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Pfizer announced Thursday it will seek Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August for a third dose of its COVID-19 vaccine. The drugmaker predicted those who have been fully vaccinated will need a booster shot within six to 12 months of receiving their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
But hours later, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a joint statementby the FDA and Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) saying, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.”
The statement did not explicitly mention Pfizer, but said “a science-based, rigorous process” headed by the CDC, FDA and the National Institutes of Health would determine when or whether boosters were necessary.
According to the HHS statement:
“FDA, CDC and NIH are engaged in a science-based, rigorous process to consider whether or when a booster might be necessary. This process takes into account laboratory data, clinical trial data and cohort data — which can include data from specific pharmaceutical companies, but does not rely on those data exclusively.”
In a statement to CNN Friday, the World Health Organization said:
“We don’t know whether booster vaccines will be needed to maintain protection against COVID-19 until additional data is collected,” adding, “limited data [is] available on how long the protection from current doses lasts, and whether an additional booster dose would be beneficial and for whom.”
Scientists “applauded the statement” from HHS, The Washington Post reported, saying boosters were not imminent and the science isn’t clear on if or when they will be needed.
“My opinion right now … is that current vaccination seems to be largely ‘holding,’” said E. John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “But the companies seem to suggest their continued follow-up of their trial patients shows concerning levels of waning of immunity. Not much of these data from the companies are publicly available yet. I agree we need as much independent data and assessment as possible on this topic.”
John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine, said:
“No one is saying we’ll never need a booster, but to say we need it now and give the public the impression the vaccines are failing and something needs to be done as a matter of urgency. … The time isn’t now. The decisions that are going to be made will be made by federal agencies.”
The HHS statement followed recommendations made June 23 by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization and Practices (ACIP). Members of the ACIP COVID-19 working group said they would recommend booster shots only if there were a demonstrated decline in efficacy — not just a waning antibody response.
Boosters may be recommended if there’s a variant that’s able to evade the vaccines, according to slides presented by Dr. Sara Oliver, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Dr. Sharon Frey, ACIP member and clinical director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Saint Louis University Medical School, said:
“I would have to agree with the interpretation of the working group in the sense that there’s no data to support recommendations to support boosters at this time. There’s no evidence against declining protection at this time.”
Pfizer CEO insists boosters are needed
Pfizer has been working on two different booster strategies it anticipates could carry sales beyond the immediate pandemic need: a third 30 mg dose of its current vaccines and an updated vaccine that targets the South African variant.
All U.S. pharmaceutical companies involved in making COVID vaccines are working on formulating and testing booster shots to prepare for the possibility, The Washington Post reported.
Pfizer argued that as antibody blood concentration wanes, boosters will be required to ensure the broad population can’t carry the virus. This would quench the epidemic faster, the company said.
Pfizer said its vaccine’s effectiveness had eroded, citing two lines of evidence outside scientists have not seen in detail. This included an Israeli government analysis that showed reduced efficacy with Pfizer’s vaccine and the Delta variant, and data from Pfizer’s continued follow-up of people who were vaccinated last summer.
“While protection against severe disease remained high across the full six months, the observed decline in efficacy against symptomatic disease over time, and the continued emergence of variants, are key factors driving our belief that a booster dose will likely be necessary to maintain highest levels of protection,” Pfizer said in a statement.
Pfizer said it would submit data to regulators within weeks showing a third dose of its vaccine at six months caused antibody levels to shoot up five to 10 times higher than the original two-dose regimen. Moderna announced similar data in May.
Pfizer motivated by profit margins
Less than 24 hours after Pfizer announced plans to seek emergency use authorization of a third dose, the drugmaker’s stock was up 1.6%.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has said for months a booster would likely be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations, even as public health officials and academic scientists said it wasn’t clear yet when a booster would be needed.
Booster shots for COVID are expected to serve as a key revenue driver in the years to come for Pfizer and its primary rival in the U.S., Moderna. Pfizer in May projected global sales of its COVID vaccine to reach $26 billion in 2021.
The company has also been frank that its current pricing — $19.50 per dose in the U.S. — is temporary. On an earnings call in February, Frank A. D’Amelio, Pfizer’s executive vice president of global supply, assured investors the company sees the vaccine market evolving as the pandemic wanes, and will likely be able to charge more per dose than it was getting under pandemic supply deals.
D’Amelio said a more typical price for a vaccination was $150 or $175 per dose.
“Now, let’s go beyond a pandemic-pricing environment, the environment we’re currently in. Obviously, we’re going to get more on price,” D’Amelio said. “So clearly, there’s a significant opportunity for those margins to improve once we get beyond the pandemic environment that we’re in.”
Pfizer said it would begin testing a booster shot specifically programmed to combat the Delta variant in August, reaffirming concerns by scientists who predicted in April that pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, would create a vaccine treadmill with continuous booster shots targeted at emerging variants.
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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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UK attorney Anna de Buisseret today announced serving Notices of Liability on COVID-19 clinics and individuals administering the experimental biological agent known as the “COVID-19 vaccine” without obtaining fully informed consent, freely given in accordance with the Nuremberg Code and UK and International law.
“COVID jabs are experimental and still in phase 3 clinical trials,” de Buisseret explained. “The Nuremberg Code therefore applies. The injector MUST obtain the individuals fully informed consent freely given. All MATERIAL RISKS must be made clear to them and an individual risk assessment conducted.”
De Buisseret said among those served is Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England, UK government’s Chief Medical Advisor, and head of the public health profession Professor Chris Whitty.
In April, Doctors for COVID Ethics served Notices of Liability for COVID-19 vaccine harms and deaths on all European Parliament Members.
In the United States, Health Impact News gave public notice that two private corporations, CVS and Rite Aid, have been issued a Safety Warning for the potential danger of indiscriminate COVID-19 “vaccination” in the naturally immune and recently COVID-19 infected, by Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, MD, Phd, on April 29th, 2021.
Many physicians have now spoken publicly about studies showing that those with natural COVID immunity will see a 2- to 3-fold increased risk of adverse reactions from the COVID shots.
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With millions of people now fully “vaccinated” against the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), one would assume that the number of new “cases” in this demographic is on the decline. To the contrary, the latest data shows that at least half of all new Chinese Virus cases are occurring in people who got the jab(s).
In the United Kingdom, which is reportedly a “testing ground for how vaccines are coping,” the so-called “delta variant” is on the rise among the injected, who are supposed to be protected against the virus based on government and media claims.
Of the 146,000 alleged cases of delta variant identified throughout Great Britain, at least 50 percent of them are people who rolled up their sleeves to “protect grandma” and do their part to “flatten the curve.” So much for “science.”
Hilariously, “health authorities” are still insistent that the injections are “working,” even in vaccinated people who are still testing “positive” for the Fauci Flu. According to the “scientists,” the shots are still effective, even though they are clearly not.
“First, vaccines aren’t 100% effective,” claims The Wall Street Journal, a supporter of the injections.
“Not everyone who is inoculated will respond the same way. Those who are elderly or whose immune systems are faulty, damaged or stressed by some other illness are less likely to mount a robust response than someone younger and fitter.”
The Journal goes on to claim that Wuhan Flu shots are still “highly effective” no matter what the data says because “some people will still be vulnerable to the virus even after receiving their shots.”
We know, it is hard not to laugh at such nonsense. These statements make zero sense, and yet some people read this type of thing and nod their head in blind agreement as if they prove the “science” behind the Fauci Ouchies.
No, covid vaccines are not safe or effective
As for other research that shows vaccinated people are up to eight times more susceptible to the delta variant, well, this, too, supposedly shows that the vaccines are “working.”
Even if every new case of the Chinese Virus was in a vaccinated person and the only people dying were vaccinated people, the mainstream media would still be claiming that the shots “work” and that this only goes to show that they are “not perfect.”
“I think it shows the vaccines are working,” says Tom Wingfield, a lecturer and infectious disease physician from England who believes in the vaccines, despite the evidence against them.
Julian Tang, a clinical virologist and professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Leicester, agrees. He says all the new cases of delta variant being identified in vaccinated people are simply “breakthrough infections” that are the exception rather than the norm.
The norm, Tang insists, is a suppression of hospitalizations and deaths following mass injection, simply because he says so – the data be damned.
“The EUA (emergency use authorization) documents filed by Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen all demonstrate that the use of these Experimental Drug / Vaccines that include either the mRNA or dsDNA of the Spike Protein produced by this Gain-of-Function Research, do NOT statistically reduce the incidence of COVID-19,” noted one Journal commenter.
Another tried to pull a fast one by virtue signaling about race, claiming that people with white skin have downplayed the Chinese Virus because it was never a problem for them, supposedly only affecting “black, brown, working class, and elderly people.”
“Speak to your neighbors from India … they all suspect ‘delta’ was a boon for the organ-harvesting market,” wrote another, offering a different perspective on the situation.
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As the Biden administration peddles its plan to send door-knocking missionaries across America to spread ‘vaccine awareness’ (and keep track of who’s vaccinated and who’s not), White House-coordinated FEMA “surge teams” are being assembled to reinforce local efforts on the ground.
In preparation for the coming campaign, Lake County, Illinois has published ‘Helpful Hints’ for volunteers taking part in their “Community Health Ambassador Outreach Door Knocking Project to Increase COVID Vaccine Acceptance.”
If you’re nervous, that’s ok! We all still get nervous, even if we’ve done this before.
You don’t need to have all the answers. If you are unsure of an answer, be honest. Tell the person asking that you are a volunteer, and you will take down their question so that a health department staff person can get them the correct answer.
Inform, don’t convince. Your job is to equip the person at the door with the information/resources they need to make an informed decision about their health. You are not trying to convince anyone to do something they don’t want to do.
Ignore no soliciting signs. You’re not soliciting! You’re offering critical information and resources. What you are doing is not illegal.
Knock and then back up [zh: so you don’t get shot?]. Follow COVID-19 distancing protocols and speak clearly. If someone is uncomfortable with you being there in person, offer to give them more distance or leave them a flyer.
Use your script. This will give you the basics. Once you get comfortable with it, feel free to make it sound more like you as long as all the key information is there. Make clear up front that the building has let you in and you’re from the health department.
Perhaps most importantly, volunteers are told to keep a list of who’s been naughty or nice.
Report on your work! Be sure to fill out the Doorknocking Spreadsheet with the counts of who still needs a vaccine, who is already vaccinated, who needs more info, etc. This is important information that the Health Department is relying on!
The door knockers are then given various scenarios in an attached script. For example:
PM (property manager) /CAM (community association manager): We don’t allow solicitation on our property.
CHM (community health ambassador): I understand but I am not selling anything, we want to provide accurate information to the seniors in your community. Our goal is to maximize the vaccination effort so that ALL of your seniors receive the COVID vaccine when the clinic comes on-site. All I want is to see your seniors protected against COVID.
And…
Senior: I’ve had allergic reactions to medications and foods years ago, is this vaccine safe for me?
CHA: The only true contraindication to this vaccine is a severe (anaphylactic) reaction to an injectable/vaccine in your past [ZH: *cough* what?]. Or an allergy to an ingredient in the vaccine, like polysorbate. After your vaccination, they will observe you for 15 minutes to be sure you’re doing well. With a history of other allergic reactions, they may want to watch you for a total of 30 minutes, instead of the standard 15 minutes, just to be sure you’re feeling ok. But if you have any question about your past allergies and vaccine compatibility, you should ask your doctor/healthcare provider.
Apparently door knockers are already operating in various towns.
HEADS UP! The Covid Gang is knocking on doors in North Carolina, California, Colorado and Oregon. People on TikTok are reporting they door knock then come back a week later. All of us need to post where they are at so we can sort of make up a map!
“They're telling you that you'll end up in a government database if you don't comply, and that government agents will be showing up and knocking on your door. What's really going on?”
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Nonetheless, the American political and media establishments seem to blithely assume that Haiti’s internal affairs are very much America’s business. State Department spokesman Ned Price says “It is still the view of the United States that elections this year should proceed.” An “electoral timetable” proposed by Moïse was “backed by the Biden administration, though it rejected plans to hold a constitutional referendum.”
Imagine, for a moment, that Russian president Vladimir Putin announced his support for the US holding 2022 congressional midterm elections, but denounced a proposed constitutional amendment.
Haven’t American politicians spent the last several years kvetching about supposed “Russian meddling” in US elections? Is there some particular reason why “election interference” is bad when others do it to us, but good when we do it to others?
The United States has intervened in Haiti’s internal affairs for more than 200 years, almost always with poor results for both countries’ populations.
After Haiti’s slave population rose up and overthrew their French masters, Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton recognized Toussaint Louverture’s new regime and encouraged independence (Louverture maintained the colonial relationship with France until 1804).
Under Thomas Jefferson, the US withdrew that diplomatic recognition under pressure from slave owners who feared a spread of Louverture’s rebellion to the American mainland, and refused to recognize Haiti’s independence until 1862. Subsequently, Washington intervened militarily in Haiti multiple times, occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, and supported the dictatorships of Francois “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier from 1957 to 1986 on the Cold War logic that Haiti could be a Caribbean “counterweight” to Communist Cuba.
Since the fall of Duvalier The Younger, the US government has continued to intervene in Haitian affairs — dangling and withdrawing aid, engaging in economic blockade, and intercepting and repatriating US-bound refugees, based on who’s in charge in Port-au-Prince and whether they toe Washington’s line.
While it’s simplistic to conclude that the US government is responsible for all of Haiti’s many problems, Washington certainly bears a great deal of responsibility for those problems. The way forward and out of that culpability is less, not more, interference in Haiti’s affairs.
If the US government really needs a “Haiti policy,” that policy should include two elements: Free trade and welcoming refugees. Beyond that, hands off Haiti!
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Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
Featured image: Haiti’s National Police guard remove makeshift barricades made of steel fences and tree branches protesters placed to block the National Palace entrance, Oct. 31, 2019. (Photo: Matiado Vilme / VOA — Public Domain)
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Half an hour’s taxi ride from the House of Pizarro, the presidential palace in Lima, Peru, is a high-security prison at the Callao naval base. The prison was built to hold leaders of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), particularly Abimael Guzmán. Not far from Guzmán’s cell is that of Vladimiro Montesinos, intelligence chief under former President Alberto Fujimori, who is also now imprisoned. Montesinos was sentenced to a 20-year prison term in 2006 for embezzlement, influence peddling, and abuse of power. Now, audio files from phone calls made by Montesinos from his prison indicate an attempt to influence the results of Peru’s presidential election after Pedro Castillo, the candidate of the left-wing Perú Libre party, won the election.
By the evening of June 6, 2021, Peru’s National Jury of Elections should have declared Pedro Castillo the winner of the presidential election. But it did not. A month later, matters remain in stasis as Peru does not yet have an official winner of the election.
Castillo’s opponent, Fuerza Popular’s Keiko Fujimori—the daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori—has hired a range of Lima’s top lawyers to obstruct any decision by the state’s electoral commission. In addition, her team has cast aspersions against the campaign of Castillo and Perú Libre, accusing them—without evidence—of being financed by disreputable groups, including drug cartels. The Peruvian media, largely controlled by the oligarchy, have gone along with Fujimori’s allegations; their apparent goal is to paint Castillo as an illegitimate winner and to set aside the verdict of the electorate.
Bribes
Meanwhile, hard evidence continues to emerge of the dirty tricks at the heart of Fujimori’s campaign to steal the election. Montesinos, the right-hand man of Fujimori’s father, made 17 phone calls from the prison between June 2 and June 24. Twelve of these calls resulted in a phone conversation; there was no answer to five of them. The Peruvian naval authority in charge of the prison said that Montesinos had applied to call his girlfriend. On June 26, Peru’s Defense Minister Nuria Esparch indicated that the navy will conduct an investigation.
Montesinos did not call his girlfriend. Instead, the old spymaster—and former CIA agent—called Pedro Rejas, a former commander in Peru’s army who is close to the Fujimori campaign. Montesinos tells Rejas in one call on June 10 to bribe the three members of the election commission $1 million each. “The only solution is to work through Guillermo in order to transfer the payment in favor of the three electoral jury members, who are supposed to be open to the bribe, and therefore guarantee the result.” The “Guillermo” in the conversation is Guillermo Sendón, who is on record affirming his relationship with one of the members of the electoral commission, Luis Arce Córdova. Sendón says that he helped Arce in his failed campaign to become president of the Supreme Court and met Arce several times in this period. Sendón’s last recorded visit to Arce was on June 22.
The audios are damning. In Peru, the case is known as Vladiaudios. This is a nod to a 20-year-old scandal called Vladivideos, when Montesinos was caught on tape bribing congressman Alberto Kouri to support Perú 2000, the party of Alberto Fujimori. In the months that followed, more videos came out: Montesinos offering millions of dollars to Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 5, and Channel 9 if they prevented the opposition from coming on their television programs. The Vladiaudios are as damning as the Vladivideos, both showing Montesinos attempting to use bribery to secure the electoral victory of the Fujimoris.
Where will the money come from? Montesinos proposes that Rejas approach Dionisio Romero (the CEO of Credicorp) and Rafael López Aliaga. It seems he has thought about everything: what to do and how to do it. Sitting in jail, this old intelligence agent could not do it himself. He required an accomplice and phone calls that were recorded and leaked to the media.
Involve the CIA
In one of the calls, Montesinos tells Rejas to involve the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “Look, what they have to do is to go to the U.S. Embassy and talk with the embassy intelligence officer. Bring all the fraud documentation… Go to the embassy and talk with the person in charge of intelligence at the embassy. That is in the Office of Regional Affairs.” The Office of Regional Affairs in Lima is the CIA station.
Montesinos gives precise instructions. Keiko Fujimori’s husband “can go [to the embassy], since he is an American citizen.” Her husband is Mark Villanella, whom she met at Columbia University in 2004. “Take the documents,” Montesinos advises. “Show them. Deliver them to the embassy and ask them to bring them to their chief in Washington… And in Washington, the chief can bring it to the notice of the president, and the White House spokesperson can issue a statement to prevent Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua from imposing their will in Peru. With such a statement, they have great leverage.”
Montesinos is not the only one in Fujimori’s circle with a history of trying to involve the United States in Peru’s elections. Her close adviser Fernando Rospigliosi has a long history of walking into the U.S. Embassy and asking for assistance in preventing the left from prevailing in elections. The current U.S. ambassador in Peru—only recently appointed—is Lisa Kenna, a former CIA agent.
Unconventional Warfare
Montesinos is an expert in unconventional warfare. The followers of Fujimori, he tells Rejas in one of the conversations, want to use a conventional approach, but “this will not work.”
“There is conventional warfare and unconventional warfare,” he says. “In unconventional warfare, you have to use special procedures… Conventional lawyers are not going to succeed because the procedure is irregular.” Arguments before the courts, in other words, are not sufficient; bribes are required.
Luis Arce, the man on the electoral commission, is now under investigation by Peru’s public prosecutor.
Meanwhile, the National Jury of Elections has still not closed the election in favor of the winner, Pedro Castillo. What we have instead is unconventional warfare with the U.S. Embassy as a player in the drama. Coups nowadays in Latin America do not need armies. Having good lawyers, bags of money, and a handful of thugs in and out of jail is all that is needed.
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This article was produced by Globetrotter.
José Carlos Llerena Robles is a popular educator, member of the Peruvian organization, La Junta, and representative of the Peruvian chapter of Alba Movimientos.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
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The Canadian federal and provincial governments have handed over C$23 billion (US$18.5 billion) in subsidies to three major oil and gas pipeline projects in just the past three years, according to a new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), defying global calls to phase out government support for fossil fuels.
But even that total is likely an undercount given the lack of transparency from the Canadian government over its support of the industry. “Canadian support to pipelines is higher than $23 billion dollars, but we don’t know by how much. The access to information request that we filed resulted in thousands of pages either redacted or withheld,” Vanessa Corkal, policy advisor at the IISD, and lead author of the report, said in a statement.
“Canadians deserve to know that their money is going towards a prosperous future and not putting that future at risk,” she said.
The state-backed fossil fuel expansion continues even as signs of the climate crisis grow more pronounced. A record-breaking heat wave baked western Canada in late June, killing hundreds of people and igniting around 180 wildfires in British Columbia.
The three projects — Keystone XL, the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline, and the Coastal GasLink pipeline — have been steadfastly supported by the Canadian federal government and the oil-rich province of Alberta, despite suffering from enormous financial risk and fierce opposition by some First Nations and environmental groups.
The IISD report found at least eight different types of financial support for the projects, including loans, loan guarantees, and liabilities. For instance, Alberta took a $1.5 billion equity stake in Keystone XL in 2020, making it a partner in the long-contested pipeline project that would have extended from Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. It also offered $6 billion in loan guarantees for the pipeline.
With Keystone XL killed off by the U.S. government in January, Alberta now finds itself joining TC Energy, the owner of the pipeline, in a lawsuit against the Biden administration seeking $15 billion damages in the wake of the permit cancelation. After reviewing its options, TC Energy announced in June that it was terminating the project.
Another example is the $500 million loan given to the Coastal GasLink pipeline — another project owned by TC Energy — by Export Development Canada, a federal agency. The 416-mile pipeline will carry natural gas from northeastern British Columbia to Kitimat, B.C., on the Pacific Coast for export, but it traverses Indigenous territories. In February 2020, protests erupted across Canada in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en who oppose the project.
Wet’suwet’en Solidarity Event – Queen’s Park to City Hall, Toronto, Ontario – February 22, 2020. Credit: Jason Hargrove. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
But the government’s direct ownership of the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline, a long-distance pipeline that would take Alberta’s oil sands to the Pacific Coast for export, is “by far the largest example of pipeline support,” according to the IISD report. The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau purchased the project for C$4.5 billion in 2018 to rescue it from cancelation by its previous owner, Texas-based Kinder Morgan.
The purchase went beyond merely providing some financial support. The government set up a Crown corporation – a state-owned company – to build the pipeline. Without the nationalization of the project by the Canadian government, the pipeline would not have gone forward.
As DeSmog has reported, multiple First Nations and environmental groups have targeted Trans Mountain’s corporate insurers, pressuring them to back out of supporting the project.
The IISD report says that with the financial risks to major fossil fuel infrastructure projects on the rise, the industry is increasingly turning to the Canadian government for explicit financial support. Instead, public money should be accelerating a clean energy transition, experts say.
“The public money that Canadian governments are funneling into pipelines could pay for renewable energy or affordable housing,” said Kai Nagata, communications director for British Columbia-based advocacy group Dogwood, commenting on the report. “We could create thousands of jobs, but instead we are paying industry to pollute and worsening the climate crisis.”
Government subsidies for long-distance pipelines contradicts Canada’s own stated commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2025, in line with pledges from both G7 and G20 countries.
The United Nations, the International Energy Agency, and other global bodies have also called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies. In fact, the U.N. says that the production of fossil fuels needs to decrease at a rate of 6 percent per year between 2020 and 2030 in order to hit climate change targets.
In April 2021, Canada announced a new climate target, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, a commitment widely seen as underwhelming.
Canada’s support for a fossil fuel expansion also defies calls by a long list of economists to fund a green stimulus in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a move which would not only help economies recover from the 2020 downturn, but also put them on a more sustainable pathway.
Of the C$23 billion in support and subsidies for the three controversial pipelines identified in the IISD report, roughly C$10 billion occurred after the onset of the pandemic. Canada even classified pipeline construction as an “essential service” so that work could proceed, despite calls from First Nations to halt operations due to the health risks.
In May 2020, Alberta’s energy minister Sonya Savage went as far as to say that the pandemic is “a great time to be building a pipeline because you can’t have protests of more than 15 people.”
Government backing for the industry continues. On July 5, the Alberta government announced a C$825 million purchase of a 50 percent stake in a new oil sands refinery in Edmonton, which it will own jointly with Canadian Natural Resources, an oil sands producer. “We are taking action to get a better deal for taxpayers,” Savage said.
“Government support for pipeline construction can extend and expand the development of fossil fuel production sites within Canada that would not otherwise have been economically attractive,” IISD said. “This can result in large increases in carbon emissions that last for decades.”
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Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change and international politics. He has been featured in Oilprice.com, The Fuse, YaleE360 and NACLA.
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Fox News host Tucker Carlson was mocked on social media this week for stating that he had been told that the National Security Agency was reading his private emails and spying on him. The usual suspects called Carlson paranoid, because there are so many checks and balances to assure the feds would never illegally target a vexatious Biden critic. However, on Tuesday, a dissent by Travis LeBlanc, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, revealed that one of the NSA’s most intrusive surveillance engines, XKeyscore, may be violating federal law and Americans’ rights and privacy.
In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked documents proving that XKeyscore was the surveillance state’s incarnation of paranoia. What did it take for the NSA to justify vacuuming up Americans’ emails and internet data? Merely detecting “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” The peril of that farcical standard was compounded because, as Snowden explained, NSA surveillance tools enabled him to “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.” Thanks to its all-encompassing standard of “suspicious,” NSA has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens,” according to former NSA senior analyst William Binney. Six months after Snowden’s disclosures began, federal judge Richard Leon issued a ruling denouncing the NSA surveillance regime as “almost Orwellian”: “I cannot imagine a more indiscriminate and arbitrary invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.”
After the uproar created by the Snowden revelations, the civil liberties watchdog board leaped into action to investigate XKeyscore. Six years later, the board finished its 56-page report, a confidential version of which was provided to the White House and select members of Congress in March. Unfortunately, the board apparently did not have time to look under any rocks to see what the NSA might be hiding. In a dissent partially declassified on Tuesday, LeBlanc complained that the board failed to ask “how many U.S. persons have been impacted by XKeyscore, how much data the program collects and analyzes, how widely information analyzed through XKeyscore is shared, the number of lives saved, or the number of terrorist events averted as a result of XKeyscore.” In 2019, XKeyscore resulted in “hundreds of compliance incidents,” and LeBlanc noted that “U.S. law and the known collection or processing of U.S. person information are serious compliance issues.” However, the civil liberties oversight board did not “request specific information” about violations of U.S. law by NSA. LeBlanc groused that the board’s report “reads more like a book report of the XKeyscore program than an independent oversight analysis.”
The NSA apparently never even bothered doing a formal analysis of the legality or constitutionality of XKeyscore until 2016, after the oversight board specifically requested such information. NSA later claimed that it had done earlier legal analyses that justified XKeyscore but refused to share them with the oversight board. LeBlanc told the Washington Post, “We have a very powerful surveillance program that eight years or so after exposure, still has no judicial oversight, and what I consider to be inadequate legal analysis and serious compliance infractions.”
NSA claims it conducted “appropriate legal reviews” for XKeyscore. NSA said the same thing when Snowden started blasting their credibility to smithereens. Rebecca Richards, NSA’s civil liberties and privacy officer, declared that the compliance incidents were investigated and “we found them to be standard intelligence practices.” This is not as reassuring as Richards might have hoped. Consider the harebrained legal rationales that justified data roundups after 9/11. Section 215 of the Patriot Act entitles the government to seize—without a warrant—information relevant to a terrorism investigation. The Bush and Obama administrations decided that all phone records of all Americans were “relevant” to terrorism investigations. NSA effectively claimed that it was not “targeting” any individual since it was seizing everyone’s data. This “finding” was kept secret from the public and the vast majority of Congress—as well as from federal judges who heard cases challenging the constitutionality of federal surveillance regimes.
Many of LeBlanc’s XKeyscore criticisms remain classified. In his publicly released statement, he said it was “inexcusable” that the board failed to make any effort to seek declassification of the report or any portions thereof. Sen. Ron Wyden, the most dogged congressional watchdog of federal spying, commented on LeBlanc’s disclosure: “I continue to be concerned that Americans still know far too little about the government’s surveillance activities under Executive Order 12333 and how it threatens their privacy.” Wyden is pressing for numerous civil liberties board reports to be declassified to “shed light on these secret authorities that govern the collection and use of Americans’ personal information.” Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is muzzled from disclosing the NSA’s confidential dirt.
Unfortunately, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created in 2004, is the same type of lap dog as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which rubberstamps 99 percent of requested search warrants. In late 2005, the New York Times reported that George W. Bush’s “secret presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse… the email of millions of Americans.” The NSA’s program was quickly christened the “J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner,” but that didn’t stop the civil liberties watchdog board from heartily endorsing it. In 2007, before the Board could issue its belated first annual report, Bush White House staffers massively rewrote and censored a draft version, spurring Democratic board member Lanny Davis to resign in protest. The watchdog board, unlike Sen. Wyden, failed to issue any pre-Snowden warnings that federal surveillance regimes were out of control.
None of this proves that the NSA has been wiretapping Tucker Carlson. But his situation might parallel one of the most untimely and embarrassing Supreme Court decisions in the modern era. Barack Obama had campaigned for the presidency as an opponent of warrantless wiretaps, but after taking office, quickly swooned for that push-button power. Numerous lawsuits challenged the constitutionality of sweeping warrantless surveillance, but the Justice Department perennially sought to get plaintiffs thrown out of court. The New York Times in 2012 called the Obama administration’s position “a particularly cynical Catch-22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.” This was the legal version of frat party ethics: As long as the government blindfolds its victims, it can do as it pleases.
The Supreme Court swallowed that argument in an early 2013 decision. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 5-4 majority, noted that the Court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and tutted that the complainants “have set forth no specific facts demonstrating that the communications of their foreign contacts will be targeted.” Alito upheld the Obama administration’s position because the complaints about spying were “necessarily conjectural” and “too speculative” based on fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The majority opinion also insisted that the government had plenty of safeguards—such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—to assure innocent Americans’ rights are not violated. A few months later, Snowden’s revelations blew those arguments to pieces, revealing that the NSA can tap almost any cell phone in the world, vacuum up smartphone data, remotely access computers, and crack the vast majority of computer encryption.
After Carlson stated that his emails were being intercepted, the NSA issued a statement on Tuesday declaring that “Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency… With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.” “Not an intelligence target” is about as re-assuring as “not the drone target” was for the huge number of innocent bystanders blown up by Obama’s assassination program. Ninety percent of the people whose emails and other data were dragged into NSA surveillance dragnets were not the NSA’s actual targets, according to a 2014 Washington Post analysis based on data that Snowden provided.
Since 9/11, trampling the Constitution has been a no-fault offense in Washington. In his dissent revealed this week, LeBlanc declared that “the public is rightly worried about secret surveillance programs.” Many of the folks mocking Tucker Carlson’s concerns would be wise to read up on the recent history of mass illicit surveillance. “Government under the law” requires more than perfunctory denials of federal crimes.
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A high-profile European pathologist is reporting that he and his colleagues across Europe have not found any evidence of any deaths from the novel coronavirus on that continent.
Dr. Stoian Alexov called the World Health Organization (WHO) a “criminal medical organization” for creating worldwide fear and chaos without providing objectively verifiable proof of a pandemic.
Another stunning revelation from Bulgarian Pathology Association (BPA) president Dr. Alexov is that he believes it’s currently “impossible” to create a vaccine against the virus.
He also revealed that European pathologists haven’t identified any antibodies that are specific for SARS-CoV-2.
These stunning statements raise major questions, including about officials’ and scientists’ claims regarding the many vaccines they’re rushing into clinical trials around the world.
They also raise doubt about the veracity of claims of discovery of anti-novel-coronavirus antibodies (which are beginning to be used to treat patients).
Novel-coronavirus-specific antibodies are supposedly the basis for the expensive serologytest kits being used in many countries (some of which have been found to be unacceptably inaccurate).
The May 13 video interview of Dr. Alexov was conducted by Dr. Stoycho Katsarov, chair of the Center for Protection of Citizens’ Rights in Sofia and a former Bulgarian deputy minister of health. The video is on the BPA’s website, which also highlights some of Dr. Alexov’s main points.
We asked a native Bulgarian speaker with a science background to orally translate the video interview into English. We then transcribed her translation. The video is here and our English transcript is here.
Among the major bombshells Dr. Alexov dropped is that the leaders of the May 8 ESP webinar said no novel-coronavirus-specific antibodies have been found.
The body forms antibodies specific to pathogens it encounters. These specific antibodies are known as monoclonal antibodies and are a key tool in pathology. This is done via immunohistochemistry, which involves tagging antibodies with colours and then coating the biopsy- or autopsy-tissue slides with them. After giving the antibodies time to bind to the pathogens they’re specific for, the pathologists can look at the slides under a microscope and see the specific places where the coloured antibodies — and therefore the pathogens they’re bound to – are located.
Therefore, in the absence of monoclonal antibodies to the novel coronavirus, pathologists cannot verify whether SARS-CoV-2 is present in the body, or whether the diseases and deaths attributed to it indeed were caused by the virus rather than by something else.
It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Alexov as just another crank ‘conspiracy theorist.’ After all many people believe they’re everywhere these days, spreading dangerous misinformationabout COVID-19 and other issues.
In addition, little of what Dr. Alexov alleges was the consensus from the May 8 webinar is in the publicly viewable parts of the proceedings.
But keep in mind that whistleblowers often stand alone because the vast majority of people are afraid to speak out publicly.
