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A New York Times Sunday edition article on September 26 devoted an entire page, excluding an ad for luxurious furniture, to an examination of various efforts in the United States to initiate measures aimed at addressing historic discrimination and institutional racism.

Reparations, the demand for material and monetary compensation for the exploitation and national oppression of African Americans from the periods of colonial and antebellum enslavement right through the enactment of legalized segregation (Jim Crow) to the contemporary unequal social status and police misconduct, has gained considerable attention over the last five decades.

The New York Times begins its report with a focus on Detroit where during the post-World War II years, thousands of African American families were forcibly removed from the lower east side in the areas known as Black Bottom, Paradise Valley and others. In the mid-1950s, utilizing eminent domain, the white administration ordered people to leave certain areas of the city with almost no provisions for relocation or restitution.

Later, by the early 1960s, people living, working, worshipping, and conducting business along Hasting Street and neighboring areas were told to leave so that the Chrysler and Fisher Freeways could be constructed. These highways were designed in part to transport whites from their places of employment in the city out to the suburbs where homes and business complexes were being built. The Times article says that over 43,000 people were dislocated from the eastside within a decade.

Detroit Rebellion erupts on 12th and Clairmount, July 23, 1967 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

In 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act, also known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, was passed and signed into law by the then administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It should be noted that the defense component of the legislation was enacted under Eisenhower who was Commander of the European Theater during World War II for the U.S.

A group of lawyers and political activists within the Detroit Democratic Party apparatus have placed a proposal on the upcoming November 2 ballot which would establish a taskforce to examine what reparations would look like in the city. The language on the proposal is quite vague and there has been no real discussion on how issues such as the displacement of Black communities, by not only the existing municipal administrations at the time, but more importantly, acknowledging that these policies stemmed from the profit motives of real estate firms, banks, the automotive industry and the federal government.

Since the 1950s, the population of the city of Detroit has declined every single census period to the present. From its peak at 1.8 million people in 1950, some 70 years later the number of people estimated to be living in Detroit is 637, 601. With the encouraged abandonment and forced removals of approximately 1.2 million residents over seven decades, any task force looking at reparations would demand a program for repopulation of the city with a principal focus on African Americans and other nationally oppressed groups dislocated by the combination of private and governmental forces.

Yet the current economic trajectory of the corporate interests and their imposed-Mayor Mike Duggan does not include the reconstruction of Black communities in Detroit as part of their agenda. Even though the existing administration may not directly oppose the proposal on the November ballot, the question remains as to what type of approach will the taskforce take in recommendations to ameliorate the present situation stemming from a historical legacy of policies which negatively impacted African Americans.

After being forced from Black Bottom and Paradise Valley many within the African American population relocated to the westside area of Virginia Park. It was in this very neighborhood that the 1967 rebellion erupted on July 23rd of that year. This uprising was the largest of its kind initiated by African Americans up until that time. The Rebellion ushered in a period of resistance within the auto industry, schools and colleges, neighborhoods and unrepresentative political structures.

The election of the Detroit’s first African American Mayor Coleman A. Young was a direct result of the struggles emanating from housing discrimination, dislocation, super-exploitation within industry, corporate media distortions, the fight against police brutality and policy neglect from the successive municipal and federal administrations. Since the period of 1974-1993 when Young was in office, the consistent erosion of any semblance of political power in Detroit among African Americans is an apparent social reality.

Other Local Efforts for Reparations

An announcement by the City of Evanston, Illinois, located north of Chicago, that it would enact a reparations program by providing housing assistance grants to African Americans. The city leaders say they are recognizing the discrimination in housing which has existed for decades in major urban areas and their suburbs.

These efforts have drawn criticism from both whites as well as people within the African American community. The conservative whites are claiming that any project to assist Blacks represents “preferential treatment” and “reverse discrimination.  On the other hand, many African Americans contend that the realization of any genuine form of reparations extends far beyond the role of local governments and must hold the federal government and the multinational corporations accountable for their role in the oppression and exploitation of African Americans.

The New York Times article from September 26 reports that:

“’There are a number of detours away from what I would call true reparations, and one of those are these alleged local programs,’ said William A. Darity, Jr., an economics professor at Duke University who has studied reparations for decades. Mr. Darity argues that an adequate reparations program, totaling about $11.2 trillion for an estimated 45 million Americans — more than 13 percent of the U.S. population — who would qualify for it, can only exist on the federal level. Where cities plan to get these funds to support a local reparations program remains to be seen. Some of these local officials are looking for answers that don’t automatically equate to a huge cash payout.”

In Tulsa, Oklahoma where the centenary of the 1921 race massacre was recently commemorated, the demand for reparations is rising from the community. Over 300 African Americans were killed on May 31-June 1 when white racist mobs including police, elected officials and national guard troops destroyed churches, homes, small businesses and social organizations which dislocated thousands.

For years the City of Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma deliberately withheld information about the race massacre and instead described it as a “riot.” Three survivors of the 1921 murderous spree in Tulsa are demanding reparations for their suffering and loss of generational wealth.

The Oklahoman newspaper wrote on this question in May emphasizing:

“Across the United States, renewed calls for reparations to help right decades-old racial injustices have been part of a racial reckoning that seemed to gain momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

As the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is commemorated and survivors of the tragedy are honored, a demand for justice in the form of reparations will continue to be part of the conversation. Damario Solomon-Simmons, lead attorney for a landmark reparations lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and other entities, said the case for reparations has successfully been made in other situations across the country, and reparations for massacre survivors and their descendants are long overdue.”

Reparations and the Existing Power Structure in the 21st Century

Many scholars have documented the causal relationship between the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and the advent of industrial capitalism. Writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, among many others, have long ago made the case for the rejection of the false narratives enunciated by the beneficiaries of exploitation and national oppression.

The growth and prosperity of capitalism and imperialism in Western Europe and North America is not due to the superiority or ingenuity of the white ruling class. The profits accrued from African enslaved labor and colonial exploitation provided the economic basis for every major industry which emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, in the 21st century, a reckoning on the part of the oppressed is mounting.

With specific reference to Detroit, the African American community has played a leading role in the development of the reparations demand. The Nation of Islam (NOI), which was founded in Detroit in the early 1930s, later during the 1960s called for the allocation of substantial portions of land within or outside the U.S. where African Americans would form their own nation. The NOI believed that the descendants of slave masters owed a debt to the former enslaved mandating that this independent Black state be subsidized by the federal government for 20-25 years.

Later in Detroit during March 1968, over 500 delegates to the inaugural conference of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) demanded the granting of five southern states to Blacks in the U.S. to form their own territorial nation. The following year, in April 1969, the National Black Economic Development Conference was held at Wayne State University in Detroit. A Black Manifesto was drafted by former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Executive Secretary and International Affairs Coordinator, Dr. James R. Forman, and adopted by the gathering of several hundred people.

Forman’s Black Manifesto began with a resounding call for Black Liberation and Socialism in the U.S. The document demands the payment of $500 million to $3 billion in reparations which would be utilized to build educational institutions, media and publishing outlets, cooperative housing and agricultural programs. Forman became an executive board member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and the International Black Workers Congress (IBWC) which grew out of the post-Rebellion work of the Black proletariat within the auto plants, service sectors, communities and schools of Detroit.

In 1989, African American Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Detroit submitted House Resolution (H.R.) 40 which would set up a research committee to study the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans. The bill was reintroduced every year until his departure from Congress. As a result of the mass demonstrations and rebellions of 2020, the bill has gained new life after being voted recently out of committee for the first time in 2021.

These actual historic examples of the demands for reparations must be studied in order to place the contemporary emphasis on localized efforts in their proper perspective. The call for reparations cannot be divorced from the continuing struggles against national oppression, capitalism, imperialism and the need for socialist construction.

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

Featured image: James Forman and Lucius Walker issue the Black Manifesto in May 1969

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***

An English friend recently learned about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to either kidnap or kill journalist Julian Assange and quipped “I’ll bet he’s happy to be safe and sound in Belmarsh Prison if he has a chance to read about that!” I replied that his time in Belmarsh has been made as demeaning as possible by an English judge and the British are just as capable of executing a Jeffrey Epstein suicide or “accident” if called upon to do so by their American “cousins.” He agreed, reluctantly. Indeed, the roles of American allies Britain and Australia in what is turning out to be one of the world’s longest-playing judicial dramas has been reprehensible.

For those readers who have missed some of the fun of the Assange saga, a recap is in order. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who was living in London, was the Editor in Chief and driving force behind Wikileaks, which debuted in 2006 and was one of the alternative news sites that have sprung up over the past twenty years. WikiLeaks was somewhat unique in that it often did not write up its own stories but rather was passed documentary material by sources in government and elsewhere that it then reprinted without any editing.

Assange attracted the ire of the ruling class when he obtained in 2010 a classified video from an unidentified source that showed an unprovoked 2007 shooting incident involving U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad in which a dozen completely innocent people were killed. The government’s anger at WikiLeaks intensified when, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with classified material that demonstrated that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks also reportedly helped to arrange Snowden’s subsequent escape to Russia from Hong Kong.

The bipartisan animus directed against WikiLeaks intensified still further in the summer of 2016 when the group’s website began to release emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The immediate conclusion propagated by Team Hillary but unsupported by facts was that Russian intelligence had hacked the emails and given them to WikiLeaks.

It was perhaps inevitable that Assange’s reporting, which has never been found to be factually inaccurate, was in some circles claimed to be based on information provided to him by Russian hackers. Even though he repeatedly denied that that was the case and there are technical reasons why that was unlikely or even impossible, this led to a sharp Russophobic response from a number of intelligence and law enforcement services close to the United States. Assange was charged in Britain in November 2010 on an international warrant demanding that he be extradited to Sweden over claims that he had committed rape in that country, an accusation which later turned out to be false. He posted bail but lost a legal battle to annul the warrant and then skipped a preliminary hearing in London in June 2012 to accept asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which has diplomatic immunity. He stayed in the Embassy for eighty-two months, at which point a new government in Quito made clear that his asylum would be revoked and he would be expelled from the building. He was preparing to leave voluntarily in April 2019 when police arrived and he was arrested on a charge of his failure to appear in court seven years before which was regarded as “bail jumping.” He was sent immediately to Belmarsh high security prison, where Britain’s terrorist prisoners are confined.

After his arrest, Assange continued to be incarcerated due to a U.S. Justice Department extradition request based on the Espionage Act of 1918, apparently derived from possible interaction with the Chelsea Manning whistleblower case. Assange has now been in Belmarsh for 29 months in spite of increasing international pressure asserting that he is a journalist and should be released. The British have hesitated to extradite him on the basis of the evidence produced by the U.S. government, which included the claim that Assange aided the former U.S. Army analyst Manning break into a classified computer network in order to obtain and eventually publish classified material, but they have likewise failed to release him. The British judge denied extradition in January, suggesting that if he were to be returned forcibly to the U.S. he would likely commit suicide, but she also denied Assange bail as he was considered to be a flight risk. The U.S. appealed that verdict and the next hearing is scheduled for the end of October. It should be noted that no evidence produced by the Justice Department has plausibly linked Assange to the Russian intelligence services.

Which brings us to the Yahoo news revelation regarding the CIA plot to shoot, poison or kidnap Assange while he was sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy. It goes something like this: in 2017, Assange’s fifth year in the Embassy, the CIA debated going after him to end the alleged threat posed to government secrets by him and his organization, which was still operating and presumed to be in contact with him. WikiLeaks had at that time been publishing extremely sensitive CIA hacking tools, referred to as “Vault 7,” which constituted “the largest data loss in CIA history.”

In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him. Fortunately, saner views prevailed, particularly when the British refused to cooperate in any way with activity they regarded as clearly illegal.

So Assange is still in prison and what does it all mean? The only possible charge that would convincingly demonstrate that Assange was spy paid by Russia would be related to his possibly helping Chelsea Manning to circumvent security to steal classified material, but there is no real evidence that Assange actually did that or that he is under Russian control. So that makes him a journalist. That he has embarrassed the United States, most often when it misbehaves, is what good journalists do. But beyond that the disgraceful CIA plans to kill or abduct Assange as an option to get rid of him reveal yet again the dark side of what the United States of America has become since 9/11.

More to the point, getting rid of Assange will accomplish nothing. He worked with a number of like-minded colleagues who have been more than able to pick up where he left off. He has been largely incommunicado since he has been languishing in Belmarsh Prison and it is his associates who have continued to solicit information and publish it on their site. Mike Pompeo’s unapologetic response to this assassination or kidnapping story was “They were engaged in active efforts to steal secrets themselves, and pay others to do the same …” Of course, if all that were true Mike and the government lawyers have had an opportunity to demonstrate just that in a British court. They couldn’t do so and instead promoted the easier option of just killing someone for publishing something true. And assassination is a blunt instrument that rarely accomplishes anything. One recalls that in January 2020 Pompeo certainly participated in the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Militia Leader Muhandis in Baghdad. What did that accomplish apart from turning a nominally friendly Iraq hostile to the U.S. presence?

Or, as Assange’s lawyer put it more to the point, “As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information.” Unfortunately, that is not all that the Assange case is about. It is not just a question of truth or fiction and journalistic ethics, but rather an issue of the abuses enabled by powerful men who believe that their power is unlimited. That is the real abyss that the United States has fallen into and the only way out is to finally hold such people, starting with Pompeo, accountable for what they have done.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Dear Readers,

For much of this year, independent media – including Global Research – has felt the sting of increased online censorship”, in the form of a “crackdown on news that challenges official government narratives”.

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Project Veritas released the fifth video in its COVID vaccine investigative series today featuring a sit-down interview with Pfizer insider, Melissa Strickler. She leaked internal emails that show corporate executives telling staff to be secretive about the use of human fetal tissue in laboratory testing of the COVID vaccine.

Watch the video here.

Pfizer’s Chief Scientific Officer, Philip Dormitzer, admits aborted fetus tissue is used in the company’s vaccine program, but that employees should just stick with Pfizer’s polished narrative omitting any mention of aborted fetal tissue to avoid any issues with the public.

“HEK293T cells, used for the IVE assay, are ultimately derived from an aborted fetus,” Dormitzer said. “On the other hand, the Vatican doctrinal committee has confirmed that they consider it acceptable for Pro-Life believers to be immunized. Pfizer’s official statement couches the answer well and is what should be provided in response to an outside inquiry.”

Vanessa Gelman, who serves as Pfizer’s Senior Director of Worldwide Research, encouraged staff to be careful when talking about human fetal cells in the company’s vaccine program.

“From the perspective of corporate affairs, we want to avoid having the information on fetal cells floating out there,” Gelman said.

“The risk of communicating this right now outweighs any potential benefit we could see, particularly with general members of the public who may take this information and use it in ways we may not want out there. We have not received any questions from policy makers or media on this issue in the last few weeks, so we want to avoid raising this if possible,” she said.

In another email thread, Gelman doubled down on being secretive about this information.

We have been trying as much as possible to not mention the fetal cell lines…One or more cell lines with an origin that can be traced back to human fetal tissue has been used in laboratory tests associated with the vaccine program,” she said.

The whistleblower who shared these emails with Project Veritas, Pfizer manufacturing quality auditor Melissa Strickler, said she was not sure whether aborted fetal tissue made it to the final COVID vaccine product.

“They’re being so deceptive in their emails, it’s almost like it is in the final vaccine. It just made me not trust it,” she said.

Strickler said that Project Veritas was the only place she could go to tell her story.

“I have no one else to turn to when my own company won’t be honest with me. What I was told to do was to trust Project Veritas and to go with you guys by lawmakers, by lawyers,” she said.

The whistleblower has created a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign for herself now that she has gone public. People can support her directly by donating at the following web address: www.GiveSendGo.com/PfizerWhistleblower

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Featured image is from Project Veritas

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Sweden and Denmark on Wednesday said they will pause the use of Moderna’s COVID vaccine for younger age groups after reports of possible rare side effects, including myocarditis.

The Swedish health agency said it would pause the vaccine for people born in 1991 and later, as data pointed to an increase of myocarditis and pericarditis among youths and young adults who had been vaccinated, Reuters reported.

“The connection is especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s vaccine, ‘Spikevax,’ especially after the second dose,” the health agency said in a statement.

The health agency said it now recommends Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine instead. People born 1991 or later who received a first Moderna dose — approximately 81,000 people — will not get a second Moderna jab.

Earlier this week, the Swedish health agency said 12- to 15-year-olds would only get Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

Denmark said that, while it was already using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as the main option for 12- to 17-year-olds, it had decided to pause the Moderna vaccine for people under 18 as a “precautionary principle.”

“In the preliminary data … there is a suspicion of an increased risk of heart inflammation, when vaccinated with Moderna,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement.

The agency referred to data from a yet unpublished Nordic study, which will be sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment once the data is finalized, the agency added.

Norway, which already recommends the Comirnaty vaccine for minors, reiterated Wednesday rare side effects could happen, particularly in boys and young men, and mainly after receiving a second dose.

The EMA approved the use of Comirnaty in May, while Spikevax was approved for use in children over 12 in July, U.S. News reported.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”

Pericarditis is inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart that can cause sharp chest pain and other symptoms.

According to the the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there have been 6,561 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis reported following COVID vaccines, with 5,874 cases attributed to Pfizer, 1,515 cases to Moderna and 161 cases to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine between Dec. 14, 2020 and Sept. 24, 2021.

Among 12- to 17-year-olds, there have been 617 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, with 603 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.

VAERS is the U.S. government-run system for reporting vaccine adverse events, but some of the reports sent to the system come from outside the U.S.

Another sad story! Mom so proud that her 14-year-old son could get the COVID vaccine… but now doctors confirm her son meets the criteria for having post-vaccine myocarditis.

SUBSCRIBE #TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66Edfiw5https://t.co/CmRUHc8QMr

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2021

On June 25, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning to patient and provider fact sheets for both Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines suggesting an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis — particularly following the second dose and with onset of symptoms within a few days after vaccination.

The FDA’s update followed a June 23 meeting which included a review of information and discussion by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — a committee within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that provides advice and guidance on effective control of vaccine-preventable diseases.

During the meeting, the committee acknowledged 1,200 cases of heart inflammation in 16- to 24-year-olds, and said mRNA COVID vaccines should carry a warning statement.

Health officials said the benefits of receiving a COVID vaccine still outweigh any risks. But physicians and other public commenters during the June 23 meeting accused the CDC of exaggerating the risk of COVID to young people, and minimizing the risk of the vaccines.

The FDA approved Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for emergency use in the 12 to 15 age group in May, and approved a biologics license application for the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine Aug. 23 — leaving the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine under Emergency Use Authorization.

A third booster dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was approved for the immunocompromised and those in “high risk” professions in September — in what was deemed a controversial move by the CDC and FDA, both of which overruled the recommended guidance issued by their vaccine advisory committees.

In June, Moderna asked the FDA to expand emergency use of its COVID vaccine in adolescents aged 12 to 17. A decision has yet to be made.

Both Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) have asked the FDA to approve booster doses of their COVID vaccines for emergency use. The FDA will convene its advisory panel next week to review booster data from both J&J and Moderna.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from CHD

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On June 2, the Australian government conceded for the first time that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) supported CIA covert operations in Chile in the early 1970s. These operations created the climate for a coup against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government. The National Security Archive (NSA) recently published some of the ASIS’ station reports in Santiago, and the story has drawn attention in the Australian media.

The subject of ASIS and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) activities in Chile have been the subject of inquiry by journalists, politicians, and researchers for decades. But the Australian government has long worked to cover its paper trail in Chile. Even though the declassification of these documents for the first time is a significant development, few details are revealed by the heavily redacted documents beyond the admission that Australia had an ASIS station in Santiago and collaborated to some degree with the CIA.

Clinton Fernandes, a professor of politics at the University of New South Wales began the process to declassify the ASIS’ station reports in Chile in 2017 with barrister Ian Latham and solicitor Hugh Macken. According to Fernandes, when he started searching for the archives on ASIS records in Chile, the Australian “government’s response was that we can’t even confirm or deny the existence of records.”

On May 26, Fernandes and his legal team filed a 16-page set of arguments for the declassification of ASIS records on Chile and in early June, Fernandes was finally given files on ASIS activities in Chile.

Decades of Secrecy

Fernandes was not the first to look into ASIS’ activities in Chile in the early 1970s. Journalist Ian Frykberg published an article in October 1974 in the Sydney Morning Herald citing two former intelligence agents who claimed it was likely that the Australian mission in Chile was working with the CIA by “acting as the conduct for money passing from the CIA to newspapers and individuals leaking propaganda information to newspapers and other influential people.”

On December 2, 1974, Clyde Cameron, the Labor and Immigration Minister wrote to the Attorney General Senator Lionel Murphy about ASIO agents in Chile.

“I am particularly disturbed to learn that ASIO agents have been posing as migration officers in South America,” Cameron wrote, “and I am now convinced—though firm denials are to be expected—that the reports of ASIO collaboration with the CIA in bringing about the overthrow of the Allende Government is very close to the mark.”

In 1977, a Royal Commission into Australia’s Intelligence and Security (popularly known as the Hope Royal Commission) was tabled before the Australian Parliament. At the commission, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam stated:

“It has been written—and I cannot deny it—that when my Government took office, Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the government of Chile.”

In 1983, Seymour Hersh published a biography on ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entitled The Price of Power. In that book, the New York Times investigative journalist claimed that since the CIA was aware that its agents were under close surveillance by the new Allende administration, Washington turned to its allies— in this case, Australia. By 1971, Hersh argues that the CIA station in Santiago “was collecting the kind of information that would be essential for a military dictatorship in the days following a coup–lists of civilians to be arrested, those to be provided with protection, and government installations to be occupied immediately.” A year later, Australia “agreed to monitor and control three agents on behalf of the CIA and relay their information to Washington.”

Australia’s involvement in the events following the coup continued for decades. In 1989, journalists Brian Toohey and William Pinwill published a book on ASIS entitled Oyster: The Story of The Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Another Labor administration in Canberra took the authors to court to prevent them from publishing any material on ASIS that had not been vetted by the government. Toohey and Pinwill’s final manuscript was negotiated with officials from ASIS and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It reported that, while the November 1970 CIA proposal for ASIS to become involved in Chile was accepted by the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, ASIS itself “noted there was no vital Australian political or economic interests in Chile at that time.”

In recent years, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) journalist Florencia Melgar broke the international story that notorious Pinochet secret police agent and alleged torturer Adriana Rivas (at the time on the run from Chilean authorities) was living in Sydney. For the story, Melgar said she submitted a formal request to the Australian government to investigate ASIS activities in Chile, but her request was turned down, and she was “warned” that she “risked legal prosecution” if some of the material she obtained  through Chile’s Foreign Affairs official records went to print.

Thus what Fernandes and his legal team achieved is no small feat. Australia, as an article in the New York Times accurately noted recently, may be the world’s most secretive democracy.

The Contents of the ASIS Station Reports

Although this was the first time reports officially recognized that the Australian government had an ASIS station in Santiago, Chile from 1971 to July 1973, the information published at the NSA is mainly technical. According to the NSA itself, the “documents turned over to Fernandes contain few revelations of actual covert operations, intelligence gathering or liaison relations with the CIA in Chile; those sections of the records are completely censored.”

Most of the communications relate to the difficulties that Australians faced carrying out their tasks in Chile. Reports include comments on everyday events like communication delays, station vehicle deliveries, agent lodgings, and observations like “[a] fluent knowledge of Spanish in SANTIAGO is a necessity.” According to Fernandes, another document notes the difficulty ASIS had in getting a safe while “there are several mentions about how beautiful Chilean women are.”

Despite these seemingly insignificant reports, an April 1973 memorandum states that if Australia’s role in Chile at the request of the CIA became public, Prime Minister Whitlam “would find himself in an extremely difficult political situation as, quite clearly, it would be impossible for him to present the MO9 [ASIS] presence in Santiago as being in the direct Australian national interest.”

The importance of the April 1973 memorandum cannot be understated. Domestically, Whitlam came to power with the support of a large movement against the war in Vietnam. Once in office, his was the most progressive administration Canberra had seen in decades, promoting a wide range of social policies. If Australia’s activities in Chile had been discovered during Whitlam’s term in office, a section of his own Labor base could have become hostile.

By July 1973, the ASIS station was allegedly disbanded, although NSA documents indicate that  “one ASIS agent reportedly stayed in Santiago until after the September 11, 1973, military coup.”

During the time that this final Australian ASIS agent was allegedly in Chile, leftists were being violently tortured and executed by the Chilean military. Peter Kornbluh, Director of Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects at the NSA would not speculate on that agent’s activities.

“That information” said Kornbluh “is contained in still-classified documents that the Australian government should release for the verdict of history.”

Australia and the Pinochet Connection Today

In November, former Pinochet secret police agent Rivas will return to the Federal Court in Sydney to continue fighting her extradition. She is wanted by the judicial system in Chile for the alleged kidnapping and disappearance of seven members of the Chilean Communist Party. Rivas, a former member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence, DINA) and personal secretary to Manuel Contreras, the head of Chilean intelligence (1973-1977), has already lost two appeals. The eventual conclusion of her case could set a precedent.

According to Chilean-Australian journalist Juan Miranda, there is “real proof that other members of Pinochet’s secret service” could be “living in Australia.” Miranda claims these possible members of the regime are being investigated, and at some point their presence will be raised with authorities in Australia.

Diego Andrés Peñaloza Pinto is a 28-year-old law graduate from the University of West Sydney whose family emigrated to Australia from Chile in order to escape political persecution. Several of his family members were disappeared or killed by the Chilean secret police.

“It is concerning and disappointing to know that the Australian taxpayer was duped into funding Australia’s involvement in the toppling of a democratically elected government,” said Peñaloza after ASIS’ activities in Chile were confirmed.

Peñaloza’s mother, Sandra del Carmen Pinto, added that it saddens her “that the country that gave me so much helped people that took so much from me.”

Together with 70 Chilean-Australians, Pinto has added her name to an open letter sent to Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) demanding that the Australian government apologise for its participation in the overthrow of the Allende government. The open letter also requests that “the government of Australia declassify all necessary files regarding ASIS activities in Chile in the 1970s.”

Although his work led to the Australian government admitting ASIS role in the overthrow of Allende, Fernandes has few hopes that he will ever see the full declassification of Canberra’s reports on Chile or countries like East Timor and Cambodia. If those reports were published, Fernandes is sure that they would show Australia’s intelligence agencies’ “total immersion in the CIA’s activities.”

The Australian government signed the new strategic defence alliance AUKUS with the U.K. and United States last month to build a series of nuclear-powered submarines and deepen cyber and artificial intelligence cooperation. In light of a recent series of Australian journalists and whistle blowers being threatened with legal actions or even arrested for their attempts to expose abuses by the Australian government, Fernandes’ comments should come as no surprise. Australia’s secretive nature, and who its key international allies are, has largely remained unchanged since September 11, 1973 when president Allende was violently removed from office in Chile.

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Rodrigo Acuña is an independent journalist on Latin American politics and host of Alborada’s Indestructible Podcast. He holds a PhD from Macquarie University. You can follow him on Twitter at @rodrigoac7.

Featured image: President Salvador Allende in Rancagua, Chile in 1971. (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional Chile, Wikimedia Commons)

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***

Iran has closed its airspace to Azerbaijan’s air force, which supplies military equipment to the Nakhijevan Autonomous Republic, Haqqin.az reported Tuesday, October 5. According to Azeri media publications, the country’s defense department has already been notified of the change.

“Baku regarded this decision as another betrayal against Azerbaijan, which is instigated by the Armenian government,” the Defense Ministry reportedly said. [sic]

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From Press TV: Iran concerned by Israel presence in Caucasus, will not accept any geopolitical change in region: FM

Iran wants Russia to be wary of “potential changes in region’s borders”

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian wants Russia’s “to be sensitive about any potential changes in borders across the region.”

Amirabdollahian made the remarks on Tuesday, October 5 in Moscow, ahead of his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Iranian foreign policy chief said Iran “certainly will not tolerate geopolitical change and map change in the Caucasus”, Al Jazeera reports.

Amirabdollahian said Iran expects Russia “to be sensitive about any potential changes in borders across the region, and be sensitive about the presence of terrorists and the movements of the Zionist regime that threatens regional peace and stability”.

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Tension has been high between Iran and Azerbaijan, which share a 700km (430 mile) border, since mid-September. Iran’s army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have recently mobilised forces and held military drills close to its northwestern borders with Azerbaijan amid lingering tensions following Azerbaijan’s 44-day war with Armenia last year. Azerbaijan and Turkey, in response, launched a joint military drill starting on Wednesday.

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Azerbaijan shuts office, mosque linked to Iranian Supreme Leader

Azerbaijan has closed a mosque and an office linked to Iran’s supreme leader in Baku just days after Tehran held military maneuvers close to the two countries’ common border, RFE/RL reports.

“The [Husseiniyya] mosque and the office of Seyyed Ali Akbar Ojaghnejad, representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Baku, were sealed and closed today by order of the authorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan,” Iran’s Tasnim agency said on October 5.

Azerbaijan’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that the cause for the closure, which also affected other indoor spaces, was a surge in coronavirus infections.

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Ojaghnejad has been Khamenei’s representative in Azerbaijan since 1996, according to the website of his office, which is located on the premises of the mosque.

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Iran’s embassy in Baku said in a statement on the evening of October 5 that it had followed up on the matter through diplomatic channels, adding that there had been no advance warning of the move.

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Tensions have been high recently between the two neighbors, who share a 700-kilometer border. Iranian ground forces began maneuvers near the frontier on October 1, a move criticized by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website

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

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***

It’s now been more than eighteen months since governments began the new social experiment now known as “lockdowns.” Prior to 2020, forced “social distancing” was generally considered to be too costly in societal terms to justify such a risky experiment.

Yet in 2020, led by health technocrats at the World Health Organization, nearly all national governments in the world suddenly and without precedent embraced the idea of lockdowns.

On the other hand, the Swedish regime rejected the idea.

For this act of iconoclasm, the Swedish government was pilloried by media organizations and non-Swedish government officials worldwide. The predictions of doom and of a widespread Swedish bloodbath were ubiquitous. Months later, even when it became clear Sweden was not the death-addled outlier many assumed it would be, it was common to see articles declaring Swedish covid policy to be a “disaster.”

Even eighteen months later, as the Sweden-is-doomed narrative broke down even more, critics of Sweden contort themselves to create an anti-Swedish narrative. Consider this August 2021 article at Business Insider, for example, which carefully slices and dices the data to make Sweden’s outcomes look bad. The author slyly writes:

Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.

Note the sleight of hand used here. In one sentence, the comparison focuses on diagnoses compared to the UK and Italy. This is surely because actual deaths from covid are fewer per million in Sweden than in either of the UK or Italy. Indeed, the author with this comparison only succeeds in showing us that covid is less fatal in Sweden where there are more cases but fewer deaths. The author then quickly changes the subject to comparisons in deaths so as to make sure Sweden compares unfavorably to Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

These claims are becoming increasingly desperate, since in terms of excess deaths Sweden is better off than most of Europe overall, and also better off than most other northern European countries. (And much better than southern European countries.) Moreover, “excess mortality” is a better measure of deaths in a given country since it provides a broader view of the actual effects of both covid and covid policy.

Certainly, one can find some European regimes that had fewer deaths proportionally. Norway, Denmark, and Finland have remarkably low numbers of covid deaths compared to all of Europe.

But this fails to explain why Sweden’s nonbloodbath compares favorably to most EU member states, including France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and others.

For example, as of late August, excess mortality in Sweden was approximately 785 per million people. In France, the total is 988 per million, and in Spain, it is 1,917 per million. In EU nonmember the United Kingdom, the total is 1,657 per million.

This trend was already becoming apparent months ago, and in March Reuters reported,

Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively…. Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden.

Other data, also according to Reuters, “which included an adjustment to account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal mortality patterns of countries analysed,” Placed Sweden at eighteenth out of twenty-six in terms of mortality. The “highest” ranked—that is, the worst ranked—were Poland, Spain, and Belgium.

Another way of comparing Sweden to the rest of Europe is to look at excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 compared to “average monthly deaths” from 2016 to 2019.

In the time since February 2020, total deaths (measured as a percentage of the 2016–19 average) were lower in Sweden than in the “EU 27” in fourteen out of eighteen months.

Granting that Denmark, Norway, and Finland all compare favorably against Sweden, most other European countries can’t boast of such things.

Compared to France, Sweden’s excess monthly deaths were lower in thirteen out of eighteen months in that period. Comparisons were similar when looking at the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. Indeed, among Europe’s large nations, only Germany fares better than Sweden.

So, yes, if we insist on cherry-picking exactly three countries to which to compare Sweden—i.e., Finland, Denmark, and Norway—Sweden looks like some kind of outlier. But with most other countries in Europe, plus the UK, Sweden compares well. Moreover, even if Sweden were only “about the same” as other European countries, this would still contradict the prophecies of doom handed down by the public health technocrats.

