequences Russia would face if they invaded Ukraine’s territory. The liberal cheerleaders for war at CNN have been reporting what US and European leaders have been up to in regards to planning harsh sanctions on Russia because it’s President, Vladimir Putin is misbehaving, therefore punishment must be served by the American empire, So how dare you Vlad for wanting to protect your country!, “the kinds of costs the US and European allies are discussing for Russia are “designed to be implemented very, very fast,” the official said, without detailing what those measures would be. “That is partly why we have chosen the measures that we are working on.” One of their actions is most likely to cut Russia off the Swift payment system since the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency for the moment. “The Biden administration has repeatedly said there will be severe economic consequences. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan also made clear last week there will be further US defensive military support for Ukraine as well as US support for NATO countries on the eastern flank of Russia invades Ukraine”, continued:
I’ve made it absolutely clear to President Putin,” Biden said. “If he moves on Ukraine, the economic consequences for his economy are going to be devastating. Devastating, number one. Number two, we will find it required that we’ll have to send more American and NATO troops into the Eastern Flank, the (Bucharest) 9, all those NATO countries where we have a sacred obligation to defend them against any attack by Russia. And number three, the impact of all of that on Russia and his attitude, the rest of the world, his view of Russia would change markedly. He’ll pay a terrible price
In early December, rt.com also has been documenting what’s been happening with the Ukraine’s decision to recklessly build-up its troop levels in the Donbass region which is a clear threat to Russia’s security concerns:
Ukraine has now stationed well over 100,000 troops and large quantities of hardware in the war-torn Donbass region, the Russian Foreign Ministry alleged on Wednesday morning, amid rising tensions. Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that “the Armed Forces of Ukraine are increasing [their] military force, pulling heavy equipment and personnel.”
“According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said. Zakharova also condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for submitting a bill to the national parliament that would allow units from foreign armed forces to enter the country as part of multinational exercises next year. According to her, such a move directly contradicts the Minsk agreement, signed in 2014 in a bid to end the fighting between Kiev’s forces and troops loyal to two self-declared breakaway republics
What’s even more dangerous is the talk of a first-strike option with nuclear weapons against Russia by Mississippi’s high-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker as reported by FOX news:
Sen. Wicker made the startling comment during an on-air interview where he was asked about the escalating situation abroad. Wicker, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he is ruling nothing out as a potential response to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin. “I would not rule out American troops on the ground,” Wicker said, adding, that “We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action”
Let’s make something clear, if the US and Europe are considering a war against Russia through Ukraine, it can escalate into another nuclear standoff reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands. Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders. Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia. Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet. The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.
The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict. Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war. Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right.
Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours.
Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs.
Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
* how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
* whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
* how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
* whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
* and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. For anyone who believes people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too.
This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
Câmara had been invited to Davos despite the fact that he was considered persona non grata by many governments and business leaders. 