Also, Dr. Alexov has an unimpugnable record and reputation. He’s been a physician for 30 years. He’s president of the BPA, a member of the ESP’s Advisory Board and head of the histopathology department at the Oncology Hospital in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.
On top of that, there’s other support for what Dr. Alexov is saying.
For example, the director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany said in media interviews that there’s a striking dearth of solid evidence for COVID-19’s lethality.
“COVID-19 is a fatal disease only in exceptional cases, but in most cases it is a predominantly harmless viral infection,” Dr. Klaus Püschel told a German paper in April. Adding in another interview:
In quite a few cases, we have also found that the current corona infection has nothing whatsoever to do with the fatal outcome because other causes of death are present, for example, a brain hemorrhage or a heart attack […] [COVID-19 is] not particularly dangerous viral disease […] All speculation about individual deaths that have not been expertly examined only fuel anxiety.”
Also, one of us (Rosemary) and another journalist, Amory Devereux, documented in a June 9 Off-Guardian article that the novel coronavirus has not fulfilled Koch’s postulates.
These postulates are scientific steps used to prove whether a virus exists and has a one-to-one relationship with a specific disease. We showed that to date no one has proven SARS-CoV-2 causes a discrete illness matching the characteristics of all the people who ostensibly died from COVID-19. Nor has the virus has been isolated, reproduced and then shown to cause this discrete illness.
In addition, in a June 27 Off-Guardian article two more journalists, Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter, added to the evidence that “the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact.”
The pair also confirmed “there is no scientific proof that those RNA sequences [deemed to match that of the novel coronavirus] are the causative agent of what is called COVID-19.”
Dr. Alexov stated in the May 13 interview that:
the main conclusion [of those of us who participated in the May 8 webinar] was that the autopsies that were conducted in Germany, Italy, Spain, France and Sweden do not show that the virus is deadly.”
He added that:
What all of the pathologists said is that there’s no one who has died from the coronavirus. I will repeat that: no one has died from the coronavirus.”
Dr. Alexov also observed there is no proof from autopsies that anyone deemed to have been infected with the novel coronavirus died only from an inflammatory reaction sparked by the virus (presenting as interstitial pneumonia) rather than from other potentially fatal diseases.
Another revelation of his is that:
“We need to see exactly how the law will deal with immunization and that vaccine that we’re all talking about, because I’m certain it’s [currently] not possible to create a vaccine against COVID. I’m not sure what exactly Bill Gates is doing with his laboratories – is it really a vaccine he’s producing, or something else?”
As pointed to above, the inability to identify monoclonal antibodies for the virus suggests there is no basis for the vaccines, serological testing and immunity certificates being rolled out around the globe at unprecedented speed and cost. In fact, there is no solid evidence the virus exists.
Dr. Alexov made still more important points. For example, he noted that, in contrast to the seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t been proven to kill youth:
[With the flu] we can find one virus which can cause a young person to die with no other illness present […] In other words, the coronavirus infection is an infection that does not lead to death. And the flu can lead to death.”
(There have been reports of severe maladies such as Kawasaki-like disease and stroke in young people who were deemed to have a novel-coronavirus infection. However, the majority of published papers on these cases are very short and include only one or only a small handful of patients. Moreover, commenters on the papers note it’s impossible to determine the role of the virus because the papers’ authors did not control sufficiently, if at all, for confounding factors. It’s most likely that children’s deaths attributed to COVID-19 in fact are from multiple organ failure resulting from the combination of the drug cocktail and ventilation that these children are subjected to.)
Dr. Alexov therefore asserted that:
the WHO is creating worldwide chaos, with no real facts behind what they’re saying.”
Among the myriad ways the WHO is creating that chaos is by prohibiting almost all autopsies of people deemed to have died from COVID-19. As a result, reported Dr. Alexov, by May 13 only three such autopsies had been conducted in Bulgaria.
“That’s quite stressful for us, and for me in particular, because we have protocols and procedures which we need to use,” he told Dr. Katsarov. “…And another pathologist 100 years from now is going to say, ‘Hey, those pathologists didn’t know what they were doing [when they said the cause of death was COVID-19]!’ So we need to be really strict with our diagnoses, because they could be proven [or disproven], and they could be checked again later.”
He disclosed that pathologists in several countries in Europe, as well as in China, Australia and Canada are strongly resisting the pressure on them to attribute deaths to COVID-19 alone:
I’m really sad that we need to follow the [WHO’s] instructions without even thinking about them. But in Germany, France, Italy and England they’re starting to think that we shouldn’t follow the WHO so strictly, and [instead] when we’re writing the cause of death we should have some pathology [results to back that up] and we should follow the protocol. [That’s because] when we say something we need to be able to prove it.”
(He added that autopsies could have helped confirm or disprove the theory that many of the people deemed to have died of COVID-19 in Italy had previously received the H1N1 flu vaccine. Because, as he noted, the vaccine suppresses adults’ immune systems and therefore may have been a significant contributor to their deaths by making them much more susceptible to infection.)
Drs. Alexov and Katsarov agreed that yet another aspect of the WHO-caused chaos and its fatal consequences is many people are likely to die soon from diseases such as cancer because the lockdowns, combined with the emptying of hospitals (ostensibly to make room for COVID-19 patients), halted all but the most pressing procedures and treatments.
They also observed these diseases are being exacerbated by the fear and chaos surrounding COVID-19.
We know that stress significantly suppresses the immune system, so I can really claim 200% that all the chronic diseases will be more severe and more acute per se. Specifically in situ carcinoma – over 50% of these are going to become more invasive […] So I will say that this epidemic isn’t so much an epidemic of the virus, it’s an epidemic of giving people a lot of fear and stress.”
In addition, posited Dr. Alexov, as another direct and dire result of the pandemic panic many people are losing faith in physicians.
Because in my opinion the coronavirus isn’t that dangerous, and how are people going to have trust in me doing cancer pathology, much of which is related to viruses as well? But nobody is talking about that.”
We emailed Dr. Alexov several questions, including asking why he believes it’s impossible to create a vaccine against COVID-19.
He didn’t answer the questions directly. Dr. Alexov instead responded:
We also emailed five of Dr. Alexov’s colleagues in the European Pathology Society asking them to confirm Dr. Alexov’s revelations. We followed up by telephone with two of them. None responded.
Why didn’t Dr. Alexov or his five colleagues answer our questions?
We doubt it’s due to lack of English proficiency.
It’s more likely because of the pressure on pathologists to follow the WHO’s directives and not speak out publicly. (And, on top of that, pathology departments depend on governments for their funding.)
Nonetheless, pathologists like Drs. Alexov and Püschel appear to be willing to step out and say that no one has died from a novel-coronavirus infection.
Perhaps that’s because pathologists’ records and reputations are based on hard physical evidence rather than on subjective interpretation of tests, signs and symptoms. And there is no hard physical evidence that COVID-19 is deadly.
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Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, was a freelance medical writer and journalist for 22 years and now is an independent investigative journalist. You can watch her June 15 interview on The Corbett Report, read her otherOff-Guardian articles and follow her on Twitter.
Patrick Corbett is a retired writer, producer, director and editor who’s worked for every major network in Canada and the US except for Fox. His journalistic credits include Dateline NBC, CTV’s W-5 and the CTV documentary unit where he wrote and directed ‘Children’s Hospital’, the first Canadian production to be nominated for an International Emmy. You can follow Patrick on Twitter.
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).
Last week’s ruling by the British High Court allowing prosecutors to appeal an earlier judgment blocking Julian Assange’s extradition, poses the very real danger that the WikiLeaks publisher will be dispatched to his American persecutors in the not-too-distant future.
The ruling is a microcosm of the Assange case as a whole. As they have for the past decade, the British courts have thrown aside the WikiLeaks founder’s legal and democratic rights. They have granted a US appeal that is both duplicitous and irregular under conditions in which the entire attempt by the American state to prosecute Assange has been exposed as an illegal frame-up.
The corporate media remains silent, or presents the latest travesty against Assange as fair play. The major political parties in the US, Britain and Australia, which have orchestrated the campaign against the WikiLeaks founder, give their tacit stamp of approval declaring, along with the official politicians who have occasionally voiced “concern” over Assange’s persecution, that the British “legal process” must be “respected.”
The US appeal is a damning refutation of those, including among Assange’s own supporters, who have peddled dangerous illusions that the US administration of President Joe Biden may drop the prosecution if a sufficient number of moral pleas are addressed to the new occupant of the White House.
The appeal was first issued in the dying days of the Trump administration but it was continued, honed and argued for by Biden’s Justice Department. Assange remains in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison and faces the prospect of lifetime incarceration in the US because Biden is determined to press ahead with the prosecution of a journalist and publisher for exposing American war crimes, human rights violations and illegal spying operations.
That is because the Assange prosecution is viewed as a crucial precedent by the imperialist powers for the suppression of dissent and anti-war opposition amid a ratcheting up of the preparations for military conflict, including the Biden administration’s threats and provocations against China, and the first signs of a resurgence of working-class struggle.
The appeal also confirms the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Siteabout January’s British District Court decision that barred extradition.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser accepted all the substantive arguments of the US prosecutors, including their right to try a publisher under the Espionage Act. Her ruling, prohibiting extradition, was framed in the narrowest terms. Its purpose was to defuse a groundswell of opposition to the prospect of Assange’s extradition and to provide the US with ample scope for prosecution.
Baraitser ruled that extradition would be “oppressive.” Assange’s compromised health and the conditions of his imprisonment in the US would likely result in his suicide.
The deliberate consequence of that judgment was that there was only a legal sliver between Assange and extradition.
The US has exploited this with its appeal claiming that the conditions of imprisonment would not be so oppressive. It has proposed worthless assurances that Assange would not be held under Special Administrative Measures (SAM), regulations that impose almost total isolation on a prisoner, and that he could serve out his sentence in Australia.
The extradition hearing had heard harrowing testimony about the dire psychological consequences of SAMs and conditions at the supermax ADX Florence prison where they are frequently imposed.
The US arguments, accepted as a legitimate basis of appeal by the British court, were demolished by Stella Moris, Assange’s partner and an international human rights lawyer.
In a statement issued on Friday, Moris wrote:
“Reports about US undertakings are grossly misleading. On any given day 80,000 prisoners in US prisons are held in solitary confinement. Only a handful are in ADX/under special administrative measures. ADX is just one of dozens of self-described supermax prisons in the United States. The US government also says it may change its mind if the head of the CIA advises it to do so once Julian Assange is held in US custody.
“With regard to the supposed concession of allowing Julian to serve jail time in Australia, it was always his right to request a prisoner transfer to Australia to finish serving his sentence because he is an Australian. It is no concession at all. There are existing agreements between the US and Australian authorities. What is crucial to understand is that prisoner transfers are eligible only after all appeals have been exhausted. For the case to reach the US Supreme Court could easily take a decade, even two.
“What the US is proposing is a formula to keep Julian in prison effectively for the rest of his life. The only assurance that would be acceptable would be for the Biden Administration to drop this shameful case altogether, once and for all. He should not be in prison for a single day, not in the UK, not in the United States, not in Australia—because journalism is not a crime.”
As Moris noted, the US appeal itself reserved the “right” to impose SAMs once Assange is on US soil. Testimony at the extradition hearing, including from a former US prison warden, established that the imposition of SAMs is essentially extra-judicial, often being introduced at the say-so of the intelligence agencies, and with no genuine means of appeal.
The hearings, moreover, heard evidence of a case in which similar assurances were immediately thrown out the door once extradition was secured. Lawyers for terrorist leader Abu Hamza had argued that his extradition would be oppressive because he would likely be held under SAMs, despite severe health issues, including a missing hand. US prosecutors guaranteed that this would not be the case stating that if he were, it would only be for a short time. Once they had their hands on Hamza, they placed him under SAMs in ADX Florence, where he remains.
Aside from the wilful credulity of the British court, the US assurances contradict affidavits presented by Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg to the extradition hearings which indicated that SAMs would be considered as an option for Assange’s imprisonment. Because of this, the High Court would have been within its rights to deem the assurances new evidence, not applicable in an appeal hearing because they were not presented to the lower court where the matter was first heard.
The decision to hear the appeal creates a highly dangerous situation for Assange. Nick Vamos, a partner at the Peters & Peters law firm and a former head of extradition at the Crown Prosecution Service, told the Guardian that the appeal process could proceed “quite quickly.” He added: “There’s also a longstanding history of our courts accepting the assurances from requesting states.”
In the immediate future, the decision means that Assange will remain indefinitely imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison, where he has been incarcerated for more than two years. More broadly, the appeal demonstrates that the US government is planning to continue its persecution of the WikiLeaks founder for decades to come.
The suggestion that Assange could serve out a sentence in Australia recalls a scenario outlined by Fred Burton, chief security officer of Stratfor, which is often described as a “shadow CIA.” In a 2010 email to a colleague, subsequently published by WikiLeaks, Burton said the US strategy against Assange was: “Pile on. Move him from country to country to face various charges for the next 25 years. But, seize everything he and his family own, to include every person linked to Wiki.”
That strategy was initiated by the Obama administration in which Biden served as vice-president. Obama empanelled a Grand Jury to try and concoct charges against Assange. Parallel with this, his administration was involved in numerous dirty-tricks operations against Assange including discredited Swedish allegations of sexual misconduct.
Only when these extra-judicial operations had succeeded in depriving Assange of his liberty by forcing him to seek political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, did the Obama administration apparently drop its plans for a formal prosecution.
A report in the Stundin newspaper earlier this month shed further light on the Obama-Biden campaign, demonstrating the extent to which the US collaborated with an Icelandic conman and paedophile Sigurdur Thordarson to violate Iceland’s sovereignty and frame Assange as a computer hacker, under Obama’s administration. This included taking possession of files stolen by Thordarson from WikiLeaks, lying to Iceland’s government about why FBI agents were flown to the country in 2011, and ferrying the Icelandic criminal around Europe.
Thordarson was later picked up by the Trump Justice Department as it publicly-unveiled charges against Assange in 2019. His claims were prominently featured in a superseding indictment, issued by US prosecutors in June 2020, which is the basis of the extradition request.
Thordarson has now admitted, however, that almost all his testimony consisted of lies proffered in exchange for immunity from US prosecution. The American government thus submitted a false indictment to the British courts.
Baraitser’s January judgment, upholding the substantive arguments of US prosecutors, cited Thordarson some 22 times. His claims of hacking, since withdrawn, were presented as proof that the prosecution had met the test of dual criminality, requiring that offences be illegal in both Britain and the US for extradition to be granted.
The dependence of the prosecution case on Thordarson’s lies should have meant that it was summarily dismissed. The same is true of well-documented allegations that the CIA illegally spied on Assange, including his privileged discussions with attorneys, when he was a political refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy. Despite all of this, the attempted prosecution continues.
The latest High Court ruling again demonstrates that the fight for Assange’s freedom cannot be based upon moral appeals to his persecutors, or any section of the political establishment, from the Biden administration, to the British judiciary, the Australian authorities and the corporate media. All of them nailed their colours to the mast long ago.
The constituency for the defence of Assange and the defeat of state frame-ups is the international working class. It is being propelled into struggle against the very political forces that have pursued Assange as they carry out the homicidal policy of “herd immunity” on the pandemic, preside over ever-greater social inequality, and escalate their reckless drive to war. Every effort must be made to apprise the working class of Assange’s plight and to mobilise it in his defence.
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Featured image: Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019 (Source: WSWS)
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What really happened on the night when the president of Haiti was assassinated? And why? We may never know the complete story. According to initial reports, the home of Jovenel Moise was invaded at around 1 a.m. on July 9 by more than two dozen armed men, mostly of them Colombian nationals, plus at least two U.S. citizens. So far, about 20 suspects have been detained. But some of the hitmen evaded initial capture, and so far three are dead. At the moment, the remaining, fragile government is being headed by acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph.
Breathless news reports call the events shocking, almost unprecedented. But they also note that Haiti has bordered on being a “failed state” for some time. In fact, it crossed that border long ago, and more than 20 heads of state have been assassinated around the world since World War II. The list of countries on that list, just in the Western Hemisphere, includes Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, and Grenada.
In 1946, Bolivian President Gualberto Villaroel was killed by a lynch mob in La Paz. Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza was murdered in 1956. Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo Molina was gunned down in 1961; his assassins included one of his generals. And Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was killed by local militants in 1983. Six days later the U.S. led an invasion and ousted the regime that had attempted to replace Bishop.
Other prominent heads of state who have died violently since 1945 include Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, Iraq’s King Faisal, Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquate Ali Khan, South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, South African Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd, Iranian President Mohammed Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Hojjatoleslam Mohammed Javad Bahonar, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Lebanon President-elect Beshir Gemayel, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Swedish Prime MinisterOlof Palme, and, of course, U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Still, Haiti does have an especially violent past. In July 1915, for example, its head of state, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, was cornered in the French embassy by rebel forces. The insurgents had widespread popular support. This also was no shock, since Sam was known as a rampaging, vindictive thug who had seized the government by force and murdered hundreds of his political enemies before running for cover. When a mob finally found him cowering in an attic, they hacked their president to pieces.
The island nation, once known as the “pearl of the antilles,” had been through seven presidents in four years, most of them killed or removed prematurely. The rural north was under the control of the Cacos, a rebel movement that adopted its name from the cry of a native bird. Although widely portrayed as a group of murderous bandits, the Cacos were essentially nationalists attempting to resist the control of France, the U.S, and the small minority of mulattos who dominated the economy.
But a Haiti run by rebels and peasants was not acceptable to outside interests, especially in the U.S., who considered the nation an endangered investment property. The National City Bank controlled the country’s National Bank and railroad system, and sugar barons viewed the country’s rich plantations as promising takeover targets. Thus, on July 29, 1915, after several weeks of observation from cruisers anchored offshore, two regiments of Marines landed. Their initial objective was to make certain that the U.S. choice, Senator Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, was installed as head of state. A snap-election was staged less than two weeks later. The occupation lasted 19 years.
“When the National Assembly met, the Marines stood in the aisles with their bayonets until the man selected by the American Minister was made President,” recalled Smedley Butler, the Marine hero who led the decisive military campaign and administered Haiti’s local police force during the following two years. “I won’t say we put him in,” Butler wrote later. “The State Department might object. Anyway, he was put in.”
Few journalists were on hand in 1915, and most newspapers were willing to accept the official version. According to President Woodrow Wilson, establishing a protectorate was part of a grand effort to halt a radically evil and corrupting revolution, support the slow process of reform, and extend his policy of the open door to the world.
But that was just the official story. Actually, Wilson saw the island nation as a geo-strategic pawn in the build up to World War I; specifically, he was worried that Germany might take advantage of the local political turmoil to establish a military base in the hemisphere. He also had other, largely economic reasons to seize control of the country.
During the early years of the U.S. occupation, the Cacos continued to resist, under the leadership of their own Sandino, an army officer turned guerrilla leader named Charlemayne Peralte. Murdered by an American Marine in 1919, Peralte became a symbol for the democracy movement of the late 1980s that ultimately led to the election of the liberation theology priest Jean Bertrand Aristide.
In the 1990s, after decades under the dictatorship of the Duvalier family, it happened again. Seven months after Aristide’s 1991 election, he was overthrown in a military coup. It took three years, but by 1994 Haiti’s plight became big news. The coverage was highly selective, however, never mentioning CIA support for those who conducted the coup or the Haitian military’s involvement in drug trafficking. Prior to this U.S. occupation, the media was also suspiciously silent about, as Aristide put it, a sham embargo that squeezed the poor but exempted businesses. Although an oil embargo was imposed, fuel was easily smuggled into the country from the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, a smear campaign against Aristide was launched.
Just as President Wilson had veiled his actions on behalf of US economic interests with rhetoric about stability and democracy, President Clinton talked about upholding democracy. In fact, the central objective of the 1990s occupation was to maintain effective control of the country until Aristide’s term expired. Media coverage tended to obscure the obvious: the U.S., never comfortable with Aristide, had entered into an agreement with the Haitian military for national co-management until the next elections.
Looking back, most policy-makers and analysts suggested that the U.S. had originally occupied Haiti only to restore stability. Few stressed that some sort of revolution was underway; even those who did invariably described the situation as chaotic. According to conventional wisdom, the US remained in Haiti for 19 years because the Haitian people could not effectively govern themselves or sustain democratic institutions. They weren’t ready in 1915 and, some skeptics claimed, they still weren’t in the 1990s.
At a September 1994 rally, Ross Perot echoed this popular prejudice in his own know-nothing style. “Haitians like a dictator,” he announced, “I don’t know why.” The implication, underscoring his own opposition to U.S. intervention, was that he also didn’t care what happened there, and neither should most people.
The Bush administration may have counted on a similar reaction when it embraced a violent uprising against Aristide beginning in late 2003, or even after it reportedly forced him to sign a resignation letter at 2 a.m. on Sunday, February 29, 2004. According to the “ex-president,” he was kidnapped at gunpoint, and flown without his knowledge to the Central African Republic. This should not be so hard to believe, since Aristide never had the Bush administration’s support, and his inability to maintain order in an atmosphere of U.S.-backed destabilization provided an excellent pretext for another exercise in “regime change.”
In early February, a “rebel” paramilitary army crossed the border from the Dominican Republic. This trained and well-equipped unit included former members of The Front for the Advancement of Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), a disarming name for plain clothes death squads involved in mass killing and political assassinations during the 1991 military coup that overthrew Aristide’s first administration. The self-proclaimed National Liberation and Reconstruction Front (FLRN) was also active, and was led by Guy Philippe, a former police chief and member of the Haitian Armed Forces. Philippe had been trained during the coup years by U.S. Special Forces in Ecuador, together with a dozen other Haitian Army officers. Two other rebel commanders were Emmanuel “Toto” Constant and Jodel Chamblain, former members of the Duvalier era enforcer squad, the Tonton Macoute, and leaders of FRAPH.
Both armed rebels and civilian backers like G-184 leader Andre Apaid were involved in the plot. Apaid was in touch with US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the weeks leading up to Aristide’s overthrow. Both Philippe and Constant had past ties to the CIA, and were in contact with U.S. officials.
On February 20, 2004, U.S. Ambassador James Foley called in a team of four military experts from the U.S. Southern Command, based in Miami, according to the Seattle Times. Officially, their mandate was to assess threats to the embassy and its personnel. Meanwhile, as a “precautionary measure,” three U.S. naval vessels were placed on standby to go to Haiti. One was equipped with Vertical takeoff Harrier fighters and attack helicopters. At least 2000 Marines were also ready for deployment.
After Aristide’s kidnapping, Washington made no effort to disarm its proxy paramilitary army, which was subsequently tapped to play a role in the transition. In other words, the Bush administration did nothing to prevent the killing of Lavalas and Aristide supporters in the wake of the president’s removal. In news coverage of the crisis, both Haiti’s dark history and the role of the CIA were ignored. Instead, so-called rebel leaders, commanders of death squads in the 1990s, were recognized as legitimate opposition spokesmen.
The Bush administration effectively scapegoated Aristide, holding him solely responsible for a worsening economic and social situation. In truth, Haiti’s economic and social crisis was largely caused by the devastating economic reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund beginning in the 1980s. Aristide’s 1994 return to power was conditioned on his acceptance of IMF economic “therapy.” He complied, but was blacklisted and demonized anyway.
Which raises a key question: Why does this keep happening? One reason may be basic geopolitics. Hispaniola (the island that contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic) is a gateway to the Caribbean basin, strategically located between Cuba to the North West and Venezuela to the South. Thus, having a military presence on the island, or at least leverage with whatever regime emerges, can help to sustain political pressure on other “troublesome” countries nearby, while providing a convenient base to step in as part of any regional military operation deemed necessary in the future.
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Greg Guma has been a writer, editor, historian, and progressive manager for half a century, leading businesses and campaigns in Vermont, New Mexico, and California. His early work with Bernie Sanders led to The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. His other books include two novels, Spirits of Desire and Dons of Time, and non-fiction like Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptions, and the forthcoming book, Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History.
Featured image is from Lautaro Rivara/People’s Dispatch
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Every week the horrendous crime wave that is sweeping across America seems to get even worse. In some of our largest cities, looting, murder and violence are becoming a way of life, and authorities seem powerless to do anything about it. Is this what we can expect life in the United States to look like moving forward? All over the globe, people are watching us, and they are stunned by what they have been witnessing. Criminals are wildly out of control, and many of our largest cities are being transformed into extremely violent war zones.
For example, just check out what happened in Oakland over the weekend. According to Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, his officers were completely overwhelmed by “the level of violence and gunfire”…
The Fourth of July reeled into “12 hours of non-stop chaos” Sunday night with several victims wounded by celebratory gunfire, a homicide and a massive sideshow marred by gunfire. The night culminated at the sideshow, where more than 200 participants pelted police officers with debris and flashed them with hand-held lasers.
Embattled Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong told reporters that the level of violence and gunfire overwhelmed his officers.
Next door, the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco has evolved into systematic looting.
Sadly, no retailer is immune. Even though Neiman Marcus has enthusiastically embraced a whole host of “woke” causes, criminals ruthlessly looted one of their stores in San Francisco on Monday…
Looters were captured on video Monday ransacking a Neiman Marcus in San Francisco as thefts continue to plague businesses in the area.
At least nine suspects smashed display cases, snatched handbags, and jetted out of the building before law enforcement arrived to the scene at about 6 p.m., according to footage. The suspects were seen running out of the store with their hands full of merchandise before entering an apparent getaway car that sped off down a busy intersection.
If you have not seen footage of the looters yet, you can watch it right here. This happened in broad daylight, and it is hard to believe that such scenes are actually happening in the United States of America.
Walgreens shuttered 17 of its stores in the San Francisco area in the past five years, and the company said thefts in the area are four times more likely than anywhere else in the country as executives budgeted 35 times more for security personnel to guard the chains.
Target executives in the city also decided to limit business hours in response to an uptick in larceny.
But unless they completely close up shop, the looting is going to continue.
Criminals in California have learned that if they keep the value of the merchandise they steal at each store to under $950, they won’t be charged with a felony even if they are caught. So now we are witnessing a wave of retail theft that is unlike anything we have ever seen before…
SF Police Lt. Tracy McCray pinned the blame on DA Chesa Boudin (whose parents were part of the radical and violent Weather Underground, and left two police officers dead during a botched heist). According to McCray, Boudin’s “criminals first agenda” is responsible for the uptick in crime.
“What happened in that Walgreens has been going on in the city for quite a while,” McCray said in June. “I’m used to it. I mean, we could have a greatest hits compilation of people just walking in and cleaning out the store shelves and security guards, the people who work there, just standing by helplessly because they can’t do anything.”
Up in Portland, the street violence just continues to get even worse.
Earlier today, I was saddened to learn that a very generous man that had put up a pop-up swimming pool for the homeless during the heat wave had been viciously stabbed to death…
A man whose ingenious pop-up swimming pool kept the homeless cool during the recent heat wave was fatally stabbed in the same spot just one day later, according to Portland police.
Officers identified Tyson L. Morlock as the man who was found stabbed in the inner eastside Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood at Division Street and Southeast Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard around 3:37 a.m. on Thursday, July 1.
He tried to make Portland a better place, and now he is dead.
Of course so many people are being murdered these days that it is extremely difficult to keep up with all of the carnage.
In Chicago, this holiday weekend was the most violent weekend that we have seen in 2021 so far, and that is really saying something…
Every July 4th weekend police in Chicago brace for an uptick in violence – even more than is usual when typical weekends average about 40 shootings – and this holiday weekend was no different, easily registering as the deadliest and most violent this year given the total death count. New York City has also been witnessing a steady uptick in seemingly random shootings and violence, including brazen acts committed in broad daylight in heavily trafficked areas, such as the recent Times Square wounding of a US Marine.
On Monday the Chicago Sun-Times has tallied 92 people shot over the long July 4th weekend, with 16 killed. The Sun-Times database shows the numbers killed to be a weekend high for all of 2021 so far.
There are certain areas of Chicago that are essentially “no go zones” at this point, but of course the same thing could be said about the worst parts of many other major U.S. cities.
As I discussed the other day, it is being reported that murder rates in our largest cities were up by an average of 30 percent in 2020, and as of a few weeks ago they were up another 24 percent so far in 2021.
Ordinary citizens are begging our leaders to “do something” about this enormous wave of violence, but at this point nothing seems to be working.
If things are this bad now while the U.S. economy is in “recovery mode”, how bad will conditions get when the next severe downturn comes along?
It is heartbreaking to watch our society come apart at the seams all around us, and I have a feeling that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.
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As shock grips the Caribbean island nation of Haiti following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the Haitian government has carried out a campaign to arrest suspects it alleges are responsible for the murder.
Haitian Director of National Police Leon Charles announced at a press conference that the assassination squad that killed Moise is comprised of 28 foreigners, including two Haitian-Americans and 26 Colombian nationals. Fifteen of those Colombians have been detained while three were killed in a gun battle and eight remain fugitives. Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano has admitted that some of the Colombians are retired military personnel. Among them are at least one highly decorated soldier who received training from the United States and another who has been implicated in the murder of Colombian civilians.
Ties to oligarchs
The Haitian-Americans have been identified as James Solages, 35, and Joseph Vincent, 55. Solages lives in Fort Lauderdale where he is the CEO of EJS Maintenance & Repair and runs a nonprofit group, the website of which has since been scrubbed of information. Prior to relocating to Florida, he lived in the southern Haitian coastal city of Jacmel.
According to The Washington Post, Solages’ Facebook profile, which has since been removed, listed him as the chief commander of bodyguards for the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. The Canadaian Embassy confirmed that Solages previously worked as a security guard. While in Florida, Solages was an “avid and vocal supporter of former President Michel Martelly,” the founder of Moïse’s Haitian Baldheaded Party (PHTK), according to Tony Jean-Thénor, leader of the Veye Yo popular organization in Miami, founded by the late Father Gérard Jean-Juste.
Photos of James Solages and an armored military vehicle that he posted to his now-removed Facebook page
The Haitian Timesreported Solages also used to work as a security guard for both Reginald Boulos and Dimitri Vorbe, two prominent members of Haiti’s tiny bourgeoisie. Although initially friendly to him, they both became bitter opponents of Moïse. Boulos was also a prominent supporter of previous coups in 1991 and 2004 against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The Boulos family is one of the wealthiest in Haiti and owns a pharmaceutical company that, in 1996, was responsible for poisoning scores of children with its tainted fever medicine, some fatally. Since the July 6-8, 2018 national uprising against the IMF-dictated hike of fuel prices, Boulos has attempted to recast himself as a popular and progressive figure (after one of his stores was burned and looted), heading a political party called the Third Way Movement (MTV).
Vorbe is the executive director and vice president of Société Générale d’Énergie SA, one of the largest private energy companies in Haiti which had a sweet-heart deal providing power to the energy grid that Moïse sought to renegotiate after the collapse of the PetroCaribe program, under which Venezuela provided Haiti with cheap oil and credit from 2008 to 2018.
Many believe Boulos is the intellectual author and financial backer of Moïse’s murder.
“Solage’s employment by Boulos and centrality to the operation appears to confirm the growing popular consensus in Haiti that this controversial merchant-turned-politician was the principal backer of Moïse’s assassination,” explained journalist Kim Ives, continuing:
A lot of factors have been pointing to his involvement: The arrival of the mercenaries in nine brand new Nissan Patrol vehicles without license plates suggests that they were vehicles coming from the Nissan dealership owned by Reginald Boulos. The Haitian people have already concluded that Boulous was behind the assassination and have dechoukéed [uprooted] the dealership, Automeca, that he owned.”
Colombian assassin trained by the U.S.
While the Haitian-Americans reportedly served as translators, the muscle of the assassination squad came from Colombia, the U.S.’s top regional ally, which serves as a platform for destabilization and regime change plots in the region, from Venezuela to Ecuador – and now apparently Haiti.
The most prominent member of the hit squad is Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín, a 41-year-old former special operations commando who retired from the military as a member of the Simón Bolívar No. 1 infantry battalion on December 31, 2019. According to the Colombian newspaper La Semana, Grosso “had several special combat courses, had been a member of the special forces and anti-guerrilla squads, and was known for being a skilled paratrooper who flew through the air without fear.”
In 2013, Grosso was assigned to the Urban Anti-Terrorist Special Force group, a secretive elite military detachment dedicated to counter-terrorism operations and carrying out kidnappings and assassinations (euphemistically known as ‘high value target acquisition and elimination’). This branch of the military is also tasked with providing security to VIP figures from the Colombian president to U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.
“He was one of the most prepared,” a source remarked to La Semana.
Among Grosso’s preparations was special command instruction from the United States military, which supplies training and weapons to the Colombia military, one of the most repressive armed forces in the region and one that works to secure international corporate interests and drug trafficking routes.
“How many false positives (see the following paragraph), how many social leaders, how many signers of the peace accord, will be on this man?” left-wing Colombian Senator Gustavo Bolivar commented on Twitter.
Grosso was joined by Francisco Eladio Uribe Ochoa, who had retired from the Colombian Army in 2019, according to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. Eladio Uribe’s wife told the newspaper that he had been investigated for participation in the execution of civilians — a practice known as “false positives,” in which the Colombian military lured at least 6,402 civilians, murdered them, and dressed them in guerrilla fatigues in order to inflate their kill numbers. This gruesome practice helped military commanders reach lofty kill-count quotas set by the United States and was incentivized with bonus pay and vacation time for soldiers who carried out the killings.