None of this “proves” of course that Sweden adopted the ideal response to the spread of disease. But at the very least, the Sweden experience betrays the solemn predictions of so many health “experts” who predicted total disaster for Sweden. Moreover, even if Sweden did have worse outcomes than most of Europe, that would not justify the widespread destruction of human rights necessary to force people into lockdowns, unemployment, and social isolation. The utilitarian approach is a road to untrammeled state power. But even the utilitarian approach doesn’t work for the lockdown advocates who fail even by their own metrics.

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***

Instead of successfully pressuring India into abandoning its special and privileged strategic partners in Russia, the US’ threatened sanctions might backfire by sabotaging the Quad.

The US has consistently threatened to sanction India under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for its planned purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems that it expects to begin receiving in November. Senior parliamentarian Subramanian Swamy said in late September that he heard from unnamed sources that the US does indeed plan to make good on these threats instead of extending a sanctions waiver like some in India hope. Nevertheless, he believes that US-Indian relations won’t be too adversely affected. This comes shortly after the Quad held its first-ever in-person summit in the US last week.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying criticized that gathering due to its members’ intent to sow discord between her country and its regional partners. The Quad is comprised of Australia, India, Japan, and the US, all of whom are suspected of attempting to “contain” China through a variety of hybrid means, including conventional military provocations, so-called supply chain “decoupling”, and information warfare, among others. India is regarded as one of this emerging US-led military bloc’s main members because of the vanguard role that it could play in these destabilization efforts due to its neighboring proximity to China.

Alas, even India’s potentially leading role in the US’ grand strategic campaign to “contain” China isn’t enough to spare it from its “ally’s” weaponization of economic-financial instruments through sanctions. America is still caught up in its Trump-era Russophobic craze and will stop at nothing to sabotage Moscow’s historical military relations with New Delhi for zero-sum aims. Ironically, the zero-sum outcome that ultimately transpires might not be the one that the US’ decision makers expect. Instead of successfully pressuring India into abandoning its special and privileged strategic partner, the US’ threatened sanctions might backfire by sabotaging the Quad.

To explain, India has reaffirmed on numerous occasions that it has no intent of reneging on its S-400 deal with Russia, the latter of which has full faith in its partner’s sincerity. This means that no one should expect New Delhi to dump Moscow due to Washington’s sanctions pressure. It’s unclear exactly what form its CAATSA sanctions might take, but they’d nevertheless represent the US imposing punitive economic-financial costs against one of its top Quad partners. It would be a humiliation for the proud nation of India to retain the same level of military cooperation with the US after that happens, which is why relations might actually worsen.

Not only that, but the US might not even want to cooperate as closely with India as before due to America’s concerns that its partner’s acquisition of Russia’s S-400s could somehow or another enable Moscow to tap into their military communication networks. These fears are factually unfounded and are only being used as the pretext for pressuring India into dropping its special and privileged strategic partner so that the US can replace its leading role in that country’s military-industrial complex, but they’d nevertheless also compel the US to limit its military cooperation with India if it wants to uphold the so-called “credibility” of its false claims.

In the possible scenario of India and the US limiting their presently expanding military cooperation with one another, let alone scaling it back through either India’s voluntary withdrawal from some Quad exercises or the US’ exclusion of it from the same, the CAATSA sanctions might actually be a blessing in disguise for Eurasia. The South Asian state already saw how the US abandoned its Afghan allies in August then backstabbed its oldest ally France the month after by poaching its AUS$90 billion submarine deal with Australia from it through AUKUS. It’s about time that India wakes up and realizes that it cannot rely on US support to “contain” China.

The sooner that this happens, whether out of its own will by proudly taking a step back from the Quad in the event that it’s sanctioned or due to the US piling further pressure upon it after imposing those threatened punitive economic-financial costs on India, the better that it’ll be for Eurasian stability. India would learn the long-overdue lesson about America’s unreliability as an “ally” with comparatively less costs than if it was misled into provoking another kinetic conflict with China only to be abandoned by America like many expect would inevitably happen. For that reason, it might not be all that bad if the US sanctions India later this year.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

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***

Chatter of an incoming large-scale ground operation in Greater Idlib have ramped up following the apparent failure to negotiate any solution between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

As the days were leading up to Erdogan and Putin’s meeting the situation seemed rather calm, and that remained for a few days.

Following that, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the other terrorist factions in Greater Idlib renewed their frequent ceasefire violations.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) responded, and Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) airstrikes also continued their near-daily occurrence.

On October 5^th, the SAA sent a large convoy of reinforcements to the Idlib frontlines, as seen in several videos.

Turkey is also making its own deployments to Syria, sending reinforcements so as not to be caught unprepared in case of an operation starting.

The Saraya Ansar Abu Bakr al-Siddiq faction announced that it had used an IED to attack a convoy of the Turkish Armed Forces on the Nakhlai-Erich highway in the Syrian province of Idlib.

The group is one of the terrorist factions in the region, and is presumably protected by Turkey, but still targets it.

There are two versions of why that is happening:

The first is the attack is a sort of revenge for all the Syrians who were killed by Turkish soldiers along the border. The second version is that the group was allegedly “planted” by Damascus to sabotage the Greater Idlib terrorists and Turkey army from behind enemy lines.

Still, on October 5^th, full fire exchange returned in Greater Idlib.

SAA shelling targeted the towns of al-Bara and Kansafra, and the villages of al-Fatira, Fleifel, Sfuhun and al-Ruwaiha in Zawiya Mountain, south of Idlib, with rockets and heavy artillery.

Additionally, bombing targeted the villages and towns of Tuqad, Kafr Nuran and Mekalbis, west of Aleppo, and the Ghab Plain, west of Hama.

The Turkistan Islamic Party targeted government forces’ positions in the village of Tanjara, west of Hama.

The mutual shelling coincided with an intense flight of Russian drones over the targeted areas.

For months, the northwestern regions of Syria have been witnessing mutual bombardment between the two sides of the conflict in different areas.

There is certainly a limit to how long this constant exchange can continue before the SAA and Russia’s VKS are forced to go on the offensive and move in. After all, the Idlib factions have little interest to push outwards as they are protected by Turkey’s observation posts, to a point.

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***

President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema.

But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.

Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, 6 more than Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, healthcare, clean energy or fighting poverty.

The 2022 military spending bill (NDAA or National Defense Authorization Act) that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending, a $37 billion increase over this year’s military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill—but don’t expect too much of a debate there either, as most senators are “yes men” when it comes to feeding the war machine.

Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Rep. Sara Jacobs to strip $24 billion that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an across-the-board 10% cut (with exceptions for military pay and healthcare).

After adjusting for inflation, this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020, and is only 10% below the post-WWII record set by Bush II in 2008 under cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Joe Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War U.S. president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Truman to Bush I.

In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms build-up that Trump justified with his absurd claims that Obama’s record military spending had somehow depleted the military.

As with Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the JCPOA with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests that he is happier to continue Trump’s ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.

In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget.

Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the 10% cut in the failed Ocasio-Cortez Amendment, which garnered support from only 86 Democratic Reps and was opposed by 126 Dems and every Republican.

Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume over 60% of discretionary spending.

“How’re you going to pay for it?” clearly applies only to “money for people,” never to “money for war.” Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, healthcare and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan.

A study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields: 26,700 jobs when invested in education; 17,200 in healthcare; 16,800 in the green economy; or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments.

It is tragic that the only form of Keynesian stimulus that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democratic Members of Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year based on the Maryland poll.

So why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that Members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the “unwarranted influence” of Eisenhower’s infamous Military-Industrial Complex has become more entrenched and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.

The Military-Industrial Complex exploits flaws in what is at best a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the public and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next 13 military powers. This is especially tragic at a time when the wars of mass destruction that have served as a pretext for wasting these resources for 20 years may finally, thankfully, be coming to an end.

The five largest U.S. arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) account for 40% of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions, and they have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts since 2001 in return for those contributions. Altogether, 54% of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion since 2001.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the Military-Industrial Complex, and their senior members are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress. So it is a dereliction of duty for their colleagues to rubber-stamp military spending bills on their say-so without serious, independent scrutiny.

The corporate consolidation, dumbing down and corruption of U.S. media and the isolation of the Washington “bubble” from the real world also play a role in Congress’s foreign policy disconnect.

There is another, little-discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, and that can be found in a fascinating 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process.”

The “Hall of Mirrors” study surprisingly found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”

The authors made a counter-intuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”

This was particularly striking in the case of Democratic staffers, who were often convinced that their own liberal views placed them in a minority of the public when, in fact, most of their constituents shared the same views. Since congressional staffers are the primary advisors to members of Congress on legislative matters, these misperceptions play a unique role in Congress’s anti-democratic foreign policy.

Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38% of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.

On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect … [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”

It is not always easy for a member of the public to find out whether their Representative votes as they would like or not. News reports rarely discuss or link to actual roll-call votes, even though the Internet and the Congressional Clerk’s office make it easier than ever to do so.

Civil society and activist groups publish more detailed voting records. Govtrack.us lets constituents sign up for emailed notifications of every single roll-call vote in Congress. Progressive Punch tracks votes and rates Reps on how often they vote for “progressive” positions, while issues-related activist groups track and report on bills they support, as CODEPINK does at CODEPINK Congress. Open Secrets enables the public to track money in politics and see how beholden their Representatives are to different corporate sectors and interest groups.

When Members of Congress come to Washington with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt Military-Industrial Complex, which has brought us only endless war, and to listen to their constituents.

The Hall of Mirrors study should be required reading for congressional staffers, and they should reflect on how they are personally and collectively prone to the misperceptions it revealed.

Members of the public should beware of assuming that their Representatives vote the way they want them to, and instead make serious efforts to find out how they really vote. They should contact their offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold them accountable for their votes on issues they care about.

Looking forward to next year’s and future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful but even more dangerous arms race with Russia and China.

As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon–and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy.

While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in healthcare and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Featured image is from Rise Up Times

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***

On the Steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 1st, celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Code, Dr. Nagase gave this powerful speech.

Dr. Daniel Nagase has been a doctor for over 15 years, he graduated from Dalhousie Medical School in 2004.

He has been an emergency doctor for 10 years and has been working in rural underserviced communities throughout Alberta since 2015.

He has a story he’d like to share with you about what happened after he gave Covid patients Ivermectin in a small hospital west of Red Deer.

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Dr. Maximilian C. Forte gets to the heart of the matter. We must face honestly that unscrupulous bankers, corporate hucksters, media hacks, and corrupt politicians have succeeded in pushing bogus science on the mostly compliant leadership of our universities. This exercise of power over a weak and servile academia is pretty much the death knell for what once could be credibly described as institutions of higher learning.

Now we have institutions of compliance with lethal and injurious emergency measures. These measures have been imposed on us without imposing on the ascendant authorities any real requirement to prove with credible evidence that a genuine emergency actually exists. Courts have failed, the media has failed, the medical profession has failed and now the universities have failed on a gargantuan scale to provide reasonable checks that might balance against the utter failure of our so-called parliamentary democracy to provide honest and conscientious governance.

Prof. Forte points to the absurdity of  “a university that effectively bans free speech?” If only that was the problem. Unfortunately it goes much deeper. Why have there been so few faculty voices speaking with the clarity of Prof. Byram Bridle and Prof. Denis Rancourt to identify the mounting travesties that have been obvious from the inception of the manufactured COVID crisis?

Mostly our faculty associations have been compliant right up to this advanced stage of the crisis when all constitutional protections for our inalienable rights and freedoms are being bulldozed under in ways that might become permanent and irreversible.

As for protecting the principles of academic freedom, I accuse our own Canadian Association of University Teachers of playing fast and loose on that score. Our association of faculty associations has not lived up to the heavy responsibilities it bears to defend academic freedom. Instead, CAUT is well in line with the betrayal of social democracy by the trade union movement and the NDP. As I see it, CAUT is more than willing to host the woke perspectives whose proponents seem to want more masking, more lockdowns, and more submission to cradle-to-grave regimes of mandatory vaccines no matter how unsafe nor how ineffective.

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From Dr. Maximilian C. Forte

Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, QC, Canada, H3G-1M8

October 5

It is because of situations such as these, that I wonder why some colleagues–who are opposed to the mandates, the restrictions, and all the propaganda that goes with them–are fighting so hard to get exemptions. Who would want to preserve their place in such an institution? A university, that effectively bans free speech? It defeats the purpose of wanting to be an academic, and certainly wanting to remain. One might want to keep their job in a university…but when there is no university any longer as such, all you are keeping is “a job”. Sorry, but I would rather maintain the right to say what I think, and be folding sheets at the local Days Inn.

Imagine the inversion we have achieved here: a professor has to live in fear of what students might say.

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The only surprise was that it did not come sooner.  Big Tech whistleblowers are not exactly running out of the offices of Silicon Valley, so it was with some excitement that Facebook could produce a person willing enough to show us the laundry, with the dirt still caking the content.

And the laundry in question proved to be bountiful, with internal company documents running into the thousands showing a fruit salad range of mendacity, deception and approaches to combating hate, violence and misinformation on its platform.  The Wall Street Journal capitalised.

Before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Production, Product Safety, and Data Security, Frances Haugen, who revealed her identity on October 3, elaborated.  Lawmakers were certainly more pleased with Haugen’s frankness, a far cry from the testimony of Facebook global head of Safety, Antigone Davis, who gave little away the week prior.

As an algorithm specialist, Haugen spent time at Facebook dealing with civic misinformation, counterespionage and democracy.  She also had previous stints at Google, Pinterest and Yelp. “Having worked on four different types of social networks, I understand how complex and nuanced these problems are,” she claimed in her opening statement.  “However, the choices being made inside Facebook are disastrous – for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy and for our democracy – and that is why we must demand Facebook make changes.”

Where there were conflicts between profits and safety, these were resolved in favour of the former. “The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat.”  Online discussions (Haugen calls it “dangerous online talk”) had, in some cases, “led to violence that harms and even kills people.”

The hearing itself spent much time on Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, which emphasises interactions (likes and comments) from those the company deems the use closest to.  While not in of itself pernicious, data scientists, Haugen’s documents reveal, were concerned that this focus was having a skewed effect.

Another concern for Haugen is the company’s use of engagement-based ranking.  Content receiving more reactions from users are given ranking in terms of priority, meaning that violence and misinformation receive prominence.  In “basically damning 10 years of my own work”, Haugen suggested that a chronological ranking system would be preferable.

Facebook’s relationship with information – and misinformation – is deeply problematic.  Safeguards were implemented in the leadup to the 2020 US presidential election, only to be removed.  After the Capitol riot of January 6, they were reintroduced.  This, Haugen suggests, demonstrates a false logic at play: that using its current algorithms is necessary for profits while stressing safety would diminish them.  Not so, claims the whistleblower: having oversight governed by researchers, academics, and government bodies could actually aid growth.  “With appropriate oversight and some of these constraints, it’s possible that Facebook could actually be a much more profitable company five or ten years down the road, because it wasn’t as toxic, and not as many people quit it.”

These suggestions are not free of their own problems.  Government oversight is hardly a guarantee on the veracity and verity of information and having an example of it set in the United States is bound to see it replicated in other countries.  Nor is it a guarantee against censorship, ever the prerogative of moralising lawmakers keen to use the message of safety to block material.

Haugen also wishes to see reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects the social media platforms from legal liability.  Should the algorithms in question be shown to cause harm, then the company should be made liable.  “Facebook should not be given a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth and reactiveness over public safety.”

Zuckerberg’s response to the Haugen show was predictably filled with denial.  “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.”  He found it “difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.”  The examples he adduced were themselves suggestive of how deep the mire has become: the creation of “an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues”; the employment of “so many people” in “fighting harmful content”.  But what really irked Zuckerberg was the suggestion that “we prioritize profit over safety and well-being.”

The company chief can hardly be too bothered: he is vacationing.  It fell to the demons of Facebook PR to go to work.  “Today,” Director of Policy Communications Lena Pietsch fired in statement, “a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives – and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question.”

The statement had it all: demeaning the whistleblower’s testimony as irrelevant, ill-informed and unimportant, largely because she was unimportant to begin with, lacked access to the relevant channels and could not possibly have formed a valid opinion about the company.  That said, Facebook did agree that it was “time to begin to create standard rules for the internet.”  This involved an over to you message to Congress.  “It’s been 25 years since the rules of the internet have been updated and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”

Beyond these disclosures, Facebook will be fighting with committed savagery to convince those on the Hill that change, were it to happen, should be minimal.  From the company’s perspective, it has to be, given the central tenets of surveillance capitalism that underpin its success.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.  Email: [email protected]

Video: “How Many People Are We Going to Kill if We Keep Following this Narrative”, Asks Ontario Emergency Physician

By Dr. Rochagné Kilian and Strong and Free Canada, October 06, 2021

Dr. Rochagné Kilian, an ER doctor in Owen Sound, Ontario, resigned in protest of mandatory vaccines and the corruption of our health services. Dr. Kilian came to public attention when the recording of the Grey Bruce hospital board was released.

Video Emerges Where Fauci and Others Planned for a “Universal mRNA Flu Vaccine” Which Became the “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine” Because People Were Not Afraid Enough of the Flu Virus

By Brian Shilhavy, October 06, 2021

Last night Alex Jones of Infowars.com did a special broadcast regarding an October, 2019 video that they had just become aware of that was a panel discussion hosted by the Milken Institute discussing the need for a Universal Flu Vaccine.

Pure Insanity: Now Anyone with Any Disease in Alberta Can be Counted as a “COVID” Case

By Ethan Huff, October 05, 2021

In an announcement, Alberta Chief Health Officer Deena Hinshaw explained that people who test “negative” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), as well as people who never get tested at all but who show respiratory symptoms of any kind, will be automatically added to the official case count that the government relays to the media.

People are Dying Worldwide: “Foreign Aid” to Finance 1.8 Billion Vaccine Doses. Western Governments, Billionaires and Big Pharma Come to the “Rescue of the Poor Countries”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 07, 2021

The mRNA “experimental” vaccine was launched in mid to late December 2020. In many countries, there was a significant and immediate shift in mortality following the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccine.

The Covid “Killing Spree” – And the “Robotization” of the Survivors. We Need A Nuremberg 2.0

By Peter Koenig, October 06, 2021

During Hitler’s Nazi Reich, doctors and nurses were obliged to kill disabled or handicapped children – for the good of society, for obtaining a clean Arian State. And for economics. Most of them complied. They killed innocent children, adults, and old-age people as well, for the same purpose. The elderly and infirm were injected with a poison, so they wouldn’t cost money to the state.

Why Is the UN Dictating Canada’s Provincial Health Policies?

By Prof. Scott Masson, October 06, 2021

There can be no rationale for trashing the Nuremberg Code that does not destroy the ethical legitimacy of health care, no appeal to the public good when conscience has been denied any validity, and no claim to defend a health-care system that dismisses thousands of health professionals that does not simultaneously destroy it.

Lessons for Ethically-compromised Physicians in 2021 from the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg (1946 – 1947)

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, October 06, 2021

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.

Video: Dr. Kary B. Mullis. “No Infection or Illness Can be Accurately Diagnosed with the PCR Test”

By Kary B. Mullis and Dr. Gary Null, October 06, 2021

In 1996, Dr. Gary Null interviewed the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Kary B. Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test. He stated that no infection or illness can be accurately diagnosed with PCR. He also discussed his thoughts regarding Dr. Fauci and the scientific and medical establishments.

J’Accuse! The Gene-based “Vaccines” Are Killing People. Governments Worldwide Are Lying to You the People, to the Populations They Purportedly Serve

By Doctors for COVID Ethics, October 06, 2021

The signal of harm is now indisputably overwhelming, and, in line with universally accepted ethical standards for clinical trials, Doctors for Covid Ethics demands that the COVID-19 “vaccination” programme be halted immediately worldwide.

“The Harmful Behaviour of Facebook”: Social Media Destabilizes Democracy and Harm Users’ Mental Health

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, October 06, 2021

Controversies involving the role of social networks in the contemporary world are on the rise. Far beyond the blackout on October 4, large technology companies have recently been criticized for acting in a socially destructive way, harming the mental health of their users and fostering the polarization of society.

The Police State’s Reign of Terror Continues … With Help from the Supreme Court

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, October 06, 2021

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Constitution being inexorably bled to death by the very institution (the judicial branch of government) that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.

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***

Under the aegis of the newly established Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Russians are now gearing up to revamp the Ajaokuta Iron and Steel Complex that was abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, and further take up energy, oil and gas projects in Nigeria, as well as facilitate trade between Nigeria and Russia.

After Soviet’s collapse, Russia has been struggling to find ways of regaining part of its Soviet-era economic influence throughout Africa, and Nigeria has been high on Russia’s agenda for reviving multifaceted business ties, at least to share the market and take up opportunities similar to external players such as the United States, Europe and China.

President Olusegun Obasanjo visited Russia in 2001. Since then, there had been a number of deals and business proposals, these previously and in theory featured in Russia-Nigerian relations. As far back in June 2009, Dmitry Medvedev as president visited Nigeria for the first time, held topmost state level talks on possible nuclear energy, oil exploration and military cooperation. There were talks also focusing on the establishment of petrochemical plant in Nigeria. Alongside there was also a declaration on principles of friendly relations and partnership between Nigeria and the Russian Federation.

Nowhere, among the four nation-tour, was it more obvious than in oil-rich Nigeria when Medvedev expressed regret saying Russia was “almost too late in engaging with Africa. In fact, work with our African partners should have been started earlier.” How serious is Russia’s engagement with Africa, even after the four-nation tour – Egypt, Nigeria, Angola and Namibia? Medvedev’s statement still has some relevance, and a lot more implications and interpretations.

Russia has been prospecting for its nuclear-power ambitions down the years. According to Russia’s Rosatom, the protocol signed at that time on nuclear offered the possibility of bilateral cooperation for the development of nuclear infrastructure and the joint exploration and exploitation of uranium deposits. The aim, two nuclear plants estimated cost at US$20 billion – the bulk of it by Russia, is to boost Nigeria’s electricity supply.

Russia’s second-largest oil company, and privately controlled Lukoil, has gone forth and back these several years with plans to expand its operations in Nigeria, and in a number of West African countries. There has been a long-dead silence after Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, signed an agreement with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on the exploration and exploitation of gas reserves with a new joint venture company known as NiGaz Energy Company.

Nigeria needs Russian technology to boost industrialization just as Russia needs Nigeria as a market for its industrial products and military equipment. There is weak indication that the two countries have sufficient and adequate perception of each other. This, in part, is responsible for the lack of the political will to implement the existing bilateral agreements.

There are many other aspects of the bilateral relations. With high interest, Russians are pushing for military-technical cooperation. The supply of Russian military equipment could play a high value addition to the fight against notorious Boko Haram. In most of the economic deals, the Nigerian political elites are under strong influence of Beijing, London and Washington. The interest is to distance Moscow from African countries.

Nigeria is an economic powerhouse in West African region. As well known, Nigeria is one of the Africa’s fastest growing economies and it boosts the largest population. Russia and Nigeria have some sort of economic relations, but these are not consistent with the long-standing cordial relations between both countries.

In addition, Nigeria is a vast market with huge potentials for prospective foreign investors and so is Russia. Regrettably, investors from both sides appear to know little or nothing about these opportunities. This is, usually attributed to the apparent inadequate knowledge of the many investment opportunities in both countries.

Statistics are extremely hard to obtain. By the end of 2018, Russia’s trade with Nigeria was almost US$600 million, still seen as far below the full potential of trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. Stunningly, talking about bilateral economic footprints, both Russians and Nigerians are unprepared to give needed useful information about Russia’s investment in Nigeria.

The term – bilateral relations – seen as a two-way street, Nigeria’s presence in the Russian Federation is only the diplomatic representative office. Russians hardly encourage African presence in the Russian Federation, and on the other hand, Africans are simply undesirous or unenthusiastic about developing commercial links except a few countries. Despite criticisms, reports show that majority prefer traditional markets – the United States and Europe, and now Asian region. The African political elite and business people choose the United States and Europe for their holidays and as tourism destinations.

Undoubtedly, Africa is growing despite the tremendous challenges and several setbacks. There are still new windows opening especially with the start of African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the most ambitious integration initiative embedded in the Agenda 2063 of the African Union.

It stresses working in industrial hubs, localizing manufacturing and marketing goods in the borderless trading space throughout Africa. It simply increases the attractiveness of the African market and makes it more significant for external players. This, however, points vividly to the fact that Africa is on a transformative journey of industrialization and diversification, and utilizing its vast reserves of natural resources.

While, it explicitly seems, Russian companies do not have enough resources to engage in such investment expansion, it is necessary to demonstrate dynamism, consistency and commitment with whatever economic areas and countries that are identified, especially this time at the start of the landmarked AfCFTA. The market is potentially the largest, Africa – is the continent of the future.

Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, established and inaugurated late September 2021, now has as its primary task to raise bilateral economic relations between the two countries. It will help implement some of the significant issues that were discussed during the historic first Russia-Africa summit held October 2019 in Sochi, Russia.

President of Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Dr Obiora Okonkwo told the visiting Russian delegation headed by Ambassador Oleg Ozerov, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and Head of the Secretariat of Russia-Africa Partnership Forum (RAPF), that establishment of the NRCCI was the first step towards resuscitating and strengthening existing relations between Nigeria and Russia.

He said the official inauguration of the chamber shows the beginning of a new journey that will enable “Nigeria explore business relations with the Russian Federation, and will promote economic growth, technology transfer, development and foster better understanding between both countries.”

Reports indicated that Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NRCCI) was created and incorporated under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 1990, and has established beneficial relationships and contacts with numerous economic development organizations in the Russian Federation.

The principal objectives of NRCCI is to promote commerce, industry, trade and ancillary services; foster, advance and protect commercial, industrial, trade and professional enterprises. “We are therefore seeking to establish an industrial development mechanism built on the principle of mutual beneficial relationships with their own business groups. The strategy is to establish and sustain business contacts with the existing numerous economic development organizations in Russia and Nigeria,” explained Okonkwo.

The Russian business delegation included Andrei Albeshchenko from the Association of Economic Cooperation with African States; Andrei Vladimirov, State Atomic Energy Corporation Overseas; Stepan Belanovich, Uralchem United Chemical Company JSC; Maksim Poltoradnev, Uralchem United Chemical Company JSC and Russian business executives from enterprises interested in Africa.

The September business visit to Abuja was organized by the Association of Economic Cooperation with African States (AECAS) with support from the Russian Foreign Ministry, assistance from the Russian Embassy in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Ozerov and his delegation paid an official courtesy call on Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the Presidential Villa.

According to reports, Vice President Osinbajo has expressed keen interest in developing bilateral cooperation and the need to increase the presence of Russian companies in Nigeria. Vice President Osinbajo stressed the fact that the formal inauguration of a Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NRCCI) will consolidate efforts to deepen the long-lasting relationship and invigorate business opportunities between Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Russian Federation.

“We are interested in developing relations with Nigeria. It is one of the largest and most promising economies where we see lot of opportunities. We were happy to hear that the Vice President supports the development of bilateral economic relations. Russia has a lot to offer, from new technologies to fertilizers, agriculture, energy and infrastructure projects. We must intensify cooperation to achieve tangible results prior to the second Russia-Africa summit,” Ambassador Oleg Ozerov, Head of the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, told journalists during the press conference following the meeting.

Within the framework of the joint declaration adopted at the first Russia-Africa Summit, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation established the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum also moved to create an Association of Economic Cooperation with African States (AECAS).

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

Featured image is from TheCable

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Turkey and Azerbaijan are presenting a united front against a potential enemy in the face of Iran.

Ankara and Baku announced that they would hold a joint military exercise near the border with the Islamic Republic between October 5^th and October 8^th.

Titled “Unshakable Brotherhood,” the drills are organized to “develop friendship, cooperation and coordination between the Turkish and Azerbaijani Land Forces.”

Prior to these exercises in Nakhichevan, joint military exercises with Georgian, Azerbaijani and Turkish servicemen “Eternity-2021” were launched in Georgia on October 4^th.

These are all an attempt to show force before Iran, as it held large-scale military exercises along the border with Azerbaijan in the previous days.

Tehran meanwhile released a series of hype videos, mostly from its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) showcasing the capabilities it was deploying along the border.

Two days earlier, the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Defense Force (IRIADF) unveiled a new tactical radar and an air-defense simulator.

These improvements are significant, as Azerbaijan, as well as Turkey employ a large number of UAVs in their military operations. In the event of hostilities, they need to be countered in order to avoid a repeat of the Armenia-Azerbaijani war for Nagorno Karabakh. Tehran is deeply concerned of the strengthening of the Baku’s military cooperation with Tel Aviv, fearing the deployment of Israeli Harop UAVs in the border regions.

One of the videos demonstrates about 4,000 IRGC speed boats that were deployed in the port of Astara on the Caspian Sea that could quickly reach the Azerbaijani oil facilities in the Caspian Sea. Such a reinforcement could play a strategic role in case of a direct confrontation.

Tehran will likely not openly oppose Turkey and Azerbaijan’s attempt at “two states – one nation”, but it will evidently also not support it. This is an issue for Iran, as up to 30 million ethnic Azerbaijanis live in its north-western region, so-called Iranian Azerbaijan, compared to the entire population of its neighbor that sits at 10 million. A realization of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan of a unified Turkic world directly threatens Iran’s livelihood.

Geographically, a big part of Ankara and Baku’s effort is to organize a direct transport corridor to the Caspian Sea and further to Central Asia.

Armenia’s Syunik region separates Azerbaijan’s mainland from the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. In a recent visit of Armenia’s Foreign Minister to Tehran, it was underlined that Iran is against the removal of Armenian servicemen from the Syunik region and would be ready for a direct confrontation if it happens.

Iran is fortunate in this regard that it doesn’t need to fight, but simply show its forces and mark the red lines, as both Russia and China do not seem willing to allow “Great Turan” to turn into reality.

The developments are still in their early stages, but it is very apparent that both Ankara and Baku are making significant movements and are unwilling to stop their attempts. There are sure to be pushes towards shifts in a geopolitical landscape in the coming months and years.

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In June 2021, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference with families who shared stories about the injuries they’d suffered as a result of taking the COVID jab

September 10, 2021, WXYZ-TV Channel 7 posted a request on Facebook, asking people who had lost an unvaccinated loved one to COVID-19 to contact them for a story. The post has received more than 241,000 comments and most are about someone who was injured or died from the COVID shot, or who got severe COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated

Jodi O’Malley, a registered nurse who works for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is blowing the whistle on COVID jab injuries. Suspected vaccine injuries are not being reported, even though it’s required. In fact, few health care workers are familiar with this requirement and they don’t know how and where to file such reports

Brandon Schadt, a Johnson & Johnson regional business lead, has been caught on tape saying children should not get the COVID jab, and media cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the shots

Justin Durrant, a Johnson & Johnson scientist, agrees babies and young children don’t need the COVID shot, and tells the undercover reporter to not get the Johnson & Johnson COVID “vaccine”

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At the end of June 2021, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference with families who shared stories about the injuries they’d suffered as a result of taking the COVID jab. You can watch the hour-long meeting, which was widely censored and suppressed, above.

While Johnson is diplomatic, stating that most people have no problem after taking the jab, and that the shots have saved many lives, it seems clear that side effects from the COVID injections are FAR more common than anyone is willing to publicly admit.

Case in point: September 10, 2021, WXYZ-TV Channel 7 posted a request on Facebook,^1,2 asking people who had lost an unvaccinated loved one to COVID-19 to contact them for a story.

As of September 29, 2021, the post had more than 244,000 comments, and the vast majority are about someone who was injured or died from the COVID shot, or who got severe COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. You can browse through the hundreds of thousands of comments here. Below are some examples of the comments posted on the site:

“My good friend’s grandpa just passed away due to receiving his booster vaccine.”

“How about doing a story about my uncle who was in fine shape until he got vaccinated. Or my boss’s uncle who was healthy and in his 50s, then died suddenly a week after getting vaccinated.”

“My sister-in-law’s father died of a stroke 48H after Moderna vax. He was active and healthy.”

“The shot murdered my friend three weeks after he got it.”

“I have a close friend that now has myocarditis after the shots. High Mortality within 5 years. Perfectly healthy prior to the shots.”

“I know 2 women who had strokes right after their shot.”

“We lost an uncle to heart inflammation 2 days after he received the vaccine.”

“Lost a very dear man after his second dose of the vaccine and he said he regretted getting it and he advised me not to get it. How about reporting on those? He died of a brain aneurysm, and was a very healthy man.”

“My beautiful mother passed away recently, 23 days after having the first AstraZeneca shot (that I didn’t know she was getting). ‘Immunization’ was the ‘cause of death’ on her death certificate.”