Though Eladio Uribe’s wife said that he had been exonerated, his name has appeared in a file of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a court formed out of the 2016 peace accord, which has investigated several thousand cases of false positives that the Colombian government had not previously admitted. Eladio Uribe is one of two soldiers accused in the 2008 murder of Luis Carlos Cárdenas in the village of Chorros Blancos in Antioquia region.
Other alleged members of the hit squad alleged to have killed Moïse include:
Of the 28 total people who allegedly participated in the assassination, four of the Colombians arrived in Haiti on June 6, 2021. Grosso arrived in the Dominican city of Punta Cana and crossed the land border into Haiti two days later. Photos show him and other suspects at popular tourist sites in the Dominican Republic.
A photo of Grosso, left, along with some of the other suspects posing in Haiti posted to Grosso’s Facebook page
Unanswered questions and a growing consensus
Questions also remain about why Moïse’s security team failed to protect him, and if any of its members were complicit in the murder. Dimitri Herard, the head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace, is under investigation by the United States government for arms trafficking, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). While there is no evidence (but many rumors) linking him to the murder, “Herard is one of the individuals most responsible for the safety of the president.”
While the Haitian government has identified what appear to be Moïse’s assassins, there is still no hard evidence — just circumstantial — linking them to Boulos and possibly even Vorbe. Nonetheless, “there is a growing consensus that Reginald Boulous, for whom an arrest warrant [was] issued last week, paid for the mercenaries,” according to Ives. “It appears to be becoming more and more evident that the sector of the Haitian bourgeois, with whom Jovenel Moïse was at war, are intimately linked to his assassination.”
As the investigation into Moïse’s murder unfolds, the U.S. appears to be preparing the groundwork to deploy troops to Haiti at the request of a figure whom it has spent decades grooming. According to The New York Times, Claude Joseph, who is in a struggle against Dr. Ariel Henry to head the Haitian state in the wake of Moïse’s assassination, requested the U.S. send military forces to guard key infrastructure, including the port, airport, and gasoline reserves. White House Spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that the U.S. would reinforce U.S. personnel in Haiti with FBI and DHS deployments.
CIA's NED created fake student movement GRAFNEH in #Haiti in the 2000s, which partnered with the bourgeoisie mafia to destabilize/destroy the nascent and promising democracy the poor majority fought to establish. Current de facto puppet PM Claude Joseph was one of NED's minions. https://t.co/zgz6GCQxpUpic.twitter.com/w1Q83qIfN2
— Madame Boukman – Justice 4 Haiti 🇭🇹 (@madanboukman) July 4, 2021
Joseph is an asset of the United States and its regime-change arm, the National Endowment For Democracy. Wikileaks cables revealed that he first came to prominence in 2003 as the leader of a NED-spawned student front called GRAFNEH in the lead up to the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He also founded another NED-funded anti-Aristide group Initiative Citoyenne (Citizens’ Initiative). He is reported by Haitian radio stations to have been, with prominent Haitian ex-Deputy Gary Bodeau, one of the principal assailants who severely beat the late Father Gérard Jean-Juste in a Pétionville church in 2005.
Jean-Juste, perhaps the most prominent supporter and surrogate of the then exiled-in-South-Africa President Aristide, had been falsely accused of involvement in the killing of his own cousin, Jacques Roche, a writer.
“Essentially, we have a U.S. puppet asking his puppeteer to invade Haiti for the fourth time in just over a century,” Ives concluded. “But both the region and, above all, the Haitian people are sick and tired of U.S. military interventions, which are largely responsible for the nation’s current debilitated, critical state both economically and politically. Much of the most oppressed neighborhoods are now heavily armed and have already announced a revolution against the likes of Boulos, so the U.S.-led invaders of 2021 are likely to face a resistance similar to that which emerged against the U.S. Marines in 1915 and UN ‘peace-keepers’ in 2004, only more ferocious.”
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Dan Cohen is the Washington DC correspondent for Behind The Headlines. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. He tweets at @DanCohen3000.
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Yesterday afternoon, the CDC issued a new guidance stating that children who are fully “vaccinated” do not have to wear masks when schools reopen this fall. This latest policy decision has nothing to do with science and protecting kids, it’s a blatant and malicious attempt to browbeat parents to have their sons and daughters injected with experimental boosters that are causing debilitating conditions like myocarditis and led to the deaths of nine children ranging from 12-17 years old last week alone.
Two weeks ago, the World Health Organization published a bulletin strongly advised that children should not get “vaccinated” for Covid-19 due to the lack of evidence that mRNA and adenovirus shots are safe and effective for adolescents and young adults only to rescind it out of political considerations.
Yesterday, the CDC went one step further in the duplicity department as they doubled down on the mass-“vaccination” agenda. After deploying psychological manipulation that drew on the lessons gleaned by Dr. Stanley’s experiments to get 48.2% of the American population “vaccinated”, they are now gunning for our children with the ferocity of a rabid pit bull.
Joe Biden and his ilk are attempting to drive up the “vaccination” rate—which has stalled because too many refuse to become lab rats in this ongoing pharmaceutical experiment by injecting themselves with “vaccines” that are undergoing clinical trials until at least 2023—by weaponizing masks and segregating schools based on children’s medical status. What the CDC is doing is beyond reprehensible; they know that children are susceptible to peer-pressure so they are otherizing the “unvaccinated” to condition them into covet the jabs. Moreover, they are encouraging principles and teachers to give preferential treatment to students who are “vaccinated” and punish others by making them labor to breathe through masks.
If this guidance is implemented by schools, it will create a paradigm where children who are not “vaccinated” will become targets of taunts and bullying by those who got jabbed. The CDC is betting that these children will then turn on their parents and make them cave. They are trying to override the concerns tens of millions of fathers and mothers have about the safety and efficacy of these experimental gene therapy cocktails that have led to the deaths of over 9,000 people to date according to the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System.
The VAERS system is updated today Dr. Gold and it is incredibly alarming.
— Hipster Conservative (@ReformHipster) July 9, 2021
This level of state-sponsored coercion to get people “vaccinated” by force or by choice is unprecedented in the history of the United States. What makes the CDC’s latest gambit even more pernicious is the fact that children have been almost untouched by Covid-19. The overall death rate for the 21 and younger demographic is 0.02%; more children have been injured and killed by the “vaccines” than the number of kids who died as a consequence of the Coronavirus. Moreover, kids are not vectors of the virus; by God’s grace they have been largely spared from this pandemic.
The only reason that more people don’t know about these provable facts is because the ever obsequious mainstream media have reverted to their Iraq war form as they intentionally suppress information and broadcast biotech corporation propaganda as news. The establishment as a whole—from politicians, media personalities to medical professionals and beyond—who are pushing these “vaccines” have conflicts of interest that they are not disclosing. Most of them are getting funded, either direct or indirectly, by the likes of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. They are more interested in preserving their kickbacks that are delivered by way of contributions, advertisement revenues and grants than they are in protecting our children.
The same is true about the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention; instead of safeguarding the public, they have cast their lot with Big Pharma. The CDC’s decision to experiment on children in ways that would make Mengele proud is not surprising given the fact that they once had direct oversight over the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. A leopard doesn’t change its spots and neither does the CDC change its pattern; after experimenting on African-American males for decades, they are now coming for our children.
I have studied media since I was a teenager, in fact I initially decided to pursue journalism when I attended George Mason University only to change my major when I realized what mainstream media is all about. What I have witnessed over the past 12 months alone with respect to this insane mass-“vaccination” campaign affirms my decision. Here is what they are not telling us: people who get Covid-19 and recover develop antibodies and T-cells that are infinitely better than the synthetic antibodies derived from the jabs. Even the NIH admitted this fact before they decided to bury it like a mafia capo entombing his victim in the deserts of Nevada.
They are suppressing the risks while hyping all the benefits that are minimal at best. I interviewed Dr. Brian Tyson in the video below about all these things and then some only for YouTube to delete it within 24 hours. If these “vaccines” are so great, why the hell are they turning to this level of tyrannical censorship? The answer is simple, they don’t want you to know the truth. The very things we have been deplatformed for—whether it’s about the origins of Covid-19 to the perils of these experimental “vaccines”—are now being proven true. They are trying to deny the self-evident truths about these dangerous boosters so they can inject as many people as possible before their lies are fully exposed.
Since our government, the supposed free-press and almost every major institution of note is in bed with biotech corporations as they push agendas hatched by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates, let me offer this advice to parents they won’t hear coming from the mouths of the establishment. If you value the lives of your children, if you want them to have a long and healthy life and if you want to one day become grandparents, DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN GET JABBED FOR COVID-19!
If the school they are attending decides to go along with the CDC’s political guidance, which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with engineering society, pull them out of that school and move somewhere else if you must. Children are too vulnerable and too precious to sacrifice them at the altar of pseudo-science. As horrific as Covid-19 is—I do not dismiss or diminish the lethality of this virus given that I lost my mom last year this God-forsaken and man-made virus—the fact is children are 200 times more likely to die in a car accident than dying from Covid-19. Given this fact, the only way to understand the CDC’s latest mask mandate is by realizing that they have been struck by group-psychosis.
We must draw a red line when they place crosshairs on the arms of children. If the ruling class insists on targeting our kids, then we must cash the check that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence and reclaim our government from the grips of globalist monsters who arrogantly believe that they can remake society in their image. That level of hubris will eventually lead to the solutions Parisians turned to 1789 when they had enough of being pushed around by depraved aristocrats. Vive la révolution!
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Setting the Record Straight
About two months ago, a reporter from @Politico by the name of @tina_nguyen reached out to me inquiring about an article that I published dedicated to the men and women of the US military.
— Teodrose Fikremariam (@Teodrose_Fikre) July 11, 2021
For the record, the revolution that I am referring to is not one of guns but one of hearts and minds. There is only one reason why a fraction of humanity terrorizes and oppresses billions around the world with impunity. As long as we are divided, we will always be powerless. The minute we are united, our powers will burn away the pseudo-might of plutocrats. As to the “invisible hands” who are intent on fulfilling a plot that was hatched a long time ago, there is no need to warn you, you know exactly what you are doing. Just know your evil schemes will fail, I hope you like dust because you will be eating it when the day of reckoning arrives:
“I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.” ~ Thomas Paine
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Teodrose Fikremariam is the co-founder and editor of the Ghion Journal. Prior to launching the Ghion Journal, he was a political organizer who once wrote a speech idea in 2008 that was incorporated into Barack Obama’s South Carolina primary victory speech. He is originally from Ethiopia and a direct descendent, seven generations removed, of one of Ethiopia’s greatest Emperors Tewodros II.
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As the United States and NATO‘s war in Afghanistan struggles to end, most observers and commentators, at least in the West, are still either delusional enough or more likely paid enough, not to publicly recognize a basic evidence: the Taliban are in the process of winning the 20-year war, which is the United States’ longest war in the country’s relatively brief history.
Some at least pretend to be puzzled by this turn of events. However, all of it, or at least the final outcome, was completely predictable, almost from the start and definitely for at least a decade. When you look at the numbers, it appears that what truly kept the empire and its NATO vassals in Afghanistan was the financial imperative of the military-industrial complex, the imperative of war for profit.
Now that the war in Afghanistan is almost over, we must look at its vertiginous costs: human and financial. Numbers are abstractions that do not carry any weight in emotions. But when the matter becomes macabre war bookkeeping, the numbers become grim, atrocious and loaded with pain, as they accurately tell the story of 20 years of disproportionate and intense suffering imposed on the Afghan people by the occupiers. The tabulation of misery for Afghans will keep echoing long after the invaders, who brought mostly death and destruction, are gone.
First the number of deaths for NATO: since the invasion in 2001, more than 3,500 NATO troops have died, as well as 3,900 US contractors. This total of 7,400, not to minimize it, represents less than 5 percent of the global death toll during the 20-year war. In other words, more than 95 percent of the deaths were Afghans: either Taliban, Afghan army soldiers, or civilians. The Taliban death toll estimate stands at 51,000. Meanwhile, the NATO-trained Afghan army’s death toll is currently 66,000. More than 47,000 Afghan civilians are estimated to have died in the conflict. Overall, the Brown University Costs of War Project, which has been doing a stellar job at tracking the nasty war numbers, estimates that in all, between 171,000 and 176,000 people were killed in the war.
Further, the war’s side effects include elevated rate of diseases due to malnutrition, lack of clean water, and vastly reduced access to health care. Despite NATO’s propaganda buzzwords about so-called nation building efforts, which in time became the pseudo mission, the life expectancy in Afghanistan is currently 52 years. Every factor correlated to a premature death, such as poverty, malnutrition, poor or no sanitation, and lack of basic health care have been closely associated with the 20-year war.
Let us now focus on the gargantuan financial costs of the war. According to the Pentagon, the US military operations in Afghanistan through two decades have cost $1.00 trillion. According to the Brown University researchers of the Costs of War project, however, the real cost of the war in Afghanistan is a staggering $2.26 trillion.
Over the years, many analysts and even people in the four successive US administrations, as well as military commanders, knew that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable. In its folly, and arrogant ignorance of the historical nature of Afghanistan as “graveyard of empires,” the US empire and 38 of its vassals embarked in a delusional so-called nation building Afghan project of a massive scale. Of course, because the current empire is Orwellian in nature, just like in Iraq shortly afterward in 2003, nation building was in fact nation wrecking: a perverse geopolitical strategy of engineering failed states in order to justify an endless occupation.
The four administrations: Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden, are all guilty, but they will never be charged for the countless deaths and mayhem their policies created. As matter of fact, they will never publicly make amends and admit their monumental failures. But the answer for this lack of candid remorse might reside elsewhere. In the context of wars for profit, it hardly matters who wins or loses on the battlefields or the number of innocent people who die and are called collateral damage. This might sound cynical, but what really matters is the bottom line: the profit for the shareholders of the military-industrial complex. Many investors, in the United States and elsewhere, have become incredibly wealthy from the $2.26 trillion “invested” in the Afghanistan war by American taxpayers, largely without their approval or even their knowledge.
I wrote extensively about the Afghanistan/Pakistan war in the 12 years since we started News Junkie Post. In 2012, I drew an analogy with the war in Vietnam in my analysis: “NATO is winning in Afghanistan like the United States was in Vietnam”. It was sarcastic but nonetheless correct. The United States had to admit publicly that it had lost the war in Vietnam in a debacle, because at the time some real reporting was still going on. I don’t think that any US administrations, and their mighty NATO allies, will ever admit that they lost their 20-year war against the Taliban. Some of us remember the US’ dramatic exit from the American embassy under siege in Saigon when it officially lost the Vietnam war. It was live, on prime time, for everybody in the world to see. This was quite a contrast from the US military vacating their sprawling Bagram base near Kabul. A few days ago an Afghan army commander described that the US military left their Bagram Air base in the middle of the night, like thieves. They simply shut down electrical power and left behind a vast amount of discarded equipment, supplies such as bottled water, and random trash.
In this de facto defeat of the US empire, isn’t it embarrassing that such a formidable military force like NATO, so advanced in terms of technology, compared to its enemy, would lose to a ragtag army equipped with Kalashnikovs and mostly, either stolen or makeshift, military equipment like home made improvised explosive devices (IED). In this completely asymmetrical warfare the little guys armed with their shear courage, patience, and remarkable guerrilla-warfare intelligence have prevailed. The ultimate victory of the Taliban, it has to be called that, should be a lesson for future want-to-be Goliaths, a lesson for neocolonial imperial powers that their occupation schemes do not usually end well.
What kind of arrogance and stupidity made the Orwellian Empire and its NATO associates think that they would surely beat Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, considering that Alexander the Great, the British Empire, then the USSR had all failed? The same insane rationale was probably at play in the mind of Adolf Hitler when he thought he could do better than Napoleon against Russia. The near outcome of America longest war is a proof that with organization, skills and pure will power, fighting for one’s land and culture against a foreign occupation can make a people unbeatable. There’s no doubt in my mind that from now on, nobody will dare to invade the land of the Pashtuns.
At its peak, during the Obama/Biden administration, the United States had 100,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Now many of them must realize that they went there for nothing. Or even worse, maybe they came back home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and without a leg or an arm. President Biden has already pushed back the deadline for a complete withdrawal of the US troops from May 1 to September 11, 2021. There are still around 7,000 allied troops in Afghanistan, half of them Americans. Let us hope that the nefarious and powerful military-industrial complex doesn’t find a way to whisper in Biden’s ear that the US military should just stay a little bit longer, or maybe install a CIA drone base in Pakistan. While the US and NATO cannot claim victory, they can still wrongly claim “Mission Accomplished” and leave entirely. The sooner the better for a land they wrecked.
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Long-term exposure to physical agents can be detrimental to children due to their vulnerability. This study aimed to assess and compare the electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure level around the kindergartens from the underground transmission line (UGTL). We investigated randomly selected 24 kindergartens based on the location of the UGTL. The EMF emission levels were measured using an EMDEX II (Electric and Magnetic Digital Exposure Meter). The maximum mean value of the EMF emission level was 13.5 mG around the kindergartens and 17.7 mG from the point of UGTL to kindergartens. EMF emission level around the kindergartens was significantly associated with the location of the UGTL (t = −7.35, P < 0.001). These estimates are not trivial, as long-term exposure to EMF among kindergarten children can lead to different health problems. Routine monitoring of EMF emission levels is recommended including the awareness of EMF exposure to public citizens.
Introduction
Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are a form of radiation energy associated with the modern use of electrical power. Sensitive areas like schools, kindergartens, hospital, and other public facilities have been of great concerns of various studies. EMF exposure can lead to environmental impacts (1).
In city areas, transmission lines that are distributed underground still can pose negative consequences to the general public. Kindergartens, schools, and hospitals are more sensitive to EMF exposure.
Exposure to EMF has been correlated with the occurrence in humans, including infants, of potential adverse biological and health effects (2). A variety of studies, however, have not identified statistically significant associations between exposure to EMF and health risks. Although numerous studies have been performed to assess environmental EMF exposures, they are mainly concentrated on assessing exposure in adult populations. Restricted information is available on EMF exposure levels and their related settings in kindergartens and schools (3, 4).
While most of us over the years have probably heard rumblings of the possibilities of negative health effects attributed to high levels of exposure to EMFs, little definitive word has reached the mainstream stamping it as a legitimate concern. The concern about exposure to EMF has developed because of the number of epidemiological studies (5). EMF exposure can pose impacts on the public and the environment. Mostly in city areas, the transmission lines are distributed and constructed underground to minimize the exposure limits. Children’s nervous system is more susceptible than that of adolescents to the effects of EMF exposure. Even though many of us have arguably noticed unconfirmed reports of the possibilities of negative health impacts linked with EMF exposure over the years, no particular set has gone mainstream embroidering it as a real issue (6, 7).
This paper is a short research commentary article based on findings from the assessment and comparison of the EMF emission level from the underground transmission line (UGTL) around kindergartens. The study focuses on the EMF emission level assessment in kindergartens located around the UGTL to address the immediate concern of EMF exposure among children.
Methods
The EMF emission levels in kindergartens were measured based on the location of the UGTL in December 2020. This study includes 24 kindergartens across Busan, South Korea (12 kindergartens located near UGTL and 12 kindergartens without UGTL). The UGTL locations and kindergartens in Busan City were accessed from Busan Korea Electric Corporation and Ministry of Education, Korea, respectively. Then, 24 kindergartens were sampled randomly from the list of kindergartens based on the UGTL location. We calculated the EMF emission levels with two measurement techniques as shown in Figure 1: (i) EMF measurement around the kindergartens and (ii) EMF measurement from the point of the UGTL to kindergartens. The emission levels of EMF were measured using EMDEX II (Electric and Magnetic Digital Exposure Meter). At 0.5, 1, and 1.5 m from ground level, we monitored the EMF emission levels. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 23. To identify the association of EMF emission and UGTL, a simple linear regression analysis was performed.
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Since cellphones first came onto the market in 1983, they have gone from clunky devices with bad reception to today’s sleek, multifunction smartphones with more than 5 billion subscribers worldwide.
For more than a decade, Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, a researcher in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health, has been on a quest to prove that radiation from cellphones is unsafe. But, he said, most people don’t want to hear it. “People are addicted to their smartphones, We use them for everything now, and, in many ways, we need them to function in our daily lives. I think the idea that they’re potentially harming our health is too much for some people.”
Since cellphones first came onto the market in 1983, they have gone from clunky devices with bad reception to today’s sleek, multifunction smartphones. And although cellphones are now used by nearly all American adults, considerable research suggests that long-term use poses health risks from the radiation they emit, said Moskowitz. “Cellphones, cell towers and other wireless devices are regulated by most governments,” said Moskowitz.
“Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s.” Since then, he said, research has shown significant adverse biologic and health effects — including brain cancer — associated with the use of cellphones and other wireless devices. And now, he said, with the fifth generation of cellular technology, known as 5G, there is an even bigger reason for concern.
Berkeley Newsspoke with Dr Moskowitz about the health risks of cellphone radiation, why the topic is so controversial and what we can expect with the rollout of 5G.
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Berkeley News: I first heard you speak about the health risks of cellphone radiation at Berkeley in 2019, but you’ve been doing this research since 2009. What led you to pursue this research?
Joel Moskowitz: I got into this field by accident, actually. During the past 40 years, the bulk of my research has been focused on tobacco-related disease prevention. I first became interested in cellphone radiation in 2008, when Dr. Seung-Kwon Myung, a physician scientist with the National Cancer Center of South Korea, came to spend a year at the Center for Family and Community Health. He was involved in our smoking cessation projects, and we worked with him and his colleagues on two reviews of the literature, one of which addressed the tumor risk from cellphone use. At that time, I was skeptical that cellphone radiation could be harmful. However, since I was dubious that cellphone radiation could cause cancer, I immersed myself in the literature regarding the biological effects of low-intensity microwave radiation, emitted by cellphones and other wireless devices.After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stress — free radicals, stress proteins and DNA damage — I became increasingly convinced that what we were observing in our review of human studies was indeed a real risk.
BN: While Myung and his colleagues were visiting the Center for Family and Community Health, you reviewed case-control studies examining the association between mobile phone use and tumor risk. What did you find?
JM: Our 2009 review, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that heavy cellphone use was associated with increased brain cancer incidence, especially in studies that used higher quality methods and studies that had no telecommunications industry funding. Last year, we updated our review, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, based on a meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies — twice as many studies as we used for our 2009 review — and obtained similar findings. Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.
BN: One thing I think we should address upfront is how controversial this research is. Some scientists have said that these findings are without basis and that there isn’t enough evidence that cellphone radiation is harmful to our health. How do you respond to that?
JM: Well, first of all, few scientists in this country can speak knowledgeably about the health effects of wireless technology. So, I’m not surprised that people are skeptical, but that doesn’t mean the findings aren’t valid. A big reason there isn’t more research about the health risks of radiofrequency radiation exposure is because the U.S. government stopped funding this research in the 1990s, with the exception of a $30 million rodent study published in 2018 by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ National Toxicology Program, which found “clear evidence” of carcinogenicity from cellphone radiation.In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, adopted exposure guidelines that limited the intensity of exposure to radiofrequency radiation. These guidelines were designed to prevent significant heating of tissue from short-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, not to protect us from the effects of long-term exposure to low levels of modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation, which is produced by cellphones, cordless phones and other wireless devices, including Wi-Fi. Yet, the preponderance of research published since 1990 finds adverse biologic and health effects from long-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, including DNA damage. More than 250 scientists, who have published over 2,000 papers and letters in professional journals on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields produced by wireless devices, including cellphones, have signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits. So, there are many scientists who agree that this radiation is harmful to our health.
BN: Why did the government stop funding this kind of research?
JM:The telecommunications industry has almost complete control of the FCC, according to Captured Agency, a monograph written by journalist Norm Alster during his 2014-15 fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics. There’s a revolving door between the membership of the FCC and high-level people within the telecom industry that’s been going on for a couple of decades now. The industry spends about $100 million a year lobbying Congress. The CTIA, which is the major telecom lobbying group, spends $12.5 million per year on 70 lobbyists. According to one of their spokespersons, lobbyists meet roughly 500 times a year with the FCC to lobby on various issues. The industry as a whole spends $132 million a year on lobbying and provides $18 million in political contributions to members of Congress and others at the federal level.
BN: It reminds me of when the U.S. Surgeon General released a landmark report in 1964 that linked cigarettes with dangerous health effects, including cancer and heart disease. Even though the 10-person committee consulted more than 7,000 articles already available in biomedical literature, the report’s findings were very controversial when they came out.
JM: Yes, there are strong parallels between what the telecom industry has done and what the tobacco industry has done, in terms of marketing and controlling messaging to the public. In the 1940s, tobacco companies hired doctors and dentists to endorse their products to reduce public health concerns about smoking risks. The CTIA currently uses a nuclear physicist from academia to assure policymakers that microwave radiation is safe. The telecom industry not only uses the tobacco industry playbook, it is more economically and politically powerful than Big Tobacco ever was. This year, the telecom industry will spend over $18 billion advertising cellular technology worldwide.
BN: You mentioned that cellphones and other wireless devices use modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation. Can you explain how cellphones and other wireless devices work, and how the radiation they emit is different from radiation from other household appliances, like a microwave?
JM: Basically, when you make a call, you’ve got a radio and a transmitter. It transmits a signal to the nearest cell tower. Each cell tower has a geographic cell, so to speak, in which it can communicate with cellphones within that geographic region or cell. Then, that cell tower communicates with a switching station, which then searches for whom you’re trying to call, and it connects through a copper cable or fiber optics or, in many cases, a wireless connection through microwave radiation with the wireless access point. Then, that access point either communicates directly through copper wires through a landline or, if you’re calling another cellphone, it will send a signal to a cell tower within the cell of the receiver and so forth.The difference is the kind of microwave radiation each device emits. With regard to cellphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, there is an information-gathering component. The waves are modulated and pulsed in a very different manner than your microwave oven.
BN: What, specifically, are some of the health effects associated with long-term exposure to low-level modulated radiofrequency radiation emitted from wireless devices?
JM: Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death. In 2001, based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency fields were classified as “possibly carcinogenic” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. In 2011, the IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans. Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a stronger classification. Most recently, on March 1, 2021, a report was released by the former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which concluded that there is a “high probability” that radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, two types of brain tumors.
BN: Let’s talk about the fifth generation of cellphone technology, known as 5G, which is already available in limited areas across the U.S. What does this mean for cellphone users and what changes will come with it?
JM: For the first time, in addition to microwaves, this technology will employ millimeter waves, which are much higher frequency than the microwaves used by 3G and 4G. Millimeter waves can’t travel very far, and they’re blocked by fog or rain, trees and building materials, so the industry estimates that it’ll need 800,000 new cell antenna sites.Each of these sites may have cell antennas from various cellphone providers, and each of these antennas may have microarrays consisting of dozens or even perhaps hundreds of little antennas. In the next few years in the U.S., we will see deployed roughly 2.5 times more antenna sites than in current use unless wireless safety advocates and their representatives in Congress or the judicial system put a halt to this.
BN: How are millimeter waves different from microwaves, in terms of how they affect our bodies and the environment?
JM: Millimeter wave radiation is largely absorbed in the skin, the sweat glands, the peripheral nerves, the eyes and the testes, based upon the body of research that’s been done on millimeter waves. In addition, this radiation may cause hypersensitivity and biochemical alterations in the immune and circulatory systems — the heart, the liver, kidneys and brain.Millimeter waves can also harm insects and promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens, so it’s likely to have some widespread environmental effects for the microenvironments around these cell antenna sites.
BN: What are some simple things that each of us can do to reduce the risk of harm from radiation from cellphones and other wireless devices?
JM: First, minimize your use of cellphones or cordless phones — use a landline whenever possible. If you do use a cellphone, turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you’re not using them. However, when near a Wi-Fi router, you would be better off using your cellphone on Wi-Fi and turning off the cellular because this will likely result in less radiation exposure than using the cellular network.
Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack. If you have to put it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. Text, use wired headphones or speakerphone for calls. Don’t sleep with it next to your head — turn it off or put it in another room.
Third, use your phone only when the signal is strong. Cellphones are programmed to increase radiation when the signal is poor, that is when one or two bars are displayed on your phone. For example, don’t use your phone in an elevator or in a car, as metal structures interfere with the signal.
Also, I encourage people to learn more about the 150-plus local groups affiliated with Americans for Responsible Technology, which are working to educate policymakers, urging them to adopt cell tower regulations and exposure limits that fully protect us and the environment from the harm caused by wireless radiation.
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… Not novel… no pandemic.. no variants… campaign of coercion & terror to address a stated objective. Dr David Martin, SG!! Who can tell us what the vaxxed can do about this synthetic recombinant chimera protein?
“There was no novel Coronavirus. Check of gene sequence vs all patent records showed not novel since 1999! There are 120 patented pieces of evidence showing total fallacy of claim ‘novel’!”
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As Weinstein rightly points out, if the WHO (or virtually every federal regulatory agency for that matter) has been captured and is being influenced by industry, in this case Big Pharma, and is itself putting out information that goes against medical science, then this is something that must be discussed and exposed. That is precisely what he did in the two episodes that YouTube wiped.
It is totally accurate while it gets down into the weeds about what the Pfizer-BioNTech data that were presented to FDA and its sister agencies in Europe and Japan show and don’t show. Much of the information comes from a Japanese government release. FDA hid this information.
Joining me today is Dr. Peter McCullough, here to discuss the COVID-19 vaccine push and how this agenda has overshadowed, whether by ignorance or dishonesty, the viable and efficacious alternative treatments that many experts have been trying to call attention to since the beginning of the COVID crisis.
The federal government has ensured that 5G can come to your neighborhood whether you like it or not. A recent rule change allows the telecoms industry to turn consenting private residences into cell towers, endangering the health of the neighborhood. The only way to fight back is to talk to neighbors who may be considering adding an antenna to their house to inform them of the facts that industry is conveniently leaving out.
Backed by Washington and Ottawa, Moïse appears to have been killed by elements within his own violent PHTK political party. The well-organized operation was probably bankrolled by one of the country’s light skinned oligarchs and almost certainly carried out with support from inside the government.
Slowly, against their will, and against their natural inclination to watch football and eat pizza, Americans are awaking to the reality of a totalitarian system with its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of their existence. Sadly, the true nature of this tyranny still eludes the understanding of most citizens, in part because the process by which America was transformed utterly has been slow, in part because the commercial media points us away from the true causes of this slippage and pins all blame on easily identifiable bad guys.
Thank you for all you do to make the world a better place for our children. I write to you both as World Leaders to ask for your advice and help in these challenging times. I would like to know what I can do, together with my friends, to help avert a Third World War, and prevent further suffering and death for millions for my brothers and sisters around the world.
During this COVID-19 crisis, both the FDA and CDC have made decisions that have not been in the best interest of the population or individuals. They have approved investigational products without sufficient safety or efficacy data, and they have actively censored or ignored existing treatments and natural immunity. They are actively partnering with the COVID-19 vaccine makers.
The US CDC has only granted manufacturers of the mRNA-type inoculations temporary permissions to call them “experimental gene therapy”. They are not to be named vaccines. If governments, the media and the medical community at large does it anyway, they are lying to you.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that “the opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc” across the nation and that “Johnson & Johnson helped fuel this fire.” James said her focus remains “getting funds into communities devastated by opioids as quickly as possible.”
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VAERS data released today by the CDC showed a total of 438,441 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 9,048 deaths and 41,015 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and July 2, 2021.
Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) included 9,049 reports of deaths, across all age groups, following COVID vaccines — an increase of more than 2,000 compared with the previous week. The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date.
Data released today show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and July 2, 2021, a total of 438,441 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 9,048 deaths — an increase of 2,063 over the previous week. There were 41,015 serious injury reported during the same time period — up 6,950 compared with last week.
In the U.S, 328.9 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of July 2. This includes: 134 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 182 million doses of Pfizer and 13 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.
Of the 9,048 deaths reported as of July 2, 22% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 15% occurred within 24 hours and 37% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
The most recent reported death includes a 13-year-old boy (VAERS I.D. 1431289) with a previous history of COVID who suffered cardiac arrest and died 17 days after vaccination with Pfizer.Other reports include a 13-year-old boy (VAERS I.D. 1406840) who died two days after receiving a Pfizer vaccine, three 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918, 1382906 and 1242573), four 16-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1420630, 1426828, 1225942 and 1386841) and three 17-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1199455, 1388042 and 1420762).
Pfizer says boosters needed, U.S. federal health agencies, scientists disagree
As The Defender reported today, U.S. federal health agencies and the maker of one of the most popular COVID vaccines are publicly at odds over if or when fully vaccinated people will need a third “booster” dose.
Pfizer announced Thursday it will seek Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA in August for a third dose of its COVID vaccine. The drugmaker predicted those who have been fully vaccinated will need a booster shot within six to 12 months of receiving their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
But the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hours later issued a joint statementby the FDA and Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) saying, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.”