“I now know more people injured by the vaccine than people who even had covid.”

“No but I know of two people who died from Covid after being fully vaccinated.”

“My uncle passed away 3 months after his second shot. He was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, had surgery, was released to rehab and then died of a blood clot. Thanks Pfizer.”

“I know two women who had miscarriages within 2 days of taking it.”

These responses are what you would call a major CLUE. As noted by one commenter,

“Doesn’t sound like you’re getting the story you need judging by the vast majority of these comments about vaccine losses and side effects. Since there is such an overwhelming outpouring of vaccine reactions maybe do a story on that? There’s lots of people here to pool from it seems.”

We now also have medical insiders blowing the whistle, confirming COVID jab injuries are incredibly commonplace, and most are never reported. In an upcoming article, I will share businessman Steve Kirsch’s analysis that strongly suggests the reports in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) is underreported by a factor of 41. This means there may actually be more than 200,000 deaths and up to 5 million COVID jab injuries.

In a stunning Project Veritas report, Jodi O’Malley, a nurse working for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reveals health officials are ignoring and covering up COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

O’Malley says she’s seen “dozens of people come in with adverse reactions,” including myocarditis, congestive heart failure and deaths, yet the reactions are not being reported. This, despite the fact that both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention require any suspected injury from an emergency use vaccine to be reported.

“If everyone is supposed to gather this data and report it, but no one is reporting it, how will anyone know the vaccine is truly safe? They don’t,” O’Malley says.

One of the reasons O’Malley decided to come forward, knowing she will likely lose her job over it, is because one of her coworkers who was coerced into taking the shot died. “Nobody should have to decide between their livelihood or take the vaccine,” O’Malley says.

She also points out that while there are medications such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that have been shown to be safe and effective against the virus, the HHS will terminate anyone who uses these drugs. Were these drugs permitted, the COVID jab wouldn’t even qualify for emergency use. When O’Malley asks Gayle Lundberg, a DHHS pharmacist, if ivermectin can be given to a patient if the doctor is willing to prescribe it, Lundberg responds:

“I am stuck. I am told you are absolutely not to use [ivermectin] under any circumstances whatsoever for somebody with COVID, unless you don’t want to have a job. I’m not going to lose my job over this.”

“This is evil at the highest level,” O’Malley says. “You have the FDA, the CDC, that are both supposed to be protecting us, but they are under the government, and everything we’ve done so far is unscientific.”

Another whistleblower, Deborah Conrad, was recently featured in a Highwire exclusive. Conrad, a physician’s assistant, reveals there’s a complete disregard for the requirement to report COVID jab injuries at her hospital too. I will publish that interview this coming Friday, October 8, 2021.

Johnson & Johnson Officials Caught on Tape

In Part 3 of its COVID vaccine investigative series, Project Veritas exposes the true sentiments of two Johnson & Johnson officials: Brandon Schadt, a Johnson & Johnson regional business lead, and Justin Durrant, a Johnson & Johnson scientist.

Speaking to an undercover Project Veritas reporter over a meal, Schadt admits he does not agree with the push to vaccinate children.

“Kids shouldn’t get a f*cking [COVID] vaccine,” he says. “It’s terrible … It’s a kid, you just don’t do that, you know? Not something that’s so unknown in terms of repercussions down the road.”

When asked if we really have no idea what the long-term repercussions are, he replies, “I mean, how could you? Right? There’s nobody who’s 30 years in who said, ‘Hey, I had the vaccine and I don’t have a third eyeball.” When asked if we can trust the media when it comes to reporting on the COVID shots, Schadt states, “In no capacity should we ever trust anything that they say.”

Durrant also doesn’t think babies and young children need the jab, saying “It wouldn’t make that much of a difference” if children are unvaccinated for COVID. That said, he does seem to be onboard with the corporate policy to push the injection on adults, regardless of need or personal beliefs.

He admits that what they’re doing is making life so inconvenient for the unvaccinated that they just give up and get it. Despite that, Durrant tells the undercover reporter: “Don’t get the Johnson & Johnson [COVID vaccine]. I didn’t tell you [that] though.”

FDA Warnings Issued for Janssen, Pfizer and Moderna

In late April 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration added a warning label to the Janssen COVID shot about the risk for potentially serious blood clotting in the brain and other sites, including the abdomen and legs, in combination with thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), particularly among women.^3,4 In mid-July, Guillain-Barre syndrome and altered immunocompetence were added to the list of warnings.^5,6

In June 2021, Pfizer and Moderna both got warning labels added to their COVID shots as the FDA concluded there’s a “likely association” between the mRNA injections and heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults.⁷

June 24, 2021, Fierce Pharma reported that “heart inflammation has occurred at a rate of 12.6 per million among those aged 12 to 39, according to the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink.”⁸

Menstrual Problems Emerging as a Widespread Side Effect

One of the side effects that has yet to register on the FDA’s and CDC’s radar is menstrual irregularities among women. According to a September 16, 2021, editorial in The BMJ,⁹ more than 30,000 reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal bleeding had been filed with the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Yellow Card Scheme, which collects and monitors adverse vaccine reactions, as of September 2, 2021.

The editorial was written by Victoria Male, a reproductive immunology specialist at the Imperial College of London. According to Male, the link between these bleeding irregularities and the COVID jabs, irrespective of brand, is a plausible one that warrants further investigation. She writes:¹⁰

“Menstrual changes have been reported after both mRNA and adenovirus vectored covid-19 vaccines, suggesting that, if there is a connection, it is likely to be a result of the immune response to vaccination rather than a specific vaccine component.

Vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) has also been associated with menstrual changes. Indeed, the menstrual cycle can be affected by immune activation in response to various stimuli, including viral infection: in one study of menstruating women, around a quarter of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 experienced menstrual disruption.

Biologically plausible mechanisms linking immune stimulation with menstrual changes include immunological influences on the hormones driving the menstrual cycle or effects mediated by immune cells in the lining of the uterus, which are involved in the cyclical build-up and breakdown of this tissue.”

Assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Kathryn Clancy, who is researching acute immune activation and menstrual repair mechanisms, told The Defender she’s “dismayed that the research design of [COVID] vaccine trials makes it impossible at this time to actually explore this relationship, and hope drug and vaccine manufacturers in the future take these considerations into account.”¹¹

US Reports of Menstrual Irregularities

In the U.S., the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had logged a total of 9,589 reports of menstrual disorders following a COVID injection as of September 17, 2021.¹² Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a pediatrician, also weighed in on The BMJ article, telling The Defender:¹³

“If we were to follow the scientific method, as it was taught in textbooks (knowing full well there is no longer any adherence to the scientific method), we would immediately see this observation of menstrual cycle changes in tens of thousands of women as a signal, for which necessary questions would need to be asked …

A true adherence to the scientific method would allow for answers to be reported without bias or prejudice for a desired outcome of the results … There is a long list of side effects that the manufacturers of the injection sent to the FDA in the fall of 2020.

Many of the injuries people are reporting after receiving these injections, including bleeding, blood clots, autoimmunity, Guillain-Barré syndrome and many others, are well known to the manufacturers and the FDA but, the powers that be continue to ignore the reports of people presenting with these real-time adverse events, as if they have nothing to do with the injections, at all.

Essentially, they gathered the data in clinical trials but have kept them completely under wraps.”

Palevsky believes the menstrual irregularities reported by women who have gotten the COVID shot may be related to effects from the spike protein that their bodies are now producing.

NIH Funds Study to Investigate Menstrual Irregularities

In early September 2021, the Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Office of Research on Women’s Health, both of which are part of the National Institutes of Health, announced they will award $1.67 million in grants to five research institutions to investigate the link between menstrual irregularities and the COVID jabs.^14,15

Over the next year, researchers at Boston University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University and Oregon Health and Science University, will try to determine whether the menstrual changes are directly linked to the COVID shots, how long the changes last, and what the underlying mechanism is.

The five studies are expected to enroll somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 participants, according to Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of the Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

There’s also an independent group that is collecting data from unvaccinated women who are experiencing abnormal bleeding patterns after coming into close contact with a COVID jabbed individual. Palevsky and Dr. Christiane Northrup are part of this research group, among others. You can find more information about this project on MyCycleStory.com.¹⁶

Mounting Data Tell a Horrifying Story

In closing, while authorities insist the COVID shots are “safe and effective,” mounting data tell a different story. Not only are the injections losing effectiveness within months, as demonstrated by Israeli data discussed in the video above, VAERS has also received more than 726,960 adverse events reports following the COVID shot, including 15,386 deaths and 66,642 hospitalizations, as of September 17, 2021.¹⁷

These numbers are so staggering, there’s really nothing that can compare. In nine months, these shots have caused more VAERS reports of injury and death in the United States than all available vaccines over the past 30 years. A similar situation can be seen in the U.K., where 30,305 people have died within 21 days of their COVID shot. And that was just within the first six months of the vaccine rollout.¹⁸

In August 2021, Japan’s health ministry suspended the use of 1.63 million doses of Moderna’s injection after finding foreign substances that looked like metal particles in some vials. Then, in mid-September, suspected contaminants were discovered in a particular lot of Pfizer’s injection as well.¹⁹ Still, we’re told to just roll up our sleeves and ask no questions. Why?

As noted by Schadt, the Johnson & Johnson employee caught on tape by Project Veritas, the mass vaccination campaign isn’t really about public health, it’s about politics and money. Beyond that, I believe it’s about building the control mechanism needed for the Great Reset. Vaccine passports will allow unelected technocrats to control and manipulate the whole world according to their own whims.

As expected, it doesn’t end with two doses. In Israel, a fourth Pfizer shot is already being rolled out, and the year isn’t even over yet. And all those who took the first two doses will now lose all of their freedoms all over again, until they catch up on the recommended boosters. This is precisely what we can expect to happen everywhere else in the world, where vaccine passports are rolled out.

Freedoms are being tied to being up-to-date on your vaccinations, and once COVID-19 disappears, if ever, they’ll just come out with something else that must be injected into you if you want to work, go to school, travel, shop or live a semi-normal life.

This is what the new biosecurity state is built around. The question is, is that any kind of life? Is that how we want to live? Is this the world we want for our children and grandchildren? If not, we must all do our part and resist mandates, vaccine passports and restrictions based on vaccine status. The good news is, together we can win, because there are far more of us than there are of them.

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Notes

¹ Facebook WXYZ-TV Channel 7 September 10, 2021

² World Tribune September 13, 2021

³ Yale Medicine April 21, 2021, updated August 4, 2021

⁴ FDA Press Release April 23, 2021

⁵ FDA.gov Janssen COVID Vaccine Package Insert

⁶ CNBC July 12, 2021

^7, 8 Fierce Pharma June 24, 2021

^9, 10 The BMJ 2021; 374:n2211

^11, 13 The Defender September 22, 2021

¹² NVIC MedAlerts VAERS data as of 9/17/21

¹⁴ NIH August 30, 2021

¹⁵ The Defender September 8, 2021

¹⁶ Mycyclestory.com

¹⁷ OpenVAERS

¹⁸ The Expose September 15, 2021

¹⁹ KyodoNews September 14, 2021

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Controversies involving the role of social networks in the contemporary world are on the rise. Far beyond the blackout on October 4, large technology companies have recently been criticized for acting in a socially destructive way, harming the mental health of their users and fostering the polarization of society. The dissemination of hate speech, fake news, and the omission of the companies’ officials in the face of crimes, offenses and disrespectful discussions that commonly occur on digital platforms have drawn the attention of many experts, activists and legislators to a problem that seems to have reached its limits: the threat that social networks pose to the stability of democracy.

Recently, the denunciations made by a former Facebook employee have strongly impacted public opinion regarding the real functioning of social networks. Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old American engineer who held the position of product manager at Facebook, has stood out for her criticisms about the company’s negative role in the mental health of child users. Beyond mere criticism, Haugen became active in defending the imposition of legal restrictions on Big Tech companies, participating in hearings in the US Senate, where she exposed information about the harmful behavior of Facebook, urging lawmakers to impose limits on companies of the technology sector.

Haugen’s main criticism is that Facebook maintains an internal policy that seeks to grow at any cost, prioritizing profits and the expansion of the platform to any ethical limits. According to her, Facebook purposely provides inappropriate content to children and young people in order to provoke extreme reactions because, in this way, despite the mental damage of users, the chances of virtual interaction increase through views, likes and shares, making the platform grow more and more. The same happens with other social networks belonging to the Facebook Group and chaired by Mark Zuckerberg, such as Whatsapp and Instagram.

These were some of her words:

“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people (…) Yesterday we saw Facebook taken off the internet. I don’t know why it went down, but I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies”.

She added:

Facebook understands that if they want to continue to grow, they have to find new users. They have to make sure that the next generation is just as engaged with Instagram as the current one. And the way they will do that is by making sure that children establish habits before they have good self-regulation (…) It’s just like cigarettes, teenagers don’t have good self-regulation. They say, explicitly, ‘I feel bad when I use Instagram and yet I can’t stop’.”

The Senate reaction was quite favorable to Haugen. With very few exceptions, politicians applauded the former employee and complemented her statement with comments criticizing severely the working dynamics of social media. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, said:

“When they allowed 99% of violent content to remain unchecked on their platform including the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, what did they do? Now we know, Mark Zuckerberg was going sailing.”

On the other hand, in response, Mark Zuckerberg made a statement on his media accounts in response, denying all of Haugen’s words and criticizing her stance. Zuckerberg says it is “illogical” to think that his companies push inappropriate content to generate negative reactions. These were his words:

“The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don’t know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed.”

In fact, the psychological impacts generated by the use of social media has become an increasingly discussed issue in recent years. There is clear evidence that the use of social networks without any kind of regulation – except that one self-imposed by the companies themselves – has caused irreversible damage to the mental health of young people, who constantly expose their thoughts and bodies in texts and photos that are available for the entire world, often resulting in negative repercussions.

Unable to control the reactions of those who consume the exposed content, young users try to seek more and more positive reactions – as this is a way to improve their social acceptance -, which results in more and more exposure. Social networks automatically boost the content that is being commented on, even if in a derogatory or disrespectful way, just so that more users maintain interaction expanding the platform. The same happens with criminal, violent or pornographic content posted on the networks.

Despite the self-imposed rules prohibiting this type of content, in practice, the companies tend to push them to be more and more consumed, generating reactions and expanding the network. Regardless of whether the reactions are positive or negative, the mere fact that virtual interaction is taking place generates profits for companies, motivating them to increasingly seek to promote all kinds of inappropriate content. It is difficult to measure the effects of this type of constant exposure to inappropriate content and disrespectful reactions in the virtual environment, but certainly many traumas can be developed from this.

The American legislation of the last decades has given a lot of power to social networks, allowing them to work in a system of self-regulation, which in practice means absolute freedom. These networks act as real states whose territory is a cybernetic environment. These “virtual states” are immune to the laws of the physical world and create their own rules – and if in the physical world laws are designed in order to preserve democracy, in these virtual environments they are designed to generate profits.

Now, Washington has a choice to do: either legislation changes completely and imposes severe limits on social networks, or the virtual world will generate more and more damage to the physical world, harming the mental health of young people and destabilizing the entire democratic social structure with unnecessary polarizations and the spread of hatred.

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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Dr. Rochagné Kilian, an ER doctor in Owen Sound, Ontario, resigned in protest of mandatory vaccines and the corruption of our health services.

Dr. Kilian came to public attention when the recording of the Grey Bruce hospital board was released (watch below).

In that recording, board president Gary Simms cannot provide any evidence whatsoever of his dire predictions of a ‘tidal wave of pediatric Covid cases’ which he says are coming this fall, while threatening Dr. Kilian when she spoke up for the truth.

Dr. Kilian has spoken out before regarding the growing corruption of our health care services and has shown leadership and integrity by resigning from her position.

“At least 80% of the ER patients in the past three months were double-vaxxed”, says Dr. Kilian of her informal survey of patients entering the ER with serious medical issues. “How many people are we going to kill if we keep following this narrative?”

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A civil court has sided with a nurse who was suspended without pay after she refused the COVID-19 vaccine.

The ruling was given by the Tribunal of Milan on September 16, following the appeal of the Italian nurse, who was not named. She had been suspended without pay in February because she refused to receive the jab in defiance of a vaccine mandate imposed by her employer. The tribunal called the suspension “illegitimate” and ordered the employer to pay the nurse her full wages with interest and arrears. The decision overturns previous court rulings for similar cases.  

It is the first time in Italy that a court of law has ruled in favor of an employee in a case of a suspension or a dismissal for failure to vaccinate. 

The decision comes from one of Italy’s most authoritative courts and is considered particularly significant because it overturns precedents  and enshrines in law the illegitimacy of dismissing or suspending employees without pay for failing to vaccinate.  

“This was one of the first cases of suspension of a healthcare worker,” stated Mauro Sandri, the nurse’s lawyer, in an interview on YouTube.

Sandri compared the case to that of 5 nurses in a similar situation; they lost their appeal in May.

“Everyone [in Italy] will remember the ruling in Belluno, when 5 nurses who were suspended by their employer launched an appeal and lost it,” he said.  

“The mainstream [media] amplified the outcome of that ruling by going so far as to say that it was pointless to appeal to suspensions imposed by employers.”  

Sandri then recalled that the ruling in that case was “unfortunately emulated by other tribunals, including Modena and Verona” and that “a jurisprudence had been created, giving employers license to suspend their employees.” 

All of Sandri’s previous attempts to appeal such decisions had been unsuccessful. However, he sees that this new decision had overturned the trend.

“This decision was overwhelmingly positive, as it established the illegitimate nature of the suspension,” he said.  

The nurse in question had been suspended since February and had not received any salary since that time. The court therefore ordered the employer to pay her salary for the full period in which she had not been compensated, with added interest, as Sandri pointed out. 

“The appeal aimed at obtaining her reinstatement in the workplace (…) So we requested that, as well as a full payment of her wages, with arrears.” 

The Italian lawyer is convinced that the new ruling will serve as case law for similar cases in the future. 

“The court’s decision will certainly set a benchmark for future rulings,” Sandri said.

“It’s going to be a milestone (…). For me, it’s also going to be the basis for further cases that I have pending.”

The lawyer encouraged workers in similar situations after resisting pressure to take the vaccine to sue not only for lost wages but also for damages. Sandri described the scare-tactics and threats used by some employers who pressure their workers into getting vaccinated as a form of “bullying.”  

“The same principle can be applied in many other situations where there is a vaccine mandate,” he said.

“Anyone employed at a company who has been unduly pressured to get vaccinated and perhaps suspended for not doing so thus becomes a victim of bullying.”  

Sandri also sees the ruling as a hopeful development in the ongoing fight against the imposition of the “Green Pass” in Italy. 

“This ruling shows us how important it is to defend your rights in an efficient manner in order to obtain results,” he said.

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This sickness doth infect/ The very life-blood of our enterprise. — Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, “Autoimmune disease happens when the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between your own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to mistakenly attack normal cells.”

Canada’s health bureaucracy is now acting like an autoimmune disease to the body politic.

How did many of health-care’s “front-line heroes” of the past 18 months suddenly find themselves out on the streets because they refused to comply with vaccine mandates?

It makes no sense to the health-care professionals. It also destroys the health care they provide to the public. Surely it is not accidental.

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“As prime minister of Japan at the time of the [Fukushima] disaster, I now believe that the time has come for Japan and the world to end its reliance on nuclear power,” Naoto Kan writes in the introduction of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021 (WNISR).

“Around once a year, I still visit the remains of the Fukushima Daiichi site. Even though ten years have passed, progress in the decommissioning process remains frustratingly slow, driving home to me the importance of avoiding any repeat of such an event.

“The large quantities of radioactive debris that remain within the stricken reactors continue to release alarming levels of radiation. We already know from the example of Chernobyl that the timescale needed for this nuclear waste to drop to safe radioactivity levels will be measured in terms of centuries.”

Stagnation

This year’s WNISR is the work of 13 interdisciplinary experts from across the world. For nearly 30 years, these annual reports have provided important factual antidotes to industry promotion and obfuscation.

In broad terms, nuclear power has been stagnant for 30 years. WNISR notes that the world’s fleet of 415 power reactors is 23 fewer than the 2002 peak of 438, but nuclear capacity and generation have marginally increased due to uprating and larger reactors being built.

There is one big difference with the situation 30 years ago: the reactor fleet was young then, now it is old.

The ageing of the reactor fleet is a huge problem for the industry, as is the ageing of the nuclear workforce ‒ the silver tsunami. The average age of the world’s reactor fleet continues to rise, and by mid-2021 reached 30.9 years. The mean age of the 23 reactors shut down between 2016 and 2020 was 42.6 years.

The International Atomic Energy Agency anticipates the closure of around 10 reactors or 10 gigawatts (GW) per year over the next three decades. Reactor construction starts need to match closures just for the industry to maintain its 30-year pattern of stagnation.

Renewables

But construction starts have averaged only 4.8 per year over the past five years, and there’s no indication of looming growth. During the past decade, the average time between reactor construction start and grid connection has been 10 years.

From 2001-2020, there were 95 reactor startups and 98 closures around the world. There were 47 startups and no closures in China, while in the rest of the world there were 48 startups and 98 closures. As of mid-2021, 53 power reactors were under construction, 16 fewer than in 2013 and far fewer than the peak of 234 in 1979.

Nuclear power’s contribution to global electricity supply has fallen from a peak of 17.5 percent in 1996 to 10.1 percent in 2020 – a 4.3 percent share of global commercial primary energy consumption.

Renewables reached an estimated 29 percent share of global electricity generation in 2020, a record share. Non-hydro renewables at 10.7 percent in 2020 overtook nuclear in 2019 and the gap grew in 2020 with non-hydro renewables generating 16.5 percent more electricity than nuclear reactors.

Total investment in new renewable electricity exceeded US$300 billion in 2020, including US$142 billion investment in wind and US$149 billion in solar. Investment in renewables was 17 times greater than nuclear investment of around US$18 billion.

Solar

In 2020, a record 256 GW of renewable capacity were added to the world’s power grids, including 111 GW of wind and 127 GW of solar. There was a net gain of 0.4 GW of nuclear capacity in 2020.

Despite the marginal increase in nuclear capacity in 2020, nuclear generation fell by 3.9 percent. That compares to a 21 percent increase in solar generation, and 12 percent for wind power.

Since 2009, levelised cost estimates for utility-scale solar dropped by 90 percent, wind by 70 percent, while nuclear costs increased by 33 percent.

Despite the hype, China’s nuclear program is modest: 2 GW of new nuclear capacity added in 2020 compared to 72 GW of wind, 48 GW of solar PV and 13 GW of hydro. Solar and wind combined generated twice as much electricity as nuclear in China in 2020.

In India, wind and solar generation combined was more than three times greater than nuclear generation in 2020.

Vulnerabilities

In the European Union, renewable power generation at 38 percent overtook fossil fuels at 37 percent in 2020 while nuclear power accounted for 25 percent. Last year was the first year that non-hydro renewables generated more power than nuclear in the EU.

In the US, renewable generation in 2020 was 12 percent of the total compared to 20 percent for nuclear. The gap is closing fast due to the growth of renewables and the slow but steady closure of ageing reactors – the average age is over 40.

Last year, nuclear generation in the US declined by 3.6 percent to the lowest level since 2012 while wind increased by 14 percent and solar by 22 percent.

France’s nuclear generation fell by 12 percent in 2020, WNISR notes, to the lowest level in 27 years. With debt-laden utilities, huge liabilities for decommissioning and waste management, an ageing reactor fleet, and catastrophic cost increases for new reactors, the situation is bleak.

In addition to a vast amount of energy data, WNISR includes detailed analyses of the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters; the vulnerabilities of nuclear power to the impacts of climate change such as dwindling and warming water resources, storm impacts, sea-level rise and a chapter on nuclear decommissioning.

Crime

WNISR details the slow and unsteady progress of small modular reactors. The report notes that “so-called advanced reactors of various designs, including so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), make a lot of noise in the media but their promoters have provided little evidence for any implementation scheme before a decade at the very least.”

WNISR notes that previous reports have covered irregularities, fraud, counterfeiting, corruption, and other criminal activities in the nuclear sector. This year’s report dedicates a chapter to nuclear criminality and includes 14 case studies with serious implications – including safety and public governance – that came to trial in the period 2010-2020.

The report states:

 “A stunning number of revelations in recent years on irregularities, fraud, counterfeiting, bribery, corruption, sabotage, theft, and other criminal activities in the nuclear industry in various countries suggest that there is a systemic issue of ‘criminal energy’ in the sector. …

“Although not comprehensive, this analysis offers several noteworthy insights: Criminal activities in the nuclear sector are not new. Some major scandals date back decades or have been ongoing for decades.

“Organized crime organizations have been supplying workers to nuclear sites – e.g. the Yakuza in Japan – for over a decade.

Corruption

“Serious insider sabotage has hit major nuclear countries in recent years – like a Belgian nuclear power plant – without ever leading to arrests.

“There is no systematic, comprehensive, public database on the issue. In 2019, the IAEA released a report on cases of counterfeit or fraudulent items in at least seven countries since at least the 1990s.

“In Transparency International’s 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index about half of the 35 countries operating or constructing nuclear power plants on their territory rate under 50 out of 100.

“In the Bribery Payers Index (BPI, last published in 2011), seven out of the ten worst rated countries operate or are building nuclear power plants on their territory.”

The discussion about whether safe nuclear power can be generated in the right circumstances remains white hot. However, we clearly do not live under the right circumstances. The risks from nuclear – both energy and weapons – remains existential.

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Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and an organiser of a global NGO statement on nuclear power and climate change to be released ahead of COP26.

Featured image: IAEA experts depart Unit 4 of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on 17 April 2013 as part of a mission to review Japan’s plans to decommission the facility. (Source: Greg Webb / IAEA)

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***

Since the dawn of capitalism the logic of collective commons has been systematically challenged by the capitalist class through commodification and private appropriation of wealth. One of their earliest objectives, when factories started to appear in Europe just over several centuries ago, was to take away the common people’s resources and livelihoods by grabbing the lands they lived on and so force them to migrate to the cities and accept the miserable and miserably paid jobs in the factories. On farther continents under European domination their goal had been to grab the land and resources of local populations and force them into hard labour under the whip of imperialist exploiters.

From the 16^th to the 19^th century the various countries that one after the other fell under the yoke of capitalism all went through vast periods of destruction of collective commons, a process that has been well documented by such authors as Karl Marx (1818-1883) book 1 of Capital, [1] Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) in The Accumulation of Capital, [2] Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) The Great Transformation, [3] Silvia Federici (1942) Caliban and the Witch. [4] A great film by Raoul Peck about the young Karl Marx [5] visualizes examples of the destruction of collective commons with dramatic scenes of the brutal repression of poor people collecting wood for fuel in German Rhineland forests and Karl Marx’s stand in support of their centuries old legal and traditional right to do so that was running contrary to capitalistic logic. Daniel Bensaïd wrote Les Dépossédés : Karl Marx, les voleurs de bois et le droit des pauvres (in French) a concise description of the process of destroying collective commons. [6]

In Capital, Karl Marx describes certain forms of grabbing by the capitalist system in Europe:

“The spoliation of church properties, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat”. (Capital, Book I, eighth section. Chap. 27)

While capitalist production was being imposed on Europe it was also spreading all over the globe:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation”. (Capital, book I, part 8. Chap. 31)

Marx very succinctly describes the four centuries leading up to the generalization of the industrial revolution at the time Capital was written:

“The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17^th century, they arrive at a systematic combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition (Chap. 31).

Since then, capitalism has continued its offensive against collective commons for two reasons: 1. The commons have not yet entirely disappeared and therefore they limit the total domination of capital, which consequently seeks to appropriate them or reduce them to the bare minimum. 2. Important struggles have recreated commons during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. These commons are constantly being challenged.

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries there have been simultaneous destructions and creations of collective commons

During the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century, popular movements recreated social commons by developing systems of collective support: cooperatives, strike funds, solidarity funds. The victories of the Russian revolution also led to a short period of creation of common properties, until Stalinism degenerated into dictatorship and shamefully privileged a bureaucratic caste as described by Leon Trotsky in 1936 (Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed. [7]).

In many capitalist countries (in varied degrees of development) the governments realized that to maintain social peace and even to avoid a resurgence of revolutionary movements some scraps had to be thrown to the populations. This resulted in the development of welfare states.

After WW2, from the second half of the 1940s to the end of the 1970s the wave of decolonizations mainly in Africa, Asia and the Middle-East, and the victorious revolutions in China (1949) and Cuba (1959) led to the redeployment of some collective commons notably through the nationalizations of strategic infrastructures (Suez canal in 1956 by the Nasser regime) and commodities such as copper by Allende in the early 1970s and petroleum resources (Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran…).

This period of reaffirming collective commons is expressed in several United Nations documents from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the 1986 Declaration on the Right of Development which in article 1 paragraph 2 affirms: “The human right to development also implies the full realization of the right of peoples to self-determination, which includes,(…) the exercise of their inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources.” [8] This inalienable right of peoples to full sovereignty over their resources is constantly challenged by the IMF, the World Bank and the majority of governments in the interests of big private corporations.

Concerning collective commons

In this article we will not establish a stricto sensodefinition of what are ‘collective commons’. The term will be used in a wide generic sense. This will include the collective ownership of lands which under different forms has marked the history of Humanity right up to the most recent concepts of ‘collective commons’; public services which are 20^th century social conquests won through social struggles and financed through taxation. ‘Collective commons’ also includes workers’ own solidarity structures that grew with early capitalism such as solidarity and strike funds, cooperatives, mutual loans, not forgetting more recent developments such as labour laws and welfare state structures won by the working classes during the 20^th century and analyzed in an original manner by Bernard Friot. [9] In a collective commons environment mercantile relations are either excluded or reduced to minimal proportions.

An extract of Jean-Marie Harribey’s book, La richesse, la valeur et l’inestimable suggests that the ever worsening ecological crises would stimulate renewed interest in the ’notion of the commons [arising] from the awareness of the existence of a common heritage of humanity and therefore of the need to preserve certain material resources (water, air, soil, forests, raw materials) and also immaterial resources (climate, knowledge, culture, health, financial stability, peace, etc.)”. [10]

The activity of social reproduction has also come to the forefront of concerns about the commons through the work of feminist movements. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser write in their manifesto Feminism for the 99%, [11] “Finally, capitalist society harbors a social-reproductive contradiction: a tendency to commandeer for capital’s benefit as much ’free’reproductive labor as possible, without any concern for its replenishment. As a result, it periodically gives rise to ’crises of care,’ which exhaust women, ravage families, and stretch social energies to the breaking point (page 65). The authors’ define social reproduction as follows “It encompasses activities that sustain human beings as embodied social beings who must not only eat and sleep but also raise their children, care for their families, and maintain their communities, all while pursuing their hopes for the future. These people-making activities occur in one form or another in every society. In capitalist societies, however, they must also serve another master, namely, capital, which requires that social-reproductive work produce and replenish ‘labor power’” (page 68).

What the authors add later on brings us closer to the situation highlighted by the current multidimensional crisis of capitalism and the coronavirus pandemic: ’[Capitalism assumes]that there will always be sufficient energies to produce the laborers and sustain the social connections on which economic production, and society more generally, depend. In fact, social-reproductive capacities are not infinite, and they can be stretched to the breaking point. When a society simultaneously withdraws public support for social reproduction and conscripts its chief providers into long and grueling hours of low-paid work, it depletes the very social capacities on which it relies. (page 73)

What is denounced in this passage allows us to better understand the fragility of capitalist society in the face of epidemics, the inability of governments to do what is necessary in time to best defend the population, the pressure put on workers in the essential and vital sectors to come to the aid of the population while, at the same time, as a result of the decisions of these same governments, they are underpaid, devalued and in insufficient numbers. The same can be said about the causes of the failure of governments to address the consequences of climate change and the under-equipment and lack of civil protection personnel in the face of increasingly frequent ’natural disasters’.

Public debt has been and still is systematically used as a means of grabbing commons

Since the 1970s public debt has systematically been used as a means of grabbing commons, as much in the North as in the South. The CADTM, along with other social movements, has not ceased to denounce this since the 1980s. We have devoted a dozen books [12] and several hundred articles to this issue. It is very satisfying to see that more and more writers are now highlighting the issue of debt as a weapon against public property. [13]

We cite once again Feminism for the 99%:

’Far from empowering states to stabilize social reproduction through public provision, it authorizes finance capital to discipline states and publics in the immediate interests of private investors. Its weapon of choice is debt. Finance capital lives off of sovereign debt, which it uses to outlaw even the mildest forms of social-democratic provision, coercing states to liberalize their economies, open their markets, and impose ’austerity’ on defenseless populations. (page 77)

All through the neoliberal offensive that has been the dominating ideological tendency since the 1980s, governments and different international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF have insisted on the “duty” to repay external debt in order to generalize a tidal wave of privatizations of many countries’ strategic economic sectors, public services and natural resources, whether in developed countries or not. As a consequence, the previously existing tendency towards reinforcing collectivism has been reversed.

The list of assaults on public properties based on public debt is long. Some have accelerated the ecological crisis and the development of zoonoses: rapid deforestation, intensive animal farming and monocrops to gain foreign currencies in order to pay foreign debt, all of this in the framework of structural adjustmentpolicies induced by the, already ill mentioned World Bank and IMF.

Some of the political policies imposed through debt repayment obligations have seriously hindered the capacity of states and populations to deal with public health crises including the coronavirus pandemic: stagnation or reduction of public health budgets, imposing compliance to medical patents, renouncing the use of generic drugs, giving up producing medical equipment domestically, preferring private sector medical treatment and medicine distribution, suppressing free access to medical care in many countries, reducing the quality of working conditions in the medical sector and introducing the private sector into numerous essential public health services.

Already, over a century and a half ago Marx put it in a nutshell: “Public debt: the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era”. [14] Once we have become aware of the way repayment of public debt is instrumentalised to impose mortal neoliberal capitalist policies, we know we must fight for the cancellation of illegitimate debt.

Coming next part 2: Knowledge appropriation and Big Pharma profits during the pandemic

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Translated by Mike Krolikowski and Christine Pagnoulle

This article was originally published on CADTM.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. See his bibliography. He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

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***

Sides are forming around the Iran vs Azerbaijan squabble. But this fight is not about ethnicity, religion or tribe – it is mainly about who gets to forge the region’s new transportation routes.

The last thing the complex, work-in-progress drive towards Eurasian integration needs at this stage is this messy affair between Iran and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus.

Let’s start with the Conquerors of Khaybar – the largest Iranian military exercise in two decades held on its northwestern border with Azerbaijan.

Among the deployed Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units there are some serious players, such as the 21st Tabriz Infantry Division, the IRGC Ashura 31 battalion, the 65th Airborne Special Forces Brigade and an array of missile systems, including the Fateh-313 and Zulfiqar ballistic missiles with ranges of up to 700 kilometers.

The official explanation is that the drills are a warning to enemies plotting anything against the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei pointedly tweeted that “those who are under the illusion of relying on others, think that they can provide their own security, should know that they will soon take a slap, they will regret this.”

The message was unmistakable: this was about Azerbaijan relying on Turkey and especially Israel for its security, and about Tel Aviv instrumentalizing Baku for an intel drive leading to interference in northern Iran.

Further elaboration by Iranian experts went as far as Israel eventually using military bases in Azerbaijan to strike at Iranian nuclear installations.

The reaction to the Iranian military exercise so far is a predictable Turkey–Azerbaijani response: they are conducting a joint drill in Nakhchivan throughout this week.

But were Iran’s concerns off the mark? A close security collaboration between Baku and Tel Aviv has been developing for years now. Azerbaijan today possesses Israeli drones and is cozy with both the CIA and the Turkish military. Throw in the recent trilateral military drills involving Azerbaijan, Turkey and Pakistan – these are developments bound to raise alarm bells in Tehran.

Baku, of course, spins it in a different manner: Our partnerships are not aimed at third countries.

So, essentially, while Tehran accuses Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev of making life easy for Takfiri terrorists and Zionists, Baku accuses Tehran of blindly supporting Armenia. Yes, the ghosts of the recent Karabakh war are all over the place.

As a matter of national security, Tehran simply cannot tolerate Israeli companies involved in the reconstruction of regions won in the war near the Iranian border: Fuzuli, Jabrayil, and Zangilan.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdullahian has tried to play it diplomatically:

“Geopolitical issues around our borders are important for us. Azerbaijan is a dear neighbor to Iran and that’s why we don’t want it to be trapped between foreign terrorists who are turning their soil into a hotbed.”

As if this was not complicated enough, the heart of the matter – as with all things in Eurasia – actually revolves around economic connectivity.

An interconnected mess

Baku’s geoeconomic dreams are hefty: the capital city aims to position itself at the key crossroads of two of the most important Eurasian corridors: North-South and East-West.

And that’s where the Zangezur Corridor comes in – arguably essential for Baku to predominate over Iran’s East-West connectivity routes.

The corridor is intended to connect western Azerbaijan to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic via Armenia, with roads and railways passing though the Zangezur region.

Zangezur is also essential for Iran to connect itself with Armenia, Russia, and further on down the road, to Europe.

China and India will also rely on Zangezur for trade, as the corridor provides a significant shortcut in distance. Considering large Asian cargo ships cannot sail the Caspian Sea, they usually waste precious weeks just to reach Russia.

An extra problem is that Baku has recently started harassing Iranian truckers in transit through these new annexed regions on their way to Armenia.

It didn’t have to be this way. This detailed essay shows how Azerbaijan and Iran are linked by “deep historical, cultural, religious, and ethno-linguistic ties,” and how the four northwestern Iranian provinces – Gilan, Ardabil, East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan – have “common geographical borders with both the main part of Azerbaijan and its exclave, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic; they also have deep and close commonalities based on Islam and Shiism, as well as sharing the Azerbaijani culture and language. All this has provided the ground for closeness between the citizens of the regions on both sides of the border.”

During the Rouhani years, relations with Aliyev were actually quite good, including the Iran‑Azerbaijan‑Russia and Iran‑Azerbaijan‑Turkey trilateral cooperation.

A key connectivity at play ahead is the project of linking the Qazvin‑Rasht‑Astara railway in Iran to Azerbaijan: that’s part of the all-important International North‑South Transport Corridor (INSTC).

Geoeconomically, Azerbaijan is essential for the main railway that will eventually run from India to Russia. No only that; the Iran‑Azerbaijan‑Russia trilateral cooperation opens a direct road for Iran to fully connect with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).

In an optimal scenario, Baku can even help Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman to connect to Georgian ports in the Black Sea.

The West is oblivious to the fact that virtually all sections of the INSTC are already working. Take, for instance, the exquisitely named Astara‑Astara railway connecting Iranian and Azerbaijani cities that share the same name. Or the Rasht‑Qazvin railway.

But then one important 130km stretch from Astara to Rasht, which is on the southern shore of the Caspian and is close to the Iranian–Azeri border, has not been built. The reason? Trump-era sanctions. That’s a graphic example of how much, in real-life practical terms, rides on a successful conclusion of the JCPOA talks in Vienna.

Who owns Zangezur?

Iran is positioned in a somewhat tricky patch along the southern periphery of the South Caucasus. The three major players in that hood are of course Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Iran borders the former Armenian – now Azeri – regions adjacent to Karabakh, including Zangilan, Jabrayil and Fuzuli.

Source: The Cradle

It was clear that Iran’s flexibility on its northern border would be tied to the outcome of the Second Karabakh War. The northwestern border was a source of major concern, affecting the provinces of Ardabil and eastern Azerbaijan – which makes Tehran’s official position of supporting Azerbaijani over Armenian claims all the more confusing.

It is essential to remember that even in the Karabakh crisis in the early 1990s, Tehran recognized Nagorno‑Karabakh and the regions surrounding it as integral parts of Azerbaijan.

While both the CIA and Mossad appear oblivious to this recent regional history, it will never deter them from jumping into the fray to play Baku and Tehran against each other.

An extra complicating factor is that Zangezur is also mouth-watering from Ankara’s vantage point.

Arguably, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who never shies away from an opportunity to expand his Turkic-Muslim strategic depth, is looking to use the Azeri connection in Zangezur to reach the Caspian, then Turkmenistan, all the way to Xinjiang, the Uyghur Muslim populated western territory of China. This, in theory, could become a sort of Turkish Silk Road bypassing Iran – with the ominous possibility of also being used as a rat line to export Takfiris from Idlib all the way to Afghanistan.

Tehran, meanwhile, is totally INSTC-driven, focusing on two railway lines to be rehabilitated and upgraded from the Soviet era. One is South-North, from Jolfa connecting to Nakhchivan and then onwards to Yerevan and Tblisi. The other is West-East, again from Jolfa to Nakhchivan, crossing southern Armenia, mainland Azerbaijan, all the way to Baku and then onward to Russia.

And there’s the rub. The Azeris interpret the tripartite document resolving the Karabakh war as giving them the right to establish the Zangezur corridor. The Armenians for their part dispute exactly which ‘corridor’ applies to each particular region. Before they clear up these ambiguities, all those elaborate Iranian and Tukish connectivity plans are effectively suspended.

The fact, though, remains that Azerbaijan is geoeconomically bound to become a key crossroads of trans-regional connectivity as soon as Armenia unblocks the construction of these transport corridors.

So which ‘win-win’ is it?

Will diplomacy win in the South Caucasus? It must. The problem is both Baku and Tehran frame it in terms of exercising their sovereignty – and don’t seem particularly predisposed to offer concessions.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are having a ball exploiting those differences. War, though, is out of the question, either between Azerbaijan and Armenia or between Azerbaijan and Iran. Tehran is more than aware that in this case both Ankara and Tel Aviv would support Baku. It is easy to see who would profit from it.

As recently as April, in a conference in Baku, Aliyev stressed that

“Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia and Iran share the same approach to regional cooperation. The main area of concentration now is transportation, because it’s a situation which is called ‘win‑win.’ Everybody wins from that.”

And that brings us to the fact that if the current stalemate persists, the top victim will be the INSTC. In fact, everyone loses in terms of Eurasian integration, including India and Russia.

The Pakistan angle, floated by a few in hush-hush mode, is completely far-fetched. There’s no evidence Tehran would be supporting an anti-Taliban drive in Afghanistan just to undermine Pakistan’s ties with Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The Russia–China strategic partnership looks at the current South Caucasus juncture as unnecessary trouble, especially after the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. This badly hurts their complementary Eurasian integration strategies – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Greater Eurasian Partnership.

INSTC could, of course, go the trans-Caspian way and cut off Azerbaijan altogether. This is not likely though. China’s reaction, once again, will be the deciding factor. There could be more emphasis on the Persian corridor – from Xinjiang, via Pakistan and Afghanistan, to Iran. Or Beijing could equally bet on both East-West corridors, that is, bet on both Azerbaijan and Iran.

The bottom line is that neither Moscow nor Beijing wants this to fester. There will be serious diplomatic moves ahead, as they both know the only ones to profit will be the usual NATO-centric suspects, and the losers will be all the players who are seriously invested in Eurasian integration.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is an from Editorial/Transcontinental Times

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Summary

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.

Physician and surgeon 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. Brandt had been appointed by Adolf Hitler to head the Euthanasia Program, Aktion T4. The defendants were indicted on four counts:

1. Conspiracy to Commit War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity;

2. War Crimes (I.E., Crimes Against Persons Protected by the Laws of War, Such as Prisoners of War);

3. Crimes Against Humanity (Including Persons Not Protected By The Laws Of War); and

4. Membership in a Criminal Organization (the SS).

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

The specific crimes charged included more than twelve series of medical experiments concerning the effects of and treatments for high altitude conditions, freezing, malaria, poison gas, sulfanilamide, bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, bone transplantation, saltwater consumption, epidemic jaundice, sterilization, typhus, poisons, and incendiary bombs.

These experiments were conducted on concentration camp inmates. Other crimes involved 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. The defendants were charged with ordering, supervising, or coordinating criminal activities, as well as participating in them directly. The fourth count concerned membership in the SS (Schuttzstaffeln) of the Nazi regime.

Brandt on trial, 20 August 1947 (Public Domain)

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 material presented in this project includes case file documents (the briefs and document books created and used in the course of the trial), evidence file documents (the evidentiary documents from which the prosecution, and occasionally the defendants, derived their exhibits), and the trial transcript.

The trial documents and evidence file documents related to Case 1 amount to approximately 2800 documents and 13,000 pages of material.

Indictments – (25 Oct. 1946)

Four Counts:

1. Conspiracy to commit war crimes against humanity: The ordering, planning, and organization of the war crimes and crimes against humanity charged in counts two and three. Charged against all of the defendants. The tribunal decided not to convict on this charge.
2. War crimes: Charged against all defendants. 15 guilty, 8 acquitted.
3. Crimes against humanity: Charged against all defendants. 15 guilty, 8 acquitted.
4. Membership in a criminal organization:  Membership in the SS. Charged against K. Brandt, Genzken, Gebhardt, R. Brandt, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Sievers, Brack, Hoven, and Fischer. All found guilty.

Human Experiments and Other “Medical” Crimes (itemized in counts 2 and 3):

1. High-altitude experiments. March – August 1942. Conducted for the German air force to investigate the effect of high-altitude flying; experiments were conducted at the Dachau camp using a low-pressure chamber. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Romberg, Ruff, Schroeder, Sievers, and Weltz. Charges against K. Brandt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick were withdrawn. R. Brandt and Sievers were convicted.
2. Freezing experiments. August 1942 – May 1943. Conducted primarily for the German air force to investigate treatments for persons who had been severely chilled, using prisoners at the Dachau camp. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Schroeder, Sievers, and Weltz. Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, and Weltz were acquitted; R. Brandt, Handloser, Schroeder, and Sievers were convicted.
3. Malaria experiments. February 1942 – April 1945. Conducted to test immunization for and treatment of malaria; experiments were conducted on more than 1000 prisoners at Dachau. Charged against Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rostock, and Sievers. (Evidence was also presented against Rose, but no judgment was reached.) No judgment was made concerning Mrugowsky. Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Poppendick, and Rostock were acquitted; Sievers was convicted.
4. Mustard (“lost”) gas experiments. September 1939 – April 1945. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forces to investigate treatment of injuries caused by Lost (mustard) gas; experiments were conducted at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and other camps. Charged against Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Rostock, and Sievers. Blome, Gebhardt, Handloser, and Rostock were acquitted; K. Brandt, R. Brandt, and Sievers were convicted.
5. Sulfanilamide experiments. July 1942 – September 1943. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forces to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs as treatments for infected wounds; experiments were conducted at Ravensbrueck. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Fischer, Gebhardt, Genzken, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Oberheuser, Poppendick, Rostock, and Schroeder. Charges against Becker-Freyseng, Blome, and Schroeder were withdrawn. No judgment was reached concerning R. Brandt. Genzken, Poppendick, and Rostock were acquitted; K. Brandt, Fischer, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, and Oberheuser were convicted.
6. Bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and bone transplant experiments. September 1942 – December 1943. Conducted for benefit of German armed forces, using Polish inmates at the Ravensbrueck camp. Charged against K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Fischer, Gebhardt, Handloser, Oberheuser, and Rostock. Charge against R. Brandt withdrawn. K. Brandt, Handloser, and Rostock were acquitted; Fischer, Gebhardt, and Oberheuser were convicted.
7. Seawater experiments. July – September 1944. Conducted for the German air force and navy to test methods of making seawater drinkable; experiments were conducted at Dachau. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, Beiglboeck, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rostock, Schaefer, Schroeder, and Sievers. The charge against Mrugowsky was withdrawn. K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Handloser, Poppendick, Rostock, and Schaefer were acquitted; Becker-Freyseng, Beiglboeck, Gebhardt, Schroeder, and Sievers were convicted.
8. Epidemic jaundice experiments. June 1943 – January 1945. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forcesto investigate causes of and inoculations against epidemic jaundice; experiments were conducted on Polish prisoners at Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler camps. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rose, Rostock, Schroeder, and Sievers. Charges against Becker-Freyseng, Rose, and Sievers were withdrawn. R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rostock, and Schroeder were acquitted; K. Brandt was convicted.
9. Typhus (“spotted fever”) and other vaccine experiments. December 1941 – February 1945. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forces to test the effectiveness of vaccines against typhus, smallpox, cholera, and other diseases; experiments were conducted at Buchenwald and Natzweiler. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Genzken, Handloser, Hoven, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rose, Rostock, Schroeder, and Sievers. Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, Gebhardt, Poppendick, and Rostock were acquitted; R. Brandt, Genzken, Handloser, Hoven, Mrugowsky, Rose, Schroeder, and Sievers were convicted.
10. Poison experiments. December 1943 and September – October 1944. Conducted to investigate the effect of various poisons, including poison in food and poisoned bullets; experiments were conducted at Buchenwald (food) and Sachsenhausen (bullets). Charged against Gebhardt, Genzken, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick. Gebhardt, Genzken, and Poppendick were acquitted; Mrugowsky was convicted.
11. Incendiary bomb experiments. November 1943 – January 1944. Conducted to test pharmaceutical treatments for phosphorus burns; experiments were conducted at Buchenwald, involving the infliction of burns by materials from incendiary bombs. Charged against Gebhardt, Genzken, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick. All were acquitted.
12. Sterilization experiments. March 1941 – January 1945. Conducted to develop methods of rapid, large scale sterilization in order to ensure the eventual elimination of “enemy” populations while keeping captive workers as a labor force during the war. Experiments were planned and/or conducted at Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, and elsewhere employing drugs, x-rays, and surgery. Charged against Brack, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, Oberheuser, Pokorny, and Poppendick. The charges against Mrugowsky and Oberheuser were withdrawn. K. Brandt, Pokorny, and Poppendick were acquitted; Brack, R. Brandt, and Gebhardt were convicted.
13. Skeleton collection. June 1943 – September 1944. Conducted to complete a skeleton collection for an anatomical research project at the Reich University of Strasbourg; one hundred twelve Jews at Auschwitz were killed for the purpose. Charged against R. Brandt and Sievers; both were convicted.
14. Tubercular Polish nationals. May 1942 – January 1944. Polish nationals alleged to have incurable tuberculosis were imprisoned or killed on the pretext of protecting the health of Germans in Poland. Charged against Blome and R. Brandt; both were acquitted.
15. Euthanasia. September 1939 – April 1945. Involved the secret killing of the aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed children, and others, beginning at asylums in Germany and later in the camps and occupied territories. Charged against Blome, Brack, K. Brandt, and Hoven. Blome was acquitted; Brack, K. Brandt, and Hoven were convicted.

Other charges:

16. Phenol (gas oedema) experiments. 1942 – 1944. Conducted to investigate whether levels of phenol in gas oedema serum caused fatalities among wounded soldiers; experiments were conducted on prisoners at Buchenwald. Charged against Handloser, Hoven, and Mrugowsky. Handloser was acquitted; Hoven and Mrugowsky were convicted.
17. Phlegmon experiments. 1942. Conducted to test treatments for sepsis and related diseases, in coordination with sulfanilamide experiments at Ravensbrueck; experiments were conducted at Dachau and Auschwitz. Charged against Fischer, Oberheuser, and Poppendick; all were acquitted.
18. Polygal experiments. 1943 – 1944. Conducted to test the effectiveness of polygal, a blood coagulant, for the treatment of wounds. Charged against Blome, Handloser, Poppendick, and Sievers. Blome, Handloser, and Poppendick were acquitted; Sievers was convicted.
19. Planning, organization, and administration (of 1-15 above)
20. Conspiracy: Count 1.
21. Membership: Count 4.

The Nuremberg Code (1947)

Permissible Medical Experiments

See this.

The great weight of the evidence before us to effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:

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, overreaching, 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.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

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 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 probable 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.

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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired American family physician who practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care during the last decade of his professional career. His patients came to see him asking for help in getting off the psychotropic drugs to which they were addicted and which they knew had sickened them and disabled their brains and bodies.

Dr Kohls lives in Duluth, MN, USA and writes articles that deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination agendas, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace.

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

Dr Kohls’ Duty to Warn columns have been archived at a number of websites around the world, including the following:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/?ptype=article; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/author/?a=Gary%20G.%20Kohls,%20MD

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/

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***

For weeks, Iran has been concentrating troops and heavy vehicles on its border with Azerbaijan as tensions continue to mount. Participating in military exercises on the Azerbaijani border include several infantry, special forces and armored units, as well as several fighter jets, helicopters and missile systems.

The “Conquerors of Khaybar”, the name given to the military exercise, is a reference to a battle fought by Muhammed, the founder of Islam, against the Jews in 628 CE. This is an obvious reference to the close relationship Azerbaijan has with Israel. Not only does Azerbaijan acquire Israeli weapons, many of which were used against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, but Mossad has a legal right to operate in the Caucasian country as part of their spying and espionage acts against Iran.

In response, the Azeris announced joint military exercises with Turkey between October 5 and 8, dubbed “Indestructible Brotherhood 2021.” Officially, the maneuvers are to improve cooperation and coordination between the land forces of Turkey and Azerbaijan, but it’s also a supposed message towards Iran that Azerbaijan is not alone. In fact, Azerbaijan is so confident that a lawmaker even quipped that Pakistan’s army would invade Tehran if it made any hostile move against Baku, while another lawmaker threatened to cut Iran’s tail.

Tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan have been building for months now, with no signs that relations are improving or stabilizing. On October 5, Azerbaijan closed down the office of the Iranian spiritual leader in Baku, a significant move when remembering that only Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Bahrain are Shi’te-majority countries out of the 50 Muslim-majority countries across the world.

Closing down of the Iranian spiritual leader’s office in Baku was in response to Iran closing its airspace to the Azerbaijani Air Force. This is a major move as flying over Iranian airspace was the most direct route to carry military reinforcements and supplies to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic from Azerbaijan proper. Both Azerbaijani territories are separated by Armenia’s Syunik Province, hence why the Iranian flight route was needed. However, for Azerbaijan to reach its detached autonomous region, it now must take an extended bypassed route over Georgia and Turkey. The move by Iran now adds extended travel time, something that would be catastrophic if a war broke out.

Moreover, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted on Sunday: “Those who, under the illusion of relying on others, think that they can provide security, know that they will be slapped soon.” The tweet also comes as news emerged that Azerbaijan will soon acquire a batch of Israeli-made Arrow 3 anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense missiles.

After rhetorically supporting last year’s joint Azerbaijani-Turkish invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh in a gross miscalculation on the intentions and purposes of the war, Tehran is now exerting pressure on the ongoing attempts to close the trade corridor between Iran and Armenia. Azerbaijani authorities recently announced that Iranian trucks heading to the Armenian capital of Yerevan, in addition to paying a transit fee of $300, will not be able to travel at night, but only during the day. Following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan captured a part of the road that links Iran to Yerevan, hence why Iranian Deputy Transportation Minister Kheirollah Khademi visited Armenia on Monday to express Tehran’s financial and technical support for a 400-kilometer transit road linking the Iranian border crossing at Nordooz to Yerevan, bypassing Azerbaijani-held territories.

From the Iranian perspective, assisting Armenia now is also a part of their conflict with Israel, a country that Yerevan has never had good relations with, unlike Baku. According to Tehran, Israel has four bases in Azerbaijan. Even though Israel denies having its own bases there, the Jewish state actually considers Azerbaijan as a part of its peripheral strategy – establishing alliances with countries close to enemy states.

This flurry of exchanges between Iran and Armenia, despite the former strongly backing Azerbaijan rhetorically during last year’s war, is undoubtedly due to the complex dynamics created by Turkey’s pursuit of an ideologically syncretic neo-Ottoman and pan-Turkic foreign policy. The Turks, along with cultural and linguistic affinities, are also motivated to strengthen their relations with Azerbaijan so they can collaborate in the energy field and establish trade corridors with Central Asia.

The confrontation between Iran and Azerbaijan can easily involve not only the Turks, but also the Israelis in a more meaningful way beyond weapon sales and intelligence exchanges. Tehran is taking a huge risk by threatening war with Azerbaijan as it could reignite the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and draw in Armenia, Turkey and perhaps even Pakistan.

At the same time, despite all of Azerbaijan’s bravado and confidence after defeating a weak Armenian military with the assistance of Turkey and Syrian mercenaries, it is unlikely that Ankara will allow a war to occur as they recognize and understand Iran’s military might. While Baku is full of arrogance after last year’s victory, Turkey is struggling to keep its economy afloat while maintaining its various military operations across the region. For this reason, it is unlikely that a war between Iran and Azerbaijan will breakout as Turkey, which has de facto control over large parts of the Azerbaijani military, will not allow its ally to provoke a war in the same way they did with Armenia. Unlike Baku, Ankara understands that Iranian power is incomparable to Armenia’s.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image: Iran’s national army began exercises near its border with Azerbaijan, October 1, 2021. (Credit Image: © Iranian Army Office via ZUMA)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

While India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar is doing a masterly job to canvass support for the Biden Administration’s project to delay any constructive engagement with the Taliban Government in Kabul by the international community until Washington gets its act together, on a parallel track, the Anglo-American axis has been working systematically to re-engage the Taliban. read more 

In this connection, the overnight trip by the UK Minister for the Armed Forces, James Heappey to Uzbekistan on September 21-22 was actually a working visit to put in place the logistics for a sustainable engagement with the Taliban Government. The US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman swiftly followed it up this week in Tashkent. read more 

Heappey made a ‘field trip’ to Termez where a massive Soviet era air base is located (from where the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was staged in 1980.) The intention seems to have been to assess the possible use of Termez to open a ‘humanitarian corridor’ towards Afghanistan. 

There is a huge groundswell of opinion in the world community, repeatedly highlighted by the UN agencies and Secretary-General António Guterres in the recent weeks, that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in real time in Afghanistan. For the Biden Administration, which is already badly wounded by the clumsy evacuation at Kabul Airport, this looming humanitarian crisis has the explosive potential to damage its reputation further. 

Suffice to say, the US and the UK are positioning themselves to spearhead a humanitarian aid programme that in political terms would also inevitably open the pathway to their engagement with the Taliban Government. The idea is to ‘normalise’ the relations with the Taliban at a working level and build mutual trust to a point from where formal diplomatic recognition of the government in Kabul can follow as a logical step sooner rather than later. 

Interestingly, there are some indications already that the Biden Administration is distancing itself from the previous Afghan ambassador in Washington Adela Raz who was appointed by the Ashraf Ghani government.  

Fundamentally, Washington and London have decided that it is possible to do business with the Taliban Government. At the root of this is their strategic assessment that there is no better way to address the security threat emanating from from the ISIS and other terrorist groups present in Afghanistan than by co-opting the Taliban Government, given the fact that Taliban and ISIS are mortal enemies of each other. read more

In the weekend, in fact, Taliban destroyed a major hideout of the ISIS in Charikar town to the north of Kabul. Second, any independent counter-terrorist operations by the US or the UK on Afghan soil will be firmly opposed by the Taliban as an attack on their country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That is to say, the US and the UK would risk getting entangled in a confrontation with the Taliban, which is not only futile but can be counterproductive as it could destabilise Afghanistan and create conducive ground for the ISIS to exploit. 

Third, the fact of the matter is that the Taliban is a known entity for the Western intelligence agencies over the past many years, and rhetoric apart, western capitals have a positive impression about the Taliban’s pragmatic outlook and their eagerness to integrate into the western world. 

Of course, Western experts do not share the one-dimensional view of the Taliban that the Indian establishment propagates, namely, that they are a mere Pakistani proxy without an Afghan identity of their own. 

Fourth, the Western assessment is that it is unwise to let the Taliban become utterly dependent on the regional states surrounding Afghanistan — Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan — in the prevailing international climate of big power rivalry in new cold war conditions. 

Fifth, while the esoteric of ‘Afghan resistance’ is intoxicating to the uninformed mind, the cold professional assessment in knowledgable quarters is that the Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a compelling reality that cannot be ignored and the regime is consolidating in that country. Other thanks the maverick leadership in Tajikistan, no one thinks that The Taliban government is in any danger of being overthrown. read more

That is to say, realistically speaking, there is no alternative to doing business with the Taliban government, and the earlier the contacts in such a direction are initiated, the more productive it will be for both sides. The spectre of refugee flow from Afghanistan is indeed haunting the Western world. 

All these multiple considerations have prompted the visit by the UK Prime Minister’s special representative on Afghanistan Sir Simon Gass (concurrently the chairman of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and formerly British ambassador to Iran) to Kabul earlier today to make the first direct contact with the Taliban government. 

Sir Simon was accompanied by Martin Longden, the C’dA in the British Embassy in Kabul (which is now relocated to Doha). The two British diplomats were received by the Taliban Foreign Khan Amir Khan Muttaqi.

The British side later tweeted that Sir Simon had “serious and substantial discussions with Muttaqi. A wide range of issues covered — including the humanitarian crisis, terrorism, the importance of safe passage for UK & Afghan nationals, and rights of women and girls.” A UK readout subsequently  said the British envoys also met the two deputy prime ministers of The Taliban government Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Akhund and Mawlawi Abdul-Salam Hanafi.

It added, “Sir Simon and Dr Longden discussed how the UK could help Afghanistan to address the humanitarian crisis, the importance of preventing the country from becoming an incubator for terrorism, and the need for continued safe passage for those who want to leave the country. They also raised the treatment of minorities and the rights of women and girls. The government continues to do all it can to ensure safe passage for those who wish to leave, and is committed to supporting the people of Afghanistan.” Conceivably, a reopening of the UK embassy in a near future — or some form of British presence in Kabul — cannot be ruled out. 

The Allies Sculpture: Life sized bronze statues of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sitting on a bench in New Bond Street, London, reminding the world of the shared history of the two great powers.

There is no gainsaying the fact that as often in modern history, the US and the UK are moving in tandem. Presidents and prime ministers come and go but the ‘special relationship’ is alive and thriving! read more

Without doubt, Sir Simon’s mission had the full backing of the Biden Administration.. With Sir Simon flying into Kabul, the first move in the new great game begins in Afghanistan as a template of the so-called ‘strategic competition’ — to borrow the expression from the Biden Administration — involving the US, Russia and China.

This audacious British move cutting through the shibboleths of vitriolic rhetoric over the DNA of the Afghan Taliban would have taken Moscow and Beijing by surprise. Who’s afraid of recognising the Taliban government, after all?

It is a stark warning that the war in Afghanistan has mutated into a newer form of the 19th century great game. Only yesterday, there were rumours swirling in the Kremlin media that Chinese planes had landed in Bagram air base.

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Featured image: Sir Simon Gass, British Prime Minister’s representative on Afghanistan, seated second from left, with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Amir Khan Muttaqi, Kabul, October 5, 2021. (Source: Indian Punchline)

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***

Last night Alex Jones of Infowars.com did a special broadcast regarding an October, 2019 video that they had just become aware of that was a panel discussion hosted by the Milken Institute discussing the need for a Universal Flu Vaccine.

The video clip that they played of this event was a 1 minute and 51 second dialogue between the moderator, Michael Specter, a journalist who is a New Yorker staff writer and also an adjunct professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Rick Bright, the director of HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

In this short clip, which was extracted from the hour-long panel discussion, Anthony Fauci explains that bringing a new, untested kind of vaccine like an mRNA vaccine, would take at least a decade (“if everything goes perfectly”) to go through proper trials and be approved by the FDA.

He would know, because he had been trying to do it for about a decade already by then (October, 2019), trying to develop an mRNA based vaccine for HIV.

But now they were discussing something much bigger than just a vaccine for AIDS patients. They are talking about a “Universal Flu Vaccine” that everyone would have to take – a huge market for Big Pharma!

Rick Bright, the director of HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), then speaks and states that what could happen is that “an entity of excitement that is completely disruptive and is not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes” could change that.

Here is the short clip which I put on our Bitchute and Rumble channels last night:

Alex Jones spent over 50 minutes covering this on his show last night, and it looks like he covered it on his show today as well.

I have not had a chance to watch these yet, as I went and found the original 1 hour panel discussion video, and spent the day listening to and analyzing that, so that I could supply this report to our readers.

Joining Fauci, Rick Bright, and Michael Specter at this event were:

• Margaret Hamburg, Foreign Secretary, National Academy of Medicine
• Bruce Gellin, President, Global Immunization, Sabin Vaccine Institute
• Casey Wright, CEO, FluLab

In short, this panel discussion focused on what they perceived as the need for a universal flu vaccine, but they admitted that the old way of producing vaccines was not sufficient for their purposes, and that they needed some kind of global event where many people were dying to be able to roll out a new mRNA vaccine to be tested on the public.

They all agreed that the annual flu virus was not scary enough to create an event that would convince people to get a universal vaccine.

And as we now know today, about 2 years after this event, that “terrifying virus” that was introduced was the COVID-19 Sars virus.

And so now we know why the flu just “disappeared” in the 2020-21 flu season. It was simply replaced by COVID-19, in a worldwide cleverly planned “pandemic” to roll out the world’s first universal mRNA vaccines.

This was always the goal, and previous efforts through various influenzas, AIDS, Ebola, and other “viruses” were all unsuccessful in leading to the development of a universal vaccine to inject into the entire world’s population.

Margaret Hamburg stated regarding getting a “Universal Vaccine” into the market:

“It’s time to stop talking, and it’s time to act.”

“I think it is also because we haven’t had a sense of urgency.”

Michael Specter asks:

“Do we need lots of people to die for that sense of urgency to occur?”