The HHS statement did not explicitly mention Pfizer, but said “a science-based, rigorous process” headed by the CDC, FDA and the National Institutes of Health would determine when or whether boosters were necessary.
Pfizer’s assertions about the need for boosters contradict other research, and several experts pushed back against the claim.
“There’s really no indication for a third booster or a third dose of an mRNA vaccine, given the variants that we have circulating at this time,” Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, told the New York Times. “In fact, many of us question whether you will ever need boosters.”
“No one is saying we’ll never need a booster, but to say we need it now and give the public the impression the vaccines are failing and something needs to be done as a matter of urgency. … The time isn’t now. The decisions that are going to be made will be made by federal agencies.”
Pfizer and BioNTech are developing a version of their COVID vaccine that targets the Delta variant, The New York Times reported this week. The companies expect to begin clinical trials of the vaccine in August.
Pfizer and BioNTech reported — based on their own studies that have not been published, nor peer-reviewed, according to the Times — that a booster given six months after the second dose of vaccine increased the potency of antibodies against the original virus and the Beta variant by five- to tenfold.
Vaccine efficacy may decline six months after immunization, the companies said in a news release, and booster doses may be needed to fend off virus variants. The vaccine makers said they will submit their findings to the FDA in the coming weeks, a step toward gaining authorization for booster shots.
17-year-old student required to get vaccinated suffers heart condition
Concerns around COVID vaccines and heart inflammation, especially in young males, continue to circulate. But according to an update posted today on the CDC website, the agency’s researchers have concluded the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks of myocarditis after vaccination.
European drug regulators today announced they also have found a “possible link” between a “very rare heart inflammation” and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but sided with U.S. regulators, saying they also believe the benefits of the shots outweighed any risks.
Meanwhile, The Defender continues to report on teens who have experienced heart issues after taking the vaccines — including a 17-year-old student who developed symptoms of a heart condition about one week after his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID and subsequently was diagnosed with a heart condition.
The teen’s father, Fabio Berlingieri, told “Fox & Friends” his son had COVID and recovered, but was required to get the vaccine in order to play soccer.
Fox News medical contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier, who appeared in the interview with Berlingieri, said the way the New York Times and the CDC are presenting the data regarding the adverse effects of vaccines in adolescents is “irresponsible.”
“They cherry-pick the way they present the data. It’s an all or none approach. They say either adolescents are fully vaccinated or every single one of them is going to get COVID-19. That’s the way they are balancing it right now,” Saphier said.
Saphier said more weight should be given to potential adverse effects, like myocarditis and other heart inflammation issues, when deciding who should be vaccinated. She also encouraged the FDA to look closer at vaccines before recommending a universal policy.
Hundreds injured by COVID vaccines turn to GoFundMe for help
As reports of adverse events to COVID vaccines continue to grow in number, those injured by the vaccines are struggling to pay their medical bills.
As The Defender reported July 8, more than 180 people injured by COVID vaccines have had to turn to GoFundMe for help with large medical bills and other expenses, including Emma Burkey — the high school senior who underwent three brain surgeries due to blood clots after receiving J&J’s COVID vaccine.
People facing huge medical bills after being injured by COVID vaccines have few options, beyond what their own health insurance covers. That’s because under federal law, vaccine makers are shielded from liability.
Since June 1, the CICP reported 869 pending cases but offered no further information. Since the program’s inception in 2010, only 29 claims have been paid, with an average payout of around $200,000. The other 452 claims (91.4%) were denied. Ten claims won approval but were deemed ineligible for compensation.
Biden plans to deploy federal teams in door-to-door COVID vaccine campaign
Making no mention of any safety concerns related to the vaccines, President Joe Biden this week announced plans to ramp up the federal government’s efforts to get more Americans vaccinated under a new “door-to-door” program.
As The Defender reported this week, under Biden’s program, the White House will deploy teams of officials from the CDC, Federal Emergency Management Administration and other federal health agencies. Biden suggested the unique door-knocking approach was needed now that “we are continuing to wind down the mass vaccination sites that did so much in the spring.”
Biden said the administration will also “step up efforts to get vaccines to doctors who serve younger people so that adolescents ages 12 to 18 can get vaccinated and — as they go for back-to-school check-ups or getting ready for their physicals they need for fall sports.”
Biden cited concerns over the COVID Delta variant, which he said is more transmissible and has forced some European countries to return to lockdowns. He did not mention any of the safety concerns previously noted by the CDC and FDA, including blood clots and heart inflammation, associated with the vaccines.
Number of cases among fully vaccinated continue to climb
Reports of COVID breakthrough cases among fully vaccinated people continue to rise, as The Defender reported earlier this week. As of June 28, the CDC reported 4,686 breakthrough cases resulting in death and hospitalization.
Nearly 30 people in Louisiana who were fully vaccinated against COVID died from the virus, according to the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH). Dr. Joseph Kanter, LDH state health officer and medical director, said 27 people between the ages of 28 and 93 have died with COVID more than two weeks after being fully vaccinated.
According to the San Francisco Examiner, more than 7,550 breakthrough cases have been reported, through June 23, in Californians who were fully vaccinated. Most cases were minor, but 62 people died from COVID, according to the California Department of Public Health.
California’s public health agency reported 584 fully vaccinated people had been hospitalized with COVID infection, but hospitalization status wasn’t available for 46% of post-vaccination cases. On July 7, state health officials reported 2,013 new infections among all Californians, including 24 deaths.
According to a report by the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH), breakthrough cases have resulted in 140 hospitalizations and 20 deaths in the state. As of May 1, TDH has not counted all breakthrough cases as the CDC “asked that only severe outcomes (hospitalization or death) be reported.”
123 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries
According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. After repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions, a health communications specialist from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force contacted us on March 29 — three weeks after our initial inquiry.
The individual received our request for information from VAERS, but said she had never received our list of questions, even though employees we talked to several times said CDC press officers were working through the questions and confirmed the representative had received them. We provided the list of questions again along with a new deadline, but never received a response.
On May 19, a CDC employee said our questions had been reviewed and our inquiry was pending in their system, but would not provide us with a copy of the response. We were told we would be contacted by phone or email with the response.
We have contacted the CDC numerous times since and were told nobody knew the specialist from the agency’s Vaccine Task Force who contacted us in March, and our request was still pending in the system. It has been 123 days since we sent our first email inquiring into VAERS data and reports and we have yet to receive a response.
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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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New figures released by researchers in the UK show that just 25 under-18’s died from COVID from March 2020 to February 2021, two-thirds of whom had “chronic” health conditions, and that lockdown measures aimed at children “may prove a greater risk than that of SARS-CoV-2 itself.”
The numbers show that there is around a 1 in 500,000 chance of children dying from coronavirus in England, and that includes victims of pre-existing medical conditions, like heart disease and cancer.
“More than 75 per cent of the children who died had chronic conditions, while two thirds had more than one underlying condition and 60 per cent had life-limiting conditions,” reports the Daily Mail.
During the same time period, 124 children died from suicide and 268 died from trauma.
25 under-18s in England died from the CV19 between 3/20 and 2/21, or 1 in 481,000. In the same period, 124 children died from suicide and 268 died from trauma due to pandemic response. Lockdown “may prove a greater risk than… SARS-CoV-2 itself”https://t.co/zuH4JEf6Bv
Studies conducted by researchers at University College London, the University of York and the University of Liverpool found that lockdown measures which remove children from social environments “may prove a greater risk than that of SARS-CoV-2 itself.”
The numbers should inform the government when it comes to considerations of the pros and cons of vaccinating children, although don’t expect the story to receive much wider media attention.
Earlier this year, experts in the UK warned that isolation and depression caused by lockdowns had created a “mental health pandemic.”
According to mental health experts in Australia, COVID-19 lockdowns were found to have been a major contributing factor in a doubling in the number of youth suicides.
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On June 12, Danish soccer player Christian Eriksenhad a sudden cardiac arrest and almost died while playing against Finland, sparking questions if he got vaccinated prior to the European championship. Neither Eriksen nor his doctors have ever confirmed or denied his vaccination.
A German investigative journalist now has directly asked the Danish Football Association about Eriksen’s covid vaccination status. After some attempts to dodge the question, the press officer gave the following answer:
“Hi Jens, We have no comments on players vaccinations as it’s a private issue. You can quote me on that. I have no further comments to you.. Bh Høyer.”
Specifically, the press officer even refused to confirm that Eriksen was not vaccinated.
Meanwhile, two recently vaccinated Caribbean cricket players also collapsed while playing, while a former Uruguayan soccer player died of cardiac arrest shortly after vaccination at age 48, as did, apparently, several teenage athletes in the US. The US CDC recently confirmed that mRNA covid vaccines increase the risk of heart muscle inflammation, especially in young males.
Large-scale vaccination of people at low risk of severe covid may not have been a good idea. In particular, vaccinating athletes prior to tournaments may not be a good idea, as unrecognized heart muscle inflammation (myocarditis) is a major cause of sudden cardiac arrest in athletes.
Postscript
It has sometimes been argued that vaccination against covid may prevent “long covid” or multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS) in children and young adults; however, new reports from Israel and the US indicate that, to the contrary, covid vaccines may themselves cause MIS as well as “long covid”-like conditions, often lasting for months or possibly even longer.
The following three-minute video, produced by Covid Vaccine Reactions, shows both adults and children suffering from debilitating post-vaccination health issues, raising further questions about the risk-benefit ratio of covid vaccinations in people at low risk of severe covid. A Facebook group called “Covid Vaccine Victims” had 120,000 members – before it got shut down by Facebook.
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If the World Health Organization has been captured by Big Pharma and is putting out information that goes against medical science, then public health is at grave risk
While the WHO insists large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) must be completed before ivermectin can be recommended, RCTs actually are not the gold standard in terms of scientific evidence. Meta-analyses are
A meta-analysis of 24 RCTs clearly demonstrates that ivermectin produces large statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance
Ivermectin distribution campaigns have also resulted in rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality, which indicate that ivermectin is effective in all phases of COVID-19
While the WHO and world governments are willing to roll the dice when it comes to the novel COVID shots, they insist on ridiculously high standards of safety and effectiveness when it comes to off-patent drugs that have decades of safe use
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DarkHorse host Bret Weinstein, Ph.D., has conducted a couple of long and really valuable interviews in recent weeks. One was with a lung and ICU specialist, Dr. Pierre Kory, who is also the president and chief medical officer1 of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). The FLCCC has published three different COVID-19 protocols, all of which include the use of ivermectin:
I-MASK+2 — a prevention and early at-home treatment protocol
I-MATH+3 — an in-hospital treatment protocol. The clinical and scientific rationale for this protocol has been peer-reviewed and was published in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine4in mid-December 2020
I-RECOVER5 — a long-term management protocol for long-haul syndrome
In another episode, Weinstein interviewed Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine technology.6 In both instances, YouTube deleted the videos. Why? Because they discussed science showing ivermectin works against COVID-19 and the hazards of COVID gene therapies. Never mind the fact that Kory and Malone are the widely recognized leading experts in their fields.
In the wake of this targeted takedown, podcast host Joe Rogan invited Weinstein and Kory in for an “emergency podcast” about the censorship of ivermectin. As noted by Weinstein in a June 23, 2021, tweet, “The censorship campaign obscuring Ivermectin (as prophylactic against SARS-CoV2 and as treatment for COVID-19) kills.”7
Indeed, we now know that early treatment is crucial to prevent complications, hospitalizations, death and/or long-haul syndrome, so censoring this information is inexcusable, and has without doubt resulted in needless deaths.
What Is Misinformation?
As Weinstein explains, there are several things in dire need of discussion. For starters, there’s the issue of YouTube’s community guidelines and posting rules, which are so vague that it’s impossible to determine beforehand if something is going to be deemed in violation.
Violations, in turn, threaten the ability of people like Weinstein to make a living. His entire family depends on the income generated through his YouTube channel. He now has two strikes against him, where YouTube claims he’s been posting “spam” and “medical misinformation.” One more, and the entire channel will be demonetized.
A central problem here is, who determines what misinformation is? YouTube has taken the stance that anything that goes against what the World Health Organization says is medical misinformation. However, the WHO doesn’t always agree with other public health agencies.
For example, the WHO does not recommend the drug remdesivir, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does, and virtually all U.S. hospitals routinely use the drug on COVID-19 patients.
Another example where the WHO and the CDC are in disagreement is how the virus can be transmitted. While the CDC admits SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus that transmits through the air, the WHO does not list air as a form of transmission. So, is the CDC putting out medical misinformation?
Censorship Is a Disinformation Tool
As Weinstein rightly points out, if the WHO (or virtually every federal regulatory agency for that matter) has been captured and is being influenced by industry, in this case Big Pharma, and is itself putting out information that goes against medical science, then this is something that must be discussed and exposed. That is precisely what he did in the two episodes that YouTube wiped.
If an organization is putting out medical misinformation, and talking about this is censored, the end result is going to be devastating to public health. Overall, we’re in an untenable situation, Weinstein says, as people are losing their livelihoods simply for discussing the science and laying out the evidence. Licensed, practicing doctors are prevented from sharing practical knowledge that can save lives.
The fact that YouTube is making up the rules as they go is clear. One of Weinstein’s interviews was deemed to be “spam.” How can a discussion between highly respected and well-credentialed scientists and medical professionals be spam? YouTube obviously couldn’t determine what was incorrect about it so they simply made up an excuse to take the video down.
Or more likely, they knew exactly what they were doing and removed it because it countered what appears to be their primary agenda, which is to promote the COVID jab.
As noted in the featured interview, censorship is actually a form of disinformation, which is defined as “information given to hide the actual truth.” A perfect example of this is the suppression of the lab-leak theory. For a year and a half, no one was allowed to discuss the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Wuhan lab. There’s no telling how many tens of thousands of people lost their social media accounts, including yours truly, because they violated this rule.
The lab-leak theory was “debunked,” according to all the industry-backed fact checkers. Now, all of a sudden, the evidence has somehow taken root and everyone is talking about it. Mainstream media pundits are squirming in their seats, trying to explain why they overlooked the obvious and roundly dismissed the evidence for so long. What was “misinformation” yesterday is now “fact.”
Who decided this? Big Tech censored verifiable facts for a year and a half, and there’s every reason to assume they censored it on behalf of someone. They grossly misinformed — nay, disinformed — the public, yet they’re not held accountable for any of it.
The Manufacturing of Medical and Scientific Consensus
As noted by Weinstein, the idea that medical and scientific consensus can be established seemingly from one day to another in the middle of a pandemic involving a novel virus is simply not believable. It cannot happen, because scientific and medical consensus arises over time, as experts challenge each other’s theories.
A hypothesis may sound good, but will break apart once another piece of evidence is added. So, it changes over time. What happened here, however, over the last year and a half, is that a consensus was declared early on, and subsequent evidence was simply discarded as misinformation.
The examples of this are numerous. Take vitamin D, for example. We’ve long known vitamin D influences your immune system. Yet the manufactured consensus declared vitamin D irrelevant in the case of COVID-19, and this stance remains to this day, even though dozens of studies have now demonstrated that vitamin D plays a crucial role in COVID-19 outcomes specifically.
The lab leak theory is another example. Manufactured consensus declared it bunk, and that was it. Face masks were declared effective without any evidence, and anyone pointing out the discrepancy between this recommendation and what the scientific literature was showing was simply declared to be violating some vaguely defined “community standards.”
Manufactured consensus declared hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin dangerous and/or useless, saying we can’t possibly risk using these drugs unless they’re proven safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials (RCTs). As noted by Weinstein, they willingly roll the dice when it comes to the novel COVID shots, yet apply ridiculously high standards of safety and effectiveness when it comes to off-patent drugs that have decades of safe use.
There’s something very unnatural and unscientific about all of this, and that raises serious questions about intent. What is the intent behind these manufactured consensuses that by any reasonable standard have been proven flawed or incorrect?
For all the talk about preventing dangerous misinformation being spread by the average person, governments, Big Pharma, Big Tech and nongovernmental organizations that have a great deal of influence over nations, have in fact engaged in the biggest disinformation campaign in human history. The question is why?
As noted by Kory, over time, he has developed a deep cynicism about many of the agencies and organizations that are supposed to protect public health, because their recommendations and conclusions do not comport with good science. And, if we trust them exclusively, we can get into real trouble.
The thing is, there must be a reason for why they don’t follow the science, and that, most likely, is because they’re beholden to financial interests. If the science doesn’t support those financial interests, it’s disregarded.
This is why, by and large, there’s a very clear dividing line between those who promote the ideas of the WHO, the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and those who don’t.
Those who disagree with the manufactured consensus are almost exclusively independent, meaning they’re not financially dependent on an organization, company or agency to which the facts are inconvenient.
“Heretics” also tend promote products that they cannot make a profit from, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, two drugs that have been used for so long they’re off-patent. Alternatively, they recommend natural products like vitamin D, which is virtually free, especially if you get it from optimal sun exposure.
Gold Standard Evidence Supports Ivermectin
As noted by Kory, while the WHO insists large RCTs must be completed before ivermectin (or hydroxychloroquine) can be recommended, RCTs actually are not the gold standard in terms of scientific evidence. Meta-analyses are.
The reason for this is because any given trial can be skewed by any number of protocol factors. When you do a meta-analysis of several trials, even if those trials are small, you have the best chance of detecting signals of danger or benefit because it corrects for flaws in the various protocols.
In the case of ivermectin, FLCCC recently conducted a meta-analysis8 of 24 RCTs, which clearly demonstrates that ivermectin produces “large statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”
They also found that when used as a preventive, ivermectin “significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19.” In one study, of those given a dose of 0.4 mg per kilo on Day 1 and a second dose on Day 7, only 2% tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 10% of controls who did not get the drug.
In another, family members of patients who had tested positive were given two doses of 0.25 mg/kg, 72 hours apart. At follow up two weeks later, only 7.4% of the exposed family members who took ivermectin tested positive, compared to 58.4% of those who did not take ivermectin.
In a third, which unfortunately was unblended, the difference between the two groups was even greater. Only 6.7% of the ivermectin group tested positive compared to 73.3% of controls. Still, according to the FLCCC, “the difference between the two groups was so large and similar to the other prophylaxis trial results that confounders alone are unlikely to explain such a result.”
The FLCCC also points out that ivermectin distribution campaigns have resulted in “rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality,” which indicate that ivermectin is “effective in all phases of COVID-19.” For example, in Brazil, three regions distributed ivermectin to its residents, while at least six others did not. The difference in average weekly deaths is stark.
In Santa Catarina, average weekly deaths declined by 36% after two weeks of ivermectin distribution, whereas two neighboring regions in the South saw declines of just 3% and 5%. Amapa in the North saw a 75% decline, while the Amazonas had a 42% decline and Para saw an increase of 13%. Importantly, ivermectin’s effectiveness also appears largely unaffected by variants, meaning it has worked on any and all variants that have so far popped up around the world.
Kory also points out that once you can see from clinical evidence that something really is working, then conducting RCTs becomes unethical, as you know you’re condemning the control group to poor outcomes or death. This is, in fact, the same argument vaccine makers now use to justify the elimination of control groups by giving everyone the vaccine.
All of that said, RCT evidence for ivermectin will hopefully come from the British PRINCIPLE trial,9which began June 23, 2021. Ivermectin will be evaluated as an outpatient treatment in this study, which will be the largest clinical trial to date.
How Ivermectin Works
While ivermectin is best known for its antiparasitic properties, it also has both antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties. With regard to how it can help against SARS-CoV-2 infection, studies10have shown ivermectin lowers your viral load by inhibiting replication.
In “COVID-19: Antiparasitic Offers Treatment Hope,” I review data showing a single dose of ivermectin killed 99.8% of SARS-CoV-2 in 48 hours. A recent meta-analysis11 by Dr. Tess Lawrie found the drug reduced COVID-19 infection by an average of 86% when used preventatively.
An observational study12 from Bangladesh, which looked at ivermectin as a preexposure prophylaxis for COVID-19 among health care workers, found only four of the 58 volunteers who took 12 mg of ivermectin once per month for four months developed mild COVID-19 symptoms between May and August 2020, compared to 44 of the 60 health care workers who had declined the medication.
Ivermectin has also been shown to speed recovery, in part by inhibiting inflammation through several pathways and protecting against organ damage. This, of course, also lowers your risk of hospitalization and death, which has been confirmed in several studies.
Meta-analyses have shown average reductions in mortality ranging from 75%13 to 83%14,15 The drug has also been shown to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2 when taken before or after exposure. When you add all of these benefits together, it seems fairly clear that ivermectin use could vaporize this pandemic.
Where You Can Learn More
While ivermectin certainly appears to be a useful strategy, which is why I am covering it, it is not my primary recommendation. In terms of prevention, I believe your best bet is to optimize your vitamin D level, as your body needs vitamin D for a wide variety of functions, including a healthy immune response.
As for early treatment, I recommend nebulized hydrogen peroxide treatment,16,17 which is inexpensive, highly effective and completely harmless when you’re using the low (0.04% to 0.1%) peroxide concentration recommended.
All of that said, ivermectin and several other remedies certainly have a place, and it’s good to know they exist and work well. On the whole, there’s really no reason to remain panicked about COVID-19. If you want to learn more about ivermectin, there are several places where you can do that, including the following:
Twelve medical experts20 from around the world — including Kory — shared their knowledge, reviewing mechanism of action, protocols for prevention and treatment, including so-called long-hauler syndrome, research findings and real world data. All of the lectures, which were recorded via Zoom, can be viewed on Bird-Group.org21
An easy-to-read and print one-page summary of the clinical trial evidence for ivermectin can be downloaded from the FLCCC website22
A more comprehensive, 31-page review of trials data has been published in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology23
The FLCCC website also has a helpful FAQ section where Kory and Dr. Paul Marik, also of the FLCCC, answer common questions about the drug and its recommended use24
A listing of all ivermectin trials done to date, with links to the published studies, can be found on c19Ivermectin.com25
Mark Your Calendars for VERY Important Interview!
Please be sure to mark your calendar so you don’t miss my groundbreaking interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, July 4, 2021. We discuss the very distinct possibility that everyone who receives the COVID jab may die from complications in the next two to three years.
You should have plenty of time to view this vitally important exchange of information as it is the national Fourth of July holiday. We literally share life-changing information, so please be sure to read it and share with your friends.
This is largely because getting the jab now immediately places the injected individual in the very high risk of dying from COVID. Most have the false assurance that they are protected but, in reality, they are far more vulnerable and as a result will not take very aggressive proactive measures to avoid dying from pathogenic priming or paradoxical immune enhancement before it is too late.
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The reasons I am tremendously excited about what this 60 minute video (condensed from the 3 hr 20 min original) has to offer:
1. It is totally accurate while it gets down into the weeds about what the Pfizer-BioNTech data that were presented to FDA and its sister agencies in Europe and Japan show and don’t show. Much of the information comes from a Japanese government release. FDA hid this information.
2. There was no evaluation of reproductive toxicity or genotoxicity in animals before the mRNA vaccines were authorized for humans. Then CDC recommended them for pregnant women, feeling humans could serve as the lab rats for this experiment.
3. The vaccine was not injected into animals to see where it went. Instead, studies (most likely done long before the pandemic) using only 2 of the 4 lipid nanoparticle components, and no mRNA at all, were presented to regulators. The LNP particles went everywhere in the body, but were found in especially high concentrations in the animals’ ovaries.
4. The mRNA component was not injected into animals in experiments. Instead, data on some other mRNA, designed for a completely different experimental vaccine (presumably from an experiment that preceded the pandemic) was supplied to regulators.
5. Fauci was apparently right: the experimental vaccines were injected into humans before they were tested in animals. This is against the law, as I understand it.
6. People like me with some knowledge of the US regulatory system appreciate the detail, and Malone/Weinstein’s pointing out the multiple anomalies in the federal processes that preceded vaccine authorization.
7. The men in the video tell us what we know, what we should know, what is being withheld.
8. The men in the video are very smart and very good at what they do. And all three risked their careers or businesses to share this information.
9. I think that the most pro-vaccine intellectuals will have a very hard time refuting anything in this video. So please lead them to this water, and make them drink. It is 60 minutes long. I think if they only agree to watch half, they will be hooked enough to finish.
10. I hope this helps families come together on this issue, realizing that those desperate for vaccination have a point, and those opposed have at least an equal point–especially where children, who cannot give informed consent to be vaccinated, are concerned.
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Featured image: A hand holding an mRNA vaccine vial. (Spencer Davis / Unsplash)
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Russia said it is prepared to activate a military base in Tajikistan in response to fighting in Afghanistan near the central Asian country’s southern border. After over 1,000 Afghan soldiers retreated from fighting with the Taliban and fled into Tajikistan, Tajik officials requested assistance from a Russian-led military alliance.
Tajikistan, Russia, and four other former Soviet states are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). “Given the current situation in the region, as well as the remoteness and mountainous terrain of some parts of the border with Afghanistan, dealing with this challenge on our own seems difficult,” Hasan Sultonov, the Tajik representative to the CSTO, said on Wednesday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow is prepared to help its treaty ally. “We’ll do everything, including using the capabilities of the Russian military base on the border of Tajikistan with Afghanistan, to prevent any aggressive encroachments against our allies,” he said.
Tajikistan has activated 20,000 reservists to bolster the border in response to the Afghan soldiers entering the country. It’s unlikely that the Taliban would open up a front in Tajikistan, especially if it risks drawing Russia into the fighting. But the violence in northeast Afghanistan will continue to spill into Tajikistan to some extent.
Russia has been very critical of the US and NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite the almost 20 years of wars, Lavrov described the Western exit from the country as a “hasty withdrawal.”
“The situation is rapidly deteriorating, including in the context of the hasty withdrawal of American and other NATO troops, who over their decades of their stay in this country have not achieved visible results in terms of stabilizing the situation there,” Lavrov said.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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Joining me today is Dr. Peter McCullough, here to discuss the COVID-19 vaccine push and how this agenda has overshadowed, whether by ignorance or dishonesty, the viable and efficacious alternative treatments that many experts have been trying to call attention to since the beginning of the COVID crisis.
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Yesterday (April 10, 2019) a reader alerted me to the fact that I am being smeared on Wikipedia as a “vocal supporter of the current Russian government and its policies.” The reader also reports that an article in the Daily Beast calls me a “Putin worshiper.” The reader says that he tried to edit the Wikipedia entry without success, and he urged me to give it my attention.
I do not know whether the person who wrote my Wikipedia entry intended to smear me or is merely uninformed. However, dissenting voices do get smeared on Wikipedia. It is an ongoing problem for many of us. For years readers and people who know me would make corrections to my Wikipedia biography, but as soon as the corrections were made, they would be erased and the smears reinstalled.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it is an idealistic approach based on the belief that truth is more likely to emerge when everyone has a voice than when explanations are provided by a select group of experts or peers. This idealistic approach is not without merit. Moreover, it might work very well with subjects and people who do not have ideological opponents or are of no threat to those intent on controlling explanations.
The problem arises when a subject or a person is controversial and is especially the case if the person’s arguments disprove or dissent from official explanations. In The Matrix in which we live, truth-tellers are unwelcome to those who control the explanations in order to advance their agendas. Until truth-tellers can be silenced or completely censured, the practice is to discredit them with smears. Thus, I and many others have been described as “conspiracy theorists” for reporting factual information that contradicts the official and unproven explanation of 9/11, anti-semites for criticizing Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians and influence over U.S. foreign policy, and as “Russian agents” or “Putin stooges” for keeping the record straight about Ukraine, Syria, and Putin’s effort to avoid military conflict with the West.
In the pre-Internet age it was difficult to smear people. Newspaper editors would allow letters to the editor to correct factual mistakes or to provide a different interpretation of a collection of facts, but shied away from smears. This doesn’t mean that smears never happened, but not with the abandon of the Internet era.
Open works in process like Wikipedia, Internet comment sections and social media are ideally suited for smearing people and broadcasting the smears worldwide prior to any correction of them. Thus, the digital revolution has been a godsend to government agencies such as the CIA, State Department, Mossad, the Israel Lobby, corporations and other private interest groups, ideological movements such as neoconservatism and Identity Politics, and politicians, all of whom have agendas that are furthered by controlling the explanations.
As money is the highest value for many people, there is an unlimited supply of people who can be hired to smear those who challenge official explanations. A smear can start in a comment section, move to social media, and from there to a website and on to Wikipedia.
It is truth tellers who are smeared, people such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Manning, and whistleblowers whose messages are inconvenient for powerful private and government interests.
Smears are effective. There is no shortage of gullible and uninformed or misinformed people. They take a smear at face value and avoid the person or idea smeared. Despite the extreme clarity of Julian Assange’s orchestrated persecution, many see him as a “rapist escaping justice,” “Russian spy,” and “a blackmailer of governments and people.”
In short mud sticks better than facts. That is why I am not optimistic about the future of truth in the digital age. Many see the digital age as the era when truth will flourish. I understand their case. Their belief is not without merit. But the digital age is also an age in which lies can flourish because, unlike the print age, they can be so easily spread.
Consider, for example, the description of me as a “vocal supporter of the current Russian government and its policies” and a “Putin worshiper.” I am a well known critic of the Russian government’s neoliberal economic policies. Michael Hudson and I have jointly criticized the Russian government’s neoliberal economic policies and demonstrated that they are harmful to Russia’s economy. I am known also as a skeptic of Putin’s policy of turning the other cheek to Washington’s and Israel’s aggressions. I appreciate and admire Putin’s enormous self-control, but I have expressed concern that Putin’s unwillingness to put down a hard foot fails to turn away wrath and instead encourages more aggression that sooner or later will result in thermonuclear war.
The Russian government is aware of my position, as is the Russian media where I am often interviewed. My position is also clearly expressed on my website, which is read internationally. So why does the Daily Beast and Wikipedia misrepresent my position?
Wikipedia and comment sections can work only if commentators are responsible people who are carefully monitored by knowledgeable and responsible monitors. But this takes us back to peer-reviewed explanations that Wikipedia was created to avoid.
Historically, messengers are killed, so truth tellers have to expect smears or worse–Julian Assange was arrested this morning inside the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Mankind is fallen. Governments do evil. The most evil is done to those who oppose evil. Truth cannot be told without cost to he who tells the truth.
When I speak of truth-tellers, I am speaking of people whose motive is to tell the truth. Truth is their agenda. I am not saying that truth tellers are infallible and always right. I am saying that they strive to be. They do not intentionally write falsehoods and mislead.
Truth is not opinion. It is pointless to tell a truth teller that you disagree with him. You can present a case that his facts are wrong. You can present a case that there is a better explanation of the facts.
In my experience when most people say they disagree, they mean that they prefer another explanation that is more congenial to their feelings and emotions. For example, many Americans believed the preposterous Russiagate fib because they dislike Trump, just as today conservative talk radio has adopted the official explanation of 9/11 because it can be used against the outspoken female Muslim member of Congress. The facts have nothing to do with either belief. In both cases, the facts are resisted because the truth is not as emotionally comforting or as useful for the agenda at hand as the lie.
I have no objection if readers undertake to monitor and correct the account presented of me in Wikipedia. It will be an ongoing process, and will require the commitment of many of you. Those behind the attacks on me have a lot of money and a lot of hirelings, and they can erase your work as soon as you finish.
The digital revolution and the control mechanisms it provides makes it far more likely that we will end up in a locked down dystopia than would ever have been possible in the print age. But the digital revolution represents perhaps an even greater threat to humanity. It is making humans redundant.
What are humans to do when everything is automated? If the tech nerds have their way, we soon won’t be allowed to drive cars.
What will humans do when there is no need for their labor? Boston Dynamics, a Waltham Massachusetts company, has come up with a robot that replaces warehouse workers. The prediction is that 40 million more Americans will be shoved out of the workforce by robots over the next ten years.
Has anyone thought about who is going to be employed and have the money to purchase the products of robots? No doubt we will be promised all kinds of new and better jobs like we were promised to take the place of the offshored manufacturing and professional service jobs. The promised jobs never showed up. And no, this is not a luddite argument. Everyone can’t be employed designing robots to replace humans.
Each warehouse will rush to increase its profits by laying off employees, and none will consider the aggregate effect on consumer demand for the products in the warehouses. Will the warehouses have to give back their gained profits in taxes to support the unemployed? Will the warehouses have any profits if people haven’t income from jobs with which to buy the products in the warehouses? Does the robot age mean profits have to be socialized in order to sustain human life?
An intelligent approach to technology would be to focus on technology that enhances human performance, not on technology that eliminates the need for humans.
At Stanford University technology has emerged, or is emerging, that permits real time changes in the movements of a person’s mouth as he speaks in order to broadcast a message different than the one the speaker is speaking. The mischief possible with this technology is unacceptable. Television could destroy any unwelcome politician or leader by showing him delivering a message designed to destroy him. If people catch on, it would mean the end of televised speeches as no one would believe any speech unless they were present in person.
People already find it challenging to comprehend reality. The emergence of technology capable of falsifying reality in real time presages a future in which fact and fiction become indistinguishable. The unintended consequence of this technology may well be the death of truth.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The knot in Afghanistan is tying up ever tighter, as clashes between government forces and the Taliban are happening throughout the country.
Generally, the Taliban come out on top, but on July 8th, in Badghis it was different.
On July 7th, Taliban fighters stormed the capital city – Qala-e-Naw, expecting to easily “liberate” it.
The fighters stormed key government buildings and freed around 600 prisoners from the provicial central prison.
However, the group met with heavy resistance from government forces.
Qala-e-Naw is currently in the hands of government forces.
Clashes with Taliban fighters are still ongoing in the city’s outskirts.
According to the Afghan Defense Ministry, 69 Taliban fighters were killed and 23 others were wounded in recent operations in the outskirts of Qala-e-Naw.
Loads of weapons and ammunition were also captured from the group.
The rest of the province is in Taliban hands, and likely it is just a matter of time until the capital falls.
Government forces have lost many of the contested districts in recent days, with the Zendah Jan district in Herat province falling into the insurgents’ hands.
Clashes between the Taliban and Afghan armies were reported in the Nawur district in Ghazni province, which is still heavily contested in the central region.
Iran is attempting to assist the negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, by hosting a meeting between both delegations in Tehran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called the talks “substantive” saying that no impediment remains for Afghans of all political stripes to chart a peaceful and prosperous future for the next generation.
In a six-point joint statement issued by Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem, the two sides agreed that continuing the war was dangerous for the country and all efforts must be made to find a peaceful solution.
However, as far as Turkey is concerned it is ready to throw a wrench in those plans.
On July 6th, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Ankara was preparing to send Syrian militants to Afghanistan.
What role they will fill remains unclear, as Turkey is currently priming to provide security to the Kabul airport and nothing more.
Turkey appears to be heading to a military adventure in Afghanistan.
The Taliban has already warned Ankara against keeping any troops in the country after September 11th.
Judging by Turkey’s recent operations in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh and its successive operations in Syria and Iraq, Ankara is unlikely to listen to any reason or warnings.
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How a little-known rule could alter your neighborhood and endanger your health.
The federal government has ensured that 5G can come to your neighborhood whether you like it or not. A recent rule change allows the telecoms industry to turn consenting private residences into cell towers, endangering the health of the neighborhood. The only way to fight back is to talk to neighbors who may be considering adding an antenna to their house to inform them of the facts that industry is conveniently leaving out.
Our previous coverage provides more background on the OTARD rule, an acronym for “over the air reception device.” Originally, the rule prohibited local municipalities from restricting the installation of satellite dish antennas and other antennas on private residences for reception of TV signals; it didn’t apply to devices that also transmitsignals. The FCC recently implemented changes to the rule that allows industry to install wireless transmitting antennas on private homes; and since this would be done on private property, it circumvents the need for companies to meet local zoning and environmental requirements. There is also no requirement to notify neighboring property owners. The OTARD rule has thus been changed from a pro-consumer rule to a pro-industry rule.
Telecom companies are now reportedly going around neighborhoods with deceptive offers like: “Earn $600 – Get paid for doing nothing while helping your community. Be the first person to provide Internet of Things coverage in your neighborhood.”
For some, this may be a tempting offer. Industry may even offer benefits like free internet…but they may also charge you for the electricity used by the antenna. We just don’t know. But it is certain that wireless companies are not telling property owners that they could be held liable if their neighbors experience negative health effects due to the radiation coming from these antennas.
While the telecoms industry has insisted for decades that cell phones, and now 5G networks, are completely safe, there are mountains of evidence to suggest otherwise. We’ve covered a lot of this evidence in previous articles linking EMF radiation to altered metabolism, cancer, cardiovascular disease, DNA damage, impaired sperm function, cognitive impairment, neurological damage, and many more health conditions.
For these reasons, insurers rank 5G EMF radiation as “high risk,” and due to these risks, most insurance plans include an “electromagnetic field exclusion”—that is, insurance plans do not cover injuries related to wireless radiation. Telecoms cannot offer homeowners insurance against liability from the antenna causing physical harm to others because this insurance doesn’t exist.
Unless immediate action is taken, we will be exposed to radiation generated by wireless devices on an unprecedented scale. Especially concerning is that 5G networks that are being rolled out use short millimeter waves, which cannot travel as far as longer waves. This means that more “small cell” towers are needed to create a network, which is why the telecoms industry needs to turn private homes into cell towers. Some neighborhoods would see dozens of small cells installed, all of them emitting microwave radiation. These towers will also emit the lower 4G frequencies, since 5G rollout is still ongoing.
There are particular dangers with 5G networks. We’ve pointed out that Israeli researchers found that our sweat ducts act as antennas for millimeter waves, meaning we would absorb more of this energy into our bodies. Millimeter wavelengths are also used in crowd control systems, making people caught in the high-powered millimeter wave feel like their skin is on fire. No independent research has confirmed the safety of 5G networks.
The US government’s own National Toxicology Program released the results of a $30 million, ten-year project looking into the link between cell phones and cancer. It concluded that “there is clear evidence that male rats exposed to high levels of radiofrequency radiation (RFR) like that used in 2G and 3G cell phones developed cancerous heart tumors.” Again, 5G networks dramatically increase these exposures due to the increased number of “small cells” which will blanket neighborhoods with EMF radiation.
An additional issue is that it’s nearly impossible to effectively sue the wireless companies themselves. A close look at city and municipal contracts shows that it isn’t Verizon, for example, doing business, but a smaller LLC that is created by Verizon to do business in a particular location. This insulates Verizon from being liable for huge amounts in damages. If a lawsuit is successful, you’re raiding the coffers of a “Verizon New York, Inc.” or a smaller company “doing business as” Verizon. ANH is, however, joining Safe Technology Minnesota in submitting an amicus brief in support of Children’s Health Defense’s lawsuit challenging the FCC for adopting the OTARD rule changes.
A better strategy is to engage with neighbors considering telecoms offer of satellite installation and asking questions: are they aware that insurance against health effects from EMF radiation doesn’t exist? If a neighbor, or neighbors’ children, get sick from the radiation emanating from the antenna on their house, can they afford a legal defense? Are they aware of the myriad health dangers associated with EMF radiation? Are they on the hook for the electricity taken up by the antenna? Perhaps proactive action to discuss the issue with neighbors before the industry makes the offer can inoculate neighborhoods from industry propaganda. Friendly but frank conversations about this issue may be the only way to prevent your neighborhood from being blanketed with EMF.
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Featured image is from Alliance for Natural Health
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One of the worst economic theories that has been forced upon poor countries, and economics students, is known as comparative advantage. This means that each country should specialise in what it can make, grow or do ‘best’(1) and this will benefit everyone. If a country has the right climate then it should focus on growing crops that require that climate. If it has low wages, then it should focus on labor-intensive tasks, such as sewing clothes. This theory is propaganda. There are three main flaws with it.
Firstly, the main advantage that most poor countries have is cheap labour. This means that large numbers of people in poor countries have little choice but to do extremely simple, repetitive tasks like making clothes for export. They end up competing against each other to offer the cheapest labor. Corporations can play them off against each other and pay them almost nothing. (This is discussed further in a later post on sweatshops).
The second flaw is that many poor countries have been encouraged to focus on growing one crop for export, such as coffee or cotton, only to find that the price drops considerably.(2) Some of the poorest countries in Africa get much of their export earnings from selling cotton, but as cotton prices are consistently low, they do not have enough income to survive.(3) Tanzania and Mozambique were dependent on exports of cashew nuts, but the price collapsed in the year 2000. A World Bank report recognised these problems in 2005 when it noted that:
“a development strategy based on agricultural commodity exports is likely to be impoverishing”.(4)
The focus on growing crops for export leads to a decrease in farming of food for domestic consumption. The world now produces more food than ever before, easily enough to feed everyone, but malnutrition is still widespread. Indonesia was once self-sufficient in rice but now they grow more profitable palm oil for export and malnutrition has increased.(5)
Price drops also happen with goods that are not farmed. Chile was dependent on copper exports, but the price collapsed in 1996. Venezuela relies on oil exports so when the price drops their income decreases dramatically. Commodity prices of oil, iron ore, copper and other raw materials crashed in 2015.(6) There have been price collapses in almost every traded product at different times. These price collapses do not just lead to lower incomes. They lead to malnutrition, starvation and death.
The third, and perhaps most important, flaw is that comparative advantage is based upon what each country is capable of doing now. The theory ignores the evidence that with the right forms of teaching, training, investment and long-term planning, countries can develop the capacity to do more sophisticated tasks in future. One of the best writers on this topic, the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, has written:
“If they want to leave poverty behind, they have to defy the market and do the more difficult things that bring them higher incomes.”(7)
If poor countries want to become advanced nations, by definition they have to invest in more advanced technologies. They have to develop new industries (this is known as industrialisation) and protect them early on.
The Coffee Trade – A glaring example of exploitation
Coffee is one of the most important exports for many developing countries. Every detailed analysis of the supply chain for coffee shows that the growers only receive a small amount, but everyone else in the chain, the processors, the distributors, the shippers, the transport companies, the financiers, the insurers and the retailers (mostly supermarkets and coffee shops) make big profits. The big coffee companies make extremely large profits from processing and packaging the coffee. This is known as ‘adding value’. The coffee growers merely sell the raw coffee beans.
The campaign organisation, Oxfam, found that from 1990-2000 total coffee sales worldwide increased from $30 billion to $60 billion but the revenues of countries that grow the coffee beans decreased from $10 billion to $6 billion. The growers received only a tiny fraction of that amount. The same pattern has continued. In 2019, demand for coffee was greater than ever, but prices paid to growers were the lowest for 13 years.(8) For coffee that costs a few dollars in the shops, the grower gets just 1 cent.(9) If growers received ten times as much, their lives could be transformed, but consumers in rich countries would barely notice the difference. For many growers, the cost of growing coffee is often greater than the amount they can earn. The problem became so bad at one point that growers in Ethiopia stopped growing coffee and turned instead to growing drugs.(10)
There was an association of coffee-producing countries who worked together to make sure that growers earned a reasonable living. Unfortunately, international lenders like the World Bank helped Vietnam start growing coffee in the 1990s. This meant that there was too much coffee being produced. The excess coffee was not needed, so it became difficult to keep paying everyone a reasonable wage for coffee that no one would buy. This led to the collapse of the association in 2001(11) and growers have been receiving poverty-level earnings ever since.
The coffee trade highlights the issue of individual countries trying to decide how to trade within one big inter-connected world. It takes three years for coffee plants to produce their first crop. In that time, other countries might have started growing coffee, so prices might change. If we were genuinely trying to get poor people out of poverty, we would not be encouraging them to grow even more coffee. Leaving development to the whims of global markets is unlikely to provide steady, and growing, incomes for large numbers of poor people.
If coffee were traded in the same way as French wine, coffee farmers would be able to process and package the coffee themselves and make much more profit. However, the trade rules of rich countries, particularly Europe, deliberately penalise poor countries if they try to add value.(12) Leaders from advanced nations deliberately maintain the international trade system in such a way that most of the profit ends up in the pockets of their companies.
FairTrade – Better, But Not The Solution
Fairtrade is a system of trading that is supposed to ensure that producers in poor countries get a fair deal. This means a fair price for their goods, and long-term contracts to provide security.(13) The economic debates about the pros and cons of Fairtrade are surprisingly complicated, but the general principle that we should not exploit workers in poor countries is one that most people would agree with. Fairtrade companies do guarantee higher income for growers and better working conditions.
However, fairtrade is only a partial solution to the problems of poor countries. The amount that growers are paid is still low. In a genuinely fair world, it would not be possible for corporations to exploit workers. Everyone involved in the supply chain for goods sold in any advanced nation should be employed under reasonable conditions. If these countries are ever to escape poverty, we must have a trade system that guarantees poor people a good income for basic items like coffee and clothes. If they want to become advanced nations, they will still have to industrialise.
Extremely Unfair Trade
The concept of fairtrade highlights the amount of goods in advanced nations that are traded unfairly. For most goods, someone in the supply chain has been treated badly somewhere in the world. If the garment worker who made your clothes was not working in a sweatshop, the farm labourer who picked the cotton was probably paid a pittance. If tech workers in China are now better paid than in the past, the people dismantling your computer in India at the end of its working life are still being poisoned, and the mineworkers who extract raw materials are in danger of being shot if they form a union. The dominant business model is extremely unfair trade.
We saw in earlier posts that one reason why the US overthrows foreign governments is to put leaders in power who will run their country using economic policies that benefit the US. We also saw that the economic system is rigged to enable the rich to extract wealth from everyone else. When rich countries buy goods from poor countries, they pay much less than they are worth. People in poor countries are simply not paid as much as they should be for their exports.(14) Wages in poor countries have been kept artificially low for generations.
Global Minimum Wage
Some people and organisations are now pushing for a global minimum wage, to try to ensure that every worker can receive a reasonable wage for their work. This has the potential to rapidly transform the living standards of many of the world’s poorest people.(15) When minimum wages were introduced in rich countries, many rich and powerful people objected.(16) Think tanks have already started doing propaganda to mislead us about a global minimum wage, but whilst there are complex issues about how we determine the correct amount and how we enforce it, there really aren’t any good arguments against the idea.
The Continuation of Colonialism
Commentators in rich countries have known for hundreds of years that the best way to be successful at trade is for a country to import raw materials, which are usually cheap, and export manufactured goods, which are usually more expensive and more profitable. At the moment we are encouraging poor countries to do the opposite. The policies being recommended are the same policies that colonial powers enforced during the colonial era.(17) Files that were kept secret at the time, but have now been declassified, show that the aim was to keep poor countries poor. Rich countries recommend these policies because they enable rich people to get richer. By encouraging poor countries to focus on the most basic industries, we guarantee that they will not industrialise and will remain poor.
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom
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Jovenel Moïse was a violent and corrupt tyrant. While his passing may not elicit much sympathy, the Haitian president’s assassination should not be celebrated.
Backed by Washington and Ottawa, Moïse appears to have been killed by elements within his own violent PHTK political party. The well-organized operation was probably bankrolled by one of the country’s light skinned oligarchs and almost certainly carried out with support from inside the government. Police controlled the road to his house yet this video shows a convoy of armed men moving methodically up the hill towards the president’s residence. The presumed assassins announced that they were part of a US Drug Enforcement Agency operation.
Incredibly, the president and his wife were the only individuals hurt in the operation. None of Moïse’s direct security were harmed. Nor were any police. Reportedly, a dozen bullets riddled his body.
Moïse was extremely unpopular. Little known before former president Michel Martelly anointed him PHTK presidential candidate, important segments of the oligarchy had turned against Moïse. So had most of the right wing Haitian political establishment. During his mandate Moïse appointed seven different prime ministers, including a new one on Monday. Previous interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, now claims he is in charge of the government, which is disputed by recently appointed (though not sworn in) prime minister Ariel Henry. The day after the assassination Joseph met the “Core Group”, which is a collection of foreign ambassadors (US, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil, UN and OAS) that wields immense power in Haiti. Afterwards the UN special envoy for Haiti, Helen La Lime, a former US State Department official, said Joseph will lead the country until a planned September election.
While much of the establishment had turned against Moïse, few among the impoverished masses ever supported him. Since massive anticorruption protests began in July 2018 a strong majority of Haitians have wanted Moïse to go. Protesters were enraged by the Petrocaribe corruption scandal in which the Moïse and Martelly administrations pilfered hundreds of millions of dollars. Between mid 2018 and late 2019 Moïse faced multiple general strikes, including one that shuttered Port-au-Prince for a month.
For a year and a half Moïse has been ruling by decree and his already limited constitutional legitimacy expired February 7. In response a new wave of mass protests began.
During his mandate there have been a number of horrific state-backed massacres. At the end of April Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic and L’Observatoire Haïtien des crimes contre l’humanité published a report titled “Killing with Impunity: State-Sanctioned Massacres in Haiti”. It documents three “brutal attacks” by government-backed gangs that left 240 dead in neighborhoods known for resistance to Moïse.
The scope of the violence and lawlessness has worsened in recent weeks. Gang violence has engulfed entire neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, displacing thousands of women and children. On June 29 reporter Diego Charles, activist Antoinette Duclair and 13 others were killed in a violent attack.
It’s unlikely Canada had a direct hand in Moïse’s assassination. In fact, Canadian officials were likely unhappy about the killing. But, that doesn’t mean Canadian hands aren’t all-around the crime scene.
Ottawa has strengthened the most regressive and murderous elements of Haitian society. In 2004 the Canadian government helped sabotage the most democratic election in Haitian history. 7000 elected officials were overthrown when the US, France and Canada destabilized and then ousted the elected president.
After backing a 26-month coup government that killed thousands, the US and Canada tried to block social democratic candidate René Préval from becoming president. That failed. But they undercut Préval when he attempted to raise the minimum wage and joined the subsidized Venezuelan oil program Petrocaribe. After the terrible 2010 earthquake they took advantage of the government’s weakness to sideline Préval and impose the PHTK in a rushed ‘election’.
In February I wrote about Canada’s role in enabling Haitian corruption and violence after it came to light that PHTK senator Rony Célestin stashed nearly $5 million in Montréal property. The story quoted Haitian-Canadian author Jean “Jafrikayiti” Saint-Vil who explained: “The PHTK regime headed by Michel Martelly and his self-described ‘bandi legal’ (legal bandits), came to power thanks to fraudulent elections organized, financed and controlled by the foreign occupation force established in Haiti since the coup d’état of February 2004. The planning meeting for the coup d’etat and putting Haiti under trusteeship was organized by Canadian Minister for La Francophonie Denis Paradis. The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti [January 31-February 1, 2003] succeeded in overthrowing the legitimate President as well as 7,000 elected officials from the region’s most impoverished country. The elected officials were replaced by bandits such as ‘Senator’ Rony Célestin.”
Offering an even more stark way of understanding Canada’s relationship to violence in Haiti Saint-Vil asked, “Can you imagine [Hells Angels leader] Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher and [serial killer] Carla Homolka installed as Senators in Canada by fraudulent elections led by a coalition of Haitian, Jamaican, Ethiopian diplomats in Ottawa?” Few Canadians would be happy with such an outcome, but it’s a troublingly apt description of US, Canadian and French policy in Haiti.
It may turn out that the CIA or another arm of the US government had a hand in Moïse’s assassination. But, it’s more likely Moïse was killed in an internal PHTK struggle over political power, drug routes, pillaging state resources, etc. Or maybe there was a dispute over some gang alliance or act of violence.
A presidential assassination in the middle of the night with the probable involvement of other elements of the government reflects that deterioration and criminal nature of the Haitian state. It’s the outgrowth of the US and Canada empowering the most corrupt and violent actors in Haiti.
Washington and Ottawa support the most retrograde elements of Haitian society largely out of fear of the alternative: a reformist, pro-poor, government that seeks out alternative regional arrangements.
Canadian officials “knowingly support drug traffickers, money-launderers and assassins in Haiti”, tweeted Madame Boukman in February. “That is the only way Canadian mining vultures can loot Haiti’s massive gold reserves.”
It may be hard to believe, but that description is not far from the mark.
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Moderna, together with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), sent mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on December 12, 2019 — raising significant red flags
The providers agreed to transfer “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna” to the university’s investigator and was signed by Ralph Baric
Baric pioneered techniques for genetically manipulating coronaviruses, which became a major focus for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
Baric worked closely with WIV’s Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., on research using genetic engineering to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans”
Serious questions need to be answered, including: Were Moderna, NIAID and Baric aware that COVID-19 was circulating in mid-December 2019, or did they have knowledge far before that such a vaccine would soon be in demand?
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So much has happened over the past year that it may be hard to remember what life was like pre-COVID. But let’s flash back to December 2019, when the idea of social distancing, compulsory masking and lockdowns would have been met with disbelief and outrage by most Americans.
At that time, most were blissfully unaware of the pandemic that would change the world in the next few months. It wasn’t until December 31, 2019, that the COVID-19 outbreak was first reported from Wuhan, China,1 and at this point it was only referred to as cases of viral pneumonia, not a novel coronavirus.2 I say “most” because it seems some people may have been aware of something lurking much earlier than it appeared.
In confidential documents3 revealed by the U.K.’s Daily Expose, Moderna, together with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), sent mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill December 12, 2019 — raising significant red flags. As The Daily Expose reported:4
“What did Moderna [and NIAID] know that we didn’t? In 2019 there was not any singular coronavirus posing a threat to humanity which would warrant a vaccine, and evidence suggests there hasn’t been a singular coronavirus posing a threat to humanity throughout 2020 and 2021 either.”
COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate Was Released Prior to Pandemic
The confidential disclosure agreement relays a material transfer agreement between the providers — Moderna, NIAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The providers agreed to transfer “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna” to the university’s investigator.5
“The material transfer agreement was signed the December 12th 2019 by Ralph Baric, PhD, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then signed by Jacqueline Quay, Director of Licensing and Innovation Support at the University of North Carolina on December 16th 2019,” Daily Expose noted.
At this point, some backstory information is more than relevant. We know with great certainty that researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had access to and were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, and manipulating them to become more infectious and to more easily infect humans. We also know that they collaborated with scientists in the U.S. and received funding from the National Institutes of Health for such research.
Baric, who signed the material transfer agreement to investigate the mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate before there was a known COVID-19 pandemic, pioneered techniques for genetically manipulating coronaviruses, according to Peter Gøtzsche with the Institute for Scientific Freedom,6and these became a major focus for WIV.
Baric worked closely with Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, also known as “bat woman,” on research using genetic engineering to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” According to Gøtzsche:7
“Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to ‘examine the emergence potential.’ In 2015, they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS virus replacing its spike protein with one from another bat virus known as SHC014-CoV. This manufactured virus was able to infect a lab culture of cells from the human airways.
They wrote that scientific review panels might deem their research too risky to pursue but argued that it had the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks. However, the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the COVID-19 pandemic was negative, as this research highly likely created the pandemic.”
Moderna Gets Emergency Use Approval for COVID Vaccines
The rest of the story, as the saying goes, is history. December 12, 2019, Amy Petrick, Ph.D., NIAID’s technology transfer specialist, signed the agreement, along with Dr. Barney Graham, an investigator for NIAID, whose signature is undated.8 May 12, 2020, just months later, Moderna was granted a fast-track designation for its mRNA-1273 vaccine by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. According to Moderna’s news release:9
“mRNA-1273 is an mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein, which was selected by Moderna in collaboration with investigators from Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the NIH.”
December 18, 2020 — about one year after the material transfer agreement was signed — the FDA issued emergency use authorization for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 18 years of age and older.10 June 10, 2021, Moderna also filed for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 shot to be used in U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 17 years.11 Yet, we still have no answers to some glaring questions:12
“It was not until January 9th 2020 that the WHO reported13 Chinese authorities had determined the outbreak was due to a novel coronavirus which later became known as SARS-CoV-2 with the alleged resultant disease dubbed COVID-19. So why was an mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by Moderna being transferred to the University of North Carolina on December 12th 2019?
… Perhaps Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would like to explain themselves in a court of law?”
SARS-CoV-2 Appears To Be Uniquely Able to Infect Humans
Nikolai Petrovsky, professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, is among those who has stated SARS-CoV-2 appears to be optimally designed to infect humans.14
His team sought to identify a way by which animals might have comingled to give rise to SARS-CoV-2, but concluded that it could not be a naturally occurring virus. Petrovsky has previously stated it appears far more likely that the virus was created in a laboratory without the use of genetic engineering, by growing it in different kinds of animal cells.15
To adapt the virus to humans, it would have been grown in cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus would then adapt and eventually gain the ability to bind to the human receptor. U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) pointed out that the issue of binding sites is an important one, as the distinctive binding sites of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein “confer ‘near-optimal’ binding and entry of the virus into human cells.”16
Scientists have argued that SARS-CoV-2’s unique binding sites may be the result of either natural spillover in the wild or deliberate recombination of an unidentified viral ancestor. Baric and others, including Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance president, to which he is closely tied, were quick to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis, which suggests that SARS-CoV-2 accidently leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Yet, according to Gøtzsche:17
“On 9 December 2019, just before the outbreak of the pandemic, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how his researchers at the Wuhan Institute had created over 100 new SARS- related coronaviruses, some of which could get into human cells and could cause untreatable SARS disease in humanized mice … ”
Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance funded controversial GOF research at WIV; NIAID gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, which then funneled it to WIV.18 Daszak, despite working closely with WIV, was part of the World Health Organization’s investigative team charged with identifying the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Not surprisingly, the team dismissed the lab-accident theory.
Baric’s SARS-Like Virus Wasn’t Made Public Until May 2020
Regarding the novel SARS-like virus that Shi and Baric created in 2015, this research was conducted using a grant from EcoHealth Alliance.
While the information relating to the virus’ DNA and RNA sequences was supposed to have been submitted to a national biotechnology information database when the research was published, this wasn’t done until years later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As reported by Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director for the Organic Consumers Association:19
“The work, ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,’20 published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium21 on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium … and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH.
As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires22 authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited23 in GenBank until May 2020.”
Meanwhile, both Baric24 and Daszak were involved in organizing the publication of a scientific statement, published in The Lancet and signed by 26 additional scientists, condemning inquiries into the lab-leak hypothesis as “conspiracy theory.”25
Daszak was also made a commissioner of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19, but now that his extreme conflict of interest has been made public, he was recused from the commission.26
Baric, Daszak Downplay Lab-Leak Theory
At the time The Lancet statement was released in February 2020, Daszak had advised Baric against adding his signature because he wanted to “put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”27 The authors also declared no competing interests.
In an update published June 21, 2021, The Lancet stated, “Some readers have questioned the validity of this disclosure, particularly as it relates to one of the authors, Peter Daszak.”28 The journal invited the authors to “re-evaluate their competing interests,” and Daszak suddenly had much more to say. His updated disclosure statement reads, in part:29
“EcoHealth Alliance’s work in China includes collaboration with a range of universities and governmental health and environmental science organizations, all of which are listed in prior publications, three of which received funding from US federal agencies as part of EcoHealth Alliance grants or cooperative agreements, as publicly reported by NIH.
… EcoHealth Alliance’s work in China involves assessing the risk of viral spillover across the wildlife–livestock–human interface, and includes behavioral and serological surveys of people, and ecological and virological analyses of animals.
This work includes the identification of viral sequences in bat samples, and has resulted in the isolation of three bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are now used as reagents to test therapeutics and vaccines.
It also includes the production of a small number of recombinant bat coronaviruses to analyze cell entry and other characteristics of bat coronaviruses for which only the genetic sequences are available.”
Also of note, a special review board, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) committee, was created within the Department of Health and Human Services to evaluate whether grants involving dangerous pathogens are worth the risks.
Baden-Mayer explained, “This committee was set up as a condition for lifting the 2014-2017 moratorium on gain-of-function research. The P3CO committee operates in secret. Not even a membership list has been released.”30
Daszak stated in his updated disclosure, “NIH reviewed the planned recombinant virus work and deemed it does not meet the criteria that would warrant further specific review by its Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee.”31
However, according to Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright, an NIH grant for research involving the modification of bat coronaviruses at the WIV was sneaked through because the NIAID didn’t flag it for review.32 In other words, the WIV received federal funding from the NIAID without the research first receiving a green-light from the HHS review board.
The NIAID apparently used a convenient loophole in the review framework. As it turns out, it’s the funding agency’s responsibility to flag potential GOF research for review. If it doesn’t, the review board has no knowledge of it. According to Ebright, the NIAID and NIH have “systemically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review.”33
Who Knew What, and When?
We now have proof that Moderna and NIAID sent their mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates to Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in mid-December 2019. Were they aware that COVID-19 was circulating at that time, or did they have knowledge far before that such a vaccine would soon be in demand? The red flags, and cover-ups, continue to mount, but ultimately the truth will prevail.
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.
The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.
In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.
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Slowly, against their will, and against their natural inclination to watch football and eat pizza, Americans are awaking to the reality of a totalitarian system with its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of their existence. Sadly, the true nature of this tyranny still eludes the understanding of most citizens, in part because the process by which America was transformed utterly has been slow, in part because the commercial media points us away from the true causes of this slippage and pins all blame on easily identifiable bad guys.
Those seeped in the progressive political tradition sensed a radical loss of justice and transparency under the George W. Bush administration, a trend that only accelerated under the Trump administration—with a perceived reprieve under Obama and the possibility of a positive turn under Biden.
Those marinated in the juices of conservative politics observed an end of freedom and the spread of fake “leftist,” ideology that oppresses the citizen under Clinton and Obama.
Both interpretive communities refer to the same social and political trends, to the war on freedom that renders us up as sacrificial lambs to the cruel gods of global capital. The rhetoric employed by the two groups is so radically different, however, and the histories of the United States that they embrace are so divergent, that they are lost in intense ideological conflicts even as they describe the same creeping totalitarianism.
That conflict is no accident. That ideological battle over the insignificant is just what the doctor ordered for the interests of high finance. Or as J. P. Morgan put it,
“By dividing the people, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.”
The super-rich already had their consultants come up with detailed studies on how to divide up citizens by religion, by ethnic identity, by cultural signifiers, and by class so that they are incapable of unity even in the face of the complete takeover of the economy, the media, education and the political process.
“Progressives” refer to the supporters of Trump in rural areas as “stupid” and fundamentalist Christians refer to the followers of the Democratic Party as “evil.”
This profound misunderstanding is probably reinforced by numerous classified operations in which individuals promoting divisive left-wing, or right-wing, positions are encouraged, and paid, to do so as render those who should have common cause as foes.
There is another reason why we have such a difficult time understanding the transformation of our society. The nature of this totalitarianism runs against the assumptions we were taught by movies, novels, and news reports. Our minds are cluttered with archetypes for dictatorship and evil that are at odds with the reality.
The greatest crime of Hollywood was convincing us that evil takes the form of a monster with fangs and claws, of an evil leader with a sinister smile. Corrupt journalists extend this fiction to the public sphere, explaining how evil is embodied in foreign leaders like Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or in domestic ill-doers like Hillary Clinton (for the right) or Donald Trump (for the left).
As a result, we are unable to detect, or to understand, the takeover of our society that has taken place.
That is to say that we are confronted by “inverted totalitarianism,” to borrow the term of the philosopher Sheldon Wolin, a cultural and political state in which all aspects of our daily lives are controlled by multinational corporations without our knowing and we lose all freedom.
As a result, our actions are profoundly limited; we are constantly beaten down by an iron fist covered in the soft glove of interest charges, student loans, and constant surveillance.
The totalitarianism that we face is “inverted” in the sense that we expect some dictator standing on top and playing the bad buy, oppressing us out of personal greed, vanity or cruelty. But the true source of our misery is rather the manner in which multinational corporations use supercomputers to calculate profits and then extract as much money as possible from us by making it impossible for us to grow our own food, to heal our own illnesses, to teach ourselves, or to entertain ourselves. Instead, we must buy products, online, or in supermarkets, in transactions from which multinational corporations and banks will invariably take a major cut. The only learning that is recognized and accredited is expensive and is controlled by corporations.
We are offered only false choices between Pepsi or Coke, between Taco Bell or Wendy’s, between action films or romantic comedies, and between the Democratic or Republican Parties.
The process by which citizens lost their self-reliance, their self-sufficiency in food production and in energy production, and the basic skills of sewing, knitting and carpentry, growing dependent on products supplied by corporations, began 100 years ago. We can trace the current crisis back to the campaigns of John D. Rockefeller to force citizens to be dependent on petroleum through the promotion of automobiles and trade, the slashing of budgets for public transportation and the massive funding for highways, the push for the mechanization of farming and the popularization of plastics.
Rockefeller also paid off experts so as to marginalize homeopathic medicine and traditional treatments and create dependency on overpriced hospitals that are tied to corporations, while rendering universities and research institutes dependent on the benevolence of the rich, thus making systematic critiques of the sources of wealth a taboo topic.
To be more specific, the invisible inverted totalitarianism that has taken control of our daily experiences can be traced back to the launch of Windows as an operating system in 1985. Microsoft Word, under the rule of Bill Gates (an ardent student of John D. Rockefeller), set out to control the means by which citizens utilize their computers and later, to control how they interacted with each other over the internet.
Sure, presidential elections were held every four years, and the public was given a chance express itself. Secret secret police did not cart off those who criticized the government—in fact criticism of government was encouraged as way to distract from the impact of bank deregulation.
Most citizens were hardly aware that having one corporation control the system software for all computers that they supposedly “owed” meant that they had lost their freedom.
Yet the shift was profound. Whereas the individual previously could decide for himself where to place files in his office, how to organize documents and layout his papers around his typewriter, the manner in which information is organized within Windows is extremely limited, determined in advance by unaccountable forces and the format and layout cannot be modified by the user.
Needless to say, this first step down the road to tyranny, this fatal loss of basic autonomy, was carefully covered up in the rhetoric of convenience and efficiency, exciting innovation and technological advancement, so that few recognized the loss.
Myths about the importance of convenience, of connectivity and of globalization were swallowed by the entire population. Critical topics like the scientific method, the control of the means of production and the decision-making process in government, and in other institutions, were forgotten.