Hamburg replies that: “There are already lots of people dying” from the flu each year.

Bruce Gellin states that basically people just are not afraid enough of the term “the flu.”

There are so many things that are revealed about how Big Pharma and government health authorities think in this panel discussion. For example, they bemoan the fact that if they do too good of a job in public health, then they lose funding to develop products that fight viruses.

Michael Specter states: “It seems to me that one of the curses of the public health world is, if you guys do your job well, everyone goes along well and healthy.”

Hamburg: “And they cut your funding.”

Rick Bright complains that the yearly distribution of flu vaccines is inefficient in terms of collecting data, and in the process actually admits that some vaccines just don’t work well:

“We distribute 150 million doses of the seasonal (flu) vaccines every year, we don’t even know how many people are being vaccinated from the doses that are delivered to the people, which doses they got, and what the real outcome was, so that we can learn from that knowledge base on how to optimize or improve our vaccine. So there are opportunities that we have today…

I think if we uncloaked the poorest performing vaccines in the market place today, it might be very revealing to tell us which of the technologies we have, and allow us to go deeper into those technologies to determine why they are more effective. There are vaccines licenses today that are more effective. I think that we’re just afraid to admit the truth.”

So much for the public mantra that is espoused by Big Pharma and government that the “science” of vaccines is “settled,” and that they are completely “safe and effective.”

Casey Wright repeats the mantra that was publicized every year, before COVID, about just how deadly the flu virus was: “650,000 people die every year from the flu.”

As we have documented many times over the past decade here at Health Impact News, this is simply not true. This is an estimate because actual laboratory confirmed cases of influenza each year are very small, probably less than 1000 in the U.S.

Most flu-like symptoms are never tested in a lab to determine what is causing the symptoms. They were always just classified as “flu” to inflate the numbers to justify the very profitable flu shot each year. Some of our previous coverage of this issue: CDC Inflates Flu Death Stats to Sell More Flu Vaccines, Did 80,000 People Really Die from the Flu Last Year? Inflating Flu Death Estimates to Sell Flu Shots

So as they have inflated the COVID-19 cases since last year, they are simply continuing their policy of inflating flu numbers each year in order to sell their vaccines. They obviously could not have done both last year, as the public would have quickly seen that the math doesn’t work.

And yet, so many in the public bought the lie that the COVID-19 measures got rid of the flu, but not COVID-19.

Ultimately, this panel discussion can be boiled down to: Nobody wants to fund research for a universal flu vaccine. So how do we change that? Create a pandemic of fear over the flu (but they couldn’t call it the “flu” because people are no longer afraid of influenza, and the fear over “AIDS” had also subsided).

Fauci then addressed this “perception problem.”

There’s this perception (about the flu), if it’s so serious, how come people get the flu each year and it isn’t a catastrophe?

When you’re dealing with a disease like HIV, if you get HIV, it’s serious. Whether you’re young, whether you’re middle aged, or whether you’re old. If you get cancer, that’s bad. Whether you’re young, whether it’s intermediate… whereas if it’s influenza, some people, they go throughout life and it doesn’t impact them at all.

There isn’t anyone who is afraid of influenza. You go into a focus group and you say: Are you afraid of getting HIV if you’re at risk? Oh, absolutely.

Are you afraid of getting cancer? Absolutely. Are you afraid of the flu? Don’t bother me.

That’s the reality of how people perceive flu.

And it is going to be very difficult to change that, unless you do it from within and say, I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem, in a disruptive way….

Specter then asks:

In the long run, over time, if the 2009 pandemic had been much more deadly, would that have ended up being a better thing for humanity?

Everyone is silent as they obviously were thinking about how to answer that, and Specter says: “Come on gang.”

Fauci ultimately answers and says “No” because there were other years that were worse than 2009 and it didn’t change a thing in terms of creating a universal vaccine.

Hamburg then states:

The sad truth is that when there is a major crisis, it focuses attention and usually resources and some significant mobilization follows.

We need, #1, this time to be different, and we also need to really organize ourselves in a way where there will be accountability for sustained action, and not just response.

Specter states:

Craig Venter, who is a controversial person, but interesting to me, has written that he thinks we ought to have a vaccine, such that, if you take off in a plane from Hong Kong, and are infected, by the time your plane lands in New York, there ought to be a vaccine assembled and deliverable to you.

How crazy is that? How far are we from that? Are we ever going to get there?

Bright replies:

I’m not going to say how far away, but I don’t think that’s too crazy.

I think that if we move towards the era of synthetic-based vaccines, I think we remove the dependencies of thinking the vaccine has to be grown into something else, an egg, a cell, or insect cell – any type of dependency embryo.

If we can move into more synthetic, the nucleic acid based, messenger RNA based, those sequences can be rapidly shared around the world.

He then goes on to talk about using a 3D printer to print out a “vaccine patch” that people use to administer the “vaccine.”

We also learn in this panel discussion why Anthony Fauci is so opposed to natural immunity, because natural immunity for influenza, according to his view, translates to an immune response against other strains of a particular influenza virus, which will interfere with what they are trying to do with the vaccines.

That is why he wants to inject infants as young as 6 months old with a universal vaccine, as he states here, to prevent that “confused” natural immunity from happening before the child grows older.

So the big question that this panel was tackling, was how do they implement their strategies, and what is holding them back?

Certainly the government/regulatory issue is a big one, and now two years later we can see exactly how they did that, by controlling the FDA and the CDC to promote the “killer virus pandemic” narrative as long as possible to justify taking emergency measures that short-cut the normal procedures for bringing novel, new drugs to the market.

It also clearly explains the vicious opposition to existing, cheap therapeutics that very easily treated what is really just the seasonal flu “virus,” which stood in their way of rolling out a universal vaccine.

Casey Wright then made a rather remarkable comment about “philanthropy” and its role in this effort:

There’s a potential role for philanthropy to play there… we are in a position to take on a little more risk (she smiles eerily as she says this), to be open to a little bit more experimentation and methods in how we do things. That’s what I think is unique about FluLab, and is unique about other philanthropies.

I think they can play a really important role there, and fund a set of bolder, maybe earlier promising concepts.

Bingo! Think Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other “philanthropies” that are “unburdened” by regulatory issues as they spend their money pretty much unchecked, with no accountability, all in the name of “science” and the “greater good.”

We have seen most certainly how the Gates Foundation has done this in India by luring poor people into highly questionable ethical experimentations on vaccines, such as the Gardasil vaccine which we have covered so often over the years here at Health Impact News.

Bruce Gellin then talks about a report published by his organization that called for an “entity” that would make these decisions and bring everyone together to collaborate to create this universal vaccine, and eliminate those who oppose.

The report was published in 2019, and here is the press release.

He states:

They called for this “entity” which is the collaboration we talked about. They called for the need to infuse innovation, to find some of these people who we don’t know might be part of the problem to come into this. And to try to think about how we talk about this differently so that your stomach flu doesn’t keep us from making progress. (everyone laughs…)

I assume that this “entity” is Gellin’s group, The Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group.

Today, this is the main group fighting “vaccine hesitancy” and trying to silence any dissenting voices that get in their way of rolling out this universal vaccine, which of course we now know is the COVID-19 vaccine.

Online Misinformation about Vaccines

Watch the entire panel discussion to learn just how arrogant these people are. This is on our Bitchute and Rumble channels.

Your Life Only has Value as a Lab Rat to These Satanic Tyrants

This is one of the most explosive videos I have ever watched that takes us into the mindset of the Globalist Tyrants and their greedy desire to control the human race by means of vaccines.

As you watch this, you need to ask yourself: Who appointed these people as caretakers of humanity to decide what is good for the entire human race?

At the very core of this problem of medical tyranny is a fundamental difference of how one views life.

This panel represents the Luciferian, Satanic worldview that completely excludes God as the Creator of Life.

When they talk about the “deficiencies” of natural immunity, this is a direct Satanic attack on the human race, created in God’s image, and this has always been the case behind the “science” of vaccines.

This worldview represented by this panel believes that they are a higher form of life that can dictate to the masses how to live their lives, because these people honestly believe that they are tasked with saving humanity, and saving the planet, and that everyone else is too ignorant to make these decisions.

They are psychopaths driven by greed and the desire to control. We only see their public side, but they are human beings just like everyone else, and if we could see how they live outside of their public life, they would probably never be able to maintain their positions of power, because it would be plain to see just how evil they are.

Look at Anthony Fauci, for example. Does he look like an 80-year-old man? What does he do to stay looking so young?

We know that the rich and famous are addicted to pursuing youth and maintaining their power, and that many do so by consuming “young blood,” the blood taken from young people, including what is reportedly the very addictive drug “adrenochrome” harvested from babies just before they are executed. See: “Young Blood” – The Emerging Market for Products Made from the Blood of Children

They think nothing of people dying in mass for the sake of “science” and developing their universal vaccines. This universal vaccine is something they have worked on for decades now, and their dreams are finally coming to fruition through COVID-19.

I have been covering this issue for over a decade now, and nothing in this panel discussion surprised me at all.

The only way to control the global population for their own agendas is to control their health, and they have learned after decades of failure that it is nearly impossible to develop a biological weapon capable of infecting and spreading through the entire population.

The reason for this is because God’s natural immune system is just too strong, as it adapts and overcomes these diseases, as a built-in safe guard for the human race.

I would suspect that pretty much ALL of the past historical “pandemics” have been failed biological weapon programs that they have tried to develop. In the end, they have learned that the only way to infect everyone on the face of the earth, is to inject them with a poison via vaccines.

This has ALWAYS been the goal of the vaccine movement, even if most in the movement were not aware of it, and were foolish enough to believe that vaccines actually conferred health upon people.

REAL health is not something that can be purchased from “health authorities.” It is a free gift given to us by our Creator, and the most healthy people on the planet today are those very few individuals who recognize this truth, and stay as far away from pharmaceutical products as they can knowing they are poisons, and make every effort to eat clean, whole foods as God created them, and breathe fresh air, something that is getting more and more difficult to do as they pollute the atmosphere with their chemicals in geoengineering.

There are “natural medicines” that God has supplied us to use when our immune system is not balanced properly, and they are found in nature and generally available to all, because they cannot be patented, since they are God-made, and not man-made.

We must resist these Satanic tyrants! Your health is the most important thing God has given to you. Without your health, you are at their mercy and enslaved by their medical system.

Without your health you cannot love your spouse, you cannot produce children, you cannot live your life to its fullest and accomplish the purpose that God placed you on this earth to accomplish.

The mark of the beast prophesied in the Bible that is necessary to take in order to participate in the economy is here, and it is the COVID-19 vaccine, and this video is just further proof to this fact.

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For years now, and in response to similar projects at central banks in Europe and – more importantly – China with the PBOC, the Fed has been hemming and hawing about whether to take the possibility of creating a “FedCoin” more seriously.

Senior officials have been pretty tetchy about carefully weighing the “pros and cons” of a system that  would, in theory, enable the Fed to deposit money directly into the ‘digital wallets’ of regular Americans, a power that could ultimately render the entire private banking system obsolete.

And so, as we wait for the Fed to take the next tenuous steps toward developing a CBDC, WSJ has offered yet another leak confirming that the Fed is finally ready to release its official ‘report’ on CBDCs, which will serve as the start of a long-promised “review” of the pros and cons of CBDCs that’s supposed to allow for public feedback. The report could drop “as early as this week”.

Some more compassionate proponents of a FedCoin argue it could create a kind of “parallel” system where the Fed would be able to directly and easily dispense FedCoins to the public (the ideal of “helicopter money”, finally achieved), without relying on banks or the IRS as intermediaries, which could make delivering this type of aid faster and cheaper. It could also offer a more “efficient” avenue for distributing welfare or financial aid (that is, unless the Fed chose to distribute FedCoin through financial intermediaries instead of sending them directly from the Fed to the American people.

It could also be the greatest weapon in the war to make cash obsolete.

But within the Fed, the drive to create a “FedCoin” is primarily rooted in the fear that not having a central bank digital currency could potentially threaten the dollar’s dominance in the global financial system. In that respect, it’s like any other technological arms race.

Here’s more on that from Fed Governor Lael Brainard:

“It’s just very hard for me to imagine that the US, given the status of the dollar as a dominant currency in international payments, wouldn’t come to the table in that circumstance with a similar kind of an offering,” she said.

Chairman Powell has done his best to push for caution, arguing that it’s more important to “get it right” than be “first to market”. Put another way: who cares if the PBOC roles out the “e-RMB” first? The dollar’s role in the global financial system is much greater, which means the US is obligated to proceed with more trepidation.

Powell and others have said repeatedly that the Fed’s research so far has been early and exploratory. Powell has also pointed to the fact that many Americans still use and prefer cash. Most importantly, Powell has addressed concerns that a CBDC would effectively allow the Fed to monitor the finances of every American.

“It’s our obligation to do the work both on technology and on public policy to form a basis for making an informed decision,” he said last month.

Others on the Fed, including Randy Quarles, the Fed’s financial regulation guy, has slammed CBDCs as a fad, noting that the US dollar is already “highly digitized”. A report from the Philly Fed recently warned that a CBDC could also destabilize the financial system if everybody were to pull their digital dollars from markets, mutual funds and banks.

But enough of what senior Fed officials are saying: pretty soon, it will be the “public’s” turn, as the Fed has promised to solicit public comment during its review.

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During Hitler’s Nazi Reich, doctors and nurses were obliged to kill disabled or handicapped children – for the good of society, for obtaining a clean Arian State. And for economics.

Most of them complied. They killed innocent children, adults, and old-age people as well, for the same purpose. The elderly and infirm were injected with a poison, so they wouldn’t cost money to the state.

Did they have scruples? Maybe some of them did. But not following the orders of the tyrants, would have cost them their jobs – and livelihoods. And probably more. Punishment was not excluded.

At the end of the war, the criminals were judged.

The Nuremberg trials lasted about a year, from 20 November 1945 – 1 October 1946 and condemned the surviving criminals, those who could be apprehended in Germany or elsewhere in the world.

Many fled and went into hiding, many of them in South America, into states with military governments and who were “quietly” sympathetic to the Nazis. See this.

Today, the Situation is much Worse. In fact, there is No Comparison.

All 193 UN member countries are involved. They are subscribed to the same evil agenda. They are under the same diabolical blackmail spell, even the entire UN system doesn’t dare to oppose its tyrannical system. The UN and members of the UN family, in particular WHO, they actually help drive the agenda forward.

The people around the world have to be made aware of what’s behind this sinister plan – this outright killing spree.

The people have to know what is in the injections that go as “vaccines”, because most people haven’t a clue.

The mainstream media and their governments, in many cases governments elected and paid by the very people, who are now being betrayed, miserably betrayed and killed by their governments, still believe in their governments.

Simply because they cannot imagine the unimaginable. Yes, it is very difficult. But they should listen – and observe and research for themselves in those alternative media that the big and powerful mainstream hasn’t censured or shot-down altogether. The one publishing this article is one of them.

We Need Urgently a Nuremberg 2.0

We cannot wait until humanity has been extinct – and extinct it will be, if we do not react NOW to this madness, to this crime of biblical proportion, a crime of dimensions humanity has never experienced before in known history.

There is this phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, meaning they, those who bend over to the tyranny, believe in the devil’s narrative for comfort, but in their heart they now its false, it’s a lie. That happens when it’s easier to believe in a lie that accommodates their immediate life, rather than dealing with the often hard and devastating truth – which, if not attended to, will catch up sooner or later.

The Spanish Fifth Column Research Team, when they first examined a vaccine vial, they discovered that these vials are filled largely with a fluid called Graphene oxide, which has electromagnetic properties, thereby transforming your body into an electromagnetic field. See this.

Video: Interview with Ricardo Delgado 

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The Spanish Fifth Column Research Team also discovered that babies born to parents who were inoculated between December 2020 and January 2021, were born with black eyes. These babies are also known as Pandemic Babies or, more recently, Black-Eyed Babies. See this. Is this a coincidence? What will be other consequences? We may find out, as time goes on.

What’s In the Vaccine Vials

As if these occurrences weren’t disconcerting enough, Dr. Carrie Madej gave a shocking interview on the Stew Peters show on 29 September 2021. What she had discovered after examining different vials from different batches of both Modern and J&J injections, called “vaccines”, is hair-rising. She appeared obviously shocked by what she had seen after examining the “vaxx” vials. It is absolutely devastating.

You should take the time to watch and listen to the entire video. But, starting about minute 11 (of a 15 min. video), she mentions the Bill Gates experiments in West Africa, where vaxxed adults were literally robotized with credit cards, which were their only means of payment, no cash – and that in a part of the world were talking digital money is like a foreign language. See this or watch the video below.

The West African experiment had started in August 2020. Bill Gates then openly spoke about how humans would be digitized, so that all their personal data, including their money accounts would be “built-in” an electromagnet system in their body.

He even used the term Operating System, that we will be living with a built-in Operating System. It was too strange to believe.

Now it’s happening. A trial, for what will come to us, if we do not stop it.

It is in our power. We have to become a unit of people in solidarity around the world, because We, the People, around the globe – those of us who survive the “killing spree” – are destined to live the same horror towards the new future, towards The Great Reset.

Of course, belonging to this “dark cult”, he had to tell the world, they have to tell us ever so often what they are up to. That’s part of their cult’s rule. And they obey it by the letter, as we can see when we go back in history. But they present these atrocities in such ways that we, who are conveniently blind-folded – don’t see it, or do NOT WANT to see it. And they, every time, are moving a step closer to their end goal of total control of a drastically reduced population.

The WEF Officially Announces “The Great Reset”

Almost in parallel, in mid-2020, Klaus Schwab, WEF, brought us The Great Reset. Its contents are also difficult to believe – with the ending, “You will own nothing and be happy”.

This infers that the human is no longer human, but has been transposed to become a “transhuman” through artificial intelligence, robots – and other digital gimmicks which control his life – if one may still call this a life.

“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future” — Klaus Schwab, WEF (June 2020)

What is envisaged under “the Great Reset” is a scenario whereby the global creditors will have appropriated by 2030 the World’s wealth, while impoverishing large sectors of the World Population.

In 2030 “You’ll own nothing, And you’ll be happy.” (see video below)

“Transhumans”

Of course, such algorithms may also be used to turn off lives that are not worth having roaming-authority around Mother Earth, because somehow, they have found ways to oppose the system, or otherwise do not contribute.

Killing a “transhuman”, a half-robot, may not even be considered murder – since it is for the good of society.

Video: Towards Digital Tyranny with Peter Koenig

Click here to link to bitchute version

People! That’s the world we are living in, and have been living in for almost 20 months. That’s the situation we are moving towards, if We, the People, just let it happen. For this new world, “new normal”, as many like to call it, we need the dangerous ultra-shortwaves of 5G and soon 6G. They will transmit the algorithm-calculated signals, with which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots control us all, our behavior, our money, and, of course, our” wellbeing”.

This may happen, if We, The People, just keep slumbering in our cognitive dissonance dreams – that all will be the same as before, we just have to sit it out. Wrong, so wrong.

“Sustainable Development”: A Nightmare

The next ten years are crucial. It’s not by accident that they are called, UN Agenda 2030 – or “The Sustainable Development Goals”. These SDGs are a deviation bait for the developing countries and for all those in the UN system who work for them.

The 17 so-called SDGs are not achievable, because they would require several trillions of dollars, or dollars equivalents, of investments, money that is not available; money that is being spent for producing and selling injections, so-called “covid-vaccines”, the satellites and earthly antennas, millions, it takes to beam and receive on earth the 5G and soon 6G ultra-short vaves down to earth; and for paying Big Pharma to come up with ever new vaxxes, with new boosters every six months or so, all with the same or similar contents, to make sure your body becomes an electromagnetic field if, and this is a Big IF, you survive, as not all people react the same to these injections.

Never forget, the more you are “vaccinated” with these poison jabs and, in addition of deadly graphene, spike proteins are injected into your body, the more you jeopardize your own immune system. That’s what they want, of course. So, you become vulnerable to every little disease, including the common flu and covid.

Do not – ever – believe that these vaxxes are for the benefit of your health. They are for killing or dominating you, for controlling you, for stealing your assets and savings and transferring them upwards – to the ultra-rich – you know who they are, no need to mention them by name.

And even if the money was available for the 17 SDGs in some 130 developing countries, in the so-called Global South, these countries would lack the absorptive capacity to implement their largely foreign imposed ambitious dream-plans. Western money is simply stamped out of thin air, and as soon as it is transferred to a Global South country, it becomes debt. And as we know, debt is a rope around the neck. In other words, enslavement.

Back to where we are today. Thinking about Dr. Carrie Madej’s most recent video – see above – portraying the most recent knowledge on what these deadly injections are supposed to do, there is only one key warning – be aware, stay away from it. Stay away from the electromagnetic poison jab.

Why do you think they push so hard that every soul on earth – except them, of course, those in government, in their science, in their medical world, who play along with their narrative – is being inoculated with this deadly poison?

Today, the Government blackmails people, corporations, schools, universities, airlines, railway companies, hospitals, and of course, their own administration is the master example to request that all employees be “vaccinated” – if not they lose their job. Can you imagine? This means either you inject your body with a deadly poison, or you lose your livelihood. Not even Nazi Germany exerted such horrifying blackmail upon her citizens.

This concerns two to three generations today, who have to struggle to make a living – if they don’t give in to the vax coercion.

Many of them have to support families, pay rent – let alone food – and many will starve, because they do not have a support system that would share their income or housing with them. We are talking about hundreds of millions of people in the Global North, who are threatened and potentially lose their work.

We are only in 2021. This masterfully thought-out plan, The Great Reset, is supposed to finish its work and reach its targets in ten years, by 2030.

What may come next?

The unvaxxed are not allowed into super markets, and are not allowed to order food online.

Friendly vaxxed neighbors, a friend or even family member may then soon also not be allowed to shop for the unvaxxed – surveillance will be everywhere, is already everywhere.

We are moving towards a world for which the term tyranny is way too soft, a new word needs to be invented. It was shocking to hear all EU governments declare in lockstep: No jobs of the unvaxxed. George Orwell’s imagination in 1984, of how the future may look like, was way too benign.

“We are at the Gate to Hell”. So says Dr. Mike Yeadon – and he may be closer to the truth than you can ever imagine. See this.

Listen to Dr. Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, talking about the pandemic and the COVID vaccine.

Watch the video below.

We Should Stand United

Why do the vaxxed and unvaxxed not unite in solidarity to fight their common enemy?

How many have been force-vaxxed and already died from the vaxx-injuries? The mainstream media will not tell: Cancers of the ovaries, prostate, breast, they affect often the reproductive systems – blood clots that move to the lungs, impairing breathing, oxygen intake, or move to the heart, causing heart embolies, or the brain, resulting in brain strokes, and so on. It will be difficult, as Dr. Yeadon, former VP and Chief Scientist of Pfizer, says, to link the cause of death to the covid injection – as the injuries can be very diverse, and autopsies are in most cases not allowed, exactly, to keep a veil over the cause of death.

They, the vaxxed, injured and death, leave families behind. Imagine what it means for so many children, for no reason, and no fault of theirs, they cannot go to school, or have to wear the oxygen-starving, totally useless masks, and / or losing one or both of their parents because they had to be poison-injected in order to continue earning a living!

We are so far gone, that all those who have submitted to the deadly potion have no idea whether they will live or die, and if they live how they will be ‘robotized’ or ‘trans-humanized’, by the all controlling “elite”, the dark, sinister side of non-humanity among us, still roaming Mother Earth.

How do these people at heads of governments, heads of the UN system and its multiple agencies, the bought – or coerced – scientists, lawyers, teachers, doctors – and so on – sleep at night? And live a seemingly normal life? The answer is, they are not humans. They are not even trans-humans. They are — a new term has to be invented for this abhorrent species of living beings.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

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

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A paper published Sept. 30, in Eurosurveillance showed COVID spread rapidly by a fully vaccinated patient to fully vaccinated staff, patients and family members — despite a 96% vaccination rate and use of full personal protective equipment. Five patients died and nine had severe cases.

A paper published Sept. 30 in Eurosurveillance raises questions about the legitimacy of “vaccine-generated herd immunity.”

The study cites a COVID outbreak which spread rapidly among hospital staff at an Israeli Medical Center — despite a 96% vaccination rate, use of N-95 surgical masks by patients and full personal protective equipment worn by providers.

The calculated rate of infection among all exposed patients and staff was 10.6% (16/151) for staff and 23.7% (23/97) for patients, in a population with a 96.2% vaccination rate (238 vaccinated/248 exposed individuals).

The paper noted several transmissions likely occurred between two individuals both wearing surgical masks, and in one instance using full PPE, including N-95 mask, face shield, gown and gloves.

Of the 42 cases diagnosed in the outbreak, 38 were fully vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine, one had received only one vaccination and three were unvaccinated.

Of the infected, 23 were patients and 19 were staff members. The staff all recovered quickly. However, eight vaccinated patients became severely ill, six became critically ill and five of the critically ill died. The two unvaccinated patients tracked had mild COVID cases.

The authors concluded:

“This communication … challenges the assumption that high universal vaccination rates will lead to herd immunity and prevent COVID-19 outbreaks … In the outbreak described here, 96.2% of the exposed population was vaccinated. Infection advanced rapidly (many cases became symptomatic within 2 days of exposure), and viral load was high.”

According to the paper, the outbreak originated from a fully vaccinated haemodialysis patient in his/her 70s who was admitted with fever and cough and placed in a room with three other patients.

The patient had not been tested for SARS-CoV-2 on admission day, because his/her symptoms were mistaken for a possible bloodstream infection exacerbating congestive heart failure.

To determine the source of the outbreak, researchers conducted phylogenetic analysis on the whole-genome SARS-CoV-2 sequences that were available for 12 cases in the outbreak, including staff and patients from Wards A, B and C and dialysis departments.

All were infected with the Delta variant and epidemiologically and phylogenetically connected to the same outbreak, except for one case. That case and three staff members were not considered part of the outbreak.

“This is a very interesting paper and it is scientifically very sound,” said Dr. Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., Children’s Health Defense chief scientific officer and professor of biology at Simpson University.

“The breakthrough rate of 96.2% of the vaccinated population shows that in this instance, the vaccine was virtually useless in preventing transmission,” Hooker said. “It should also be noted the two reported cases among unvaccinated patients were mild, whereas six of the vaccinated patients died.”

BioNTech CEO says new COVID vaccine will be needed in 2022

The head of BioNTech — the German company that co-developed a COVID vaccine with Pfizer — said a new formula will likely be needed by mid-2022 to protect against future mutations of the virus.

According to Bloomberg, Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNtech, told the Financial Times that while current COVID vaiants, such as the contagious Delta strain, were not different enough to undermine current vaccinations, new strains will emerge that can evade booster shots and the body’s immune defenses.

“This year [a different vaccine] is completely un-needed, but by mid-next year, it could be a different situation,” Sahin said. “This is a continuous evolution, and that evolution has just started.”

According to a new pre-print study submitted for peer review, Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine antibodies disappear in many by seven months.

Six months after receiving the second dose of Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine, many recipients no longer have vaccine-induced antibodies that can immediately neutralize worrisome SARS-CoV-2 variants, Reuters reported.

Researchers analyzed blood samples from 46 healthy, mostly young or middle-aged adults after receipt of the two doses and again six months after the second dose.

“Our study shows vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine induces high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the original vaccine strain, but these levels drop by nearly 10-fold by seven months” after the initial dose, Bali Pulendran of Stanford University and Mehul Suthar of Emory University said in an email to Reuters.

In roughly half (47%) of all subjects, neutralizing antibodies that can block infection against COVID variants, such as Delta, Beta and Mu, were undetectable at six months after the second dose, the study showed.

Neutralizing antibodies are not the immune system’s only defense against the virus. Still, they “are critically important in protecting against SARS-CoV-2 infection,” said Pulendran and Suthar.

Researchers said the findings warrant administering a booster dose around six to seven months to enhance protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants.

Fauci says three shots of a COVID vaccine is ‘optimal regimen’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday he believes the “optimal regimen” of vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus will include a booster shot.

Fauci’s comments come a week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorized boosters for millions of Americans, including those whose professions make them “high risk.”

Nearly 1 million Americans have already scheduled appointments to receive a third dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, according to the White House.

Pfizer and BioNTech on Sept. 30 submitted initial data from their vaccine trial on children between 5 and 11 years old to the FDA.

The FDA’s independent vaccine advisory committee will hold three meetings in October to discuss COVID booster shots, mix-and-match boosters and vaccines for children 5 to 11 years old, the agency announced Friday.

The first two meetings, on Oct. 14 and 15, will cover booster doses of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccines — both of which are authorized for use in adults.

During the second meeting, the committee also will discuss data from the National Institutes of Health on the safety and efficacy of getting initial doses of one COVID vaccine and, later, a booster dose of another manufacturer’s shot, Politico reported.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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A new vaccine “tailored” to target next-generation Covid-19 will likely be needed by the middle of 2022, according to the head of BioNTech, the biotechnology company that developed the Pfizer shot.

The German firm’s CEO, Uğur Şahin, told the Financial Times that Covid-19 variants such as the Delta strain were more contagious but could be tackled by booster shots of current vaccines.

However, he added that mutations would emerge that could slip past the body’s vaccine-acquired immune defenses.

“This year, [a different vaccine] is completely unneeded. But by mid next year, it could be a different situation,” Sahin said, adding that “tailored” versions of current vaccines would be needed to specifically target the new strains that emerge.

“This virus will stay, and the virus will further adapt,” he said.

“We have no reason to assume that the next-generation virus will be easier to handle for the immune system than the existing generation. This is a continuous evolution, and that evolution has just started.”

Vaccination programs will feature two main streams by next year, Sahin predicted, with booster shots for those already inoculated and a continued campaign to get the vaccines to those who have had minimal access to them thus far.

A number of vaccine developers, including BioNTech and US pharma major Pfizer – which helped bring the company’s mRNA vaccine to the market – have been under pressure to share patents and technology to allow wider production of vaccines.

While Sahin claimed patent-sharing posed no risks to quality control, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has repeatedly argued that waiving intellectual property rights would disincentivize innovation. However, critics such as former US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Tom Frieden have accused pharma companies of “war-profiteering.”

Sahin declined to forecast how the Pfizer vaccine would be priced in the future, but told the newspaper that it would still be needed in the coming years.

According to the co-founder of BioNTech Dr Ugur Sahin, the COVID-19 vaccine he designed for Pfizer was designed in just few hours in a single day on January 25, 2020.

No other vaccine in history has been created and manufactured so quickly. Previously, the fastest vaccine ever developed took more than four years.

Meanwhile, new research from Trinity College Dublin and University of Edinburgh found more evidence that vitamin D protects against severe COVID-19 disease and death.

According to a whistleblower nearly 50000 patients died soon in 14 days after getting COVID vaccine shot. ‘They are lying. There is no question they are lying,’ said Attorney Renz. ‘The mantra of ‘safe and effective’ must stop after today’s information.’

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The COVID-19 “Vaccine” and the Nuremberg Code. Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 05, 2021

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.

Pure Insanity: Now Anyone with Any Disease in Alberta Can be Counted as a “COVID” Case

By Ethan Huff, October 05, 2021

In order to keep the “case” count high and the plandemic moving right along, government officials in Alberta, Canada, are now counting all illnesses as “covid” in order to justify all the tyranny.

Spanish Government Says that the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Has Not Been Isolated

By Free West Media, October 05, 2021

The Spanish Ministry of Health does not have SARS-CoV-2 cultures for testing and does not have a list of laboratories with samples of this virus. The government confirmed this to critical lawyers and organizations.

The Monday October 4th Facebook Blackout Reveals Real Power of Big Tech Companies

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, October 05, 2021

The problem has hit the Facebook group companies, causing damage not only to social media, but also to various websites and apps that are somehow linked to Mark Zuckerberg‘s businesses – including banking and financial transaction apps.

Potentially Millions of First Responders, Police, Teachers, Healthcare Workers Will Soon be Out of a Job over COVID Vaccine Mandates

By J. D. Heyes, October 05, 2021

An increasing number of governments, including the federal government, are mandating that their employees get a COVID-19 vaccine or else lose their jobs.

Huge Uptick in Ivermectin Use Is Causing Profit-driven Big Pharma to Sell Patented Copycat Pills

By Joel S. Hirschhorn, October 05, 2021

I am confident in predicting that as more and more bad news about the ineffectiveness and dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines become increasingly known to more of the public, the big drug companies will increasingly switch from vaccines to prescription antiviral medicines.

Forever Wars, Recaptured in Real Time

By Pepe Escobar, October 05, 2021

The 21^st century, geopolitically, so far has been shaped by the U.S.- engineered Forever Wars. Forever Wars: Afghanistan-Iraq, part 2, ranging from 2004 to 2021, is the fourth in a series of e-books recovering the Pepe Escobar archives on Asia Times.