The next step in this hidden tyranny over our daily lives came in the form of search engines like Google, social networks like Facebook, and other massive, interconnected, corporations that mediated the interactions of the individual with the community, often taking over critical functions that previously belonged to the community or to non-profit institutions like schools or research centers.
Under the guise of greater convenience for the individual, businessmen with unlimited funding from investment banks were able to buy up rivals, block out alternatives that offered search engines as cooperatives, and thereby created search engines that pose as transparent institutions but derive money through the sophisticated manipulation of human interactions using algorithms.
Because Google and Facebook had such resources that they could lose money for years, the manner in which they whittled away at the autonomy of the citizen was almost undetectable. Equally important was the strategy of using short-term stimulation of the brain by postings, instant messages and gaudy news reports, to remap the connections between synapses so as to render most incapable of complex, three-dimensional, thinking. That service, the creation of a dumbed down, passive, population, was true product that internet giants offer to their real clients.
Google controls what information we access to, in what order we have access to it, and it lays out a hierarchy of significance in search results that has some basis in fact, but is primarily a political act for sale to the highest bidder.
Results of Google searches are altered, on a case-by-case basis, in response to the needs of corporations to promote their views to extremely specific audiences.
Although we are trained to think of Google as a public service, its falsehoods, increasingly given authority by the parallel Wikipedia entries created by public relations firms, are not subject to external review. Google users are never permitted to participate in the process of the formulation of policy, or in the review of content. That is to say, the United States calls itself a democracy, but the primary tool that citizens rely on for information is run as a dictatorship.
Another popular cloak for the slip into tyranny is the framing of “opinion” as content in the news. Scientific fact ceased to be central in reporting from 1990s. In its stead, opinion polls of groups selected by polling companies are held up as a confirmation of what is true.
Public opinion polls are the propaganda equivalent of stock buybacks. The billionaires, having radically deregulated the economy and dumbed down the population, merely force-feed their opinions to the public through the media that they control and then claim that the policies they want are demanded by the public.
Facebook gives the appearance that the citizen can express himself freely, and can make friends with anyone. Yet, since Facebook Inc. controls whom a citizen can easily find through its network, and who sees what, and it does not permit users to use their own software, or design their own page, or own the networks they create on Facebook, or to have any say in how Facebook is administered, the freedom is fiction.
Legal concepts like the contract have been twisted beyond recognition in the totalitarian cyberspace that surrounds us.
A contract is a negotiated agreement between two parties. On-line, however, whether it is the decision to accept cookies, or to comply with the rules for a commercial application, the user has no right to make demands of the corporation. He or she is given the false choice of either agreeing with all conditions offered, or not having access to the service. The contract is an empty ritual.
We are accustomed to permitting Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat or Instagram to determine what becomes of information that we share, and we are unaware of the billions in profits those corporations make by selling off the information, the content, and the creative ideas that we supply without giving us any compensation. In a sense, these social networks are a form of virtual slavery.
COVID19 Totalitarianism
Because the thinking of citizens has been degraded for decades, and citizens rely on corporate-sponsored sources for basic information, it became possible, for the first time, to create a virtual pandemic, planned by the super-rich, promoted by the news sources that they own, authorized by experts at the institutes and universities that they fund, and legitimated by government agencies (and international institutions like the World Health Organization) that have been radically privatized.
Previously, a significant number of citizens were capable of assessing the accuracy of information on their own. Research institutes like Harvard University still had an ethical commitment to the scientific method and to academic integrity.
All that is over now. The façades of the NIH and Harvard remain the same, maybe they are even better maintained, but the intellectual innards have rotted away. Distinguished professors are easily assembled to give testimony to ridiculous theories about COVID19.
The dangers of the COVID19 vaccines are not the primary threat. The danger lies rather in the shift of the decision-making process for policy away from science, and away from a transparent policy debate. COVID19 serves a successful precedent for invisible forces at private equity funds to decide medical policy in secret and then feed it to us through authority figures.
Those invisible forces now feel they are free to require of us, without any accountability to science, that we have any substance that they offer injected into our bodies as a condition for the right to attend school, to find employment or to receive medical treatment.
The process was made possible by the interaction of social networks, search engines, commercial media, and other critical components of daily experience that determine opinions concerning reliable and authoritative voices. That process is run as an invisible dictatorship that controls a distracted, confused and unfocused population, drowning in connectivity.
Nothing will get better until citizens recognize the cause of this nightmare was not the legacy of the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas or the Trumps, although they all played their role, but rather the end of the self-reliant and informed citizen with access to the writings of experts with a deep commitment to the scientific method and to ethical principles.
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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
I Shall Fear No Evil
Why we need a truly independent candidate for president
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This unit would also be the first ever mobile medium-range missile battery of the US Army, and three more are to follow.
The Army is pursuing a Mid-Range Capability (MRC) to fill the gap in the service’s fires portfolio between the Precision Strike Missile’s (PrSM) initial capability of roughly 499 kilometers and ranges it expects to achieve with ground-launched hypersonic missiles.
After the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty fell apart, the US immediately began revealing in-development missiles that would be in breach of the treaty.
The effort on developing the new mid-range missile battery is being led by the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) but once the first battery is fielded, the program will transfer to the Army’s Program Executive Office for Missiles & Space.
In 2022, the Army will assemble both the MRC launcher payload deployment system and the first Battery Operations Center (BOC) for the first battery.
A battery will consist of four launchers and one BOC, but the number and distribution of missiles included in the battery is classified.
A system integration and checkout is scheduled for the third quarter of FY22 followed by initial fielding and training to the first unit beginning in the first quarter of FY23.
The Army will seek a release to deploy the system in the third quarter of FY23, according to the schedule in the documents and will conduct an SM-6 test and a Tomahawk test also in the third quarter of FY23.
This development is moving rapidly, but the US Army works in several directions, as it is also beginning funding in FY22 to extend the range of PrSM out to 1,000 kilometers as part of its layered approach.
Mixing and matching ranges from different locations “creates an incredible dilemma for the enemy,” Brig. Gen. John Rafferty said. Rafferty is in charge of Long-Range Precision Fires (LRPF) modernization.
These developments and more are part of the renewed US strategy, poised at great power conflict and the need to defeat “peer aggression.”
All of the U.S. military services are investing in new long-range strike systems to meet this need.
The Army is investing in medium-range and very long-range surface-to-surface missiles to equip its newly formed Indo-Pacific and Europe Multi-Domain Task Forces (MDTF).
The Air Force, which has long provided DOD with the preponderance of its long-range strike capacity, is acquiring B-21 stealth bombers, next-generation cruise missiles, and other munitions that can be delivered by aircraft against targets in contested areas.
The Navy and Marine Corps are fielding new strike munitions for sea control and sea denial in the Indo-Pacific, including ship-borne long-range hypersonic boost-glide land attack weapons and vehicle-mounted medium-range missiles capable of attacking ships in littoral areas.
The Navy and Air Force are also increasing the range, effectiveness, and capacity of the “kill chain” needed to find, fix, track, and attack targets over long ranges.
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“There are numbers like over 61,000 reported COVID inoculation injuries, over 6,000 deaths as a result of the jab.
That’s horrific.
That should make every person shutter. But those are just numbers, right?”
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I hope this letter finds you and your families well. I hope you will continue in good health to perform your important work.
Thank you for all you do to make the world a better place for our children. I write to you both as World Leaders to ask for your advice and help in these challenging times. I would like to know what I can do, together with my friends, to help avert a Third World War, and prevent further suffering and death for millions for my brothers and sisters around the world. I have been reading the news about military build-up in Europe and South East Asia, etc., and the rhetoric being used by many of our World Leaders (words cut deeper than swords and often can never be taken back!) and wonder ‘what’s to be done to make peace and prevent violence and war’?
I know in your hearts you are both good men. You both know the pain of suffering and loss in your own lives and deep inside you don’t wish others to undergo pain and suffering.You both know that violence, no matter where it comes from, brings with it unbearable suffering into lives, often already crushed by the crosses, toils and disappointments ofliving not to mention pandemics, (such as your own countries, but particularly India) famines, poverty, climate crisis, etc. You both have the power to change things by working together. Please join NOW and exercise your leadership on behalf of a suffering humanity.
Having visited Russia and the USA and having met your peoples, I know they are good, who feel love for each other and humanity. I, believe your people are not, nor do they wish to be, enemies.For myself, I have no enemies only brothers and sisters. Yes, there is fear and anxiety about difference, but this should not divide and separate us, the human family.
The artificial enmity between Russia and the USA has gone on too long already, and the world asks you to end this by becoming friends and peacemakers not only for your own people, but for the entire world, especially the children, who deserve your help to survive violence, hunger, pandemics, wars, climate changes. Language is so very important and the tongue is mightier than the sword. Please, put away a rhetoric of insult and abuse and start a dialogue of respect for each other and your countries.
The war games being practiced in Europe are dangerous because something may happen that will trigger a waras evidenced by the two last World wars. We the Peoples of the World, do not want war, we want peace and disarmament, to feed the hungry and provide a better life for all children.
Please, President Putin and President Biden: Make peace not war, start to disarm and give the world some hope. It will become solid and reliable if you will create a joint scientific Peace Academy to replace violence with reason, primarily between Arabs and Israelis. This would be your joint immortal peacemaking contribution to history. We have the fundamental proposals of this Academy for your consideration.
Thank you! Love and Peace,
Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate – 1976
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At the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on October 22, 2020 Meeting, Steve Anderson, PhD, MPP, Director, Office of Biostatistics & Epidemiology, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) gave a presentation on CBER “Plans for Monitoring COVID-19 Vaccine Safety and Effectiveness”.
His presentation included a slide, below, about COVID-19 vaccine adverse event outcomes (injuries and deaths) which the FDA and CDC would be specifically monitoring. But he did not show the slide to VRBPAC, or the viewing public. He clicked right by it.
These side effect choices were not random. He explained they were based on evidence from the clinical trial data and from known science on the vaccine platform and components. This is from the transcript of the meeting.
These vaccine adverse event outcomes are being reported to VAERS in unprecedented numbers.
In the presentation, Anderson says that “Tom” also has information about adverse outcomes. By “Tom” he means Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC, and his presentation started at about 1:59 in the video — before Anderson — but Shimabukuro didn’t talk about the information at all and he also clicked right through two slides without pausing. One was a list of vaccine adverse event outcomes they would be looking for in the passive Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
The other was a list of vaccine adverse event outcomes they would be looking for in CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink System (VSD). The public and most independent researchers have no access to this data for independent review.
The FDA has a new system launched in 2017 (a full decade after FDA Amendments Act of 2007 that required them to create an active postmarket risk and analysis system covering at least 100 million persons) called Biologics Effectiveness and Safety (BEST) System. The BEST system is now being used to try to establish background rates for the COVID-19 vaccine “Adverse Events of Special Interest” that the CDC and FDA will be monitoring with their systems.
To estimate incidence rates of AESIs in special populations of interest stratified by calendar year, sex, age group, and race/ethnicity (where reliably available) in each data source over the period 2017–2020. These populations will include:
o Older adults(i.e.,65 years old and abovea tcohort entry)
o Pediatric population(i.e.,0–17 years old at cohort entry)
o Pregnant women
o Individuals who received a seasonal influenza vaccine in the previous calendar year
During this COVID-19 crisis, both the FDA and CDC have made decisions that have not been in the best interest of the population or individuals. They have approved investigational products without sufficient safety or efficacy data, and they have actively censored or ignored existing treatments and natural immunity. They are actively partnering with the COVID-19 vaccine makers.
There are two important aspects of establishing whether reported adverse events are related to receipt of a vaccine. One is epidemiological. The rates of certain health issues in the general population are compared to the rates in people getting vaccinated. That’s what the FDA’s BEST study is about. Obviously, this information alone cannot rule causation in or out. Biological studies are also needed. Can the product cause the outcome seen? Ever since the 1986 National Vaccine Injury Act passed, removing from vaccine makers liability for injury or death for products recommended to children and pregnant women, the CDC has been in charge of vaccine safety and utterly failed in their duties. Biological studies are almost non-existent. The CDC prefers to use weaker epidemiological studies that are easily manipulated to desired outcome, to try to claim reported events are not associated.
Will they do the same for the COVID-19 vaccines? If so, will they get away with it?
Fortunately during COVID, researchers around the world have been awakened to the capture and corruption of public health agencies and they are beginning to do their own, independent studies. They are starting their own journals that have no ties to governments or the drug industry. A revolution is beginning within the ranks of doctors and scientists who believe in honest and ethical science and medicine.
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The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, which also tracks reports of injuries and deaths following the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines.”
A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries.
The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.)
So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured due to COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.
The EudraVigilance database reports that through July 3, 2021 there are 17,503 deaths and 1,687,527 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
From the total of injuries recorded, half of them (837,588 ) are serious injuries.
“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.”
One subscriber from the UK commented on the article and stated that the same thing was happening there:
It is exactly the same in Scotland and England.
My vaccinated friends are not getting appointments with their family doctors who are avoiding them post vaccination even although there are no patients in the GP surgery waiting rooms when they have tried to get appointments. It is utterly cruel given they talked them into getting the vaccinations and accepted 10 UK pounds from the Scottish and English governments per person vaccinated on their patient list and did not disclose the risk of these vaccinations to the patients.
A friend nearly passed out close to the GP surgery, a kind stranger wheeled her up to the GP surgery and she was not allowed to be seen by her GP because she did not have an appointment. The nurse refused to take bloods because they are not allowed to do so until management confirms they can do this so they cannot even do exploratory bloods to investigate what has gone wrong with these patients post vaccination.
Another friend’s hospital consultant phoned a friend’s GP insisting her family doctor see her given she had had heart procedures and no appointments for 2 years. She told me after first Pfizer shot “it was like acid going into my veins” and the queen did not get the same vaccine asshe did which will be completely true. Her GP treated her with disdain and was not pleased to see her and my friend also tells me that every time she walks now post vaccination her heart races and her son has been unwell post vaccination too.
All my friends who got the vaccination have had severe worsening of their pre-existing medical conditions and some have got heart conditions they did not previously have or chronic obstructive airways disease.
I have noticed most have became irritable and short-tempered as they are becoming unwell not realising the vaccine is harming them and they are lashing out at others for no good reason.
In UK, NHS contributions are deducted from people’s salaries and the retired paid these all their working life and now are getting refused service but they will still take these NHS contributions regardless. It is wicked and cruel. Though it is the governments who are instructing the GP and hospital management to treat the patients in this abysmal manner.
I am quite sure this will be happening in most if not all countries.
God be with us all.
A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. This subscriber has volunteered to do this, and it is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.
Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.[1]
Here is the summary data through July 3, 2021.
Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2,Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 8,426 deaths and 632,623 injuries to 03/07/2021
17,754 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 99 deaths
14,858 Cardiac disorders incl. 1,165 deaths
126 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 12 deaths
42,716 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,928 deaths
269 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 17 deaths
1,349 Immune system disorders incl. 5 deaths
4,793 Infections and infestations incl. 259 deaths
3,378 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 92 deaths
3,359 Investigations incl. 93 deaths
1,616 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 94 deaths
19,416 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 88 deaths
175 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl. cysts and polyps) incl. 18 deaths
28,239 Nervous system disorders incl. 465 deaths
338 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 2 deaths
24 Product issues
3,193 Psychiatric disorders incl. 75 deaths
1,061 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 66 deaths
723 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 death
7,268 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 438 deaths
8,400 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 32 deaths
690 Social circumstances incl. 16 deaths
540 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 42 deaths
4,602 Vascular disorders incl. 160 deaths
Total reactions for the experimental vaccine AZD1222/VAXZEVRIA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/AstraZeneca: 3,871 deaths and 852,616 injuries to 03/07/2021
9,950 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 160 deaths
13,336 Cardiac disorders incl. 454 deaths
115 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 3 deaths
227,408 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,009 deaths
607 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 32 deaths
3,359 Immune system disorders incl. 14 deaths
19,508 Infections and infestations incl. 247 deaths
8,912 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 94 deaths
18,352 Investigations incl. 88 deaths
10,315 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 50 deaths
131,547 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 50 deaths
379 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl. cysts and polyps) incl. 9 deaths
180,575 Nervous system disorders incl. 612 deaths
279 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 5 deaths
117 Product issues
16,000 Psychiatric disorders incl. 33 deaths
3,045 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 33 deaths
8,593 Reproductive system and breast disorders
28,994 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 447 deaths
39,173 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 25 deaths
866 Social circumstances incl. 5 deaths
754 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 16 deaths
19,209 Vascular disorders incl. 283 deaths
Total reactions for the experimental COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 601 deaths and 44,486 injuries to 03/07/2021
405 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 18 deaths
659 Cardiac disorders incl. 73 deaths
16 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
250 Ear and labyrinth disorders
10 Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
518 Eye disorders incl. 3 deaths
4,283 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 25 deaths
11,832 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 150 deaths
58 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 4 deaths
161 Immune system disorders incl. 1 death
598 Infections and infestations incl. 16 deaths
413 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 8 deaths
2,420 Investigations incl. 39 deaths
225 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 11 deaths
7,687 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 17 deaths
18 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl. cysts and polyps)
9,547 Nervous system disorders incl. 76 deaths
15 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
11 Product issues
459 Psychiatric disorders incl. 5 deaths
150 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 8 deaths
166 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 1 death
1,453 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 47 deaths
1,125 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 2 deaths
91 Social circumstances incl. 3 deaths
393 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 27 deaths
1,523 Vascular disorders incl. 65 deaths
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Notes
[1] These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.
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United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era.
Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally count on to oppose wars have been the ones largely defending it. They have also often been the ones to label war opponents as “Assad apologists” or “genocide deniers”—causing them to be blacklisted.
Protest against bombing of Syria in Newark, New Jersey, in April 2017. Most protests against the war in Syria have been small like this, and protesters have been susceptible to ridicule as Assad lovers or apologists. [Source: northjersey.com]
In April, The Nation magazine published an essay by Gilbert Achcar, a professor of international relations at the University of London and co-author with Noam Chomsky of a book critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, entitled “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools.”
Achcar divides the Left into two factions—one which “opposes all forms of imperialism and oppression,” and one which “supports any regime or force that is the object of Washington’s hostility.” The latter includes “Russia’s thuggish capitalist and imperialist government, or Iran’s theocratic regime or the likes of Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein.”[1]
The binary Achcar paints is misleading because it does not take into account war critics’ attempts to present more nuanced portraits of American targets for regime change like Putin or Milošević or even Hussein that would account for their domestic popularity. Nor the value placed on the principle of national self-determination and sovereignty, and identification of the double standards of U.S. human rights concerns.
He quotes favorably in his Nation article from a 2019 statement signed by several prominent figures on the American Left—including Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, the late David Graeber and David Harvey—demanding that the United States “continue military support for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Force,” in the face of Donald Trump’s announced withdrawal.
This position was based on fear that if the U.S. withdrew, the Kurds would be slaughtered by Turkey, the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIS) or the “murderous Assad regime,” as Achcar termed it.
The Kurds, however, were being used as a proxy force by the U.S. in a regime-change operation that would enable foreign exploitation of Syria’s oil and military domination of the Middle East—and would inevitably be abandoned.
Western empires had used the pretext of human rights many times before to justify colonization, and recruited disaffected minority groups, which was no different in this case.
Voices from Syria
Mark Taliano and Basma Qaddour’s book, Voices from Syria—now out in its second edition—offers a strong rebuttal to Achcar and others who consider opponents of U.S. military intervention in Syria to be foolish.
The authors—one a Montreal based teacher, the other a Syrian journalist—point out that the majority of Syrians consider Assad an authentic nationalist who has saved Syria from jihadist terrorists sponsored by the U.S., NATO, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and Gulf Arab states like Qatar.
The terrorists have killed an estimated 150,000 civilians and another 260,000 fighters and kidnapped thousands more, some of whom were used for illegal organ harvesting.
Their goal is to impose a theocratic regime and to divide, plunder and exploit Syria and open it up to predatory foreign corporations.
Taliano and Qaddour write that “Syria’s stand against the Western agencies of death and destruction is a stand for all humanity against the dark forces that fester beneath our politicians’ empty words and the courtesan media’s toxic lies.”
These lies have ensured that few in the U.S. or West have acknowledged Syria’s heroic victory against colonial aggression—a modern-day equivalent to Vietnam’s victory over the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Long-Standing Plan for Regime Change
Two weeks after the September 11th attacks, General Wesley Clark was visited by a senior general who told him that the U.S. was going to attack Iraq: “The decision has basically been made.”
The key to the success of these latter operations was to convince the U.S. public that wars of aggression were military interventions carried out for humanitarian purposes. The way to do that was to give off the illusion that the targeted leaders were brutal dictators intent on waging a campaign of genocide against their own people.
Assad’s Accomplishments
Syria was a main target on Rumsfeld’s list because its leader, Bashar al-Assad, was a secular nationalist like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, who was defiant of the West.
In 2000, Bashar succeeded his father Hafez al-Assad, who had long been a thorn in the side of the West. He had allied Syria with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and in 1971 allowed the Russians to establish a naval base at Tartus.
Though vilified in the West, Bashar retains support of the majority of Syrians because he has advanced free health care and education for Syrians and retained Syrian control over most of its economy while rallying the people against foreign aggression.
Syrian city of Aleppo before and after U.S.-backed war of aggression on Syria. [Source: petapixel.com]
While certainly there are brutal aspects to his rule like with his father, Assad’s accomplishments before the war, according to Taliano and Qaddour, included: a) construction and restoration of 10,000 mosques and 500 churches; b) construction of 8,000 schools; and c) construction of 600,000 apartment units for young people and 6,000 hospitals and clinics.
Further, salaries increased by 300 percent under Assad’s rule, thousands of new businesses sprung up, agricultural and industrial capacity increased, the illiteracy rate was kept low, and the unemployment rate declined from 28 to 12 percent.
Assad family in 1980s. Hafez in lower right and Bashar on left. [Source: newrepublic.com]
These facts are at odds with the depiction of Assad as a genocidal tyrant.
The latter is part of a demonization campaign initiated by intelligence agencies and embraced by factions of the Left that have unwittingly helped to advance the agenda of the U.S. empire.
“Your Obama Leading Proxy War”
In March 2011, Americans were led to believe that idealistic pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in the southern city of Daraa—inspired by Arab Spring protests in Egypt and Tunisia, and following an incident of police brutality.
Seven police were killed by the demonstrators in the very first protests, and 60 security forces were massacred two weeks later. The plan of the mob was to provoke a police response that would make it seem like the security forces were reacting harshly, which would discredit Assad’s regime.
For the first three weeks, police and security personnel were under orders, though, not to carry guns.
As the protests spread, foreign terrorists began descending on Syria and were paid $300-$400 per month. Although Syrian soldiers were paid only one-tenth of that amount, they remained mostly loyal to the Syrian government.
Majd al-Zaim, a Syrian, stated that what had happened in Syria was “not a revolution or civil war [as has been depicted in the Western media]. The terrorists are sent by your government [the U.S.]. They are Al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, Wahhabi, Salafist, Talibans and the extremist jihadists are sent by the West, Saudis, Qataris, Turkey…. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting Al-Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country.”
Historical Background
Historically, Syria faced divisions between secular nationalist and Shia Alawites and Sunni fundamentalists who allied with the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1982, Hafez al-Assad crushed an Islamic rebellion (the Hama massacre), foreshadowing his son’s actions 30 years later.
Voices from Syria tells the stories of the victims of U.S. policy like Ammar, whose sister was killed by a Wahhabi suicide bomber while she was on her way to the local university.
Ammar said that, after the first blast, another suicide bomber blew himself up in the same place, taking advantage of the gathering of people and ambulance teams. At the hospital, Ammar saw many burned and charred bodies, including his sister, who was now a “body without a soul”—like so many others.
Lilly Martin, an American living in Syria, is quoted in Voices from Syria as stating that she could not vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election because Clinton had overseen “the transfer of weapons from Libya to Turkey to be used specifically by the American-backed terrorists.”
These terrorists destroyed Martin’s home on March 21, 2014, beheaded her Christian neighbors and kidnapped and raped the old ladies.
Image on the right: Lilly Martin [Source: muckrack.com]
Dr. Declan Hayes described an attack by al-Nusra (U.S.-backed jihadi group) on the village of Kesab where the terrorists swarmed across the border on motorbikes, pick-up trucks, and Western ambulances, and proceeded to desecrate all of Kesab’s churches, loot the village graves and strip the houses of anything of value.
Pepken Djourian and his wife saw their only son executed in front of them, after which his body was left to rot in the sun before being thrown into the ground like a dog.
In another case, terrorists beheaded and executed a captured soldier while he was speaking to his father on the phone so he could hear his son being killed.
The terrorists further roasted bakery workers in a town loyal to Assad in an oven and slaughtered staff at a medical clinic and displayed their severed heads in the marketplace for intimidation.
Operation Timber Sycamore
Some of the head choppers were trained by U.S. military advisers at terrorist training camps in Jordan under the CIA’s $1 billion Operation Sycamore, the largest covert operation since the arming of the mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Turkish helicopters could be seen overhead during armed terrorist invasions of towns while the Syrian Arab Army was fighting insurgents who wore Turkish military uniforms and carried Turkish military identification.
The Israelis allowed Al Qaeda militants, Jabhat al-Nusra, to use the occupied Golan Heights to fight against the Syrian Army, while the Israeli Air Force repeatedly bombed Syria.
Many Syrians, however, laud the Russians for helping to save their country.
Ammar told Taliano and Qaddour that “the Russians provided the biggest humanitarian aid by supporting the Syrian Armed Forces against Western backed barbarian terrorism,” and that Russian aid—including food and medical supplies—was distributed directly to needy people.
Lilly Martin stated that Russia had “saved the Syrian Coast”—along with Syrian towns like Kesab that were on the verge of destruction by the CIA-backed terrorists.
Cruel Economic War
The cruelty of Western policy is exemplified by its economic war on Syria, about which Achcar and his associates have been silent.
The goal of the economic war has been to weaken Syria and demoralize its people so as to pave the way for Syria’s conquest.
Militias affiliated with both the U.S. and Turkey blocked the sale by Syrian peasants of wheat and barley east of the Euphrates, thus exacerbating the food shortage in the country.
They have sold oil illegally in northern Iraq and set fires in an attempt to decimate Syria’s yield of strategic crops. Many of the fires have targeted olive trees, which are used to produce olive oil—a source of livelihood for many Syrians.
The economic sanctions have further prevented needed medical supplies and equipment from getting into Syria and caused milk shortages resulting in the deaths of children.
Fraudulent Pretexts
These sanctions have been legitimated by false propaganda.
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which was signed into law in December 2019 by President Donald Trump, was named after a government defector, Caesar, who leaked thousands of photographs alleging torture of civilians by Assad’s security forces.
CNN show discussing Caesar’s “torture” report that was a basis for extending sanctions. [Source: mondialisation.ca]
Caesar’s identity was also unclear and he was suspected of being in the employ of the CIA.
More Bright Shining Lies
American-educated opinion about the Syria conflict has been forged by numerous other deceptions.
These include allegations of chemical weapons attacks by Assad—which most Syrians believe were “staged by the terrorists helped by the USA and UK.”
Image below: James Le Mesurier, who led the White Helmets, was a suspected British MI6 agent who died under suspicious circumstances in November 2019. [Source: rt.com]
Another deception surrounds the White Helmets—a group of Western-funded humanitarian aid workers that received endorsement from A-list celebrities like George Clooney.
They staged scenes for public relations purposes, assisted in public executions, and functioned as an Al Qaeda affiliate, according to Taliano and Qaddour, which occupied and destroyed more than 7,000 schools.
The War on Terror Is a Fraud
The Syrian War exemplifies that the War on Terror is a fraud.
The U.S. government has claimed for the last two decades to be fighting the scourge of terrorism, but has armed, trained, and supported Islamic terrorists in Syria as part of an imperial strategy designed to control the country’s oil wealth and dominate the entire region.
U.S. policy in Syria is no anomaly as the U.S. has supported Islamic fundamentalists in Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Gulf Arab states like Qatar, which allows terrorist financiers to operate in its borders.
Only a very limited number of Americans have recognized the dangers of this strategy—owing in large part to the sophisticated propaganda that has effectively brainwashed many of those who would traditionally identify themselves as antiwar.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].
Notes
[1] Declassified British documents obtained by The Grayzone Project showed that Achcar trained British Cultural Defense Units who played a key role in the British war in Afghanistan. The Units have also advised the military on how to operate in other countries, including those that were at one time colonized by Great Britain. See Ben Norton, “Elite UK military unit secretly trained by leftist regime-change advocate Gibert Achcar and other academics,” The Grayzone Project, October 3, 2019, https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/03/leftist-regime-change-activist-gilbert-achcar-academics-train-uk-military/
Featured image is from The Greanville Post
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
Comments Off on The Syria Deception: The Public Has Been Hoodwinked Yet Again into Supporting a Criminal War of Aggression—and One that Has Been Effectively Lost
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Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, born in Berlin in 1950, is a German medical doctor, a scientist and teacher. He practices foremost in the US, but also gives regular seminars in Germany (See this).
In the following one-and-a-half-minute video, Dr. Klinghardt says it all. What to do to totally control, dumb and eventually kill people: You spray their food with Glyphosate (Bayer/Monsanto), contaminate the air with aluminum dust from chemtrails (see this), and add some more aluminum to vaccines, for example Covid-19 injections, actually they are not vaccines.
The US CDC has only granted manufacturers of the mRNA-type inoculations temporary permissions to call them “experimental gene therapy”. They are not to be named vaccines. If governments, the media and the medical community at large does it anyway, they are lying to you.
What is further needed, Dr. Klinghardt says, are certain electromagnetic frequencies (5G), to kill the detox enzymes in your body. And precisely these frequencies are brought to us via our cell-phones, to which 99% of people living in western societies are virtually “married”.
In conclusion, he observes, that behind such a diabolical plan, there must be evil scientists and evil politicians. See the video (in German with English translation) below or here.
What to do? Abstain from taking PCR tests which have nothing to do with actually detecting the never isolated SARS-CoV-2 virus. They are based – unnecessarily – on taking slime samples from way up in your nose, touching the thin membrane that separates your sinuses from the brain. You may bet that the tests have another agenda. The “tests” potentially could introduce chemicals into your brain which dull your Pineal gland, so as to diminish and eventually kill your sensibility and sensitivities.
What these non-vaxxes also do, is they have a strong sterilizing effect on women and drastically reduce men’s sperm count. It all fits in with the eugenists agenda of massive depopulation.
What to do? Simple. Abstain and don’t let yourself be coerced into taking PCR tests and mRNA-type experimental gene therapy jabs.
Yes, you may be temporarily confronted with many restrictions for travel and attending public events. Stick it out. This crime of epic proportions is in the process of being laid open. Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, and his team of the international-German Corona Investigative Committee has already begun filing class-action suits in Canada and the US, and is suing institutions and individuals in Germany and in Europe at large.
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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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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) would do well to coordinate its members’ efforts to contain Afghan-emanating regional terrorist threats such as ISIS-K, encourage a political compromise between Kabul and the Taliban, and devise a plan for developing the war-torn country’s connectivity potential so as to ensure its long-term stability.
The future of Afghanistan is more uncertain than ever before against the backdrop of the Taliban’s rapid advance throughout the country in the wake of America’s impending military withdrawal by 31 August. Most observers predict an intensified period of civil war if the group, which is still regarded as terrorists by most countries such as Russia despite Moscow pragmatically hosting them on several occasions over the years for peace talks, isn’t able to take Afghanistan’s main cities that still remain under government control. The resultant chaos might create a dangerous opportunity for ISIS-K to expand its presence in the country and even become a major security threat to Central and South Asia. With the US practically abandoning its anti-terrorist commitments, perhaps for what some suspect might be Machiavellian reasons related to provoking this very scenario, it therefore falls on the SCO to ensure regional security instead.
This group comprises most of the Central Asian Republics (CARs, with the exception of Turkmenistan), China, India, Pakistan, and Russia.
Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia are observers while Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey are dialogue partners.
One of the SCO’s mandates is to jointly confront the threats of terrorism, separatism, and extremism as well as enhance economic cooperation between its members. Considering the fast-moving events described in the first paragraph of this analysis, it therefore follows that they have a natural interest in working together when it comes to Afghanistan. This can take security, political, and economic forms. The first concerns supporting the two member states bordering Afghanistan, especially highly fragile and formerly civil war-torn Tajikistan, while the second involves facilitating dialogue between the warring parties. The third, meanwhile, concerns Afghanistan’s connectivity potential.
To elaborate a bit more, nearly 1,600 Afghan troops reportedly fled to Tajikistan in recent weeks in order to escape the Taliban’s rapid advance in Northern Afghanistan. Sputnik reported that the group has allowed a major border crossing to continue operating unimpeded, and it’s widely known that the Taliban doesn’t harbor any regional expansionist plans. It’s therefore highly unlikely that they’d pose a threat to Tajikistan or any other CAR. Even so, the prevailing uncertainty over Afghanistan’s future might result in large-scale refugee influxes, especially if ISIS-K exploits the situation. For this reason, President Putin recently promised his Tajikistani counterpart full support for ensuring its border security. There should be no doubt that the Russian military base in that country is more than capable of fulfilling this mission if requested to do so, but it nevertheless provides an excellent opportunity for the SCO’s members to cooperate more closely on the security front.
Thus far, its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) hasn’t seen any real action. The SCO is comprised of very diverse members who lack meaningful security coordination apart from largely symbolic drills that are held every now and then. It would immensely boost the organization’s effectiveness if Tajikistan requested its assistance, even if only for the purpose of functioning as a so-called “live action exercise” in support of the Russian-led mission. That doesn’t imply the prolonged dispatch of their servicemen under the SCO banner either since this could also be accomplished by more intelligence sharing through this structure as well as the provisioning of relevant material support. Although India is in a rivalry with China and Pakistan, they all might put their differences aside in the interests of pragmatism so as to obtain the multilateral security experience that could be put to use during future regional crises, whether concerning Afghanistan or elsewhere.
The second dimension of the SCO’s game plan for Afghanistan should involve all members doing their utmost to encourage a political compromise between Kabul and the Taliban. Reuters reported earlier this week that the latter intends to present a peace plan during talks sometime next month, which might in effect function as an ultimatum for preventing their speculatively planned move on the capital. The Taliban denies that it’s seriously considering any such attack, but observers fear that it might become an inevitability if Kabul refuses to submit to their demands. In order to avoid the pronounced instability that would likely follow that battle, it’s in the SCO’s interests to see to it that the Taliban and Kabul reach a deal during the next round of talks. The Afghan government is already largely demoralized by the US’ withdrawal and its official American ally will soon be less capable of defending it than ever before following its September withdrawal, so this scenario is indeed possible.
Therein lies the third part of what the SCO should do to help Afghanistan and that’s present the basics of a comprehensive regional economic integration proposal for showing all domestic stakeholders that peace would veritably be in everyone’s best interests. February’s agreement between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan to construct a trilateral railway (casually referred to as PAKAFUZ after the first letters of each participating country’s name) could unlock the war-torn country’s supercontinental integration potential by finally bringing together Central and South Asia. That could in turn lead to the establishment of a new economic axis stretching from Russia in Eastern Europe all the way down to India in South Asia that could tentatively be referred to as the SCO Corridor. This ambitious proposal should ideally be presented to Kabul and the Taliban by the SCO as a whole with the assistance of all its members during the next round of peace talks in August.
There isn’t enough time to flesh out the exact details, but each country could still generally commit something or another to this plan, even if only broad promises of financial assistance (whether grants and/or loans) as well as technical expertise. What’s most important is that both warring parties (but especially obstinate Kabul) realize that coming to a pragmatic compromise would suit all of Eurasia’s interests, not just their own, and that the supercontinent’s most promising multipolar body has a direct stake in that outcome. The SCO must walk the walk instead of just talk the talk, so to speak, hence the need to put aside some of its rival members’ differences in order to jointly present a credible plan to this end (whatever its lack of detail for the moment considering the short time frame). The much-needed goodwill and trust that could facilitate this could be greatly advanced through the earlier proposal of providing multilateral security assistance to Tajikistan.
To bring everything together, the SCO has the responsibility to take the lead in ensuring that the situation in Afghanistan doesn’t soon spiral out of control and create fertile ground for ISIS-K’s regional expansion. The bloc can only accomplish this by jointly containing such terrorist threats to the neighboring CARs like Tajikistan, encouraging Kabul and the Taliban to pragmatically reach a political compromise during the next round of peace talks in August so as to prevent the feared intensification of the Afghan Civil War, and greatly assisting the aforementioned by devising a credible plan for transforming Afghanistan into the centerpiece of the proposed SCO Corridor from Eastern Europe to South Asia. This is admittedly a lot to ask for an organization that hasn’t yet ever been confronted with a real crisis, let alone one that’s as urgent as the Afghan Civil War, but it’s still possible to accomplish even some of what’s been suggested so long as the political will is present.
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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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The settlements removed the pharmaceutical company from a jury trial that started Tuesday, June 29, on Long Island, New York. Several big opioid makers and distributors are also defendants in the case.
Johnson & Johnson did not admit liability or wrongdoing in settling with New York state and with Nassau and Suffolk counties, but the $229.9 million settlement with the state also called for the company to stop selling the painkillers nationwide.
Johnson & Johnson fuels opioid epidemic
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that “the opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc” across the nation and that “Johnson & Johnson helped fuel this fire.” James said her focus remains “getting funds into communities devastated by opioids as quickly as possible.”
Johnson & Johnson said the settlements were consistent with its prior agreement to pay $5 billion to settle opioid claims by states, cities, counties and tribal governments nationwide. The company and the largest U.S. drug distributors – AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. – have proposed paying a combined $26 billion to end thousands of opioid lawsuits.
Tuesday’s opioids trial was one of several scheduled for this year, with others underway in California and West Virginia. Drugmakers AbbVie Inc. and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. and several distributors are among the defendants. Pharmacy chain Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. is also a defendant, though it was sued only by the counties. (Related: Kentucky sues WALGREENS for promoting opioid epidemic.)
Walmart Inc., Rite Aid Corp. and CVS Health Corp. were detached from the trial during jury selection. CVS reportedly settled with Nassau and Suffolk counties although terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.
Johnson & Johnson has also been appealing an Oklahoma judge’s 2019 ruling that the New Jersey-based company pay that state $465 million for its deceptive marketing of opioids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said nearly 500,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2019.
Johnson & Johnson causes all sorts of health problems
The pharmaceutical giant knew for decades that its baby powder was tainted with carcinogenic asbestos and chose to keep that information from regulators and the public. A government-funded study from the mid-1990s found that Johnson’s baby powder caused cancer in rats and other studies have found an increased risk of cancer in women who used the company’s talc-based products.
In 2018, the company was ordered to pay $4.7 billion to thousands of victims who reportedly developed cancer from using Johnson & Johnson’s products. In that case, 22 women alleged the company’s talc-based products, including its baby powder, contained the known carcinogen, asbestos, which caused them to develop cancer. According to reports, there are over 9,000 similar talc lawsuits against the company.
These cases may have contributed to the hesitancy of many Americans to take the coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine manufactured by Johnson & Johnson – one of the three COVID-19 vaccines to receive emergency use authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The other two were manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna.
Pfizer has long history of misleading public about its drugs
Pfizer also had a long history of misleading the public about its drugs.
In 2000, the Washington Post published a major exposé accusing Pfizer of testing a dangerous new antibiotic called Trovan on children in Nigeria without receiving proper consent from their parents. The experiment occurred during a 1996 meningitis epidemic in the West African country.
Interestingly, the Washington Post is now defending the same company in regards to COVID-19 vaccine.
Pfizer pays $2.3B in largest health care fraud settlement
The pharmaceutical giant also paid out $2.3 billion in 2009 to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products. It was the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice.
Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc., a subsidiary of Pfizer, has agreed to plead guilty to a felony violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for misbranding Bextra with the intent to defraud or mislead. Bextra is an anti-inflammatory drug that Pfizer pulled from the market in 2005.
The company agreed to pay a criminal fine of $1.195 billion, the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the U.S. for any matter. Pharmacia & Upjohn also forfeited $105 million, for a total criminal resolution of $1.3 billion.
In addition, Pfizer has agreed to pay $1 billion to resolve allegations under the civil False Claims Act that the company illegally promoted four drugs – Bextra; Geodon, an anti-psychotic drug; Zyvox, an antibiotic; and Lyrica, an anti-epileptic drug.
The federal share of the civil settlement is $668,514,830 and the state Medicaid share of the civil settlement is $331,485,170. Pfizer has gotten all those money back and more as its COVID-19 vaccine became the first to get EUA from the FDA.
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A Maryland healthcare worker who had just accepted a job with the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital reportedly died after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine required for employment.
Appearing skeptical, 45-year-old mom Robin Spring Saunders wrote on social media that she received her first jab on June 21 and that it was mandated by her place of work.
“I never thought I’d get a Covid shot but I got my first one today,” a post from Saunders stated. “Unfortunately my job requires it.”
In a Facebook update, Robin’s mom asked for prayers for her daughter after she suffered a reaction to the vaccine and was in the hospital ICU.
“Johns Hopkins told her she had to have the shot to start her new job,” her mom wrote.
Robin’s cousin Crystal wrote on Facebook that Robin had had her “2nd covid shot,” which would have spaced the two doses out by mere days, and that she was “in the ICU with brain swelling and heart issues.”
“She is currently on a ventilator,” Crystal wrote. “She was also told she had to have this shot in order to start her new job.”
Other family members also desperately asked for prayers, and noted that she may have had her “2nd covid shot.”
Posts did not note whether Robin received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
According to a post later that day from Saunders’ daughter, however, her condition took a turn for the worst and she died in the ICU.
An obituary at the Connelly Funeral Home of Essex in Baltimore shows a memorial for Robin.
At least one commenter on Facebook advised the family to seek legal help, as it remains to be seen if the hospital will be held liable.
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Former Pfizer Vice President and Chief Science Officer Michael Yeadon today told America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) that a Reuters“fact checker” article calling his statements “misinformation” is “a mixture of straw men and sheer invention,” saying the Reutersarticle was “well worth rebutting”.
This is not the first timeReuters has tried to discredit Yeadon by “fact checker” obfuscation, although past attempts have been less half-hearted. This time, Reuters called Yeadon an “anti-vax proponent” who “has made unfounded claims”. Relying on an entity that calls itself “Meedan’s Health Desk, a group of public health scientists working to tackle medical misinformation online,” the Reuters“fact check” addresses Yeadon statements on asymptomatic spread, variants, the COVID-19 vaccine, and its use in pregnancy.
The article’s concluding “verdict” tries to claim that “infected but symptom-free people can spread the coronavirus; vaccinated people are better protected but not 100% immune; research shows COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for adults and pregnant women.”
Relating to the article, Yeadon said: “The narrative statements that have repeatedly been claimed by the authorities which are a pack of lies are:
“1. Asymptomatic transmission. It’s definitely a lie. Have you seen that video where Fauci states that ‘it’s always a symptomatic person who drives an epidemic and never people without symptoms’?
“There’s also a terrific peer-reviewed journal article showing that domestic transmission in asymptomatic cases was effectively zero.
“All marries up with the statements I’ve made, and with biological logic.
“2. Variants. They’re just being idiotic. I can show several good quality papers demonstrating that T-cells from a convalescent person or an immunized person each recognize all the then-available variants, again, as anticipated by fundamentals of immunology. The weak twaddle in their piece about antibodies is risible.
“3. Vaccines. The bastards are actually claiming they’re safe. Got them. We have VAERS, Yellow Card, and EMA monitoring. We have mechanism of toxicity. We have multiple open letters to EMA (warning of blood clots) which were immediately followed by vaccine withdrawals (for blood clots).
“4. Pregnancy/fertility. No one in their right mind thinks giving experimental treatments to pregnant women is other than reckless. Especially when reproductive toxicity testing is incomplete.”
Yeadon continued:
“But on top of this stupidity, are two recent public disclosures: (I) the distribution of vaccine to tissues in mice shows a very disturbing concentration into ovaries. No one has followed it up, so the assumption has to be this is happening in humans too, and (II) our concern expressed in the December 2020 petition to EMA about immune cross-reactivity between spike protein and human syncytin-1 has been confirmed. A paper was very recently published showing young women making antibodies to syncytin-1 within days of vaccination.”
Summarizing, Yeadon concluded:
“Of course this is wholly fraud. Imagine that the number of people in U.K. who’d actually been killed by the virus, instead of dying with it, was just a couple of thousand; you’d been on the streets with torches and pitchforks.
“You should be. Governments everywhere have lied and lied and lied about every one of the central narrative points about this virus.
“The effect of compliance with their ludicrous policy responses has been to hollow out and arguably to have destroyed economically several G20 counties, and actually increased the number of avoidable deaths, not least by deprivation of healthcare.
“These people all need locking up in that new high-security facility being built at speed at Wellingborough, Northants. The prima faciecase against a dozen or so people in U.K. warrants their arrest pending criminal prosecutions.
“If these figures are of the same order of magnitude for other countries as well, and there is no reason to assume otherwise, then the plague is a deception of unprecedented proportions, and crimes committed against humanity on a huge scale have been committed here.”
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Featured image is from America’s Frontline Doctors
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From its headquarters just blocks from the White House, a small, high-powered team of former ambassadors, lawyers, and Obama appointees has spent the past few years solving problems for the world’s biggest companies.
Less than six months into the Biden administration, more than 15 consultants from the firm WestExec Advisors have fanned out across the White House, its foreign policy apparatus, and its law enforcement institutions. Five, some of whom already have jobs with the administration, have been nominated for high-ranking posts, and four others served on the Biden-Harris transition team. Even by Washington standards, it’s a remarkable march through the revolving door, especially for a firm that only launched in 2017. The pipeline has produced a dominance of WestExec alums throughout the administration, installed in senior roles as influential as director of national intelligence and secretary of state. WestExec clients, meanwhile, have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute.
The arrival of each new WestExec adviser at the administration has been met with varying degrees of press coverage — headlines for the secretary of state, blurbs in trade publications for the head of cybersecurity — but the creeping monopolization of foreign policymaking by a single boutique consulting firm has gone largely unnoticed. The insularity of this network of policymakers poses concerns about the potential for groupthink, conflicts of interest, and what can only be called, however oxymoronically, legalized corruption.
WestExec does not affirmatively share its clients, and public financial disclosure forms only offer broad outlines. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that government ethics laws written decades ago aren’t equipped to handle a situation in which a single firm launches 15 senior officials. “Yes, they’re employed by the government, I’ll grant you that. But are they actually working for the American people or not? Where does their loyalty lie?” said Clark. “The private sector can in essence co-opt the public sector.”
“These White House officials are experienced government leaders whose prior private sector experience is part of a broad and diverse skill set they bring to government service,” said a White House spokesperson in a statement. WestExec did not reply to a detailed list of questions for this story.
The firm describes one of its chief selling points as its “unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis,” now confirmed by the saturation of its employees in positions of power. WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts and helped defense corporations modernize with tech; it worked to help multinational companies break into China. One of its collaborators is the defense-centered investment group Pine Island Capital Partners, which launched a SPAC, or “blank check” company,” last year. Tony Blinken advised Pine Island and was a part owner. (Michèle Flournoy, another WestExec co-founder, had her nomination to be secretary of defense nixed. President Joe Biden instead nominated Lloyd Austin, himself a former Pine Island partner but not a WestExec consultant.)
What makes WestExec “boutique” is the promise that its executives would have face time with its seasoned policymakers. “We felt other firms brought people in for big names and never got to see the big names,” said one WestExec co-founder in 2020. “Tony is on client calls.”
The WestExec to Biden administration pipeline, part one. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
Blinken, now Secretary of State, advised household names like telecommunications giant AT&T, defense contractor Boeing, shipping magnate FedEx, and the media company Discovery as a WestExec founding partner. He worked for Big Tech pillars Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Uber. He helped niche companies like speakers bureau GLG, art seller Sotheby’s, and biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Blinken also lists clients that are global investment firms and asset managers, like Blackstone, Lazard, Royal Bank of Canada, and the multinational conglomerate SoftBank — which does extensive business with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He even advised the consulting group McKinsey & Company. Though Blinken left WestExec in July 2020 — after The American Prospect inquired about the relationship — each of these businesses has an international profile that may impact his calculations as he implements Biden’s foreign policy.
Blinken also brought several of his key staff members at the State Department with him from WestExec. His senior adviser Julianne Smith, who listed Boeing and SoftBank as clients, earned $34,000 as a WestExec consultant while holding down a full-time role at the think tank German Marshall Fund. Smith has been nominated to be permanent representative to NATO. (Blinken also brought WestExec executive assistant Sarah McCool to the State Department as his director of scheduling.) Barbara Leaf, a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, worked for the firm and advised the National Basketball Association. She went on to serve as Biden’s senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. Leaf awaits a vote to be the State Department’s assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs. Meanwhile, consultant Daniel B. Shapiro, Obama’s ambassador to Israel and a “very busy” early member of the firm, according to his colleague, is being floated as a Middle East envoy. The Prospect revealed last summer that one of WestExec’s clients was Windward, an Israeli artificial intelligence company that specializes in ship tracking.
The firm also provided a comfortable place for Biden’s most powerful intelligence chiefs to wait out the Trump administration. Director of National IntelligenceAvril Haines had her name scrubbed from WestExec’s website early on, but she worked with the firm from October 2017 to July 2020, when she joined Biden’s transition team as foreign policy lead. According to a questionnaire completed before her confirmation hearing, she delivered “strategic advice” on “cyber norms; national security threats; and testing, evaluation, validation and verification of machine learning systems by the Department of Defense” to clients like Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Open Philanthropy. Deputy Director of the CIA David S. Cohenwas an early member of WestExec’s “core team” alongside Haines and Blinken. But it’s impossible to know who his clients were, because an exemption for the spy agencies’ officials means that his disclosure is not publicly available.
“That exempts them from public accountability,” said Clark, the ethics expert at Washington University, “and that’s a problem because we can’t necessarily rely on internal controls and external, public disclosure.” A CIA spokesperson declined to share the companies Cohen worked for at WestExec.
Then there’s Chris Inglis, who the Senate recently approved as national cyber director. He earned $15,000 from the firm and worked for internet security outfit CrowdStrike and email encryption company Virtru.
Since its founding in 2017, WestExec’s focus has been to enhance the capabilities of defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. It partners with the Silicon Valley venture firm Ridgeline, which describes itself as “mission-driven” — meaning that unlike some tech investors, which avoid working with the military, Ridgeline seeks out military products. Both Cohen and Inglis appeared on Ridgeline’s website, and through that partnership, Blinken invested in the venture group’s many portfolio companies. The obscure startups have kooky names (Agolo, Doodle, Wallaroo, etc.) but are innovating advanced technologies like drones, artificial intelligence, and robots. The alumni of WestExec are deeply engaged in emerging tech, which could lead to conflicts of interest as they take on policymaking roles that affect the contracts the government greenlights.
One of the administration’s most visible faces also worked at the firm. Jen Psaki, now the White House press secretary, was a senior adviser to WestExec, where she did crisis communications for the Israeli facial recognition software company AnyVision and advised the nonprofit Spirit of America.
The WestExec to Biden administration pipeline, part two. Not pictured: senior adviser to the domestic policy adviser Erin Pelton; director of scheduling for the secretary of state Sarah McCool; nominee for assistant secretary of defense Celeste Wallander; Biden-Harris transition team advisers Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Cristina Killingsworth, Jay Shambaugh, and Puneet Talwar; deputy director for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission John Costello; and vice chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Robert O. Work. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
As companies faced the Covid-19 pandemic’s massive challenges,Lisa Monaco joined Blinken on client calls. As a WestExec adviser, she worked for Boeing and SoftBank. Now Monaco is the U.S. deputy attorney general. Before Matt Olsen earned millions of dollars as a senior official at Uber, he worked early on as a principal for the firm. Biden has nominated Olsen to be assistant attorney general in the National Security Division.
Ely Ratner is developing China policy for the Defense Department as assistant secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs. At WestExec, according to his Office of Government Ethics forms, “Billable hours were for background white papers without identified clients and most income was passive retainer.” Though he only earned $11,450 at WestExec, he did so while making more than $400,000 at the think tank Center for a New American Security.
Gabrielle Chefitz, a senior associate of WestExec, joined the Pentagon as special assistant to the under secretary of defense for policy. In June, Biden nominated WestExec senior adviser Celeste Wallander to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
WestExec’s consultants are so connected and pedigreed that they often hold down multiple jobs, appointments, and titles. That’s how someone like Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former WestExec senior adviser, can join the Treasury Department as a senior official without much notice. At the end of May, Biden nominated Rosenberg to be Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorism financing. In her LinkedIn profile, she says she has managed federal initiatives to “promote financial transparency.” Her role at WestExec fell off the bio that the White House released publicizing the nomination.
The U.S. Agency for International Development administrator’s office is also full of the firm’s consultants. Colin Thomas-Jensen “advised WestExec and its clients on due diligence and navigating political risk in Sub-Saharan Africa,” and those clients included Boeing, SoftBank, and Delta Capital Management, a venture capital firm that specializes in financing litigation. In April, Thomas-Jensen joined USAID as national security director. That month, WestExec’s Latin America expert Michael Camilleribegan serving as senior adviser to Administrator Samantha Power and as executive director of the agency’s Northern Triangle Task Force. As a WestExec consultant, he advised Blackstone, SoftBank, the Intel founder’s multibillion-dollar nonprofit Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the mineral extraction company Rio Tinto.
And it’s not just international policy that will be shaped by the firm. Erin Pelton, who works in the White House as a senior adviser on domestic policy, provided advisory services to WestExec. And the nominee to be the Department of Commerce’s assistant secretary for industry and analysis, Grant Harris, has a connection to the firm. His personal consulting firm Connect Frontier, which advises companies and organizations working in developing markets, hired WestExec.
“West Exec’s advisors have worked together at the highest levels of government, navigating and anticipating the impact of international crises on decision making — we can provide the same insights and strategies to business leaders around the world,” Blinken said in an early pamphlet advertising the firm.
A half-year after Blinken’s return to government, the pamphlet is still featured on WestExec co-founder and managing partner Nitin Chadda’s LinkedIn profile. It’s a reminder to potential clients about the firm’s enduring proximity to power.
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” It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.
It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
It is really quite amazing to reflect on the series of events that unfolded in the 1960s.
At the start of the decade, the U.S. State stood continuing to defend segregation based on race. A few years later, a generation of Americans saw themselves in many jurisdictions embracing more freedom and equity. In the first few years, America’s war campaign in south-east Asia was hardly questioned. Good men upon leaving high school suited up to be dispatched to a mission of battle with little regard to the patriotic necessity of the task. In the later years, the popular opposition to the war in Vietnam grew to the point of abandoning their country as a draft dodger rather than participate in a questionable horror.
With the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, so also ended the dream of the 1960s.
In 1968, Kennedy was running to replace as president his older brother John F Kennedy shot while in office under suspicious circumstances. Following a successful result in the California primaries, he finished speaking in the Embassy Room ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and headed down a passageway to the kitchen, the pantry, and the press room where reporters were waiting. Along the way, a young man named Sirhan Sirhan popped in front of him where over a dozen witnesses saw him, and fired at Kennedy. Several people tackled Sirhan, but in the process, Kennedy went down and several other people present were shot as well, though none had died. [2]
Kennedy was rushed to hospital. Twenty six hours after the incident, Kennedy passed away. All at once, hopes for a future with increased promise, health, education and peace as opposed to war pretty much died as well in the public imagination. [3]
His was the fourth assassination in less than five years of a mighty leader guiding the populace towards a more just and prosperous future. The other three, of course, were John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. In one sense, the deaths of those four people in such a limited span of time may have been enough to throw dark clouds over the sunshine chasing away the despairing evils nesting in the tarnished nation.
Over the next four weeks, the Global Research News Hour spends time looking into each and every one of these shocking crimes. It assesses what might have been different had the murders not been successful. It examines the various holes in the official stories revealing truths that are hidden, and arrives in the end at how those in power operate, control and cover-up the crimes affecting us all.
This week’s instalment focuses on the last of the four deaths: Robert F. Kennedy. Not only is it the most visibly provable crime committed by someone other than Sirhan Sirhan, but the individual in question is facing a parole hearing at the end of march.
The investigator who will be playing a role directing us through the 60s assassinations is a remarkable chronicler of every single one of these cases. He has even been referred to as the guru of the probers into the assassinations. His name is James DiEugenio.
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Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.
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Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.
Robert F. Kennedy speaking at the University of Kansas (March 18, 1968); www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-at-the-university-of-kansas-march-18-1968
Lisa Pease (2018), ‘A Lie to Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy’, Feral House; www.amazon.ca/-/fr/Lisa-Pease-ebook/dp/B07J5RSBN1/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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The reign of the country’s longest serving Prime-Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has officially come to an end after 12 years. He is now standing trial facing widespread corruption charges.
Although muted celebrations did take place among some of those who love democracy, many progressives are still cautious about the track record of his replacement, Naftali Bennett.
Bennett has been a vocal supporter of the settlement movement for many years and has a poor record when it comes to defending basic human rights and respecting norms of international law.
Bibi (as Netanyahu is known) has vowed to return and will be doing all he can to disrupt the new government – which is united only by their desire to keep him out of power. Parties from across the spectrum of Jewish-Israeli politics are joined by the United Arab List (or “Ra’am” party), marking a huge change from the status quo. Previously, parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Knesset have done so from Opposition.
While it is the most diverse government in Israeli history, Bennett’s Yamina party won just 6.2% of the vote. This gives Bennett a dubious world record – no-one has ever won such a small amount of the popular vote and become a national Prime Minister before.
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America has an accountability problem. In fact, if the Covid-19 disaster, the January 6th Capitol attack, and the Trump years are any indication, the American lexicon has essentially dispensed with the term “accountability.”
This should come as no surprise. After all, there’s nothing particularly new about this. In the Bush years, those who created a system of indefinite offshore detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, those who implemented a CIA global torture program and the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance policy, not to mention those who purposely took us to war based on lies about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, were neither dismissed, sanctioned, nor punished in any way for obvious violations of the law. Nor has Congress passed significant legislation of any kind to ensure that all-encompassing abuses like these will not happen again.
Now, early in the Biden era, any determination to hold American officials responsible for such past wrongdoing, even the president who helped launch an assault on the Capitol, seems little more than a fantasy. It may be something to discuss, rail against, or even make promises about, but not actually reckon with — not if you’re either a deeply divided Congress or a Department of Justice that has compromised itself repeatedly in recent years. Under other circumstances, of course, those would be the two primary institutions with the power to pursue genuine accountability in any meaningful way for extreme and potentially illegal government acts.
Today, if thought about at all, accountability — whether in the form of punishment for misdeeds or meaningful reform — has been reduced to a talking point. With that in mind, let’s take a moment to consider the Biden administration’s approach to accountability so far.
How We Got Here
Even before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the country was already genuinely averse to accountability. When President Obama took office in January 2009, he faced the legacy of the George W. Bush administration’s egregious disregard for laws and norms in its extralegal post-9/11 war on terror. From day one of his presidency, Obama made clear that he found his predecessor’s policies unacceptable by both acknowledging and denouncing those crimes. But he insisted that they belonged to the past.
Fearing that the pursuit of punishment would involve potentially ugly encounters with former officials and would seem like political retribution in a country increasingly divided and on edge, he clearly decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Ultimately, as he said about “interrogations, detentions, and so forth,” it was best for the nation to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward.”
True to the president’s word, the Obama administration refused to hold former officials responsible for violations of fundamental constitutional and legal issues. Among those who escaped retrospective accountability were Vice President Dick Cheney, who orchestrated the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq based on lies; the lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo, who, in his infamous “Torture Memos,” justified the “enhanced interrogation” of war-on-terror prisoners; and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who created a Bermuda triangle of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In terms of reform, Obama did ensure a degree of meaningful change, including decreeing an official end to the CIA torture of prisoners of war. But too much of what had happened remained unaddressed and lay in wait for abuse at the hands of some irresponsible future president.
As a result, many of the sins that were at the heart of the never-ending response to the 9/11 attacks have become largely forgotten history, leaving many potential crimes unaddressed. And even more sadly, the legacy of accountability’s demise only continues. Biden and his team entered office facing a brand-new list of irregularities and abuses by high-ranking officials, including President Trump.
In this case, the main events demanding accountability had occurred on the domestic front. The January 6th insurrection, the egregious mishandling of the pandemic, the interference in the 2020 presidential election, and the use of the Department of Justice for political ends all awaited investigation after inauguration day. At the outset, the new government dutifully promised that some form of accountability would indeed be forthcoming. On January 15th, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcedthat she planned to convene an independent commission to thoroughly investigate the Capitol riots, later pledging to look into the “facts and causes” of that assault on Congress.
Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland similarly promised, “If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.” Meanwhile, signaling some appetite for holding his predecessor accountable, during the presidential campaign, Joe Biden had already ruled out the possibility of extending a pardon to Donald Trump. In that way, he ensured that, were he elected, numerous court cases against the president and his Trump Organization would be open to prosecution — even as Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, recently suggested, reviving of the obstruction of justice charges that had been central to the Mueller investigation of the 2016 presidential election.
Reluctance in the Halls of Accountability
Six months after Joe Biden took office, there has been no firm movement toward accountability by his administration. On the question of making Donald Trump and his allies answer for their misdeeds, the appetite of this administration so far seems wanting, notably, for example, when it comes to the role the president may have played in instigating the Capitol attack. Sadly, Pelosi’s call for an independent commission to investigate that insurrectionary moment passed the House, but fell victim last month to the threat of a filibuster and was blocked in the Senate. (Last week, largely along party lines, the House passed a select committee to investigate the insurrection.)
Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the pandemic, potentially responsible for staggering numbers of American deaths, similarly seems to have fallen into the territory of unaccountability. The partisan divisions of Congress continue to stall a Covid-19 investigation. National security expert and journalist Peter Bergen, for instance, called for a commission to address the irresponsible way the highest levels of government dealt with the pandemic, but the idea failed to gain traction. Instead, the focus has turned to the question of whether or not there was malfeasance at a Chinese government lab in Wuhan.
It matters not at all that numerous journalists, including Lawrence Wright, Michael Lewis, and Nicholson Baker, have impressively documented the mishandling of the pandemic here. Such disastrous acts included early denials of the lethality of the disease, the disavowal of pandemic preparedness plans, the dismantling of the very government office meant to respond to pandemics, the presidential promotion of quack cures, a disregard for wearing masks early on, and so much else, all of which contributed to a generally chaotic governmental response, which ultimately cost tens of thousands of lives.
In truth, a congressional investigation into either the Capitol riots or the Trump administration’s mishandling of the pandemic might never have led to actual punitive accountability. After all, the 9/11 Commission, touted as the gold standard for such investigations, did nothing of the sort. While offering a reputable history of the terrorist threat that resulted in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and a full-scale summary of government missteps and lapses that led up to that moment, the 9/11 report did not take on the mission of pointing fingers and demanding accountability.
In a recent interview with former New York Timesreporter Philip Shenon, whose 2008 book The Commission punctured that group’s otherwise stellar reputation, Just Security editor Ryan Goodman offered this observation: “[An] important lesson from your book is the conscious tradeoff that the 9/11 Commission members made in prioritizing having a unanimous final report which sacrificed their ability to promote the interests of accountability (such as identifying and naming senior government officials whose acts or omissions were responsible for lapses in U.S. national security before the attack).”
Shenon added that the tradeoff between accountability and unanimity was acknowledged by commission staff members frustrated by the absence of what they thought should have been the report’s “most important and controversial” conclusions. In other words, when it came to accountability, the 9/11 Report proved an inadequate model at best. Still, even its version of truth-telling proved too much for congressional Republicans facing a similar commission on the events of January 6th.
Note, however, that the 9/11 Commission did lead to movement along another path of accountability: reform. In its wake came certain structural changes, including a bolstering of the interagency process for sharing information and the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
No such luck today. And signs of the difficulty of facing any kind of accountability are now evident inside the Department of Justice (DOJ), too. Despite initial rhetoric to the contrary from Attorney General Merrick Garland, the department has shown little appetite for redress when it comes to those formerly in the highest posts. And that reality should bring to mind the similar reluctance of Barack Obama, the president who originally nominated Garland unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court.
For anyone keeping a scorecard of DOJ actions regarding Trump-era excesses, the record is slim indeed. While the department did, at least, abandon any possible prosecution of former National Security Advisor John Bolton for supposedly disclosing classified information in his memoir on his time in the Trump administration, Garland also announced that he would not pursue several matters that could have brought to light information about President Trump’s abuse of power.
In May, for instance, the department appealed a court-ordered call for the release of the full version of a previously heavily redacted DOJ memo advising then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the evidence in the Mueller Report was “not sufficient to support a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the President violated the obstruction-of-justice statutes.” In fact, the Mueller Report did not exonerate Trump, as Mueller himself would later testify in Congress and as hundreds of federal prosecutors would argue in a letter written in the wake of the report’s publication, saying, “Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would… result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”
Adding fuel to the fire of disappointment, Garland pulled back from directly assessing fault lines inside the Department of Justice when it came to its independence from partisan politics. Instead, he turned over to the DOJ inspector general any further investigation into Trump’s politicization of the department.
The Path Forward — or Not?
These are all discouraging signs, yet there’s still time to strengthen our faltering democracy by reinstating the idea that abuses of power and violations of the law — from inside the White House, no less — are not to be tolerated. Even without an independent commission looking into January 6th or the DOJ prosecuting anyone, some accountability should still be possible. (After all, it was a New York State courtthat recently suspended Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law.)
On June 24th, Nancy Pelosi announced at a news conference that a select Congressional committee, even if not an independent 9/11-style commission, would look into the Capitol attack. That committee, she added, will “establish the truth of that day and ensure that an attack of that kind cannot happen and that we root out the causes of it all.” True, she didn’t specify whether accountability and reform would be part of that committee’s responsibilities, but neither goal is off the table.