Trump, Twitter and the Digital Town Hall

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 05, 2021

The merits are hard to stomach for partisans long jaundiced by presumption and dislike, but the cheer at the deplatforming of Donald Trump by a range of social media platforms said as much about the nature of any sentiment about democracy as it did about those claiming to defend it.

The Brutality of Denying Water to Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills

By Daphne Banai, October 05, 2021

Abu Hani and his family live only two kilometers from the Israeli settlement outpost of Avigayil in the occupied South Hebron Hills. But unlike Avigayil’s residents, who are connected to Israel’s national water grid, Abu Hani and his children are barred from doing so.

Pfizer Scientists Caught Undercover Admitting Pfizer Is Evil and that Natural Immunity Is Better than the COVID-19 Vaccine

By Brian Shilhavy, October 05, 2021

Project Veritas released their fourth video in its COVID-19 vaccine investigative series today which exposed three Pfizer scientists saying that antibodies lead to equal, if not better, protection against the virus compared to the vaccine.

What Biden Told the Indians

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, October 05, 2021

It has been a sobering two years. India’s economy crashed and it cannot be the magnet anymore for investors in Silicon Valley. ‘Make in India’ withered away. The current pitch for a spot in the global supply chain is unconvincing.    

Are US War Plans with China Taking Shape?

By Brian Berletic, October 05, 2021

The US and its allies continue beating the drums of war in regards to China, but how serious is this? Will it really lead to war, or is it merely posturing meant to give the US the most favorable position on the other side of a fully ascendant China?

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges.”—George Carlin

You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

In fact, in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs, our so-called rights have been reduced to mere technicalities, privileges that can be granted and taken away, all with the general blessing of the courts.

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Constitution being inexorably bled to death by the very institution (the judicial branch of government) that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.

Court pundits, fixated on a handful of politically charged cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term dealing with abortion, gun rights and COVID-19 mandates, have failed to recognize that the Supreme Court—and the courts in general—sold us out long ago.

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Americans can no longer rely on the courts to “take the government off the backs of the people,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. When presented with an opportunity to loosen the government’s noose that keeps getting cinched tighter and tighter around the necks of the American people, what does our current Supreme Court usually do?

It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern.

More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt, seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government interests than with upholding the rights of the people enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.

Every so often, the justices toss a bone to those who fear they have abdicated their allegiance to the Constitution. Too often, however, the Supreme Court tends to march in lockstep with the police state.

As a result, the police and other government agents have been generally empowered to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance.

In recent years, for example, the Court has ruled that police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits; police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips; Secret Service agents are not accountable for their actions, as long as they’re done in the name of “security”; citizens only have a right to remain silent if they assert it; police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside; police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime; police can stop, search, question and profile citizens and non-citizens alike; police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense”; police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home; and it’s a crime to not identify yourself when a policeman asks your name.

Moreover, it was a unanimous Supreme Court which determined that police officers may use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops. That same Court gave police the green light to taser defenseless motorists, strip search non-violent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and break down people’s front doors without evidence that they have done anything wrong.

The cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear, allowing lower court judgments to stand, are almost as critical as the ones they rule on. Some of these cases have delivered devastating blows to the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

By remaining silent, the Court has affirmed that: legally owning a firearm is enough to justify a no-knock raid by police; the military can arrest and detain American citizens; students can be subjected to random lockdowns and mass searches at school; police officers who don’t know their actions violate the law aren’t guilty of breaking the law; trouble understanding police orders constitutes resistance that justifies the use of excessive force; and the areas immediately adjacent to one’s apartment can be subjected to warrantless police surveillance and arrests.

Make no mistake about it: when such instances of abuse are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution, one can only conclude that the system is rigged.

By refusing to accept any of the eight or so qualified immunity cases before it last year that strove to hold police accountable for official misconduct, the Supreme Court delivered a chilling reminder that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

This is how qualified immunity keeps the police state in power.

Lawyers tend to offer a lot of complicated, convoluted explanations for the doctrine of qualified immunity, which was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to rig the system, ensuring that abusive agents of the government almost always win and the victims of government abuse almost always lose.

How else do you explain a doctrine that requires victims of police violence to prove that their abusers knew their behavior was illegal because it had been deemed so in a nearly identical case at some prior time?

It’s a setup for failure.

A review of critical court rulings over the past several decades, including rulings affirming qualified immunity protections for government agents by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order, protecting the ruling class, and insulating government agents from charges of wrongdoing than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Indeed, as Reuters reports, qualified immunity “has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”

Worse, as Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police.”

For those in need of a reminder of all the ways in which the Supreme Court has made us sitting ducks at the mercy of the American police state, let me offer the following.

As a result of court rulings in recent years, police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless searches. Police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless arrests based on mere suspicion. Police can claim qualified immunity for using excessive force against protesters. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a mentally impaired person. Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits. Police can stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.  Police officers can stop cars based on “anonymous” tips or for “suspicious” behavior such as having a reclined car seat or driving too carefully. Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime.  Police can use the “fear for my life” rationale as an excuse for shooting unarmed individuals. Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes.” Not only are police largely protected by qualified immunity, but police dogs are also off the hook for wrongdoing.

Police can subject Americans to strip searches, no matter the “offense.” Police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home. Police can use knock-and-talk tactics as a means of sidestepping the Fourth Amendment. Police can carry out no-knock raids if they believe announcing themselves would be dangerous. Police can recklessly open fire on anyone that might be “armed.” Police can destroy a home during a SWAT raid, even if the owner gives their consent to enter and search it. Police can suffocate someone, deliberately or inadvertently, in the process of subduing them.

To sum it up, we are dealing with a nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat.

So where does that leave us?

For those deluded enough to believe that they’re living the American dream—where the government represents the people, where the people are equal in the eyes of the law, where the courts are arbiters of justice, where the police are keepers of the peace, and where the law is applied equally as a means of protecting the rights of the people—it’s time to wake up.

We no longer have a representative government, a rule of law, or justice.

Liberty has fallen to legalism. Freedom has fallen to fascism.

Justice has become jaded, jaundiced and just plain unjust.

And for too many, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the American dream of freedom and justice for all has turned into a living nightmare.

Given the turbulence of our age, with its government overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, profit-driven prisons, corporate corruption, COVID mandates, and community-wide lockdowns, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Featured image is from The Crux

O Relógio do Clima, instalado por Roberto Cingolani na fachada do Ministério da Transição Ecológica, iniciou a contagem decrescente: faltam menos de 7 anos para a catástrofe climática causada pelo aquecimento global. O relógio está regulado calibrado de acordo com as previsões do instituto MCC, em Berlim, e não nas do IPCC (Comissão das Nações Unidas para as Alterações Climáticas). Calcula que a temperatura média global, que aumentou cerca de 1 °C desde o nível pré-industrial de 1750, poderá aumentar 1,5 °C em 2050 (ou seja, em três séculos), principalmente devido ao CO2 (dióxido de carbono) libertado na atmosfera pelas actividades humanas, o que causa uma intensificação do efeito de estufa. Segundo os cientistas da ONU, contribui secondariamente para o aquecimento global o aumento da actividade do Sol, enquanto, pelo contrário, para outros cientistas é a causa principal.

No Pré-Cop de Milão, do qual o Ministro Cingolani foi o principal organizador, o complexo quadro científico das alterações climáticas e das suas consequências ambientais foi espectacularizado utilizando técnicas de filmes sobre catástrofes. Confrontados com a previsão “científica” de que dentro de sete anos o planeta Terra será envolvido numa catástrofe climática, os 400 jovens de todo o mundo, reunidos por Cingolani em Milão, exigiram que a indústria de combustíveis fósseis fosse encerrada até 2030 e que os governos deixassem de financiá-la agora, substituindo-a por fontes verdes que não emitem CO2.

O Ministro Cingolani comprometeu-se em concretizar esse objectivo. Há de facto uma forma de o fazer, se a Itália tivesse um plano estratégico para criar um sistema energético integrado baseado na energia solar fotovoltaica e especialmente termodinâmica (com espelhos que concentram os raios solares), e em grandes parques eólicos, especialmente offshore (com turbinas eólicas instaladas em águas pouco profundas ou flutuantes). O projecto inovador solar termodinâmico desenvolvido pelo Prémio Nobel, Carlo Rubbia, que teria tornado possível produzir um terço das necessidades eléctricas italianas com algumas centrais solares de emissão zero, foi deliberadamente afundado e está agora a ser utilizado na China. A construção de parques eólicos offshore está dificultada, de tal forma que existe apenas um, em Taranto.

O Ministro Cingolani tem, contudo, uma “solução”: a energia nuclear (ver artigo do Director do Greenpeace Itália no il manifesto de 3 de Setembro). Cingolani declarou-o, de modo aberto e polémico, quando foi convidado por Renzi para a Escola de Educação Política ‘Italia Viva’. O Ministro patrocinou então uma conferência de apoiantes nucleares. Não é coincidência que, depois de conhecer John Kerry, o enviado especial do Presidente dos EUA para a gestão climática, se tenha convertido de oponente a apoiante da energia nuclear. Cingolani foi imediatamente acompanhado por Salvini, que disse: “Uma central nuclear na Lombardia? Qual é o problema?” Assim, o poderoso lobby nuclear também se radicou em Itália, que já obteve um primeiro resultado fundamental na União Europeia: o Centro Comum de Investigação, encomendado pela Comissão Europeia, incluiu a energia nuclear entre as “fontes de energia verde” apoiadas e financiadas pela União Europeia, para eliminar as emissões de CO2 até 2050.

Assim, a União Europeia está a relançar a indústria nuclear, numa altura em que esta se encontra em profunda crise devido ao aumento dos custos e a problemas técnicos. Embora as centrais de energia solar possam produzir mais electricidade do que as centrais nucleares, sem custos adicionais ou emissões perigosas, só para armazenar temporariamente a enorme quantidade de resíduos radioactivos produzidos pelas centrais nucleares da União Europeia, espera-se que o seu custo seja de 420-570 biliões de euros. Adiciona-se a enorme cifra necessária para o desmantelamento dessas mesmas centrais, que, na maior parte atingiram ou superaram a idade limite de 35 anos e estão a tornar-se cada vez mais caras e perigosas. Entretanto, a Agência Internacional para a Energia Atómica autorizou a descarga no mar de mais de um milhão de toneladas de água radioactiva, que se acumulou na central nuclear de Fukushima, após o acidente de 2011, com o  resultado de que aumentaram as mortes por cancro provocadas por esta “fonte de energia  verde”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

La transizione “ecologica” al nucleareBy Manlio Dinucci, October 05, 2021

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

L’Orologio del clima, installato da Roberto Cingolani sulla facciata del Ministero della transizione ecologica, ha iniziato il countdown: mancano meno di 7 anni alla catastrofe climatica provocata dal riscaldamento globale. L’orologio è tarato sulle previsioni dell’istituto Mcc di Berlino, non su quelle della Ipcc (la Commissione Onu sul cambiamento climatico). Essa calcola che la temperatura media globale, aumentata di circa 1 °C dal livello preindustriale del 1750, potrebbe salire nel 2050 (ossia in tre secoli) di 1,5 °C, principalmente a causa della CO2 (anidride carbonica) immessa nell’atmosfera dalle attività umane, che provoca una intensificazione dell’effetto serra. Secondo gli scienziati Onu, contribuisce secondariamente al riscaldamento globale la più intensa attività del Sole, che per altri scienziati è invece la causa principale.

Nella Pre Cop di Milano, di cui il ministro Cingolani è stato principale organizzatore, il complesso quadro scientifico del cambiamento climatico e delle sue conseguenze ambientali è stato spettacolarizzato con tecniche da film catastrofico. Di fronte alla previsione «scientifica» che tra sette anni il pianeta Terra sarà travolto dalla catastrofe climatica, i 400 giovani radunati da Cingolani a Milano da tutto il mondo hanno chiesto che l’industria delle fonti fossili sia chiusa entro il 2030 e che i governi smettano di finanziarla fin da ora, sostituendola con fonti green che non emettano CO2. Il ministro Cingolani si è impegnato a realizzare tale obiettivo.

Ci sarebbe effettivamente modo di farlo, se l’Italia avesse un piano strategico per realizzare un sistema energetico integrato basato sul solare fotovoltaico e soprattutto termodinamico (con specchi che concentrano i raggi del Sole), e su grandi parchi eolici soprattutto offshore (con turbine eoliche installate su bassi fondali o galleggianti). L’innovativo progetto del solare termodinamico messo a punto dal Premio Nobel Carlo Rubbia, che avrebbe permesso di produrre un terzo del fabbisogno italiano di energia elettrica con alcune centrali solari a emissioni zero, fu deliberatamente affossato e ora tale tecnologia viene usata in Cina. La realizzazione di parchi eolici offshore viene ostacolata, tanto che ce n’è solo uno a Taranto.

La «soluzione» il ministro Cingolani, però, ce l’ha: il nucleare (v. articolo del direttore di Greenpeace Italia sul manifesto del 3 settembre). Cingolani lo ha dichiarato in modo aperto e polemico quando è stato invitato da Renzi alla Scuola di formazione politica di Italia Viva. Il ministro ha quindi patrocinato un convegno di sostenitori del nucleare. Non a caso dopo che ha incontrato John Kerry, inviato speciale del Presidente Usa per la gestione del clima, riconvertitosi da oppositore a sostenitore del nucleare. A Cingolani si è accodato subito Salvini, che ha detto: «Una centrale nucleare in Lombardia? E che problema c’è?». Anche in Italia dunque si è radicata la potente lobby del nucleare, che ha già ottenuto nella Ue un primo, fondamentale risultato: il Centro congiunto di ricerca, incaricato dalla Commissione Europea, ha incluso il nucleare tra le «fonti energetiche verdi» sostenute e finanziate dall’Unione Europea per eliminare entro il 2050 le emissioni di CO2.

La UE rilancia così l’industria nucleare nel momento in cui è in profonda crisi a causa dei crescenti costi e problemi tecnici. Mentre le centrali solari possono produrre più elettricità di quelle nucleari, senza costi aggiuntivi né pericolose emissioni, solo per stoccare provvisoriamente l’enorme quantità di scorie radioattive prodotte dalle centrali nucleari della Ue si prevede una spesa di 420-570 miliardi di euro. Si aggiunge l’enorme cifra necessaria allo smantellamento delle centrali stesse, che per la maggior parte hanno raggiunto o superato l’età limite di 35 anni, divenendo sempre più costose e pericolose. Intanto l’Agenzia internazionale per l’energia atomica ha autorizzato lo scarico in mare di oltre un milione di tonnellate di acqua radioattiva, accumulatasi nella centrale nucleare di Fukushima dopo l’incidente del 2011. col risultato che aumenteranno le morti per cancro provocate da questa «fonte energetica verde».

Manlio Dinucci

O Presidente Biden anunciou o nascimento da AUKUS, uma parceria estratégico-militar entre os Estados Unidos, a Grã-Bretanha e a Austrália, com “o imperativo de assegurar a paz e a estabilidade a longo prazo no Indo-Pacífico”, a região que, na geopolítica de Washington, se estende desde a costa ocidental dos EUA até à da Índia.  O objectivo desta ‘missão estratégica’ é ‘enfrentar em conjunto, as ameaças do século XXI, como fizemos no século XX’. Está clara, a referência à China e à Rússia. Para “defender contra ameaças em rápida evolução”, a AUKUS lança um “projecto chave”: os Estados Unidos e a Grã-Bretanha ajudarão a Austrália a adquirir “submarinos a propulsão nuclear, armados convencionalmente”.

A primeira reacção ao anúncio do projecto AUKUS foi a da França: assim, ela perde um contrato de 90 biliões de dólares, estipulado com a Austrália, para o fornecimento de 12 submarinos Barracuda, de propulsão convencional. Paris, acusando ter sido apunhalada pelas costas, retirou os seus Embaixadores dos EUA e da Austrália. A atenção política e mediática tem-se concentrado na disputa entre Paris e Washington, deixando na sombra as implicações do projecto AUKUS.

Em primeiro lugar, não é credível que os Estados Unidos e a Grã-Bretanha fornecessem à Austrália, a tecnologia mais avançada para construir, pelo menos, oito submarinos nucleares da última geração, com um custo unitário de cerca de 10 biliões de dólares, para os equipar apenas com armamento convencional (não nuclear). É como se fornecessem porta-aviões à Austrália, incapazes de transportar aviões.  Na realidade os submarinos terão tubos de lançamento adequados tanto para mísseis não nucleares como para mísseis nucleares. O Primeiro Ministro Morrison já anunciou que a Austrália irá adquirir rapidamente, através dos EUA, “a capacidade de ataque de longo alcance” com mísseis Tomahawk e mísseis hipersónicos, que podem ser armados tanto com ogivas convencionais como com ogivas nucleares.

Naturalmente, os submarinos australianos também poderão lançar mísseis balísticos USA Trident D5, com os quais os submarinos americanos e britânicos estão armados. O Trident D5 tem um alcance de 12.000 km e pode transportar até 14 ogivas termonucleares independentes: W76 (de 100 kt) ou W88 (de 475 kt). O submarino de ataque nuclear Columbia, cuja construção foi iniciada em 2019, tem 16 tubos de lançamento para os Trident D5, pelo que tem capacidade para lançar mais de 200 ogivas nucleares capazes de destruir outros tantos alvos (bases, portos, cidades e outros).

Neste contexto, é evidente que Washington cortou Paris do fornecimento de submarinos à Austrália não simplesmente por razões económicas (favorecer as suas próprias indústrias de guerra), mas para fins estratégicos: passar para uma nova fase de escalada militar contra a China e contra a Rússia no “Indo-Pacifico”, mantendo o comando absoluto da operação. Cancelado o fornecimento de submarinos franceses de propulsão convencional, obsoleto para esta estratégia, Washington iniciou o que a ICAN-Austrália denuncia como “a crescente nuclearização da capacidade militar da Austrália”. Uma vez operacionais, os submarinos nucleares australianos serão efectivamente colocados na cadeia de comando norte-americana, que decidirá o seu emprego.  Estes submarinos, cujo verdadeiro armamento ninguém será capaz de controlar, aproximando-se das costas da China, em profundidade e silenciosamente e também das da Rússia, poderiam atingir os principais alvos nestes países em poucos minutos com uma capacidade destrutiva igual a mais de 20.000 bombas de Hiroshima.

É fácil de prever qual será a primeira consequência. A China, que de acordo com o SIPRI, possui 350 ogivas nucleares em comparação com as 5.550 dos Estados Unidos, irá acelerar o desenvolvimento quantitativo e qualitativo das suas forças nucleares. O seu potencial económico e tecnológico permite-lhe equipar-se com forças nucleares comparáveis às dos Estados Unidos e da Rússia. Isto deve-se ao aprendiz de feiticeiro Biden que, ao lançar o “projecto chave” dos submarinos nucleares na Austrália, exalta “a liderança de longa data dos Estados Unidos na não-proliferação global”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Joe Biden apprendista stregone nucleare

il manifesto, 21 de Setembro de 2021

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

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After a short hiatus amid the meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, airstrikes on Syria’s Greater Idlib have made a comeback.

On October 3^rd, the Russia’s Aerospace Forces (VKS) carried out strikes on the area, targeting Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) positions.

According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the raids targeted the outskirts of the town of Kinda in the western countryside of Idlib as well as the al-Akrad Mount in the northern Lattakia countryside.

Recent reports claim that HTS and its allies are preparing a provocation in Greater Idlib with chemical-armed rockets, possibly to hinder any operation by the SAA.

With help from the Western-backed White Helmets organization and the Turkistan Islamic Party, HTS moved eight newly-made rockets, armed with chlorine and sarin from one of its headquarters in the outskirts of Idlib city to al-Ghab Plains in the northwestern Hama countryside.

HTS believes that a false-flag chemical attack in Greater Idlib could provoke military strikes by the US and its Western allies against the SAA. This is not too far-fetched, as the US-led coalition has bombed Syrian government positions in the past following alleged chemical attacks carried out by the Bashar al-Assad government.

Meanwhile, in a sign of improvement of their bilateral relations, the royal Jordanian palace announced that King Abdullah had received a phone call from Syria’s President, the first such call in 10 years.

During the phone call, King Abdullah and President Assad discussed bilateral ties and means of enhancing cooperation between their respective countries.

Just two weeks earlier, Syrian Defense Minister and Chief of Staff Ali Ayyoub paid a visit to Jordan where he discussed “fighting terrorism and border control” with the Kingdom’s military leadership. Later on September 23, Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad met with his Jordanian counterpart in New York on the side line of the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

Damascus, having consolidated power in most of the country and especially amid the recent success in Dara’a, is beginning to return on the local and even international scene, attempting to restore bilateral relations and take part in various international forums.

As a result, it is not also too unexpected that a large-scale ground operation in Greater Idlib is impending, as this is the only significant militant pocket left in the country. To carry it out, the government needs as much support as it can get, in order to guarantee that as little outside meddling is allowed.

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***

This Monday, October 4th, the world suffered a very unusual episode: a major blackout of social networks. Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and several other networks went offline worldwide for more than seven hours. Far from affecting only people addicted to social networks, the blackout had a strong impact on the economy, influencing several companies that depend on the use of these networks to operate their marketing. In parallel, several suspicions remain, paving the way for conspiracy theories about the real reasons for the temporary collapse of networks.

The cyber-blackout affected the entire world. For hours, the main social networks on the planet were completely off. The problem has hit the Facebook group companies, causing damage not only to social media, but also to various websites and apps that are somehow linked to Mark Zuckerberg‘s businesses – including banking and financial transaction apps. The affected platforms were completely inaccessible for seven hours, both on computers and mobile phones.

The main social networks on a global scale that remained immune to the blackout were Twitter and Telegram, which have no links with the Facebook group. However, with the high volume of simultaneous accesses, the problem started to affect these networks as well. As people were unable to use their accounts on Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram, the number of accesses and downloads of twitter and telegram apps reached unprecedented levels, which created an overload, resulting in operational crises and successive system crashes.

The internal servers of companies linked to Facebook were also affected by the sudden blackout. In the installations of Facebook and its branches, employees could not communicate with the company’s headquarters and had great difficulties in trying to solve the problem, because their machines were completely offline. In fact, blackouts of Facebook Group’s companies are nothing new, having become a common occurrence in recent years. In 2021, episodes of blackouts on the networks were reported on three occasions, in March, June and September. However, in all these cases, the connection was restored in less than two hours. Furthermore, these were just common system errors, while yesterday the DNS of Facebook and other apps went down – apparently, the BGP routes of these services were temporarily removed from the internet, which is something curious and practically inconceivable.

It is not by chance that the most varied conspiracy theories have emerged around the internet trying to explain the occurrence. Recently, the debate about the power of Big Tech companies has taken a central role in American political society. The White House is increasingly in favor of passing stricter legislation on the freedom of these companies, advocating restrictive measures that are severely criticized by high-tech investors. In recent months, Joe Biden has continued the policy initiated by Donald Trump in relation to social networks.

The former president limited freedom of expression in the virtual environment by restricting companies’ immunity for posts by their users. Biden has continued this trend and has tried to impose rules that make it possible to judicially punish corporations that allow the propagation of fake news and hate speech on their networks. Both Republicans and Democrats almost unanimously support the imposition of new norms on the tech companies, which has made the debate more and more fierce. In this sense, there is clearly a conflict of interest between the US government and Big Tech that cannot be ignored when we look at Monday’s case.

But what is most remarkable is another factor. In recent days, the world has been shocked after former Facebook employees leaked confidential information that reveals that the company has a policy of prioritizing profit over security.

A series of millions of documents popularly known as “Facebook Files” came to light, revealing some of the company’s most confidential information. The case is still closely related to the scandal of the “Pandora Papers”, which were a recent leak of information about offshore businesses held by entrepreneurs and politicians in tax havens, far from tax legislation.

In practice, what happens is that Facebook privileges famous and rich people over ordinary users in terms of security policies and, therefore, covers up signs of illegal transactions. The company possibly had data on several of the businesses revealed in Pandora Papers but did not deliver them to security agencies due to the high profitability it obtained from the permanence of criminal users. Both scandals are bringing new horizons to the debate about the ethical limits Big Tech companies’ freedom, with a notorious strengthening of the support for new restrictions.

It is precisely considering this topic that the questions arise: could Facebook itself have caused an internal crash to get rid of compromising data? Was the global blackout a tactic to avoid a lawsuit? It’s difficult to answer these questions as we do not know for sure how much data was lost during the blackout, but certainly the coincidence of dates with the Pandora Papers scandals is something quite interesting.

It is not conspiracy theory to think that this may have been another chapter in the war between the US government and the Big Tech companies. Also, the event appears to have given corporations even more power. The economic impact was immense, companies lost billions of dollars and stock exchanges had a historic drop in just seven hours of blackout. So, what to expect from a scenario where these episodes become more frequent? What would happen if Big Tech companies began to sabotage themselves to harm the economy and pressure the government to reject the restriction projects?

Apparently, Washington is realizing that it has conceded too much power to the Big Tech companies and that it may be too late to reverse this scenario.

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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire

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***

Project Veritas released their fourth video in its COVID-19 vaccine investigative series today which exposed three Pfizer scientists saying that antibodies lead to equal, if not better, protection against the virus compared to the vaccine.

These scientists talk about the kind of culture they have to work in with Pfizer, with one scientist calling the company “evil.”

They did not know they were being recorded.

This is on our Bitchute and Rumble channels.

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***

Three Swiss Guards have resigned and three others have been suspended after refusing to comply with a Vatican mandate that they get the COVID-19 vaccination.

The Swiss Guards, colloquially known as the Pope’s bodyguards, had previously been ordered “to protect their health and that of the others they come into contact with as part of their service” by getting the jab.

The mandate was part of a broader instruction to all Vatican employees to get the COVID shot or face losing their jobs.

“Besides the three guardsmen sent back to Switzerland, at least three others were suspended from active duty after they agreed to vaccinate but have yet to receive their jabs,” reports RT.

The fact that there is no religious exemption against taking the vaccine within the Vatican tells you everything you need to know about the Vatican and the Pope.

Pope Francis has repeatedly amplified pro-vaccination narratives and refused to extend any understanding to Catholics who are hesitant to take the jab.

The Pontifical Academy for Life, the official bioethics academy of the Catholic Church, has also insisted that it is a “moral responsibility” for Catholics to take the vaccine.

“The Vatican has said that it considers it acceptable for Catholics to use vaccines, even those that use stem cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research,” reported the Mail.

The Italian government has also passed a decree applying to both the private and public sector ordering companies to withhold pay from workers who refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

Those found working without the pass face fines of up to €1,500 euros after it was extended as a condition of entry for museums, stadiums, pubs, restaurants, and schools.

As we highlight in the video below, by enforcing vaccine mandates, the Pope is also enforcing vaccine passports, which some Catholics would argue represent something not too dissimilar from the Mark of the Beast from the book of Revelations.

Wow, so Christian!

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***

In order to keep the “case” count high and the plandemic moving right along, government officials in Alberta, Canada, are now counting all illnesses as “covid” in order to justify all the tyranny.

In an announcement, Alberta Chief Health Officer Deena Hinshaw explained that people who test “negative” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), as well as people who never get tested at all but who show respiratory symptoms of any kind, will be automatically added to the official case count that the government relays to the media.

“So, we do have that framework where schools, if they see that there are an increased number of children who are ill because of respiratory illness, or teachers or staff, they can work with Alberta Health Services,” Hinshaw revealed.

“And in some ways, that is adding an additional layer of protection because if individuals choose to not get tested for covid but are home with an illness, they’re now counted in the list as being part of that ‘outbreak.’”

Words like “outbreak” really get the people going, even if they are completely fictitious, so this approach is likely to keep the Branch Covidians scared as can be and ready to get their next Biden Booster shot the moment it becomes available.

“So, it’s less dependent on needing a test to be a part of identifying where there is an issue,” Hinshaw added, indicating that the government is making everything up on the fly to push an agenda.

“We are, as I mentioned, working with education to determine if there are any adjustments that need to be made to this framework. But there are no other settings right now aside from continuing care and acute care at locations where there’s a significant risk of transmission and severe outcomes.”

Alberta Chief Health Officer Deena Hinshaw: Going forward, we’re counting all sick people who decline Covid tests as Covid-positive pic.twitter.com/mDZqT030Gh

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 27, 2021

Covidism is the real virus

As it turns out, most new “cases” of the Chinese Virus are fictitious, even outside of Canada. Here in the United States, every reported “surge” or “outbreak” is completely made up to scare people into compliance.

At least half of all new cases are either asymptomatic or erroneous, a recent study found. The same is true about hospitalizations, which are largely being manufactured to create the illusion that sickness is spreading like wildfire.

The disease that threatens us all is the religion of Covidism, and Hinshaw is one of its high priestesses. Watch below as she runs through a ridiculous masking and hand sanitizing ritual before speaking to the press:

“If there should be an outbreak in those settings, we are ensuring that follow-up takes place to mitigate and to manage outbreaks,” Hinshaw added in a statement.

“However, in schools, again we are taking the approach that an illness that fits that definition of respiratory illness is treated the same way whether it’s someone who is diagnosed with covid or not.”

Meanwhile, India is seeing the fewest real-life cases of illness because of its use of ivermectin as opposed to “vaccines.” Conversely, Israel is seeing a massive spike in disease thanks to the country now being about 80 percent vaccinated with more “booster” shots soon on the way.

“No one in their right mind believes you clowns anymore,” wrote one commenter at Citizen Free Press about Hinshaw and her fellow Branch Covidians.

“It has nothing to do with a virus and has never had anything to do with the virus,” wrote another. “This is all orchestrated to take our rights away and push us towards a socialist ‘utopia’ that most of us do not want.”

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***

The Spanish Ministry of Health does not have SARS-CoV-2 cultures for testing and does not have a list of laboratories with samples of this virus. The government confirmed this to critical lawyers and organizations.

“The Spanish Ministry of Health does not have SARS-CoV-2 cultures for experiments and does not have a directory of laboratories that have isolation cultures for experiments,” the government stated in response to a public request from critical citizens, including the organizations Asociación Liberum and Biólogos por la Verdad [Biologists for the Truth] on July 22, 2021. This was received by the authorities on August 10 and was registered under the number 001-059144.

Among other things, the lawyers and scientists were interested in whether the virus had been isolated. According to the Transparency Act 19/2013 of 9 December, the Ministry of Health had one month from this point in time to formulate a corresponding statement.

Various critics of the government measures against Covid report on the curious response of the Spanish government, which transformed the country into a health dictatorship from March 14, 2020 onward. These include the lawyer Aitor Guisasola and the media portal El Diestro.

“All responsibility for diagnosis and treatment has been shifted to the health professionals, recognizing that ‘tests alone are often not enough to diagnose the disease’… But the tests are being used to make decisions about curfews, shop closures, quarantine, patient treatment, vaccinations and absolutely dictatorial measures are justified and people’s freedoms are revoked, while they ‘are usually not sufficient to determine the disease’.”

Finally, El Diestro addressed a message to all those who have been vaccinated:

“Take this document and go to your family doctor or your health center and ask for explanations. Because something has been injected into your body, but the person who administered it to you, does not even know what it is for or what is contained in it. Will this wake people up or will they go back to sleep?”

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***

Our country is still reeling from the still-lingering COVID-19 pandemic, but that’s not because the virus is such a massive threat to the survival of the human race.

It’s because leftists in government at all levels continue to exploit the coronavirus in ways that greatly enhance their own power and authority, which is part of the same long game that leftists always play in their quest to someday completely trash our founding constitutional system and replace our republic with a dictatorial regime centering all power, ultimately, in Washington, D.C.

An increasing number of governments, including the federal government, are mandating that their employees get a COVID-19 vaccine or else lose their jobs; an increasing number of Americans are opting out of the mandate, and while we applaud them for standing up for bodily autonomy, it seems that many of the vaccine rejectors are frontline emergency personnel and caregivers.

The Daily Mail reports, for example, that dozens of Massachusetts State Troopers have left the force in opposition to Gov. Charlie Baker’s vax mandate:

A Massachusetts police union said on Friday that dozens of state troopers have resigned over a COVID vaccine mandate for state workers.

The mandate requires state workers to get the vaccine shot by October 17 or may face termination from their jobs.

A lawsuit was filed by The State Police Association of Massachusetts – a union that represents 1,800 officers – in an attempt to delay the mandate enforced by Republican Governor Charlie Baker. That suit was thrown out Thursday.

“Many of these troopers are going to be returning to their previous municipal police departments within the state that allow for regular testing and masks,” union president Michael Cherven noted. “To date, dozens of troopers have already submitted their resignation paperwork.”

What is angering is that not long ago police officers, nurses, teachers, paramedics and other frontline workers (including truck drivers) were being hailed as heroes as they carried out their duties without a vaccine being available — and without anyone seeing them as some sort of societal threat.

Not anymore, which again shows you just how politicized the left has made this virus and the vaccine.

“Throughout COVID, we have been on the front lines protecting the citizens of Massachusetts and beyond,” SPAM chief Cherven added.

“Simply put, all we are asking for are the same basic accommodations that countless other departments have provided to their first responders, and to treat a COVID related illness as a line of duty injury,” he added.

However, Judge Jackie Cowin of the Massachusetts Supreme Court denied the request last week.

“Specifically, the public interest is, unquestionably, best served by stopping the spread of the virus, in order to protect people from becoming ill, ensure adequate supply of medical services, and curtail the emergence of new, deadlier variants of the virus,” Cowin told the Daily Wire.

Only, the vaccine isn’t doing that; there have been an increasing number of so-called ‘breakthrough infections’ in people who have been vaccinated. So what is the point of getting one? And remember when we were being told life would ‘get back to normal’ with the availability of the vaccine?

How come COVID has become a vaccine mandate throughout society but flu vaccines haven’t, though flu kills children and is a seasonal death threat?

But it’s not just police officers we’re losing; nurses and teachers have lined up to refuse the vaccine as well.

Yahoo News recently reported on one case involving Texas nurses:

More than 100 staff members at Houston Methodist Hospital who were fired for refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 appealed a judge’s ruling that sided with the hospital’s right to terminate their employment.

“We are going to most likely go all the way up to the Supreme Court,” Jennifer Bridges, a registered nurse and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, which was enjoined by 117 former employees of the hospital.

And in New York City, as many as 28,000 public school teachers and employees risk losing their jobs if they don’t take the jab by an Oct. 1 deadline.

So much for the left’s chant, ‘My body, my choice!’ What hypocrites.

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***

The merits are hard to stomach for partisans long jaundiced by presumption and dislike, but the cheer at the deplatforming of Donald Trump by a range of social media platforms said as much about the nature of any sentiment about democracy as it did about those claiming to defend it.  For one, it shut off a valve of fantastic, instant recognition to a figure whose thoughts are best aired rather than cellared in underground vats.

But cellaring, hiding, suppressing unsavoury viewpoints are the very things social media platforms are getting more enthusiastic about, much of it pushed on the censorious lobby that claims to have a monopoly on veracity and good behaviour.  In the name of misinformation, offence and incitement, users will be either suspended, barred or subjected to digital excommunication in the name of safety.

Which brings us to the fascinating nature of Trump’s latest legal action against Twitter.  In January, the former US president was banned from the platform following the January 6^th riot at the Capitol building inspired by supporters riled by claims that the election had been stolen.  It began as a temporary ban of 12 hours for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy”.  Two days later, the ban was made permanent.  “In the context of the horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would permanently result in this very course of action,” Twitter claimed in its January 8 statement. “The company’s “public interest framework” existed to permit “the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly.”  But this role did not exist “above our rules entirely” and could not be used “to incite violence, among other things.”

The reasoning behind the ban was illuminating of a social media giant sitting in shallow judgment.  Two of Trump’s tweets were singled out: one claiming that 75 million “great American patriots who voted for me” would “not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”; the second stating that he would “not be going to the Inauguration on January 20^th.”  Assuming the imperious role of civics guardian, the company strained to identify these mutterings as violating “our Glorification of Violence policy”.

At the time German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the decision “problematic” while Jens Zimmermann, Social Democrat member of the Bundestag, wondered what it meant “for the future actions of social media platforms”.

In July, Trump began his legal battle to seek reinstatement across a range of platforms, filing a class action lawsuit against Google, Twitter and Facebook. “We are demanding an end to the show-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well,” he stated at the time.

On October 1, Trump filed a more specific complaint in the Southern District of Florida claiming that Twitter “coerced by members of the United States Congress” was censoring him.  The social media platform, the complaint argues, “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate”.  With 88 million followers, Trump argued that his account had become “an important source of news and information about government affairs and was a digital town hall.”

The filing also made a pointed remark to Twitter’s somewhat varied approaches to users.  Why permit the Taliban, “a known terrorist organization”, room to tweet about their military victories across Afghanistan yet claim that his own efforts had been accused of “glorifying violence”.

Resort was also made to Florida’s social media legislation, the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, which was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis in May to spite “the Silicon Valley elites” only to be blocked two months later by a bemused judge.  One of the plaintiffs, Steve DelBianco of the industry group NetChoice, expressed delight at the absurd proposition that the court ruling “ensured that social media can remain family-friendly”.  But equally absurd was the law’s idiosyncratic drafting, which included an exemption for companies operating theme parks in Florida.  It is likely to perish at the hands of the Federal Appeals Court.

Leaving aside the twaddle put forth by DelBianco, the difficulties of targeting social media platforms are almost insurmountable.   Content moderation remains a pillar of using such fora, one guaranteed by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which gives the digital giants platform rather than publisher status. And the sacred First Amendment is assumed to apply to government actions rather than corporate mischief.

The efforts by Trump to place his legal arguments against Big Tech on the hook of the First Amendment has received little support. One mighty voice in the field of jurisprudence thinking Trump has a case is Alan Dershowitz, who has argued that the case “pits freedom of speech on the one hand against the First Amendment on the other.”  Such reasoning can well justify why lawyers deserve a bad name, but Dershowitz sees it as the high-tech behemoths quashing free speech. “They are censoring but they’re claiming the right to do so under the First Amendment”.

Withering scorn has been levelled at that view. “Unlike delusional Dershowitz,” Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu insisted with smug confidence, “I read the First Amendment and it does not apply to private sector companies.”  Laurence Tribe, formerly Carl M. Loeb Professor at Harvard Law School, took a dim view of his former colleague.  “How low can a former law professor sink?  To call a bogus lawsuit on a fake version of the First Amendment an important case, much less ‘the most important’ of the century?  Has he no shame?”

Democratic strategist Kaivan Shroff, conforming to the fashion of the times, suggested a retributive remedy: the cancellation of Dershowitz’s status as emeritus professor.  Harvard Law School had “a professional and ethical responsibility to its community – past, present and future – to associate with faculty who are ethical and have a high regard for the law.”

For all such righteous splutters, Dershowitz and Trump have a point in pointing out a symptom of the US body politic that has become cripplingly apparent: business and the interests of capitalism have come to control speech, its circulation, its distribution.  For decades, they had already come to guide politicians and political parties, exercising influence through campaign donations. Why run for elected office when you can buy it?

In 2010, the US Supreme Court decision of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission found that limits upon “independent political spending” from corporations and private interest groups violated the First Amendment.  Those with deep purses could only deem this the natural order of things: if you have cash, spend it to influence opinion in the name of free speech.  Put rather simply, such speech was a shield big capitalism could well employ if it needed to. (Rep. Lieu, take note.)

Gore Vidal used to remark that anyone seeking the keys to the White House could only do so with the approval of the Chase Manhattan Bank.  Had he lived to see the Trump cancellation saga, he may well have added those Big Tech titans to the sterile committee of electoral approval.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

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***

Although there are 23 fewer nuclear reactors in the world today than at the 2002 peak of 438, the past year saw a small uptick in the number of reactors operating worldwide and a corresponding increase in the global fleet’s net operating capacity.

That’s one data point in the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021, the latest in a series of annual industry reports compiled by an international team of independent experts led by Mycle Schneider, a consultant based in Paris. The 409-page report, released this week, is packed with information about global and country-specific trends, but several findings stand out, and they don’t bode well for the nuclear energy industry.

First, although nuclear capacity is up, nuclear electricity production is down.

Without China, where most of the new construction is happening, the decrease in production would look even bigger. In 2020, China for the first time produced more nuclear electricity than France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy. Only the United States produced more.

Nuclear energy’s share of global electricity generation also continued its steady decline, dropping from a peak of 17.5 percent in 1996 to 10.1 percent in 2020.

Although net nuclear capacity rose last year, the 0.4-gigawatt increase was minuscule in comparison with the gains made by renewable energy. “Nuclear is irrelevant in today’s electricity capacity newbuild market,” the industry report concludes.

Second, the report throws cold water on the prospects for small modular reactors. These reactors get a lot of media coverage and some public funding “but are so far unavailable commercially and will not be for another 10–15 years—if ever. Pilot projects in Argentina, China, and Russia have been disappointing,” according to the authors.

Third, the report warned that nuclear power is less resilient than renewables to challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. While there is no indication that the COVID-19 pandemic compromised safety at nuclear power plants, the pandemic not only reduced nuclear electricity consumption but also affected some schedules for reactor commissioning and fuel loading.

And finally, the 2021 report for the first time devoted an entire chapter to how criminality is affecting the industry. “There is a real question about the exposure of the nuclear power sector to criminal activities including bribery and corruption, counterfeiting and other falsification, as well as infiltration by organized crime,” the report says.

The report cites three major corruption cases involving US nuclear energy companies in 2020. In one case involving the construction of two new reactors, the United States Attorney for South Carolina has charged two Westinghouse officials with multiple felonies.

“Fraudulent and criminal activities in the nuclear industry entail significant potential and real consequences for the public,” the report warns. These activities can affect safety and security at nuclear power plants, and increase the cost of nuclear energy.

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Dawn Stover is a contributing editor at the Bulletin. A science writer based in the Pacific Northwest, her work has appeared in Scientific American, Conservation, Popular Science, New Scientist, The New York Times, and other publications. One of her articles is included in the 2010 Best American Science and Nature Writing, and another article was awarded a special citation by the Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism.

Featured image: The sixth reactor at the Tianwan Nuclear Power Station in China entered commercial operation in June 2021. Credit: China National Nuclear Corporation/Facebook

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***

When the first COVID-19 shots were given emergency use authorization back in December of 2020, we started publishing the stories that were available in the public space of those who were suffering and dying after taking the shots.

I began a list that I appended to the end of any articles we published about the COVID-19 shots, so people could get an idea of how many were suffering from these experimental shots that dissenting doctors and scientists began to call “bioweapon” shots.

The corporate media and Big Tech have done their best to suppress these stories, publishing a few every once in a while to acknowledge this was happening, but always in the context that these were “rare” side effects, and that the benefits of the shot were greater than the risk, which we now know is a complete lie.

After more and more people made the fateful decision to get the shots, I could no longer keep up with the individual stories that were being published, and began publishing articles of stories in batches.

The list became so long, that people started complaining that they had to scroll too far down the page to get to the comments, so I truncated the list and then published the entire list on a separate page.

Now, as we start the month of October, 2021, the number of people going public with their stories are so many, that I just pick and choose some that are representative of the sheer mass of reports now coming in, and try to do at least one story a week highlighting these tragic stories, as we are constantly getting new readers and subscribers who are just now beginning to wake up to the truth about what is really going on with these shots.

It is truly overwhelming, and as I read these stories every day, I know the emotional toll it can take on the people who are aggregating these stories and publishing them. I am truly grateful for them, as I share that emotional trauma myself, and it drives me to publish these as much as I can, even though if I spent all of my waking hours now trying to read and publish all of these, it would not even be enough.

And even though there are so many now that have gone public, all of them are still but a tiny fraction of the actual injuries and deaths that follow these shots, because the vast majority being injured and dying are being told it has nothing to do with the shots, and many actually still believe that and would not dare go public and endure the scorn and ridicule that accompany all who do go public.

I am putting today’s update into a video, because we now have tens of thousands of subscribers to our video channels, and the videos often get more traffic than our articles.

As I publish this today on October 4, 2021, there appears to be some kind of cyber attack happening against Big Tech, as Facebook and their platforms have been down for most of the day already.

I do not know how much longer we have before there is a total Internet blackout, so I feel the urgency more than ever to bring you these stories.

Please download all of our videos (and articles!) whenever you can to your local devices, so you can continue sharing them with your family and friends should we be taken down off the Internet.

This report starts with warnings from the survivors, and then documents a few of the many who have now died, including children and babies who have died, not because they made a choice to get the shots, but because their parents did.

I believe all of these stories came from the COVID Vaccine Injuries Telegram channel, although some of them can be found on other platforms aggregating these also. We are extremely grateful for your work!

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***

Maddison Farris, editor-in-chief of a student newspaper at Oklahoma State University, was forced to resign after criticizing the school’s mask policy.

“I think that this whole event truly shows that not all opinions are valued and that diversity of thought is falsely advertised here,” Farris told Campus Reform.

On September 9, Farris wrote a column for The O’Colly explaining that she had been removed from a classroom for not wearing a mask.

Farris had previously researched Senate Bill 658, which affirms that a mask cannot be required within a school setting in Oklahoma. She noted that “multiple phone calls with the governor’s office confirmed what I already knew.”

“If I believed that it was just a mask, then, of course, I would simply wear it for an hour or two and then go about my day,” Farris explained.

“But it is more than a mask. It’s control. It’s control over my choices, desires and body,” she continued. “I will not allow any institution to take away my right to decide for myself what is best and to make my own decisions, or to take away the rights and decisions of others.”

Two days later, The O’Colly’s editorial board added a “correction” to the article stressing that Farris’ article was indeed an opinion piece. It claimed that though Farris’ explanation of the law was “misleading,” they supported Farris’ freedom of expression.

“As American citizens, we affirm our belief in the First Amendment and the right as journalists to express our personal opinions no matter if our viewpoint is different from those around us,” the correction stated.

Nevertheless, Farris submitted a letter of “forced resignation,” explaining that she had been called into a September 13 meeting with the rest of the editors and pressed into leaving her post.

Farris told Campus Reform that although most students at Oklahoma State support free speech, but there is a “portion of students who value free speech until it makes them uncomfortable.”

Campus Reform reached out to Farris, The O’Colly, and Oklahoma State University for comment; this article will be updated accordingly.

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Ben Zeisloft is a Campus Reform Student Editor and Pennsylvania Senior Campus Correspondent, reporting on liberal bias and abuse for Campus Reform. He is studying Finance and Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Benjamin also writes for The UPenn Statesman and the Wharton International Business Review.

Featured image is from Campus Reform

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a long and well-documented history of questionable conduct when it comes to regulation of chemicals important to the profit centers for many large and powerful corporations.  Numerous examples show a pattern of agency actions that allow for the use of dangerous chemicals by consumers, farmers, groundskeepers and others despite evidence of harm.

Documents and other evidence, including information provided in public disclosures by multiple EPA scientists, reveals actions in which EPA managers have intentionally covered up risks associated with certain chemicals. According to the evidence from these EPA insiders, pressure from chemical manufacturers, chemical industry lobbyists and from certain U.S. lawmakers drives internal agency manipulations that protect corporate interests but endanger public health.

Evidence indicates the misconduct dates back decades and has occurred in administrations led by Democrats and Republican alike.

A research project sponsored by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics said while the EPA has “many dedicated employees who truly believe in its mission,” the agency has been “corrupted by numerous routine practices,” including a “revolving door” between EPA and industry in which corporate lawyers and lobbyists gain positions of agency power; constant  industry lobbying against environmental regulations; pressure from  lawmakers who are beholden to donors; and meddling by the White House.

Background: Blowing the whistle

The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21 Century Act, signed into law on June 22, 2016, was the first substantive reform to Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The law requires EPA to make an affirmative determination on whether a new chemical substance presents an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment under “known, intended or reasonably foreseen conditions of use.” See information here.

Despite the law, the EPA has failed to make valid determinations about the risk presented by numerous chemicals.

In June 2021, four EPA scientists, each working within the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and
Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), publicly accused the the EPA of deliberate tampering with chemical risk assessments. The four whistleblowers made their complaints public through a group called Public  Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

In a June 28 letter to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform, PEER said the four EPA scientists were providing “disturbing evidence of fraud and corruption,” involving “deliberate tampering with chemical risk assessments conducted under the Toxics Substances Control Act (TSCA), including PFAS (a.k.a. “forever chemicals”), and the deletion of potential health effects without the knowledge or consent of the human health assessors.”

The letter further states:

“All four clients have experienced numerous instances where their risk assessments were changed by their managers or by colleagues in response to direction by management. These changes include –

• Deleting language identifying potential adverse effects, including developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, mutagenicity, and/or carcinogenicity;
• Major revisions that alter the report conclusions to indicate that there are no toxicity concerns despite data to the contrary; and
• Risk assessments being reassigned to inexperienced employees in order to secure their agreement to remove issues whose inclusion would be protective of human health.”

As a result of the manipulations, people who work with these chemicals are not receiving information they need to protect themselves, such as “proper handling procedures, personal protection needed, accidental release measures, and first aid and firefighting measures,” according to PEER.

This is a particular concern for pregnant women, according to the PEER complaint.

Erasing important information

On August 26, 2021, PEER filed a separate complaint alleging that the EPA has been breaking the law by erasing original versions of internal communications and draft documents and retaining only the final version of key documents. The practice violates the Federal Records Act by eliminating details of the decision-making process from outside review, according to PEER.

PEER states that that discarding of documents trails is not only contrary to law but also violates the EPA’s own records retention policy. According to PEER, its complaint focuses on two classes of documents:

• Alterations of chemical risk assessments by managers in which both the identity of the manager and the alterations themselves are not apparent; and
• Internal comments related to the development of its Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, in which EPA software overwrote the original and all prior versions any time there was an edit. Thus, only the “final” version was saved.

“It is as if EPA memorializes its internal decision-making in disappearing ink,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA enforcement attorney, said in a press release. “EPA’s record-keeping practices allow unknown officials to make changes while disguising what precisely was changed and who changed them.”

PEER said it has asked the National Archives and Records Administration to intervene to prevent the EPA from destroying more records and to adopt safeguards to prevent any recurrences.

The case of Ruth Etzel

Ruth Etzel,  former director of the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection (OCHP), filed a  whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board contending she was subject to illegal retaliation in 2018 and 2019. Etzel said the agency retaliated against her after she complained publicly about what she said was  EPA resistance to stronger public protections against lead poisoning.

At the EPA it was Etzel’s job to determine the impacts of regulations on children. But she alleges she was improperly removed from her position after speaking out about EPA failures, and was assigned to a division where she was not allowed to work on prevention of lead poisoning.

Etzel is both a pediatrician and an epidemiologist and is recognized internationally as an expert on child health and the environment. She was named the 2021 winner of the Public Policy and Advocacy Award by the Academic Pediatric Association.

More than 120 environmental and health organizations  complained to EPA about Etzel’s removal, saying the agency was sending a “signal that children’s health is not a priority for the agency.”

Reporting on EPA’s misconduct

See here information, including news articles, regarding alleged EPA misconduct and regulatory failures:

New evidence of corruption at EPA chemicals division, by Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, September 18, 2021

EPA whistleblower testifies her advocacy for stronger health protections drew agency retaliation, by Carey Gillam, USRTK, September 13, 2021

‘The harm to children is irreparable’: Ruth Etzel speaks out ahead of EPA whistleblower hearing, Carey Gillam, The Guardian, September 12, 2021

The EPA’s rationale for banning chlorpyrifos may make it harder to eliminate other brain-harming pesticides , Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, August 24, 2021.

Formaldehyde causes leukemia, according to EPA assessment suppressed by Trump officials, Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, August 19, 2021.

EPA exposed: Leaked audio shows pressure to overrule scientists in “hair-on-hire” cases,  Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, August 4, 2021.

Whistleblowers expose corruption in EPA chemical safety office, Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, July 2, 2021.

How pesticide companies corrupted the EPA and poisoned America, Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, June 30, 2021.

Flawed analysis of an intentional human dosing study and its impact on chlorpyrifos risk assessment,  Lianne Sheppard, Seth McGrew, Richard Fenske, Environment International, July 2020.

Further Efforts Needed to Uphold Scientific Integrity Policy at EPA,  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General, May 20, 2020.

EPA Allowed Companies to Make 40 New PFAS Chemicals Despite Serious Risks, Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, September, 19, 2019.

E.P.A. Won’t Ban Chlorpyrifos, Pesticide Tied to Children’s Health Problems, Lisa Friedman, New York Times, July 18, 2019.

Emails show Trump EPA overruled career staff on Wisconsin air pollution, Timothy Gardner, Reuters, May 28, 2019.

US environment agency cuts funding for kids’ health studies, Sara Reardon, Nature, May 13, 2019.

Meet 3 women who stood up to Trump to protect the American people — and lost their jobs,  The Hill, January 19, 2019.

White House, EPA headed off chemical pollution study, Annie Snider, Politico, May 14, 2018.

Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, Carey Gillam, Island Press, October 10, 2017.

Records Show EPA Efforts to Slow Herbicide Review Came in Coordination with Monsanto, Carey Gillam, Huffington Post, August 18, 2017.

EPA Official Accused of Helping Monsanto “Kill” Cancer Study, Joel Rosenblatt, Lydia Mulvany, and Peter Waldman, Bloomberg, March 14, 2017.

Poison Spring- The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA, Evaggelos Vallianatos and McKay Jenkins, Bloomsbury Press, April 14, 2014.

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Abu Hani and his family live only two kilometers from the Israeli settlement outpost of Avigayil in the occupied South Hebron Hills. But unlike Avigayil’s residents, who are connected to Israel’s national water grid, Abu Hani and his children are barred from doing so. Not only do they not receive a drop from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, the Israeli authorities also prohibit them from maintaining cisterns for storing rainwater, as they had been doing until Israel took over the area.

Abu Hani, like many other Palestinian breadwinners in the South Hebron Hills, is forced to travel great distances and pay exorbitant prices in order to fill up a rusty container that will provide his family with water.

He is not the only one. According to human rights group B’Tselem, Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills buy water transported by trucks that usually come from the nearby Palestinian city of Yatta, often paying more than four times the price of water for residential use in Israel. These high prices mean that Palestinians may spend as much as a third of their monthly income on water. Contrast that with Israel, where the average family spends only 1.3 percent of its monthly income on water.

The lack of local water infrastructure for Palestinians means average daily water consumption per capita among Palestinian West Bank residents stands at 28 liters per capita per day, whereas consumption in the Israeli settlements in the South Hebron Hills is 211 liters per capita per day. This consumption level is similar to that in humanitarian crisis areas around the world such as Darfur, according to B’Tselem.

Denying water to the Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills is one of many brutal methods for expelling the local population in order to take its land and hand it over to Jewish settlers.

That brutality, of course, cannot be enforced without the presence of an occupying army. I witnessed it last week when 50 Israeli activists, including members of Knesset Mossi Raz (Meretz) and Ofer Cassif (Joint List), accompanied Abu Hani and his water tanker from the village of A-Tuwani to Al-Mugafara community, where he lives.

As we were walking on the main road, an army ambulance suddenly drove past us. We politely cleared the way, but as it passed us, the ambulance stopped, blocked the road, and out poured a group of armed soldiers. Within minutes, more army jeeps arrived.

An Israeli soldier kneels on the neck of an Israeli left-wing activist during an attempt to bring water to Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, April 17, 2021. (Osama Iliwat)

The soldiers attacked us, threw tear gas, and tried to stop us from delivering the water. One of the protesters was violently thrown on the ground, and wounded by an Israeli officer. Another demonstrator was knocked to the ground, after which a soldier kneeled on his neck. Six demonstrators were arrested and detained for seven hours.

As an activist in the occupied Jordan Valley for the past 15 years, I have witnessed this injustice on a daily basis. Thousands of Palestinians in the area do not have access to water in temperatures that can swell up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer. Palestinian families must travel every three days through IDF live-fire zones (which sprawl over 46 percent of the Jordan Valley) to bring water in rusty containers at the price of NIS 1,700 ($530) per month.

Often the army will confiscate or destroy the containers, leaving entire families without a drop of water for long stretches of time, as they did in the hamlet of Khirbet Humsa or Ras a-Tin in the peak of July’s summer heat. Other times, if Palestinians decide to buy their water from the Palestinian Authority, the army will destroy their water pipes.

The settlers themselves also take an active role in water sabotage. Over the last two years, they have cordoned off two springs in the area, blocking access to local Palestinian shepherds from watering their flocks.

An aerial photo of the demolition of the Khirbet Humsa community in the Jordan Valley, occupied West Bank, July 8, 2021. (Oren Ziv)

Many Palestinians in the Jordan Valley who depend on agriculture install makeshift water pipes and connect to the national water grid independently. However, without a construction permit, doing so is considered “illegal” and means the Israeli authorities can demolish those pipes at any time. The Civil Administration — which runs the day-to-day affairs of the millions of Palestinians under occupation — rejects over 98 percent of Palestinian building permit requests in Area C, where both the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills are located, while regularly carrying out demolitions for so-called planning and construction violations.

Water is a given for most Jewish Israelis, regardless of what side of the Green Line they live on. Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills must struggle every day to secure every drop of water for themselves and their families. For 54 years, the Israeli authorities, through an increasingly brutal military, have been depriving Palestinians living under occupation of the right as part of its efforts to expel a native, civilian population from their land, simply because they are not from the right ethnic or religious group. This is apartheid at its worst.

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Featured image: A Palestinian farmer fills water tanks in the West Bank village of Khirbet al-Makhoul, Jordan Valley, October 9, 2013. (Activestills.org)

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New Hampshire, like many other states, is deeply penetrated by military culture, funding, and institutions. Yet its presence is hardly visible to many people.

This is amazing, as the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about was a mere fragment of its scope today.

An interactive map of the New Hampshire military-industrial-educational-recreational complex is available here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1DW10hd6cE7XmFuNIrycFLEShv7f0RtE-&usp=sharing

Military contractor campaign donations, propaganda, and patriotism account for much of the support for our endless wars and preparation for them, costly in economic, environmental, and human ways. In addition, a multitude of interests sustains the military and its budget, and encourages silence about its wars of aggression and other activities.

The antiwar movement must contend with the many ordinary citizens who may have no desire to kill people, destroy the environment, or overthrow governments. They are trying to earn a living, fund their charitable organizations and schools, or save their communities from economic devastation. At present, without a national budget devoted to human needs, they see no other choice but to slip under the wings of the lush military budget.

The military contracts for almost everything. Along with other government enterprises, such as prisons and highways, this further ensures their survival while contributing to booming regional economies where unemployment levels are low.

F-35, BAE Systems and More

Readers of specialty publications, such as the NH Business Review, may learn that: “In New Hampshire, the F-35 program supports 55 suppliers—35 of which are small businesses—and over 900 direct jobs, much of them located at BAE Systems in Nashua. The F-35 program generates over $481 million in economic impact in the state” (9-21-17).

Incidentally, the F-35—considered the most expensive weapon in history—has been rated unfavorably by military experts.

The city of Nashua’s website informs us that BAE is the largest employer in the city and, in addition: “A total of 130 defense contractors were awarded contracts between 2000 and 2012, which is indicative of how robust the defense industry has become in Nashua.” Not coincidentally, Money magazine has rated Nashua as the best place to live.

BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire. [Source: facebook.com]

The weapons manufacturers and their component suppliers dominate the manufacturing sector of the NH economy. BAE, a British corporation, has the largest slice of Department of Defense (DoD) contracts in NH, totaling more than $2 billion in the 21^st century. The company is the premiere advanced weapons provider to the U.S. Navy.

Its products include advanced naval machine guns, electromagnetic railguns and hypervelocity projectiles along with tracked and wheeled armored combat vehicles, naval guns, artillery and missile launching systems, and advanced precision strike munitions and ordnance.

Other large NH weapons firms and their suppliers include: L3 Technologies, Impact Science and Technology, Kollsman (a subsidiary of Elbit, the Israeli firm that builds hi-tech walls), Timken, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed (the latter two have subsidiaries here).^[1]

The New Hampshire Aerospace & Defense Export Consortium boasts of its great success and significant growth in finding foreign markets for New Hampshire’s defense exports.

New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan (D) visits Timken Aerospace offices in Lebanon, New Hampshire. [Source: hassan.senate.gov]

Nationally, multimillion and billion-dollar defense contracts also go to firms in information technology, intelligence, construction, remediation, and logistics (transportation, food, clothing, janitorial services, etc.).

Among the larger recipients in NH are Red River Technology (software maintenance), Warwick Mills (technical textiles), Environmental Alternatives (nuclear remediation), and C & S Wholesale Grocers (food and transport). The DoD, a larger economy than most nations, contracts out to every nook and cranny.

Medium and small businesses also received stimulation from its budget, such as Portsmouth Blind & Shade (window shades), Alan’s of Boscawen (meals), Velcro (hook and loop material), Univex Corporation (fat analyzing kit), and Monadnock Lifetime Products (disposable double handcuffs).

Green Feet Enterprises provided specialized mountain rescue training for Naval Special Operations Warfare. Child care centers, heating oil companies, landscapers, carpenters, appliance dealers, and others get some of the pie. This may explain the vast silence regarding the trillions spent.

The DoD has preferential provisions for contracts with small, disadvantaged, veteran-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned, woman-owned, minority-owned, American Indian-owned, or Black American-owned businesses, and also for firms in the AbilityOne Program or labor surplus areas.

Thus, out-of-state contractors may be used without meeting market efficiency standards. Silver Wolf Enterprises of Great Falls, Montana, an American Indian-owned business, provided “Microwaves” (contract description but apparently the kitchen equipment), to a site in Newington, NH.

The Pentagon, Non-Profits, and Higher Ed

For-profit businesses are not the only recipients of large DoD contracts. From 2000 to 2018, there were about 800 contracts and grants to NH non-profit organizations, state and local governments, higher education, and medical institutions. Many of the non-profits are research institutes, think tanks, or engineering firms, not charitable organizations.

For example, the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute had grants for $19m and $1.5m for biotechnology research, and Autonomous Undersea Systems had a $969,348 grant for research to improve naval operations. One of the grants to the Academy of Applied Science of Concord was for $11m, for basic research. The Student Conservation Association (a non-profit organization) has received many large DoD grants for construction monitoring, conservation work, and other activities.

Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) hosts the official opening of BioFabUSA in 2017. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, Governor Chris Sununu, former Senator Kelly Ayotte, former Governor John Lynch, and Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas attended to demonstrate their non-partisan support. [Source: businessdefense.gov]

Similar to the DoD contracts in the billions that Goodwill Industries receives nationwide for clothing and janitorial services, organizations that train and employ disabled people perform this type of work in NH. Northern New England Employment Services, with headquarters in Maine, had many contracts to supply workers for NH military sites. Industries for the Blind had contracts for furniture; CW Resources provided janitorial service in Portsmouth.

The University System of New Hampshire and Dartmouth participate in the DoD’s environmental research programs as well as others. Of the USNH contracts, one for nearly $2m, is to study “Seed dispersal networks and novel ecosystem functioning in Hawaii.” Dartmouth also receives grants for military medical research. The state’s universities and colleges are provided with tuition and fees for ROTC students.

In Keene, the Monadnock Economic Development Corporation is planning a joint project with Keene State College to create a “business hub” that will train students for work at BAE and other military contractors. Their announcements do not explain the nature of these businesses.

Defense Department Installations in the State

The State of NH receives support for National Guard facilities; one such grant was for $22,545,587. The Guard serves civilians in natural disasters, and more recently as a very efficient vaccination service. It is needed and appreciated here, but the other side of its service is deployment on overseas military adventures.

New Hampshire National Guard. [Source: nh.ng.mil]

Towns and counties have DoD contracts to provide police protection, for example, to Army Engineers recreational and flood control sites. The militarization of police, such as the Bearcat of Keene, may also be noted.

Bearcat of Keene, an example of police militarization. [Source: flickr.com]

The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) performs much essential civilian work. In NH, it maintains many lovely lake sites for civilian recreation, and also awards subcontracts. For example, a local contractee is Bigg Dawg Landscaping of Weare, a woman-owned business providing janitorial service at Hopkinton-Everett Lakes. However, USACE is a DoD component and helps to mitigate criticism of it.

Force Protection recreation area from New Boston Air Force Station. [Source: schriever.spaceforce.mil]

Children are fostered by the military in several ways. There is, of course, the national menu of war games: on TV and the computer, and at sporting events. Closer to home, military recruiters appear in high schools. Many children take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); their names and results are sent to recruiters. Although it is possible to opt out of the testing, children and parents are often unaware of this.

There are about 10 high schools in NH with Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) programs, some with marksmanship activities. Most of those taking the training do not become officers, but they are indoctrinated in the military perspective and may become comfortable with violent solutions.

On November 1, 2017, the Keene Sentinel reported: “Plans for air marksmanship training in Fall Mountain cafeteria cause concern, by Meg McIntyre. LANGDON—A school board decision to allow JROTC air marksmanship training in the Fall Mountain Regional High School cafeteria has drawn concern from parents, prompting the district’s superintendent to put the training on hold. After considering every option, the school cafeteria was determined to be the best location for JROTC to conduct Air Rifle Marksmanship.” (Its usual venue was under construction.)