And Pelosi’s fallback plan to convene a House select committee could still have an impact. After all, remember the Watergate committee in the Nixon era. It, too, was a select committee and it launched an investigation into abuses of power in the Watergate affair that helped bring about President Nixon’s resignation from office and helped spark or support court cases against many of his partners in crime. Similarly, the 1975 Church Commission investigation into the abuses of the intelligence community, among them the FBI’s notorious counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO, was also a select committee project. It led to significant barriers against future abuses — including a ban on assassinations and a host of “good government” bills.
Pelosi rightly insists that she’s intent on pursuing an investigation into the Capitol attack. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler are similarly determined to investigate the government seizure of Internet communications. Local court cases against Trump, Giuliani, and others will, it appears, continue apace.
Through such efforts, perhaps the potentially shocking facts could see the light of day. Continuing such quests may lead to anything but perfect accountability, particularly in a country growing ever more partisan. Above and beyond the immediate importance of giving the public — and history — a reliable narrative of recent events, it’s important to let Americans know that accountability is still a crucial part of our democracy as are the laws and norms accountability aims to protect. Otherwise, this country will have to face a new reality: that we are now living in the age of impunity.
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When Alexander Parkes invented the first thermoplastic in 1856, he probably had no idea how pervasive his invention would become in the centuries that followed. Today, thanks to the invention of injection molding, plastic is used in almost any industry you can imagine, including manufacturing, packaging, construction, education, transportation, and healthcare.
The use of plastic in manufacturing has been expanding exponentially since it was introduced over one and a half centuries ago. For example, by 2018, the production of plastics on a global scale reached almost 360 metric tons. It is expected that over a billion metric tons of plastics will be produced by 2050.
From the numbers above, it’s clear that plastic will continue to be an important part of the manufacturing process. Consequently, processes like injection molding will continue to play a significant role for those who want to manufacture thousands, if not millions, of products with plastic components.
In this article, we follow the history of plastic and injection molding. We start by focusing on the events that led to the invention of plastic as we know it today. The article will then focus on the invention of the first plastic molding machine and how the technology has progressed since then.
The First Condensation Polymer
The development of the first condensation polymer produced by Jacob Berzelius in 1847 paved the way for developing artificial commercial plastic about 15 years later. The first condensation polymer was polyester, made from tartaric acid and glycerin.
Jacob Berzelius was a Swedish chemist whom Britannica.com describes as one of the founders of modern chemistry. The same source reports that Berzelius “is especially noted for his determination of atomic weights, the development of modern chemical symbols, his electrochemical theory, the discovery and isolation of several elements, the development of classical analytical techniques, and his investigation of isomerism and catalysis, phenomena that owe their names to him.”
The First Artificial Commercial Plastic
Alexander Parkes registered the patent for the first thermoplastic in 1856 in the United Kingdom. He called the material Parkesine. This transparent material was produced by treating cellulose in nitric acid and then dissolving it in alcohol. The process resulted in a flexible material that could be molded into any shape when hot and would harden as it cools down.
As Parkesine became more popular, so did its uses. Its popularity also grew because it was cheaper and easier to work with than ivory, bone, and wood, which had been the primary materials for making such items as buttons, combs, and piano keys in the past.
The Plastics Hall of Fame reports that “Parkes’ earlier work in natural rubber compounding was helpful in his later efforts to develop a plasticizer for cellulose nitrate.” The same source adds, “He used a variety of solvents as well as camphor.”
About four years after Parkes’ patent registration, John Wesley Hyatt perfected the Celluloid. The Plastic Hall of Firm suggests that “Although Parkesine and its successors were never commercially successful, Parkes’ work provided the path for Hyatt to make his breakthrough with plasticized cellulose nitrate as a substitute for ivory billiard balls and other groundbreaking applications.”
Inventing the First Plastic Molding Machine
Following his work in perfecting Celluloid, John Hyatt partnered with his brother Isaiah Hyatt to patent the first plastic molding machine in 1872. Initially, the machine was used to produce billiard balls from Celluloid. When compared to the plastic injection molding machines of today, the inaugural machine was rudimentary.
Rudimentary as the Hyatt brothers’ first molding machine was, it made the process of making things like billiard balls, hair combs, buttons, and piano keyboards much easier.
The Hyatt brothers had started working on the idea that finally came to fruition in 1868 when a billiard-making firm had requested them to come up with a way that would make it possible to create billiard balls in a way that was efficient and would result in more uniform balls.
Notwithstanding all the developments in plastic and injection molding in the second half of the 19thcentury, there was still a considerable challenge with the use of cellulose. It proved to be highly flammable, presenting a significant fire hazard. The fire hazard was solved by German scientists Arthur Eichengrun and Theodore Becker in 1903. Their efforts produced types of cellulose that were less flammable.
The First Truly Synthetic Plastic
As efforts continued to improve the qualities of plastic and make it safer to use, Leo Hendrik Baekeland created what is often called the first truly synthetic plastic: Bakelite. This was in 1912. Bakelite is called the first truly synthetic plastic because not a single molecule in the plastic can be found in nature.
Writing for ScientificAmerican.com, Susan Freinkel explains the conditions under which Bakelite became popular. She reports that Bakelite was invented when the demand for a scarce natural substance known as shellac started escalating because of its excellent electric insulation capabilities. At that time, the electrical industry was seeing a rapid expansion.
To show how popular Bakelite would later become, Freinkel quotes a 1924 issue of Time magazine: “Families gathered around Bakelite radios (to listen to programs sponsored by the Bakelite Corporation), drove Bakelite-accessorized cars, kept in touch with Bakelite phones, washed clothes in machines with Bakelite blades, pressed out wrinkles with Bakelite-encased irons—and, of course, styled their hair with Bakelite combs.” Adding that Bakelite was a “material of a thousand purposes.”
Many of the popular thermoplastics still in use today were invented in the 1930s and 1940s. Hundreds of polymers have been added over the years, increasing the use of plastic molding.
Spurred by the Economic Boom Following WW II
For almost seven decades after the Hyatt brothers patented Celluloid and plastic machine molding, the process remained relatively unchanged. However, by 1946, the World War II effort, which had just ended the previous year, had created an enormous demand for products that needed to be made cheaply in huge numbers. This demand fueled the economic boom that followed the war.
In response to the growing demand for cheap, mass-produced products in the post-war period, James Hendry produced the first screw injection molding machine in 1946, creating a seismic shift in the plastic industry. This made it possible to do things that would have not been possible before, like premixing and adding color before molding.
The screw injection molding machine allows the plastic material to flow under gravity onto a turning screw from the hopper. The screw supplies the mechanical energy that, together with the mechanical heaters, melts the resin. As the molten resin enters the mold, the screw retracts back in the direction of the hoper. Encyclopedia Britannica, in the diagram below, illustrates this process.
Introducing the Gas Plastic Injection Process
When Hendry invented the first extrusion screw injection machine in 1946, he did not go home to bask in the glory of his efforts. He continued his work in the plastic molding field.
In the 1970s, Hendry’s efforts resulted in the introduction of gas in plastic molding, making it possible to create more complex plastic products. The stronger products that could be made using this process led to plastic taking over many of the roles previously played by other materials like steel.
Plastic Injection Molding Today
The improvements that have taken place in the plastic injection molding industry since the 19th century continue to this day. Almost any product today can be made from plastic or has a plastic component.
Plastic injection molding has become more pervasive because improvements over the years have turned it into a quick and affordable method of creating high-quality products.
Even though plastic injection molding still uses the same fundamental principles as those introduced by the inventors of the process, like the Hyatt brothers, centuries ago, computers have vastly improved contemporary processes and made it possible to rapidly and precisely create more intricate parts.
The Future of Plastics and Injection Molding
Learning about the history of plastics and injection molding provides us with a chance to peep into the technology’s future.
Ronan Ye writes for the online digital magazine IndustryToday.com and predicts that plastic injection molding will continue to be a growing technology. This growth is spurred by industries like car manufacturing that turn to plastic because it is lighter and results in motor vehicles using less energy and, in the process, reducing the harm to the environment caused by the use of fossil fuels.
Ye also notes that the plastic molding industry will also benefit from continuous improvements in software, improving the accuracy of parts and lowering costs. He predicts a future where “the industry will continue to evolve with better technology, environmental conditions, and finer material specifications.”
For those who are not yet using plastic injection molding, Ye has a prophecy: “Knowing the advantages of technology and the latest trends as well, it shouldn’t take too much time before you implement plastic injection molding in your field of work.”
The plastic injection molding industry may have started with two men getting a brief from a billiard ball-making firm that wanted to make better and more even balls, but today it has grown into an industry where much more serious stuff than billiard balls is at play.
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“The politically initiated climate catastrophe theory is the biggest pseudo-scientific scandal of the 21st century so far,” says meteorologist David Dilley, a 20-year employee of NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Climate Change: The Single Greatest Misinformation Campaign in World History” – Stephen Moore, CNS News, May 2015
“CO2 isn’t a problem. It is probably the biggest misdirection in the history of science.” “You cannot find a record of any length, of any time period in the history of the Earth where CO2 has caused temperature to increase.” – Dr Timothy Ball, environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg
“’Global Warming’ is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” – Prof. Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
“There is no denying that there is also in science – more often than we scientists would like – deceit and fraud, not only negligent sloppiness, but really deliberate fraud.” – Dr. Hubert Markl, former President of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science.
“Climate models are ‘simplistic nonsense’” – Leo Smith, WUWT on January 6, 2015
“We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear.” “Top climate scientists, who often rely on state funding, have been “manipulated and politicized”. – Philippe Verdier, weather chief at France Télévision, Oct.2015
The hysteria over the alleged threat of global warming “is the biggest scientific scandal in history,” noted Japanese scientist Dr Kiminori Itoh, one of the co-authors of the IPCC report.
Professor Seitz, former president of America’s National Academy of Sciences concluded “I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”
“It is CO2 climate alarmism that is a lie and thus the greatest scientific, political, economic and educational scandal of our time.” – Dr Ralph D. Tscheuschner, physicist
“Climatic change has existed on this earth ever since it has existed. For the time being, the reasons for this manifold climate change have not been sufficiently researched. And there is absolutely no reason to assume that it will not continue. But to get worked up about it and to think that mankind could stop this change by a joint decision in Heiligendamm (at the G8 summit), that is pure hysteria, that is stupid stuff.” – Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt on 3 June 2007, interview, BILD newspaper.
“It is easier to deceive people than to convince them that they have been deceived.”-Mark Twain
“We no longer have experience in dealing with real emergencies. This leads us to fantasise about catastrophes with relish. For example, the climate catastrophe, which I consider an astonishing phenomenon of mass delusion.” – Prof. Gerhard Schulze, sociologist, Bamberg
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe foresaw the “climate catastrophe”:
“One must always repeat what is true, because error is also constantly preached around us – and not by individuals, but by the masses, in newspapers and encyclopaedias, at schools and universities. Error is on top everywhere, and it is comfortable and cozy in the feeling of the majority, which is always on its side.”
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.
“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.
“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” – Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.
“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” – Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.
“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so… – Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.
“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” – Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.
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Dr Rudolf Hänsel is a qualified psychologist and educationalist.
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The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) condemns the arrogance and illegality of United Nations Special Envoy for Haiti Helen La Lime’s July 8 statement that Haitian Prime Minister Claude Joseph will be the new president, just one day after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
The decision was announced to the press after a closed-door UN Security Council meeting had been called on Haiti. But BAP asks: Who gave the United Nations special envoy the power to make that kind of determination for the people of Haiti?
This sounds like a play right out of the old regime-change book. As BAP stated in its July 7 press release, BAP smells a rat.
BAP is concerned the political situation the United States created by supporting a dictatorship in Haiti is quickly replicating the moment when the United States swept in to colonize the predominantly African/Black country after the 1915 assassination of Haiti’s president, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.
“The Black Alliance for Peace remains steadfast in our call against foreign intervention and occupation of Haiti,” says Jemima Pierre, BAP’s Haiti/Americas Coordinator. “We call on all anti-imperialist and Black internationalist forces to stand with the Haitian people and oppose U.S. and European interventions deployed under the guise of the ‘Responsibility to Protect.’”
What Haiti needs is authentic national sovereignty and self-determination.
“When people say Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, they fail to understand it is the Pan-European colonial powers that have kept Haiti with its hands tied behind its back,” says BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka. “We say time out on white Western powers causing destruction in the global South.”
Shortly after Democrats wrung their hands over the possibility of Donald Trump staying past his term in office, Biden came into office and immediately lent his support to Moïse to stay beyond the February 7 term limit. That decision sent thousands of Haitians protesting in the streets week after week.
“The Haitian people clearly understood that the United States, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States were behind this,” says Chris Bernadel, a member of BAP’s Haiti/Americas Committee. “During these massive protests, they called for all of these Western powers to exit Haiti.”
While Biden expressed support for Black Lives Matter and for democracy during his campaign for president, true support would have meant ending U.S. meddling in Haiti’s affairs. This assassination relieves the Biden-Harris administration of the embarrassment of having to reconcile the contradiction between pretending to respect Black lives and democracy and supporting a dictator who had reigned after his term had ended on February 7.
That is why for BAP, it doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger to kill Moïse because the Pan-European colonial-capitalist powers are responsible for the suffering of the Haitian people.
BAP vigorously opposes any and all foreign institutions and structures intervening in Haiti. The Haitian people must be allowed to exercise self-determination and address their internal political situation without interference, as BAP noted in its July 6 press release.
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Featured image is by Lautaro Rivara/People’s Dispatch
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A report released today by the Center for Biological Diversity details how pervasive and damaging offshore fracking and other extreme oil and gas extraction methods have become in the Gulf of Mexico since 2010.
Based on an analysis of federal records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and published scientific studies, the report documents more than 3,000 instances of offshore fracking, 700 cases of acidizing offshore wells, and at least 66.3 million gallons of fracking waste dumped into the Gulf over a decade.
Chemicals used in offshore fracking and acidizing pose significant health risks to both humans and wildlife, including cancer, reproductive harm, neurotoxicity and even death. The increasing use of fracking could threaten the tourism and fishing industries, which account for about 2.85 million jobs on the Gulf Coast — or about 10 times the number of jobs in the region’s federal offshore fossil fuel industry.
“Offshore fracking threatens Gulf communities and wildlife far more than our government has acknowledged. To protect life and our climate, we should ban these extreme extraction techniques,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center. “A decade into the offshore fracking boom, officials still haven’t properly studied its public health impacts. The failure to curb this major source of pollution is astounding and unacceptable.”
Offshore fracking has become a near daily occurrence over the past decade. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, blasts water and chemicals into the seafloor to fracture rock and release oil and gas. Acidizing injects hydrofluoric or hydrochloric acid to etch pathways in rock walls and release the fossil fuels.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows companies to discharge unlimited amounts of fracking wastewater into the Gulf. An industry report to the EPA found that each frack releases about 21,480 gallons of fracking waste, including biocides, polymers and solvents, into the Gulf of Mexico.
These chemicals kill aquatic species in laboratory tests that simulate concentrations of the substances found near offshore platforms. Many chemicals used in fracking are known to harm reproduction and development, yet about 76% of the chemicals used in fracks haven’t even been studied for their impacts on human and wildlife health.
Despite the known health risks of many fracking chemicals and the lack of knowledge about many others, the federal government approves extreme well-stimulation methods at a rapid rate.
Today’s report, titled Toxic Waters: How Offshore Fracking Pollutes the Gulf of Mexico, is available here.
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Featured image: Cover of Toxic Waters report (Photo by Drew Bird Photography)
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The British newspaper Daily Telegraph did some kite-flying in the weekend that London is considering open-ended deployment of a contingent of elite special forces to Afghanistan “ to provide training to Afghan units and deploy with them on the ground as advisers.”
At the same time, the New York Times reported that White House approves Gen. Austin S. Miller, the top American commander in Afghanistan, staying on at his post for “at least a couple more weeks,” although US troop withdrawal is complete.
Connecting the dots, it appears that the US is trying hard to replace the forever war in Afghanistan with a Syria-like hybrid war. The stunning success Russia registered in ensuring the survival of the Assad regime in Syria provides a role model for the Pentagon commanders.
Thus, Miller will “help transition the American military mission” to a hybrid war. The Pentagon has worked out an “over-the-horizon capacity” whereby American warplanes and armed Reaper drones based mainly in the Persian Gulf will participate or back up the Afghan military operations against the Taliban. read more
The US still hopes to reorganise the counter-terrorism capabilities and assets in the region. Foreign Ministers of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were recently invited to Washington for consultations to formulate backup plans that could allow the US to bank upon these two countries. Uzbekistan seems favourably inclined, prompting Afghan President Asharf Ghani to visit Tashkent to follow up. (here, here, here, here and here)
In effect, Washington is seeking to reposition some forces in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which means that the first-tier troops, drones, bomber planes, and intelligence assets to be placed at bases or appropriate facilities in these Central Asian countries remain available in real time for intervention in the war against the Taliban.
As in Syria, local Afghan militia groups can be brought into the fight against the Taliban. Afghan warlords have worked with the Pentagon and the CIA previously. Equally, the lobby of Pentagon contractors is very influential in the Beltway and the White House is all but certain to extend their contracts.
The grand strategy appears to be to: a) beef up the capacity of the Afghan forces which would prevent an outright Taliban takeover but without the US taking on any combat duties; b) copy from the Russian playbook in Syria by heavily using air power without putting boots on the ground; c) and, make the Taliban realise through a war of attrition that there is no alternative to a negotiated settlement.
In an interesting role reversal from Syria, the US will claim that its involvement in Afghanistan is at the invitation of the Kabul government.
Indeed, if the strategy is seen to be working, other NATO countries can be expected to join the fray, as had happened in Syria and Iraq, embedded in the militia groups or Afghan military units.
The strength of the Pentagon contractors is put at 18000 personnel, the bulk of whom have served in the US military previously. The activities of the Wagner Group in Libya and some African countries apparently provide an inspiring model for the Pentagon.
The American media is awash with apocalyptic visions of Afghanistan’s descent into civil war. This has helped generate domestic support in the US for the Pentagon and CIA’s continued involvement in Afghanistan, even as President Biden extracts political mileage for ending the forever war. Simply put, a hybrid war will be a “win-win” situation for the White House, Pentagon and the CIA — and NATO.
The bottom line is that for geopolitical reasons, the US and NATO are determined to remain as the dominant foreign presence on the Afghan chessboard. Washington visualises that the regional states — Russia, China, Iran or Pakistan — may have serious reservations about a long-term US / NATO presence in Afghanistan, but they will not confront the US.
Will the US strategy of hybrid war work? A definitive answer will be possible only through August, given the variables at work. But the chances are rather bleak. The humiliating defeat at the hands of the Taliban has created a profound credibility problem for the US in the region.
Besides, intrinsically, this is a high-risk strategy. The Taliban will resist and American lives may be lost. Again, the Central Asian states must agree to provide the staging posts for the hybrid war. The Taliban has sternly warned them.
Indeed, Russia and China are opposed to any American military presence in the Central Asian region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has hit out at sections of Afghanistan’s ruling elite who are collaborating with Washington’s hybrid war plans, accusing them of trying to prolong the negotiation process and scuttle the prospects for an interim government.
“They should think about the consequences of these actions for their homeland,” Lavrov said. “Russia is already holding consultations both through bilateral channels and within the Collective Security Treaty Organization to protect its neighbours in Central Asia from any direct and serious threat,” Lavrov told reporters in Moscow last week. The remarks were obliquely referring to the US strategists.
But Moscow is not taking chances. Russia’s Southern military district (which includes facilities in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan) will receive advanced military equipment, including the Sukhoi-34 multirole aircraft. The air defence capabilities of the Russian base in Tajikistan are being strengthened, including with deployment of the newest Verba portable anti-aircraft missile systems (MANPADS). President Vladimir Putin had a call with Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmanov last week where he pledged all Russian support to strengthen Tajik defence capabilities.
Most important, the Taliban’s success through the coming 6-8 weeks to batter, demoralise and destroy the Afghan armed forces and shift the politico-military balance in its favour will be a key factor in the shape of things to come. This is where Afghanistan is fundamentally different from Syria. The US is overlooking the big role Iran played in tandem with Russia to turn the tide of the Syrian conflict.
Meanwhile, Taliban has also shown savviness to prevent other Afghan groups from uniting behind Ghani as well as to create synergy between its political track at Doha and the military path in Afghanistan. Against the backdrop of the US’ plans to fight a hybrid war, the Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahidtold Reuters on Monday,
“The peace talks and process will be accelerated in the coming days … and they are expected to enter an important stage, naturally it will be about peace plans. Possibly it will take a month to reach that stage when both sides will share their written peace plan… Although we (Taliban) have the upper hand on the battlefield, we are very serious about talks and dialogue.”
The bottom line is that no regional state bordering Afghanistan wants the war to continue in any form. Within Afghanistan too, there is opposition to any further US military intervention. The cowardly manner in which the US troops slunk away from Bagram base will be talked about in the Afghan bazaar for a long time to come and will become folklore.read more
Former President Hamid Karzai, who remains an influential figure in Afghan politics and internationally, gave a string of interviews with the foreign media recently where his constant refrain has been that Afghanistan is done with the US interference, and Afghans should be left alone to manage their affairs.read more
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Featured image: Bagram after US military left the base, Kabul, July 5, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)
In my opinion, as an experienced medical doctor, there was never (and there still is not) any medical justification for the extreme measures taken worldwide in the name of a single unremarkable coronavirus (which was never novel as claimed).
Two days before the European Football Championship match between Denmark and Finland, the coach of the Danish national team had announced in the media that he was very worried because UEFA had not provided free COVID vaccines in the run-up to the European Championship and not all players of the participating teams in the European Championship had been vaccinated.
The Taliban’s lightning-fast takeover of Afghanistan in the wake of the US’ full military withdrawal by September 11th presents certain security concerns for India, but the South Asian state only has very limited options for ensuring its relevant interests, none of which credibly involve any conventional military involvement contrary to widespread speculation about this scenario.
Carlos Lazo and a small band of Cuban Americans are on a 1,300-mile pilgrimage from Miami to Washington, D.C., to end the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Despite the blistering summer heat and occasional death threats (including a trucker who tried to run them off the road), the marchers persist. Lazo’s group is called Puentes de Amor, Bridges of Love, and this grueling walkathon is certainly a labor of love.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced plans to ramp up the federal government’s efforts to get more Americans vaccinated against COVID under a new program that includes “literally knocking on doors,” as Biden puts it.
Yeadon, Montagnier and Zelenko all believe the COVID-19 shots could reduce life expectancy by several decades, depending on several factors, including whether you’re required to get booster shots. In fact, there may be reason to suspect that many who get the jabs and subsequent boosters could lose their lives within two to three years, as a result of pathogenic priming.
The Taliban are on a roll. Earlier this week their P.R. arm was claiming they hold 218 Afghan districts out of 421 – capturing new ones every day. Tens of districts are contested. Entire Afghan provinces are basically lost to the government in Kabul – de facto reduced to administer a few scattered cities under siege.
A major crisis is on the rise in Haiti. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere has been going through one of the most difficult periods in its history, particularly aggravated by the end of the UN peacekeeping mission, which had kept troops in Haitian territory for more than a decade. The constant conflict between armed militias and the government resulted in another tragic episode: the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, inside his own home, on Wednesday.
After forty some years of disinflation and declining interest rates, there is some confusion about whether or not this long disinflationary decline is about to end, to be replaced with a creeping up of real wages, prices and interest rates.
There have been many such stories, both short and long. The essence of them all in western media is that Bab al Hawa must be kept open for humanitarian reasons. Many of the articles castigate Russia or any other country such as China which might vote to block a renewal of United Nations authorization of the border crossing.
In my opinion, as an experienced medical doctor, there was never (and there still is not) any medical justification for the extreme measures taken worldwide in the name of a single unremarkable coronavirus (which was never novel as claimed).
The alleged present pandemic was always purportedly a medical problem. Medical doctors are trained (or should be) to solve medical problems.
It takes many years of intense training and experience to produce competent medical doctors. The fact that medical doctors were shunted out of the picture (and that shamefully they allowed themselves to be rendered redundant) in solving a medical problem tells you all you need to know as to what has ensued.
The proper practice of Medicine was deliberately corrupted by politicians and pseudo scientists and the resultant chaos, confusion and fear generated (with the malign assistance of behavioural psychologists) is a direct result of that.
Now, the public is incapable of distinguishing between good scientists and bad scientists.
They trust politicians they once distrusted!
The only people capable of leading (and trained to lead) the public out of their Stockholm Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, post-traumatic stress disorder, severe depression (take your pick) resulting from well over a year of severe psychological torture through fear propaganda and “arbitrariness” (the deliberate creation of confusion with mixed messages etc.) are honest medical doctors.
The public is desperate for a credible lead out of this obvious pseudo-medical chaos. The public will believe medical doctors whom they perceive to be honest and they will follow their lead.
Medical doctors have an ethical duty to provide that lead and most urgently medical doctors need to stop the vaccination programme by raising the alarm –re. the huge number of deaths due to the “vaccines” and the fraud/cover-up which the absence of post-mortems so obviously constitutes.
A positive PCR test never equated with a “case” and “deaths” were fraudulently created by falsification of death certificates in order to terrify populations into taking a dangerous inadequately tested gene-based vaccine which was ineffective and which they did not need, during a purported emergency which was clearly not an emergency (Ioannidis).
And, always remember the WHO swine flu pandemic fraud of 2009. As I understand it, that particular episode of medical nonsense was stopped almost singlehandedly by a medical doctor, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, who subsequently forced an official investigation at the Council of Europe which duly found the WHO to be guilty as charged of fraud. And, everybody forgot!!!
In the face of the glaring widespread absence of the usual safeguards and transparency and the extreme level of coercion, I think that doctors must infer (from the best figures we have at our disposal) that mass murder by the state and cover-up thereof is taking place worldwide and that it will continue.
In such fraught circumstances, we doctors have a professional and ethical duty to warn the public as a matter of urgency of ongoing extremely serious state criminality.
The onus of proof lies with the state to prove that we are wrong.
They will not be able to do that because they have with criminal intent covered up mass murder by systematically concealing and destroying evidence of mass murder.
There comes a point when the sheer volume of false exculpatory statements indicates intent to commit crime.
There is much more to be said, but these are my initial somewhat hurried thoughts.
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Dr. Stephen Frost, prominent medical doctor human rights activist and anti-war whistleblower. North Wales. Founder of Doctors for Covid Ethics. Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Measured by the Christian calendar, the period of about 500 years from the fall of the Roman Empire until the end of the first millennium was a time characterized by economic, intellectual and cultural decline in the European Christian world. In retrospect, it is now referred to as ‘the Dark Age’, even as other cultures, including that of Islam but those in other parts of the world too, thrived during this period.
Since March 2020, a number of fine analysts have carefully documented the true nature of what is happening to our world under cover of what the World Health Organization has labeled the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’.
And among these fine analysts, who have investigated ‘The Great Reset’ promoted by the World Economic Forum as well as other initiatives such as those related to transhumanism, eugenics and Cyber Polygon, there is a strong consensus that does not coincide with propaganda released by elite agents in international organizations, national governments and the corporate media.
In essence, these critiques document extensive evidence of an elite coup that seeks to comprehensively restructure human society into a technocratic dystopia in which such previously fundamental concepts as human identity, human liberty, human rights (such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement), human privacy and human volition are not just notions of the past but are beyond the comprehension of the typical ‘transhuman’.
To reiterate, for the bulk of the human population left alive, concepts such as ‘free will’ and ‘freedom’ will no longer exist as ideas, let alone as aspirations or realities. You can access a number of these insightful critiques here: Resources.
So whether we label this world envisaged by the elite as a ‘brave new world’, ‘1984’, the second ‘Dark Age’, a ‘technocratic dystopia’ or, more simply, ‘slavery’ matters little because, whatever the label, what lies immediately ahead is a human future not worth living.
And so resistance is imperative. But unless this resistance is strategic it will not achieve the outcome we seek.
Why? Because this elite coup has been decades in the planning and so resistance that is not carefully designed and rigorously implemented will not succeed. The elite is too well organized for haphazard acts of resistance to have any impact. Hence, there is no point simply reiterating the need for resistance. Only a strategically-focused campaign of nonviolent resistance – such as that outlined below – has any serious prospect of succeeding.
So what does it mean to resist strategically?
Resisting strategically means that we understand the power structures and relationships in society and particularly the way in which the global elite has the power to control us. The elite has power to control us through a number of means. For example, it can control what most people fear, think and believe by ensuring that its international organizations, governments, medical establishments, pharmaceutical industry and corporate media (including corporate social media) present a particular ‘package’ of information which, in this case, focuses on the supposed danger of the SARS-Cov-2 ‘virus’ and the importance of going along with a wide range of measures (including lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, mask-wearing, contact tracing and injections) while also censoring media outlets and authors that publish the truth.
Beyond controlling the narrative, however, the global elite has many other means at its disposal to control us, many of which are being expanded with the progressive rollout of measures associated with implementation of the fourth industrial revolution (which is fundamentally what the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ is about).
These additional means include the deployment of 5G which, apart from the horrific impact this will have on life generally as this electromagnetic radiation further contaminates the biosphere, will enable comprehensive surveillance, digital ID (possibly implanted in your brain: see ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” Is Being Re-Engineered by the Elite’s Coup’) linked to your bank account and health records, a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life, the digitization of money as well as robotization of the workforce and the military.
But, of course, there is more. Much more. In the words of Dr Joseph Mercola: ‘The Great Reset’ means the complete transformation of everything from ‘government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings. The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.’ See ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’
So while these measures are being implemented and thus increasing the capacity of the global elite to control us, we do not have to cooperate. Moreover, we can resist it very effectively and encourage those we know who are also concerned about what is happening to resist effectively as well.
And, in the end, our success or failure will be determined by one simple factor: Are we able to mobilize enough people to act strategically as suggested below?
How Can We Resist Effectively?
Well, as mentioned above, effective resistance requires us to nonviolently noncooperate with those measures that give the global elite the power to control us. That is, we need to focus our resistance so that it undermines the power of the elite. Sound difficult? Believe it or not, it isn’t really.
Let me elaborate a little.
As I have explained on a number of occasions, for example, there is little point organizing a massive protest demonstration unless these mass mobilizations give people who attend (and/or those who hear about them) clear guidance on actions to take to effectively resist once they leave the demonstration. This is because demonstrations, no matter how large, have little impact in themselves (beyond building a sense of solidarity). For example, on 15 February 2003, the largest demonstration in human history – involving 30,000,000 people in 600 cities around the world protesting the impending US invasion of Iraq – took place. And what did it achieve? The ‘Global War on Terror’ goes on still with no evidence to suggest that resistance on that day or since has had the impact we might have hoped.
My point then is simple. We either resist The Great Reset in a way that undermines the power of the elite to conduct this coup or we enter a world in which those still living will wonder about the value of being alive.
Refuse Covid-19 tests and experimental injections: Choose Natural Health.
Don’t buy 5G upgrades: Resist the fourth industrial revolution.
Boycott Corporate & Government Media: Choose free and truthful media & social media.
Pay with Cash & Switch to Community Owned Banks.
Don’t Wear Masks or Social Distance.
Keep your small business open in lockdown. Buy from small businesses. Don’t use contact tracing QR codes.
Don’t pay Covid-19 related fines: Risk becoming a prisoner of conscience. Seek support.
You can download the posters/leaflets, each with an explanation and references, at the link above. Each leaflet explains why this particular action is important in undermining elite power so that those who receive it (whether by email, in their letterbox or as they attend or walk past a nonviolent action designed for the purpose) clearly understand the value of undertaking this action (every day, not just one day). If you are interested in organizing activities of this type locally, you can also download the ‘Campaign Overview’ at the link above which offers a simple explanation of how to get more people involved.
If you want more information (including a fuller analysis and other resources) and the complete list of the 29 strategic goals of the campaign, you can access everything at ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’.
Under cover of a non-existent ‘pandemic’, the global elite is now engaged in an elaborately planned endeavour to take complete control of human life and human society using measures clearly outlined in the literature related to ‘The Great Reset’, the fourth industrial revolution, transhumanism, eugenics and Cyber Polygon.
There is also considerable evidence that increasing numbers of people are weary of the elite-driven response over the past 18 months and that a proportion of these people are now openly sceptical about the official narrative.
But only the rarest person knows how to resist effectively.
And yet if we are to defeat this elite coup, we must mobilize millions of people to noncooperate with fundamental elements of it.
Otherwise the New Dark Age will not be an age from which transhumans will be emotionally and intellectually equipped to emerge, no matter how long they are given. Why? Because the transhumans the elite is intent on creating will not think or feel for themselves; they will have no Self-will to drive their behaviour. They will be programmed to be willing slaves for life.
The time during which human beings can still make choices is rapidly drawing to a close. We must use that time to choose resistance that makes a difference, and invite others to make that choice too.
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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to ‘Global Research’.