Philanthropy represents another stretch of the arms. The DoD itself donates surplus property to the Red Cross, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Camp Fire, Little League Baseball, U.S. Olympic Committee, National Civilian Community Corps and others, and also participates in programs such as Boy Scouts’ encampment. The weapons contractors generously fund community organizations and take a particular interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education.

A popular robotics program in NH schools is FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a non-profit that aims to increase interest in STEM education. “BAE Systems, Inc. is proud to partner with FIRST® because we know that the hands-on experiences and life skills which students gain through FIRST®–including collaboration, critical thinking, communication, creativity and confidence—are necessary for our country, our communities, and even our own future workforce worldwide.”

Strategic Partners include Bechtel, Boeing, Booz Allen, GM, Lockheed, and United Technologies.

BAE Systems partnering with FIRST®. [Source: baesystems.com]

FIRST is also funded by the DoD and the New Hampshire Department of Education, which offers “grants to every public and charter school in New Hampshire to give every student a chance to be on a FIRST team.” “For grades 9-12, ages 14-18 the FIRST Robotics Competition provides for teams of students that build and program a robot to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors. . . . For grades K-4, ages 6-10 the G FIRST LEGO® League Jr. teams design and build a Team Model based on the Challenge, using LEGO® Education WeDo to program it to move.”

BAE has an additional program: “[I]n partnership with the University of New Hampshire, the ‘BAE Systems Summer STEM Scholar Program’ provided scholarships for 10 students to attend the university’s Tech Leaders camp. The project was designed and run by seven BAE Systems engineers, who also served as mentors for the students and provided insight on what it is like to have a career at BAE Systems.”

BAE-sponsored STEM project in New Hampshire. [Source: baesystems.com]

The pension fund for NH state government workers has been heavily invested in Microsoft and Cisco, major defense contractors. Churches, museums, and many non-profit organizations (as well as individuals) have investments in mutual funds that do very well with returns from military contractors.

Bought and Paid For

New Hampshire’s congressional representatives’ campaigns are funded by military contractors, and they have fruitful mutual relationships. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, for example, received $28,027 from BAE Systems in the 2020 election cycle.

A member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, Shaheen voted for record military budgets under the National Defense Authorization Acts, and for military intervention in Syria in September 2013.

Even if there were no campaign donations, every politician knows how important military spending is to the state’s economic survival. The NH Aerospace & Defense Export Consortium includes manufacturers, banks, non-profit organizations, universities, and local governments.

Recruiting Stations and Bases

Military institutions are well established in the Granite State. Recruiting stations are found throughout the state, as well as armories—many with lead contamination.

There are five military bases: Londonderry Army Reserve, New Boston Air Force Station, Air Force Active Newington, Pease ANGB Air Force Guard Portsmouth, and Somersworth USARC Army Reserve. New Boston and Pease are superfund sites now reported as clean.

Bases in the U.S. generally cannot be shown on a single printed map, as there are more than 4,000 of them.

They are economic hubs in their areas. Real estate, shopping, entertainment, restaurants, motels with housekeeping suites, car rentals, even museums, are advertised on base websites.

New Boston, a former bombing range, is now part of the Space Force, and uses a small area for “critical satellite command and control.” Other parts of the range, deemed clean, are available for recreation (for those with military connections), including rentals of cabins, kayaks, RV sites, party supplies, bikes, and bouncy castles.

New Boston Space Force site. [Source: upload.wikimedia.org]

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and many non-profit organizations providing services or solidarity for veterans are also part of the military-industrial complex. While there are a few member organizations critical of our military operations, e.g., Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War!, most are strongly supportive.

Contractor philanthropy is especially directed to military charities. The corporation’s website states: “BAE Systems supports organizations that provide services to military members and their families, veterans, or operate in the security and intelligence fields or other military support functional areas.”

There is much more to the bootprint. Militarized police forces; board members of military contractors with educational, charitable, and political ties; board members of non-profits with military connections; and the old symbols of statues, parades, and glorification of our violent history in schools and speeches.

So many citizens are included, some happily, others because it is the best way to earn a living or keep a worthy organization afloat. This is not to blame them—almost all of us are connected in one way or another—but it helps to explain why there is so little protest about the military budget or the international predations of the military.

The DoD has spent trillions in the 21^st century. Meanwhile, funds are lacking for support of essential infrastructure and social services—even in NH, one of the richest states in the richest nation.

Even more tragic is the history and future aim of the military’s mission: not to “defend” the nation, but to protect corporate “interests,” and to maintain “world supremacy,” even when that results in the murder of people, destruction of the environment, and obliteration of governments, in violation of U.S. laws, the U.S. Constitution, and international law.

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Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire. She is the author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and with Shawn P. Wilbur, of Charles Fourier’s anti-war fantasy, The World War of Small Pastries (Autonomedia, 2015). Joan can be reached a: [email protected].

Notes

1. My information on contractors, obtained from the usaspending.gov database of federal contracts, covers approximately the period from 2000 to 2018. 

Featured image is from nhpr.org

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I am confident in predicting that as more and more bad news about the ineffectiveness and dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines become increasingly known to more of the public, the big drug companies will increasingly switch from vaccines to prescription antiviral medicines.

The unrelenting opposition to using ivermectin to treat and prevent COVID-19 is stronger than ever. This has resulted from a gigantic increase in demand for IVM by much of the public. Despite big media tirades against IVM, the truth about its effectiveness (together with failure of COVID vaccines) has reached the public through many articles on alternative news websites and truth-tellers on countless podcasts. Its success has forced Big Pharma to create expensive copies of it.

Monthly IVM prescriptions increased 72 percent from 39,864 in 2019 to 68,428 in 2021 (through May). Just when COVID vaccination started to be pushed in January 2021 prescriptions hit a high of 97,192. A number of medical specialties greatly increased off-label use of IVM for fighting COVID in this period: anesthesiology, 1,319%; pulmonology, 1,167%; cardiology, 741%, for example. Strong support by physicians for IVM to cure and prevent COVID.

And in my book Pandemic Blunder I made the case with data that using cheap, safe and effective generics like IVM and hydroxychloroquine would prevent 80% or more of COVID deaths. Esteemed physician Peter McCollough later said 85%. For the U.S., that means some 600,000 lives could have been saved, and globally over 4 million lives.  Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have also died from COVID vaccines, the failed solution to the pandemic.

Merck, a maker of IVM, is getting much positive press coverage for its forthcoming prescription oral antiviral (molnupiravir). It is designed to replace IVM, which they cannot make big money from. The FDA will soon give it emergency use authorization because of the emerging clarity that COVID vaccines do NOT work effectively or safely.

That the Washington Post says that what Merck has created is the “first covid-fighting pill” illustrates how awful big media has been in ignoring the proven benefits of the IVM and HCQ generics. And in ignoring the many failures of COVID vaccines. In its October 2 front page story on the new Merck pill, it did not even mention IVM or present any data showing IVM as proven even more effective than the new expensive drug tested on only hundreds of people for a short period. In contrast, IVM has been used successfully on hundreds of thousands of people to treat and prevent COVID.

Speaking as someone who is using IVM as a prophylactic, here is what I have seen in recent times. Though getting a prescription for it is very difficult and stressful it can be done through a number of websites. But then the battle just begins. Many pharmacies, especially big chain ones, will not fill IVM prescriptions if there is any evidence that it is being used to fight COVID. And then you will likely discover, as I did, that virtually no pharmacy (typically small community ones) that will fill such prescriptions has any IVM. That’s right. There is a national shortage of IVM because of huge demand in recent months and because U.S. makers have not escalated production.

Probably, millions of vaccine resisters are using IVM, especially those resisting booster shots.

Can you still get it? Yes, and even without a prescription. It will have to come from India, with many makers of IVM. It can take many weeks to get it. But the cost is a tiny fraction of what U.S. pharmacies have been charging when they did have it in stock. Rather than $4 or $5 for a 3 mg pill, you can buy 12 mg pills for way under $1 a pill.

But there is more to the IVM story.

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that there is massive medical science data showing absolute reliable data that IVM is safe and effective for both treating and preventing COVID. This is what should be a bold large headline in newspapers if we had honest big media: IVM SAFE AND EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVE TO COVID VACCINES.

But instead, there is a constant barrage of articles and statements from government agencies asserting IVM should not be used to fight COVID. They argue it is unsafe and ineffective. Both are lies aimed solely at protecting the mass vaccination effort and the profits of big drug companies. And now protecting the new Big Pharma market for antiviral pills.

FDA has issued very strong warnings against using IVM for COVID. Nothing it has said follows the true science and mountains of data supporting safe and effective IVM use. Like other IVM opponents, it has conflated personal IVM use with the use of IVM products designed for animals.

This is even more infuriating. Merck, despite being a maker of IVM discredited its use for COVID by irresponsibly stating, “We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.”

Clearly, Merck, Pfizer and other vaccine makers are developing their own oral antivirals to directly compete with the cheap and effective IVM. These antivirals, unlike cheap generic IVM, would be patented so expensive pills could be sold worldwide. They will find some ingenious ways to copy IVM but make enough changes to get patents.

Already, Merck has begun production of its new pill to be taken twice daily for five days. Even more significant: The U.S. government has made an advance purchase of 1.7 million treatment courses for $1.2 billion! That is over $700 per treatment. So much more profitable than making IVM. Forget the billions of dollars spent on vaccines that are injuring and killing many people.

I am confident in predicting that as more and more bad news about the ineffectiveness and dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines become increasingly known to more of the public, the big drug companies will increasingly switch from vaccines to prescription antiviral medicines. This is what smart corporate business strategic planning is all about. With Merck, it has already started. And FDA, CDC and NIH will go along with this strategic switch.

This will preserve a trillion-dollar market for pharmaceutical companies. How the government and public health establishment weasel word their switch from COVID vaccines to antiviral pills will be a marvelous magical trick to watch. Do you think that they will admit that millions of people worldwide have lost their health and lives from vaccine use? Of course not. Expensive antiviral pills will simply be sold as a better solution.

Be clear about the science explaining why IVM and HCQ have worked. They both (along with zinc) interfere at the earliest stage of COVID infection with viral replication. Stops infection in its tracks. They work as prophylactics for the same reason. If you keep a modest amount of IVM and HCQ in your body (and take zinc, vitamins C and D, and quercetin), any virus that enters your body can be stopped before major viral replication. The new prescription medicines coming from Merck and other Big Pharma are designed to serve the same function as the cheap generics.

This is the big truth coming to fruition: All the emerging information on COVID vaccine ineffectiveness and dangerous and often lethal side effects is forcing a major strategic shift to antivirals.

Congressman Louie Gohmert has recently made a number of solid observations about IVM:

Almost 4 billion doses of ivermectin have been prescribed for humans, not horses, over the past 40 years. In fact, the CDC recommends all refugees coming to the U.S. from the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean receive this so-called dangerous horse medicine as a preemptive therapy. Ivermectin is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be an “essential medicine.” The Department of Homeland Security’s “quick reference” tool on COVID-19 mentioned how this life-saving drug reduced viral shedding duration in a clinical trial.

To date, there are at least 63 trials and 31 randomized controlled trials showing benefits to the use of ivermectin to fight COVID-19 prophylactically as well as for early and late-stage treatment. Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit the replication of many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. It has strong anti-inflammatory properties and prevents transmission of COVID-19 when taken either before or after exposure to the virus.

Ivermectin also speeds up recovery and decreases hospitalization and mortality in COVID-19 patients. It has been FDA approved for decades and has very few and mild side effects. It has an average of 160 adverse events reported every year, which indicates ivermectin has a better safety record than several vitamins. In short, there is no humane, logical reason why it should not be widely used to fight against the China Virus should a patient and doctor decide it is appropriate to try in that patient’s case.

And that small number of adverse events pales in comparison to hundreds of thousands for COVID vaccines.

A new, comprehensive report noted that 63 studies have confirmed the effectiveness of IVM in treating COVID-19. There’s a great website to see positive IVM data.

And consider what former Director of Intellectual Property at Gilead Pharmaceuticals, Brian Remy, said about the necessity of implementing ivermectin. “It is simple — use what works and is most effective — period. Ivermectin used in combination with other therapeutics is a no-brainer and should be the standard of care for COVID-19. Not only would this be good for business and help avoid the criticism and bad PR, and potential civil/criminal liability for censorship, scientific misconduct, etc. for misrepresentation of Ivermectin and other generics, but most importantly it would save countless lives and end the pandemic for good.” Amen.

Want even more positive facts? Consider the India experience. In India’s deadly second pandemic surge, ivermectin obliterated their crisis. Within weeks after adopting IVM cases were down 90%. Those states with more aggressive IVM use were down more dramatically. Daily cases in Goa, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi were down 95%, 98%, 99%, 99%, respectively.

And appreciate this: Dr. Kory and the FLCCC published a narrative review in May 2021, showing the massive effectiveness of IVM against COVID-19 in reducing death and cases. They concluded that it must be adopted globally immediately. Yet big media without respect for public health waged war against IVM. Now it is going crazy in support of the expensive Merck antiviral pill.

To sum up: The IVM story is far from over. We now have a pandemic of the vaccinated. From all over the world the fractions of people said to have died from COVID who were fully vaccinated are very high, often 80%. Many people with breakthrough COVID infections die. Blame those deaths on the vaccines. Big media suppresses all the negative information on the vaccines and all the positive information on IVM. This double whammy is pure evil. It is designed to pave the way for the new, expensive generation of antiviral pills once the medical and public health establishments backtrack from their vaccine advocacy and coercion.

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This article was originally published on LifeSiteNews.

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn has a doctorate in engineering but has worked on health issues for decades. He is the author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles on the pandemics. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors. He has lectured at many universities, including the Army War College.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

The 21^st century, geopolitically, so far has been shaped by the U.S.- engineered Forever Wars.

Forever Wars: Afghanistan-Iraq, part 2, ranging from 2004 to 2021, is the fourth in a series of e-books recovering the Pepe Escobar archives on Asia Times.

The archives track a period of 20 years – starting with the columns and stories published under The Roving Eye sign in the previous Asia Times Online from 2001 all the way to early 2015.

The first e-book, Shadow Play, tracked the interplay between China, Russia and the U.S. between 2017-2020.

The second, Persian Miniatures, tracked the Islamic Republic of Iran throughout the “axis of evil” era, the Ahmadinejad years, the nuclear deal, and “maximum pressure” imposed by the Trump administration.

Forever Wars is divided in two parts, closely tracking Afghanistan and Iraq.

Forever Wars, part 1 starts one month before 9/11 in the heart of Afghanistan, and goes all the way to 2004.

Part 2, edited by my Asia Times colleague Bradley Martin, starts with the Abu Ghraib scandal and the Taliban adventures in Texas and goes all the way to the “Saigon moment” and the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The unifying idea behind this e-book series is quite a challenge: to recover the excitement of what is written as “the first draft of History”.

You may read the whole two-volume compilation chronologically, as a thriller, following in detail all the plot twists and cliffhangers.

Or you may read it in a self-service way, picking a date or a particular theme.

On part 1, you will find the last interview by commander Massoud in the Panjshir before he was killed two days before 9/11; the expansion of jihad as a “thermonuclear bomb”; life in “liberated” Kabul; life in Iraq in the last year under Saddam Hussein; on the trail of al-Qaeda in the Afghan badlands; who brought us the war on Iraq.

On part 2, you will revive, among other themes:

• Abu Ghraib as an American tragedy.
• Fallujah as a new Guernica.
• Iraq as the new Afghanistan.
• The myth of Talibanistan.
• The counter-insurgency absurdities in “AfPak”.
• How we all remain hostages of 9/11.
• The Pipelineistan Great Game.
• The failing surges – in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
• How was life in Talibanistan in the year 2000.
• NATO designing our future already in 2010.
• Afghanistan courted as a player in Eurasian connectivity.

And since July 7, the chronicle of the astonishing end of the 20-year-long Forever War in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021.

The majority of the articles, essays and interviews selected for this two-part e-book were written in Afghanistan and in Iraq and/or before and after multiple visits to both countries.

So welcome to a unique geopolitical road trip – depicting in detail the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune that will continue to shape the young 21^st century.

Ride the snake.

Click here to purchase the e-Book from Asia Times.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

“You cannot pretend nothing has happened!” That was the rallying cry at the San Francisco State University faculty grievance hearing, addressed to President Lynn Mahoney and Provost Jennifer Summit.

On Sept. 30, 2021, from ten in the morning until 4 pm, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Director/Senior scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program (AMED) at San Francisco State University (SFSU), presented her case against the university administration in a public grievance hearing during which she alleged that SFSU failed to protect her academic freedom when Zoom cancelled an open classroom she had co-organized with Tomomi Kinukawa (Lecturer Faculty, Department of Women and Gender Studies) almost exactly a year ago, a webinar described in one of their announcements as “a historic round-table conversation with Palestinian feminist, militant, and leader Leila Khaled.”

For background information on the cancellation last year of the webinar on Palestinian rights called “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” see my blog post: Learning the Palestinian Revolution & The Zoomification Of Higher Education.

Capture on the left is from a Zoom public grievance hearing at SFSU on Sept 30, 2021 over the university administration’s mishandling of Zoom’s cancellation a year ago of an open classroom webinar that included Palestinian feminist icon Leila Khaled on the guest panel.

The hearing (ironically conducted on Zoom) was accessible to the public in accordance with university regulations, although accessibility issues came up on more than one occasion as the hearing proceeded, with Professor Abdulhadi saying at one point: “Many of my family members in Palestine and elsewhere have tried to come in and they are also being interrogated [as to] who they are and people in Palestine do not like invasive questions, so they should be able to attend without actually being asked who they are and [told] they shouldn’t be there to support me.” And at another point: “I’m just asking about people who might be in the waiting room. I know that one of my nieces said to me, can you let me in? I said I’m not the one who can let you in.”

Addressing Professor Abdulhadi’s concerns, her representative at the hearing, Sang Hea Kil, Department of Justice Studies, San Jose State University, said: “This brings up some problems about process, because if this hearing was happening on campus, then San Francisco State University is a public campus, so basically anybody can walk on campus and if they think that the faculty hearing is interesting, they can walk in, without having to have their name be required or their affiliation to the university [questioned]. So, I just want to mark for the record that there seems to be some problems here with maybe San Francisco State’s interpretation of the faculty hearing manual because I definitely interpret it very differently.”

I sat through the entire proceeding (which was recorded with live transcription) and was startled by the pro forma and halfhearted nature of the administration’s response to the passionate outpourings of the principals and witnesses at this grievance hearing. They had one expert witness, Carleen Mandolfo, SF State’s associate vice president of Faculty Affairs and Development, who prompted the remark by Professor Abdulhadi’s representative: “It’s unclear to me why you were chosen for the expert witness for the … administration if you kind of repeatedly said that you weren’t involved in the event or what happened.” The response from the witness: “I don’t know.”

Quoting the grievance hearing manual, the university representative’s opening statement highlighted the standards by which the allegations must be weighed and stated that the faculty member bringing forward the grievance must connect the alleged wrong done to them by the university “with the rights accruing to his or her job classification. And I want to stress the fact that as stated by the hearing manual … Dr. Abdulhadi bears the burden of proof today. She must present enough evidence that convinces the panel by a preponderance of the evidence that she was wronged by the University in connection with her rights as a faculty member… And just to make it very clear, there are no tie-breakers and the preponderance of the evidence standard [applies]. She must show that it is more likely than not that her claims are valid.”

Professor Abdulhadi’s representative, Professor Sang Hea Kil, then presented compelling evidence in the form of exhibits of emails, other documents and poignant testimonies by four individuals, two of whom were directly involved in the preparation and coordination of the cancelled webinar. At the end of this presentation, she listed four proposed remedies, denying the University’s claim that “the remedy requested for the university to create its own video platform is unreasonable, unduly burdensome and outside of the scope of the university’s responsibility and purpose.”

Capture from a US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel webinar streamed on Sept 28, 2021 that explored SFSU’s “consistent undermining of the AMED studies program, its sabotaging of the incorporation of Palestine into critical ethnic studies, its consistent flouting of academic freedom, its privileging of Zionist Jewish voices, feelings and perspectives over the lived experiences and struggles of anti-Zionist Jewish students and activists as well as Arab, Muslim and/or Palestinian students.”

The evidence was compelling. It was presented with only cursory cross-examination of the witnesses by the administration and a final statement riddled with “technical difficulties” that simply reiterated the administration’s opening statement and failed to engage with the specific allegations presented by Professor Abdulhadi’s team.

The evidence directly challenged the university administration’s claims that the cancellation of the webinar “was not by any act of the University at all. In fact, the University actually asked Zoom not to cancel the event, and they on numerous occasions, offered Dr. Abdulhadi … university resources and support to host the event on different platforms… [and that] Dr. Abdulhadi has not suffered any harm in connection with her rights as a professor, not by means of a contract violation … or any other right or benefits associated with her position. The person censored here was Leila Khalid, and as unfortunate as that is, she’s not an employee at this university and we do not owe her any duties, or responsibilities.”

Professor Sang Hea Kil provided evidence that Professor Abdulhadi’s right of academic freedom was violated by San Francisco State Administration “by their words and actions that the administration attempted to chill her free speech by erroneously threatening her and her co-organizers with possible criminal liability and imprisonment for classroom speech, and that the administration did nothing to alleviate Zoom censoring of her and her co-organizers’ open classroom [and facilitated] the shutdown of their Zoom open classroom on other venues … We have three parts to the presentation roadmap: first we’re going to review the tenets of academic freedom that permeate the campus and academic programs, we’re going to review what happened. We’re going to review what happened before the classroom [event], what happened the day of the classroom, and what happened after with the open classroom webinar.”

I will now quote excerpts from testimonies by two professors who acted as witnesses at the hearing. The first is Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa, who disputed the University’s claim that “Dr. Abdulhadi cannot show harm or any infringement on the rights related to her employment and [that therefore] it essentially means that she has no standing for this grievance.”

The second is Dr. Blanca Missé, Assistant Professor of French in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department and is a member of the board of California Faculty Association as well as the California State University Employees Union, who explained why one of the remedies requested (for the university to create its own video platform) is neither “unreasonable” nor “unduly burdensome and outside of the scope of the University’s responsibility and purpose,” as the University representative claimed.

A call by Palestine Legal inviting the public to attend the second grievance hearing against SFSU on 10/19 from 10–4pm PST to addresses 14 years of attacks on Professor Abdulhadi and the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program she directs. Attend this grievance here.

From Professor Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa’s testimony in response to the question: “Please explain if there were any negative outcomes for you and how the San Francisco State University administration handled the situation with your collaborative classroom event?”

The silencing of the webinar has multiple negative outcomes. First of all, the burden of [extra work] carried out by Dr. Abdulhadi and myself. We had to work for months to address all the issues created by the censorship, I mean the silencing, and we had to explain to our students what took place, and we had to write additional lectures, then assign readings to turn silencing into a teachable moment. We had to readjust our syllabi and assignments and so forth, and while doing that we also had to seek legal help.

… What we had to go through before and after the cancellation of the open classroom also needs to be understood as a form of violence…. This administration’s validation [of accusations of criminality on the part of Zionist groups pressuring Zoom] exposed us to [attacks] by the media and right-wing tabloids. For example, a New York Post journalist emailed me and informed me that the US Department of Education is asking other federal agencies, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department to review the September 23 events, and also it was reported that right-wing, far-right [individuals] were urging the Attorney General and FBI director to investigate whether our classroom [teaching] violated the material support for terrorism act, and it was then under the Trump administration and in that political climate.

[All that] took a huge toll on our emotional and physical health and wellbeing. And also … all of us who are engaged in knowledge production and teaching know how violent it is when our meticulously planned courses get publicly demeaned, and our anti-colonial narratives for justice, our life’s work, gets silenced by the leaders of our own institution.

And finally, I must say that it angers me that our administration denied our students and the rest of this once in a lifetime opportunity to directly learn from the panelists and the prominent feminist scholar and global revered public intellectual Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi. Anyone who teaches can understand it doesn’t happen very often, it’s a very rare moment and very privileged moment for all of us, and that includes the older community members who registered for the webinar.

It’s as if the administration completely failed to see the value of our open classroom, and that hurts especially, because both the provost and president are feminist scholars, and I must say this is intellectually irresponsible, that they didn’t support a classroom in a meaningful way so that our students and also wider community were able to actually listen to all these great thinkers of our time. I’m actually very much embarrassed, as a community member of their efforts to silence us.

Professor Blanca Missé began by pointing out that she too teaches about armed struggle [in her case, in the French colonial and WWII contexts] and the liberation of people from colonial and foreign domination, and then she went on to focus her remarks on the question of academic freedom and how the administration is accountable.

… I’m here today, of course, because I want to support my two colleagues … [against an administration that “was carrying forward” the libelous accusations [by Zoom] that they were engaging in criminal activity, that they were associated with terrorist groups].

But also, because I feel like these actions have a chilling effect on everybody. Just imagine a lecturer faculty member or non-tenured faculty member like myself getting an email like that sent by the provost [addressed to the organizers and accepting at face value that they might be engaged in criminal activity at the say-so of Zoom and Jewish Zionist groups], the impact it has, in what I think I can do and teach in this institution is very restrictive and censoring. If I had to ever receive an email like that, it will be really traumatizing.

We all teach difficult and controversial topics. [For example] I teach in the French program right now the history of the resistance in France and how the Nazi army criminalized the French resistance, the acts of sabotage and armed resistance against the Nazi occupation. Next week, I will be teaching the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and we will be watching the Battle of Algiers.

… one of the moments when I decided to proactively start organizing and discussing this matter with my colleagues, is after receiving the email that was sent by President Mahoney [on September 23, 2020] explaining the cancellation of the event. It was an interesting email, because we were told that although the university disagreed with the action carried forward by Zoom, [the corporation] had the right to this action to censor the class, because [the class] violated Zoom’s terms of service. And that was the end of the story. And many of us were waiting for: and what are you going to do about it?

And then, and what are you going to do about it never happened. So, we were told that in this period when most of the instruction was being conducted on Zoom, that there is now a conflict between academic freedom, which is what should govern and rule educational institutions in this country, and the terms of service of Zoom. And when this conflict emerges, our administration goes AWOL.

[Our academic] freedom is governed by the terms of service of Zoom, which is a private company, because of course they can do what they want as a private company, but our administration has failed to reestablish the framework of academic freedom in education and say that all education on campus is decided by the faculty, and all the classes should be allowed. And it is our role as the administration to provide the material infrastructure for litigation and scholarly debates, to move forward.

So, when we were presented with this as a matter of fact, and then no action was required by the administration, I decided as an active member of my union who is engaged in questions of academic freedom (I belong to several organizations) to discuss this thoroughly with specialist colleagues outside of the institution, such as Professor [Judith] Butler, who couldn’t be here today, with whom I consulted, and we decided we need to push back against this new normal.

Which is that we don’t have academic freedom, we’re governed by the terms of service of a private corporation. We wrote a petition with our demands, and two days ago got more than 100 faculty members at San Francisco State to say okay what’s going on here.

If the terms of service of Zoom violate academic freedom, you need to take action. You can either review these terms of service or provide an alternative platform and drop the contract with Zoom, but you must do something as a State University because it is your responsibility to ensure that academic freedom is upheld in our campus. And that is regulated by the Academic Senate, that is a preamble of our contract in the CFA [California Faculty Association]. We come to work in this institution, under the understanding that it is the duty of our administration to materially protect our academic freedom. That is a contract we have, and that contract was broken.

It was broken and it has not been repaired. And we have seen zero actions to attempt to repair this contract — that is to say to restore academic freedom and to restore the dignity, the reputation and the academic freedom of the two colleagues, whose academic freedom was violated.

So this is something that, in my opinion, we crossed the line, and we need to change, and to seek structural change in our campus in terms of academic freedom to demand that we do something about Zoom. We would like our own university to provide a way to stream classes so we don’t rely on an outside company. During the pandemic, our administration outsourced part of learning to a private company. They outsourced it, and then we lost control of it … to a corporation. We should have the material resources to provide online instruction regulated by a public institution where the faculty remains the sole power to define what is allowed or not allowed.

It’s very clear that outside groups off campus start pressuring and bullying our administration, and then bullying private companies like Zoom to then interfere in the business of our administration, and that completely changes what is going on on campus, and what can be said what cannot be said, what can be taught, what cannot be taught and that affects all of us, because you know, many faculty who signed that petition are faculty teaching in the field of science. Why? Because they’re struggling, every day with the encroachment of private interest groups and private corporations who seek to limit, regulate and censor some of the research happening in the science field. So, they are very familiar with this problem, right.

It is very important for us as a faculty that we send a clear message to our administration about the new normal that has been established. It is a violation of our academic freedom and it needs to be redressed and changed. We cannot pretend nothing has happened. And the most shocking thing in this case is that for the administration, nothing has happened; there is no evidence provided to us that they’ve been really thinking hard about this matter.

The remedies proposed at the grievance hearing were as follows:

1. Dropping Zoom as a corporate partner to the university.
2. Creating alternative streaming platforms that protect academic freedom.
3. Ensuring the timely rehosting of the same webinar, this time with no interference.
4. Issuing a public apology to Drs. Abdulhadi and Kinukawa, their invited guests, and the 1,500 SFSU students and other participants who registered for the open classroom.

The faculty panel will announce its decision in two weeks. Their recommendation then goes to the university president who can uphold or reject it. Next step is arbitration by an arbitrator agreed upon by SFSU administration and the union, whose decision is binding.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Pentagon’s Dilemma: The Covid Vaccine Impairs the Performance of U.S. Fighting Forces

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 04, 2021

The adverse events and injuries pertaining to the Covid vaccine are amply documented: thrombosis, heart attacks, myocarditis, blood clots, neurological impacts. Indelibly these conditions will affect the performance and capabilities of US fighting forces.

Video: Digital Tyranny and the Rockefeller-Gates WHO “Vaxx-Certificate Passport”: Towards a World War III Scenario

By Peter Koenig, October 04, 2021

Behind its development is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – with support of the Rockefeller Foundation – and others belonging to the sinister all-digitization, depopulation and eugenics agenda.

Video: Why Do So Many Still Buy the Covid Narrative? Prof. Mattias Desmet

By Prof. Mattias Desmet and Dan Astin-Gregory, October 04, 2021

My guest tonight is Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, and his observations over the past 18 months have led him to conclude that the overwhelming majority have indeed fallen under a kind of spell.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Historic and Legal Perspectives of the Pandemic

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr, October 04, 2021

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. covers both the legal aspects of our efforts seeking to disapprove the emergency use of the experimental gene therapies and points out the dangers of the political climate that allows these restrictions and mandates to be enforced while the global economy is about to burst.

Video: Attorney Thomas Renz Releases Medicare and Pfizer Whistleblower Data: Vaccine Related Injuries and Deaths Far More Widespread Than Reported

By Sundance, October 04, 2021

Thanks to a Whistleblower that came forth to Attorney Thomas Renz, the public is now seeing, for the first time ever, hard data from the largest database available in the U.S. to study the COVID-19 impact including deaths & injuries; The CMS Medicare Tracking System.

The Military and Intelligence Origins of Public Health. The Pharmaceutical Branch of the Military Industrial Complex

By Dr. T. P. Wilkinson, October 04, 2021

As a conservative campaigner for healthcare safety, especially for children, and an environmental activist Kennedy has concentrated on corporate malfeasance and regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry. In this talk he explains the relationship of the health crisis to the State itself.

“Our Species is Being Genetically Modified”: Humanity’s March Toward Extinction? Analysis of the Microbiome and Virome

By David Skripac, October 04, 2021

The innate immune system is the initial and primary means by which our bodies interact with a virus. The innate system helps the body find a genetic balance with each new viral update that is being presented to it.

U.S. Military Vaccine Mandate: A Teachable Moment.

By Thomas L. Knapp, October 04, 2021

On August 25, two days after the US Food and Drug Administration fully approved the Pfizer-Biontech COVID-19 vaccine, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered “full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces.”

As Tories Fete Boris Johnson, a Social Catastrophe Looms

By Peter Oborne, October 04, 2021

While the ruling party gathers for a swanky conference to celebrate its political successes, average Britons are struggling with fuel shortages, economic devastation and a deadly pandemic.

Trump’s Decision to Reinforce Blockade and Dismantle US Embassy in Cuba: Declassified US Report Dismantles Story of Alleged “Acoustic Attacks”

By Telesur, October 04, 2021

According to the study, there are no microwave weapons associated with the alleged health ailments that caused the Trump administration to decide to dismantle its embassy in the Cuban capital.

Revolution at the United Nations? First Ministerial Meeting of the “Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations”

By Carla Stea, October 04, 2021

This new “Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations” offers an alternative option to vulnerable targeted member states, and the inclusion of China and Russia in this new organization seeking to re-create balance in “Defense of the United Nations Charter” promises a formidable alternative of hope, and, indeed, power for the increasing number of United Nations member states threatened with subjugation by Western capitalist dominance.